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Category Archives: Politics
Wait or Hustle
Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”
— author unknown, from a Chinese fortune cookie
The Government Serves Us, Not the Other Way Around
his rejoinder entitled “What is Citizenship?” Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry repeats and expands upon his original thesis — that people must be forced to fulfill their duty to serve the state, only this time Gobry emphasizes the concept of citizenship to buttress his argument. With citizenship, he says, come duties and obligations to the state.
Interestingly, Gobry doesn’t explain the specific terms of this obligation. Presumably it is an open-ended construct, one that the state no doubt should have the omnipotent power to decide. If the state decides that four years of military service is satisfactory, so be it. If the state instead decides that a lifetime of service shall be necessary, well, that’s just the way life goes sometimes.
Or maybe the majority decides. Since we live in a representative democracy, why not let Congress make the call? After all, they’re Americans too, right? What’s wrong with Congress voting on how each citizen shall fulfill his obligation to the state by determining how each person is going to best serve the collective?
It’s good that Gobry has clarified that he is not, in fact, a libertarian, because his two articles now help draw clear distinctions between the way that libertarians think and the way that statists think.
As we can see from Gobry’s two articles and, for that matter, Zach Maurin’s article, “America Needs Universal National Service,” statists see society as a great big bee hive, one in which everyone exists to serve the greater good of the hive. We regular people, needless to say, are the workers. Our duty to the collective is to do what we’re told, stay healthy, produce “growth,” and work for the greater good of the hive.
Libertarians look at society totally differently. We believe that every person has the right to live his life the way he wants, so long as his conduct is peaceful. You exist for your own sake and for the sake of your own happiness, as you yourself perceive it. Thus, so long as a person doesn’t initiate force or fraud against others, he is free to make whatever choices he wants as he proceeds from birth to death, even if those choices meet with the disapproval of everyone else in society. For us, that’s what freedom is all about.
Within the libertarian paradigm, people have their own individual set of values. One might, like Gobry, feel a moral duty to serve the state in some capacity. Another might feel a moral duty to serve God. Another might feel the same way about serving others. Some might not feel any sense of moral duty to serve anyone.
But notice that there is one big difference between the libertarian paradigm and the statist paradigm subscribed to by Gobry: force. Under Gobry’s system, it is legitimate for the state to initiate force — even deadly force — against people who do not share the same concept of duty that he has and who refuse to participate in his concept of duty. Under libertarianism, people have the absolute right to determine and pursue their own values without being interfered with by state gendarmes.
The idea that people should be free to decide moral issues for themselves bothers Gobry because of the so-called free-rider problem. He thinks that a society in which people are free to make the “wrong” choices is one that will inevitably decline.
Oh? Really? In my church, there are many people who make donations on a purely voluntary basis. Some of them are extremely large donations. Some people, I would assume, don’t make any donations at all. I don’t know of one donor who has threatened to withhold his support until everyone has been made to fork over a donation. In fact, the minister doesn’t even make financial support a condition of participating in church services. I’m confident the same applies to all other churches in America.
The same holds true, of course, with any charitable endeavor. People choose to support what’s important to them, even if everyone else is choosing otherwise. Very few people structure their charitable giving based on the so-called free-rider problem.
It is difficult to understand where Gobry draws the line with respect to his concept of state-enforced duty. He obviously thinks that military service is a mandatory duty of citizenship. But what if most other people think that educational or religious service is a much more important duty of a citizen? How does Gobry propose to resolve the problem? Surely he wouldn’t say that he himself should be the final arbiter of what duties come with citizenship, would he?
One can only assume that given his devotion to citizenship and the state that Gobry would say, “Let the majority decide. Let Congress vote on the matter.”
So, let’s say that Congress reaches one of its famous compromises. Every American will now be required to serve two years in the military, another two years in a government-approved church, and another two years in a public school, for a total of six years of national service.
Do you see a problem with that type of system? Libertarians sure do. It destroys the concept of freedom in the pursuit of national service.
Where Gobry goes wrong is with his assumption that the state, not the individual, is sovereign. He forgets that we the people have called the government into existence, not the other way around. Federal officials work for us. They have a duty to serve us. They are our servants. They should be grateful to us for having the privilege of serving us.
Citizenship does not change one iota the fundamental relationship of master and servant between the individual and the state. That relationship’s primary function is to identify those people who have the right to vote, a right that enables people to peacefully change administrations. But the right to vote doesn’t entail the right to enslave others by forcing them to serve the state or anyone else.
Gobry cites Sweden as an example of where “shared values” justify forcing people to serve others within the context of a welfare state. Gobry’s statement about Sweden is revealing:
I am fairly confident that if you were to run opinion polls in Sweden and ask the citizens of that country whether they would be willing to trade higher economic growth for higher inequality, the vast majority of respondents would say “no.” Swedes have decided that they want to live by a certain set of values, and one of these values is a relatively strong egalitarianism, and to have the kind of society that they want, it is necessary to have the state redistribute a lot of money.
Notice the phrase I have emphasized — “the vast majority of respondents.” What Gobry is saying is that the commitment to the welfare-state way of life isn’t shared by all Swedes, only a majority of them.
What about the minority — those who have a different set of values, perhaps believing that people should be free to accumulate wealth and decide for themselves what to do with it, as libertarians do?
Gobry says, too bad. People with different values need to be forced to surrender them to the will of the majority.
That’s not the way libertarians see it. We believe in fundamental, God-given, natural rights that preexist government, rights that are immune from the will of the majority. Our philosophy is embodied in the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects fundamental rights from majority rule — and not only for citizens but also non-citizens.
What happens when a person says “no” to mandatory military service, mandatory church service, mandatory educational service, or mandatory welfare-state service?
That’s the question that I originally posed to Gobry, a question that he obviously finds very discomforting given his silence on the matter. But the question of coercion goes to the heart of the statist system and every statist should be made to confront it. So I will repeat it: How about it, Gobry: Should the federal gendarmes kill people who forcibly defend their natural, God-given right to live freely or should they instead walk away and leave them alone. What say ye?
Jacob Hornberger, FFF
Where Did All the Progressives Go ?
In understanding why progressivism and liberalism are not the same thing and even moreso, why progressivism hates liberalism, there are two inescapable facts:
1) During the progressive era, progressives were everywhere.
2) Today, progressives are everywhere.
Well, what’s in the middle? For some reason, no matter where I go there is an extreme resistance on the part of conservatives to admit (out loud or even perhaps even to themselves) that progressives re-labeled themselves as liberal and are now wearing camoflage. Why is this? I don’t know. Every now and then you see someone attempt to dig it out and they do get it right, but those are far and few between.
We know where the progressives are during the 1900s, they’re in the White House they’re controlling many parts of the senate and they’re setting up the beginnings of the bureaucratic state. We know where the progressives are during the 1910s, we see several destructive Constitutional amendments, and things kind of (we are told by historians) come to a closing right at the end of 1919 going into 1920. Well wait just a minute! No no, stop right here. Examine this. Starting in 1920 where did all the progressives go?
Yes, they got routed politically in the 1920 election and through the remainder of Calvin Coolidge’s presidency the progressives got smoked really bad. But did the progressives disappear? No. Progressivism doesn’t die. So where did it go? Where did all of the progressives go?
Well the short answer is, the progressives came back as strong as possible during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That’s easy, everybody knows that. Except for one problem. Nobody knows it. Let me explain. Is FDR a liberal president or a progressive president? You have to pick, and there’s a 50% chance you’ll get the answer incorrect.
The answer is that FDR was never ever a liberal president. He was always a progressive. Calling these people “liberal” is the great historical lie. “The Big Lie”. But the amount of people who are wedded to this lie is astounding. It is a bi-partisan lock.
So FDR was a liberal. THEN WHERE DID ALL OF THE PROGRESSIVES GO??? See, that’s the question that destroys it all. Where. Did. All. The. Progressives. Go? No conservative believes that the progressives just magically went away, did they go “poof”? Did they go to mars? Are they butterflies, did they flutter away up to Greenland? No. They were here all along, they stayed right here, peddling their poisonous wares until the time was right. Like cockroaches in the night. But yet, far too many ignore this. After the 1930’s, the progressives came roaring right back again a few decades later in the 1960’s. But that’s another topic in itself as well.
Where did all of the progressives go? Right here, here is where they went. In his speech on July 02, 1932, accepting the nomination for President of the United States, FDR said:
Let us feel that in everything we do there still lives with us, if not the body, the great indomitable, unquenchable, progressive soul of our Commander-in-Chief, Woodrow Wilson.
So progressive FDR waves high and proud to their history as fellow progressives, then he says this:
Yes, the people of this country want a genuine choice this year, not a choice between two names for the same reactionary doctrine. Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.
There it is. With that, progressivism had successfully been re-named. Our party must be the liberal party he says.
Where did all of the progressives go? Mark the day.
On July 02, 1932, that’s the day every progressive died. That’s their birthday. July 02, 1932. This sentence is not a contradiction.
Where did all of the progressives go? Look for the camoflauge. This camoflauge is brought to you by the letters “L”. “I”. and “B”.
Some day, I don’t suspect it will be within my lifetime, but some day. Some day, conservatives are going to have to go to war to reclaim this word. “Liberalism”. They stole it, they don’t deserve it, and they certainly didn’t do a thing to earn it. Within whatever the final defeat of progressivism entails, this word must be restored away from them. And this word will be a benchmark. Long before progressivism’s final defeat, the mask must be ripped off for all time. No enemy is truely defeated who still possesses their camoflage or other tools of war.
Anonymous
Bob Dole is a Hero Because in World War II He Fought Dictators Like Joe Biden
Biden reportedly called Bob Dole a “hero” at his funeral.
Why would Joe Biden call Bob Dole a hero? Bob Dole WAS heroic in fighting to help the United States and its allies defeat the Nazis and imperialist Japanese in World War II.
But Joe Biden is doing everything in his power now to ensure that the United States economy collapses, that its citizens become impoverished and that our military loses in the Middle East, against Russia and against Communist China.
Joe Biden’s destruction is helping ensure that the bloodsheed and suffering of men like Bob Dole doesn’t count for anything, in the end.
Joe Biden, given who he is and what he does every day, cannot possibly consider Bob Dole and other World War II veterans “heroes.”
But these veterans would be right to consider Joe Biden every bit as great an enemy as Hitler and the Japanese emperor in World War II.
Under Biden’s regime, we are an occupied country — little different, on its present course, from how a defeated United States would have looked back in 1945 had Dole and other heroes not done their jobs so well.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
The Boundless Entitlement of Hillary Clinton
Imagine Mitt Romney, five years after he lost the 2012 US presidential election to Barack Obama, reading out the victory speech he would have given if he’d won. And then imagine him breaking down half-way through as he contemplates what could have been – or, as he sees it, what should have been.
You would probably expect some sort of professional intervention.
This is no longer a hypothetical scenario. On streaming site MasterClass, which provides pricey ‘lessons’ from self-important, famous figures, Hillary Clinton has delivered the speech she would have given if it weren’t for those pesky Trump voters.
As she relives the 2016 victory that wasn’t, she does hold it together for a bit. But during a particularly butt-clenching segment, where she starts addressing her mother, Dorothy Rodham, Clinton starts to choke up:
‘I dream of going up to her, and sitting down next to her, taking her in my arms, and saying… “You will have a good family of your own and three children. And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become the president of the United States.”’
As Wilde might have put it, you’d have to have a heart of stone to listen to Clinton’s ‘victory’ speech and not laugh.
Just pause for a second and contemplate the scale of delusion and entitlement on show here. Even now, five years and one presidential election later, it seems Clinton is still acting as if she should have won. As if she had her rightful future stolen from her.
Sad, as Trump would say.
Part of the problem is Clinton herself. Long before 2016 she treated the presidency as little more than the next step in her brilliant career, the inevitable reward for being, as she put it, ‘the most qualified candidate in history’. Such was her sense of entitlement that voters, elections and democracy barely featured in her calculations. It was as if she was supposed to inherit the presidency rather than win it. As Dick Morris, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, put it in 2019, Clinton acted as if ‘God put her on the Earth’ to be president.
Indeed, she was so certain of becoming president that on the night of the election itself she tirelessly rehearsed her victory speech, only realising, much later, that she might have to deliver a concession speech instead.
Clinton has never come to terms with what happened. Trump’s victory appeared to her as a glitch in the matrix, a gross mistake or worse – a fiendish Russian plot.
Her 2017 book-length response to the election, What Happened, was shot through with delusion and displacement. She claimed that she would have been president if former FBI director James Comey hadn’t opened an investigation into the use of her private email account a few days before the ballot. That she would have been president if it wasn’t for ‘the unprecedented interference’ of Vladimir Putin, who ‘is not a member of my fan club’. As she told NBC’s Today in 2017, ‘Absent that, I believe the evidence shows I would have won’.
Imagine Mitt Romney, five years after he lost the 2012 US presidential election to Barack Obama, reading out the victory speech he would have given if he’d won. And then imagine him breaking down half-way through as he contemplates what could have been – or, as he sees it, what should have been.
You would probably expect some sort of professional intervention.
This is no longer a hypothetical scenario. On streaming site MasterClass, which provides pricey ‘lessons’ from self-important, famous figures, Hillary Clinton has delivered the speech she would have given if it weren’t for those pesky Trump voters.
As she relives the 2016 victory that wasn’t, she does hold it together for a bit. But during a particularly butt-clenching segment, where she starts addressing her mother, Dorothy Rodham, Clinton starts to choke up:
‘I dream of going up to her, and sitting down next to her, taking her in my arms, and saying… “You will have a good family of your own and three children. And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become the president of the United States.”’
As Wilde might have put it, you’d have to have a heart of stone to listen to Clinton’s ‘victory’ speech and not laugh.
Just pause for a second and contemplate the scale of delusion and entitlement on show here. Even now, five years and one presidential election later, it seems Clinton is still acting as if she should have won. As if she had her rightful future stolen from her.
Clinton has never come to terms with what happened. Trump’s victory appeared to her as a glitch in the matrix, a gross mistake or worse – a fiendish Russian plot.
Her 2017 book-length response to the election, What Happened, was shot through with delusion and displacement. She claimed that she would have been president if former FBI director James Comey hadn’t opened an investigation into the use of her private email account a few days before the ballot. That she would have been president if it wasn’t for ‘the unprecedented interference’ of Vladimir Putin, who ‘is not a member of my fan club’. As she told NBC’s Today in 2017, ‘Absent that, I believe the evidence shows I would have won’.
Clinton has never come to terms with what happened. Trump’s victory appeared to her as a glitch in the matrix, a gross mistake or worse – a fiendish Russian plot.
Her 2017 book-length response to the election, What Happened, was shot through with delusion and displacement. She claimed that she would have been president if former FBI director James Comey hadn’t opened an investigation into the use of her private email account a few days before the ballot. That she would have been president if it wasn’t for ‘the unprecedented interference’ of Vladimir Putin, who ‘is not a member of my fan club’. As she told NBC’s Today in 2017, ‘Absent that, I believe the evidence shows I would have won’.
But Clinton’s entitled arrogance isn’t even the main reason for her refusal to accept what happened five years ago. Her delusions of victory have been propped up and amplified by her affluent support base and the bruised political and media elites that cheered her on. They were so used to being in power, to having their views and values reflected in their leaders, that they simply couldn’t accept the 2016 result. So they sought to undermine it. They cast it as a racist, white-supremacist vote. They called themselves the ‘Resistance’. And they blamed Trump’s victory on Russian interference.
In their refusal to accept the result, they were denying democracy. And if Clinton’s tearful rendition of her victory speech is any indication, she is still denying reality. Someone really should make an intervention.
Tim Black is a spiked columnist.
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The Way Out of the Statist Morass
Given the seemingly intractable welfare-warfare system that characterizes the United States, it might be tempting for some people to despair and simply give up and surrender to what might appear to be the inevitable — the permanent continuation of our lives as serfs on the welfare-warfare state plantation.
After all, Americans have lived under a welfare state since the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt used the Great Depression as an excuse to revolutionize America’s economic system. That’s was what Social Security was all about — establishing a system where the federal government’s primary function would be to take care of people with money that has been forcibly taken from other people.
Today, the federal government is viewed as parent or, even worse, a god, one that is charged with taking care of people’s retirement, healthcare, education, food, housing, and other welfare items.
Moreover, since 1947 Americans have lived under a national-security state form of governmental structure, one in which the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA wield omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, such as assassination, torture, indefinite detention, secret surveillance, coups, alliances with doctoral regimes and criminal organizations, denial of due process, denial of trial by jury, and more. Because the United States was supposedly confronted by an international communist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia, the notion was that the United States had no choice but to become a national-security state to protect America from going Red.
Today, the Cold War’s war-on-communism racket has been replaced by the war-on-terrorism racket. Despite losing a 20-year-long war in Afghanistan, U.S. troops, serving as deadly and destructive world policemen, are still stationed in the Middle East and other parts of the world killing and injuring people, impoverishing people, and destroying property. Moreover, the national-security establishment, bolstered by its assets in the mainstream press, has succeeded in converting two of its old Cold War opponents — China and Russia — into renewed official enemies, both of whom are supposedly coming to get us again.
Today, there is hardly any aspect of federal life that is not mired in crisis or chaos. Federal spending and debt to finance all this welfare and warfare are totally out of control. To pay off the debt and to enable the feds to spend more than what they’re bringing in with taxation, the Federal Reserve is printing money like there was no tomorrow. Its inflation of the money supply is now being reflected by soaring prices across the board.
We have a massive healthcare crisis, reflected by Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and COVID.
We also have a decades-long, perpetual immigration crisis, accompanied by an immigration police state along the border — all because of America’s statist system of immigration controls.
Given the death and destruction that continue to be inflicted by U.S. troops and the CIA around the world, there is still an ongoing terrorism crisis.
Let’s not forget the decades-long drug-war crisis, which has brought nothing but violence, corruption, and failure.
If there were no way out of this statist morass, there would be good reason for people to despair and lament and think about giving up and surrendering. If that were the case, it might be understandable why companies who sold cyanide capsules would be prospering.
But the fact is that there is a way out of this statist morass. That way is libertarianism, the most noble and glorious political and economic philosophy ever devised by man. Libertarianism is able to bring an end to all of these statist crises and all this statist-induced chaos.
What would a libertarian society look like?
It would be a society in which people would be free to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with it. No more mandatory charity. No more Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public schooling, public housing, or any other type of government-provided welfare. All charity would be voluntary.
No more government control or regulation of economic enterprise. Enterprise would be entirely free of governmental control and regulation.
No more drug laws.
No more government involvement with healthcare whatsoever. No more Centers for Disease Control.
No more national-security state, including the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. No more state-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, denial of due process, denial of trial by jury, and other totalitarian-like measures. America’s founding governmental system of a limited government republic, with relatively small military force, would be restored.
No more foreign interventionism, foreign aid, and foreign wars.
No more Federal Reserve. No more legal-tender laws. No more fiat (paper) money. Instead, a free-market monetary system would be implemented.
No more federal income tax and IRS.
Radical? You bet! But liberty — genuine liberty — is a radical idea. What matters is that there is a way out of the statist morass in which we are mired. It’s really just a question of whether we can achieve a critical mass of Americans who are passionately committed to living in a genuinely free, prosperous, peaceful, and harmonious society.
Stop Calling Them “Liberal”
“If I like what you say or do, then you may do it. If I dislike or disapprove of what you say or do, then you may not do it; it’s a felony. If you FAIL to do what I want, that may also become a felony.”
What used to label itself “liberalism” has come to this.
The proper term is: totalitarianism. We went from a totalitarian mentality in the ruling elites of the Obama years to the actual practice of totalitarianism in the socialist-Communist-fascist era of the Bidenistas.
Example: forced medical treatment. Example: government monitoring of your spending, via seizure of your bank account passwords. Example: forced mask-wearing. Example: forced closure of your business based on arbitrary, subjective standards of “essential” and “non-essential”. Example: Selective use of the police based upon political status — as in letting Black Lives Matter supporters loot and riot unrestrained, while arresting pro-Trump supporters, and denying them due process, merely for showing up at the Capitol.
As for inflation, generated by government debasement of the currency in order to finance unlimited government spending, their answer is: “Live off of our programs.” In other words: Live a borderline-poverty life with no hope of advancement. How liberal is that?
As for the ruining of our once great military, through deliberate strategic blunders designed to destroy that military, the answer to dealing with aggressive tyrannies in Iran, Russia and China: “If you can’t beat them — join them.” In other words: Become the totalitarian countries who wish to conquer us because we are not totalitarian; or at least, we didn’t used to be.
There is nothing whatsoever “liberal” about today’s ruling elites or the officially prevailing viewpoints. The true liberals are those who stand up to these irrational, insane, unjust and dogmatic edicts. The true tyrants are the ones who will force their victims to live lives of intolerable mediocrity, impoverishment, enslavement and despair — merely so they can feel virtuous and and powerful.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Words of Wisdom in a Sea of Insanity
Careful what you wish for. If Republicans retake the U.S. Senate, this hollow fossil will still be using his influence to make life easier for Communists. We need a new system. These awful people broke the republic our founders gave us.
“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., gave Democrats until mid-December to find a resolution to raise the debt ceiling, but now he hopes to find GOP votes to support Democrats, and former President Donald Trump is blasting the Republican leader for folding on the issue.” [Newsmax]
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Unemployment (or increasing employment drop-out) is GOOD news to tyrants; they want us shiftless and dependent. Rising prices are GOOD news to them; they want us poor and helpless. Virus outbreaks (real or exaggerated) are GOOD news; viruses give them an excuse to control. Wake up: Your “democratically elected leaders” are not merely fools; they are evil people.
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Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows is suing Nancy Pelosi and every member of the January 6 Committee as “unconstitutional.”
Better idea: If the DemComs fail to pull off another election fraud since they only enjoy the support of about 30 percent of the population, and they therefore lose control of Congress in 11 months, then let’s wait until after the election and ARREST and criminally prosecute all of them for subversion of the Constitution and illegally harassing members of a previous government solely for political reasons. This has got to stop. And it will not stop until we thoroughly and permanently defeat and permanently remove from power every last one of them. And let’s start with Liz Cheney.
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“The State reserves the right to be the SOLE interpreter of the needs of society.” — Benito Mussolini, 1934
Replace “The State” with “Fauci.” Or “CNN.” Or some actor or sports star. You get the idea.
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Here’s the thing: Nobody is coming to rescue us. We are on our own. This isn’t depressing. It’s our strength and our power. We have to discover it — and use it.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 