Buchanan Misses the Mark in "Carcasses of Dead Policies"

Pat Buchanan's latest missive bemoaning America's foreign and "defense" policy atavism, specifically its dedication to preserving and expanding NATO, leaves the libertarian reader with the feeling that Buchanan is either a liar or incredibly naive. Since Buchanan is a paleoconservative, the answer is probably "both." Regardless, many informed readers, especially libertarians, will find themselves irritated by this piece.

The upshot of the article is that America is foolish for not only preserving NATO, but actively expanding it twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and seventeen years after the USSR's breakup and the end of the Cold War. Certainly this is a viewpoint that most, if not all libertarians share. We agree that NATO is irrelevant to today's geopolitical reality. Many of us will go even further and state that it never should have been formed to begin with, given its clearly interventionist intentions, albethey bathed in a veneer of "defense."

What the libertarian reader will take issue with is Buchanan's assertion that the United States' chief motive for maintaining NATO is a refusal to "giv[e] up its role as Defender of the West, [or to]...accept that the curtain had fallen and the play was closing after a 40-year run." Does Buchanan, who has spent most of his adult life wallowing in the filth that is Imperial American politics, really want us to believe that he does not know the real truth behind NATO's continuing existence? Does he really not know, and think that we do not see, that the real reason for NATO's continued existence and expansion is the undisguised goal of America's ruling class to rule the world, even if by partial proxy?

There is no lack of realization by the Powers That Be that the Cold War is over, nor is there a lingering fear of the corpse of the former Soviet Union. What there absolutely is, however, is a very deep resentment of the fact that the collapse of the USSR deprived the military-industrial-political complex of any rational raison d'etre. The arms industry that had been built up over the course of a quarter of a century could no longer be justified, since "the greatest enemy of democracy", the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was no more and therefore there was no longer any justification for mass productoin of armaments, even for export to "allies." The Establishment further realized that the obscene profits being made by perpetuating this pointless, freedom and economy-destroying arms race would come to an abrupt end unless a new enemy was manufactured from whole cloth. That new enemy, of course, became "Islamo-Fascism", later reduced simply to "terrorism", the Establishment having gone from fighting an ideology to fighting a tactic.

Buchanan's mock outrage at NATO's continued existence and his carefully crafted appeal to political common sense is pure windowdressing and has become a common feature of most of his recent work. As one of Richard Nixon's senior staff members (which by itself tells us volumes), one of Buchanan's functions was to spread disinformation about Nixon's political opponents, a job that enabled him to perfect this journalist art to new heights. He has continued to exist within the Beltway journalism subculture ever since and has gained access to every major political figure in the nation over almost the last forty years. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but Buchanan is for all practical purposes a member of the very Establishment that he would like us to think he opposes. Perhaps his greatest coup has been to

This is, alas, typical of far too many paleocons like Buchanan. While they at least paid lip servce to the idea of liberty and limited government in decades past, they have almost completely surrendered, quite willingly it appears, to the intoxicating lure of State power. Buchanan knows damned good and well that the unstated reason for NATO's continuing existence is to serve as a proxy legion for Amerika's global empire and the military-industrial interests that control it. But because he subscribes to the philosophy best described by the German phrase "Die Staat ueber Alles" {the State above all else), he either cannot bring himself to admit this, or, just as likely, has no qualms with it. Either way, his feigned frustration in print with the status quo simply is not convincing.

Perhaps one day very soon, Buchanan will come to truly appreciate the nation's founding principles as the current political establishment collapses from the rot within. Until then, look for him to simply continue shooting at shadow targets.

The Obamunist's Phony Electronic "Town Hall"

President Monkey Ears, apparently realizing that the sheeple are awakening to the fact that he is full of bovine excrement after having broken every last one of his campaign promises, has decided to throw them a rubber bone by staging an "electronic town hall" on line. For those with precious life minutes to waste, this dog and pony show (NOT the first of it's kind, by the way), can be accessed here, at least for now.

But it turns out that the Obamunist isn't really all that interested in what the hoi polloi have to say, since he's already stopped taking questions after just a day of having the electronic town hall forum open. Of course it's not as if it would do any of us liberty lovers any good even if he still was accepting them. Glancing briefly at a random sampling of the questions submitted in several categories, I notice that ALL of them assumed that it was His Holiness, Emperor Barack I the Divine's sacred duty to fix their every imaginable problem. Of course, what else would one expect? Does anyone really think that this megalomaniac scumbag and his puppeteer staff would even for a second allow, much less answer, any hardhitting questions that question his legitimacy? Please.

Nowhere did I see any questions that I, or indeed any liberty lover would have asked, such as:

"Did you not take an oath of office, on January 19, 2009, to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?'"

"If the answer to the previous question is 'yes', then can you tell me exactly and verbatim where within that document you swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend that you are permitted to do anything on your current agenda?"

"Do you even have the vaguest clue what you're talking about when you stand in front of the entire nation and spew forth streams of noxious verbal diarrhea in which you promise to fix each individual's every problem?"

"Do you have even a gnat's grasp of the fundamentals of economics?"

"Where were you really born?"

"Why don't you just admit that you're really a narcissistic Marxist authoritarian nihilist who intends to destroy every last vestige of individual and economic freedom left in the United States?"

"Based on the assumptions behind the previous question, do you intend to openly embrace Zimbabwean president and World Champion Murdering Thug Robert Mugabe as the ideological brother to you that he is once the United States (or what's left of them) finally achieve an economy identical to that now "enjoyed" by Zimbabwe?"

"Do you honestly believe that even one of your proposed "reforms" will actually work? Could you really be that stupid?"

Would that the imperial media gatekeepers had the intestinal fortitude or constitution of character to allow such raw, gauntlet-hurling questions to be directed at His Most Saintly and Blameless Majesty. As it is, it amazes me that so many sheeple actually thought that asking His Holiness for his divine protection would actually yield any meaningful results. Then again, looking and listening around me to what constitutes "American civilization", it really doesn't amaze me at all.

When will they ever learn?

My Letter to Paul Craig Roberts

It pains and irritates me greatly to see paleoconservatives either misinterpret or deliberately misrepresent libertarian beliefs in print. Paul Craig Roberts has done exactly that in his latest essay, reprinted on the VDARE.com web site today, titled "The American Criminal Injustice System." While I agree with 99 percent of Roberts' points in the article, he makes a statement about libertarianism and prison privatization that I simply could not allow to remain unchallenged. The full text of the email I sent today to Dr. Roberts is reprinted below.


Dr. Roberts:

Thank you for your latest contribution of another hard-hitting article on the continuing deterioration of the American Justice [sic] System (published as "The American Criminal Injustice System", reprinted on VDARE.com, Wednesday, March 11, 2009). While I agree with 99 percent of the article's content, you make the following statement about two-thirds of the way through to which I must take great exception:

"Libertarian free market types believe that the private sector can do everything better than the public sector. This ideology causes libertarians to be blind to the dangerous incentives created by the privatization of prisons."

While I would never presume to speak for ALL libertarians, I believe that I can say with a great degree of certainty that you misunderstand the commonly accepted libertarian consensus on imprisonment. Most libertarians are opposed the idea of imprisonment altogether, except for those who clearly and demonstrably pose an irremediable danger to society. The State, in judicial criminal prosecutions, habitually uses (or more accurately, abuses) imprisonment as a blanket form of punishment both for victimless acts that are not crimes against property or person, such as drug distribution and consumption, or prostitution, or for actual crimes against person or property for which restitution to the actual victim is the appropriate remedy. Worse still, and as you yourself have illustrated in a number of past editorials, the terms of imprisonment are often, if not usually grotesquely out of proportion to the actual offense.

To specifically address the issue of "privatized" prisons, if you look at a broad selection of libertarian writing on this subject (visit the lewrockwell.com archives for a cornucopia of such references), you will see that the prevailing libertarian view of "private" prisons is that these institutions, as currently constituted under the State's [in]justice system, are NOT "private" institutions at all according to the legitimate definition of that word. Rather, they merely represent the subcontracting of the penal system by the State to its preferred enablers in thestate-corporate sector (which, if you are familiar with libertarian economic philosophy, you will recognize as being not "free market" institutions at all, but "crony capitalist" entities that have co-opted the power of the State for their own monopolistic ends, at taxpayer expense). Under a libertarian market-oriented justice system, Persona A, the victim of crime (or their representatives) could not compel a disinterested third party, Person C, to pay restitution on behalf of or for the incarceration of Person B, the actual perpetrator. Under the current catastrophic tyranny imposed upon us today, the State merely transfers tax monies from the public treasury to one of its politically favored cronies, regardless of the fact that 1) the average taxpayer (Person C in the preceding example) has no personal stake or legal standing in the crime committed by Person B against Person A. This is the diametric opposite of "libertarianism" as you seem to envision it.

If you have not already done so in the recent past, I strongly recommend that you read the late Murray Rothbard's treatise "Punishment and Proportionality", an excerpt from his book "The Ethics of Liberty" (the treatise can be accessed here. This provides as coherent a summation of the libertarian view of justice, restitution, and punishment as anything of which I am aware. Note the clear implication in Rothbard's proposals that the idea of incarceration is a most unappetizing one to a genuinely freedom-respecting, market-oriented justice system that focuses on tangible restitution to actual victims of crime, as opposed to that undefinable abstraction called "the People", or "the State." Incarceration is prohibitively costly (remember, in a market system, there is no such thing as "tax dollars" or "socialized costs"), often counterproductive, seldom ever serves the cause of true justice or restitution, and is a punishment reserved only as a last resort, almost always for the crime of murder. By the way, and as Rothbard notes, it's no accident of history that governments in centuries past seldom ever resorted to imprisonment as punishment, preferring either to compel convicted criminals to make appropriate restitution to their victims, or to administer capital punishment for those convicted of murder.

Is the Rothbardian solution the ideal one? Probably not; is there any such thing as "ideal" in the real world? But in a world that respects liberty, one in which there is no State to play the role of omnipotent, coercive overlord, the "private prison" travesty which we now see playing out would cease to exist.

Thanks, and keep up the good work.


Sincerely,

[Liberranter]

Doing My Part to Starve the State-Corporatist Beast - Step One

I've finally gotten off the stick and taken the first step toward doing what I should have done months or years ago: divesting myself of all Wall Street-related assets. My biggest fear to date has been the tax implications of doing so, but I've decided that this is something I will no longer let hinder me in doing what needs to be done. If the Establishment is going to steal my money, I'm going to make them do it at the point of a gun (i.e., through taxation) rather than under a ruse of "investment."

Yesterday afternoon I phoned my employer's HR department and told them to stop my allotment to my Franklin Templeton Growth Fund, to which I have been contributing regularly each month for the past twelve years. Not only has the fund lost fifty (50) percent of its value in the last two months, but the fee increases that the brokerage firm has recently levied are almost as much as the monthly share purchases themselves. Sorry, fellas, but I ain't gonna subsidize with more of my own hard-earned money your recovery from a decade of recklessly (mal)investing my money! You'll just have to eat that without any more of my direct, voluntary help!

I would like to try to sell my shares in this fund, but I'm not about to jump through the hoops set up by the Illegal Ripoff Service to avoid their confiscatory crapital gains taxes. Besides, I'd almost feel guilty pawning this increasingly worthless pile of "assets" off on anyone else foolish enough to invest in them. Therefore I'll just swallow my losses for now and hold onto the shares that I have, preparing to watch twelve years of hard-earned money disappear down the crapper once the dollar crashes and the fund is reduced to penny stock, if it even holds that much value.

I'm debating whether to invest the money formerly allocated for this fund's share purchases in gold or other precious metals or to put it toward paying down debt. I'm leaning toward the latter, as being debt-free at the point of the dollar's collapse will be just as important as having something to use as hard currency.

More to follow.