September 28, 2003

 

Liberty, War & Politics

War Party Whines Over Iraq Coverage
by Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, September 26, 2003

…To hear them tell it, everything is just hunky-dory over there – it’s the “biased” reporters, and not the concept of conquering and subjugating a country in the holy name of “democracy,” that’s the problem.

 

March 18, 2003 letter where President Bush implies an association between Iraq and September 11
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/
2003/03/20030319-1.html

Now he says there was no evidence.

Quote from letter:

…Consistent with section 3(b) of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), and based on information available to me, including that in the enclosed document, I determine that:

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001…

 

War, Peace, and the State
by Murray N. Rothbard, LewRockwell.com, 1963

…In short, the objective of the libertarian is to confine any existing State to as small a degree of invasion of person and property as possible. And this means the total avoidance of war…

Rothbard advocates the old-fashioned international rules that limited warfare. And he presents a libertarian condemnation of nuclear weapons, imperialism, foreign aid (which often props up dictators) and conscription.

 

Free and Independent
by Joseph Sobran, www.sobran.com, September 11, 2003

A recent biography of Thomas Jefferson contains an amusing statement. It says that Jefferson’s arguments in the 1798 Kentucky Resolutions “brought him dangerously close to secessionism.”

Apparently the biographer doesn’t realize that Jefferson was an explicit secessionist. For openers, he wrote a famous secessionist document known to posterity as the Declaration of Independence…

Voluntary union.

 

Rothbard Battles the Mainstream
by Benjamin Powell and Edward Stringham, Mises.org, September 25, 2003

Rothbard distinguishes his view from Mises’s, by explaining that Mises based the a priori status of economics in the neo-Kantian tradition: considering the action axiom a law of thought and therefore a categorical truth a priori to all experience. Rothbard instead draws on Aristotle and St.Thomas, and considers the axiom a law of reality that is empirical rather than a priori.

Rothbard is clear though that it is empirical only in the sense that it is self evidently true once stated and it is not empirically falsifiable in the positivist sense…

Also discusses Rothbard’s views on Burke.

 

The Knock at the DoorReview of Robert J. Stove’s The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims
by Matthew G. Alexander, The American Conservative, amconmag.com, September 22, 2003

…provides a chilling warning against complacency in freedom

History of Secret Police surveillance.

 

Does World Trade Need World Government?
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Mises.org, September 25, 2003

…Many believe that world trade, because it is a good thing, ought to be sanctioned, managed, and otherwise regulated by the government or a coalition of governments. Thus was the intellectual error behind the creation of the World Trade Organization, an international bureaucracy…

…the WTO was based on the idea that industrialized nations need to find markets for their products among the sad-sack nations of the world—not that the poor nations might have something to sell that consumers in rich nations might want to buy…

 

Will the US Privatize Iraq? Should It?
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Mises.org, September 25, 2003

…He [Gorbachev] knew that liberalization was the key to ending the grinding Soviet poverty, but he also worried that liberalization might lead to the collapse of the regime. He tried to liberalize while beefing up party control, but eventually it didn’t work. The whole system came unraveled, and he eventually had to let the Soviet empire go. The US will have to do the same…

Main topic is how privatization goes wrong in practice.