Mar 12/03 Postwar Blues by Justin Raimondo
“…The ideologues pushing us into war believe they can not only “win” the war militarily, but also “win the peace” by rebuilding a devastated Iraqi economy, keeping the Iraqi state from flying apart…, and instilling the Jeffersonian ethos… Not even the Communists had such faith in the power of social engineering…”(1)

Feb 20/03 California Woman Jailed for Feeding Deer
“A woman is in jail for feeding black-tailed deer in her backyard.” (2) Leave her alone and let her feed the deer. Instead of protecting rights, governments jail people. They believe it is their role to control everyone and everything, thus creating many stupid laws for people to break.

Mar 3/03 Libertarianism in the Age of Empire by Justin Raimondo
“…The so-called “Great Society” of President Lyndon Baines Johnson was an amalgam of everything that libertarians disdain in the modern world: collectivist economics, social engineering, and massive government expenditures, all of it enacted against the backdrop of a futile, grinding war that was chewing up conscripts and discrediting the cause of anti-Communism around the world….”

“…There were two responses to the end of the cold war in this country. One was to breathe a sigh of relief, give thanks that the peoples of the Soviet bloc had freed themselves – without U.S. military action – and turn to the problems that had been vexing this country and promised to undermine the social fabric: problems of social decay, the decline of traditional institutions, the degeneration of the public schools into little more than holding pens, the growth of big government, the alienation of individuals from an increasingly mechanized, atomized existence, and our gradual but perceptible descent into a highly civilized form of barbarism.The other response was to seek out new monsters to destroy…”

“…Why tear up the very roots of the libertarian ethic now that George W. Bush has decided to ignore Osama bin Laden and go after the tinpot dictator of a decimated country? It’s an outrage, and I have just one message to any alleged libertarians, party members or not, who support this rotten war: stop calling yourself a libertarian. …” (3)

Mar 10/03 A Far-Right Texan Inspires Antiwar Left
“…Ron Paul is a political iconoclast who takes his libertarian ideology seriously….”

“…[National Peace Lobby] Project founder Jenifer Deal is a Washington actress and D.C. Green Party official. “What we have here is a nexus of ideological concerns,” Ms. Deal says of her alliance with Mr. Paul. It doesn’t faze her that she disagrees with the congressman on almost every other subject. “If he were a fascist Klansman, I would obviously have misgivings,” she says. “But I actually think Ron Paul has tremendous moral courage.””

“Mr. Paul’s aggressive stand, a stark contrast to most mainstream politicians reluctant to challenge the president, hasn’t hurt him with his southeast Texas constituents — in fact, he is more popular than ever…” (4)

Mar 7/03 Transcript: Bill Moyers Talks with Lew Rockwell Subjects include war and the economy and the welfare state.

“…first of all leaving aside property rights and morality questions [the argument that war is good for the economy] ignores what that money would have been spent on otherwise. So to take vast sums out of the private productive economy and spend it on things that are anti-productive, weapons of mass destruction and so forth, that have no economic purpose far from being a help it’s a disaster…”

“…the New Deal didn’t work. And really we didn’t get out of the depression until probably 1948 or 1949. What the war did do was help the unemployment statistics by killing a lot of the unemployed…

… he drafted 20 percent of the workforce at one point or another into the military. So when you had — when you started out with a 12 percent unemployment rate, yes, I mean there was much less unemployment. But the vast expenditures on non-productive goods, the erection of a command to control economy, not that dissimilar from the Soviet economy. Price and wage controls. No, that was not economically good. It was economically bad…”

“…MOYERS: But doesn’t Saddam Hussein who is obviously himself a megalomaniac, doesn’t a Saddam Hussein armed with biological and chemical weapons potentially nuclear weapons, doesn’t that scare the hell out of you?

“ROCKWELL: Yeah. I mean, I don’t like the fact that George Bush has all those things too. And of course we know there’s only one government in the world that’s ever dropped atomic bombs on civilians and it’s not Iraq. So, you know, there are a lot of governments that are run by bad guys…

“So, yes, I don’t like the idea of any government like this having those kinds of weapons. But, you know, is it really the job of the U.S. government to run the world?…”

“…the basic fallacy at the heart of the welfare state. That it seeks to — that it subsidizes what it seeks to prevent, or pretends to cure. So, it subsidizes unemployment…” (5)

 

Notes

[1] http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j031203.html

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The Associated Press, Thursday, February 20, 2003, Calif. Woman Jailed for Feeding Deer

[3] http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j030303.html

[4] http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB104725224693862700,00.html
The Wall Street Journal, Mar 10, 2003, A Far-Right Texan Inspires Antiwar Left by Shailagh Murray

[5] http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_rockwell.html
PBS, Mar 7/03 Transcript: Bill Moyers Talks with Lew Rockwell