Power to the people?

Albert Jay Nock: Perhaps the most brilliant American essayist of the 20th century, and certainly among its most important libertarian thinkers

DOWNLOAD Memoirs of a Superfluous Man - MISES INSTITUTE

Albert Jay Nock, perhaps the most brilliant American essayist of the 20th century, and certainly among its most important libertarian thinkers, set out to write his autobiography but he ended up doing much more. He presents here a full theory of society, state, economy, and culture, and does so almost inadvertently.

His stories, lessons, observations, and conclusions pack a very powerful punch, so much so that anyone who takes time to read carefully cannot but end up changed in intellectual outlook. One feels that one has been let in a private club of people who see more deeply than others. This is truly an American classic.

The wisdom of Ayn Rand

The statists’ epistemological method consists of endless debates about single, concrete, out-of-context, range-of-the-moment issues, never allowing them to be integrated into a sum, never referring to basic principles or ultimate consequences—and thus inducing a state of intellectual disintegration in their followers. The purpose of that verbal fog is to conceal the evasion of two fundamentals: (a) that production and prosperity are the product of men’s intelligence, and (b) that government power is the power of coercion by physical force.

Once these two facts are acknowledged, the conclusion to be drawn is inevitable: that intelligence does not work under coercion, that man’s mind will not function at the point of a gun.

--Ayn Rand

State can seize your assets to pay for care after you’re forced into Medicaid by Obamacare

The fact that this is being treated with seriousness at Kos is an indication of how large a liability it could be for this government program. Washington is scrambling to change the law. No doubt other states will start looking at their implementation of this part of Obamacare. But there will be people caught unaware that their houses effectively belong to the government because the government forced them into Medicaid coverage.

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Who Needs the Family?

Excerpt from Sultan Knish | Daniel Greenfield:

The state replaced the family. It told men and women that they no longer needed to make permanent commitments to each or to their parents and children. So long as they paid their taxes, the state would bear the burden of their commitments. And so men and women gave up on each other, parents gave up on their children and children gave up on their parents, the family fell apart and now the state that took its place is also falling apart.

A building cannot be built on nothing. The tallest tower is only as strong as its foundation. A skyscraper may touch the sky, but it is its grip on the ground that truly counts. A civilization may reach for the sky and the stars, but it is sustained by the soil of the family and the roots of the basic social structures created by individuals perpetuating individuals, not the gargantuan social mechanisms of the state.

When a civilization destroys its families, then it destroys itself. A man cannot cut out his own heart and live. A society cannot destroy its own capacity for life and regeneration, and continue on blithely occupying itself with the wars on obesity, poverty, racism, cough syrup and gendered pronouns. The state may seem impressive, but it is only a scheme by which people pay officials to make life better for them. When the number of people begins to decline while the number of officials increases, then the man touches the place where his empty heart was, stumbles and falls.

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It's all over for the Republican Party

I’m not normally given to hyperbole, but it’s all over for the Republican party as we know it and hence all over for the United States of America as we know it. The Reagan period now looks like a blip. Only once has a Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote in 24 years.

We’ve lost when we were the incumbent party and the economy was perceived to be doing badly; we’ve lost when we were the challenger party when the economy was doing even worse.

In future, our elections will be like those in Britain or New York. We will be presented with a choice between a statist liberal and an out-there uber-liberal. And with the uber-liberal enjoying the full backing of the media and Hollywood, it’ll by no means be an easy win for the ordinary Mike Bloomberg or David Cameron-style liberal, who will be portrayed as a heartless plutocrat if he happens to come from money, or as a hopeless rube if he happens to come from nowhere.

Liberalism multiplies and reinforces its own mistakes. As liberalism’s failures pile up, they will inevitably inspire more liberalism as solutions. . .

Finita La Commedia

Thanks to HotAir.com.

STATISM

Professor Mike Rappaport is a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism.

Feb 6, 2012

In my first post on Statism, I define the concept as an excessive and harmful embrace of the power of the state.

Statism I
Conservatism, Libertarianism, Statism

Feb 9, 2012

In my second post, I attempt to show Statism functions as a bias in economics – the most market oriented of academic disciplines.

Statism II
Bias, economics, government failure, market failure, Statism

Feb 19, 2012

In this third and final post, I attempt to discuss briefly how one might apply the newest insight into human behavior – cognitive biases – to government action by administrative agencies to show how their actions might turn out to be harmful. One could then balance its effect on government and on the market to determine which was greater.

Statism III
Cognitive Biases, Statism

"But wait, this is insane: they will kill the golden goose..."

The New America?

The result is that we are witnessing a quiet but insidious revolution. At home, if successful, the state and its vast array of newly hired employees, will administer our health care system, as well as education loans (and that will need a sort of new agency like the Postal Service or DMV). We now take for granted take-overs of much of the automobile industry and financial organizations. Should cap and trade pass, the administration would be dictating energy use. If you add it up — going to the doctor, driving a car, stopping by an ATM, flipping on the lights, taking out a student loan — you could run bump into a lot of new federal bureaucrats. And that’s the point, isn’t it after all?

I doubt anyone in the administration believes that these new public sectors of the economy will be better run. (After all, the Obamas themselves did not wish to live in a city-run housing tract, or send their children to an inner-city public school: wishing to be paid by the government is rather different than relying on the government).

So What’s the Plan?

So the point instead is I think fourfold:

a) those who profit from running these new agencies will be our new anointed class, at the top, Ivy-League technocrats, and lower down among the ranks, the politically deserving: power and patronage;

b) the resultant cost increases will require more taxes on those whose ill-gotten gains should be properly redistributed to the commune; gorge the beast;

c) in political terms, a constituency that either administers or receives federal larges (think of an ACORN/SEIU hybrid) will prove a predictably loyal base in future elections: dependent future voters;

d) federal and state wages and pensions will remind us all during tough times that government “service” is the only steady, reliable, and fair employer: we will all end up the same.

Some readers point out — “But wait, this is insane: they will kill the golden goose. What fuels redistributive government are taxes from the creation of private wealth that demands open markets, incentives for profit, reasonable taxes to allow enjoyment of profits, principled exploitation of natural resources, and government enhancement rather than restriction of business.”

Why Do They Do it?

But I think the Obamians either have not read history and so do not appreciate how statism/socialism/communism have impoverished all that they have touched, or they assume capitalism solely is run by nice-guy billionaires like Buffet, Gates, and Soros who apparently clapped their hands, made a few billion, and then are happy to live on a billion or two and give the rest away to progressive causes.

There is no appreciation that scrappy, often grubby Americans this minute are scrambling on their computer terminals, on their forklifts, in their commuting cars to run a business, provide a service, or move up the employment ladder in hopes of improving their lot and leaving behind something for their kids. They are the engines of capitalism and they don’t often go to Yale, or Rev. Wright’s church, or work at Human Resources Department. And when they all do, we will be in sorry shape.

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The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen

In the ever-expanding state that the left creates, the vast majority of individuals lose significance in that they are simply less needed as the state takes over many of their roles...as the state expands further into health care, the same will happen to doctors as power and prestige are transferred from them to the heads of dozens of new government health regulatory agencies. Over time, neither you nor your doctor will fully decide your treatment...

...you will be needed essentially for one thing: to finance the one thing that is truly needed -- the state.

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"Every time the state assumes an additional function such as health insurance, child care or benefits for the aged, the need for close family ties becomes weaker."

...the national health insurance movement rose alongside a larger transfer of responsibility from the family to the state: "Every time the state assumes an additional function such as health insurance, child care or benefits for the aged, the need for close family ties becomes weaker."

More provocatively he [Victor Fuchs] says: "It may be that one of the most effective ways of increasing allegiance to the state is through national health insurance."

From Bismarck to Obama

The means by which statism has become our national theology

Statism: the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty.

I hope you will take the five minutes to watch this video. It is the most impactful one I have ever seen.

This video was made in 1984. It shows a former KGB agent disgussing how America will be completely taken over with Soviet/Socialist policies from within. He says the process of 'demoraliztion' is complete and irreversible.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHgYPDvQFU8&feature=player_embedded

It wasn't called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for nothing! If you're not frightened by this, perhaps you don't remember history or don't have a grasp of what it was truly like for those living under the Soviet rule.

PS - Please view the other videos in this series, the former KGB man explains how he taught college kids to agitate against America in the 1960's in order to further an anti-American/pro-Socialist agenda - www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHgYPDvQFU8&feature=player_embedded

If you are at all doubtful about these claims here is corroboration: Venona Project

See "HINT" below

The FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION (which LGSTARR has included in our category "Economics" in the right panel) has published an educational essay entitled "Cliches of Socialism" and here is an excerpt:

Those who advance this line of criticism are perfectly correct on one point: if there is to be an increase in political spending, there must be a consequent decrease in private spending; some people must do without. The well-being of individual persons in any society varies inversely with the money at the disposal of the political class. All money spent by the governing group is taken from private citizens – who otherwise would spend it quite differently on goods of their choice. The state lives on taxes, and taxes are a charge against the economically productive part of society.

The Opulent State, fancied by levelers who criticize the Affluent Society, cannot exist except as a result of massive interference with free choice. To establish it, a society of freely choosing individuals must yield to a society in which the lives of the many are collectively planned and controlled by the few.

The state, in our Affluent Society, already deprives us of one-third and more of our substance. Not enough! say the critics. How much then? Fifty per cent? A hundred? Enough, at any rate, so that no life shall go unplanned if they can help it. This is the ancient error of authoritarianism. The intellectual, from time immemorial, has dreamed up ethical and esthetic standards for the rest of mankind - only to have them ignored. His ideas may be ever so sound, but his efforts to persuade people to embrace them meet with scant success. The masses are too ignorant to know what is good for them, so why not impose the right ideas on them by direct political action? The State is too weak and poor? Well, make it strong and rich, he urges; and it is done. But when the State is strong and rich, it devours the intellectual together with his defenseless ethical and esthetic standards. The State acts from political and power motives, as by its nature it must. It cannot possibly be the means for realizing the dreams of spiritual advance.

"Americans squander their income on themselves while public needs are neglected."

HINT: "Americans" (the squanderers) are human beings living in America. "Public needs" is simply a (liberal's) way to refer to OTHER Americans. Are they being neglected by their parents? No. "Neglected" means that they are not as clever as a common grifter, and so the Government (Obama's) will step in and rectify their ineptitude! (Isn't that sweet???)

Obama's Victory - A British View

Editorial Daily Mail via Fourwinds10.com


A victory for the hysterical Oprah Winfrey, the mad racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, the mainstream media who abandoned any sense of objectivity long ago, Europeans who despise America largely because they depend on her, comics who claim to be dangerous and fearless but would not dare attack genuinely powerful special interest groups. A victory for Obama-worshippers everywhere.

A victory for the cult of the cult. A man who has done little with his life but has written about his achievements as if he had found the cure for cancer in between winning a marathon and building a nuclear reactor with his teeth. Victory for style over substance, hyperbole over history, rabble-raising over reality.

A victory for Hollywood, the most dysfunctional community in the world. Victory for Streisand, Spielberg, Soros and Sarandon. Victory for those who prefer welfare to will and interference to independence. For those who settle for group think and herd mentality rather than those who fight for individual initiative and the right to be out of step with meager political fashion.

Victory for a man who is no friend of freedom. He and his people have already stated that media has to be controlled so as to be balanced, without realizing the extraordinary irony within that statement. Like most liberal zealots, the Obama worshippers constantly speak of Fox and Limbaugh, when the vast bulk of television stations and newspapers are drastically liberal and anti-conservative. Senior Democrat Chuck Schumer said that just as pornography should be censored, so should talk radio. In other words, one of the few free and open means of popular expression may well be cornered and beaten by bullies who even in triumph cannot tolerate any criticism and opposition.

A victory for those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than the family, for those who prefer teachers' unions to teaching and for those who are naively convinced that if the West is sufficiently weak towards its enemies, war and terror will dissolve as quickly as the tears on the face of a leftist celebrity.

A victory for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation. A victory for intrusive lawyers, banal sentimentalists, social extremists and urban snobs.

Congratulations America!