Posted on 05/09/2005 6:19:48 AM PDT by kjvail
The second anniversary of America's expedition into Iraq passed with relatively scant fanfare. Since hostilities in Mesopotamia commenced, thousands of American and Iraqi casualties have been tallied. Every month Washington spends billion of dollars on counterinsurgency and rebuilding efforts in Iraq and further afield, which swells the nation's largest budget and budget deficit in its history[i].
As vast quantities of blood and treasure are expended abroad, Washington politicians win plaudits domestically for their warmongering, and government contracting at home and abroad burgeon, on what basis is this imperial project—financed by foreign lenders and American taxpayers—justified?...
...Democracy deconstructed
As Hans Hermann-Hoppe adeptly describes in Democracy: The God that failed, the democratic state is inherently a "public" monopoly. Unlike privately-owned monopolies, e.g., monarchies where the sovereign generally has an incentive to moderate expropriations of property to preserve the realm's present value for heirs, state officials in a democracy are mere caretakers who cannot privately enrich themselves from ownership or sale of government property.
Rather, a moral hazard and tragedy of the commons ensues as bureaucrats and politicians may merely exercise use of government property while on the state payroll, precipitating a strong inducement to maximize current use of government property, irrespective if such activities entail dire consequences for taxpayers and the economy at large.
As concerns government finance, officials conduct the borrowing and enjoy the resultant political plaudits from the constituencies that benefit from state largesse while other private citizens defray the expenditures and debts via taxation or government-stoked money creation. Indeed, Hoppe contends an elected president can run up public debts, instigate inflation, inaugurate long-running wars, and introduce other state projects footed by hapless taxpayers without being held personally liable for the consequences.
Rothbard’s Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy methodically chronicles how the personnel of successive democratically-elected administrations manipulated American foreign policy to secure the narrow self-interests of connected business interests whilst justifying these massive, costly and incessant interventions on the pretext of combating communism or promoting democracy.
Politicians who have aggressively expanded the state in America and elsewhere are extolled as great. Verily, democratic governance provides an alluring career for aspiring politicians, their cronies and bureaucrats. Not only do officials have the resources accrued by the state at their disposal, they also exercise the authority and wherewithal to confiscate private property and participate in the process of spending and borrowing—absent individual culpability—all the while receiving a salary and pension funded by taxpayers. Furthermore, politicians and appointed administrators are only accountable during regular popularity contests, in which voters can reshuffle personnel but are not inclined to alter fundamentally the scheme of free-for-all theft.
Hoppe states democracy abolishes the distinction between rulers and ruled—the limited opportunity to become a member of the royal family that pervaded under monarchy—and assumes that any member of the political system may ascend to the upper echelons of governance. Given the state's indispensable need to steal for its subsistence and the nearly unfettered entry into the ranks of the ruling class, democracy renders it that much easier for politicians to accelerate exactions from the public, as the gates remain open for any individual or faction to gain access to governmental powers and impose the same taxes or regulations themselves. As democracy has taken root in the United States and elsewhere, jostling between rival political factions has been less about how flaccid or robust the state should be, but what direction the state should take as its scope expands.
The ability of elected politicians and entrenched bureaucrats to institutionalize and enforce systematic predation and redistribution of private property is an outcome of the democratic ethos itself. Indeed, the grand bargain of democracy is this: every individual within the system—whether voluntarily or not—cedes the inviolable title to his or her property for the ability to either elect, participate in or marshal a political movement that competes for the privilege of seizing and spending everyone else's money. It follows that individual responsibility and private property ownership are seriously impaired and denigrated as the government-instituted "law of the jungle" taps innate human characteristics such as envy, self-preservation, and keenness for gratification.
As Frederic Bastiat explained in The Law, self-preservation and self-development are universal instincts among men as is the preference to do so with the minimum amount of pain and the maximum level of ease. Plunder then is favored over production, so long as the risks and inputs of confiscation are not as agonizing or as indomitable as the painstaking act of production and exchange. When given an opportunity to seize private property or stipulate regulations on owner's use thereof, as democratic rule is wont to do, participants in the political system vie for the chance to apply the state's coercive arm in service of their supporters' ends.
Motivated by envy and self-preservation, all classes of individuals demand, whether through forceful or pacific means, the franchise as its price for defraying the expenses of others running the government. Once empowered to help decide the course of public expenditures—Bastiat wrote—plundered classes opt to be as licentious as other enfranchised classes, rendering the systematic looting universal, even though such profligacy is undeniably detrimental to the economy's well-being.
It should be noted that the chief feedback mechanism of democratic government, voting, does occur in private enterprises and associations. Beyond this superficial similarity, however, there are acute distinctions. Shareholders exercise voting rights in a corporation proportionate to stock ownership whereas every eligible voter in a democratic election is entitled to one vote, irrespective if they are net tax-eaters or taxpayers.
Should shareholders grow disaffected by voting procedures, business strategies or dividends payouts they may opt out of owning a portion of an enterprise by selling stock, a prerogative denied to democratic voters who must acquiesce to government spending plans and policies—regardless of consent—lest they risk jail or emigration. The intrinsic tenuousness of property ownership in a democratic system and the inability to extricate oneself and possessions from possible confiscation accelerates the temptation to seize other people’s goods.
Bastiat argues that the onset of universal plunder undermines the purpose of law, in his view the collective organization of the individual right to defense of life, liberty and property. The moment law is perverted to engineer ends contrary to individual liberty, e.g., enshrining the notion individuals are entitled to a portion of each other’s property absent voluntary agreement, the conversion pits morality versus the adulterated law. Thus, moral chaos is the outcome of democratization, as one must either relinquish respect for the law or compromise moral sense.
The divergence between morality and democratic rule can be observed in legal positivism, the notion that right and wrong are absent prior to the introduction of legislation. Legislation attenuates predictability of law as the free entry into government and the intrinsic fluidity of political priorities ensure the governing process reflects the most urgent desires of policy-makers and the electorate, irrespective of the long-term ramifications of the enacted rules. Furthermore, the emergence of public or administrative law, which exempts government agents from individual culpability when exercising their sanctioned duties, enables the state's workforce to engage in behaviors that no other individual may commit licitly. Lew Rockwell cites a few euphemisms where the state excused itself from the laws it professes to uphold, such as kidnapping posing as selective service, counterfeiting masquerading as monetary policy and mass murder sold as foreign policy[v].
Consequently, law is not considered negative—inimical to injustice as Bastiat would have it—much less universal, eternally bestowed, discoverable by man and anterior to the institution of government. Bastiat asserts that the prior existence of life, liberty, and property is the impetus for enacting laws in the first place. Moreover, the demarcation between right and wrong and the very definition of crime is obfuscated and debased by the inexhaustible and transitory adoption and amendment of legislative diktat and the bifurcation of law codes applicable to the rulers and the ruled.
In sum, the unique characteristics of democratic government tend, according to Hoppe, Bastiat and others, to accelerate rising time preference, decivilization, and the incidence of crime to the detriment of private property, voluntary production and exchange, individual responsibility and even morality.
Why then do Messrs. Bush, Wolfowitz, and any other politicians, statesmen or bureaucrats get away with inaugurating recurring conflicts and administer an ever-expanding vehicle of coercion and plunder? The fundamental rules and ethos of democratic government impel man's innate inclination toward self-preservation and self-development to not only produce, trade and safeguard his own possessions but also employ legal theft to acquire more property from others.
Politicians and their deputies are merely the best at exploiting the system's impaired moral climate to organize the state's confiscatory arm to serve their backer's interests.
Dominican, yes. Franciscan, no.
Wasn't there something about a bull heart in that movie? Maybe Hormel should package those.
Well if you checked my about page you'd see my midieval personality type is melancholic, so you are probably right LOL. I think the Dominicans would fit me to a T.
You make my mouth water. However, hot dogs would be that assortment of cock heads and pig hooves that the autistic girl tries to steal from Il Stupido.
I just had a deeply satisfying medieval meal, untouched by technology. Burp. Wine. Burp.
Beasts of burden are lead to their rest
Quiet songbird is warming her nest
Night from dusk has distilled
Merlot my stomach filled
Shots of cognac stack up in my chest
Weeping willows’ subdued melancholy
Suits the clouds drifting forth e’er so slowly
Swaying lilies respond
To the breeze o’er the pond
This calls for Riesling with ravioli
Golden sheep congregate with their ram
Rainbow waters crash over the dam
At the sight of this idyll
Our thirst we must unbridle
Let us have Sangiovese with lamb
As a doe in spring clings to her buck
Peasant youth in haylofts try their luck
This bucolic tableau
Pleads to let the cab flow
In the company of citrus duck
When the peasant revolts occurred during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries the mass murders of the harmless defeated, and often innocent, people were at no surpassed in the 20th century. These gangsters families slaughtered entire populations with the good graces of the church. Even after the reformation in Germany, Martin Luther even joined in with the Roman Catholic officials giving his blessings to the mass murders conducted by the monarchical gangster families.
Even when monarchists fought each other mass murder had its occurrences. For example, during the 30 years war numerous instances of mass murder occurred by monarchical lead armies. Slaughter, rape, and looting of the meager belongings of civilian populations was quite common place.
Of course there were many gangster territorial wars for gaining control over enslaved populations. In those wars, populations were for the most part not needlessly killed, as the enslaved people were part of the booty and thus not to be lost in wasteful killing.
Yes you are quite correct that the monarchical system was much better for holding the masses of people in a state of virtual slavery and keeping any form of progress or enlightened thought from reaching the people. It truly was a dark ages. But once people begin to think for themselves, and progress starts to shine through, then there will be a cost. Even the monarchists realized that the stronger countries became stronger by having increasingly stronger and educated populations. And those kinds of people, capable of thinking for themselves, will not accept monarchies.
I don't know where you get your information from. The radical libertarian vision has more than quite effectively dealt with all to the above. When the debates pretty much stopped within the libertarian movement back in 1984, the problem they had was in selecting which among several visions they had. The problems then were not that they couldn't deal with the issues, it was in selecting which vision was to be endorsed, or further developed.
The problem with the radical libertarian vision is that it does not deal effectively with... natural monopolies and enterprises that require the aid of eminent domain and other types of state power...
You are quite right here, except that natural monopolies have never occurred. Monopolies only occur where government actions or inactions bring them into existence. Your entire notion of enterprises in need of eminent domain is at best a strawman argument, as such enterprises either are not in need of such, or we all would be better off with out them.
You are quite right however that "most businessmen prefer to be regulated by the government," but not because of a fear of being subjected "to endless private litigation from all comers." They like being regulated because it keeps competition down and prices up. As far as endless litigation goes, it was argued quite often among libertarians that certain libertarian scenarios would lead to a litigation society. But such visions have been quite effectively challenged. The only problem with the libertarian vision is that the Libertarian Party and much of the movement stopped developing twenty years ago its infant vision to early. It was still in need of much refinement as it still is today and always will be.
Your notion that libertarian "measures" are "seldom... practical" I find quite comical. Such meaningless relativistic statements can be said about any political theory to include the one that is currently in practice now. Of course such a statement should be expected from one who considers the Federalist No.10 a "prime source" of "political philosophy."
This is absolutely not true. The Holy Roman Empire as such was a historic collection of many different empires with different governments and governmental systems. Its history includes being conquered, falling into chaos, and plagued by civil wars. Between many of the different empires and governments laying claim to its name, it often did not even exist in name. Furthermore many of those empires often existed with little authority beyond laying claim to the name. To make a long story short, the Holy Roman Empire did not any time in history exist with continuity as as long as the current U.S. government has existed with continuity.
You are so wrong about everything I don't even know where to start, try reading a history book
As vast quantities of blood and treasure are expended abroad, Washington politicians win plaudits domestically for their warmongering, and government contracting at home and abroad burgeon, on what basis is this imperial project—financed by foreign lenders and American taxpayers—justified?...
Even harder to take your counter argument seriously, since you don't appear to have one.
We don't hear much from you jingoists these days.
I have shouted my objection to this multi-"explained" Iraq adventure from day one, stating that its only possible result would be a fruitless waste of blood and treasure.
That remains my story and I'm stickin' to it.
YES! Damn that radical left-wing Mises Institute to hell! (/sarc)
This tiny fact has only been stated about a gazillion times by the likes of administration apologists Fred Barnes and Michael Barone.
Barnes, particularly is beyond sycophancy!
This tragedy is much more a story of executive arrogance than intelligence failure.
The facts are the facts. The deficit is not the biggest in history.
There was a really good piece on this last year on Seattle Catholic, Lose the Past, Lose the Present by Dr. John C. Rao.
We must defend the truth of history at every opportunity, we are now 20 generations into this revolution, it would be so easy for the truth to be lost in the maze of revolutionary propoganda and mythology.
Everyone who cares to should study this history so as to be able to defend it well
Some starting points
Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church: A 2,000-Year History
a 500 page summary, very good overview but light on details of course
For more detailed treatment of Western history, two authors are critical:
Hilaire Belloc
The Path To Rome (1902)
Marie Antoinette (1909)
The French Revolution (1911)
The Party System (1911)
The Servile State (1912)
History of England (1915)
Europe And The Faith (1920)
Do We Agree?: A Debate Between G. K. Chesterton And Bernard Shaw, with Hilaire Belloc in the Chair (1928) (with G K Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw) aka Do We Agree?: A Debate
James II (1928)
Wolsey (1930)
Richlieu (1930)
Cranmer (1931)
Napoleon (1932)
Oliver Cromwell (1934)
Milton (1935)
Characters Of The Reformation (1936)
The Restoration Of Property (1936)
The Crisis Of Our Civilisation (1937)
Distributist Perspectives: Essays On Economics of Justice And Charity (2004) (with G K Chesterton and Harold Robbins)
Christopher Dawson
His bibliography I'll just link because it's huge. Dawson is the foremost Catholic historian of the last 500 years, his work can be the foundation of a lifetime of historical studies.
There are a number of lectures you can listen to from Intercollegiate Studies Institute on his work. Unfortunately their lecture search applet seems to be down at the moment, when I do a search I just get an error. You can browse their entire library of lectures here They have 171 lectures in audio, video and/or text formats, some really great stuff in there
Ahh ,I found some of critical import Christopher Dawson and the Rise and Fall of Christendom also The Thought of Christopher Dawson and Christopher Dawson's Historical Philosophy
(you'll need Realplayer to listen)
At best, isn't that a little like having a seriously enlarged prostate but celebrating because you don't have cancer?
I don't think the Iraq war was a waste at all. We have had a lot of benefits from it, not the least of which is eliminating a sworn enemy who had a penchant for nursing grudges, no compunction about using terror, and total control of a semi-major state to back it up. Really, we've gone over this ground so many times, the arguments to justify the war are many and they are all out there explained down to the tiniest details. It's the contrary view that if asserted needs to prove its case, and a line like I quoted clearly assumes the contrary view without seeing any need to support it. I heard and hear that exact same view, in the same words, advanced by socialists and anti-Americans alike, and it is no more substantial now than when bribed Europeans were making it.
The radical libertarian vision is just that: a vision -- and nowhere a working reality, unlike, for example, the large and productive country spawned by our Constitution. The radical libertarian consensus that you refer to is more a sign of stagnation than vigor.
Radical libertarianism is an often insightful critique, but it is not a credible alternative way to run a society. And take a close look at Federalist No. 10, for there is much in it for a libertarian to like.
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