FReepmail me to get on or off this list
FReepmail me to get on or off this list
|
Mr. Nuelle wrote,
"...state officials in a democracy are mere caretakers who cannot privately enrich themselves..."
Do we need any further proof that Mr. Nuelle is disconnected from the real world?
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?...
"Every month Washington spends billion of dollars (blah, blah) which swells the nation's largest budget and budget deficit in its history. (more blah, blah, blah)"
As a percent of our GDP, the deficit is NOT the biggest in history - period. This tiny fact has only been stated about a gazillion times by the likes of Fred Barnes and Michael Barone. Ergo any article that leads off with this big lie in the first paragraph isn't worth a shi-ite.
Well 'spreading democracy' is a messy and expensive business....of course I suppose someone forgot to ask if anyone else wanted it in the first place.
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.
Nuelle's analysis of Hoppe hits the nail on the head. Currently there is not a party of limited government in Washington DC.
These Austrians are certainly an inspiration to us all! Their experiments in government from failed monarchy, to aborted democracy, to Nazi Reich, to socialist paradise have been truly awe inspiring. Just look at the pinnacle that Austria has raise itself to in the last hundred years while America has been sliding down the tubes! :^)
From the article:
"The 'slam dunk' pretext for the invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein's reputed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Although the Bush administration touted the virtues of toppling a mass murderer and inspiring/imposing democracy across the Middle East, the most compelling and controversial justification put to the American people was the prospect of Saddam striking the U.S. with WMD himself or by proxy, given his alleged connections to al-Qaeda. Only when the hyped weapons failed to surface, and they have yet to do so, did the Bush administration quickly scrap the weapons talking points and opt for the democratization gambit.
"Judging by the findings of the latest presidential commission to investigate the intelligence failures concerning Saddam's fictitious arsenal, it is clear the nation's security services and the American people were duped, however willingly. The 14-month, $10m presidential commission concluded that virtually every shred of evidence produced by the government's $40bn per annum intelligence apparatus was predicated on gravely flawed information. At the centre of the commission's report[ii] on the pre-war amalgamation of WMD evidence was the Iraqi ex-pat code-named "Curveball," a chemical engineer and brother of one of the aides to Ahmed Chalabi, head of the then Pentagon-connected Iraqi National Congress.
"Although American intelligence officers never met Curveball before the war, save on one occasion, his dubious claims were unquestioningly infused into the Bush administration's case against Iraq. The sole Iraqi source spoke with frank specificity about Iraq's alleged biological weapons programs and existence of mobile labs described by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell during his now infamous Feb. 2003 address to the United Nations.
"Post-war investigations showed that Curveball was not even in the country at the times he claimed to have taken part in illicit weapons work. CIA analysts who lobbied for the agency to come clean about its star source's duplicity were sacked.
"According to the commission, U.S. intelligence agencies' reliance on Curveball and their failure to scrutinize his claims was the 'primary reason' that the CIA and other spy agencies 'fundamentally misjudged the status of Iraq's weapons programs.'
"Washington's other showpiece examples of Saddam's malevolent intent—secret acquisitions of uranium and aluminum tubes for a resurrected nuclear program and fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles capable of discharging nasty chemical agents above U.S. cities—were all undermined in turn by outside organizations. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency discovered in Jan. 2003 that documents fingering Iraq for attempting to purchase uranium from Niger were forged, a mere inconvenience the CIA opted to ignore until a few months after the war.
"America’s leading centrifuge physicists, who characterized it as technically garbled and unmistakably false, dismissed the CIA’s case for aluminum tubes. Without convincingly substantiating in the first place how unmanned aerial vehicles would make the trek from Iraq to America undetected, the White House's claim was duly refuted by UN Weapons inspectors before the war, who correctly assessed the vehicles as fit for reconnaissance missions, not WMD delivery.
"The glaring deficiency of the Robb-Silberman commission's report is that its remit did not entail investigating policy-makers' (mis)use of intelligence. Though the commission's findings explicitly deny that political pressure was exerted on intelligence analysts to ensure information fit the Bush administration's bellicose agenda, the dismissal is belied by the text's accounts; one could reasonably infer such a colossal blunder could not have been perpetrated without direction from political handlers at the top.
"Rather, Bush secures re-election for prosecuting a war under deliberately false pretenses against an infirm adversary unconnected to 9-11. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s appointment to head the World Bank smacks of former defence secretary and Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara's selection in 1968. Condoleezza Rice becomes secretary of state while her subordinate Stephen Hadley, assumes her former post. A figure instrumental in ensuring the spurious uranium story posited in the 2003 State of the Union Address, Bob Joseph, gets to be under secretary of state. Lastly, George Tenet—head of the CIA during this mess—is awarded a medal of freedom for presumably bending intelligence to suit his boss's whims.
"Hence, the Bush administration is exonerated by default and is presented with an unprecedented opportunity to take credit for the massive revamp of intelligence collection at home and abroad. If justice were to be served, the president and his cronies would be held to account for their actions."
Modernman and Jackbob, -- my two recent correspondents, -- you should enjoy this:
[S]tate 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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
From Reason magazine, here is a mainstream libertarian celebration of Bush's speech apologizing for Yalta -- with a hearty approval for Bush's support for freedom and democracy in the tough neighborhood that is within Russia's reach.
http://www.reason.com/links/links051005.shtml
I see that static analysis of foreign policy is every bit as useful as their static analyses of economic policy. Someone needs to explain to these people that t is not always equal to zero.