Disinformation pushed world into lockdowns (2)

China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign | The Tablet - Michael P. Senger: 

September 15, 2020 - "On March 9, Italy, the first major European country to sign onto Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, took the WHO’s advice and became the first country outside China to lock down. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte had long advocated closer ties with China. Chinese experts arrived in Italy on March 12 and two days later advised a tighter lockdown.... On March 19, they repeated that Italy’s lockdown was 'not strict enough,' saying: 'Here in Milan, the hardest hit area by COVID-19, there isn't a very strict lockdown ... We need every citizen to be involved in the fight of COVID-19 and follow this policy.' Italy was simultaneously bombarded with Chinese disinformation. From March 11 to 23, roughly 46% of tweets with the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia (Go China, go Italy) and 37% of those with the hashtag #grazieCina (thank you China) came from bots.

"While analysts typically focus on finding as many inauthentic accounts as possible, the purpose of the following discussion is different — using simple investigatory methods to evince the intent behind Beijing’s disinformation, which appears to be far more insidious than analysts have recognized. Social media and analytics companies generally only detect obvious automated activity, while fake, personally managed accounts can be created with ease. This works out well for the CCP, which has always preferred the human touch.

"On March 12, Twitter user @manisha_kataki posted a video showing Chinese workers disinfecting streets, apparently admiring China’s strategy: 'At this rate, China will be back in action very soon, may be much faster than the world expects.' As The New York Times’ Paul Mozur noted, this tweet was not shocking, funny, or newsworthy, yet it was shared hundreds of thousands of times. This caught the attention of Israeli company Next Dim, which flagged the activity as likely state-sponsored.... Twitter responded to Mozur’s article by deleting 170,000 accounts, but at the time of this writing many of the suspect accounts are still active, and a search for hundreds of similar examples can be easily repeated with one click.... 

"As more countries shut down, some suspicious online activity took a darker turn. When South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem famously refused to issue a statewide lockdown, suspicious accounts began filling her Twitter feed with abuse and graphic language to pressure her to do so. Upon closer examination, two of the accounts hurl similar abuse at governors thousands of miles apart.... When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the first governor to end his state’s lockdown, honored late Rep. John Lewis, his Twitter feed was stormed with conspicuous, vulgar language that often invoked his anti-lockdown stance.

"Sweden’s skepticism toward the CCP predates COVID-19. In January, Beijing threatened Swedish trade ties over an award given to Gui Minhai, a Swedish publisher detained in China. Sweden did not back down and later refused to follow China’s lockdown model, opting for a herd immunity strategy. Thus, Sweden became a prime target of a Chinese campaign portraying it as weak against the COVID threat. In the words of China’s state-run Global Times:

Chinese analysts and netizens doubt herd immunity and called it a violation of human rights, citing high mortality in the country compared to other Northern European countries. “So-called human rights, democracy, freedom are heading in the wrong direction in Sweden, and countries that are extremely irresponsible do not deserve to be China's friend …”

"Initially, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also opted for herd immunity. But on March 13, suspicious accounts began storming his Twitter feed and likening his plan to genocide. This language almost never appears in Johnson’s feed before March 12, and several of the accounts were hardly active before then. Britain locked down on March 23."

Read more: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid-lockdown-propaganda

Also read: 

Disinformation pushed world into lockdowns (1)

Disinformation pushed world into lockdowns (3) 

Atlas Shrugged and the literary critics

Who Is Ayn Rand?: - Lisa Duggan, Jacobin magasine:
The following is an excerpt from Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed by Lisa Duggan (University of California Press, 2019).

August 23, 2019 - ""When Atlas Shrugged made its incendiary appearance in 1957, it cracked open the apparent political consensus in favor of the welfare state to reveal intensely warring camps. The mainstream press, leading academics, and prominent literary figures didn’t just dismiss the tome; they abhorred it. [Author Ayn] Rand herself predicted to Nathaniel Branden that her novel was 'going to be the most controversial book of this century; I’m going to be hated, vilified, lied about, smeared in every possible way.' Her characteristic grandiosity notwithstanding, she was prescient.

"Atlas Shrugged was described as 'execrable claptrap,' 'grotesque eccentricity,' and a 'shrill diatribe' comparable in its godless, heartless overwrought cruelty to Nietzschean-inflected fascism. Ex-Communist ... literary critic Granville Hicks opined in the New York Times, 'It howls in the reader’s ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention. And then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds.'

"But the most notoriously devastating review came from William Buckley’s National Review. Echoing the views of many religious conservatives, ... ex-Communist ... Whittaker Chambers wrote that Atlas Shrugged substitutes 'the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross,' presenting the 'Randian Man' who, like 'Marxian Man,' is at 'the center of a godless world.' Chambers continued: 'Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.... From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"'

"These over-the-top negative reviews combined bitter rejection of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, from the Right as well as the Left, with attacks on ... the writing style and on the tone or sheer meanness of the novel. They were met with a much smaller number of equally over-the-top positive reviews and private evaluations, deeming Atlas Shrugged 'vibrant and powerful' and Rand a writer of 'dazzling virtuosity.'

"Economist Ruth Alexander, Rand’s friend, predicted that 'Ayn Rand is destined to rank in history as the outstanding novelist and most profound philosopher of the twentieth century.' A private note to the author from famed right-wing economist Ludwig von Mises praised the book as a political achievement:

Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel.... It is also – or may I say: first of all – a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled “intellectuals” and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by our governments and political parties.....

"Despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews in the mainstream press, Atlas Shrugged quickly became a word-of-mouth best seller, generating thousands of fan letters from gushing enthusiasts. Though never regarded as serious by cultural gatekeepers, the novel nonetheless became undeniably socially and politically important, sometimes compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone with the Wind, and 1984."

Read more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/mean-girl-ayn-rand-culture-of-greed-lisa-duggan-excerpt
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David Boaz remembers Andrea Millen Rich

RIP Andrea Rich | Cato @ Liberty - David Boaz:

August 1, 2018 - "I am saddened to report that my dear friend Andrea Millen Rich died this morning at her home in Philadelphia at the age of 79 after a 19-year battle with lung cancer....For more than 40 years Andrea was at the center of the libertarian movement, a mentor, counselor, friend, supporter, facilitator, networker, and gracious hostess....

"She was the first chair of the New York Libertarian Party in 1973-74. The vice chair was Howard S. Rich, whom she soon married. From 1974 to 1977 she was vice chair of the national Libertarian Party, and in 1980 she played a key role in developing television advertising for the campaign of Ed Clark, the Libertarian presidential nominee.

"From 1982 to 2005 she was the president of Laissez-Faire Books, which billed itself as 'the world’s largest collection of books on liberty.' It had a retail location on Mercer Street in Greenwich Village.... But in those pre-Amazon days, it was far better known for its monthly catalog that reached libertarians around the world. Through its Fox & Wilkes publishing imprint it brought many classic libertarian books back into print.....

"Andrea often negotiated with publishers to make books more affordable, and some books only found publishers because Laissez-Faire could guarantee an audience beyond the small academic market.

"Through her work with Laissez-Faire she became friendly with leading libertarian writers including Milton and Rose Friedman, Robert Nozick, Thomas Sowell, Nathaniel Branden, Thomas Szasz, Charles Murray, Richard Epstein, David Kelley, and Margit von Mises, widow of economist Ludwig von Mises.

"As president of the Center for Independent Thought [CIT], the parent organization of Laissez-Faire Books, she also launched and managed the Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties and the Roy A. Childs Fund for Independent Scholars.

"CIT’s biggest project was Stossel in the Classroom, which repackaged ABC News and Fox Business videos on economics and public policy by John Stossel for classroom use. The videos have been viewed by tens of millions of high school students – according to Stossel, reaching more people than ABC News and Fox News."

Read more: https://www.cato.org/blog/rip-andrea-rich
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Reason magazine celebrates 50 years in print

America’s Premier Libertarian Magazine Celebrates Its 50th Year - Troy Warden, Daily Signal:

November 2, 2018 - "Reason magazine, the print and online publication of Reason Foundation, will celebrate its 50th anniversary Saturday with well-known figures in the libertarian movement at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Los Angeles. Reason bills itself as 'the planet’s largest source of news, culture, policy, and ideas from a principled libertarian perspective.'

'Larry Friedlander, a Boston University student, founded Reason magazine in the summer of 1968. The magazine was considered unlike many magazines of the time because of its clean graphic design and clear ethos. Freidlander, who died in 2011 at age 63, painstakingly designed the magazine’s aesthetics and content from scratch at his mother’s house, Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief, told The Daily Signal in an email....

"Libertarianism is a political philosophy that emphasizes individual freedom and limits on the coercive behavior of the state. Libertarians typically favor strong property rights, civil liberties, and drug decriminalization.

"According to Mike Alissi, the publisher of Reason, the website receives 4 million web visitors a month and 3.5 million monthly video views of at least 30 seconds in length. Monthly circulation is 47,000....

"A luncheon followed by a gala Saturday night will feature conversations on and remembrances of Reason’s 50-year history of 'fighting for "Free Minds and Free Markets" via award-winning journalism and cutting-edge policy work powered by principled, pragmatic, and visionary libertarian ideals,' and what plans the magazine and foundation have in store for the next five decades....

"Fox Business Network host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery — professionally known as Kennedy — will host the evening program, which will feature remarks from Vernon Smith, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, and Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, a two-term governor of Indiana....

 "Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine along with public policy research, will give its Savas Award for Privatization to Frank Baxter, former U.S. ambassador to Uruguay ... 'for his role in co-founding Los Angeles’ largest and most successful charter school network, the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools,' Leonard Gilroy, director of government reform at Reason Foundation, said in a statement provided to The Daily Signal....

"Despite the passage of 50 years, Mangu-Ward said, “the early issues of Reason feel astonishingly relevant today'.... 'In the early days of Reason, libertarians and conservatives made common cause against the rising tide of socialism and communism,' she told The Daily Signal. 'Unfortunately, that alliance may once again be relevant.'”

Read more: https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/11/02/americas-premier-libertarian-magazine-celebrates-its-50th-year/
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Limited government as framework for utopia

Why Robert Nozick was a libertarian | Big Think - Scotty Hendricks:

August 13, 2018 - "Robert Nozick ... was a philosopher at Harvard.... After the publication of his colleague John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, which brilliantly argues for social democracy, Nozick was inspired to use similar arguments to promote his political positions. Appearing three years later, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) was Nozick’s only political philosophy book.

"He begins by advancing a straightforward premise, 'Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)'.... Nozick’s idea of rights are protections against harm to us or our property. In this way they are negative rights; they assure us that other people won’t bother us and that we can claim compensation when they do, but they don’t obligate anybody else to do anything for us....

"Our having these rights means that it is wrong to hurt people or take their property for any reason unless they consent to such action, excepting when we are correcting for a previous violation of rights. Nozick argues that this premise leaves us with only one option when we’re deciding what kind of state is justified. He calls it a 'minimal state' or the 'night watchman state' and it is much, much, smaller than any functioning state is today.

"Nozick explains that the night watchman state is 'limited to the functions of protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts, and so on.' There would also not be any taxes in this state, as that would be forcing people to hand over their property with or without their consent. It also would not be able to enact laws preventing people from making their own life choices or that force people to make ones that they don't want to make....

"Nozick ... asks how we can build a society that works for a very diverse group of people.... [H]is stance is that you can only build a 'meta-framework' that allows for a variety of people to pursue a variety of life plans. Because of this, the 'utopia' that Nozick alludes to in the title is not one but many.

"In the minimalist state, it will be possible for people to form utopian communities on their own without outside interference. Nozick claims that this is one of the greatest perks of a minimalist state, as it will allow people to choose communities that fit their lifestyle, create new ones, leave ones they don’t like, or avoid utopian dreams altogether without hassle.

"Such utopian communities could be puritanical, hedonist, communist, capitalist, dedicated to eating cheese, or whatever else people think will make them happy. The minimalist state only assures that nobody is forced into these living situations, that nobody is forced to pay for these communities other than the people living in them, that any contracts signed are adhered to, and that nobody tries to harm or defraud the members of such groups."

Read more: https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/why-robert-nozick-was-a-libertarian
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Economists urge Trump to reject protectionism

National Taxpayers Union - More Than 1,100 Economists Join NTU to Voice Opposition to Tariffs, Protectionism:

May 3, 2018 - "The current political moment has seen new trade barriers erected as well as additional threats to rescind trade agreements and play politics with trade conventions that have benefited everyone. National Taxpayers Union is joined by more than 1,100 economists urging opposition to this new economic protectionism in the following letter.

May 3, 2018
Open Letter to President Trump and Congress:

"In 1930, 1,028 economists urged Congress to reject the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Today, Americans face a host of new protectionist activity, including threats to withdraw from trade agreements, misguided calls for new tariffs in response to trade imbalances, and the imposition of tariffs on washing machines, solar components, and even steel and aluminum used by U.S. manufacturers.

"Congress did not take economists’ advice in 1930, and Americans across the country paid the price. The undersigned economists and teachers of economics strongly urge you not to repeat that mistake..... [note -- the following text is taken from the 1930 letter]

"We are convinced that increased protective duties would be a mistake. They would operate, in general, to increase the prices which domestic consumers would have to pay.... Construction, transportation and public utility workers, professional people and those employed in banks, hotels, newspaper offices, in the wholesale and retail trades, and scores of other occupations would clearly lose.... The vast majority of farmers, also, would lose....

"Our export trade, in general, would suffer. Countries cannot permanently buy from us unless they are permitted to sell to us, and the more we restrict the importation of goods from them by means of ever higher tariffs the more we reduce the possibility of our exporting to them. Such action would inevitably provoke other countries to pay us back in kind by levying retaliatory duties against our goods.

"Finally, we would urge our Government to consider the bitterness which a policy of higher tariffs would inevitably inject into our international relations. A tariff war does not furnish good soil for the growth of world peace."

Read more: https://www.ntu.org/governmentbytes/page/economists-join-ntu-to-voice-opposition-to-tariffs-protectionism
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Bettina Bien Greaves dead at 100

Bettina Bien Greaves, R.I.P. | Liberty Unbound - Mark Skousen:

January 28, 2018 - "All scholars dream of having one or more disciples who will make sure their legacy is kept alive and their works and theories prominently trumpeted before the public eye.

"For the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, there was quite a following, including two couples, Hans and Mary Sennholz, and Percy and Bettina Greaves. On January 22 the last of the four, Bettina Bien Greaves, died at the astounding age of 100. (Mary Sennholz also lived to be 100)....

"Bettina Greaves deserves to be honored as Mises’ most devoted student, and in July a room will be dedicated to her at the annual FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas.

"From the time she first heard Mises speak in 1951 at a Freeman seminar in Washington Square in New York City, Bettina was smitten. With a background in shorthand and secretarial work during the war years, she attended Mises’ famous New York University graduate seminar, taking copious notes on every lecture from 1951 until 1969. Although she had no formal training in economics, Greaves was the queen of the Austrian school and never deviated from it. She joined the Foundation [for] Economic Education (FEE) staff in 1953 and worked at the FEE mansion for the rest of her career. She survived everyone, including founder Leonard Read. After retiring, she stayed on as a board member and even donated her home in New York to FEE....

"She focused her career on advancing the works and ideas of the Austrian school, including the contributions by Henry Hazlitt and Hans Sennholz. She wrote many articles for The Freeman, gave lectures, and compiled anthologies about Austrian economics. She spearheaded FEE’s program to provide libertarian material for high school debaters with packets on foreign aid, government regulations, medical care, and other issues. She compiled and edited Free Market Economics: A Syllabus and Free Market Economics: A Basic Reader, a two-volume set that was distributed to thousands of students and teachers....

"But her main interest was always in her mentor, Ludwig von Mises.... She compiled, edited, and translated many of his books after his death in 1973. She also worked with her husband Percy [on a book] ... published in 1974, called Mises Made Easier (but never easy!). With the help of Robert W. McGee, she published an exhaustive Mises: An Annotated Bibliography (FEE, 1993, 1995). When the Liberty Fund decided to publish the complete works of Mises, Bettina was asked to be the editor, writing introductions for each volume."

Read more: http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/1808
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Catholicism and Islam

by George J. Dance

When I joined the Libertarian Party of Canada, conspiracy theory was in vogue. One book that used to be circulated a lot was Gary Allen's None Dare Call it Conspiracy. Naturally I read it. I was struck by the constant references to Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope, which Allen considered the Bible of the conspirators; so, a copy being in the LPC library, I read that too.

Years later, I have forgotten most of Quigley's book. But one thing that stood out was Quigley's theory of the "Peru to Pakistan Axis", which stuck in my head and which contemporary events keep reminding me of.

Quigley's idea was that the roughly 1,000-year Muslim occupation of Spain and southern Italy turned those 2 regions culturally Muslim. Even after the Christians regained them, the culture remained essentially Muslim, and its fundamentalist Catholicism essentially the same as fundamentalist Islam, with things like the subordination of women and the killing of "heretics" and "infidels."

When a strong Catholic state emerged in Spain, it, too, was culturally Muslim, and its foreign policy was the Islamic policy of jihad. We all know the history: the invasion of and massacres in the Netherlands; the attempted invasion of England; 100 years of war, looting, and killing in Germany; and - worst of all - the jihad in South America, with the almost total extermination of the "infidel" population. Through it all, the Spanish state was stauchly supported by the official Catholic church, with its own power base in culturally Islamic southern Italy.

Spain emerged as a world power in the 16th century, due to the massive gold reserves looted from South America. It collapsed as a power less than 100 years later, for the same reason: rampant inflation caused by too much money chasing too little real wealth. But only in the 19th century did Spain start emerging from the cultural Islamic paradigm, and only in the anarchist revolution of the 20th did it shake off the Catholic Islamist hegemony. (Note that almost the first act of the Spanish anarchists in any community, as George Orwell noted in Homage to Catalonia, was to kill the priests.)

The Catholic church itself has largely shaken off the Islamist paradigm, at least in northern Europe and North America. But many are still infected by it, including those who grew up in the culturally Islamic areas of Italy, Spain, and the Spanish-occupied parts of South America (such as Argentina, the birthplace of the present Pope).

Which explains one motivation - not the only motivation, of course - for the hostility of some in the Catholic church to libertarians and libertarianism. They see us too as heretics or infidels, suitable only for killing the bodies to save the souls, as with the people of the Netherlands, Germany, and Spanish-occupied South America. Fortunately, with the Church tamed by the Enlightenment, they lack the power, and can only rant and rave about the 'libertarian invasion." But there is nothing but lack of power stopping them from reverting to their previous methods of persuasion.

It is time to identify the Catholic anti-libertarian "crusade" as what it is: a continuation of the historical pattern of Catholic jihadism.

Remembering 100 years of Communism

Remembering Communism | Winnipeg Sun - Hendrik van der Breggen, Providence University College,:

November 11, 2017 - "Fall 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the beginning of a grand experiment in communism. This social experiment had bitter fruit that shouldn’t be forgotten.

"Influenced by Karl Marx, the leaders of Soviet communism — Lenin, Stalin, and Co. (Comrades) — strived to create a utopian society. After taking power, the communists abolished private property and took control of the means of production (factories, farms). Their promise was that state control (a 'dictatorship of the proletariat') would be temporary. Eventually, new men and women would come into being.... A socialist heaven would finally come to earth....

"It turns out that the temporary dictatorship by the communist elite wasn’t temporary. And the Soviet experiment was a disaster.... Soviet communism’s killing of its own people makes Nazi death camps pale in comparison. Whereas 6 or 7 million died in the Nazi holocaust, ... historians estimate the Soviet death toll was 20 million, whereas Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (who lived in the Soviet Union) estimates 60 million.

"Of this total, approximately 5 or more million died at a result of the Soviets’ 1932-33 deliberate starvation of Ukraine.... Millions of Soviets also died in slave labour camps (a.k.a. Gulags, made famous by Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago). Underfed and living in sub-zero temperatures, citizens were worked to death or were murdered in the woods.... [M]any Soviet citizens were simply arrested, tortured, and shot.... for criticizing government or for suspicion of being a saboteur, other times to fill government quotas....

"According to The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press 1999), other communist regimes had similar disastrous results.

• China: 65 million deaths
• Vietnam: 1 million deaths
• North Korea: 2 million deaths
• Cambodia: 2 million deaths

"In total, over the past 100 years communist regimes have been responsible for about 100 million deaths (of their own people)....

"[C]apitalist societies have done wrong, of course. (And crony capitalism is especially problematic.) Nevertheless, ... governments in capitalist societies tend to be limited in their power. They protect private property, voluntary exchange, and individual freedoms; they do not tend to murder their own people en masse.

"It remains, then, that the killing of one’s own people has been extraordinarily huge in — and a salient feature of — communist societies.... The 2008 film The Soviet Story (available on YouTube) provides additional historical perspective on the bitter fruit of the 1917 Russian Revolution — bitter fruit that should never be forgotten."

Read more: http://winnipegsun.com/opinion/columnists/remembering-communism
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The original libertarian New Country project

The Libertarian Dream Was Tried Here | History News Network - Harry Blutstein:

October 15, 2017 - "A Nevada-based real estate developer and coin dealer, Michael Oliver, had a dream.  A libertarian, he wanted to escape the overbearing clutches of governments. The only way to do so, he decided, was to create his own country, where there would be few or no rules.  In 1968, he published A New Constitution for a New Country, a practical guide on how to construct a new nation in which 'people will be free to do as they damn well please.  Nothing will be illegal so long it does not infringe on the rights of others.  If a citizen wishes to open a tavern, set up gambling or make pornographic films, the government will not interfere.'  Income would be generated from fees from ... banks wishing to establish offshore services ... and ...transnational corporations ... to establish their headquarters without bothersome rules or taxation.  It would even issue its own currency.

"Pulling together around 2,000 investors, Oliver established the Ocean Life Research Foundation.  With funds raised, Oliver’s first idea was to find a country that would be willing to sell his foundation one of its islands.... When he couldn’t find any takers, Oliver looked around for an unclaimed island....

"The best Oliver could do was Minerva Reef, in the middle of the Pacific, 500 km (260 miles) southeast of Tonga.  It had never been claimed, despite being discovered as far back as 1854.  There were, however, serious problems ... not the least being that the reef lies ... about four feet under water at high tide.

"Undaunted, in January 1971, Oliver and a small party went to Fiji, where they chartered a 54-foot motor sailer and purchased the materials to create artificial islands on the reef.  On their arrival at Minerva, the party unloaded large hunks of coral wrapped in chicken wire, concrete blocks, sand and other rubble, which allowed them to build two micro-islands on the reef.  On one of these islands, they built a small stone tower and hoisted its flag: a yellow torch of freedom on a solid blue background.  The founding fathers of Minerva hoped to expand the reclaimed land until it would eventually support a city of 30,000 citizens....

"Unfortunately for Oliver, Australia ... pressured Tonga, being the closest country to Minerva, to act.

"Taking up the challenge was King Tāufa’āhau Tupou IV.... On June 21, 1972, he led an expeditionary force to invade the Principality of Minerva. Without an army or navy to call on, the king recruited a five-man convict work detail to undertake the invasion and ... a four-piece brass band played the Tongan national anthem from on-board the royal yacht Olovaba to inspire the troops. Taking courage, when he saw that Minerva was unoccupied, the king decided to personally lead his force. Once the tide was out, the king went ashore. After tearing down [the] Minervan flag, he read aloud a proclamation of sovereignty. The reef now belonged to ... Tonga.

"When the king was safely back on board the royal yacht, his ragtag troops were left to dismantle the stone tower....  What up until now had been a bloodless war turned nasty, as a fight broke out between two of the convicts, and one was killed. So, while the Principality of Minerva never had a live population, it was left with a single gravesite, which was all that remained of the shortest and smallest war in the history of the world, and even that grave soon disappeared, as did the Principality of Minerva when successive storms washed away its artificial islands."

Read more: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/166946
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How "anti-fascist" violence enables fascism

Using Violence Against Fascists Plays Right into Their Hands | Foundation for Economic Education | Laurie Maurhofer:

August 28, 2017 - "After the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, many people are asking themselves what they should do if Nazis rally in their city. Should they put their bodies on the line in counter demonstrations? Some say yes. History says no. Take it from me: I study the original Nazis....

"Charlottesville was right out of the Nazi playbook. In the 1920s, the Nazi Party was just one political party among many.... It was in 1927, while still on the political fringes, that the Nazi Party scheduled a rally in a decidedly hostile location – the Berlin district of Wedding. Wedding was so left-of-center that the neighborhood had the nickname “Red Wedding,” red being the color of the Communist Party....

"The people of Wedding were determined to fight back against fascism in their neighborhood. On the day of the rally, hundreds of Nazis descended on Wedding. Hundreds of their opponents showed up too, organized by the local Communist Party. The anti-fascists tried to disrupt the rally, heckling the speakers. Nazi thugs retaliated. There was a massive brawl. Almost 100 people were injured.

"I imagine the people of Wedding felt they ... had courageously sent a message: Fascism was not welcome. But historians believe events like the rally in Wedding helped the Nazis build a dictatorship. Yes, the brawl got them media attention. But what was far, far more important was how it fed an escalating spiral of street violence. That violence helped the fascists enormously....

"We know now that many Germans supported the fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the streets. Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of clashes like the one in Wedding. It looked like a bloody tide of civil war was rising in their cities. Voters and opposition politicians alike came to believe the government needed special police powers to stop violent leftists. Dictatorship grew attractive. The fact that the Nazis themselves were fomenting the violence didn’t seem to matter.

"One of Hitler’s biggest steps to dictatorial power was to gain emergency police powers, which he claimed he needed to suppress leftist violence....

"Today, right extremists are going around the country staging rallies just like the one in 1927 in Wedding. According to the civil rights advocacy organization the Southern Poverty Law Center, they pick places where they know antifascists are present, like university campuses. They come spoiling for a physical confrontation. Then they and their allies spin it to their advantage....

"There’s an additional wrinkle: the Antifa. When Nazis and white supremacists rally, the Antifa are likely to show up, too. 'Antifa' is short for anti-fascists, though the name by no means includes everyone who opposes fascism. The Antifa is a relatively small movement of the far left, with ties to anarchism. It arose in Europe’s punk scene in the 1980s to fight neo-Nazism. The Antifa says that because Nazism and white supremacy are violent, we must use any means necessary to stop them. This includes physical means.... The Antifa's tactics often backfire, just like those of Germany’s communist opposition to Nazism did in the 1920s....

"The cause Heather Heyer died for is best defended by avoiding the physical confrontation that the people who are responsible for her death want."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/using-violence-against-fascists-plays-right-into-their-hands/
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Antony Fisher, libertarian think-tank pioneer

Sphere of Influence: How American Libertarians Are Remaking Latin American Politics - Lee Fang, The Intercept:

August 9, 2017 - "Antony Fisher, a British entrepreneur and the founder of the Atlas Network, pioneered the sale of libertarian economics to the broader public.... Fisher made it his mission to, in the words of an associate, 'litter the world with free-market think tanks.'

"The basis for Fisher’s ideals came from Friedrich Hayek, a forbearer of modern thought on limited government. In 1946, after reading the Reader’s Digest version of Hayek’s seminal book, The Road to Serfdom, Fisher sought a meeting with the Austrian economist in London....

"Fisher was propelled forward by a fateful visit to [Leonard] Read’s newly formed nonprofit, the Foundation for Economic Education [FEE], in New York, which was founded to help sponsor and promote the ideas of free-market intellectuals. There, libertarian economist F.A. Harper, at the time working at FEE, advised Fisher on methods for creating his own nonprofit in the U.K....

"In 1955, Fisher founded the Institute of Economic Affairs [IEA].... The institute was a place to showcase opposition to British society’s growing welfare state, connecting journalists to free-market academics and disseminating critiques on a regular basis through opinion columns, radio interviews, and conferences. Businesses provided the bulk of funding to IEA, as leading British industrial and banking giants — from Barclays to BP — pitched in with annual contributions....

"As the economic slowdown and rising inflation of the 1970s shook the foundations of British society, Tory politicians gravitated more and more to the IEA to provide an alternative vision — and IEA obliged with accessible issue briefs and talking points politicians could use to bring free-market concepts to the public. The Atlas Network proudly proclaims that the IEA 'laid the intellectual groundwork for what later became the Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s.' IEA staff provided speechwriting for Margaret Thatcher; supplemented her campaign with policy papers on topics as varied as labor unions and price controls; and provided a response to her critics in the mass media. In a letter to Fisher after her 1979 victory, Thatcher wrote that the IEA created 'the climate of opinion which made our victory possible'....

"Hayek [had] set up an invitation-only group of free-market economists called the Mont Pelerin Society. One of its members, Ed Feulner, helped found the conservative Washington think tank the Heritage Foundation, drawing on IEA’s work for inspiration. Another Mont Pelerin member, Ed Crane, founded the Cato Institute, the most prominent libertarian think tank....

"In 1981, Fisher, who had settled in San Francisco, set out to develop the Atlas Economic Research Foundation at the urging of Hayek. Fisher had used his success with IEA to court corporate donors to help establish a string of smaller, sometimes regional think tanks in New York, Canada, California, and Texas, among other places. With Atlas, though, the scale for Fisher’s free-market think tank project would now be global: a nonprofit dedicated to continuing his work of establishing libertarian beachheads in every country of the world. 'The more institutes established throughout the world,' Fisher declared, 'the more opportunity to tackle diverse problems begging for resolution.'"

Read more: https://theintercept.com/2017/08/09/atlas-network-alejandro-chafuen-libertarian-think-tank-latin-america-brazil/
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Fascists and progressives

by George J. Dance

Alt.right author James Miller believes that "Fascism has an undeserved bad reputation." In his view: "Regardless of this reputation, Fascism is a very sensible economic and social ideology." He goes on to offer the following definition:

Fascism is an economic system in which a nation’s government plays a central role in monitoring all banking, trade, production, and labor activity which takes place within the nation. Such monitoring is done for the sole purpose of safeguarding and advancing the nation and its people. Under Fascism, the government will not approve of any business activity unless that business has a positive impact on the nation as a whole and the people of the nation — this is the axiom which determines everything under Fascism.[1]

Interestingly, this definition of fascism (which looks correct) also looks like a correct definition of progressivism, the economic philosophy of the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, and every Democratic president since (save perhaps Truman and Clinton), and some Republican presidents as well (Gerald Ford, G.H.W. Bush).

Like socialism, fascism and progressivism are variants of statism: the belief that state control of society and the economy is necessary to bring about and maintain a good society. But while socialists try to achieve that control directly, through government ownership and increased government spending, progressives and fascists try to achieve it indirectly through regulation, oversight, and management of nominally private businesses and workers.

As the historical record shows, the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy, and the progressive regime of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were composed of mutual admirers, who followed a similar politico-economic agenda. As David Gordon of the Mises Institue has documented:

• The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, "stressed 'Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,' praising the president's style of leadership as being compatible with Hitler's own dictatorial Führerprinzip" (p. 190).
• Nor was Hitler himself lacking in praise for his American counterpart. He "told American ambassador William Dodd that he was 'in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan "The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual"'" (pp. 19-20)....
• Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt's Looking Forward. He found "reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices"(pp. 23-24)....
• Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. "'I don't mind telling you in confidence,' FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, 'that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'" (p. 31). Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini's program to modernize Italy: "It's the cleanest … most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious" (p. 32)[2]

Because (unlike socialism), fascism and progressivism do not directly challenge a country's economic status quo, they can appeal to the conservative as well as the totalitarian biases that I have argued exist in modern political societies.[3] However, like socialism, fascism and progressivism imply a radical restructuring of society, with state power vastly increased at the expense of individual rights and liberties.

This ideological symmetry can lead to tactical symmetries: for instance, historical fascism relied on tactics of political violence copied from those on the radical left (the anarchists and Bolsheviks).[4] Progressives, on the other hand, initially rejected those methods; one fundamental difference between progressives and fascists. That was because radical leftism and fascism were populist, bottom-up movements, while progressivism began as a thoroughly top-down, establishment movement. However, the mass-based, bottom-up progressivism that began in North America in the 1960s has increasingly also adopted political violence tactics from the radical left, further blurring the difference between the fascist and progressive ideologies.

Notes

[1] James Miller, "What is Fascism," Kevin Alfred Strong blog, August 13, 2012.  http://www.kevinalfredstrom.com/2012/08/what-is-fascism/

[2] David Gordon, "Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR" (review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. Metropolitan Books, 2006). Mises Daily, September 22, 2006, Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/three-new-deals-why-nazis-and-fascists-loved-fdr

[3] George J. Dance, "Why are there no libertarian countries?", Nolan Chart, April 29, 2017.
https://www.nolanchart.com/why-are-there-no-libertarian-countries

[4] Ludwig von Mises, "The Argument of Fascism," Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition (translated by Ralph Raico). Foundation for Economic Education, 1985, 29. Books / Digital Texts, Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/liberalism-classical-tradition/html/p/29 

Libertarian author Jerome Tuccille dead at 79

Jerome Tuccille, Libertarian Author and Trump Biographer, Dies at 79 - The New York Times - William Grimes:

February 24, 2017 - "Jerome Tuccille, who wrote one of the first manifestoes of the American libertarian movement and the first biography of Donald J. Trump, died on Feb. 16 at his home in Severna Park, Md. He was 79.

"As Mr. Tuccille (pronounced too-CHILLY) told the tale in It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand: A Libertarian Odyssey (1971), he was a disaffected Roman Catholic looking for a new faith when he discovered the writings of Ayn Rand and her radically individualist philosophy, which she called objectivism....

"In Radical Libertarianism: A Right Wing Alternative (1970), he laid out a political program that envisioned an end to conscription, taxes and government control over education, health services, transportation and other areas. It also called for the legalization of drugs, prostitution and pornography.

"In an Op-Ed for The New York Times in 1971, Mr. Tuccille called on conservatives 'who still care about such things as peace and justice and racial harmony' to vote for candidates 'who really mean peace when they say peace; who understand and intend to promote the politics of decentralization, of pollution control, of economic and judicial reform, and so on all the way down the line'....

In 1974, two years after the founding of the Free Libertarian Party, Mr. Tuccille ran for governor of New York.... Three years later, in an article for the conservative magazine National Review, he wrote the epitaph for libertarianism as a political movement. Although still committed to its ideals, he called it 'hopelessly utopian' and 'an intellectual exercise, not a serious political alternative'....

"Tuccille wrote how-to books on investing and a series of biographies, beginning in 1985 with Trump: The Saga of America’s Most Powerful Real Estate Baron.... After his Trump biography, he wrote Rupert Murdoch (1989), Barry Diller: The Life and Times of a Media Mogul (1998) and Alan Shrugged: Alan Greenspan, the World’s Most Powerful Banker (2002)....

"Tuccille remained what his son called 'a borderline anarchist. In The Gospel According to Ayn Rand (2007), ...  Tuccille wrote: 'The battle to sustain the Bill of Rights is more challenging now than ever, the fight for freedom is far from over. In many ways things have gotten worse over the decades. Government is grotesquely big, taxes are too high, civil liberties are getting crimped a bit tighter every day.'”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/books/jerome-tuccille-dead.html
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Wilder & Lane's Libertarian House on the Prairie

Wilder’s ‘Little House’ on a libertarian prairie - San Francisco Chronicle - Christine Woodside:

December 26, 2016 - "Libertarian ideas are woven into the very fabric of American life.... I think of the libertarian branch of the Republican Party as the 'Little House on the Prairie caucus.' Why? Because the beloved Little House children’s book series by Laura Ingalls Wilder was full of free-market ideals.

"Wilder was a chicken farmer and occasional journalist who became the author and heroine of the Little House books about her 1870's-80's pioneer childhood. Wilder’s secret collaborator, her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, infused the books with libertarian views....

"In 1930, during the Great Depression, Wilder and Lane were 63 and 44 years old and living on the family farm in southern Missouri. At Lane’s request, Wilder sat down and wrote of the family’s migration from Wisconsin to the future state of Kansas to Minnesota to Dakota Territory, with her Pa, Ma, and sisters, looking for the ideal farm.

"In Wilder’s early drafts, the family withstood frontier life staunchly, jaws set. Wilder told her daughter the Ingallses never showed emotion. But as Lane rewrote Wilder’s notes, she removed difficult events, like a baby brother’s death or the government’s subsidy of their blind sister’s schooling, and inserted plenty of happy dialogue with no bitterness, resentment or remorse.

"Within a few months, Lane had sold the first book, Little House in the Big Woods. One editor said it was 'the book no Depression could stop.' Readers asked for more, so the two women wrote seven more books together.

"The books extolled the power of ordinary people to make their own destinies. Consider this scene in The Long Winter, the sixth book: When frequent blizzards kept trains from bringing supplies to their Dakota Territory town, the storekeeper tries to overcharge starving neighbors who want to buy the last stock of wheat. A riot seems imminent until Pa speaks up: 'Don’t forget that every one of us is free and independent, Loftus. This winter won’t last forever, and maybe you want to go on doing business after it’s over.' It’s an appealing distillation of the idea that a free market can regulate itself....

"The series has sold millions of copies and inspired the TV show Little House on the Prairie.

"With the comfortable income provided by book royalties, Lane helped fund a free-market academy in the early 1960s in Colorado called the Freedom School [run by Robert Lefevre - ed.]. Two of the graduates were perhaps the most profoundly influential donors in modern conservatism: Charles and David Koch. Both joined the new Libertarian Party, along with Lane’s heir, Roger Lea MacBride, in the 1970s, before later returning to the Republican Party."

Read more: http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Wilder-s-Little-House-on-a-libertarian-10819927.php
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See also: Wilder's Little House books as libertarian propaganda

Ralph Raico (1936-2016)

Ralph Raico, RIP | Cato @ Liberty - Jim Powell:

December 14, 2016 - I was saddened by the news of Ralph Raico’s passing on December 13.

At Cato summer seminars during the 1980s, he delivered fabulous lectures about the history of liberty and its adversaries. He focused on European intellectual history and the development of classical liberalism. He was clear, concise and passionate, and his talks sparkled with memorable details. I still cherish audio cassettes of those lectures.

Ralph attended the Bronx High School of Science, earned a B.A. at the City College of New York, and joined the New York libertarian underground during the 1950s. His friends included Ronald Hamowy, Leonard Liggio, George Reisman, Robert Hessen, and other eager students of liberty. For a while, Ralph and his group, calling themselves the “Circle Bastiat,” met for discussions with Ayn Rand’s group, “the Collective.” Ludwig von Mises invited Ralph to attend his graduate seminars at New York University. Ralph became a close friend of Murray and Joey Rothbard.

By 1960, Ralph was at the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. in intellectual history. F.A. Hayek was his thesis advisor. Ralph started a quarterly student journal called New Individualist Review and served as editor-in-chief. Each issue featured about a half-dozen articles. The first issue appeared in April 1961. The lead article was “Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman. The second issue featured “Freedom and Coercion” by Hayek. And so it went, a cavalcade of scholarly stars, including three future Nobel Laureates. The authors included George Stigler, Yale Brozen, Karl Brunner, Henry Hazlitt, W.H. Hutt, David Levy, Walter Oi, Sam Peltzman, Wilhelm Roepke, B.R. Shenoy, Gordon Tullock, Joe Cobb, and E.G. West, in addition to Hayek and Friedman. A few conservatives joined the fun, too — William F. Buckley, Jr., M. Stanton Evans, and Russell Kirk.

As it happened, in 1962, when I had to decide on a college, I received a subscription flyer for New Individualist Review. I was familiar with a number of the authors, because I had read issues of The Freeman that my father had in his home office, and they published some of the same authors. So, the University of Chicago was where I had to go. While many college kids did fraternities or football, I did NIR. I met Ralph, joined the staff of New Individualist Review, and altogether 17 issues were published. NIR involved insightful, inspiring, and sometimes amusing exchanges among students and professors in history, economics, philosophy, science, law, and business. For better or worse, NIR was a spontaneous phenomenon that never focused on becoming an institution. Gradually, everybody got their degrees and moved on. I was the last editor-in-chief (1968).

Ralph had so much literary talent that there were hopes he might produce a glorious history of liberty, like Lord Acton talked so much about but never started. Alas, time slipped through their fingers and—for now—that big story is still out there.

Nonetheless, Ralph became known for elegantly-crafted articles, pamphlets, and chapter contributions that helped illuminate the history of liberty.

Ralph translated Mises’ 1927 book Liberalismus, an excellent basic statement of classical liberalism, into English (1962), and a number of publishers have reissued his splendid translation.

He also wrote:

• Die Partei der Freiheit: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus (1999), about the fateful struggles of German classical liberals during the 19th century.
• The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton (2010), his University of Chicago Ph.D. thesis.
• Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (2012). 

https://www.cato.org/blog/ralph-raico-rip

This work by Cato Institute is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

20th-century libertarian beginnings traced by anti-libertarian group

from "Against the Libertarian Party" | Jacobin - Branko Marcetic:

November 4, 2016 - "The modern libertarian movement has its roots in the 1930s, when a host of business leaders, terrified by Roosevelt’s New Deal, set up a series of overlapping organizations to oppose what they saw as a government incursion.

"One such group was the American Liberty League, founded in 1934 by executives from General Motors, US Steel, and other corporations, as well as three members of the du Pont family (who owned the DuPont Chemical Company).

"Another was the Volker Fund, a charitable trust set up in 1932 by Kansas City businessman William Volker (who put his nephew Harold Luhnow in charge). The fund sponsored various right-wing initiatives, such as the Mont Pelerin Society, an annual summit of pro-market scholars, journalists, and businessmen. It also helped subsidize the careers of various free-market intellectuals, such as Ludwig von Mises (“the fountainhead of modern libertarianism”) and, even more importantly, Friedrich von Hayek (whose 1947 book Road to Serfdom is widely viewed as kickstarting the free-market right’s intellectual resurgence).

"Two of the nascent movement’s most important backers were also drawn from the ranks of corporate America: J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil, and Jasper Crane, the former executive vice president of DuPont Chemical.

"Both had helped lead the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a vehemently anti-union business organization. Pew went on to bankroll the Liberty League, as well as conferences, advocacy groups, and the conservative Christian organization Spiritual Mobilization, which put out the Christian libertarian magazine Faith and Freedom in the 1950s. Crane helped organize, and used his business connections to fund, the Mont Pelerin Society and a whole host of other initiatives. He, along with the du Pont family, would go on to donate to Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964.

"Perhaps the most important libertarian cause Pew and Crane were involved in was the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), an organization that sought to teach the public about libertarian ideas.

"Both acted as trustees, joined by an array of corporate executives: Donaldson Brown, a former executive of both DuPont and General Motors; Erle P. Halliburton, the founder of Halliburton; A.C. Mattei, the president of Honolulu Oil Corporation; Hughston McBain, president and chairman of Marshall Field & Company; W.C. Mullendore, executive vice president of the Southern California Edison Company; Charles White, president of Republic Steel; and B.E. Hutchinson, chairman of Chrysler’s finance committee. (The Volcker Fund’s Harold Luhnow was also a trustee.)

"Pew and Crane’s participation in the libertarian movement and its corporate circles didn’t end there. The pair sat on the board of the Freeman, the movement’s flagship magazine, alongside a smattering of businessmen.

"Major firms bankrolled the Freeman through advertising that doubled as ideological propaganda. Instead of touting their products, major firms like Chrysler, DuPont, Republic Steel, Marshall Field, General Motors, and Sun Oil — whose executives, past and present, were involved in the FEE and older anti-New Deal groups — took out ads promoting the virtues of business and the free market. (During the 1950s and 1960s, General Electric — also a frequent Freeman advertiser and a member of NAM — featured the publication on its anti-union reading list for managers and supervisors as part of its effort to delegitimize labor leaders.)"

Read more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/libertarian-party-gary-johnson-ron-paul-president/  "
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What the U.S. Libertarian Party 'pledge' means

"To validate my membership, I certify that I oppose the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals." – Libertarian Party membership pledge

I pledge allegiance ... to what? | KN@PPSTER - Tom Knapp:

February 25, 2006 - "Often, when debating the meaning of 'the pledge,' Libertarians cite David F. Nolan, the 'founder' (with a few others, but generally recognized as the prime mover in the founding) of the Libertarian Party, to the effect that 'the pledge' was simply intended to let the FBI know that the members of this new political party weren't bomb-throwing revolutionists who would shortly be assaulting the Nixon White House with molotov cocktails.... [see video below - editor]....

"I've stated the content of the pledge. In every form I've seen, it includes the very specific phrase 'initiation of force.' That's important. That phrase has a history which pre-dates the formation of the LP by at least a decade-and-a-half and possibly longer. It is a phrase which carried great weight among the adherents of two particular schools of libertarian thought throughout the 1960s: The Objectivists and the Misesian "anarcho-capitalists" (i.e. the disciples/compatriots, respectively, of Ayn Rand and of Murray N. Rothbard).

"Nolan – or at least those who cite him – expect the rest of us to believe that the occurrence of the phrase in the LP's membership pledge was a mere coincidence: That it did not arise from the ubiquitous use of that phrase within the movement from which the party emerged. Even at first blush, that assertion looks pretty untenable.... In the very first paragraph of the article which he wrote in 1971, promoting the formation of the Libertarian Party ... Nolan describes the movement to which he belongs, and which he hopes to form into a party, as a coalition of 'Randists, Miseists (sic), and elements of the old "radical right"'....

"Nolan's biography at the Advocates for Self-Government site specifically lists Ayn Rand as a writer who 'cemented his innate libertarianism.' Is it possible that someone who regarded Rand in such terms, and whose libertarianism took the form of political action, would entirely miss the core principle of the political branch of her philosophy?

'Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate -- do you hear me? No man may start -- the use of physical force against others.' -- from Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged (1957), and For the New Intellectual (1961), by Ayn Rand....

"Next let's look at Rothbard -- leader of the second faction which Nolan wanted to form a party around....

'The fundamental axiom of libertarian theory is that no one may threaten or commit violence ("aggress") against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.' --- from "War, Peace and the State" (1963), by Murray N. Rothbard

"The actual phrase 'initiation of force' seems to have crept into Rothbard's personal vocabulary later rather than sooner....

'The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the 'nonaggression axiom.' 'Aggression' is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else.' – from For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973), by Murray N. Rothbard....

"Taken in its obvious historical context, the pledge clearly derives from a Randian and/or Rothbardian worldview and therefore – at a bare minimum – clearly and indisputably binds its takers to a no-coercive-taxes approach (which even the 'Randian minarchists' held to), and less clearly and less indisputably (but still arguably) to Rothbardian anarchism.

"The only way to get around that conclusion is to assert that the framers of the pledge were a bunch of drooling morons who in some strange trance state spontaneously and collectively forgot the entire content of the ideas they stood for, while simultaneously functioning efficiently enough to put together an organization to politically support said ideas ... and who just happened to randomly pick words out of the dictionary which were identical to nearly two decades of predominant phraseology relating to those ideas, for the purpose of saying something entirely different."

Read more: http://knappster.blogspot.com/2006/02/i-pledge-allegiance-to-what.html  'via Blog this'
Published under a Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication

George Jonas a lifelong believer in freedom

Robert Fulford: George Jonas was an enemy of every oppression, great or small | National Post:

January 11, 2016 - "For many years after the Second World War, Canadians had trouble understanding the immigrants who flowed in from eastern Europe. Their stories of oppression weren’t always taken seriously. Ukrainians, Hungarians, Poles and many others were embittered after losing their national homes to the Russian empire but Canadians found that hard to grasp. Newspaper editorials often instructed immigrants — Displaced Persons, or DPs, they were often called — that they must not bring old enmities into Canadian life.

"George Jonas, a Hungarian who became a distinguished Canadian writer, was sophisticated enough to treat that provincial attitude with an urbane shrug. He remained forever an enemy of the Soviet Union and all other despotisms.

"With his opinions uninhibited, he plunged into a six-decades-long career in Canada as poet, playwright, novelist, CBC broadcaster and journalist, ending up with the widespread respect of his profession and membership in the Order of Canada. He died Sunday in Toronto at age 80.

"A lifelong belief in freedom ran like an electric current through his poetry, his fiction and his journalism. Long-established Canadians tend to take freedom for granted, never having known its opposite, but where Jonas came from it was scarce. As a child in the early 1940s, he was made to wear a yellow star on the street, like all other Jews. After 1945 he watched the Soviet Union impose a dreary and evil dictatorship on Hungary.

"Freedom was the song Jonas sang, in all his writing He never gave up trying to protect freedom — from communists, fascists, Islamists or any other totalitarians. I can’t forget the contempt he expressed in the 1960s when describing a Canadian nationalist poet who said that Mao’s China sounded like an admirable society. How could those who were born to freedom consider bartering it away, even in imagination? 

"Freedom was the song Jonas sang, in all his writing. He proudly called himself a classical liberal. Many people think that means a conservative but he believed it meant he was an enemy of every oppression, great or small."

Read more:  http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/robert-fulford-george-jonas-was-an-enemy-of-every-oppression-great-or-small
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The racist roots of the progressive movement

Progressive and Racist. Woodrow Wilson Wasn't Alone. - Bloomberg View - Virginia Postrel:

December 8, 2015 - "Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard, reveals the largely forgotten intellectual origins of many current controversies, including disputes over tightening voter identification laws, raising the minimum wage and restricting immigration....

"Early 20th-century progressives transformed American institutions, and the movement’s premises continue to inform thinking and policy across the political spectrum. 'It was the progressives who fashioned the new sciences of society, founded the modern American university, invented the think tank, and created the American administrative state, institutions still defined by the progressive values that formed and instructed them,' writes Leonard, a research scholar at Princeton’s Council of the Humanities.

"The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, 'agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.' Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction....

"In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism.... Leonard argues [that] eugenics and scientific racism fit particularly well with progressive thought: 'Eugenics was anti-individualistic; it promised efficiency; it required expertise, and it was founded on the authority of science.' Equally important, 'biological ideas,' Leonard writes, gave progressive reformers 'a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform -- its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint.' They could feel sorry for impoverished Americans while trying to restrict their influence and limit their numbers.

"Take political participation. Nowadays, people argue about whether stricter voter identification laws are good-government protections against fraud or discriminatory attempts to deter minority and low-income voters. A century ago, leading progressives happily embraced both goals. 'Fewer voters among the lower classes was not a cost, it was a benefit of reform,' Leonard writes. After progressive reforms, including Jim Crow restrictions sold in part as anti-corruption measures, voter participation plummeted. In New York State, turnout dropped from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920, while national turnout fell from 80 percent in 1896 to 50 percent in 1924.

"Advocates similarly didn’t deny that imposing a minimum wage might throw some people out of work. That wasn’t a bug; it was a feature -- a way to deter undesirable workers and keep them out of the marketplace and ideally out of the country. Progressives feared that, faced with competition from blacks, Jews, Chinese, or other immigrants, native-stock workingmen would try to keep up living standards by having fewer kids and sending their wives to work. Voilà: 'race suicide.' Better to let a minimum wage identify inferior workers, who might be shunted into institutions and sterilized, thereby improving the breed in future generations....

"Although they generally assumed black inferiority, progressives outside the South didn’t worry much about the 'Negro question.' They were instead obsessed with the racial, economic, and social threats posed by immigrants.... So restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads. Indeed, in his five-volume History of the American People, Wilson lumped together in one long paragraph the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act as 'the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation' -- equal harbingers of the modern administrative state. With a literacy test and ban on most other Asian immigrants enacted in 1917 and national quotas established in 1924, the progressives bequeathed to America the concept of illegal immigration."

Read more: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-08/woodrow-wilson-wasn-t-the-only-progressive-racist
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Order book here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10572.html