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Downsize DC has just reported on the introduction of an act to repeal the “Legal Tender” law. This is the law which requires Americans to accept the US dollar for “all debts public and private” regardless of whether they have contracted payment otherwise. According to Downsize DC:
Choice is good because it allows competition. Monopoly is bad because
it leads to price fixing. Monopoly control over what people use for
money provides the greatest price-fixing power of all, because it
impacts ALL of your economic transactions. The Fed can manipulate the
price of absolutely everything, by increasing the number of
circulating dollars (inflation), or by decreasing them (deflation).
This act opens wide the door to competing free market currencies, yet has little immediate or drastic impact. If people are happy with US dollars, they will simply continue to use them. Those that are unhappy with manipulations by the Fed or who simply prefer inflation hedged means of payment will be able to contractually specify their preferences.
Go here to ask your elected representatives to cosponsor HR 2756 and allow freedom of choice in money.
There is so much good news out there right now it is hard to know where to begin.
First off, Carla Howell and Michael Cloud have done it again. They have filed over 78,000 signatures for a ballot initiative to repeal the Massachusetts income tax, some 12,000 more than the requirement.
This is their second go. The first time the major media outlets in the state all but ignored them, other than an occasional hatchet job. Despite the virtual blackout, the measure got some 45% of the vote. This time around they are getting massive coverage right off the bat:
The Worcester Telegram and Gazette is owned by the Boston Globe –
which is owned by the New York Times.
The Worcester T & G is the third or fourth largest newspaper in Massachusetts.
After they ran the article on our END the Income Tax Ballot Initiative On December 3rd, they polled their readers on whether we should END the Massachusetts Income Tax.
A whopping 66% of their readers voted “Yes” – while only 34% voted “No.”
You can find out more here.
Yesterday I did a posting here about climate, but I hope I will be forgiven for another one today on the same general subject. This one is because, in connection with yesterday’s posting, a commenter copied and pasted this story from Canada, which can be summarised briefly as: Canada is going to have a very cold winter.
I was not surprised by this news, even though many Canadians perhaps are. This is because, ever since doing this posting here a month ago, the notion mentioned at the end of it as hardly more than an afterthought has stuck in my mind. Here is how that posting of a month ago, mostly about giant diggers, ended:
In further interesting environment-related speculations Bishop Hill …
Yes, that Bishop Hill again.
… reckons we may be due for a cold winter, on account of the sun taking a bit of a rest just now. Interesting. We shall see.
Maybe now we are seeing. Maybe. What impressed me about this prophecy, unlike so many others in the climate change rack … , er, field, is that this one had a time frame attached. It concerned this winter. This winter is going to be cold.
Since I am on the subject of cold weather, let me mention another prophecy, also of cold weather to come, also because of the behaviour of the sun, also reported in Canada. Take a look this piece from a few weeks back, about the work of a man called Rhodes Fairbridge. Fairbridge, we learn, explained what causes the sun to influence the earth’s climate in different ways at different times. It is all to do with the alignment of the planets, and consequently the degree to which the sun is close to or quite far from the centre of gravity of the solar system. No, I do not understand that very well either.
What interested me about the article was not that it made any particular sense to me. It did not, and I am in no position to pronounce on its scientific merit or content, which could very well be zero for all I know. No, what caught my attention was that there was, once again, a prediction being made, with some dates attached to it. → Continue reading: There are cold times just around the corner!
The deranged individual who forced his way into Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign office has given us all a wake up call. How much longer will we tolerate the situation where any lunatic can threaten innocent people?
After holding three people hostage for six hours, Leeland Eisenberg, 46, emerged from Clinton’s campaign office in Rochester in a white dress shirt and red tie with duct tape wound tightly around his waist over what he said was a bomb.
The message could not be more clear… ban duct tape now!
Do it for the children.
CNN people get paid a lot of money, and no one pays me anything to engage in media politics. Yet I could rig a debate much less crudely than they did. It would be easy – I would simply pick questions, from the thousands of suggestions, that would make the Republicans look bad. I would not pick Democrat activists to ask the questions, on the contrary I would pick Republicans or real independents. There is no need to present Democrats as Republicans or undecided people.
For example, on the Log Cabin (i.e. homosexual) Republican question – I would have picked a real Log Cabin Republican, not got an Obama supporter. Nor would I have got two John Edwards supporters in to pretend to be undecideds. And I certainly would not have got a person who is on two of Senator Clinton’s committees to ask a “when did you stop beating your wife” question (about why the evil Republican candidates did not think American men and women in uniform “were not professional enough to work with gays”) – and then given him a come back after the replies so that he could denounce the Republicans again.
It was just so crude, as were the “we did not know who these people were” lies afterwards. After all the “General” was not a random face on the internet – he had been carefully chosen and had been flown in. Why are the CNN people paid so much money, when then can not even rig a debate with any skill?
Only on the “gun control” stuff did they get close to doing the rigging game well. The people chosen to ask the questions were chosen because of their aggressive manner (which seems to have a been their real manner – i.e. they were not actors putting on a show). The subtext being “people who are against gun control are nasty”.
But the rest of the presentation was pathetic.
As for the candidates:
Mike Huckabee is supposed to have done really well. For example, he turned a how would you control government spending question into an attack on the IRS.
And Fred Thompson is supposed to have done really badly. For example he gave specific policy ideas on tax, social security and the rest of the entitlement programs.
I would turn the judgement of “really well” and “really badly” on its head – perhaps that explains why no one pays me to be involved in media politics.
Ron Paul is not just doing well at fundraising on this, his second run at the Presidency. He is raising enough to be a contender. I Just received this information from their campaign:
We are closing in on three important fundraising milestones for the fourth quarter:
– During the third quarter, Fred Thompson raised $9,750,821 to be used during the primary election cycle.
– Not counting money that he loaned to his own campaign, Mitt Romney raised $9,896,719.
– Rudy Giuliani finished with $10,258,019.
Ron Paul is currently at $9,708,791 for the fourth quarter.
We are within reach of passing Fred Thompson today! Will you help us storm past these fundraising totals over a month sooner than they did?
Please make your most generous donation: www.ronpaul2008.com/donate
And don’t forget to watch the live counter on our website as we meet these marks!?
I must admit I never in my wildest dreams expected the Ron Paul campaign to do this well. Do I dare to believe we really will have a libertarian still in the running come the Republican convention?
Ramesh Ponnuru scoffs at the notion that Ron Paul’s tilt at the White House has, supposedly, encouraged an upswelling of libertarian sentiment in parts of the Republican Party. My rough guess is that he has had a bit of a positive effect and has raised a lot of money over the internet, pretty fast. Some people try to dismiss Paul as a kook but their dismissals seem to amount to little more than smears of half-understood points, such as his championing of gold-backed money (I am not convinced the dollar should be tied to gold but it is not nearly as daft, when you think about it, as the idea that the world’s largest economy can be run by a Federal Reserve bank by an army of economic gods). Despite my own differences with his strict non-interventionist foreign policy, which, pace some libertarians, is not necessarily a logical outcome of the non-initiation of force principle in the face of major foreign threats, Paul is a breath of fresh air. He is no Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater in terms of his name recognition factor or charisma – I bet hardly anyone in Britain outside a small group of political anoraks has heard of him, but his profile is pretty impressive.
Ponnuru points to Ron Paul’s own stance on abortion to prove that he is not quite the darling of the libertarian movement that some might claim. Rubbish: if Ponnuru has read any libertarian authors thoroughly, he would notice that libertarians can and do differ quite a bit on the issue. The issue of how one goes from the axiom of the right to life to the vexed question of when life begins is a difficult one, and I am not sure I am clear myself on this one. Ron Paul is against federal, ie, tax funds for abortion clinics. But that does not make him anti-abortion, it makes him anti-spending, at least on this issue.
Paul Marks has argued on this blog elsewhere that Ron Paul’s record on spending is not spotless – it is hard to think of any politician who is – but I think he is generally a positive influence on American politics.
The prospect of such a man in Britain’s Conservative Party reaching any sort of senior position at present is, of course, nil.
I long ago endorsed Ron Paul despite strong disagreements with his foreign policy. Now, with Iraq looking more and more like less and less of an issue for the next election, that disagreement is fading in importance.
Meanwhile my distaste for ‘security measures’ taken in the name of ‘defense of the homeland’ has reached a point of utter disgust. On the issues which matter to me there is probably not the light of day between a Clinton or a Guliani Presidency. Neither is likely to ask for congress to kill off ‘Real Id’. Neither is likely to put Presidential authority behind removal of even some of the more obnoxious sections of the un-Patriot Act or any of the other wildly misnamed acts of Congress.
Over my many years as a libertarian I have come to feel like someone alone in the wilderness. People who believe as I do simply do not get elected. I assumed that a Ron Paul run for the Republican Party slot would be the same, with the very positive upside that he would gain more publicity for the ideas of liberty and individualism than decades of efforts by thousands of dedicated libertarians.
I am beginning to wonder if I might have been wrong. I was rather pleasantly surprised to read that Ron is picking up more money and attention on the web than any other Republican hopeful. While this does not translate into as much attention off web as I would like to see, it is nonetheless a surprise. Ron is still very definitely in this race and it is beginning to look like he will still be in it come the Republican convention.
I would really look forward to that happening. I have not bothered to watch convention coverage in many years because the people running did not even vaguely represent me.
I could rub my hands with glee at Just imagining the horror in the eyes of media and politicos alike if someone were to stand on the podium at that convention and not just mouth words about Liberty and Individualism… but really mean them!
Republican Presidential Candidate Ron Paul seems to have attracted a lot of attention with his big fund-raising day, although Mark Steyn says that although he now has money his poll rating is still very low. If you don’t know what he looks and sounds like, watch him being interviewed by Jay Leno.
The most interesting thing I have encountered about Ron Paul is this, from Jonathan Wilde:
On the heels of the big fundraising day, I’ve noticed that a lot of people I know are declaring themselves Ron Paul supporters. Many of them are not just not libertarian. If anything, they’re big government advocates. They justify their support with vague statements like, “He’s shifting the landscape” or “The system needs to be shaken up”. I don’t think they have any idea what Paul actually stands for.
Maybe they will learn. I have long thought thought a way for libertarianism to spread will be when people get that it is a different sort of mischief they can make to the usual kind. This was surely the appeal of Marxism, while it had appeal. Now, the world is still full of Marxists but they keep quiet about it, and wrap it up as other things, like Greenery. Where’s the mischief in that? That won’t shake up the system. That is the system. But libertarianism is a kind of mischief making that dares to speak its name, and if done, would cause serious embarrassment to thousands of politicians and lobbyists and subsidy guzzlers.
Of course, much of Paul’s appeal is that he is mounting a non-left attack on US military involvement abroad. But if many are backing him because of that, they may also become acquainted with the notion that maybe seriously cutting back big government is something that a decent man could genuinely want to do. Paul wants to cut government spending on foreign wars, and rather than blowing what is ‘saved’ on schools and hospitals and other foolishnesses, he says: let the citizens keep their money.
I presume that Ron Paul has lots of domestic personal policy positions concerning how to get there from here, so to speak, as any serious political candidate must. I do know, because he said this to Leno, that he wants to phase out welfare addiction very gradually, rather than just cold turkey it, for example. But that makes sense (‘cold turkeying’ it might also make sense, I think, but what do I know?)
Talk about the American off-year elections has been dominated by the Gubernatorial elections (victory for the Republicans in Mississippi – against a trial lawyer, victory for the Democrats in Kentucky – against an ‘ethically challenged’ Republican Governor) and by the onward march of the Democrats in the Washington D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia. And, of course, by the defeat of the voucher plan in Utah by the unions.
However, there is a another side to these elections – tax and spend is clearly not favoured by the voters.
For example, voters in Oregon voted down an increase in the cigarette tax in spite of the money being for more children’s health welfare. And voters in New Jersey voted down a proposal to borrow money for stem cell research. Children’s health welfare, and stem cell research – two poster issues for the left and they were defeated. And defeated in ‘Blue States’.
Also an election in the heartland of the United States caught my eye… the tax-and-spend Mayor Bart Peterson was defeated in Indianapolis by the almost unknown Republican Greg Ballard – in spite of Mr Peterson outspending Mr Ballard’s campaign some thirty to one (thanks to donations from politically connected business enterprises and so on) and the support of the usual suspects (the media and academia).
Message to Republicans:
If you really do oppose tax-and-spend (rather than just pretend to, whilst carrying on in your normal corrupt way) you can actually win in 2008.
The campaign to become Mayor of London must be taking its toll. Boris Johnson writes today that the interests of the US and the rest of the world would be best served if Hillary Clinton reaches the White House. His reasoning is thin at best. Perhaps the real problem is that America, even though it is such a vast nation, has only been able to produce Presidential candidates of such dreadful quality as this lot (I am afraid that applies partly even to Ron Paul, for whom I have a lot of sympathy).
Insofar as the Americans are now winning in Iraq, as they do now seem to be, this is, first, because Al Qaeda have shot themselves in their stupid murderous feet by being stupid and murderous, and pissing off the Iraqi people; and second, because the Americans switched strategies, from (the way I hear it): sitting in nice big armed camps doing nothing except maybe training a few Iraqis to do the nasty stuff, to: getting out there themselves and doing it, thereby giving the Iraqi people something to get behind and to switch to, once they had worked out what ghastly shits AQ really are.
The first bit is very interesting, but this posting is about the second bit. Instapundit linked yesterday to this, and I particular like the first comment. Here, with its grammar and spelling cleaned up a little, it is:
The Democrats missed a great opportunity. Bush would not have changed strategy if the Dems did not win as big as they did. They could have said it was them that made Bush change to a successful strategy.
Over the summer I reread one of my favourite books of the century so far, How The West Has Won: Carnage and Culture From Salamis to Vietnam by Victor Davis Hanson (which was published in October 2001). In this, Hanson makes much of the Western habit of what he calls “civilian audit” of military affairs. Armchair complaining and grilling of often quite successful generals for often rather minor failures in the course of what often eventually turn into major victories. Sidelining Patton for winning some battles but then slapping a soldier. Denouncing Douglas Haig forever for winning too nastily on the Western Front. Votes of Confidence in the Commons during the dark days of World War 2. Most recently, General Petraeus being grilled on TV. That kind of thing.
Above all, there are the journalists, wandering around the battlefield being horrified and sending photos back of people who died during disasters, or during victories, thereby making those look like disasters also (which they were for the people who died.)
Unlike many with similar loyalties to his, who describe all this as a Western weakness, Hanson sees it as a major Western strength. Yes it is messy, and yes it is often monstrously unjust. Yes, it often results in serious mistakes and failures, especially in the short run. Yes the questions put to returning generals and presiding politicians are often crass, stupid and trivial. But the effect of all this post-mortemising and second-guessing and media grandstanding and general bitching and grumbling is to keep the West’s military leaders on their metal in a way that simply does not happen in non-Western cultures.
It must really concentrate the mind of a general to know that there are literally millions of people back home who are just waiting for him to screw up, so they can crow: we told you so.
It also results in Western armies filled with people who know quite well what the plan is and what the score is, having just spent the last few hours, days, weeks or even years arguing about it all. Western armies invariably contain barrack room lawyers and grumblers, to say nothing of people who sincerely believe that they could do better than their own commanders and who say so, courtesy of those interfering journalists.
Central to the whole idea of the West is that you get better decisions, and better (because so much better informed) implementation of those decisions by the lower ranks, if lots of people argue like hell about these decisions first, during, and then again afterwards. In fact if you argue about them all the time.
Take Iraq now. The narrative that is now gaining strength goes as follows: Iraq invaded for dubious reasons, but successfully. Peace lost because no plan to win it. Two or three years of chaos and mayhem. Change of strategy. Now war may be being won. Maybe this story has not quite reached the MSM, but I believe that it soon will, if only because of bloggers like this guy and this guy.
Strangely, Hanson has, during this particular war, been one of the most vocal complainers about the complainers, so to speak. He has gone on and on about how suspect are the motives of the complainers and how ignorant they seem to be of what war is necessarily like and how bad it would be if the West lost this particular war. Yet is not the way this story may now be playing out yet further evidence of the important contribution made by anti-Western kneejerk anti-warriors to the good conduct of Western wars by the West’s warriors? What these people want to do is stop the war by making the warriors give up and lose it. But what they often achieve instead is to bully the warriors into doing better, and winning. They are, so to speak, an important part of the learning experience. Hanson returns again and again to how the West often loses the early battles, but ends up winning the war.
Under heavy political pressure, President Bush switched in Iraq from a failing Plan A to what now looks as if it could be a successful Plan B. Would this switch have happened without all the pressure? Maybe, but it is surely reasonable to doubt it. The next commenter after the one quoted above says that it is still not too late for the Dems to do a switch of their own, and to start claiming that had it not been for them and all their grumbling, the switch by Bush from failure to success would never have happened. If and when they do start talking like that, they will surely have a point.
(Patrick Crozier and I recently discussed VDH in this podcast, more about which here.)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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