We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Andrea Harris is the Fox News guest blogger and showcases former US Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne‘s wit and wisdom.
So will people please just read this and then stop asking me why I keep saying that Browne and his Libertarian Party do not define libertarianism in the USA. Guys, face facts… as long as you have a barking moonbat like Browne who thinks a libertarian society could survive contact with reality in the manner he advocates, the vast majority of US libertarians will continue to either vote Republican or if they cannot stand that, just not vote at all.
There are a lot of great people in the US Libertarian Party. Unfortunately those folks are not the ones running it.
 Update: As many e-mails have pointed out (and indeed as I alluded to on my final line above), many LP members both take a very rational view regarding the current war and do not think either Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan were ‘provoked’ by the mean old USA and Britain into World War II and if we had only been nicer to nice Mr. Hitler all that nastiness could all have been avoided. After all, our own Dale Amon has LP ties and he is extremely ‘sound of mind and sharp of sabre’ on all such issues.
Nevertheless, some LP remarks ‘from the top’ since September 11th have indeed fallen into the tinfoil hat and black helicopter category of barking moonbat mating calls… and this is rather a problem for me. Getting rid of Browne is certainly a start but his whole associated idiotarian meme stream is going to be decisively flushed down the toilet as a minimum pre-requisite for getting many pukka libertarians to even touch the LP with a barge pole.
The problem with Islamic religious fanaticism is it is unable to apply realpolitik when necessary for it’s goals. To the True Believer, America is the evil fortress blocking the way of the Righteous in bringing the world to the Glory of Allah. They can not see their only one way to “defeat” America: make the cause so boring and of so little value to American interests that the taxpayers turn on it. An enemy must jujitsu like, use America to defeat America while not actually threatening Americans at home.
This is what happened in Vietnam.
North Vietnam never attempted to threaten American civilians. On the contrary, they played to the American public. They pictured themselves as victims of a foreign imperial venture who magnanimously did not blame the people of their tormenter. They set out to split the people from the government policy and they succeeded.
They could do so because total victory for North Vietnam posed little threat to Americans or their way of life. The fall of Saigon made for a few good pictures in Life Magazine. Then it was forgotten about.
Ho Chi Minh succeeded because there was a grain of truth to it. North Vietnam’s defeat of South Vietnam had hardly any affect whatever on the life of the average American. Regional Geopolitics may play well inside the Beltway (the Washington DC ringroad), but it does not hold the interest of normal folk for very long.
But this is not the case with the al Qaeda and their ilk. The attack with which they opened the War was a direct strike on Americans in America. People know they cannot just pull out of the fight. People know in their guts the enemy victory conditions are not just a state for Palestine. They are not even met by the destruction of Israel and the mass murder of everyone there, although that would have a far greater impact than Vietnam since many of those people have relations in America.
It is our entire way of life and our core values they hate. So long as we exist they cannot re-make the world into a Moslem theocracy as their mullahs tell them is right. Since it is god’s work, they are free to do anything. They will do whatever is necessary to prevent Palestine from being sorted out. It is too valuable an excuse for what they intend to do any way. Remember the answer of the alien to the President in science fiction movie Independance Day?
“What do you want with us?”
“For you to die.”
How did it come to this? I can see three equally reasonable ways.
Scenario 1: Saudi Arabia as a conspirator. The Saudi camel herders cum princes come to the realization oil money gaves them great power. They decide to use it over a period of decades to bring the decadent West under Islam. They fund a global 5th column. They use whatever tactics are necessary to infiltrate and take over Mosques in the West: education, grants… and bribery, extortion, threats and murder when necessary. Through plausibly deniable intermediaries they fund uprisings and the facilities to train armies of Orcs… I mean the faithful. They secretly do anything possible to assist in the creation of nuclear weapons under Islamic control. All the while they execute their Byzantine game they play the West for a fool and feign friendship.
Scenario 2: Son of Cold War. Much of the environment for what has come is due to the short term moves made in the global chess match of the Cold War. The propaganda, the stirring up of trouble behind the other guys lines, the money and weapons to clients, supporting friendly rulers who are kept in power by violence on their own people (The Shah of Iran for example)… all of these fertilized and created the environment now filled by the fundamentalist.
Scenario 3: It’s all their fault. The population growth in some of these Arab countries has been immense. It has turned relatively unpopulous desert into crowded slums. The combination of ignorance, poverty, crowding and incompetent government set the stage. The refusal to accept blame for their own condition made the populace an easy target for the worst sort of religious nuts.
I would personally say each of the above is partly responsible for the situation we have today. I must admit I do not think the Saudi’s actually sat back and seriously planned things that long ago. They aren’t Sauron, they’re simply opportunists with religion. However I would not be surprised to find some radical mullahs spoke with a Prince or two about such grand ideas for conquering the West from within and received a tithing of a few hundred million to just go away – but to be sure to say what fine Islamic Princes they were.
Meanwhile back in America… Americans don’t really see any way out. The Mideast crazies will commit mass murder on us if we fight; they’ll commit mass murder on us if we try to ignore them; they’ll destroy our civilization in a century or two if we try to appease them… and in the mean time they’ll commit mass murder on us just because we’re still here.
This is why there aren’t a lot of Americans out calling for “peace”. If people are going to kill us, we are not the sort to go down meekly. We’re far more likely to be every bit as vicious and a damn site more ruthlessly calculating than the mad mullahs worst nightmares can concieve.
They really have no choice but to come to terms with a pluralist, live and let live world. Because that is the world which is coming. Even if we have to kill them all to get there.
Chuck Kuffner claims I agree with the case made by We The People. I neither agree nor disagree, although I am inclined towards disagreement. The issues of law are far too arcane for me to state a position. I realize Kuffner has an FAQ against the tax protestor case in general, but I am likewise not in a position to judge their validity or whether they are equally as political a statement as We The People’s. Just because a lawyer wrote up opinions does not mean it is the only set of opinions on the matter or even that it is correct.
My stand is quite simple. Whether or not Bob Schulz has a legal leg to stand on, I find him a courageous individual committed to the cause of liberty. Unlike the al Qaeda hunger strike wimps at Gitmo, Schulz and Croteau went nearly all the way on a Ghandian protest:
July 20, 2001
BOB EATS THIS DAY. We The People have been heard.
High level DOJ and U.S. Congressional officials formally committed the U.S. government, in writing, this afternoon, to answer the People’s Income Tax charges.
Schulz & Croteau have first food in three weeks. Schulz heads home on Saturday.
Remonstrance hearing to be held on Capitol Hill. Rep. Henry Hyde (IL), former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is expected to preside.
Whether his case is frivolous or not, officials responded to the hunger strike and agreed to a hearing.
Those government officials are liars and dishonourable men. Their word is of no value and is meaningless. Their promises are as solid as a treaty by the Great White Father with the American Indians. That is the judgement I do make and will stand by.
It is independant of whether his case has any validity. They gave their word to hear it. I want people to know what sort of “men” we are governed by.
They reneged. They lied. End of story.
Charles Kuffner wrote:
Oh, and surely now that several people (myself, Matthew Yglesias, Mac Thomason, Max Power) have pointed out the idiocy of [We The People] the Samizdata folks would admit that they were wrong in assigning them any credibility, right? Not quite. I stand by everything I said.
Well the trouble I have with this is twofold:
Firstly I think Dale was just pointing out what the We The People campaign are saying, not actually making much of an argument whether it was/was not really valid.
Secondly, and my biggest grouse, the ‘not quite’ link is to my article called Tax: The view from Atlantis in which I actually said I thought ‘We The People’ would lose the legal argument. So to use Charles Kuffner’s words, I thought the ‘We The People’ campaign was not a credible way of trashing the IRS. I stand by everything I say too, Chuck. What is the problem, you don’t like people agreeing with some of what you say?
Harry Browne’s LibertyWire recently posted a letter from Rob Kampia, the Executive Director of the DC based Marijuana Policy Project (mpp@mpp.org) that many of you will find interesting.
Here’s the text from Rob Kampia’s letter:
On Tuesday of this week, three more members of Congress added their names to H.R. 2592, the Ron Paul / Barney Frank medical marijuana bill currently pending in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill now has 29 congressional sponsors.
These new House members are signing on to the bill largely because people on the Marijuana Policy Project’s e-mail list have used http://www.mpp.org/usa to fax 7,483 letters to their U.S. House members in support of this bill.
Thanks to the American Liberty Foundation, I am being permitted here to reach out to you, too.
Would you please visit http://www.mpp.org/usa to fax a personalized, pre-written letter asking your three members of Congress to pass the medical marijuana bill? This Web page provides a list of the 89 U.S. House members and 4 U.S. senators who have taken at least one positive action in support of medical marijuana.
If enacted, H.R. 2592 would allow states to determine their own medical marijuana policies without federal interference. Our goal is to persuade dozens of additional House members to co-sponsor H.R. 2592 and — at the same time — we are trying to persuade one U.S. senator to introduce a companion bill in the Senate.
The need for this legislation has never been greater. Medical marijuana is now legal in eight states — Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington — yet the DEA has conducted raids on a series of medical marijuana distribution centers in California since October.
In response to the October raid, a U.S. Justice Department spokesperson said, “The recent enforcement is indicative that we have not lost our priorities in other areas since Sept. 11.” This is an outrageous statement, and it’s time for us to fight back.
Please visit http://www.mpp.org/usa right away to add your voice to our campaign to stop the federal government’s war on medical marijuana patients and — really — the federal government’s war on states’ rights.
As a fellow libertarian, I can tell you there is nothing in H.R. 2592 that you won’t like. After all, the bill is good enough for Congressman Ron Paul to sponsor!
To further escalate the campaign to change federal policy, we are running a full-page ad in The New York Times today! It lists Walter Cronkite, Hugh Downs, a host of other celebrities and opinion leaders, various health and medical organizations, and more than 300 state legislators who are calling upon President Bush to change the federal policy. (See http://www.CompassionateAccess.org )
Would you please visit http://www.mpp.org/usa today? Thank you in advance for your help.
For those of you who are relative newcomers to the scene, Ron Paul is a Libertarian in Republican clothing. In 1988 he ran as the Libertarian Presidential candidate. I worked with he and his committee on a number of occasions and even wrote his domestic and international Space policy. I also sat and briefed him before he spoke in front of a crowd at an International Space Development Conference in Denver in May 1988, the first time a Presidential candidate had ever done so.
In other words, Ron Paul is solid and if he introduced the bill, I’ll take it as given it is at least born libertarian.
New blog Global Grumpy raises an interesting point about the surprising lack of reaction from the US media and muted reaction from conservative bloggers regarding the asinine steel tariffs. He also links to a somewhat pointless article on Slate on the legality of the subject, as if the problem was a legal one rather than an economic and political one. The fact left wing bloggers have little to say is hardly surprising but one can only speculate why the neo-con bloggers are not howling much louder.
Bush’s action is clearly damaging to the US economy due to the inevitable knock-on effects it will have on international trade, not to mention the increased costs passed on directly as US steel becomes more expensive. I was expecting to hear people making much stronger remarks about ‘The Bush Steel Tax on US consumers’ (for that is what it is). The headlines I was expecting were:
- ‘Bush causes squeals of delight amongst anti-globalization advocates’
- ‘Is Bush trying to get France to award him the Legion d’Honneur for inconsistency?’
- ‘Bush encourages reduction in global trade’
- ‘Bush to World: please add tariff barriers against goods exported from USA’
- ‘Bush tells Russians: ‘Yeah I know we are proping up your economy with aid on one hand and trying to wreck your steel industry with the other… so what? If you need money go sell nukes to Iran and stop bugging us’
I hope the reason for this is not the flip side of a phenomena I saw many times during the ghastly Clinton years: even when Clinton occasionally got something right (very occasionally), so great was the detestation of several otherwise analytical commentators (and friends) that they opposed policies which if conducted identically under any US president except Clinton, they would have supported without question. I wonder if ‘wartime’ admiration for Bush has not cause a similar blindness in the other direction towards a truly inane policy.
This is not a trivial issue and could have disastrous implications for the international trade system that are far more important than an industry which employs 150,000 people out of a population of 260 million.
[Note to ‘Global Grumpy’: the two e-mail addresses I have for you both bounce]
The We The People Foundation held their own hearing as the US Federal Government broke its word to do so. They claim testimony taken under oath shows the entire income tax system to be unconstitutional.
Decide for yourself. The hearing webcast is available here.
Perry’s comments on George W. Bush’s economically illiterate steel tariffs below are surely a reminder that conservatives (with a large or small c) are often the worst defenders of free enterprise.
How on earth can Dubya, for whom I have a fair amount of respect, talk about free markets any more with a straight face? Looks like the worst kind of vote-grubbing measure to me. Clearly bound to have an adverse impact on other sectors of the economy as well as sour relations with other parts of the world.
Bush has given the euro-weenies a stick to beat him with – and this time they have right on their side. Bush’s move is clearly related to next November’s Congressional elections. George, get a copy of Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” and wise up!
The recent trip by George Bush to Asia in which he preached the value of free trade and capitalism was of course widely reported in the media across the world. As a result, his remarks about the lowering of trade barriers are inevitably going to be thrown back in his face following the ludicrous imposition of 30% tariffs on steel imported into the USA.
Given that the underlying trend for steel imports into the USA has been downwards for years (down 30% over the last four) it is particularly bizarre that this politically motivated protectionism should have been allowed to happened. Of course this will also result in more expensive steel for the domestic US construction and manufacturing industry, it will cause retaliatory tariffs against US products overseas and most importantly, completely destroys the US ability to put political or moral pressure on other countries to lower tariffs against US goods.
So in order to protect some jobs in an inefficient sector, other US jobs are put at risk in not just steel consuming areas of the economy but also possibly the entire export sector once anti-US retaliatory measures are used to hit back by US trading partners.
Perhaps someone needs to point out to Dubya that compared to the value of liberalisation of the world trading system to a massive high tech external trading nation like the USA, the US steel industry is really not that important in the overall scheme of things. In any case, the whole idea that less competition will make the US steel industry more efficient, well, how does that work? It will just penalize the modern and the more competitive US steel producers in order to protect the less efficient unionised dinosaurs who will go bust in a few years anyway regardless. In the meantime overall competitiveness of US industry suffers versus overseas steel users who have access to steel at the regular non-‘protected’ price. Nice one George.
According to Wired the media industry has spent massive amounts of money in its’ attempts to buy the government:
Also, in the 2000 election cycle , the entertainment industry handed Democrats a whopping $24.2 million in contributions compared to $13.3 million to Republicans, according to opensecrets.org.
No wonder they were so loath to give Libertarian Presidential Candidate Harry Browne coverage during the 2000 election campaign. They just didn’t want to waste any of their Demopublican investment.
I remember laughing to myself about mediots (media idiots) who castigated President Bush for not immediately flying back to Washington DC after the attack. I simply could not understand how anyone could concievably make it into US national media without knowing about the well oiled but never before used procedures which bind the President and other top federal officials during an attack.
Of course under most of the scenarios for which these procedures were created… most of the media, along with everyone else would have been too dead or occupied trying to stay alive to bitch that the President was carrying out his assigned wartime duty. Which is to stay alive and in communications… and issue those terrible orders which only the acting President may issue, using the codes available only to him.
Similarly, I find the bruhaha over the “shadow” government inane and a result of willful ignorance. There are very real fears of attacks on the continental USA by weapons of mass destruction. While on the face of it some might think losing Washington and all the federal government a positive good… I suggest you think again. I, for one, prefer civil over military government, however benign.
The Amygdala blog did a nice bit of research on the policies and procedures involved in Continuity Of Government. He referred to a web publication written by John Pike at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). I’ll personally vet the source. I know John quite well and although we have very different politics and don’t agree on much of anything, he’s a good guy. He’s done me some seriously good turns in the past.
The purpose of Continuity of Government is to ensure that even under the direst of circumstances the United States remains under civilian control as mandated in the Constitution and does not ever fall under military governance by failure of the leadership to stay alive and in communication.
To put it bluntly, if you don’t like the dispersal of senior officials to not-so-secret locations, it is tantamount to saying you prefer the US Military keep order after we lose Washington.
And before this war is over… we just might.
If you are a registered Independant or Libertarian, or are willing to be so registered (or re-registered if you are a Demopublican), please contact the Carla Howell For Governor organization and sign her ballot petition. Just follow the quick and easy instructions I’ve excerpted from her campaign mailing:
Who can sign?
1. You must be registered to vote in Massachusetts.
2. You must be registered as an “Unenrolled” (Independent) or “Libertarian” voter.
3. If you are registered as a “Democrat” or “Republican” voter, we can re-register you as “Unenrolled” or “Libertarian”, so that you may legally sign our petitions. (Democrats and Republicans are legally forbidden from signing our petitions.)
4. If you’re a Massachusetts resident and you’re NOT registered to vote, we can register you as an “Unenrolled” (Independent) or “Libertarian”. Then you can sign our petitions.
What do you do next – if you meet these requirements?
5. Send us your name, home address, city, zip code, and phone number at petition@carlahowell.org
6. If you are registered “Democrat” or “Republican”, or if you are NOT registered to vote, please tell us in your email message, and whether you want to be registered “Unenrolled” or “Libertarian”. We’ll send you a voter re-registration form.
Here’s what we do: we mail you the petitions with quick and easy instructions.
Here’s all you have to do:
7. Sign the petitions the way the instructions tell you to. (If your signature or petitions are filled out wrong, the government will disqualify your signature.)
8. Put your signed petitions in the return envelope we provide, put a first-class stamp on the envelope, and mail it in.
Less than 60 seconds to sign. Quick and easy. Saves our campaigns money. And you will be part of the biggest Tax Revolt in Massachusetts since the Boston Tea Party.
Please send us your name, home address, city, zip code, and phone number immediately at petition@carlahowell.org . And if you are enrolled “Democrat” or “Republican”, or if you are NOT registered to vote, please include the information requested in #6 above.
Massachusetts state law forbids us from accepting petitions printed directly off the internet. The law requires us to use Secretary of State Certified hard copies printed from flaw-free templates.
By supporting Carla’s candidacy you are also assuring a high profile for the ballot initiative to end the state income tax.
Are we at Libertarian Samizdata partisan? What on Earth would ever make you think that?
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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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