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Speaking of Ron Paul… here is a press release I received last night:
If they expected us to retire quietly from the scene, the political elite are in for a surprise.
Today I am making some very big announcements.
First, from August 31 to September 2 in Minneapolis, we will host a handful of events that will shake the political establishment. Everything will culminate on Tuesday with the official launch of the Campaign for Liberty at the Rally for the Republic.
The Campaign for Liberty will be the largest organization for peace, freedom, the Constitution, and sound money in American history. It will launch in grand fashion with lots of special guests and – if the early television and print inquiries we’ve received are any indication – plenty of media attention.
I would like to personally invite you and your family to join me and thousands of others in Minneapolis for these events and send a message to the Republican Party.
Tickets will go on sale for the Rally for the Republic this Friday, July 25 @ 10AM CST. We want this to be an unforgettable day, so we are holding a ticket bomb all day Friday in the tradition of our famous money bombs. How many seats can we sell on the first day?
In patriotic fashion all tickets will cost $17.76, so you can afford to bring the whole family.
This leads me to the second big announcement. After measuring the excitement and enthusiasm, we decided that the Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota was just too small to hold you. Therefore, we are making a significant upgrade. The Rally for the Republic will now take place at the Target Center, the largest arena in Minneapolis !
This promises to be the most spirited and provocative political event of the year! We held some very large rallies during the presidential campaign, but I have never attempted anything of this scale before. Its success rests entirely in your hands.
Later this week I will announce two internationally renowned musicians as headliners for the Rally for the Republic. We’ll also be joined by rock star Aimee Allen, NBC’s Tucker Carlson, Barry Goldwater Jr., Gov. Gary Johnson, conservative stalwart Grover Norquist former Reagan deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, presidential historian Doug Wead, MTV’s Adam Curry, musician Mark Scibilia , and Frank Sinatra impersonator Rick Ellis . Other special guests will be announced soon.
My staff has been working overtime to provide you with three full days of entertainment. Please visit the schedule page of the website and read all about upcoming events. We also have a lodging page to help you find?accommodations in Minneapolis.
Together we are taking back our government and restoring the republic. Please join me in Minneapolis to kickoff the Campaign for Liberty and support our Revolution. Can I count on you to be there?
I hope our LP folk in Minnesota will be out there in force!
The Bob Barr for President efforts have been gearing up in Atlanta and if you want to see what you can do, you can find out about it here.
I would love to see that fund raiser counter spinning like the Ron Paul one did!
It is a measure of how far we have travelled in the world of ideas that the case for state central planning, as was once championed by British Fabian socialists and similar people 100 years ago, struggles to get a respectable hearing these days. That is not to say that the idea is dead, merely that it has been subjected to a sustained intellectual and practical hammering, not least the fall of the old Soviet Union.
One person who has the good sense to realise how discredited central planning has become is the American leftist writer, Jesse Larner. Who deserves some of the credit? It is a certain FA Hayek, he says, telling this to readers whom, one imagines, might have called for his defenestration by saying anything nice about Hayek only 20 or 30 years ago. The article, which focuses on Hayek’s early book, The Road to Serfdom, is fairly respectful of the case against central planning, and one might hope that this shows that parts of the left have fully grasped the folly of said. But there is a lot left in this article that is misleading, besides-the-point, or which misses some crucial points. In a way, the muddle of this article explains perfectly the mindset of what can be loosely called the left today, and yet is also suggestive of how libertarians might yet be able to engage with the smarter of them and bring them over to our side. So I have decided to take a look in some detail. Let’s start with this:
Politically, Hayek is not the cynic I had braced for. Plainly, transparently—and in stark contrast to many modern conservative intellectuals—he is a man concerned with human freedom. One of the unexpected things in Road is that he writes with passion against class privilege.
That is very revealing of the circle that Mr Larner keeps. He is amazed, apparently, that a guy who defends the free market order is not a political “cynic”. Well, if by cynicism one means a low view of those who seek to attain by power and influence what others do by enteprise and hard work, I guess he has a point, but that hardly is a sin in my book. Also, Mr Larner should have read enough right-of-centre authors to know that liberty is actually a regular concern. One of the very reasons why there was a counter-movement against socialism after WW2, from all those think tanks and academics with those strange central European surnames like Mises and Polanyi, was precisely because they saw, in socialism, the loss of liberty.
Here’s another one:
Indeed, he is often eccentric. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist. Many of his arguments rest on a reductionist idea of socialism, and his conception of the sources of law can only be called mystical.
Huh?
But Hayek is not merely an eccentric mystic.
The only justification I can think for that remark is that Hayek was a notable defender, and explicator, of the value as he saw it of the English Common Law and the post-1688 settlement in England. He called himself an “Old Whig”, was a great fan of the legal scholar Blackstone as well such figures as David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith (of course) and Edmund Burke. In the case of Burke, the influence is interesting, since the great Irish politician, now mainly remembered as a scourge of the French Revolution, was a supporter of the American Revolution, moved for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, of the old East India Company, was a notable denouncer of political corruption, and was primarily a Whig, and not a Tory. It is also true that Hayek valued the Burkean notion that there is a value, not always easily grasped, to traditions that have developed across the centuries. I’ll readily admit though that this is a weakness: just because something is traditional, does not of course make it a good thing. There is, in fact, a tension between those Hayekians who praise certain traditions and those, who, from the more natural rights portion of the libertarian camp, think that we should send some traditions to the scrapheap. → Continue reading: A civil, but still flawed look at Hayek from the left
As of July 15th, it is no longer possible for a European to fly in a vintage DC-3. Air Atlantique ran a very successful farewell tour around the UK and its flights were sold out.
Perhaps one continent’s loss is another’s gain and these passenger-worthy classics will find a home across the pond where they can continue to bring the joy of flying in the most marvelous working airplane every built.
Maybe we should start a tradition like that of the Muslims, but instead of bowing towards Brussels at a given hour each day, we could give them the other end to show the full depth of our respect for them.
Right, enough grumbling from me today. Here’s a story to cheer and inspire anyone concerned about the voluntarist ethic that is essential for a free society not reliant on the State to do everything.
A few days back, I pointed out what a collection of dishonest, inaccurate drivel was contained within Naomi Klein’s recent book, in which she wrongly accused the late Milton Friedman of, among other things, supporting the invasion of Iraq (he opposed it, as a cursory Google search could have shown her). Jonathan Chait, of The New Republic, a left-leaning US publication, also stamps hard on the woman.
Now, I might disagree with the late Professor Friedman about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq but what interests me is why some people on the left, and the right for that matter, get themselves so confused about what the likes of Milton Friedman were about. And yet his views are hidden in plain sight, or not hidden at all. He was, in the best sense of the word, a liberal. He opposed the War on Drugs. He opposed military conscription. (Does Klein?). He thought sexual relations between adults was no business of government. He opposed censorship. He opposed robbing the poor of their savings via inflation. He opposed trade union closed shops as injurious to the non-unionised worker. He opposed exchange controls and countless other controls on our lives, of all kinds. He supported school vouchers as beneficial for the children of the poor and politically overlooked. Being the son of poor Jewish immigrants, Professor Friedman was a classic example of the American Dream. His influence on American public life, and the wider world of ideas, was and still is immense.
At some gut, non-intellectual level, Ms Klein knows this. So instead of wrestling with such ideas, she has to create this conspiracy-theory: that free market ideas depend on there being brutal shock events to succeed. Really? Now, it may be true that crises such as hit Britain in the late 1970s may sweep pro-market governments to power, but there is nothing pre-ordained about this. Instead of a Maggie, we could quite easily have elected an extreme socialist government dedicated to total state central planning, as has indeed happened before. Wars and recessions are typically no friend of small government, or of the open society in general.
Ms Klein is a moron. The smarter parts of the left are starting to notice.
Glad to know that at a time when people are concerned about the economic outlook, crime and so forth, that those chaps at the European Union have not taken their eye off the ball:
The acre, one of Britain’s historic imperial measurements, is to be banned from use under a new European directive. The measurement, which will officially be replaced by the hectare, will no longer be allowed when land is being registered. After being agreed last week, the new ruling will come into force in January 2010.
I do not know why this story riles me so much, but it does. It is not that I cannot understand the logic of using a metric system so that it is possible to make instant comparisons between say, the price of a hectare of land in France and Britain, which is quite useful to be able to do when looking at the state of our respective economies. But it is the illegality of registering land by using certain measurements that is so barmy. If there is a market in land – well, partially free anyway – surely the persons buying or selling can measure it any way they please, so long as the amounts are agreed and are accurately registered. It is the accuracy of the register, not the units per se, that counts. Apart from anything else, cannot the EU and its minions do some basic maths? An acre is equal to 0.404 hectares. Every time one has to convert the old English Imperial measurements to metric and vice versa, it has the salutary effect of encouraging people to do a bit of maths, which is a good mental exercise anyway.
Many units of measurement used in the Anglo-Saxon world have been ingrained in our mental lives. I can – just about – visualise what an acre is. I cannot do that for a hectare. Far from being fogeyish or illogical, there is nothing essentially better or worse than one or the other. Roger Scruton has a nice discussion of the benefits of traditional weights and measures here. Every time there is an assault on such traditional measures, it is an assault on differences because they are differences, on the eccentric, the quaint, the odd, the unusual, the untidy.
Compared to many of the other creeping forms of “harmonisation” beloved of the Eurocrats, this may seem like a paltry measure, and I am sure that is right. But it has really annoyed me. Leave our acres alone, you tidy-minded bastards.
Freedom of speech cannot be maintained in a society where nobody ever says anything subversive or inflammatory. … Unless it is resisted, the erosion of civil liberties will continue until there is no such thing as liberty and all opposition to authority will have become crime.
– Germaine Greer
The Rocket Racing League will be doing flight demos of the Rocket Racer in Oshkosh later this month, between July 28th and Aug 3rd.
The RRL team has been working overtime to meet its goals for demonstration flights planned for three days during the convention. The flights, planned for July 29, August 1 and August 2, use aircraft based on Velocity Aircraft homebuilt canard designs. It marks the first public flights of these aircraft, which were first introduced in April.
I have heard (unconfirmed) as many as three RRL members may have their racers present. The development work on these craft was carried out by XCOR Aerospace at which a number of our readers work. Some of the Rocket Racers may use an engine from John Carmack’s Armadillo Aerospace. Because of the use of different fuel combinations a real race will see rockets with long colored flame tails behind them. Armadillo has been working on the injection of trace chemicals to allow an even wider range of colors for what many of us hope will become the most spectacular sport of the 21st Century.
Also on the near horizon is the third flight of the Spacex Falcon 1. The best information I have to date is it will occur no sooner than July 30 when the Kwajalein range again becomes available.
Did you know DC v Heller was a Libertarian plot?
The case that became D.C. v. Heller was the brainchild of three lawyers at a pair of libertarian organizations, the Cato Institute and the Institute for Justice. All were busy with other matters, so they hired Mr. Gura. “Alan was willing to work for subsistence wages,” Cato’s Robert Levy tells me, “in return for which he got a commitment from me that if the case went anywhere, it would be his baby. It turned out that that commitment was very important.”
My hat is off to James Taranto for getting the story right. Perhaps one of these days my New York schedule (and that of one of our journalist readers) will fall out in such a way that we can toast our natural born right to carry a BFG.
If you live in shit and continue to elect the people who keep you in shit simply because, historically, your family has always voted for shit, then possibly all you are going to get is … well … shit.
– with his usual tact and sensitivity Devil’s Kitchen hints at a reason why the voters of Glasgow East might just consider not voting Labour any more
Here is a fascinating teaser for a Janes subscription only article:
US military pinpoints date for HELLADS ground test. The United States military told Jane’s it is on schedule for a 2010 ground test of a lightweight high-energy laser that could be installed on a tactical aircraft to destroy missiles, rockets and mortars. The laser, known as the High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS), is being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and General Atomics, along with several other contractors.
It is all coming together about as I expected, although perhaps a little faster than I really believed.
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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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