Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Losing Faith in Politics?

In a recent article on CNN.com Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, laments that disillusioned young people may be losing their faith in politics as result of their many disappointments with the Obama era.  Professor Zeilzer implores politicians of both parties to “show that you can make progress on the policy issues that matter to them and to do so through a stronger political process that leads them to believe in politics once again.”

What might that mean to make young people “believe in politics once again”?  What are politics anyway and why should anyone invest faith in them?

The political economist, Franz Oppenheimer framed the meaning of “politics” very succinctly.

“I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor, and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the ‘economic means’ for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the ‘political means’.” *

In other words hard work, cooperation, innovation, risk taking and free exchange are the “economic” means of producing the necessities and the niceties of life.   The political means are to obtain said goods from the producers by coercion and force.  In plain English, theft.

It can only be a good thing if coercion and theft are getting a bad name.

The essence of the political process is the redistribution material resources from the caste of tax payers (producers) to tax consumers (non-producers).

As Murray Rothbard puts it:

 “the government budgetary process is a coercive shift of resources and incomes from producers on the market to nonproducers; it is also a coercive interference with the free choices of individuals by those constituting the government……. No longer do income and wealth flow purely from service rendered on the market; they now flow to special privilege created by the State and away from those specially burdened by the State.”  Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market: The Scholar's Edition

When one wonders why the political process is so stalemated, it is because the cumulative government theft (federal, state and local) has become so exorbitant that there is no longer room for leeway.  Overextended governments want to extract more and more from overburdened, unemployed and underemployed citizens.
America has calcified into two irreconcilable castes.  It may have taken only a little theft to sustain the State in bygone years.  Now it takes almost all that we have got.  Neither party offers relief.  They both take and redistribute, each to its own clientele.   There is no room anymore for politics.

Back in the Eighties Sting sang that “There is no political solution to our troubled evolution”.  He was dead on.  A civilization based upon theft is immoral, unsustainable and destructive.




*See more at: http://www.masterresource.org/2011/06/economic-vs-political-means-oppenheimer/#sthash.eSPUDtsG.dpuf

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
Paul Simon




Friday, March 21, 2014

Swimming Upstream in the Crimea River



Vice President Biden labeled Russia’s annexation of Crimea a “land grab”.  He may be spot on with that assessment.  However, the bigger picture truth is that Vladimir Putin is swimming against the tide of history.  The trend in governance is in favor of smallness and localism as opposed to aggregation and national expansion.



Throughout the world provinces and cities are agitating to secede from larger nations.  Legitimate secession movements are budding even in what we might consider to be old-line rock solid nations.  In Great Britain, Scotland is seeking Independence.  Venice wants break from Italy, Catalonia from Spain and to our North, Quebec is making separatist noises once again.



At home in America, counties and regions are bucking to extricate themselves from the majority tyranny of their state capitals.  A movement is afoot to devolve California and a piece of Oregon into six states.  Also percolating are the Northern Colorado and Western Maryland initiatives.  In the Great Lake State, much of Michigan is looking to sever ties with Detroit.  Who wouldn’t?



One might object that none of these movements has garnered majority support.  True enough but neither did the first great separatist movement, the American Revolution.  Not a problem according to Samuel Adams who told us, “It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.

Secessionist movements aside, nullification is gaining acceptance as an accepted means of pushing back against Washington’s heavy hand.   On a cultural level, the locally grown / Farm-to-Table movement strengthens local allegiance and identity.

The modern nation state is a recent invention.  It absorbed formerly autonomous fiefdoms, principalities and city states for the purpose of aggregating the massive natural, capital and human resources needed to wage Industrial Age wars.  Otto von Bismarck, who was the architect of the modern German nation, invented the modern welfare state system as an apparatus to buy loyalty and build dependency among the citizens.  Murray Rothbard explains:

“Generally, a State cannot win the passive support of a majority unless it supplements its full-time employees, i.e., its members, with subsidized adherents. The hiring of bureaucrats and the subsidizing of others are essential in order to win active support from a large group of the populace. Once a State can cement a large group of active adherents to its cause, it can count on the ignorance and apathy of the remainder of the public to win passive adherence from a majority and to reduce any active opposition to a bare minimum.”

It is becoming increasingly evident from the massive deficits, municipal bankruptcies and the EU monetary crisis that the welfare state can longer afford to buy off its citizens. 

Similarly, warfare between advanced industrial nations is no longer viable.  Our destructive capacity is too staggering, especially if the combatants possess nuclear weapons. 

Finally, digital technology empowers private individuals as well as businesses to transcend national borders.  In their visionary 1999 book, from The Sovereign Individual,   authors James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Moggs assert:

“The process by which the nation state grew up over the past five centuries will be put into reverse by the new logic of the Information Age.  Local centers of power will reassert themselves as the state devolves into fragmented overlapping sovereignties.

Government will have to adapt to the growing autonomy of the individual.  This will make smaller jurisdictions more successful.”


The point of all of this is Putin’s Crimean “land grab” is strictly old school.  Even if they manage to annex new territory, their hold will be tenuous and unstable.   Successful and sustainable millennial governance will be smaller and more cognizant of local needs as opposed to massive, bureaucratic and unwieldy.


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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
Paul Simon




Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Crimea & The End of Empire

What little that I know about foreign affairs, I learned at Camden Catholic High School and at the feet of Fr. Thomas Ploude, a former student of Henry Kissinger at Harvard.

In his wonderful seminar, Fr. Ploude left us with two fundamental principles by which to formulate a sound foreign policy.  These are for a nation to:

1.       Advance and protect its national self interest
2.       Protect and defend its natural sphere of influence

The sphere of influence for a super power such as Russia includes its border nations, navigable waterways in its vicinity as well as the broader European community with which it shares a continent.

In terms of national self interest, no nation can tolerate instability and chaos, let alone hostility on its doorstep.  From that standpoint, Russia’s heavy hand in Ukraine and Crimea is absolutely understandable.
Traditionally, the U.S. has defined its sphere of influence as the entire Western Hemisphere beginning with the Monroe Doctrine.  We have never been reluctant to intervene in our neighbor’s affairs when it suited our interests.

America’s Crimean crisis began in the late Nineteenth Century with the Spanish American War.  Once the U.S. realized its Manifest Destiny of a continental empire, it turned its attention overseas.    America established itself in Latin America via the Panama Canal.  With the Spanish American War, the U.S. gained a Caribbean stronghold Puerto Rico and in the Pacific via the Philippines and Guam.  Separately, U.S. colonists in Hawaii staged an uprising against the island’s royal family leading to U.S. annexation.
Under President Wilson, America squarely ignored George Washington’s advice and became entangle in European affairs via World War I.  Our stated ambition was to “make the world safe for democracy”.  Instead, we made Europe ripe for Bolshevism, Fascism and Nazism.

We haven’t backed off since.  Uncle Sam has established military outposts the world over.   This means that our government believes that America’s legitimate sphere of influence is everywhere.  It is the entire face of the earth.  The US of A is an empire with global reach.

 The moral justification for America’s global hegemony is to export our revolution, to bring to liberty and democracy to the great unwashed.  True conservatives from Burke to Taft to Kirk will tell you that you cannot impose a culture of western liberalism on peoples who are not ready for it.  Nations will choose that type of society and government that flows naturally from its historic values and traditions.  Our century long foreign policy of liberalizing the world by force is pure progressivist fantasy.
The phony Crimea crises              

In terms of national self interest, America has none in the Ukraine or in Crimea.  They are not vital allies or trading partners.  Our government’s main interest is in preserving the illusion that the entire world is our backyard and we are the baby sitters.

Putin’s Ukrainian escapades have pulled back the curtain to show the world that the emperor really has no clothes.  Obama, McCain and Kerry can scramble all they want to find a pair a drawers bit it’s too late.  We have been exposed.

The empire is finished.  America has overextended itself and cannot make good on its threats or promises.  It is now due time to return to our Founding Father’s vision.  I quote from President Washington’s farewell address.

"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world….The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible.  Europe (at that time our only foreign land of concern)  has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities."



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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
Paul Simon