RedStateEclectic

A Prediction

From John Lott's blog: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told CNSNews.com Wednesday that one in 10 doses of the swine-flu vaccine purchased by the U.S. will be donated to other nations before the U.S. demand for the vaccine is filled.

Sebelius also told a Senate committee that vaccine production is well behind demand.

I would like to predict that the majority of the vaccines won't arrive until the threat has passed, and we will still be forced to pay for them.

After all, it's the Chicago way. In 2006, Governor Rod bought 260,000 doses of the flu vaccine from an overseas source despite being warned by the FDA that the drugs wouldn't be allowed into this country. Guess what happened when the drugs arrived? That's right - the FDA wouldn't allow them into the country.  So Illinois donated them to Pakistan, where they were destroyed because they had expired.  $2.6 million dollars - a mere pittance compared to what this might cost.

Paths of Glory

Narrow-mindedly partisan, egotistical, self-serving, and constantly violating the Constitution - these qualities describe Congress, the President, the Federal Reserve, the (openly partial) Supreme Court, the Pentagon ...

America's military establishment is in good company. The top generals are mediocre careerists impervious to the rules of decency. Just another bunch of self-helpers nicely protected and glorified by patriotic habits that turn worthwhile traditions into conditioned reflexes uncoupled from sound judgment and adherence to substance.

Our generals are forcing a self-defeating security policy on us for the sake of preserving their institution, which means far more to them than the Constitution they swore to protect or the country they’re supposedly defending.

Make sure to read Jeff Huber's fascinating account of the highly-decorated Long War Mafia.

I found the link to Huber's piece on the long war generals in his superb article entitled McChrystal's Ultimatum, where he diagnoses:

The first thing we need to recognize is that our military is out of control. It drives our foreign and domestic policies and it gives us little in the way of national security.

Also see our posts Ron Paul Discusses Iran, Afghanistan - The Last American War? and The Callous Complacence of Those at Home.

Irish Surrender: A Servile Race in Folly Nursed, Who Truckle Most When Treated Worst

Irish voters have overwhelmingly approved the European Union’s controversial Lisbon Treaty, a document that will forever change the dynamics of European (and potentially global) politics. The “yes” vote comes just 18 months after Irish voters gave the “wrong” answer by rejecting the treaty in a first referendum.

Read the entire article - a good survey.

Far to the land of slaves and fens;
A servile race in folly nursed,
Who truckle most when treated worst.
- Dean Swift

A view from Ireland:

Not the will of the people, but the fear of the people, has led a majority of Irish voters to approve ratifyng the Lisbon Treaty in yesterday's re-run referendum.

Ireland's voters voted not on the content of Lisbon but on membership of the EU, on fear of political isolation if they did not say Yes to the same Treaty as they said No to last year, and on the promise of jobs and economic recovery which the Yes-side bullied and bamboozled them into believing was they would get if they only voted Yes.

Thus the bankrupt Irish political Establishment, which has ruined its country's economy, has opted through stupidity and fear to clamp an undemocratic Constitution on itself and most of Europe.

This year the Republic of Ireland will suffer a decline of nearly one-tenth in its economic output; it will have a Budget deficit equivalent to 12% of GDP, an unemployment rate of some 14% of its labour force and resumed net emigration from the country.

One accepts the result of the Lisbon re-run as a fact, but it is not a result that democrats need morally or politically to identify with or approve. This result does not have political legitimacy, whatever the voting percentages amount to, because of the fraudulent and undemocratic way in which the referendum was run, making it unique in these respects among the 30 or so referendums that have been held in Ireland since its Constitution was adopted in 1937.

With limitless money provided by the Brussels Commission, the political parties in the European Parliament, the Irish Government and private business firms, Ireland's Yes-side forces easily outspent the Nos by at least ten to one in a referendum campaign which was unique in modern Irish history for its massive unlawfulness and breaches of the country's referendum law.

There were at least six dimensions to this illegality:

Read about them.

I have always claimed that Europeans do not care for democracy; democracy makes only sense as a subordinate facilitator of liberty - and liberty is a notion not much appreciated in Europe. Unfortunately, the European ideal of democracy is increasingly characteristic of politics in America.

Erratic President and Velvet-Fisted Military Junta

A democracy unchecked by superordinate institutions and principles of liberty is destined for doom.

Increasingly I feel, America is sliding into uncontrollable chaos.

There is not just one Nero fiddling while Rome is burning. There are lots of them. In fact, it appears that the dignity of American institutions, like the Congress, the Presidency, the sub-role of Commander-in-Chief, top positions in the Military etc , is just a convenient veil that hides the most egregious self-serving orgy one can imagine.

I find it ironic and, indeed, hypocritical, when American dignitaries pontificate about the incredible level of government corruption in places like Afghanistan. If the dollar value of self-enrichment and aggrandisement is a measure of effectiveness in corruption, the rest of the world are sorry amateurs compared to what special interests in America accomplish routinely, as a matter of customary right as it were, and with this large section of the population or another, an entrenched two party system, and the media cheering them on.

George W. Bush gave Gen. David Petraeus and the rest of the four-stars who signed on to support the Iraq surge (Adm. Mike Mullen, Gen. Ray Odierno, Gen. George Casey, etc.) virtual control of U.S. foreign policy in April 2008 when he announced that Petraeus would make the call on troop levels in Iraq. John McCain would have given them the same latitude if elected, but when it became clear he probably wouldn’t win, the Pentagon and its supporters in Congress and the media began a drumbeat that signaled they expected the incoming Democrat to continue letting them run the show.

The long war mafia made clear its opposition to candidate Obama’s campaign promise to establish a timeline to draw down the Iraq war. Even after Obama had assumed office, Odierno, commander in Iraq, stated publicly (through Petraeus’s hagiographer Tom Ricks) that he expected to keep 30,000 more troops in Iraq through 2014 or 2015, well after the December 2011 exit deadline called for in the Status of Forces Agreement.

Mullen, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, has been a leading chanter of the mantra that says we must stay committed in Afghanistan. In a recent Joint Force Quarterly article, Mullen wrote, “The most common questions that I get in Pakistan and Afghanistan are: ‘Will you really stay with us this time?’ ‘Can we really count on you?’ I tell them that we will and that they can.”

In a recent appearance on Al Jazeera, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "both Afghanistan and Pakistan can count on us for the long term."

Every American should be stunned that our top military leadership made these kinds of foreign policy commitments without so much as a by-your-leave from the president or Congress. This is a velvet-fisted version of the kind of military junta we’d expect to see in a banana republic.

[...]

McChrystal says he sees no sign of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. So, his argument goes, in order to disrupt al-Qaeda terror network, we need 45,000 more troops to occupy a country al Qaeda is not in to make sure it doesn’t come back. And what exactly is this al-Qaeda juggernaut we’ve come to quake in fear of? As former CIA officer Philip Giraldi recently noted, “An assessment by France’s highly regarded Paris Institute of Political Studies [suggests that] Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda has likely been reduced to a core group of eight to ten terrorists who are on the run more often than not.”

If McChrystal and his allies get their way, we’ll have deployed over 135,000 troops to Afghanistan—on top of the roughly 130,000 troops still in Iraq—for the purpose of rounding up fewer than a dozen bad guys. Daffy Duck and Wiley Coyote could come up with a better strategy than that. Our military leadership and its supporters are a thundering herd of buffoons whose only real objective is to keep the cash caissons rolling and the gravy ships afloat and the wild blue budget sky high.

Now that Petraeus and Mullen have officially endorsed McChrystal’s re-escalation strategy, the pro-war echo chamber will kick into warp drive. If Obama can stand up to America’s militaristic madness, he’ll be the first president to successfully do so since Dwight David Eisenhower, who ended Douglas MacArthur’s botched Korean War and who warned us in his 1961 farewell speech against “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” that our military industrial complex would create.

The source.

See also Jeff Huber on The Neocon Artist and my posts 37 Seconds To Insult Your Intelligence, Pentagon's Most Important Acquisition, America Left Behind...,The World's Centre of Irrationality, and A Conversation in an Italian Restaurant.

Obama Evokes Grave Misgivings in His Inner Circle

Prelude: another erratic move by a president who seems like a publicity-seeking missile (hey, global lime-light, that's for me) ending up in deep water almost every time.

The White House jumped in front of a situation without understanding it, relying on the word of political cronies to shape their comprehension without checking for themselves.  Only after they failed did they ask themselves about the political environment in which they made their proposal.  Are we talking about ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, or the Olympics?  It’s hard to tell. [...]

In short, this is a microcosm of the entire administration.  They entered into a situation about which they knew nothing and put the prestige of the presidency on the line without bothering to listen past themselves and the Daley Machine in Chicago.  It only occurred to them that they didn’t know the first thing about the situation until after having wasted their time and distracting themselves from much more pressing — and presidential — matters of war and the economy.

The source.

Try again, Egobama. How about supporting America's bid for the Special Olympics?

In the meantime, more and more people are beginning to wake up, only to discover the problem child occupying the presidential throne.

The more a country moves away from liberty, the more irrational its political culture becomes. This explains why Nazi Germany was such a bizarre phenomenon. (No, I am not at all saying America is like Nazi Germany; however, there are structural similarities between totalitarian societies, and the substitution of liberty by irrationality is one).

The childish adulation of Obama that swept him into office and Barack Hussein's own naivete are entirely in line with the final stages of a dying empire, whose formidable resources have over decades increasingly been gaged, fettered, usurped, and redirected by the growing dominance of politics in all layers and corners of society.

A society that believes - as expressed in its political system - that it must be run and (re-)created by political busybodies appeals only to the grotesquely superficial and selects this type to man its cadres and very top positions.

Hillsdale College Professor Paul Rahe writes to comment on second thoughts among some prominent supporters of Obama:

In Tuesday's New York Post, Charles Gasparino reports that, although they will not admit anything of the sort in public, people like Morgan Stanley's John Mack, BlackRock's Larry Fink, Greg Fleming (once at Merrill Lynch), JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, and Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein, who backed Obama at the time of the financial crisis last Fall, are now, in private, expressing grave misgivings.

The entire post.

Not that these and other top echelon gurus whom Rahe refers to in his post strike me as sources of particular wisdom outside the realms of their respective power games, but the egomaniacally irrational authoritarian that they seem to encounter in Obama is the natural consequence of metastatising liberalism (in the American sense of the word).

I have written about these themes in Big Ego Sarkozy Envious of Egobama and The Authoritarian Nature of American 'Liberalism'.

My writing is clumsy compared to what the great Walter Lippmann has written about the natural coalition between liberalism (American meaning of the word) and authoritarianism.

I have not checked whether the below excerpts are from Lippmann's The Good Society - they may well be; at any rate I do recommend that book published in 1937 very strongly.

With an eye to the New Deal, Lippmann observed in 1937 that, while

the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words. . . .

Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come. . . . The premises of authoritarian collectivism have become the working beliefs, the self-evident assumptions, the unquestioned axioms, not only of all the revolutionary regimes, but of nearly every effort which lays claim to being enlightened, humane, and progressive.

So universal is the dominion of this dogma over the minds of contemporary men that no one is taken seriously as a statesman or a theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs. Unless he is authoritarian and collectivist, he is a mossback, a reactionary, at best an amiable eccentric swimming hopelessly against the tide. It is a strong tide. Though despotism is no novelty in human affairs, it is probably true that at no time in twenty-five hundred years has any western government claimed for itself a jurisdiction over men's lives comparable with that which is officially attempted in totalitarian states. . . .

But it is even more significant that in other lands where men shrink from the ruthless policy of these regimes, it is commonly assumed that the movement of events must be in the same direction. Nearly everywhere the mark of a progressive is that he relies at last upon the increased power of officials to improve the condition of men.

What worried Lippmann the most, argues Rahe, was the failure of those who considered themselves progressives to

"remember how much of what they cherish as progressive has come by emancipation from political dominion, by the limitation of power, by the release of personal energy from authority and collective coercion."

He cited

"the whole long struggle to extricate conscience, intellect, labor, and personality from the bondage of prerogative, privilege, monopoly, authority."

It was, he said,

"the gigantic heresy of an apostate generation" to suppose that "there has come into the world during this generation some new element which makes it necessary for us to undo the work of emancipation, to retrace the steps men have taken to limit the power of rulers, which compels us to believe that the way of enlightenment in affairs is now to be found by intensifying authority and enlarging its scope."

It is, concludes Rahe, with Lippmann's warning in mind that we - and Barack Obama's economic advisors -- should contemplate the present discontents.

Presidential Promises

Do you see a pattern? Here are just a few of Obama's many broken promises:

 

War  

Take the war in Iraq. Barack Obama rose to prominence as a vigorous opponent of the war. His antiwar speech in Chicago in October 2002 was the keystone of his campaign. With most of his Democratic opponents having voted for the war as senators, Obamacampaigned as the only true antiwar candidate. In the thick of the primaries, he declared, “I opposed this war in 2002. I will bring this war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home.” That’s how he drew the support of the Democratic left and then a broaderaudience of Americans who had turned against the floundering war. But later in the campaign, after the primaries, he backed away from his commitment to end the war in his first year. He said he would “redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months.” Soon after taking office, he essentially reaffirmed that plan. But it turned out that after about 18 more months of combat, until the end of summer 2010, the president intends to keep some 50,000 troops in Iraq until at least 2012. That’s a far cry from “I will bring this war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home.”  

Spending  

[I]n the third presidential debate, when those last few undecided voters were watching intently, Obama declared, “We’ve been living beyond our means andwe’re going to have to make some adjustments. Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.” That’s right. He promised a net spending cut.And what did taxpayers get? Right out of the box, a $787 billion kitchen-sink “stimulus” spending bill— on top of a federal budget that had increased by a trillion dollars under George W. Bush even beforethe bailout bonanzas of late 2008. A $1.8 trillion deficit in 2009, larger than the entire budget in President Clinton’s last year. The national debt skyrocketing to 67 percent of GDP. A permanent 25 percent increase in the size of nondefense spending as a percentage of GDP. And all of these figures are based on the dubious assumptions that “temporary” spendingprograms will actually expire, that discretionary spending growth will be much lower after 2012 than it is now, that national health care won’t cost more than expected, and so on. No wonder taxpayers turned out on April 15.

The source.

Employment

Unemployment in the United States hit 9.8% in September, despite the $787 billion stimulus that a Democratic Congress passed without a single Republican vote in the House and only 2 in the Senate.

That is roughly 2 points higher than the 7.8% that the White House had promised for September if the stimulus package became law.

There has been a net loss of 3 million jobs since the stimulus was passed.

The source.

The Changing of the Seasons of War

In many ways, life moves along like the seasons. There are distinct phases and general characteristics of the stages like snow in winter and a beating sun in the summer. One cannot often tell when one season begins and another ends. However, it is clear when one is in the ‘thick of it’ while shoveling snow or raking leaves. The exact inflection point usually cannot be discerned until one looks back and reflects upon the past.

So it is, I believe, with politics. Specifically, I believe we are seeing the transition from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan from a Republican or Bush venture into one of the Democratic Party and Obama. Just as the Vietnam War was begun by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson, the war was inherited by the Republicans and Nixon upon his election and shortly became a Republican war. With that transition, the opposition to the war moved from the Right to the Left even though both were intellectually apologetic for the war.

Today’s conflicts are those in Iraq and Afghanistan (and to some extent Pakistan). What began as a Republican war and one in which the GOP defended with passion has now become a Democratic war. George Will’s departure from the last seven years of rhetoric from the Republican Party will, in my view, be seen as the inflection point.

Soon after Will’s piece (to which he was attacked by many on the Right not yet ready to cede the war to Obama) the National Review published a piece saying maybe it was time to end the military’s occupation. The Right, with the passing of executive power and the military to the Left, has begun to intellectually leave its defense of the war behind.

Over the next months I suspect you will begin to hear more calls from the Right to look at exit strategies and calculate the costs that the wars are continuing to rack up. It will become increasingly critical of the military strategy and nation building. It will question the wisdom of occupying forces or spreading democracy at the end of a gun. And the Left will defend the conflict until it finds a politically acceptable exit strategy.

Make no mistake, this will not be a struggle that reflects a change in identity of either the Right or Left. Both sides are more than happy to express military supremacy around the world with only slight twists on their motivations. There is no ‘anti-war party’ unless one looks away from the Democrats and Republicans. Both enjoy the power of the state when they hold the reins.

As we watch the passing of the seasons and the transition from a Right-wing to Left-wing war it is important for those of us who abhor war and its destruction to reflect on how to prevent its rise again. The anti-war on the Right will have the next opportunity to change the face of a major political party. The anti-war Left failed to change the philosophy of the Democrats when they had a Republican war. Now it is the time to begin thinking of how to change the Republican Party into the anti-war party and end the cycle.

This is why it is important to watch the weather. In my view we clearly have the beginning of hostility within the Republican ranks towards the use of the military. We must seize upon this opportunity and convince as many of the rank and file about the shortcomings of unfettered executive power, a failure to heed the Constitution’s declaration of war provision, and the maintenance of a large standing army with bases all over the world (and funding it with fiat dollars).

It is quite possible that this ‘window’ to push for a return to the Constitution and a smaller military will be a short one. Perhaps in 2012 the GOP will once again hold the power. So for those in the GOP ranks we might have only a few years to convince our fellow activists to question what an appropriate role for the military should be.

So let us not hesitate to promote the Constitution and question our military presence all around the world. This is not a time to move slow. It is time to push for a return to the foreign policy of most of our Founding Fathers; one of a humble nation that leads by example not force.

It is time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. The seasons are swift and if you wait too long you’ll find yourself wearing shorts in a snowstorm and lamenting another missed opportunity.

The Second American Revolution

Gerald Celente, of Trends Research, has sent out a new release updating his subscribers about his analysis of the political trends in this country. he is describing the situation as the second American Revolution. Although I don't agree that things will be quite so violent (food/tax riots) as he predicts, I think his analysis is not that far off.

A large number of people are angry, scared, and have decided to not just accept the government's solutions any more. How this eventually plays out is anyone's guess. But, like Celente, I feel the Tea Parties and outbursts at Town Hall Meetings are probably just the beginning of the ugliness.

KINGSTON, NY, 12 August 2009 — The natives are restless.  The third shot of the “Second American Revolution” has been fired.  History is being made.  But just as with the first two shots, the third shot is not being heard.

 

America is seething.  Not since the Civil War has anything like this happened.  But the protests are either being intentionally downplayed or ignorantly misinterpreted. 

 

The first shot was fired on April 15, 2009.  Over 700 anti-tax rallies and “Tea Parties” erupted nationwide.  Rather than acknowledge their significance, the general media either ignored or ridiculed both protests and protestors, playing on “tea bagging” for its sexual innuendo.  

 

Initially President Obama said he was unaware of the tea parties.  The White House later warned they could “mutate” into something “unhealthy.”

 

Shot #2 was fired on the Fourth of July, when throngs of citizens across the nation gathered to again protest “taxation without representation.”  And as before, the demonstrations were branded right-wing mischief and dismissed.

 

The third volley, fired in early August, was aimed point blank at Senators and House members pitching President Obama’s health care reform package to constituents.   In fiery town hall meetings, enraged citizens shouted down their elected representatives.  It took a strong police presence and/or burly bodyguards to preserve a safe physical space between the politicians and irate townspeople. 

 

The White House and the media have labeled protestors “conservative fringe elements,” or as players in staged events organized by Republican operatives that have been egged on by Fox news and right-wing radio show hosts.  

 

In regard to this latest wave of outbursts, health industry interests opposed to any reform are also being blamed for inciting the public.  But organized or spontaneous is not the issue.  While most protestors exhibit little grasp of the complex 1000 page health care reform document (that nary a legislator has read either), their emotion is clearly real and un-staged.

 

Rightly or wrongly, the legislation is regarded as yet another straw on the already overloaded camel’s back.   A series of gigantic, unpopular government-imposed (but taxpayer-financed) bailouts, buyouts, rescue and stimulus packages have been stuffed down the gullet of Americans.  With no public platform to voice their opposition, options for citizens have been limited to fruitless petitions, e-mails and phone calls to Congress … all fielded by anonymous staff underlings.

 

Now, with Congress in recess and elected representatives less than a stone’s throw away, the public is exploding.  The devil is not in the details of the heath care reform, the devil is the government mandating health care.   Regardless of how the plan is pitched or what is being promised, to the public the legislation is yet another instance of big government taking another piece out of their lives and making them pay for it; again telling them what they can or cannot do.

 

Though in its early stages, the “Second American Revolution” is underway.  Yet, what we forecast will become the most profound political trend of the century – the trend that will change the world – is still invisible to the same experts, authorities and pundits who didn’t see the financial crisis coming until the bottom fell out of the economy. 

 

Trend Forecast: Conditions will continue to deteriorate. The global economy is terminally ill.  The recession is in a brief remission, not the early stages of recovery.  Cheap money, easy credit and unrestrained borrowing brought on an economic crisis that cannot be cured by monetary and fiscal policies that promote more cheap money, easy credit and unrestrained borrowing.

 

Nevertheless, Washington will continue to intervene, tax and exert control. Protests will escalate and riots will follow.

 

Fourth Shot of the “Second American Revolution”: While there are many wild cards that could light the fuse, The Trends Research Institute forecasts that if the threat of government-forced Swine Flu vaccinations is realized, it will be the fourth shot.  Tens of millions will fight for their right to remain free and unvaccinated.

 

Publisher’s Note: The power of the Internet and new technologies is inexorably fermenting the “Second American Revolution.”  However widespread and emotionally charged, had the tax rallies, tea parties and healthcare reform protests occurred in years past, they might have been covered by the local media, but might not have made national headline news and thus would have died stillborn.  

 

Now, with the ubiquitous camera-equipped cell phone, universal access to YouTube, and millions of twitters and tweets, the uprisings cannot be ignored, contained, managed, spun or edited down.  The revolutionary fervor will prove contagious. 

 

Can anything stop it?  

 

Trend Forecast: Before the momentum of the “Second American Revolution” becomes unstoppable, it could be derailed through some false flag event designed to deceive the public, or a genuine event or crisis capable of rallying the entire nation behind the President.   In a worst-case scenario, according to Trends Research Institute Director, Gerald Celente, “Given the pattern of governments to parlay egregious failures into mega-failures, the classic trend they follow, when all else fails, is to take their nation to war."

 

A false flag attempt, a genuine crisis, or a declaration of war, may slow the momentum of the “Second American Revolution,” but nothing will stop it.

Change Enron Can Believe In - Coming Into Its Own Under Obama...

... a little too late for Ken Lay and his eager entourage. But then, the future for new Enrons never looked as bright as today.

“If there is one thing I have been impressed with over the last decades, it is that when the environmental community defines a number one priority, something happens. Not always something good—but something.”1

Dr. Kenneth L. Lay, Chairman, Enron Corporation, June 1997 (1)

Who was the late Ken Lay, the architect and chairman of Enron throughout its 16-year history? All parties to the current legislative debate on a CO2 cap-and-trade bill should know. After all, Lay’s tireless efforts to promote CO2 regulation and enact renewable energy quotas make him a father figure for HR 2354, the Waxman-Markey climate bill, what I have called the Enron Revitalization Act of 2009.

The source.

Beware, when the State Privatises

The thinking of socialists is so macerated by mere rhetoric, i.e. disregard of precise concepts, that they can comfortably float in a cloud of nonsense and unending contradiction.

Government has spent inordinate amounts of money and exerted unspeakable coercive discretion to impart that mental infirmity on the public so thoroughly as to reap the tyrant's ultimate reward: the peoples' inability to tell right from wrong and their dependence on a (tele-prompted) prompter to feel confident enough to utter their [sic] verdict on a subject.

When the time comes for Obama to confuse you with the privatisation card, which he will soon be forced to pull out, amongst innumerable other decoys, come back to this post.

Richard Wellings reminds us in the Institute of Economic Affairs blog:

Successive governments have not used the proceeds of privatisation to give people back more of their own money to spend. Rather, they have used the savings made to expand the role of the state, for example by providing ever more generous transfer payments, higher pay for public sector employees and the funding of new regulatory bodies and agencies. Money that would have previously supported the nationalised industries is now allocated to a host of other government activities rather than being returned to taxpayers.

Those who believe in freedom should therefore not uncritically praise privatisation. It should be supported solely as a means to the end of increasing individual freedom by giving people back more of their own money to spend. Where privatisation becomes a backdoor way of expanding the role of the state and thereby reducing people’s freedom this should be exposed and criticised.

The entire, short post.