RedStateEclectic

The Best Pro Gun Piece You'll Read Today

Written by an Iowa State senior by the name of Barry Snell, there's so much good stuff in it that you'll have to read it for yourself.  Here's a few key points, but I'd be doing him a disservice if I didn't stress that there's much, much more at the link below: 

The emotional mob does not rule in America.

... you have to be a complete idiot to think the Second Amendment is about hunting.

... concealed carry is now legal nearly everywhere, and guess what? Violent crime continues to go down. 

...many of us can’t understand how an anti-gun liberal can simultaneously be in favor of abortion.

 

Again, I can't encourage you enough to go here and read the whole piece.

 

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Edmund Burke and the Woman on the A-Train

"The cloudy sky is more grand than the blue," said Edmund Burke, according to the image source.

Following up on Laura's post Conservatives and Libertarians: Uneasy Cousins, I offer the lucid - and to me highly inspiring - below lecture on the great "conservative-libertarian" thinker and politician Edmund Burke, delivered by Ian Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

I have always neglected "my Burke". Though, I once had a go at Conor Cruise O'Brien's magisterial biography. At the time, however, I was insufficiently prepared to cope with the onslaught of historic ideas and circumstances jumping at me from the tome.

Shapiro's presentation certainly is a paragon of clarity and concentration.

 

War - Spectator Sport for Western Consumers of Government Propaganda - Mali

Image credit.

The German caption translates into: Get ready for blind flying!! Yet again?

Killing people all over the world has become a sort of half thrilling, half boring pastime for the Western consumer of government propaganda (see also Panem et Circenses).

As a manoeuvre in self-importance, Western governments kill and create havoc in hapless foreign countries, carefully chosen for being the weakest and poorest in the world.

Who would risk, say, his job to safe a few lives in Mali? And if they kill one another, why should we not share in it, at least we bring the right values to the brawl.

The habit is so fashionable nowadays, i.e. politically correct, even the Germans put a toe in the pond.

It is the failure to understand that heavy handed intervention itself creates new problems has been the central failure of American policy makers ever since 9/11, witness the debacles in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. Blowback is the intelligence term used to describe the development of a new and larger problem due to a military or political action that is not carefully considered.

In order to avoid making a mistake, Washington inevitably and automatically magnifies every hiccup internationally into a threat, mobilizing massive resources that lead to the proverbial flea being smashed with a sledge hammer. That there is some kind of existential threat resulting from international terrorism is pretty much a myth. There are lethal insurgencies and terrorist groups to be sure but most have strictly local agendas and nearly all are being hunted and hounded successfully by every police and intelligence agency in the world. Terrorists ready, willing, and, most important, able to travel to Europe or the United States and successfully undertake a terrorist action are few, which means that the United States alone is spending some hundreds of billions of dollars to counter at most a handful of extremists.

Which brings us to the alleged terrorist threat in Africa in general and to Mali in particular, which might well be considered a case study of how non-traditional military engagement driven by interventionist policies can develop willy-nilly when some bad choices are made. What kind of terrorist threat does Mali actually represent and how did the current situation come about?

Read on at the source.

See also:

The Fuzzy Image War ..., Libya - Is It the Oil? as well as The Sport of Facile Killing - A Democratic Pastime (note, to read the article by P.T. Bauer scroll downward until the advertisement is out of sight.)

Putting Parameters on Our Utopias

In recent posts and comments, I have endeavoured to advise against the inclination of many fellow-libertarians to effectively stop the process of building a positive theory of the state as a result of adopting a largely normative theory that systematically selects aspects of the state considered undesirable at the expense of a(n unbiased) comprehensive picture of the state-society-nexus.

These recent comments can be read as a homage to James M. Buchanan, a classical liberal, to whose sober and incisive mind the state has been equally important and worthy of in-depth study (i) as a condition of liberty and (ii) as her antagonist.

My initial encounter with Buchanan was effected by reading his What Should Economists Do? - a paper that made him stand out vis-à-vis most of the economists I had hitherto studied. Exchange, not choice, he argues, not maximization, not allocation, is the most fundamental subject-matter of economics.

I still have the book with my tremulous underlining and lots of scrawly comments, some by pencil, some by ball-pen. Here is a passage I somehow felt urged to underscore with particular ardency, apparently first using pencil and then ball-pen:

Economics is the study of the whole system of exchange relationships. Politics is the study of the whole system of coercive or potentially coercive relationships.

Watch here Buchanan interview Hayek.

See also my Public Choice and Thinking Government Failure - James Buchanan, Father of Public Choice Turns 90.

Terrorist = Conviction

Glenn Greenwald on the charge of terrorist and the shocking implications of what it means to go to court under that charge:

But the Court of Appeals went much further. It reversed the conviction on all of the counts - including the non-terrorism counts - and ordered a new trial. That was necessary, said the court, because there are special rules that govern a trial whenever a defendant is charged with "terrorism", and these rules are so permissive, so designed to ensure conviction, that it is inherently unfair to convict someone under these rules who is not charged with terrorism.

Full article.

When is a trial no longer a pursuit of justice? When that trial possesses a predetermined outcome against you.

A Proportional Dilemma

Ben Swann: “Hang the Nullifiers”?

Big 'SIS'

From the review at Amazon:

"Ending Big SIS (The Special Interest State) and Renewing the American Republic" is a stern look at the current crisis in politics and government. The surface problems are known to all: uncontrolled spending; exploding debt; legal and regulatory absurdity; imperious bureaucracy; misdirected investment; and crippled private businesses and institutions. But these are actually symptoms, not basic problems. They cannot be cured until we face up to a deep crack in the structure of our political institutions. We have allowed special interest groups of all kinds – the Founders of the republic called them “factions” – to capture segments of the government and then use its sovereign powers to tax, legislate, spend, and regulate to promote their own agendas rather than the interests of the nation as a whole. Indeed, we celebrate capture. We assume that this jockeying for governmental advantage is part of democracy, and that somehow it will all work out. But it will not work out, because too many interests have won too much over too long a period. Our institutions, which were designed to make government act slowly, make it impossible to reverse course, especially because the winning interests support politicians who will block reform. In fact, the problems will worsen, as ever-more groups demand a share of the pie. The Founders regarded capture by faction as a threat to the existence of the republic, using, in the words of one historian, “a dreadful image of a spreading rot” of a cancer eating at the vitals of the body politic. They were right, and American politics is approaching the day when the very legitimacy of the government will come into question. The book assesses the fears of the Founders, how their ideas governed our political arrangements for 150 years, and the rise of the special interest state in the 20th century. It analyzes the powerful forces that uphold Big SIS, and closes with some specific suggestions on how to reverse course. From the book: The Founders’ view: Like architects analyzing the lines of force necessary to prevent the collapse of a building, the Founders focused on making the forces of factional passion neutralize each other, thus keeping the republic standing. (p.2) Effect on other institutions: The leverage exerted by Big SIS affects decisions far beyond the money that it commandeers directly. It distorts the incentive structures throughout society, and sends investors and workers skittering off in unproductive directions. (p.91) The ratchet: Big SIS [is a ratchet that allows] motion in one direction only – toward greater government activism -- and then locks. (p.112) Rational ignorance: As more rules are created, and as complexity and opacity grow, it becomes more difficult to be “well-informed”. The rational response is not to increase one’s efforts but to cut them back, becoming even less diligent in seeking knowledge. 9p.119) Rapacity: The interest gets the benefits while the costs are borne by society at large, so there is “no constraint on the social cost such an organization will find it expedient to impose on society in the course of obtaining a larger share of the social output for itself.” (p.120)

 

The source:

Nullification

Thomas Woods shreds a so-called “small government” group for opposing nullification:

In short, the position of the WGL appears to be as follows: we must not adopt any position that might cause us to be called names by respectable people. We must adopt all the fundamental assumptions of the regime. We must assume that the Marshall Court’s cases were all decided correctly. We must assume that the nationalist theory of the Union is correct, even though it is contradicted by the most basic facts of U.S. history. We must not try to change the minds of our fellow citizens to get them to think in new and forgotten ways. We must accept judicial supremacy. We must do nothing unconventional. We must, in short, stick to the same strategies that have yielded the “conservative movement” precisely zero victories over the past hundred years.

Maybe it isn’t the nullifiers, after all, who are being unreasonable.

Woods’s article is lengthy, due to the well-recognized curse that befalls libertarians and true small government types. Rarely can we rely on the emotional or the expedient strains of argument which lend themselves to concision. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is also the heart of tyranny.

Those darn antifederalists. If only they had not placed upon us the Bill of Rights. Then we could live in a much higher state of thoughtless bliss. Instead, we have to deal with this:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

We have felt free to let lawyers, think tanks, and supreme courts decide our rights for us, resulting in just that: a feeling of freedom rather than an actual state of liberty.

Civil Forfeiture

A hearty "Good Luck" to the Caswells as they head into court next week:

We’ve discussed the nation’s civil forfeiture problems in the past. The drug war is such a window of opportunity for government, as is any war. No one knows where a leak will occur until one sees the drip. No one feels the power of a flood until the waters rise.