RedStateEclectic

“Shock and Awe” or “Pick Your Battles”?

One of the things that I’ve noticed in some of my interactions with some of the “liberty groups” (I use that term reluctantly, because there is a great gap between the understandings of liberty among the various groups) is the difference in approach.  Let me tell you a little bit about what I’ve seen…

I’m on a number of e-mail lists here in the state—in my role as Campaign for Liberty Interim State Coordinator, and Republican Liberty Caucus State Chair, I like to keep my finger on the pulse of the various grassroots movements.  I get stuff from 9-12 groups, We the People groups, Tea Party groups, and various taxpayer organizations. Ostensibly, all of these groups are working towards the same thing (along with the two groups I represent): smaller government, fewer regulations, less taxes.  Beyond that, the groups diverge somewhat in terms of their views on international policy, government involvement in social issues, etc.

The two—somewhat distinct—approaches that I’ve seen come down to this: either a “group” takes a “shock and awe” approach (by which I mean they are all over every issue and send out “emergency action alerts” on multiple issues, every day), or they take a “pick your battles” approach (by which I mean they may be concerned about the full spectrum of issues, but are much more selective about which ones they pick to call everyone on their mailing list to action).  Which is the better approach?

I’m inclined to favor a more measured approach.  Yes, there are many issues out there, all of which are very important.  But with limited resources (people to call and write), it seems to me that calling on the same relatively small group of people to e-mail and call their members of Congress on multiple issues runs a couple of risks: 1) pretty soon, staff members (and maybe members of the House and Senate themselves) start recognizing names across issue areas, and they realize that it’s the same people calling them about everything—and that the number of people contacting them is really pretty small.  When that happens, do they then start disregarding what is being said, and peg those folks as part of the vocal fringe? 2) A somewhat related potential problem is this: if you are the one sending out half a dozen e-mails a day, asking people to call and write on every issue that is being discussed, will people quit listening to you? Will those who are receiving your e-mails start hitting “delete” without even reading them?  Will they start dismissing YOU as a crank for classifying everything as an emergency?

It seems to me that the Campaign for Liberty has had some success at mobilizing grassroots support—HR 1207 and S 604 being one of the best examples—at least in part because the group has picked its battles.  It has realized that while there are many issues that it needs to be aware of, and even bring some level of attention to (through the website, etc.), that with a limited “army”, you can’t fight battles on many fronts and hope to win—but that you can fight one or two battles at a time, and win those.

It seems to me that the big challenge for groups interested in promoting liberty and a return to constitutional government is to pick their battles, and to not get all histrionic about every issue out there.  The groups that seem to be “real” organizations—the Campaign for Liberty, and the various and sundry “taxpayer groups” (of which there are a number) seem to take a more measured approach.  Grassroots groups—loose organizations of people who just want to “do something” seem far less focused.  Those folks are passionate about their causes, and are committed to finding information on a variety of subjects, and sharing it with everyone on their e-mail list as they make a call to action—but I wonder if, in the long run, the groups that are trying to do everything won’t find themselves burning out?  Are there enough “activists” out there who will devote the time and energy to maintaining such a frenzied pace?  Are there enough replacements out there who are willing to devote the kind of time that some of these folks are—once they burn out?

I’m skeptical.  No matter how strongly people feel about liberty (or any cause), none of us can continue in such a harried state forever.  Sooner or later, family or work, or just life catches up and demands you to refocus your energies.  Even the best multi-taskers amongst us have to back off of some of our tasks once in a while.

Pick your battles.  Realize that you’re not going to win every battle.  But win enough that you keep the members of Congress wondering where you might pop up next.  And win enough that you can start to turn the tide.  It’s not about the individual battles—much as we’d like to win every one of them; it’s about who wins the war.  We’re in a long-term effort.  We need to pace ourselves.  We need to remember that (using yet another metaphor), that just because the other team scores a touchdown in the first play of the game, doesn’t mean that the game is over.  Never give up, keep up the struggle, but recognize that that not every single battle is crucial to winning the war.

LLE

Pay for Your Own Stupidity

Stossel nails it.  Amen.

The End Of Our Endurance

...[T]he city called and said they'd read we were closing - which is why restaurants usually wait until the last second to slip out of town at midnight - and that if Nathans doesn't pay $22,000 in additional taxes by tomorrow they will put liens on my house, my bank accounts and on Nathans. Can it get scarier?

Why is it that only the big guys can get bailouts, but when its a little guy, on the ropes, with no options, there's absolutely no mercy?

Bailouts are for the big players who can afford to buy the Representatives and Senators from the demuplican party. Bailouts are for photo-ops showing that your government is doing something. Bailouts are for the consolidation and growth of central power and planning to the ruination of our economy.

Do not hesitate to think that a large crisis such as a depression will engender any leniency by officeholders for the little guy. We are here to work so that we may be taxed until we have nothing left. We are here to be controlled so that politicians have new laws to pass with every subsequent year that we dutifully place the next crop of bloodsuckers into local, state, and federal positions of power with our precious little votes which we so proudly hale as the hallmark of a free society. We are here to be divided and confused, played for emotional suckers attached to the next wedge issue, so that a cabal of soulless creeps can make a world of haves verses have-nots - endlessly chinking away at the productive sector until there is nothing left but rubble.

There are no longer any citizens in the world; there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters; they are bound to die for their masters at call.... On some bright tomorrow, a geological epoch or two hence, they will come to the end of their endurance.... – H.L. Mencken

 

 

The Dismal Social Sciences

The social sciences (especially economics, law, and political science) have entirely lost their way. A long time ago.

On a world-historic scale, three most momentous events have occurred virtually at the same time (roughly during the course of the 18th century):

(1) the social sciences were borne, that is: they discovered their proper subject-matter,
(2) the theory of liberty reached a stage of unparalleled fruition (in the form of classical liberalism).
(3) after billions of years, evolution developed to the point where it discovered itself through the conduits of (1) and (2).

(1), (2), and (3) are simply different aspects of the same phenomenon.

The original and true, yet long abandoned subject-matter of the social sciences is the nature of self-generating order in human society.

It was through the observation of what originally was termed "the social" (the ability of society to organise itself without human design, a precondition of any human community of a higher complexity and capacity to sustain large populations) that classical liberalism discovered principles whereby an extended order consisting of millions of mutual strangers could persist and flourish in a way no rulers could ever accomplish.

This insight was the result of understanding grown order, or evolutionary processes, as one might call them today.

Before their untimely death, the social sciences passed on the paradigm of evolution to Darwin - and it is very sad that most people nowadays do not realise that biology is just another fruitful user of the concept of spontaneous growth, and that a society that confines the concept to biology is not likely to fare too well.

Ever since, the social sciences have strayed from this fundamental approach and reverted to treating social matters and the good society as a kit of readily observable and manageable components waiting for an interior decorator with bright ideas of arrangement. In that way, the social sciences have become the maidservant of ephemeral concerns, dirigism and its underlying intellectual hubris.

They are about feeling important (i.e. being in possession of the powerful ability to shape society properly) rather than probing into a way of order-generation exceedingly hard to understand, because this kind of order occurs amongst a far larger number of elements than we are used to deal with in our ordinary lives and occupations, or even natural scientists in capturing the comparatively simple phenomena that, say, physics ventures to make authoritative statements about.

I think, Arnold Kling is expressing an important aspect of this sad development in a post where he writes (I read his term "political economy" as synonymous with my term "social sciences":

The main science of political economy is the science of obtaining and retaining power. As far as expertise goes, the pollster, the fundraiser, and the media expert are all fundamental to the operation. The public policy expert is for decoration. If you want to be an economic policy adviser when you grow up, then my advice is to learn to rationalize the methods used by leading politicians to obtain power.

Is health care reform about health care? No, it is about seizing and retaining power. Was the stimulus about stimulus? No, was about seizing and retaining power. Is cap and trade about global warming? No, it is about seizing and retaining power. Was TARP about saving the financial system? No, it was about seizing and retaining power.

The social scientist's role in the political process is to say, "X is a problem. Government must solve X. Here are some solutions." The solutions that rationalize seizing and retaining power will bubble to the top.

Suppose you believe that regulators cannot possibly have the wisdom to direct human activity. Suppose you believe that politicians spending other people's money tend to choose less wisely than people spending their own money. If you want to get anywhere as a public policy adviser, keep those beliefs to yourself.

The source.

(PS: I do not consider that the evolutionary paradigm is committing one to an anti-religious position - rather to the contrary.)

What Might the Founders Make of It?

David Boaz writes:

Both President Obama and Sen. John McCain cited the Founders in their weekly radio addresses today, as they made the case for government actions that would have appalled those Founders. Obama invoked “the indomitable spirit of the first American citizens who made [independence] day possible” in arguing for a federal takeover of education, energy, and health care.

He might have trouble explaining how his policies reflect the spirit of the men who left us such words as these:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must be happy.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.

Meanwhile, McCain called for the American government to more vigorously support the protesters in Iran. What would the Founders say to him?

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 connection as possible….Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. …Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

Maybe each week there should be three national radio broadcasts: one from the incumbent president, one from the other big-government party, and one reflecting the views of the Founders.

The source.

March on DC

FreedomWorks is sponsoring (and the Campaign for Liberty is one of the co-sponsors) of a March on DC, to take place September 12.  They’re billing it as “The Tea Party Movement Storms Capitol Hill”. 

If you’ve got nothing else going on in mid-September, how about organizing a bus trip to DC?

YAL's New Website

The Ron Paul - endorsed group, Young Americans for Liberty, has a brand new website:

http://www.yaliberty.org/

The Ninth and the Tenth Amendment

Walter E. Williams reminds us

[...] the Ninth Amendment [...] reads: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." In essence, the Ninth Amendment says it's impossible to list all of our God-given or natural rights. Just because a right is not listed doesn't mean it can be infringed upon or disparaged by the U.S. Congress. The Tenth Amendment is a reinforcement of the Ninth saying, "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." That means if a power is not delegated to Congress, it belongs to the states of the people.

The Ninth and Tenth Amendments mean absolutely nothing today as Americans have developed a level of naive trust for Congress, the White House and the U.S. Supreme Court that would have astonished the founders, a trust that will lead to our undoing as a great nation.

The source.

Incidentally, while Walter E. Williams does not deal with economics in the above article, his piece helps also explain why Williams' economics is so good.

Constitutional illiteracy is fraught with the greatest dangers, one of which is the inability to appreciate the working of a free economy, which is just a special case of men acting under the rule of law. A free economy is what happens when the rule of law is observed.

Walter E. Williams is one of the few economists who understand the legal preconditions of liberty, and thus of a free economy. If you do not understand liberty, you cannot understand economics, or rather, the proper subject-matter of economics: the nature of a self-generating order.

So, economic decline is one of the consequences of not thinking through the great Constitution of the United States and treating it effectively (though not necessarily rhetorically) with disrepect.

The Bidding of the Leaders

Quotes are neat. They emphasize a point you make or help you to understand that things like you are experiencing have happened before. They can be inspirational as well as educational. There is one quote that I seem to come back to time and again; not for its inspiration, but for its sheer practicality. It was uttered by none other than Hermann Goering:

Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

The simple truth of that statement (made by one who caused so much death and was nearing his own) is profound. How much of our ideas are our own? We have so many wars going on against things like terror, drugs, poverty, climate change (war against humanity) - all of which come about by ceaseless propaganda by our government and the media. Who questions these things?

I wonder what it must have been like living, way back when, as the first socialist plea was codified into law ... the ripples it has made. Imagine the pleasure of thinking how just a little of your money was going to help some cause or another. The poor and indigent, perhaps? Who knows, really? At some point it began innocently enough and now we work half of our lives to satiate the omniscient and omnipotent state. The good we thought we were doing for ourselves has finally coalesced into ourselves being the problem.

Like the proverbial man who digs his own grave, we have built a government that no longer wishes to protect us, but sees us as the problem. It now protects Mother Earth. There can be no other conclusion when one considers the implications that man is the cause of Gaia's woebegone state. We have spent eons getting to the point where we have conquered nature, only to hear the leaders of the world tell us that we must recede. We must go back to the times of hardship to satisfy those in power whose perception of a perfect world means unadulterated nature (or maybe they simply mean to rule over us) and far fewer humans to disturb it.

From the innocent socialist beginnings to the now militaristic cries for overwhelming force, we have never once failed Goering's words which can now only be described as an axiom. Just once, I would like to see the people of this country decide to look elsewhere than the government's guns when solving an issue - proving the existence of the autodetermination that must flourish if we are to remain free. How I would love to prove this axiom to be false.

Connecting the Dots

What a world.