RedStateEclectic

RIP Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher:

On productiveness and the charitable instinct:“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.” On the hostile press: “If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.”

Read more at the source.

On Europe:

Thatcher’s basic take on a tight European federation was that it was unnecessary, unworkable, and dangerous. The nation state, she insisted, should remain at the heart of the international system, and a federated Europe would threaten its sway.

Moreover, Thatcher had misgivings about the Continent as a source of moral inspiration. “During my lifetime,” she reminisced, “most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one form or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions — from outside it.”

That insight alone is priceless, but it still pales compared with what she wrote more than a decade ago, when the euro was still a toddler, and the economies of Greece, Spain and Cyprus seemed as distant from calamity as they now are from salvation. “The European single currency,” wrote Thatcher in 2002, “is bound to fail — economically, politically, and indeed socially.”

Thatcher’s reasoning for this was not ideological. It was monetarist. There can be no such thing as a united currency without a united budget, she argued, at a time when it was impolite to suggest that the euro’s newlyweds would soon accuse each other of theft, deceit, laziness, imperialism and oppression.

The source.

 

The Democrats Bug Mitch McConnell. No, Really. Like, As In, Watergate.

Memeorandum has lots of links to this story about a recording that has emerged from a Mitch McConnell staff planning session, but I'll quote Politico:

 

“She’s clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced,” a McConnell aide says on the recording, which was obtained and posted by the liberal magazine Mother Jones. “I mean it’s been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she’s suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the ’90s.”

McConnell himself is heard speaking at the beginning of the meeting, which features aides presenting a whole range of opposition research they were considering using against Judd. At one point, a person describes “a wealth of material” to use potentially against Judd, prompting laughter from those present.

Jesse Benton has alleged that the recording was the result of a wiretap, and is not simply leaked campaign material. If that's true, I can't figure out why they bothered to release it.  There's nothing scandalous that I can see.  

I'm not sure why the Democrats are seemingly horrified to find out that political opponents can and will use excepts from books that candidates authored as campaign fodder.  Or that they are going to portray her as a carpetbagger athiest mentally disturbed weirdo. 

Seriously, this is the same group that decided that Mitt Romney's wife's horse was scandalous, and clamored for John McCain's medical records.  Why would they not expect that GOP to use the fact that she describes herself as mentally ill as a talking point?

Sigh.  Part of the problem here is that I'm half expecting McConnell and the GOP to apologize. * 

The big question should be was this illegal?  I seem to recall that when Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe went into an office with a hidden camera it was ignored by the mainstream media until it was portrayed as a horrible crime that should result in years of imprisonment.  The wiretapping, that is.  Not the actual criminal enterprise that agreed to help smuggle in underage sex workers. 

But if you just ignore the politics involved and read the law, then the way I see it, maybe it was illegal. Or maybe not.   A quick search brought up a legal blog that indicates that as long as one party in the conversation was aware of the recording, then it isn't illegal. So, if the recording was made by a mole in McConnell's inner circle, then yeah, it was probably not a criminal offense. (Assuming McConnell has non-disclosure agreements though, it might well be a violation of civil law.)

Note the same post goes on to say, "This prohibition includes recording any oral communication of others without their consent, so long as the recorder used an eavesdropping device." Since I'm probably not qualified to determine the differences between a secretly planted bug, a pocket tape recorder, or a surreptitiously enabled laptop microphone, I think we'll just have to wait and see if McConnell mans up and demands answers. 

*Updated: McConnell has asked the FBI to investigate.  Thank heavens.

The Great Deformation

In the below podcast, the always insightful David Stockman talks about some of the topics dealt with in his new book The Great Deformation.

 

See also here.

Which President Said This - Bush, Obama or a Clinton?

Cleaning out my bookshelves. I hate to do this, because every time I do, I eventually find myself wanting to look something up, and trying to remember which books I sent to the library sale is becoming increasingly difficult with age.  (So far, I'm still finding the library though, so I'm good!) Since I doubt that I'll be able to raise enough funds to build a library wing onto my house, some of these just have to go.

While I'm procrastinating on that task, I thought I'd grab some select quotes and let you guess which president or candidate made the following statements and/or campaign promises:

1. "As President, ... will establish pilot "second chance" homes for unwed teen mothers"
2. "An additional $400 million a year will be added to the Child Care Development Block Grant ... to help 500,000 low-income parents pay for an after-school program."
3. "As President, I will propose a Family Health Care Credit ... for every family making less than $30,000."
4. "..will establish an exemption of $2,750 for each elderly spouse, parent or relative that a caregiver tends to in their home."
5. "Government must not invest Social Security money in the stock market."
6. "Medicare must cover all expenses for low-income seniors."
7. "Enact the 'Teacher Protection Act,' shielding teachers, principals and school board members from liability arising from efforts to maintain discipline..."
8. "..promote cooperation with our allies, who should share the burden of their defense."
9. "...raise the amount in controversy for complete diversity jurisdiction from $75,000 to $100,000."

 

Have any guesses?  Here's the answer key.  Everything that is divisible by 3 is by President G.W. Bush. Those numbers aside, all the odd numbers belong to President G.W. Bush, while the even numbers all come from the platform of President G.W. Bush.

Come on.  You didn't really think I had any books about Obama here, did you?

 

 

Eco-Theocracy

Image credit.

Theocracy: a system of government by priests claiming a divine commission

It looks as if we are being increasingly ruled by an eco-(hypocracy)-theocracy:

They represent a rapidly expanding, increasingly powerful government class that is determined to control what we eat, say, do and buy.

In the environmental arena, these would-be czars and czarinas want to regulate what kinds of energy we can produce and use, cars we can drive, and jobs and living standards we can have. They are the vanguard of a dangerous alliance of eco-imperialism and vulture environmentalism.

[...]

Driven by utopian, Deep Ecology and global governance ideologies, elected and unelected ruling elites pass laws, promulgate regulations and issue edicts, based on faulty to fraudulent science and unsupported proclamations about dangerous manmade global warming, resource depletion and sustainable development. They seek to radically and fundamentally transform the energy, economic and social fabric of our nation and world – in the name of “social justice” and “saving the planet.”

They operate with little or no transparency or debate, often with vague or minimal legislative or constitutional authority, and with virtually no accountability for the false pretexts they use to justify their intrusive actions, or the harm they cause to people and wildlife. Their attitudes and actions often reflect a callous disregard for environmental values and people’s property, civil rights, jobs, health and even lives.

Our courts give them almost limitless discretion to impose laws and regulations, select pseudo-scientific “facts” to justify them, and ignore both the imaginary benefits and substantive harm they cause. They allow and encourage sweetheart “sue and settle” legal actions between regulatory agencies and activist groups, capricious agency inaction on mineral leases and permits, and arbitrary bureaucratic waivers of endangered species and other environmental laws for gigantic wind and solar projects.

Make sure to read the entire article.

The Life and Death of Democracy...

...is the title of a book by John Keane that I am reading in substantial extracts, at the moment. It is an exceedingly well written, thoughtful and inspiring book.

I have never been an anarcho-capitalist, but as a user of the vast resources - articles and ebooks - available from the LvMI, I have been tempted into ignoring alternatives to the often simplistic and enclosed views of the Rothbardians, especially concerning the state, democracy, and a number of topics in the field of economics. 

Presently, I am looking into the issue of democracy, and have made this diary entry to encourage me to pursue the below intuition - and it turns out, Keane's book provides material that confirms the hunch:

Freedom and democracy form a tense relationship. Isonomia, equality before the law – that precursor and beginning of the rule of law – gives rise to a desire to further strengthen this firewall against tyrannical domination: democracy is added to it, as a means of controlling rulers and permitting a bloodless change of government.

Why is it that there seems to be a continuing affinity that ties together the rule of law, a comparatively high degree of personal and economic freedom, and democracy?

A vague suspicion: practises characteristic of the rule of law, personal and economic freedom are protected by a subset and intersecting set of rights equally requisite to maintain democracy. In order to keep democracy alive one mustn’t undermine these common rights. Though democracy may be popular because it opens up options to act in ways that can be directed against freedom, still continued effectiveness of democracy is wedded to the need to respect rights that lend a certain robustness to freedom, too.

 

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.

 

Alchian On Politics

Armen A. Alchian (1914-2013), RIP. The great economist and versatile scholar, who died this morning, has inspired my way of thinking about politics momentously.

Writes Armen Alchian in The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian, Volume 2, in Economic Laws and Political Legislation, p.604:

To change the move toward socialism, we must change the ability of various forms of competition to be successful. I know of no way to reduce the prospective enhancement from greater political power-seeking, but I do know ways to reduce the rewards to market-oriented capitalist competition. Political power is dominant in being able to set the rules of the game to reduce the rewards to capitalist-type successful competitors. It is rule maker, umpire, and player ... But I have been unable to discern equivalently powerful ways for economic power to reduce the rewards to competitors for political power! Each capitalist may buy off a politician, but that only enhances the rewards to political power.

There are disagreements and competing ends among human beings that cannot be removed by voluntary market transactions.

Von Mises despises anarchism and praises the state. An anarcho-capitalist despises the state and praises anarchism.

I would like to meet someone who could demonstrate to me how a market product, how transacting in free markets can overcome the antagonism between the classical liberal von Mises and his anarchist opponent. Even if it were possible to offer political systems - like classical liberalism or anarchism - as vendable products, you cannot buy both, "the liberal state" and "anarchism".

You will have to resolve or, more generally, manage the differences on another plane. You need politics to sort these things out. And politics inexorably develops structures of maximal power, the most effective form of which being the state.

However, it is not a foregone conclusion at all that organising (structures of maximal) power is of necessity and uni-dimensionally destructive or otherwise evil.

To argue otherwise is tantamount to claiming that the development of humankind is an unmitigated descent into infernal conditions. After all, the technologies of power have advanced tremendously since Genghis Khan complained that an empire cannot be ruled from the back of a horse - implying that he could do a good job either at fighting and conquering or at ruling, but he could not do both properly. Since Genghis Khan's days, we have managed to organise power so as to dramatically improve levels of peaceableness, wealth, and welfare.

These attainments required us to act as political animals, as shapers and tamers of power and its most effective instrument: the state.

The consequences of the state are prismatic and ambivalent, like those of other tools with infinite uses. No one would say, a knife is evil just because a knife can be used quite improperly. And would it be sensible to suggest that human life is naturally and in any case evil, just because it can be a way of engendering as well as suffering evil?

By contrast, the absence of a dominant power results in disoriented and vehement struggles for preeminence. Hence empirically, anarchy is a highly violent state that sooner or later gives way to a more peaceful one, i.e. a more efficient structure of preeminent power.

On the scale of historic time, anarchy is a brief episode of violent anomie. As an operable societal model, it is quite simply an impossibility. It is too destructive to survive.

The theory of anarchism, in whose perspective state power is a monolith of evil, precludes itself from analysing structures of maximal power as part of the universe of evolutionary adaptations that are summarised in the term human progress.

Characteristically, anarchist theory seeks to immunise itself against empirical challenge by claiming to be rooted in an imperturbable foundation of self-evident premises.

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.)

Scientists Not Interested in Science

Richard Lindzen commenting on a speech given by president Obama at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

On the one hand, he was calling for sound science and critical analysis, on the other he was calling for the marginalisation of naysayers concerning global warming. It is, as an aside, an appalling feature of the present environment that this kind of abuse of scientific integrity is conducted to cheers at universities. Universities as such provide virtually no defense against this kind of behaviour by important officials.

(See time mark 22:00 of the below video)

The field is corrupt, without any question. I would say most scientists don’t believe this and didn’t believe it 20 years ago. But for young scientists they know they're in trouble if they say it, and so they don’t.

You created a community of scientists who are not interested in the science.

(See time mark 47:20)

On potential converts to the cause of veracity amongst scientists knowledgable enough to see through the politically correct travesty of climate science:

How do you describe these people 'for' or 'against'. It's meaningless. They're opportunistic.

(See time mark 49:20)

 

See also one of my earliest posts (from January 2008): The Sun Queen of Germany, and the very recent Tangents of Wisdom - Dürer and Popper.