An ever more elaborate system of ‘workers’ rights’ was promoted until the labour code grew to several thousand pages—a happy hunting ground for labour lawyers, a minefield for enterprises. Trade union power came to be based, not on workers recognising that union membership may serve their interests, but on legislation, government sponsorship and the patronage afforded by the immense administrative machinery of the various social insurance schemes.
[...]
The future historian of these apparent triumphs over economic reality will very likely single out two phenomena that loomed more and more ominously and in fact began to signal that no matter how the battles went, the war was beginning to be lost. One was the growing severity of job protection policies that made firing employees so difficult and expensive that employers were frightened away from hiring them in the first place. New job creation fell to levels last seen in the Great Depression, for offering employment except on short-term contracts has become an act of reckless audacity. (One small but significant breach in job protection came just the other day when the highest French court of appeal ruled that terminating employees may be permitted not only when the enterprise is making losses threatening its survival, but also when terminating employees is necessary to prevent such losses).

The other ominous phenomenon was that the high level of unemployment, which would have seemed abnormal a decade ago, has come to be seen as a fact of life. It has resisted the multitude of attempted therapies governments of both Right and Left tried to apply to it. The diminishing band of diehard defenders of the ‘European social model’ still mutter that unemployment is high because the model is not ‘social’ enough, or not European enough, and all will be well when it is made more social and more ‘harmoniously’ European. Meanwhile, it is starting to be noticed that chronically high unemployment has almost wholly drained away the bargaining power of labour in the private sector. Union militancy is now confined to the public sector—essentially, to public transport workers, teachers and government clerks. Thirty-odd years of socialist economic policies have reduced the mythical, red flag waving ‘working class’ to passive impotence.

An anecdote bears eloquent witness to how workers ‘benefiting’ from the ‘special model’ now stand compared to those who are exposed to the ‘caprice of the market’. Two years ago Toyota set up a car assembly plant in the industrially derelict region of Northeast France. More recently, the president of Toyota visited the plant, expressed his satisfaction and explained that the company has chosen to locate in France rather than in England (which was the runner-up candidate location) because ‘English workers can afford to talk back, but French workers cannot’.

I wish Anthony de Jasay was a more active, or at least more high-profile, writer or even blagger today because his magnum opus The State is so good that more people need to read about him. He still writes articles for the Library of Economics and Liberty, so I guess I should actually read them regularly and accept that as good enough for an 85-year-old.

The most complex factor in the study of economics is time. Because liberal and statist economic theory does not properly account for the fourth dimension, it rarely predicts economic development accurately.
[...]
Banks and credit-card companies invest hard capital at a substantial risk of default, to earn money in the future through interest and fees. If they believe their ability to profit from this risk and expense is threatened, and they’ve been demonized to the point where they have no effective means to influence politics to their advantage, the only logical move is to reduce risk, and increase the price of the loans they feel confident in making. This hurts new businesses and low-income consumers the most, because they have the least impressive credit ratings.

As David Z. predicted a year ago and I predicted a couple times in the past year, the bailout money taken/inflated from the American public and given to Chrysler and GM will not be repaid. “Oh, but it’s not a bailout; it’s a LOAN!” Eat crow, you accessories to robbery.

But, at least we only lost $30 billion in this venture instead of the possible maximum of $44 billion.

The $30 billion isn’t the end of it because this is the way Obamanomics works. It’s the same way Bushonomics and every other socialist, dirigiste economy works: the rich and well-connected benefit at the expense of the common people, who don’t get bailouts and are impoverished by inflation.

Hat tip: David Z. at …no third solution

Since I like directing this blag at Statists as much as at other libertarians, I’ll give some advice to the former group: Stop trying to convince yourselves that monopolistic law-enforcement entities are moral, just, or practical, and have the sense to end this embarrassing charade of pretending that you support monopolistic law-enforcement systems because they protect people’s rights or lives or property better than free-market systems in a libertarian society could. When you look deep down, you know that doesn’t make any sense, and you realize it’s foolish and absurd to suppose that people who are attracted to positions of authority and power would rarely abuse that power when they themselves hold the highest, ultimate legal authority in a particular region.

Could you imagine that, if it weren’t tragically true already?! A group of clown-suited thugs tases, arrests, and denies medical treatment to someone who probably hasn’t committed any offenses and certainly not any serious ones, and the only body to which the victim has recourse is the very one that employs those aggressors and imposes the laws that prevent him from seeking third-party arbitration! In fact, to even demand arbitration by a disinterested third party would automatically incur even more penalties on top of his original “crimes”! This is how the State wants it. This is by design; it’s how the holders of power want society to function. A monopolistic legislation, enforcement, and punishment system could not work any other way. Put simply, this type of incident is not a bug, it is a feature.

When competition is outlawed, the incentive to do good disappears, and punishment for doing bad is nearly impossible. The importance of this simple competitive mechanism in making the free market superior to socialism cannot be overstated. A libertarian society’s assortment of insurance, protection, investigation, pursuit, and arbitration systems provided on the free market would necessarily protect individual rights better and punish malfeasance more harshly, swiftly, and reliably than any monopolistic-Statist system could. If you disagree with this, please read The Enterprise of Law by Bruce Benson and The Market for Justice by the Tannehills and then get back to me. Please don’t be so stupid as to suggest Statist claptrap for me to read, because I already experience the reality of your socialist hellhole every day.

Speaking of insatiable parasites, the government of Hawaii will now tax its residents on gross gambling income rather than net gambling income.

A Hawai’i resident who wins $10,000 in a year, for example, and loses $9,000 in the same year used to be taxed only on the $1,000 in net winnings. Under the new law, that resident would be taxed on the full $10,000 in winnings.

I imagine several other states already have similar laws, but it’s no coincidence that at least one state is enacting such a tax during the Second Great Depression. Many companies offer better deals to customers in an attempt to maintain revenues (…and, unfortunately, they also fire a lot of people to cut costs) to stay afloat. The first resort of governments is to take whatever they can from their captives. It is sad to read comments about this and other stories from people who probably claim to love freedom and justice and all those other things that, they’d say, made America great, but then when it gets down to specifics they bend over backwards to support anything and everything that helps the State at the obvious expense of its subjects.

It doesn’t matter that this is unenforceable. The intent and the attitude of these parasites in government is what should really boil your blood.

Y’see, gals, if you follow sports and know a little bit about them, then you can sail right through the interrogation about your cocaine-filled golf clubs without arousing any suspicion. Such efforts to traffic drugs would obviously be unnecessary if the drugs were legal, which would be better for everyone in society because their sale, distribution, and use would be safer and our civil liberties wouldn’t be the collateral damage of the War on Drugs.

A Maryland high-school softball coach was fired after parents drank beers that they brought to an end-of-the-year team party. Because underage high-schoolers were present, observing their parents imbibing alcohol. At the coach’s private residence. A firing over this probably wouldn’t happen in a free society. Hysterical teetotaling anti-alcohol crusaders are about as wretched as they come. Without a doubt, they are more to blame for society’s alcohol-related problems, such as underage binge-drinking and drunken driving, than any other factor. There is no way they could exert as much influence without the State enforcing their delusions upon society. All of this influence is harmful. A dead giveaway of a brain-dead Statolatrist zombie is that they suggest government school board members could rise to any position of importance in an educational system in a free society (or probably any other organization or business).

In a free society, family and community would be intimately involved in the education of children because it would be necessary and because there would be neither the inclination nor the opportunity to relinquish such responsibilities to State bureaucrats. Conversely, bureaucrats and other strangers would have no opportunity to claim authority over parents or their children. Idiotic teetotalers and other brands of moral busybodies would never be in a position to make decisions about other people’s children or, in this case, a coach who supposedly…let parents do something that was in some way bad to their own children.

Frank Hatley of Cook County, Georgia, was imprisoned for one year for failing to make child support payments for a child who, as the court was aware, was not his.

In June of last year, a judge ordered Hatley to jail for failing to reimburse the state for public assistance that was paid to support his “son,” who, as the court was aware, is not actually his son.
[...]
For 13 years, Hatley made payments to the state until learning, in 2000, that the boy might not be his biological son. A DNA test that year confirmed that there was no chance he was the father, according to court documents.

Hatley…was relieved of any future child support reimbursement but was ordered to pay more than $16,000 that he had owed the state before the ruling.

Anyone who wants to claim such absurdities as this could happen and carry on for a full year in a non-monopolistic, non-coercive legal system, and that the agency responsible could continue operating as usual after this came to light, simply doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Only coercive monopolies can get away with things like this; private, peaceful bodies cannot and would not.

The British socialized medicine system will ban private organ donations from dead donors. Basically the problem is that foreigners were paying top dollar (pound, euro, whatever) for the organs of dead Britons, and it horrified the busybodies in the UK government that scarce resources were being voluntarily allocated via the price system, and that such exchanges were taking place outside of the gentle governance of the NHS.

An independent report said the public needed to be confident that scarce donor organs were allocated fairly within the NHS.

Transplant surgeons said the ban would reassure the public that organs will go to those in greatest need.

Everything is scarce and the only sensible, practical, or remotely principled way to allocate those scarce things—yes, including body parts that their owners want to donate—is by the price system of the free market that matches supply to demand. No governing body or other self-anointed group of experts could ever allocate resources or direct people more efficiently or “fairly” than the free market’s price system does. It is simply not possible in the real world, even if the governing body had the best of intentions, and especially not when decisions will inevitably be made for political rather than economic reasons. Here is a much more logical and refreshing take on the U.S.’s screwed-up, government-run organ donor system.

Those Philadelphia cops who pulled three shooting suspects out of a car and beat them back in May 2008 have been cleared of any crimes by a grand jury. (Wow, that was almost a year and a half ago?!) The most surprising part of this case is that their chief, Charles Ramsey, fired four of the officers and suspended or demoted another four, and he’s not backing down from that decision. “I have 40 years of law enforcement experience. I kinda know what I’m looking at. In my opinion, all the actions were not justified.” Good for him.

A program that allows citizens to file anonymous complaints on the Illinois secretary of state’s website about people misusing handicapped parking spots received 114 tips in its first month and a half. People snitching on each other to punish them for disobeying laws that have no basis in natural law, no relation to right vs. wrong, and that attempt to force common courtesy on everyone? Sounds par for the course for governments. Wake me when you hear of an example of government promoting a sense of respect, community, and courtesy among its captives.

A Fort Myers Beach councilman was fired after other council members learned he was married to a former porn star. Terrible and unjust. They fire him in July 2009 “without cause” after he had been married since October 2008. The dolt who led the vilification said, “It’s a matter of how effective he becomes after this situation. How much disruption there is.” You stupid moron, there was no decrease in his effectiveness and there was no disruption until you got it into YOUR pathetic little brain to make an issue out of it. You can’t work with him and approve of his effectiveness for nine months and then decide his marriage might be disruptive to his job only after you learn of it! And soon, after his wrongful termination suit against the city, the idiots on the town council won’t have to pay for his settlement out of their pockets, oh, no; it will come from the town’s treasury, in other words, other people will pay for their stupidity directly or indirectly. Prudes are bad enough, but idiotic prudes are just depressing.

An Illinois millionaire didn’t like the $80,000 property tax bill on his mansion, so he had himself ordained by some online “church,” put a wooden cross on his house, and called it a church to get a property tax exemption. Good for him, I say! Not good for him or the rest of the taxpaying suckers, say idiotic Statolatrists everywhere. A man defends himself from a crime in a nonviolent and somewhat clever way, and the sanctimonious public responds with violence and derision. Everyone is pleased that this sham was found out and the guy will now have to pay back taxes, because nonviolent nonparticipation is a violation of their moral code. (I’ll conveniently gloss over the fact that this millionaire banker made his fortune off of the ultimate State racket, the monopoly on currency, because the principle of nonviolent nonparticipation remains the same.)

How the “buy American” attitude backfires: it spurs resentment and nationalism, whereas free, borderless trade engenders the respect, goodwill, mutual prosperity, and reciprocal interdependence that characterize true civilization. Libertarians at least as early as Frederic Bastiat have known this as a truism. Welcome to the 19th century.

I am flabbergasted by people’s complete ignorance of the laws and trends of economics. It is damn near impossible for the free market to make anything more expensive or worse in quality, in the long run. Only coercion and redistribution can do that. Most of the things we consume as necessities or luxuries in our modern lives—houses, cars, computers, food, even medicines—tend to become better, cheaper, and more abundant over time. This is despite, not because of, the interference by government in the free and voluntary exchanges of peaceable people. The fact that we are supposedly spending more on health care (health insurance) than we used to should raise a red flag that something is preventing the market from working as it always does and as we all want it to, and that this thing is the State!

I don’t know why other countries seem to spend a lower percentage of their GDP and a lower amount of money per capita on their health care than the U.S. does. It is definitely not because our health care system is the best in the world. It must be because of the nature of the federal government’s interference in the health insurance industry and its history of regulations and so forth. If the alleged success of other nations’ health care industries is any guide, it is possible that complete and total socialization will actually decrease per capita expenses on health care relative to the requisite decreases in the quality and quantity we will receive. On the other hand, if the history of our government’s interference in the health care market is any guide, Obamacare will end up costing many times more than expected. (According to Peter Schiff, in 1966 it was predicted that Medicare would cost the taxpayers $12 billion in 1990. Instead, it cost $107 billion in 1990, and it’s four times that now!)

Something about the Imperial Federal Government would have to change, drastically, for American taxpayers to evade a similar fate from Obamacare. It is very possible that a mixed economy is worse in some ways for this and other industries than a nearly completely socialized one. Maybe not in the long run, though.

One entertaining part of the speech that I heard on the radio was when he vehemently denied that Obamacare would ever cover illegal immigrants. Obama can say that all he wants, and he can hold true to that promise with flying colors during his regime, but I predict that taxpayer-funded health insurance will cover illegal immigrants and visitors who didn’t pay for it, sooner or later. Quite possibly, the Republicans will let it happen to pander to Hispanic voters.

I wonder how many non-libertarian-minded people considered this: One reason people oppose the coverage of illegal immigrants’ health care with taxpayer money is because the immigrants didn’t pay for it with their taxes, and we can’t have people coming here and bankrupting our treasury by, basically, stealing products and services from the taxpayers. (Perhaps the main reason people oppose giving health care and other things to illegal immigrants is because they suffer from the misconception that the place where your mother was lying when she gave birth to you has any bearing on your rights or your freedom or your character as a human being.) But the whole point of Obamacare is to take money from people who earned it and give it to people who didn’t! It is a wealth-redistribution program in the form of mandatory insurance policies and taxes! Millions of people, like me and probably you, do not want to be forced to pay for other people’s health care, or anything else, for that matter. It isn’t charity and it isn’t altruistic! It’s bald, shameless theft! The supporters of socialized medicine are being inconsistent and hypocritical by endorsing the theft of tax money from captive Americans to pay for other Americans’ health care but opposing the theft of tax money from captive Americans to pay for foreigners’ health care.

Two posts from David Z. at No Third Solution: Is it “Un-American” to Disagree with Nancy Pelosi? and Does the NHS Provide Better Health Care?

Yuri Maltsev lived under the Soviet medical system, which somewhat soured his opinion of socialized medicine.

Robert Wenzel distills the Twitter comments of Peter Fleckstein regarding the monstrous Obamacare bill in the House of Representatives: Shock: Inside the health care bill and Shock: Inside the health care bill part 2. Yeah, Fleckstein’s commentary comes off as a bit annoying and juvenile because it’s written in textese, but that’s how you write on Twitter. Too bad he couldn’t translate them into a normal blag post or two…

As a complement to David Z.’s blag post about the British NHS, read Sean Gabb’s Libertarian perspective on the National Health Service. It’s a little long but worth the time; very enjoyable, insightful, and easy to read fairly quickly. I can’t help but quote a few paragraphs:

At the most fundamental level of analysis, legitimacy and merits have no connection with each other. The NHS is funded by compulsion. I am forced, as a taxpayer, to contribute to a system that provides health care of a kind and at costings that, given any choice in the matter, I would never accept for myself and those who look to me. I am also forced to pay towards the health care of strangers. I have no objection to charity. I try to be generous to those I know. I am prepared to be moderately generous even to those I do not know, and whom I might dislike if I did know them. But so far as I am compelled, paying for the health care of others cannot be described as charitable. It is as much an act of theft as if I were to be robbed in the street. The whole present system, therefore, is illegitimate. If it were, as we are continually assured, the “envy of the world”,my opinion would not alter. It is in itself unjust. I resent its existence in my country. I join with Mr Hannan in warning the Americans not to accept it for themselves.

This, however, is the most fundamental analysis, and no discussion can be regarded as complete without some examination of its merits. And in examining these, I fell an obligation to be as fair as possible. I will begin with the quality of health care provided by the NHS.

Here, I must dissent from much of the American condemnation. There is no doubt that the NHS is inefficient, and that it rations health care by waiting list and by explicit refusal to provide certain kinds of treatment to anyone, or by refusal to provide certain kinds of treatment to those deemed unlikely to benefit from them given their cost. But rationing in one form or another is inevitable to any system of health care. …

In attacking the British system, these critics seem to argue that their own is based on individual choice and free from any taint of collectivism. I am not an expert on the American system, but it does strike me as so heavily regulated and cartellised as to have little connection to a free market. …

If I contrast what I am told about the American system with what I know from personal experience about the British, the NHS is not really that bad. [Gabb then goes into detail about the high quality of care he, his wife, and his friends have received from the totally State-run system.]
[...]
I will add that the NHS is probably not unsustainable in the long term. It costs about £90 billion a year to run. But this is about eight per cent of gross domestic product, and is about half the American level. There are more doctors per head of population in Britain than in America. British life expectancy is higher than American. …

This should not be taken as a defence of the NHS. I am simply pointing out that is is no worse on balance than the American system. They are differently organised and differently funded. Each has specific advantages and disadvantages. neither has much connection with a free market. In both countries, however, the middle classes are able to get very good health care. In both, the poor and ignorant do not. The NHS is not a bad institution relative to the American system. It is bad for other reasons—and these may be bad reasons that apply in some degree to the American system.

What is so fundamentally bad about the British system—its compulsory principle aside—is that it nearly abolishes individual control over health care. Compared with the system with which we entered the twentieth century, all real power is centralised into the hands of the professional bodies.
[...]
These [State-run] institutions impose values of hierarchy and obedience on those within them that are hostile to liberty. People who are regimented in their working lives—and who do not rebel against this—will tend to accept regimentation in their private lives. They will accept it for themselves. They will vote for politicians who promise it for everyone. They will spread these values directly to others so far as they have contact with the public as providers of services.
[...]
I believe that the NHS should be dismantled and replaced with a more diverse, private system. This does not mean that I want to cut off health care for millions of older people who have made no alternative arrangements. It also does not mean that I want to cut off state funding and leave the current system of cartellised and regulated health care otherwise unchanged. I believe in a radical attack on all state involvement in health care, and this includes an attack on all state-created and state-upheld monopoly in health care.

I believe that all drug patent laws should be repealed. … I believe that there should be no controls on who can practise medicine. … I believe there should be no controls on the development and provision of medical products. … I believe that everyone should have the right of self-medication. This means the right of any adult to walk into a pharmacy and, without showing any prescription, to buy whatever medical product he desires. …

These reforms would bring down health care costs at once. They would also clear the way for the information technology revolution to transform the market in health care. I will not try to predict how all this will be funded, though it strikes me as reasonable that it will fall into the same pattern of direct payment, charity and voluntary mutual assurance as was common before the State took over. And when I speak of mutual assurance, I mean both for-profit insurers and not-for-profit organisations. The idea that only profit-seeking organisations are consistent with libertarianism is to take a shockingly arid view of the ideology. What libertarians should like about commerce is not its taste for profit but its distaste for compulsion. …

I will repeat—cutting off state funding all at once, and leaving in place the present system of monopoly, would be cruelty and folly. It would easily result in a step away from liberty rather than towards it. But reducing this funding over several years, as part of a general attack on monopoly, would be a blessing, the fruits of which were plain even before it was complete.

It’s music to my ears.

Though it [General Motors] was able to shed some plants and employees, it will have most of the same stifling work rules on the shop floor. It did, however, manage to shed a lot of interest payments to creditors who entrusted their money to GM in return for claims on GM assets, only to be given the shaft by the Obama administration,

The main difference in the new GM is that it will have an ownership group whose primary concerns are NOT the financial success of the company. The UAW will be primarily concerned with keeping union members employed and happy and not shifting any manufacturing to lower-cost venues. The US Government will be primarily concerned with making sure the UAW is happy and promoting a number of its own goals, like “sustainable” plants and smaller cars, irrespective of whether these goals make business sense. It will be a company more concerned with whether plants have recycling programs and workers with American passports rather than cost or quality. Both the UAW and the US government can pursue such non-business goals secure in the knowledge that financial success is virtually irrelevant, as the US taxpayer can be counted on to make up any shortfalls.

The Obama administration has denied GM’s creditors the money that GM owed them and has assumed a majority ownership of GM. According to the Washington Post,

…the new GM will be an anomaly among American businesses because most of it will be owned by the U.S. and Canadian governments. The U.S. Treasury owns 60.8 percent of the new company’s common stock, the UAW retiree health trust has 17.5 percent and the governments of Canada and Ontario 11.7 percent.

…The company’s stock value would have to rise to unprecedented levels for the U.S. to break even on its investment [the bailouts].

As I wrote in April:

Also, don’t forget that the federal government will throw more money at the Big Three; it is unrealistic to assume they can remain profitable for long, if at all; artificial stimulation of sales will constitute a small portion of Obama’s interference with their restructuring and refocusing. More money, more incentives, more subsidies, more edicts from on high.

It is far from over. This is only the beginning of the auto bubble. It will be inflated while the Big Three stagger on the inadequate legs provided by the government, and when the bubble bursts because demand isn’t high enough and Americans can’t afford to keep buying cars—de facto or de jure nationalization.

We are basically at the de facto nationalization stage. Obama said the government has “no interest” in running GM or any other car company, from which we can conclude he and his cronies have an interest in running GM or another car company.

Recessions, like hurricanes, leave wreckage behind—bankrupt businesses, high unemployment, and sometimes even tattered philosophies.

No, they don’t. Inflationary booms leave bankrupt businesses and unemployment, not to mention devalued currency, behind. Recessions correct those mistakes. The only “tattered philosophy” I’ve noticed is semi-small-government “conservatism,” whose proponents have decided they actually love big government. Two other camps, the one that’s been saying all along that big government is great and the one that’s been denouncing all government activities, are still going pretty strong and consistent.

The philosophy of economic conservatism has long been one of unquestioned deregulation. Conservatives have considered it as a way of unhooking government leashes that the economy strains against, setting it free to run at full speed and lead us to wealth.

Well, that’s certainly how the story goes, and I’ll grant that many economists and politicians labeled as conservative once railed against the tax-and-spend-and-regulate policies of the Democrats. But their influence in the conservative movement has been waning for a good many decades now. I mean, I don’t know of any conservatives who have been calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, numerous cabinet departments, or federal agencies. They still seem to oppose tax increases, but they don’t oppose the spending or the regulation.

But this philosophy seemed to collapse in the moral and financial wreckage of today’s recession. Like many conservatives, I was left facing uncomfortable questions, chiefly: Is capitalism itself fatally flawed?

Obviously he is not paying attention. Since McDonnold, similar to Kel and I, seems to be using the word “capitalism” to refer to a generally free economy, how could he possibly confuse 21st-century America with a free-market society? Regulations, spending, and devaluation of the dollar are at greater levels than they have ever been. Maybe you’ve read statistics about how many pages are added to the United States Code every year or every decade. It isn’t slowing down. It was increased dramatically during the reign of George W. Bush. So was the funding to dozens of executive and regulatory agencies. Those laws mean something and those parasitic bureaucrats are doing something. They reduce the freedom of people to work, trade, and live as they please within the borders defined by the Imperial Federal Government. It isn’t freedom and it’s been getting less free with each passing year.

McDonnold then goes over some of Karl Marx’s theories about why capitalism is fatally flawed. From what I know, it is an accurate representation of Marx’s theories and I’ll give him credit for citing some ideas of Marx other than “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” I think my objections to Marx here would be standard libertarian assertions: the concentration of capital into few hands comes along with the concentration of power into few hands, which is facilitated by Statism and hindered by libertarianism.

As recently as 1980, the US was a nation of mostly small- and medium-sized banks. Employees knew, often on a personal basis, both the depositors and the borrowers. Deposits that were not loaned out had to be kept in low-risk investments such as government bonds.

People who claimed the mantle of conservatism dismantled the regulations behind this system. This shook the industry. Through mergers and acquisitions, resources were centralized. The number of banks declined. Huge conglomerates arose and created the complex world of global finance that later collapsed. This is capitalism’s dark side of impersonal corporations, recessions, and class conflict.

I really don’t buy it. And not because I have this need to object to any and all blame that anyone places on smaller government/more freedom; it’s because we don’t have smaller government and we aren’t more free. This should be obvious to anyone. The president has more powers than ever and the number of laws governing business is ever-increasing. I will always consider the possibility that the particular governmental function that was eliminated or the order in which interventions were eased can yield negative consequences—for instance, I’ve read that some type of tax break relating to home ownership might have induced more people to buy homes they couldn’t afford. However, the correct response to such problems is to keep increasing our personal and economic freedom or to return as many freedoms as possible to us at once, because the government intervention was the problem in the first place.

The problem with conservatives is that they very obviously don’t see government intervention as a problem and they don’t see personal or economic freedom as a solution to anything. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or ignorant. Stop listening to what they say and look at the facts. Their record speaks for itself.

Another famous thinker, Adam Smith, saw a different side of capitalism. Seven decades before the “Manifesto,” he wrote “The Wealth of Nations,” about the capitalism of his day. It was one of small, decentralized firms—butchers and bakers. The driving force was not blind greed but a healthy interest in improving one’s own lot by helping others. It was a capitalism that looked a lot like the banking sector before deregulation.

Oh, I must have missed that historic sea change in global monetary policy where the Federal Reserve was abolished, along with the SEC, the FTC, and the FDIC, free coinage was decriminalized, and former Goldman Sachs executives were barred from holding positions in the Federal Reserve and the United States Treasury. Our “deregulated” system also, unfortunately, doomed large investment banks to failure by forbidding them from receiving $800 billion of inflated money, created out of thin air. It is bad that our evil “deregulated” banking sector would visit such atrocities upon us.

Is that the “free market” and the “deregulated” banking sector you’re talking about? The one that’s done so much damage?

Capitalism itself is not fatally flawed. But a hyperconservative approach to it is.

Capitalism, as in, a free market, is either complete or it isn’t. Since neither McDonnold nor I apparently know what the word “conservative” means anymore, I will do him one better by saying that a “hyperlibertarian” approach to capitalism is a free market and it is the goal any advocate of the free market should aim for.

Regulations that promote decentralized competition on a human scale are regulations that conserve Smith’s side of capitalism. These regulations should not be the enemy of conservatives; they should be our aim.

Please allow me to be the first blagger ever to quote Ludwig von Mises’s essential insight: The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.

When you hear what passes for conservative punditry nowadays, it’s no wonder Republicans are losing power and influence faster than ever. What a stupid, vacuous, hypocritical “ideology.” What an embarrassing collection of misogynist, racist xenophobes, fundamentalist Bible-fetishists, third-rate shysters, and authoritarian police state apologists.

Robert Heinlein said, “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” Libertarians have known for decades, since before Rothbard’s time, that conservatives not only fit nicely into the former group but lead the charge, all while claiming (naïvely or deviously) to champion freedom. After 8 years of both stupid and evil efforts to control others, it’s good to see mainstream conservatives are finally realizing and admitting that libertarians were right about them.

I know a quarter of a billion dollars is small beans compared to the twenty or so billion dollars the federal government recently gave—oh, sorry, “loaned”—to GM and Chrysler, but these purchases will only increase the calculated demand of Detroit vehicles (or, at least, the “green” ones), which will only push up their prices, just as the federal government and the Federal Reserve did with real estate earlier this decade.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save (CARS) bill, a.k.a. “cash for clunkers,” introduced in the House by Betty Sutton (D-OH). It would give a $3000 to $5000 tax credit to anyone who traded in an eight-year-old vehicle for a car that met certain fuel-efficiency standards. This U.S. News and World Report article gives some details about which American-made or American-assembled cars are expected to qualify for a tax credit under that program. (Note that they aren’t all Big Three products.) It hasn’t been signed into law, but I predict something like it will be.

Also, don’t forget that the federal government will throw more money at the Big Three; it is unrealistic to assume they can remain profitable for long, if at all; artificial stimulation of sales will constitute a small portion of Obama’s interference with their restructuring and refocusing. More money, more incentives, more subsidies, more edicts from on high.

It is far from over. This is only the beginning of the auto bubble. It will be inflated while the Big Three stagger on the inadequate legs provided by the government, and when the bubble bursts because demand isn’t high enough and Americans can’t afford to keep buying cars—de facto or de jure nationalization.