David R. Henderson writes about its pro-capitalist, anti-corporatist message, focusing largely on the inconsistent stance that one particular Objectivist, Edward Hudgins, takes:

But I don’t think Avatar is an attack on capitalism. One could leave the movie and have no idea, based on just the movie, about James Cameron’s view of capitalism. And while it did have some clichés (most movies do), I didn’t find it loaded. So what is Avatar? In fact, Avatar is a powerful antiwar movie—and a defense of property rights. For that reason, I found it easy to identify with those whose way of life was being destroyed by military might.

In fact, the defense of property rights in Avatar is so clear that, at one point in the movie, when the bad guys are justifying their war on the grounds that they need “Unobtainium,” I turned to a libertarian friend and said, “This is the Kelo decision.” Recall that the Supreme Court, in Kelo v. City of New London, decided that it was all right to take Suzette Kelo’s property from its low-tech use as a house so that a major corporation could use it for a “grander” project.

Which brings me back to whether this movie was an attack on capitalism. I think not. To the extent that it makes any statement about capitalism, Avatar is a defense of capitalism. Capitalism is based on property rights and voluntary exchange. The Na’vi had property rights in the crucial tree and various other properties surrounding it. Did they own it as individuals or as community tribal property? We can’t be sure, but probably the latter. They had refused to sell the property to the outsiders. There was nothing the outsiders could give them that would make it worth their while. What should we, if we are good capitalists, conclude? That, just as in the Kelo case, the people currently sitting on the land value it more than the outsiders. The land is already in its highest-valued use. Hudgins and Salam could argue that that’s implausible. Surely there would be some finite price that the Na’vi would take in return for the Unobtainium. Maybe, maybe not. But once the Na’vi have made it clear that they’re unwilling to exchange it, that should be the end of things, shouldn’t it?

Today is Veterans’ Day, formerly called Armistice Day. But, our exalted warmongering Statolatrist congressmen and senators and presidents couldn’t have a holiday that celebrated the end of a colossal State endeavor, so in 1954 they renamed it Veterans’ Day.

The attention paid to Veterans’ Day and the misconceptions this holiday brings forth have annoyed me to the point of writing a short post about such misguided military-worship. ESPN is heavy into this spirit, broadcasting College Gameday from the site of the irrelevant Navy–Air Force game last Saturday and SportsCenter live from West Point Academy this morning. For the last week I’ve heard a seemingly constant stream of TV and radio commercials and discussions and interviews in which someone “salutes our troops” or thanks them for “protecting our freedoms” or says “they allow us to live the lives we do.”

Um, how? Who steals our money, kidnaps and imprisons us for harming no one, cripples businesses, dumbs down schools, devalues our currency, imprisons us for trying to use another one, violates our right to control our own bodies, outlaws self-defense, destroys families, rigs the court system to favor convictions and plea bargains over acquittals, deliberately and systematically enriches the powerful and well-connected at the expense of the common man, outlaws private protection and arbitration systems, and, oh, yeah, inspires hatred and terrorism across the globe? The Imperial Federal Government!

The military is not a sector of the market nor an extension of the populace; it is an arm of the State. It does what politicians and generals want it to. It is not possible for the military’s objectives to be in line with those of the public because the military wants what the State wants, and what the State wants is in direct opposition to what the people want. If this is not true, then why must the State institute a coercive monopoly and murder anyone who defies it?

The reality is that the exploits of the military result in less freedom for us because in every State in mankind’s history, military interests were used as justifications for expansions of State power; these powers, by their very nature, reduce the overall freedom of the State’s subjects. Second, the American military does not protect anyone’s lives but rather does quite the opposite. Noble though the intentions of the individual soldiers may be, the military endangers non-aggressing bystanders in foreign countries directly by its attacks on other people and indirectly by inspiring more military/insurgent activity; the Department of Defense kills thousands of soldiers and puts thousands more in danger with its military adventurism; and it endangers Americans by inspiring terrorism on our own soil. (Mark my words: America’s war on terra will bring suicide-bombing to the streets of American cities as exists in Israel and Iraq.) Lastly, the Department of Defense flat-out wastes literally hundreds of billions of dollars per year; this does immense harm to our economic and financial well-being, so, no, those servicemen and -women decidedly do not “allow us to live the lives that we do.”

A standard response might go like, “Well, yeah, but it could be even worse if a foreign power took over because our military didn’t protect us.” Not only is this not true for the United States, it has been true for very few countries in the history of the world. Probably some European countries in WWII, which was a direct result of the USA’s entry into WWI. Claiming a strong (enough) military is necessary to protect us against potentially terrible conquerors is typical Statist thinking: solve one problem caused by the State with more Statism: States exist solely to take power and money away from their subjects, so you want to strengthen the “defensive” arm of our State to protect us against other ones?

Sure, there could be a despotic foreign power that threatened the lives and freedoms of people living in North America, as other countries have been threatened occasionally throughout history. But the only thing that threatens to take the lives and freedoms of Americans today is the Imperial Federal Government. The military and all its brave soldiers, who go through a hell of a lot more hardship than I probably ever will, does not act in the interests of the American people and is used by politicians to justify further encroachments of our liberty.

They are forever oblivious to the harm the State does to any child’s education, so they think simply requiring children to receive more of it will make them better-educated. This is similar to the imposition of new taxes to pay for things the people don’t want and the enforcement of new regulations to fix economic problems that the government caused in the first place. More rules, more requirements, more bureaucracy, more taxation, more coercion.

Children are subjected to an alarming amount of Statolatrist propaganda from the very earliest stages of schooling, which is proudly lauded by Obama maniacs but which detracts from the quality of their education. Statolatry itself doesn’t make people worse at math, reading, or writing, but it has obviously facilitated the continuing, government-mandated decline in those basic areas of education. The more people who are brainwashed into the peculiar belief that the State should educate people, the more people who will support its idiotic, bureaucratic impediments to good education. And it doesn’t matter how well Americans can do calculus, critique literature, or write eloquent presidential speeches; if they support the absurd socialist agenda that Obama is trying to force upon his subjects, they are doing more harm than good—more harm than they could ever do if they were ignorant, stupid, and not a cheerleader for the Almighty State.

I imagine most Obama maniacs will support these proposals because they are coming from our Savior himself but also because they love the State and anything that expands it. But the most important issue here is not the content of the proposals themselves; it’s the fact that they will be coming from a very few people who will force their ideas on the entire nation. The fact that any apparatus or infrastructure exists that would allow for a single edict to govern that many people’s lives is of primary importance—obviously the content of its edicts will serve only to enhance and enlarge it, so the existence of the Department of Education and the power given to a single president over so many people’s schooling should alarm everyone, with condemnation of the specific proposals following as a corollary. It will not alarm most leftists. They vehemently opposed No Child Left Behind because George W. Bush signed it into law, and then later they found rationales (all valid ones, I surmise) to support their knee-jerk reaction; they will undoubtedly support Obama and his Education Department’s proposals because they come from Obama, and then later they will find rationales to justify their continued support despite clear evidence that they are biased tools.

Notice my use of the term “school year” in the first paragraph. Does it bother you that we gloss over the singular, all-encompassing term “school year” as commonplace and obvious in meaning? There should be no “school year”! There should be no bureaucracy or secretary or president who decides what the school year is! That’s the problem: the unilateral power of the State to define the “school year” and do all the other things it does under the pretense of educating children!

If people want some solutions to the deficiencies in schooling, particularly class time, that children are given, they should look to the absence of family, community, and individual responsibility in children’s education. These are direct and predictable consequences of the State’s involvement in anything. I am not surprised that Obama’s proposals will put even more of the children’s time under the purview of governments and necessarily less in the company of family members—people who should (and would, in a free society) be more influential in their education. Children should be playing and exercising more, spending more time learning from their parents, more time with their siblings, more time in extracurricular music or sports lessons, more time learning how to make their own decisions, and less time in the vicinity of bureaucrats with education degrees.

The idea that more government schooling will educate children better smacks of the dim-witted Statism that also led people to advocate throwing more and more money at failing schools. Here are four easy solutions to America’s educational shortcomings: 1. Eliminate the monopolistic Department of Education (and the ability of any criminal, elected or unelected, in the federal government to make any decisions about any child’s education but his own). 2. Abolish all taxes everywhere that in any way fund any public school or public-education-related endeavor. 3. Abolish all laws that are in any way related to home-schooling. 4. Remove all restrictions, regulations, and barriers to entry for private schools.

Libertarianism is individual liberty, personal sovereignty, voluntary association, and moral egalitarianism for all people. By “moral egalitarianism” I mean everyone is equally imbued with and bound by the same rights and the same moral obligation to respect the identical rights of others; no one has the right to do anything that anyone else may not also do. I think the existence of those rights and the non-aggression principle that follows from them come as close to epistemological certainty as they can get, and the burden is on Statists to explain why these principles are imaginary, illegitimate, or impractical and why they have the right to threaten murder on any who would assert these rights.

I doubt very many people oppose those beliefs in principle. What they oppose are their fantastical imaginings of what those beliefs would imply in practice. At the same time they remain willfully ignorant of how the State opposes those innate rights—is essentially the institutionalization of the negation of liberty. What they refuse to grasp is that the very existence of the monopolistic State implies threats of murder to anyone who secedes or doesn’t participate. As hard as it is to come to grips with, Statists must realize that peaceful abstention is a violation of their moral code, and that this is abominable.

It would be helpful to the blogosphere and to the worldwide discourse on political philosophy in general if a significant number of Statists would challenge themselves as far as they could with this question: “If the first principles that libertarians endorse are right and just, then why does (my vision of) their practical implementation strike me as so frightening, so horrific? What experiences, conditioning, or other principles make me either (a) reject the implementation of those principles anyway, and/or (b) insist that Statism and not freedom are the natural corollary of those principles?”

Most people’s experience with states, living their whole lives under one, never considering what true freedom can do for a society and not looking too closely lest their Statist foundation be shaken, causes them to believe that states are a force of good even when the balance of evidence is against them. So they lash out in ridicule at libertarians instead of focusing their skepticism on their own beliefs, which is where everyone’s skepticism belongs at first.

In the comments to Radley Balko’s very good, polite, short post about Ted Kennedy, a few peculiar Statist sentiments blemish an otherwise sensible discussion about the lack of merit in Ted Kennedy’s career and agreement with Balko that Kennedy shouldn’t be venerated simply because he’s no longer eligible for the census. On the other hand, they did provide me a good starting point for yet another instructional blag post.

As you could have guessed, the contentious comments concerned Balko’s opinion that we shouldn’t admire Kennedy’s “ability to use politics, as opposed to civil society, to solve problems” and that “Getting elected to political office in itself adds no value to society as a whole”.

One commenter began,

Huh? How would be have better effected change via civil society? Presided over the local kiwanis club? Written the Great American Novel? Become a pundit? Blogger (journalist)? CEO?

Always interesting to hear what libertarians value, how small-minded they are – I guarantee there’s total radio silence on the passing of major business figures, however they themselves used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests. However corrupt and crass they are within their own sphere.

Instead of living off of the labor of captive taxpayers and voting to take and spend more of their money every year, Kennedy could have spent his inherited wealth on charity, community organizations, and private businesses that provided goods and services to people who wanted them, voluntarily. The reason people donate to non-profit organizations and do business with private companies is (usually) because they want to, because they prefer the goods or services more than they prefer the money they part with and more than the goods or services they could get elsewhere. The reason the state and federal governments have to take your taxes upon threats of murder is because the government is not voluntary and people don’t want to give their money to it. Even Ted Kennedy himself didn’t want to give more of his money to the Imperial Federal Government than he had to…otherwise he would have. He could have worked for free, but he didn’t.

In this instance, we see that the commenter’s failure to understand that “civil society” is superior to government action results from his failure to understand what “government action” implies: Submit to their edicts and give them your money, or they will take the money plus penalties and they will enter your home or business to make you comply; insist on keeping your money and living your life how you please, as is your perfect right, and they will enslave you in a metal-and-concrete cage for five or ten years; resist their beatings, kidnapping, and enslavement, as is your perfect right, and they will shoot you. It is not possible to misunderstand that the State and all its agents are the aggressors in this scenario—in the real world, every day.

If committing the atrocious offenses of not sharing much of your money and behaving or doing business in frowned-upon ways is enough to warrant the death penalty, then surely actually threatening people with murder and interfering with their lives in myriad ways is a crime against humanity that removes all pretense of legitimacy from their operation. If you would claim the latter response is necessary and proper for the former offenses, then it still remains to be explained how non-violent non-participation ranks as criminal, or even dangerous, to the Statist. The laws and the infrastructure to make and follow through on the threats precede any act by any citizen; in fact, they predate even the birth of every citizen (except at the founding of a new state); so they cannot reasonably be passed off as a response to a preexisting danger.

Doubtless the true believer would respond, “But it is in man’s nature to be contentious and violent; the preexisting State with its threat-and-punish infrastructure keeps everyone civil, cooperative, and happy.” Glossing over the fact that this is simply false, it is obvious that elected and unelected officials are not angels; they are impaired by the same shortcomings as everyone else. Further, it is obvious that the types of people who are attracted to the violent, deadly police power of the State suffer from even greater hubris, intolerance, greed, and megalomania than the average person and in proportion to the power they aspire to attain.

I have stated what principles libertarians value and gone into a little detail about what we oppose in the State. So we’re “small-minded”? Believing in the strength of community, free exchange, voluntary cooperation, and the physical, emotional, and psychological independence from the controlling hubris of others—the conviction that the answer to many of our material and psychological problems is in ceasing to kill, threaten, and coerce each other—this is small-minded? You can’t possibly comprehend what is implied by our statement “peaceful action is a better way to effect change than is governmental coercion”—what’s implied is an all-encompassing, revolutionary conception of community, law, economics, war, peace, and everything else about human interrelationships—and still refer to it as small-minded.

The better libertarian thinkers (and those of us who follow them) rail against “major business figures” who “used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests” as fervently as we do against the government agents themselves. See, for instance, this masterful essay by Roderick Long, this Kevin Carson column, and this post of mine. Maybe my fellow libertarian blaggers can leave some more links in the comments; there must surely be 100 easily accessible anti-corporatist writings that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

The commenter continued,

You could say the same you said here about FDR or Lincoln: proper management of the state, and the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world – it’s oh-so-dirty. Libertarians would rather sit on a perch apart from it all, sometimes hiding their eyes, sometimes throwing peanuts, or pretending like all problems can be solved via a little Mill or communitarianism. And that there’s a nice clean wall between politics and everything else.

7/15/2050: Radley Balko dies, contributed not much of anything because he spent his life as a journalist, and on the basis of a little Rand and Econ 101 and utilitarian philosophy decided that it would be of some value to humanity or even his community to give the stock libertarian take on whatever was at the top of the news cycle. And what do journalists really do for us anyway?

Obviously you are not paying attention.

We could say the same about FDR or Lincoln? Child, much, much worse has been said about FDR and Lincoln, and deservedly so. They are more responsible for our corporate-military-socialist state than any other two people. The death and impoverishment they permitted to be visited upon innocent people is, quite possibly, incalculable.

It is almost unfathomable to me that anyone could think the State is “the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world.” I shall take the liberty of assuming this statement refers mainly to economics—the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy our needs. The claim is that the government can take care of any problem or need that arises in a community better than the free market—especially in the 21st century with technology making the entire world more connected than ever and the pace of business faster than ever. Though my libertarian readers are already familiar with Ludwig von Mises, Statists would benefit—if only to bring a little more knowledge and sophistication to the debate—from reading Mises’s seminal essay on why socialism can’t calculate and Murray Rothbard’s perspective on Mises, his opponents, and the calculation debate.

Without reading an entire economics essay, Statists could just answer me this: How is it that elected officials and coercive referendums voted for by “the people” are better able to govern society than the cooperative choices and economic exchanges made voluntarily by “the people”?

If the “collective action problems” he refers to are legal and court systems, his position is no less secure. Check out my posts about Anthony de Jasay’s masterpiece The State (here) and Bruce Benson’s masterpiece The Enterprise of Law (here and here).

Another commenter answered his smear that libertarians, journalists, and others outside of the professional criminal class do nothing for society:

MLK never had to get elected to spur social change.

And BTW, Radley helped get a guy off of death row because of his work. More than I can say for Ted Kennedy. Other journalists have also managed to force a president’s resignation over Watergate and bring to light the massacre at My Lai just to name a couple of things. I would say that journalists have done more to expose corruption and spur change than any politician ever has.

We don’t just sit on our perch either. Go check out the work that Libertarians have done at the Institute for Justice and FIRE. Real results that actually matter to every day people who are being mistreated by peaceful legislators and their good intention regulations.

The discussion was mostly downhill from there:

“Working as a legislator isn’t a peaceful way to make change. After all, the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance or else we would be imprisoned or fined. There isn’t anything peaceful about that at all.”

And here’s the reason folks, why libertarians will never have any serious chance as politicians in the country. Nutters.

Yes, it is “nutters” to insist aggression is wrong, that keeping the peace by threatening imprisonment and murder is wrong, that encouraging a sense of community by forcing everyone to live by your rule whether they voted for it or not is wrong. The part in quotation marks, which the commenter thought was “nutters,” is a perfectly accurate and admirably principled way of understanding the world; I am constitutionally incapable of imagining how anyone could be more succinct and correct about the role of a legislator or how someone could object to it. Unbelievable.

“the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance”

And he was elected to do so as public official by you, we, the people of the country, along with the other 99 senators. You’re acting like this is a dictatorship.

Ah, yes, the old Might Makes Right justification—″a majority voted your personal liberties and a large chunk of your money away, so don’t go spreading social discord and spewing hatred because you disapprove of our mob-rule. Sure, you voted against all the people in power, but the best thing about our enlightened system is that we force everyone to comply whether they agree or not.”

It is more common than I would have thought, though no less peculiar, for Statists to justify a rights-violation because multiple people commit it rather than one. What difference does the number of people committing it make? Seriously. Blags have comments for a reason. I like getting comments.

Referring to the same passage that the previous person thought was “nutters,” the original Statist commenter wrote:

This is childish. You need to grow up. It’s not different from me saying that prisons are bad because people get locked up against their will, but refusing to take on what to do about murderers.

What to do about power and how one should distribute power is the paramount question for any society at any time in history, and solutions are judged in terms of bad and less bad. If you can’t bring yourself to stare it in the face and maybe try to make the best of it, your opinion on anything to do with politics is worthless. You don’t get to complain and be taken seriously if you want to hide.

As a policy I only address things that make sense, so the last few sentences I will ignore. (I included them to give you a full appreciation of this person’s thought processes.)

What is childish is the Statist attitude that the majority should rule, that people who peacefully abstain are somehow doing some unspecified thing that endangers your person or property, and that everyone who disagrees with your grand vision of how to run the world should be punished and made to comply. I can think of nothing more childish in the political arena. You have made no effort to understand any theory of ethics or morality, nor anything like property rights or economics. Literally the only framework you go by is “majority rules.” You don’t appreciate that people have good reason to object to their freedoms being put to a vote and to complain after losing the vote. You refuse to see how pointing guns at, restricting the preexisting freedoms of, and taking property from people who haven’t harmed or even threatened anyone is worse than the hypothetical harm that they might have done; that the government agents are committing aggression even by their own standards. You are unable to understand how anyone could object to being lorded over by a charlatan with a bright smile and a fancy suit, nor have you shown any ability to grasp how rights or freedoms could exist prior to and independently from a monopolistic state. Your political philosophy begins and ends with “majority rule.” This is the single least nuanced idea in the history of the world since “woman submit to man because he is stronger.” You are a childish buffoon who should have NO SAY in how I or any other human being run our lives.

Our objections to the aggression that defines states are very different from objecting to locking real, actual aggressors up in prison (though you just said “people” and libertarians know that governments should lock up their own people before anyone else). Your analogy looks, to me, like this: illegitimacy of legislation : no alternative to legislation :: illegitimacy of prison : no solution to murder.

Okay, analogies weren’t your strong point in fifth grade. You are ignoring stuff YOU WROTE, in the same discussion thread. Our alternative to governmental legislation is offering a goddamned product to people and selling it to them for an agreeable price. Writing a book. Starting a charity. Educating your own children instead of leaving it to the State. Et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam. These are the things you ridiculed in your first post as being ineffective compared to coercive legislation. Libertarians have plenty of solutions to murder, and all crime. Eliminating the police state is a nice first step.

Distributing power is not the paramount question for all societies. It is protecting individual rights, which allows real community to develop voluntarily and “organically” and which allows for the material progress that has increased our standard of living over the centuries. When private property rights are protected and individuals have a sincere, personal, reciprocal interest in the well-being of their neighbors, then power and many other things will be distributed more heterogeneously. Surely you don’t think giving power to politicians and taking it away from the public will distribute power in any just way? If you’d like a scholarly but brief and accessible discussion on the distribution of power in society, read the first part of Our Enemy, the State by Albert Jay Nock.

You seem very dissatisfied with this country. There are plenty of other ones out there. Why don’t you try the libertarian oasis of Somalia? You won’t have to worry about the pesky ‘dictatorship of the majority against the minority” (also called Democracy) there! You’ll be free to do as you please. No pesky governments to get in your way (they won’t even bother to build your roads!)

If things get too tough, you can always try your luck in the socialist hellhole of Sweden or Norway :)

Seriously, most of you sound like Ruby Ridge wannabe’s under a guise of reading a few Ayn Rand books, which is why you won’t be taken seriously.

Personally, if I were going to compete for a Special Olympics medal on a political website, taking the contradictory stance from what I know most readers there take, I would go to some effort to gussy up my arguments and review my thought processes to make sure I was representing my ideology well. You know, being a good ambassador for libertarianism.

None of that for these Statists. Why don’t you try the Statist’s wet dream of North Korea, or Cuba, or Zimbabwe? You gave the worst example of (what you misunderstand as) anarchy; it isn’t fair to counter with the worst examples of your beloved monopolistic States? Oh, there’s only one type of anarchy but many varied and sundry types of states. I see. And that American and Ethiopian military force attempting to impose order but, somehow unsurprisingly, only supplying murder, terror, and destruction to Somalia—you gonna pin that one on the anti-military, non-interventionist libertarians, too? You haven’t made sense yet; you might as well shoot for the moon and hope some more of your hysterical mischaracterizations of libertarianism stick for your Statist brethren.

We have observed no fewer than two of the classic inane, ignorant dismissals of libertarians in a single comment thread about Teddy freaking Kennedy: “You’re always free to move elsewhere” and “Oh, you’re just a stupid Randroid.” Add a third item to the list of ideologies Statists don’t understand. OBJECTIVISM IS NOT LIBERTARIANISM! WE ACTUALLY DON’T LIKE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH!

Sorry for rambling. I got up on my soap box for the first time in a while and wanted to flesh out my thoughts thoroughly. It’s clear from reading the whole discussion thread that brief, pointed criticisms of their statements are insufficient to sway them in the least. I know this was old hat for my libertarian colleagues; this was written to any and all non-libertarians, so I hope they read it and find some sense in it, coming away with a better understanding of freedom and the State than Radley Balko’s commenters came with.

When I say Teddy Kennedy was a terrible senator, obviously what makes him so harmful in my mind is what made him a great senator in the minds of so many Statists. He did support liberalization of immigration laws, he didn’t seem to be an outrageous drug warrior, he seemed to oppose the death penalty in principle, he seemed to oppose some military interventionism, and he voted against attacking Iraq and further funding the war at at least one point. So I will commend him for all of that right here.

The problem with Kennedy, as with a great many senators and congresshumans, is that so many of his stances were so entirely political, not principled. For instance, he supported the murderous military adventures of a president who wrote a (D) after his name but not one who wrote an (R) after his name. I have the impression that he supported just about anything the big-government Democrats did and opposed anything with a Republican stench to it; that he loved big government for the power and prestige it gave him, his family, and their cronies, and not, originally, because he really felt it could help the poor or protect the innocent. He probably convinced himself of the latter in time, but so do most people who live a life of power and privilege at the expense of the innocent taxpayers.

Some people who have no conception of civics and government refer to Ted Kennedy as a “civil servant.” What a load of obsequious crap. He was born into extreme wealth, he never had to work a real job in his life, he lived off of stolen funds his entire career, and his work consisted of taking from some to give to others while keeping a large portion of the loot for the professional criminal class. The taxpayers served him, many of them unwillingly.

Kennedy had the reputation for being a great advocate of civil liberties, but he fervently fought against and helped weaken our most important civil liberty after free speech: gun ownership and use. This was his proudest stance, his most noble crusade, the object of as much adulation by Statist cheerleaders as anything else he did. Additionally, his neo-liberal attitude that society should be dominated by racial statistics and race-awareness is clearly an attitude that has retarded our progress in racial harmony over the last few decades as much as any residual racism or bigotry has. He was a collectivist through and through, an ideology entirely incompatible with individual rights of any kind.

Some of my friends who are incapable of seeing past the (D) that appeared after Ted Kennedy’s name scorned cable news networks for their presumed fixation on Kennedy’s murder of Mary Jo Kopechne. “Let me guess: it was all Chappaquiddick, all the time,” one said disdainfully. Well, did he kill her, or didn’t he? Did he try to save his political career, or try to save her? Should he have spent the last 40 years in prison, or shouldn’t he?

Suggesting that news programs should not focus on Ted Kennedy’s heartless and remorseless murder of Mary Jo Kopechne would be like suggesting that they discuss O.J. Simpson’s life and times without giving much attention to his murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

After leaving someone to drown in your car and being solely responsible for her death, everything else you did in your life pales in comparison to that hideous act! O.J. Simpson’s irrelevant achievements on the football field (and tireless search for the real killers) don’t make up for his two murders in anyone’s mind. Mark David Chapman’s supposed religious conversion doesn’t make up for his murder of John Lennon in very many people’s minds. And Ted Kennedy’s dubious achievements as a “civil servant” don’t make up for his murder of Mary Jo Kopechne! Besides, he was a detriment to society in the Senate. It is indicative of our society’s backwardness that people regard his accomplishments in the Senate as a saving grace for his personal failings; they should be thought of as adding insult to injury!

I’ve largely grown out of the primitive attitude that revels in people’s deaths. Except in the more monstrous cases (like child molesters and people who talk at the theater), I will be content with my hatred of what the person did and everything he stood for without wishing for his death and celebrating it when it comes. I’ll just celebrate his absence from the Senate. I’m glad he is no longer a senator, that is all.

Philip Morris supports new FDA regulations on cigarettes. Why, when they’ve opposed previous interventions in their industry?

The bill, already passed by the House of Representatives, will change the face of the tobacco industry by giving the FDA the authority to restrict tobacco product ingredients, impose nicotine caps and limit advertising campaigns. It solidifies the position of the producer with the greatest market share—Altria—which makes 50% of all cigarettes in the U.S. [and which owns Philip Morris].
[...]
“Bringing new products to market will be extremely difficult,” says Maura Payne, a spokeswoman for Reynolds America….

The system is designed to help the rich and powerful and screw the little guy. True, no one cares about cigarette smokers or tobacco companies anymore, but this is simply an example of the wealth-concentrating socialist system that we live under.

Obama’s drug czar claims the DEA will be scaling back the war on marijuana users and focusing more on treatment. While that article points out some good changes the Obama regime has already made and should be congratulated for, I am skeptical that we’ll see any substantive change in drug policy in the next eight years. Call me out and remind me to issue a retraction of this prediction if it’s wrong, but our freedom over our bodies will not increase under Obama’s rule and nonviolent drug users will still spend absurd amounts of time in federal prisons. No one with any power will allow that to change any time soon because the drug war gives them too much power over their subjects.

Joseph Carnevale, the NC State student who created the famous orange barrel monster, has been arrested for larceny for pilfering the barrels from a construction site and tearing them up to build the statue. His arrest is completely illegitimate because he has as much right to those barrels as any other taxpayer. (Well, you could argue not as much as someone who pays much more in taxes, but you get the point.) The hardcore Statist might say his “theft” and “vandalism” are harmful to taxpayers because now the state of North Carolina will just have to buy more barrels with more taxpayer money, but that is obviously the fault of the thieves in government, not the non-thief Carnevale. (It should be noted that no pun was intended with the use of the word “barrel” in this paragraph and the post’s title, as the post was titled before I ever heard of the orange barrel monster.)

The Las Vegas branch of the U.S. Attorney’s Office requested personal information about two people who left “threatening” comments on a story on the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s website, and the Review-Journal is complying. The comments in question happen to be completely innocuous:

One called jury members “12 dummies” and said they “should be hung” if they convict Las Vegas business owner Robert Kahre on charges of defrauding the Internal Revenue Service with a scheme involving gold and silver U.S. coins.

The other, since deleted from the newspaper Web site, offered a bet that one of the federal prosecutors in the case wouldn’t reach his next birthday.

Wow, really scary. Funny, I don’t notice the U.S. Attorney’s Office investigating the feds who ACTUALLY AND CREDIBLY THREATENED MURDER against Kahre for not paying proper penance to the Imperial Federal Government, to the commenters and the rest of the American citizens for the same, and to those same jurors lest they decide to stay home or go to work and live their lives as they please instead of acquiescing to jury conscription.

A good way to spot pathetic pro-State trolls: they mention Bernie Madoff or Sir Allen Stanford without bringing up the professional criminals in Congress or their largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world, Social Security.

You know, instead of proposing to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana to mitigate budget shortfalls, why doesn’t anyone propose to ABOLISH THE DEA? Is that so hard to understand? Do they not realize how many billions upon billions of dollars that would save the federal government every year? And similar drug-fighting tax drains in state budgets? Is it because they are pathetic leeches who have no conception of individual rights and just support the predatory State whatever it does?

NEWTON COUNTY, Ga. — The latest case of zero-tolerance at the public schools has a 10-year-old student sadder and wiser, and facing expulsion and long-term juvenile detention.

“I think I shouldn’t have brought a gun to school in the first place,” said the student, Alandis Ford….

Alandis’ gun was a “cap gun,” a toy cowboy six-shooter that his mother bought for him.

“We got it from Wal-Mart for $5.96,” Tosha Ford said, “in the toy section right next to the cowboy hats. That’s what he wanted because it was just like the ones he was studying for the Civil War” in his fifth-grade class at Fairview Elementary School.

Tosha said that Wednesday afternoon, after school, “six police officers actually rushed into the door” of their home. “He [Alandis] opened the door because they’re police. And then they just kind of pushed him out of the way, and asked him, ‘Well where’s the gun, where’s the real gun?’ And they called him a liar…they booked him, and they fingerprinted him.”
[...]
Lt. Mark Mitchell said Thursday that Alandis had used the toy gun to threaten other children on the school bus and in his neighborhood, which Alandis denies.

Alandis was charged with possessing a weapon on school property and with terroristic acts and threats.
[emphasis added]

Let’s compare the accusations and police-state-speak of the thugs in clown suits to the child’s account of the incidents:

“On the school bus,” on Tuesday, Alandis said, “when I dug into my bookbag trying to get my phone out, the boy beside me, he reached in my bookbag and got it [the toy gun] and started telling everybody, ‘He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun,’ and spread it around the whole bus. So I put it back in my bookbag.”

But he said the students kept shouting, “He’s going to shoot all y’all, he’s got a gun, he’s going to bring it to school and shoot all y’all.” Did Alandis ever say anything like that or make any threatening moves with his toy gun? “No!”

In police states of the past, all it took was a rumor, an accusation, a vindictive psychopath wearing a clown suit, or a disgruntled bureaucrat to ruin a peaceful, innocent person’s life. Here the worthless pieces of trash who work for this child’s government school and the jack-booted thugs who probably at some point mouthed the words “serve and protect” take the incidents that the child described above, on the school bus, and report them as having happened in exactly the opposite way. The other children took his toy and taunted him with wild and obviously false accusations; if his account is correct, he clearly wasn’t going to (pretend to) threaten anyone with his cap gun, or else the one bully wouldn’t have had to take it out of the child’s backpack, against the child’s protests. This complete misrepresentation of the accused child’s account of what happened is a characteristic of totalitarian police states: you’re guilty until proven innocent, and don’t question the government’s authority figures.

Oh, yeah, I forgot: children don’t have rights at school.

The next day, the kid went to his neighbor’s house to ask him if he wanted to come out and play cowboys and indians or something. Read the neighbor kid’s reaction to the sight of—gasp!—a toy cap gun, and weep:

“He saw the gun that I had. So he ran in the house and called 911.”

Alandis said he found out later that his friend had never before seen a gun and thought it was real, and thought Alandis might shoot it. Alandis insists he never said anything to the friend other than inviting him to come out and play.

“The 911 call that we received” on Wednesday, Lt. Mitchell said, “was that a 10-year-old male was outside of a residence with a gun threatening to shoot another child.”

Mitchell was referring to the incident report from the Newton County Sheriff’s investigators who write that deputies “responded to a 911 call from a ten-year-old [neighbor of the Fords] who said there was a boy outside of his house with a gun trying to kill him.”

This probably isn’t the strongest evidence of my theory, but I think much of the Statist rot that has infected our minds during the last few generations has led to the self-hatred, disrespect for life, externalizations of blame, and vindictive attitudes that lie at the root of so many youth shootings. Guns are not the problem, and even lack of proper training with firearms, like many children from hunting families receive, is not the problem. This paranoia about weapons, the knee-jerk reaction that anyone with a weapon is a criminal and should be turned over to authorities, and the suspicion that a 10-year-old with a cap gun is a potential murderer are all part of the Statist malaise that either causes or certainly doesn’t help prevent school shootings. In other words, this kid’s paranoia and the weapon-hating, authority-kowtowing, State-worshipping mindset are more to blame for public killings than kids having access to guns.

Alandis’s mother sounds like a sharp woman:

“Someone heard that Alandis had a toy gun in his bookbag and said, ‘Oh, Alandis is going to bring a gun, he’s going to shoot everybody.’ He [Alandis] was wrong, he should never have taken it to school. And I told him that. And he’s being punished” at home. “But also on the other side of the coin, I think it’s a travesty what’s happened to him…. For them to say that’s he’s made terroristic threats is just ridiculous. We’ve taken it and changed what ‘terroristic threats’ was meant to be for.”

Perhaps another good measure of the extent of your police state is the increasing frequency with which the word “terrorism” is used, especially regarding actions that are clearly not terroristic in nature. Yeah, I think this story demonstrates three characteristics of our society that make it more or less a police state: ordinary actions are considered crimes that weren’t in the past; these actions and actual crimes that could only be considered threatening to a small number of people are labeled “terroristic” to trump up the perceived gravity of the matter and therefore the leeway of the clown-suited gangsters; and “public” is conflated with “the State,” at least in the minds of the law-enforcement officials. (Maybe this last one is more implicit than explicit in this incident, but I usually interpret this type of incident in that way.)

The public relations officer of the school system hides behind rules and procedures and political correctness like any useless drain on the human race would:

Sherri Viniard, the Director of Public Relations for the Newton County School System, emailed a statement to 11Alive News Thursday that reads, in part:

“Student safety is our primary concern, and although this was a toy gun, it is still a very serious offense and it is a violation of school rules. We will not tolerate weapons of any kind on school property.”

A toy gun is not a weapon. You acknowledge this yourself. You are too blinded by your irrational hatred of all guns (not wielded by someone wearing a clown suit) that you think a toy like this could actually be dangerous. What is dangerous is your Statolatrist, police-state-enabling, guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude towards AN INNOCENT CHILD!

The main police officer quoted in this article is similar: he has some vague idea in the back of his mind that what they did was wrong, but they can’t quite grasp the concept that following politically correct zero-tolerance policies could ever lead them astray:

“A toy gun is a toy gun,” Lt. Mitchell said, “to be played with and for kids to have fun with. But when kids use it the wrong way, just like anything, then it can be scary.”

It wasn’t used in the wrong way, unlike your gun and your position as monopoly law-enforcement official. And you ought to be an authority on scary.

The only people in this entire matter who have demonstrated the slightest bit of common sense, compassion, or social intelligence are the accused child, his mother, and the reporter. Unfortunately, Alandis still wants to be a police officer when he grows up. I hope that changes. I hope he works hard and goes into a field where he can add something to society instead of parasitizing it, like business or science or medicine. Or maybe a political activist (the good kind). I hope this sad saga alters him in a fundamental way such that he develops a healthy distrust of authority and hatred of the State. That could be a very bright silver lining to this atrocity.

And, you know, I could say all I’ve said before about government schools and monopolistic law-enforcement systems—how no one would ever freely choose to be victimized by their school and the police like this, how monopolies will never get better, how competition would go a long way to preventing such stupidity from ever happening and completely prevent it from continuing. But who is going to listen? Every Statist who hears about this story is going to blame everyone but himself and blame every way of thinking but his own. They think that the extent of their involvement in the government is to vote for politicians who are the lesser of two evils and maybe serve on a jury. It doesn’t occur to them that their explicit and repeated acts of support for this entire Statist system are exactly what allow bureaucrats to commit wrongs against people without fear of punishment. They are scared to death of letting us run our own lives and freeing ourselves of their Statist nightmare, so they will never let the freedom of association flourish that would punish and prevent these rights-violations. As evidence that I’m right, that libertarianism would promote peace, respect, and common sense where government monopolies currently forbid them, consider how few people actually support zero-tolerance policies that lead to the arrest and fingerprinting of a 10-year-old with a cap gun. These animals in clown suits and the lifeless pieces of sludge that populate school boards would either demonstrate some intelligence or become jobless and penniless in a real hurry.

I try to show my outrage and frustration at these injustices as passionately as possible in posts like this, but it’s hard. It’s tiring. You all agree with me, and you’ve heard all this before. Probably because these are far from isolated incidents, which makes it harder to evoke outrage at any particular incident either in ourselves or in others, but their commonplace nature is exactly what should outrage us the most!

Well short of Obama’s first hundred days, the dominant characteristic of his Presidency is clear: activist government, on every front. It’s harder to make out the contours of the philosophy at the core of this dazzling blur of action. Given the early and ample track record, there’s surprisingly little agreement over the nature of Obamaism.

There is among libertarians. He is a Statolatrist in the extreme, dominated by envious class warfare on the one hand and unadulterated Keynes-Krugmanism on the other.

Obama’s signature projects defy grouping under a single heading, and, as a result, he has been criticized for inconsistency.

Corporate-State socialism. Or economic fascism. Okay, that’s two headings, but they mean about the same thing. (If only "inconsistent" socliasm were his problem! That was the problem we had with the Bushies, and that was bad enough!)

What underlies so many of Obama’s decisions is an attachment to the institutions that hold up American society, a desire to make them function better rather than remake them altogether.

No critique of the notion that Obama or any other president should feel the need or have the power to either make "American institutions" function better or remake them altogether—oh, no, don’t question the very basis of the awesome power of the unitary executive.

Allowing the auto industry to die would create social havoc in communities around the country, and anything less than de-facto government control seems inadequate.

I don’t understand the American public’s inability to understand this. First of all, allowing unprofitable companies to lose money and be bought out, change their niche in the world, or make room for competitors would not result in the death of the auto industry. The increased profit motive, heightened susceptibility to competition, and necessary re-focusing on foreign over domestic sales would make the American auto industry stronger, as anyone who thought about it longer than was required for a knee-jerk patriotic-socialist reaction knows. Second, not allowing those things to happen to the automotive and other industries is precisely what has created the economic havoc we witness in the world slowly deteriorating around us. Companies must make profit to survive, hire workers, and improve their products over time, and for an economy to be healthy it must slough off the unprofitable endeavors to allow for those resources to be allocated in more desired (more profitable) ways. Just because something exists (is an "American institution") doesn’t mean it must continue to, and the longer the re-allocation of money, labor, and equipment is delayed, the more resources will have been wasted and the more difficult it will be for workers, managers, and entrepreneurs to find the most profitable enterprises.

As we can see and as pro-auto-bailout (or pro-de-facto-government-control) commentators are so quick to point out, failure of the automotive industry would create a domino effect of failure throughout the economy, so this "havoc" from unprofitability would not be confined to one or a few industries. On this they are right. But the auto industry is already failing. The unprofitability of thousands of companies is already wreaking economic havoc around the world. Unprofitability is our biggest enemy outside of the State, so to restore order and sustainability to our economy, we must allow unprofitable allocations of resources to fade away and profitable ones to take their place. Prevention of this punishment of unprofitability, to say nothing of a substantial level of direct control by the government, retards or outright prevents this economic calculation from taking place. But I wouldn’t expect that level of thought and analysis to appear in a rinky-dink magazine like The New Yorker. After all, Obama is the Savior of America, so let’s get back to praising Him and demonizing the conservatives who are virtually indistinguishable from Him and His cronies:

Obama may not see a similar need to put the government in charge of the big banks, but he has also shown that he has no taste for such a disruption of the system—even if it were politically possible, and perhaps even if it were the most direct route back to financial health.

Obviously you are not paying attention. This is exactly what "the system" is! Protect the rich and powerful and screw the little guy. This "egalitarian" Obama is debasing the dollar for the benefit of Wall Street millionaires and continuing the corporate-State socialist swindle of privatizing profits and socializing losses. He and his subordinates do not hide this. I don’t know what purpose the clause "even if it [nationalizing the banks] were the most direct route back to financial health" serves if not to suggest the possibility that it is. To type that into a sentence is to display its utter absurdity. No further refutation is (should be) necessary.

Obama seems to recognize that nothing has shredded the civic fabric in recent years more than the harsh inequalities of finance capitalism and the market ideology of a generation of American politics.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines capitalism (among other, similar definitions) as, "An economic and political system characterized by a free market for goods and services and private control of production and consumption." The Treasury Department and its central bank control the money supply and have outlawed freely competing currencies. The SEC and FTC (purport to) govern and regulate trading on financial markets and the conduction of business under their jurisdiction. The central bank’s manipulation of interest rates below where the free market obviously would have placed them led directly to sub-prime mortgage stupidity and hyper-leveraging of mortgage-backed securities. The Community Reinvestment Act played no small role in widespread mortgage defaults. The Imperial Federal Government’s explicit guarantee of mortgage loans purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (government-created and -sponsored enterprises) also permitted undue risks to be taken. The Internal Revenue Service takes a goddamned quarter or more of most people’s earnings and tells them it’s for their own good! Did I mention the currency is totally and completely controlled by the State, with literally no input of any kind from the free market? What free ownership and exchange of goods and services are you talking about? What "market ideology" are you confusing with our thoroughly socialist boobocracy? Do you even know what interest rates are for or what inflation means?

But modern conservatism has grown into exactly the opposite of its origins, in Burke’s respect for tradition and Madison’s promotion of countervailing checks on concentrations of power. Instead, like any revolutionary creed, it is abstract, hard-edged, and indifferent to experience and existing conditions.

That sounds exactly like left-liberalism. They both became Statism, as Mises, Rand, and Rothbard predicted. It became increasingly clear at this point that George Packer never had a point or had lost the ability to make one, so he resorted to bashing the Republicans, which any idiot with a keyboard can do by random accident, they’re such an easy target.

Most of the remaining congressional Republicans seem content to adhere to this creed, and to allow banks, car companies, and homeowners to be crushed under the invisible foot of the market—all that matters is the consistent application of principle.

Congratulations: you’re the first person ever to accuse neocons of being principled or consistent.

Last week, the House Republicans released a shadow budget that would repeal much of the stimulus package and impose a domestic-spending freeze in the middle of what some economists are beginning to call a depression. While claiming to be fiscally responsible, it would also create new optional tax brackets and cut or eliminate taxes of every kind, from capital gains to the estate and alternative minimum taxes, tilting the benefits sharply toward—you guessed it—the wealthy.

Maybe the wealthy would get the tax cuts because they’re the ones who pay the most taxes! A government-spending freeze in the middle of what some economists are calling (and what libertarians have been calling) a depression would be a godsend. To even insinuate that curtailing government spending would be harmful is the epitome of Statolatrist ignorance and destructive barbarism, bordering on Krugman-like stupidity.

After quoting some doom-and-gloom selections from conservatives about fascism and tyranny and 1984 coming to our lives, Packer concludes:

This is what the historian Richard Hofstadter has called “the paranoid style in American politics.” In the world of intelligence, it’s known as mirror-imaging: in this case, seeing in an enemy’s mental structure a reflection of one’s own feverish simplifications. Conservatives will not be able to understand the elusive nature of Obamaism and counter its formidable appeal until they remove the impediment of their own insular, rigid ideology.

Again, I am simply constitutionally incapable of understanding the complete and utter self-blinding exhibited by liberal Democrats: you are championing in Obama exactly what you would have demonized—and did, in fact, demonize for eight years!—in his Republican counterparts. If John McCain were president and had replicated Obama in every single, last policy proposal and official position and bill signed, liberal Democrats would vilify him as a fascist and a corporatist with every self-righteous breath and every furious keystroke.

The ideology of the Republicans is identical to that of the Democrats: gain and maintain political power. The only relevant group with a “rigid ideology” is the libertarians, whose radical ideas of peace, private property rights, individual sovereignty, sound money, and free exchange put us in the unique position of being able to understand and criticize Obama’s actions that directly clash with every one of those ideals. We understand the (not so) “elusive nature of Obamaism” just fine—a hell of a lot better than his apologetic idolaters: Enrich the powerful and well-connected at the expense of everyone else, and grow the State at every possible turn. This is Obamaism and unbiased observers with an interest in liberty saw it four years ago. It’s no different from Statism of any other stripe from any other time in our history.

Another function of government that Statists get all hysterical when you suggest it can and should be performed by private companies is safety regulations. In this instance, food inspection. The Associated Press reports:

A cheese pizza that arrived at the restaurant frozen? The Food and Drug Administration is in charge of inspecting it.

A frozen pepperoni pizza? That’s the Agriculture Department.

A fresh pizza, made at the restaurant? Both departments would be responsible for the original ingredients, if the pizza has meat on it. What if he eats eggs? It depends whether the eggs are inside the shell, in liquid form or have been processed. Fish? Some fish is inspected by the Commerce Department.

The FDA bears the brunt of food safety oversight, a mission called into question in the wake of a massive recall of peanut products. But at least 15 government agencies have a hand in making sure food is safe under at least 30 different laws, some of which date back to the early 1900s.

It’s a convoluted system.

“There is no one person, no individual today who is responsible for food safety,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. “We have an immediate crisis which requires a real restructuring.”

Yeah: in our society the only groups of people who are considered qualified or justified in certifying the safety of food are government bureaucrats. Too much government is the problem, not too little or the wrong kinds.

DeLauro and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have been proposing an overhaul of the nation’s food safety structure for more than a decade. There might now be the political will to do something following the outbreak of salmonella traced to peanuts blamed for sickening 600 people and killing at least nine others.

They may be making headway. President Barack Obama’s new agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, said he supports creating a single, combined food safety agency. It’s a major break from his predecessors.

“You can’t have two systems and be able to reassure people you’ve got the job covered,” Vilsack said.

That makes exactly as much sense as saying you can’t have two computer operating systems out there, two antivirus software companies, two construction companies making houses, two different doctors who might recommend different treatments for a patient, two different weight-loss diets, or two different houses of the legislature. What a bunch of morally bankrupt, brain-dead morons.

Not only is it possible to imagine the private choices and voluntary transactions of free individuals substituting for the fiats of a monopolistic State, such freedom can only turn out better than monopolistic State fiat. It is juvenile at best and evil at worst to suggest that the free market would not innovate solutions to problems deemed important by the populace in the absence of government. As Frederic Bastiat said,

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

What would happen if we simply treated all of these greasy pole climbers as ordinary human beings—″poor, bare, forked animals” like the rest of us—instead of turning them into fantasy figures imbued with embodiment and magic and goodness? The only extraordinary thing about them—their craving for dominion over others—is the very thing that should most repulse us, and make us wary, not draw us to them with awe, loyalty and affection.