I know that Canadians, both from my personal experiences in getting to know several pretty closely during my time in Michigan and from their reputation, are easy-going, friendly, non-confrontational people. But I also think they’re pretty down-to-earth and proud people, and they certainly know how to drink and have a good time late into the night. Man, can they drink. A proper response from the Canadian women’s hockey team to the IOC and the rest of the political correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade would have been to tell them, in true Patrick-Royian fashion, “I’m sorry, we can’t hear you because we’ve got our gold medals clogging our ears.” Oh, no! They’re drinking alcohol! (Perfectly harmless, despite the *gasp!* 18-year-old on their team!) Oh, no! They’re smoking cigars! How un-ladylike! (Perfectly harmless.) Oh, no! They celebrated in public, on the rink! Won’t they think of the children! (Nobody should care how they celebrate. If anything it’s good to show kids how to celebrate peacefully and composedly, I think. It’s also good to show girls that women who like sports are cool.)

Political correctness pisses me off. The IOC and anybody who batted an eye at the Canadian women’s hockey team celebration are a bunch of craven, whiny pansies.

As difficult as it is to define abstract ideas like rights, this much is certain: for anything to be a human “right,” it must apply fully and equally to all people in all possible times, places, and situations. Rights are universal and eternal and can never change. For rights to apply equally to everyone, and for one person’s “right” not to imply an entitlement or an aggression or an asymmetric demand of any kind with respect to another person, all rights are negative. Positive rights are not, in fact, rights, but desires or privileges. This means, for instance, that we don’t have a right to property, but rather we have a right for no one to take our rightfully owned property; when we say we have a right to free speech, this simply means no one can stop us from saying what we want on our own time and our own place, not that society must provide us with a microphone and a podium and pay any attention to us. We don’t have a right to certain things; we have a right for no one to forcibly prevent us from doing the things that everyone else may also do. Rights have an awfully strict definition, especially when you consider they must be identical from the days of the earliest cavemen to the distant, unimaginable future of the human race. That’s why there are so few of them.

Implicit in the idea that everyone has a right to health care is a deeply insidious morality. If it were true that health care were a right, then when an airline passenger had a heart attack mid-flight, or one member of a group of hikers or mountain climbers got injured, or a group of vacationers got stranded on an island and one fell ill, then despite the absence of any medical knowledge among the other people nearby, the person in need of medical care could demand that others treat him. He has a right, after all, to receive medical care from other people, free of charge, and their failure to provide it would be a violation of his rights.

“Health care” consists of expertise, labor, and products supplied to patients from medical professionals and manufacturers. It takes several years of advanced schooling and hard work, facing stiff competition, to even become a doctor, nurse, PA, etc. Turns out treating patients is a full-time job and for most doctors is, in fact, much more stressful and grueling than what most of us consider a “full-time” job. As we all know, you don’t just put on a ring, say, “Wonder Twin powers, activate! Form of: health care,” and receive treatment. Labor is required not only to treat you but also to train for years. With our economy becoming more integrated and the worldwide division of labor increasing all the time, millions of people’s labor goes into treating every patient in developed countries.

To claim health care as a right is to claim ownership not only of other people’s property but of the time and effort spent examining you, treating you, and training to become competent to treat you. To claim health care as a right is to claim jurisdiction over the actions, decisions, knowledge, time, and the very bodies of the people whom you are demanding treatment from. To claim health care as a right means the health care professionals and companies forfeit all of their rights to set their own prices for their goods and services—in fact, abrogates their right to charge any price for anything they give you, because you have a right to health care, and society must therefore provide it. No principled ethic of human relationships could permit such wholesale subjugation of one group of citizens by another. Medical care, like all goods and services, can only be provided via mutual agreement, an exchange or contract. Anything beyond that is either charity or slavery.

So now we see that most people do not, in fact, mean health care is a “right” at all, but rather something that they wish everyone could get for a low price. Most people who claim that health care is a right also wish no evil private companies would ever make money off of something needed so badly by so many people, or off of anything else, for that matter. Yeah, and it’d be nice if we could fly around on unicorns and Firefly had never been canceled, but we libertarians live in the real world, despite tiresome claims to the contrary. The next time you start to think anyone has a right to health care, or you hear someone else say health care is a right, remember what monstrous violations of actual human rights this entails and remind yourself or others that health care is only something you wish everyone had easy access to and weren’t overburdened with government inefficiency and regulations.

This is the type of crap that will dominate our lives if people don’t stop trusting politicians and start realizing the free market’s price system is what allows resources to be allocated the most efficiently, where they are needed, with minimal waste. This type of bureaucratic calculationism has impoverished hundreds of millions of people in socialist countries since the early 20th century—for example, in the Soviet Union, where people stood in bread lines and factories produced millions of huge nails and screws in order to meet their production-mass quotas more quickly and easily.

In a free society, the price for labor would be highest where it is needed the most, and it would decrease when it is less needed. No government program or bureaucracy can crunch enough numbers to make decisions anywhere nearly as well or as fast as the price system of the market. If the government weren’t screwing education systems up and then offering more of itself as the solution, the need for science teachers would be signaled by high wages and other attractive perks of the job. The need for more schools or more students at a particular school would also be signaled by greater profits or lower prices. This is a microcosm of the State-vs.-liberty argument, in which Statists claim certain things would never work fairly or resolve themselves justly without the benevolent, monopolistic State to make it so. The economy is simply one major facet of human action and interaction, and no facets are immune to the laws of human nature that make liberty more just and efficient than Statism.

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.

To understand why corporations, unions, and lobbyists spend such vast sums of money on political contributions is to understand how campaign finance “corruption” could be done away with in a clear, easy, and fair way. The reason they spend so much is because they get so much in return! With every political campaign and every election, a huge amount of money is at stake for every business—and most individuals, for that matter—and especially for the largest corporations, whose success and riches depend upon the corporate-political establishment. They spend so much money because there is the potential to get so much in return. The fact that large corporations donate money to opposing candidates and their parties is proof of this: it isn’t ideology, it is just good business.

My liberal friends and seemingly the majority, or a large minority, of Americans interested in politics are neither outraged nor saddened at the affront to individualism and self-governance that our current fascist-corporatist political-economic system represents. The mob elects legislators and bureaucrats who rule over everyone, whether we voted for them or not and whether their plans are in our best interest or not. They take people’s money and do whatever they want with it without our consent, and they’ve proven their ineptitude at spending our money in every way and at every turn. Obviously very few people are upset about this, beyond occasionally booting out incumbents who didn’t redistribute enough wealth. But now people get outraged because corporations can donate and spend as much money (part of which is our confiscated money) as they want to influence how their/our money is spent and how the conduct of business is governed in this country, whereas before, corporations could only spend a limited amount for such purposes.

First of all, those people have picked an awfully odd point to become saddened or outraged. If they thought about this issue from a principled angle, they would have been outraged long before the dollar amount for political donations/promotions was uncapped. But, most importantly, if you want to end the undue influence that corporations have on politics, get politics out of business! If politicians didn’t have the power to govern so many aspects of our lives, including the economy, then corporations, unions, and lobbyists would have no chance to engage in rent-seeking. As P.J. O’Rourke quipped, “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” In summary, achieving a state of less democracy, with its idiotic wealth redistribution and its monopolistic enforcement of mob-rule, would greatly reduce the influence that corporations have on politicians because politicians would have less influence on everything.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy should earn him the ire of self-described peaceful or anti-war liberals across the world, but all of the American liberals (at least, the supporters of the Democratic Party) love him and continue to defend him. Obama has continued the aggressive war, started by George W. Bush, in foreign countries that have not declared war on the United States. Civilians continue to be killed, retaliatory terrorism continues to kill many more, and young foreigners continue to become attracted to the terroristic, America-hating ideology that Obama and everyone else in Washington claim to be striving to quell. Libertarians predicted this would happen and routinely criticized Obama, Democratic politicians, Democratic voters, and the neocons for their imminent hypocrisy and warmongering, and we have been proven correct and justified in those attacks.

On January 23, 2009, Obama ordered air strikes against Pakistan by Predator drones, killing approximately 15 non-aggressing civilians, including 3 children in a country that had not attacked or declared war on the United States. This began Obama’s continuation of the bloody air-strike campaign carried out by CIA-operated drones (Predator aircraft) in Pakistan that was ramped up in September 2008 and continues unabated to this day. Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reports that 708 innocents (non-combatants) were killed by drone air strikes in 2009:

Of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians.

According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.

For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.

You can find a list of CIA drone air strikes carried out in Pakistan in the Wikipedia article Drone attacks in Pakistan. I was going to list them all to emphasize how bloody and counterproductive Obama’s foreign policy has been, but, as you will note if you read the news articles cited therein, those articles rarely contain details or even estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by the drone attacks. Whatever the reasons, sinister or not, the important point is that these civilian deaths are not highlighted by the media, are not stressed to the public by CIA, Defense, or White House officials, and are apparently not much concern to most Americans. Least of all the liberal Democrats who voted for Obama, continue to defend him to this day, and therefore have the blood of innocent Pakistanis and Afghanis on their hands.

They are of concern to Pakistanis, Afghanis, and terrorists and civilians across the Middle East. There is much evidence that drone attacks are counterproductive regardless of how many terrorists they kill and of the support they might receive from Pakistani and Afghani officials. For instance, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani has said, “These (strikes) are counterproductive and not in the interests of the country. I think the Obama administration will have to reconsider this policy.”

Afghanistan is, of course, more deadly for both U.S. soldiers and local civilians. This U.N. report (pdf) says that approximately 310 (one-third) of the civilian casualties that resulted from combat in Afghanistan in the first half of 2009 were caused by international military forces, which means U.S.-led forces. It is probably easier to just read the Wikipedia article. (Hey, it’s the best source for a summary of this information.) The U.N. report also concludes that civilian deaths and injuries are probably significantly under-reported because of the lack of ability to confirm many of them.

True to his promises to expand and focus the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, Obama sent 30,000 more soldiers there in December. This is another example of counterproductive warmongering that will only continue to inspire hatred, kill innocent people, and waste billions of dollars that could be spent improving our own country, something the military cannot do. He says this is a precursor to the beginning of a withdrawal from Afghanistan in 18 months (say, July 2011), so while we’re on the topic, I’ll predict that a significant withdrawal will not begin on schedule, and after it does happen and Afghanistan is controlled by its own people, the war in Afghanistan will be shown to be largely a futile effort.

The most embarrassing part of this presidency so far was Obama’s acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize, which he should have rejected. That speech consisted mostly of a promotion of military force as a vehicle of peace and a justification of the aggressive interventions of the Imperial Federal Government. Chris Floyd covered it sufficiently.

Obama’s legacy will probably be written in terms of his economic policy, which has been abominable. The idiotically named American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was his huge $787-billion stimulus bill that aimed to increase consumer spending and lending when they both needed to be curtailed like never before. Reckless borrowing (debt), which fueled unwise consumer and commercial spending and industrial expansion into unsustainable projects, is exactly what caused so many people to default on their mortgages and credit cards, so many companies to go out of business, and such a high rate of unemployment. Obama’s myopic stimulus plan operated under the Keynesian assumption that the economy is static and circular, and that more consumer spending means more economic growth, and has only delayed a true recovery.

In the second-biggest economic fiasco to date (after the trillions of dollars given to undeserving, failing automotive and financial corporations), the Cash for Clunkers program was an economic failure to anyone who paid attention. Part of the problem is that the defined goals of the Cash for Clunkers program were harmful to the American economy, so by succeeding in promoting spending, raising prices, and destroying wealth (literally), the program failed horrendously.

As alluded to above, Obama’s Treasury and Federal Reserve have committed or printed a total of $11 trillion to forestall the Second Great Depression. This number is not mentioned frequently, and the individual sources or components of this total are hardly ever highlighted or discussed, even right after the funds are printed by the Treasury and given to the companies. It is possible that they actually believe printing money out of thin air and keeping failing, inefficient, unproductive, parasitic companies afloat will promote an economic recovery and economic strength in the foreseeable future. If Obama, his economic advisers, and the people in the Treasury Department and Fed believe that, then their ignorance of the basic principles of economics and even of common sense are astounding—Krugmanian, even. If they don’t believe it, which is a distinct possibility, then they are intentionally exacerbating the economic crash in order to buy some time, possibly in the hopes that another Democratic government can be elected in 2012. How ignorant and/or short-sighted. Bloomberg reported that the bailout and stimulus funds approach the total GDP of the United States.

Being too stupid and caught up in his own messiah complex to learn from the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, His Eloquence is hell-bent on pumping up bubbles in the automotive industry and “green” technologies as fast as he can. It is unlikely the automotive bubble will ever pop because American car companies are well on their way to becoming de facto arms of the Imperial Federal Government, which will not be subject to the pressures of the free market, such as it is (though they will, as everything governmental and private is, still be governed by the laws of economics and human action, meaning they will only impoverish dollar holders more). This month, Obama announced that $2.3 billion of his $787-billion stimulus package will be rewarded for clean-energy technologies in the form of tax credits. These will go to 183 companies in 43 states. This is one of a million examples of the government interfering in the economy by taking money from people who earned it (taxpayers) or simply printing it (impoverishing all dollar holders) and giving it to people or companies for political reasons, to achieve goals defined by politicians and bureaucrats. This is not how a free society functions. This is not how a man of the people treats his people’s money.

Contrary to popular belief, Obama is terrible on issues of civil liberties, and this was even obvious during the campaign, when he voted to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that spied on users.

Glenn Greenwald and the New York Times article he cites sum up Obama’s hypocritical and not-so-stellar civil-liberties record quite well.

The Obama regime’s Department of Justice [sic] sided with that of George W. Bush regarding the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and anyone else the State deems an “enemy combatant.” The D.C. Circuit Court had issued a ruling agreeing with the Bush DOJ that prisoners being held in American prisons outside of American soil did not count as legal “persons” and that they have no Constitutional protections against torture, and Obama’s lawyers urged the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal of that case, meaning they support the ruling.

They also decided to revamp, rather than reject, the system of military tribunals established by the Bush regime.

On October 28, 2009, Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law, under the bizarre impression that hate crimes legislation protects people’s civil liberties. Oh, but the Democrats assure us the First Amendment–protection clauses in the bill will protect all of our Constitutional rights. People convicted of “hate crimes” will still be punished for their thoughts, and certain victim groups will be treated differently under the law than other victims of the same crimes, so, you know—civil liberties, Orwellian police state, it’s all the same to the Democrats.

Kinsella argues that Obama is actually worse than Bush on intellectual property.

A major indicator of Barack Obama’s ineptitude and corruption is the people he has chosen to surround himself with.

Most of my Democratic friends not only supported but lauded the selection of Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate. Presumably this was because it improved the chances of the Savior of America being elected president and was certainly not an indication of deep-seated, in fact fundamental, hypocrisy and amorality among liberal Americans. Joe Biden is a fantastic warmonger who voted to invade Iraq in 1998 and has been described as “perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration’s decision to invade” Iraq. He is a staunch opponent of civil liberties as well. Biden voted for the original PATRIOT Act, voted to reauthorize (!) the PATRIOT Act in 2006, and in fact bragged about having authored a predecessor to the PATRIOT Act in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh and another sweeping terrorism bill the year before that. This moran also supports a federal ban on smoking. Biden has a long, dirty history of supporting the Recording Industry Association of America and the FBI’s privacy-invading endeavors. He is also an ardent drug warrior who was instrumental in creating the National Office of Drug Control Policy and boasts about coining the term “Drug Czar”. Joe Biden is truly a despicable human being.

Among Obama’s cronies, Biden might only be surpassed by Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who is a creepy, slimy, vindictive, malicious politician of the worst sort. He seeks the political destruction even of fellow Democrats who have crossed him in the past, he believes the State can abrogate anyone’s right to bear arms at any time for whatever reasons it pleases, and of course he was involved in former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s pay-for-play schemes.

It was expected that Obama’s nominees for Secretary of Commerce would know nothing about business and less about economics, but it was a true sign of his ineptitude that he would nominate two who were ethically challenged hypocrites who actually, literally belong in prison under current state and federal law. Bill Richardson withdrew his nomination because he was under investigation by a grand jury for influence-peddling, meaning his political donors had received state contracts. The charges were eventually dropped, but, as you should know by now, that doesn’t mean he was innocent. (Judd Gregg, the second nominee, withdrew his nomination because of irreconcilable differences with Obama, and was a bad choice for Obama anyway because Gregg had actually voted to abolish the Department of Commerce in 1995, which makes him a great candidate from my perspective but underscores the ineptitude of Obama’s team.) The third and final nominee was Gary Locke, a money-laundering tax evader who repeated the crimes of the Clinton Chinese fundraising scandal and played the race card when he was scrutinized. This apparently made him a perfect fit for Obama’s cabinet. I’ll link to Michelle Malkin for the first time, only because she covered Locke when he was Governor of Washington and she worked for the Seattle Times.

Obama’s choices for Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairman have also proven to be terrible. This should be self-explanatory. Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke have been the primary implementers of the corporate-State socialist doctrine that large investment banks (particularly Goldman Sachs) and the American automotive companies are too big to fail, must be bailed out with stolen (printed) taxpayer money at every turn, and will ultimately better serve Geithner’s and Bernanke’s ideal way of life by becoming de facto arms of the Imperial Federal Government. They desperately cling to the Keynesian fantasy that spending = economic growth, when Americans need to save and invest, not borrow and consume. This policy will only end as Mises and Hayek predicted: with crippling inflation and more government intrusion into the economy to fix the problems it created.

It is hard to imagine how Obama could have done better at surpassing George W. Bush in the stupidity and ignorance of his selections and nominations to fill various governmental posts, but history might show that he succeeded.

His Eloquence signed two bills requiring increased energy efficiency, following the all-encompassing Statist mantra of “if you want something, regardless of whether it is desired by the people it affects, simply mandate it,” during the worst economic period since the Great Depression.

The Savior of America also appears bound and determined to inflict cruel, crippling environmental and medical-insurance policies on the United States, as evidenced by his constant fear-mongering, his blatant patronizing, his demagoguery, his terrifying speech at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and the passage of the politicized and ill-advised health care bill. However, the Green USA and Obamacare are not realities yet, so I’ll have to save those for next year (probably).

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?