Liberalism

There are two uses of the word liberalism that I find heartbreaking, even disgusting.

The first occurs when a self-described liberal pushes government power as the solution to all our economic and social woes. Government is not liberal! Government is confiscation, coercion, the taser, the jail cell!

Another is when a self-described conservative condemns liberalism as the cancer that is killing society. What? Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. So was John Locke. So was Alexis de Tocqueville. Their ideas built the world we love.

Most of all, there was Ludwig von Mises, who proudly called himself a liberal. He was the 20th century's great defender of capitalism and the free society. He decided to settle the issue about what is liberalism once at for all.

Liberalism is Ludwig von Mises' classic statement in defense of a free society, one of the last statements of the old liberal school and a text from which we can continue to learn. It has been the conscience of a global movement for liberty for 80 years.
Liberalism first appeared in 1927 as a follow-up to both Mises' devastating 1922 book showing that socialism would fail and his 1926 book criticizing interventionism. It was written to address the burning question: If not socialism, and if not fascism or interventionism, what form of social arrangement is most conducive to human flourishing? Mises' answer, summed up in the title, is liberalism.

Even in these times, Mises was aware that the meaning of liberalism had changed from its common use in the 19th century. He had to clarify that his understanding not only included commercial freedom, but was rooted in it. Without economic freedom, no other form of freedom can have material meaning.

But Mises did not accept the idea that the term had been merely stolen from the proponents of free markets. He thought it had never been worked out scientifically, and therefore, the theory of liberalism became vulnerable to political manipulation.

Thus did Mises do more than restate classical liberal doctrine. He gave a thoroughly modern defense of freedom, one that corrected the errors of the old liberal school by rooting the idea of liberty in the institution of private property (the subject on which the classical school was sometimes unclear). That is the grand contribution of this volume:

"The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production... All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand."

But there are other insights too. He demonstrates that the order inherent in a laissez-faire society stems not from a mystical source, but from the capacity of the price system to provide a means of rational coordination between independent actors. This rational pursuit of individual interest leads to the division of labor, the development of the money economy, the extended order of production and the coordinative signals of interest and profit. He argues that it is within man's rational capacity to understand the reasons for the prosperity and orderliness of freedom.

He further shows that political decentralization and secession are the best means to peace and political liberty. As for religion, he recommends the complete separation of church and state, and a cultural conviction that favors tolerance. On immigration, he favors the freedom of movement. On education, state involvement must end -- completely.

In some ways, this is the most political of Mises' treatises, and also one of the most inspiring books ever written on the idea of liberty. It remains a book that can set the world on fire for freedom, which is probably why it has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Yet the concluding message here is something that every freedom lover needs to contemplate and return to again and again. Consider his words very seriously: 

"Liberalism is no religion, no worldview, no party of special interests. It is no religion because it demands neither faith nor devotion, because there is nothing mystical about it, and because it has no dogmas. It is no worldview because it does not try to explain the cosmos, and because it says nothing and does not seek to say anything about the meaning and purpose of human existence. It is no party of special interests because it does not provide or seek to provide any special advantage whatsoever to any individual or any group. It is something entirely different. It is an ideology, a doctrine of the mutual relationship among the members of society and, at the same time, the application of this doctrine to the conduct of men in actual society. It promises nothing that exceeds what can be accomplished in society and through society. It seeks to give men only one thing: the peaceful, undisturbed development of material well-being for all, in order thereby to shield the m from the external causes of pain and suffering as far as it lies within the power of social institutions to do so at all. To diminish suffering, to increase happiness: That is its aim."

"No sect and no political party has believed that it could afford to forgo advancing its cause by appealing to men's senses. Rhetorical bombast, music and song resound, banners wave, flowers and colors serve as symbols and the leaders seek to attach their followers to their own person. Liberalism has nothing to do with all this. It has no party flower and no party color, no party song and no party idols, no symbols and no slogans. It has the substance and the arguments. These must lead it to victory."

This is more than a theory; it is a proposed strategy for achieving a dream. It is one that should attract anyone who is truly serious about making a contribution to the cause of freedom.

In the thicket of political argument, in the confusing world of political lies and rhetoric, I find myself returning to this calm and brilliant book. I've probably read it through a dozen times. I always find something new, something inspiring, something that provides me new intellectual guidance.

Jeffrey Tucker
Executive editor
Laissez Faire Books

We're All Branch Davidians Now

Nineteen years ago, just outside Waco, Texas, the FBI demonstrated once again that the state at its core is a killing machine. Monarchy, democracy, or republic – any government as conventionally defined is a legal monopoly on violence. The state is always inclined toward oppression, division, conquest, and bloodshed, because these are its tools of trade.

Matters are no different here. The myth of a free America was always seen with bitter irony by those not blessed by such freedom. In the founding generation, as half a million labored in slavery, many who fought in the Revolution genuinely believed in liberty, but for the ruling elite who chided them on, liberty was hardly more than a slogan. This has always been true of our political leaders.

The Father of the Country was a centralizing slaveowner. Old Hickory talked up freedom as he threatened war on South Carolina and forced the Cherokee to flee from their ancestral land on a barbarously murderous walk of shame. The Great Emancipator turned America into a military dictatorship and abolished the revolutionary right of secession. Wilson's New Freedom was cover for a Prussianized war machine generating revenue for his profiteering buddies on Wall Street. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms failed to include the freedom not to be drafted or interned in a concentration camp. Ronald Reagan threw the word freedom around as he trained Latin American torturers and raped the Bill of Rights in the name of fighting drugs. The United States has never lived up to its rhetoric.

But the events from February 28 through April 19, 1993, still stand out in my mind as a watershed. It was the post-Cold War regime's coming of age, signifying a major event in cultural history.

Everything about Operation Showtime was brazen, and it seemed like an overreach even by some of the government's establishment defenders. Yet today Washington's fixers must look back at these embarrassments as a hiccup at most, as growing pains on the way to establishing a militarized law-and-order apparatus of nearly unlimited power. That this stepping stone was reached on the eve of the Internet era, right before the old media began its decline in influence, was most convenient for the police state and its solidification.

The propaganda against the Branch Davidians was perfectly tuned to appeal to the masses, each adjustment in frequency coming just in time to keep the people listening. Religious fanatics with a meth lab, armed and dangerous, abusing their children – few wanted to stand up for these people during the siege. Even fewer wished to identify the Davidian response to the original raid for what it was: self-defense. The Davidians fired on the ATF so long as the ATF fired upon the Davidians, and when the ATF ran out of ammo, the Davidians held their fire. The government's officials were the aggressors. What followed were fifty-one days of psychological warfare designed to isolate the Davidians – from water, from food, from the press, their lawyers and family – and break them down like any wartime enemy.

So preposterous was the standoff that eventually even the mainstream media began asking questions. A New York Times exposé on March 28 raised all sorts of troubling issues, which only multiplied in the days that followed. Federal agents said that supervisors had known they had lost the element of surprise, but decided to go ahead with the February 28 raid anyway. Agents were reportedly unhappy with their equipment and communication methods. The poor planning and lack of contingency options were exposed. No medical assistance had been prepared for the ATF's raid. Reports emerged that some of the ATF agents had injured or killed one another in friendly fire. There were hints that other agents might have even been captured and let go by the Davidians. The ATF intelligence chief stopped holding press conferences as the heat continued to mount.

On April 19, tired from the boredom and bad publicity of just standing around outside the "compound," the FBI drove a tank through the Davidians' home, pumped it full of CS gas, launched incendiary devices at the building, and watched it go up in flames. As soon as the stakes became higher, as soon as questioning the feds meant implying they had committed mass murder, the media stopped barking defiantly and jumped back to the government's lap.

The Democrats, home of America's center-left, oversaw this exceedingly important event in the development of the police state. Unsurprisingly, every respectable liberal defended the government and believed Clinton's people when they demonized the Davidians. The entire respectable right went along with the bloodletting, too. Why wouldn't they? It was a raid planned by George H.W. Bush's ATF, carried out by the Clintonistas, and ultimately rubberstamped by the Republicans in Congress, and so everyone could get behind it. Some libertarians wavered, including Randians and other proponents of violent national secularism, and much of the radical left went limp too.

The Oklahoma City incident two years later was spun by the media as an example of anti-government extremism somehow being a greater threat than the government itself. It became increasingly un-PC to bring up what had happened in Texas. The election of Dubya and 9/11 washed away the paranoid anti-statist instincts of much of the Clinton-hating right.

Waco, from the raid's planning to the cover-up and show trials, taught the U.S. government what it could get away with – which is to say, practically anything. It can gas innocent children with internationally banned chemicals. It can hoist a federal flag atop a torched American home, claim victory, and see its public image improve. It can throw grenades at people trying to escape a building and claim they are being held hostage. In the name of protecting these "hostages" and children, it can watch as they burn and keep the firefighters away. And the massacre will be tolerated, even applauded.

Dozens of people of color died at the hands of the federal government, and the official Civil Rights movement hardly spoke up. Dozens of people were targeted for their religion, and it hardly bothered many of the very conservatives who allege a war on religion waged by DC. The largest federal-military killing of civilians on U.S. soil in a century has now become one more notch on the progressive left's timeline of major events in anti-government extremism, as opposed to a principal example of government extremism where a tiny minority community was virtually exterminated.

Indeed, in 1993 the Davidians were only the most conspicuous and recent example in America's long history of the demonized Other, the marginalized underclass in the official hierarchy of human worth. Slaves, Indians, Mexicans, Southerners, Catholics, Irish and German-Americans, Chinese immigrants, Japanese-Americans, Mormons, homosexuals, alleged Communists, rightwing extremists, and many others have played the role, often for their imagined association with the wartime enemy, but always for being out of step with the government's accepted definition of legitimate humanity. Many look back at incidents of intolerance with disbelief that Americans could be so blind to oppression. Yet when the topic of Waco comes up, they will think only of those nutcases who, according to the government and media, attacked federal agents and then killed themselves.

In the nineteen years since Waco, we have seen the police state explode in every direction and now we are all ensnared. Some groups are always more threatened than others, but no one is truly safe. The prisons have swollen to the largest detention system since Stalin's gulags. The police conduct three thousand SWAT raids a month. The war on terror has made a total mockery of what remained of the Fourth Amendment. Torture has lost its taboo. So has indefinite detention. The feds irradiate and molest airline passengers by the millions. People are jailed for taking medicine, buying Sudafed, sharing songs, and selling milk.

The Kafkaesque regulatory state threatens people of all economic classes with crushing fines and a fate in a cage. The public schools, always authoritarian institutions, have become explicit adjuncts of the criminal justice system and military recruitment offices. Every major police department has tanks and battle rifles and drones are being used for surveillance and God knows what else. Each federal department has enough firepower to conquer a small third-world country. DHS alone has ordered enough ammo to shoot every American man, woman, and child. The president claims the right to kill American citizens anywhere on the planet on his say-so alone. And he exercises that power.

Why do some of us continue to fixate on Waco? If for no other reason, because April 19, 1993 was a squandered opportunity if ever there was one. The people could have risen up and said, "Enough!"

They could have demanded the military occupation retreat from their own neighborhoods – both the federal presence and its satellite jackboots in the city police. They could have demanded an end to the gun laws, drug war, and federal war on crime, each of which was instrumental in ending the lives of more than twenty children at Waco. They could have turned against the media whose elites stood and applauded the White House as it announced and defended its latest killing spree. They could have seen the federal government for the clear and present danger it obviously poses – the only government that had militarily mass murdered American civilians on American soil since the collateral damage at Pearl Harbor.

They could have turned their backs on the killers in DC, refusing ever to believe in their lies again, saving the lives of uncountable Americans, Serbians, Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Yemenis, Palestinians, and so many others who would bear the wrath of an unhampered imperial executive in the nineteen years to come, sparing the priceless liberties we have seen shredded on the altar of state power.

Instead, they looked the other way, they yawned, even cheered. There might still be time to turn things around. But the tanks are closing in. 

Regards,
Anthony Gregory
LewRockwell.com

Government is the real terror

America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as any threat from abroad. If we want to be worthy of their legacy, we must resist the rush toward ever-increasing state control of our society. Otherwise, our own government will become a greater threat to our freedoms than any foreign terrorist.

A government out of control, unstrained by the constitution, the rule of law or morality. Bickering over petty politics as we descend into chaos. The philosophy that destroys us is not even defined. We have broken from reality a psychotic nation. Ignorance with a pretence of knowledge replacing wisdom...

We are now in the midst of unlimited spending of the people’s money. Exorbitant taxation, deficits of trillions of dollars spent on a failed welfare-warfare system. An epidemic of cronyism. Unlimited supplies of paper money equated with wealth. A central bank that deliberately destroys the value of the currency in secrecy, without restraint, without nary a whimper, yet cheered on by the pseudo-capitalists of Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and Detroit. We police our world empire with troops on 700 bases and in 130 countries around the world. A dangerous war now spreads throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Thousands of innocent people being killed as we become known as the torturers of the 21st century. We assume that by keeping the already known torture pictures from the public’s eye, we will be remembered only as a generous and good people. If our enemies want to attack us only because we are free and rich, proof of torture would be irrelevant...

We need to quickly refresh our memories and once again reinvigorate our love, understanding and confidence in liberty... We must escape from the madness of crowds now gathering.

- Ron Paul

Government is not the solution; government is the problem

Political spats and elections come and go, but one thing most voters still agree on is that government is not the solution to their problems. Not surprisingly, the Political Class disagrees.

Ronald Reagan said it in his first inaugural address in January 1981: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 60% of Likely U.S. Voters agree with the iconic president. Only 29% disagree with Reagan’s assessment, while 11% are undecided.

Our government is getting out of control, if it isn't someone is doing a great job of making us think it is. Smear campaigns, propaganda, mis and dis information. Who is it for, the American people, our "enemies"?

Some time back there was a saying going around, "Take back ATS" and other nonsence, well what about TAKE BACK AMERICA!... Or even take back the world.

It seems the people have been manipulated by fear, or maybe this quote would say it better;

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsel or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands, which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."

- Samuel Adams, debates of 1776

Or another quote that best describes that people of today, are no different than yesterday. 

"All Experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, when Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed."

--Thomas Jefferson

Are hundreds of millions of Americans, plus billions of other people around the world, willing to accept that government is the problem, not the solution? That the entire foundation of the monetary system they've come to accept is a complete fraud? That the entitlement programs they depend on are insolvent?

If not, then they're just going to vote in another set of idiots who bring them right back where they started... more debts, more regulation, more confiscation, more asset seizures, more forced redistribution, more inflation of the currency, more bailouts, more deficits, etc.

This is always the major risk in 'revolution'; you hope to replace evil with good. It doesn't always happen that way. The French got Robespierre's reign of terror in the 1790s, the Chinese got Mao in 1949, and the Egyptians traded Mubarak for a military dictatorship this year. What will happen in Spain? Greece? The US?

Now... if you're the type of person to let others dictate your fate, then I encourage you to sit around, wait it out, see what happens, and hope for the best.

If you're the type of person to take matters into your own hands, then every single one of these protests, police brutality videos, and government responses should serve as a constant reminder to become more self-reliant. Being dependent on the system is no longer an option for thinking, freedom-loving people.

In the words of Thomas Paine

"O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind."

We should prepare.