Political Eschatology

Advisory: Coarse language.  I’m tired of mincing words. Sometimes “excrement” just lacks a certain rhetorical punch.

Midnight Sunday night.  I just got home from a late dessert with a friend out on the “payment,” as they call it here in Philadelphia.  (That’s a sidewalk in standard parlance.)  This is a relative luxury, something there may not be much more of when the politicians in Washington get done with us, a subject that came up over carrot cake tonight.

Before I started this rant, I checked to see if any deal had been reached in the debt crisis.  Alas, none.  I feel quite strange about all this.  You know the world is screwed up when a philosophical anarchist is thinking in more practical terms than the politicians. Blame ought to be shared all around, but most infuriating to me is the smug self-righteousness of the Republican Party.  Cut, Cap and Balance should be renamed Sit Down and Shut Up.  This piece of hypocritical legislation is, alas, off the table.

The details of this particular story and of the past several generations are many and hard to keep track of.  I speak under correction, but indignantly nonetheless; we all know that this situation didn’t need to come to pass.  Here goes nothin’.

The Republican Party wants you to believe that it is now and has for a long time been the party of fiscal responsibility, “conservatism,” family values, and all that horse crap.  This is the party whose leadership, namely Richard M. Nixon, cut all ties between the dollar and gold on August 15, 1971, touching off one of the worst inflationary periods this country has seen.  ”We’re all Keynesians now,” quipped Tricky Dick, describing a most unfortunate turn of events that set the game clock on the middle class in America.

In the late 1970′s, Jimmy Carter, in a now infamous speech, warned the country that it needed to start living within its means, or there would be trouble.  Ronald Reagan, Boobus Americanus Secundus, came along, using what a late friend of mine called “verbal jujitsu” and said that Jimmy Carter didn’t want America to be great.  Reagan seemed to think that the laws of economics didn’t apply to us, that our Miltonesque shining city on a dunghill covered with snow had a birthright to greatness, and that we knew this was true, because, well, damnit, we say so.  And our military budget was the largest in the world.  And we spent God knows how much money on a stupid war against drugs. Etc.

But Reagan is hailed as a “conservative,” even a “libertarian,” which I find to be horrific, though to his credit, he does deserve polite applause for keeping his illegal wars of foreign aggression under a week in duration. The conservative movement of the 1970′s, a reaction against Lyndon Johnson’s soft socialism, culminated in one of the most financially disastrous presidencies up to that time.  I have to wonder if it was even necessary to outspend the Soviets in the arms race, as the conventional wisdom had it.  A sharp statesman would have found a way to make the Soviets think we were spending more than we were.  But you know damn well that some defense contractors were happier than pigs in shit with the way things were going.

Even when it came to monetary policy, the Reagan administration was a band of thieves.  Keep the interest rates low—that’s all they cared about.  The story is told—I believe it’s in Bob Woodward’s book on Alan Greenspan, called Maestro—about Fed chairman Paul Volcker, a Carter appointee, being pressed by the president and a close aide to keep rates low, i.e. pump more money into the system.  Volcker, in a testament to his character, resisted.  He was quickly replaced at the end of his term with Captain Printing Press.  Low rates stimulate the economy, said the administration.  Here’s the dirty little secret: the higher supply of money can also be used to pay for pet projects that no sane citizen would tolerate paying for with his taxes.  Inflation is an insidious, silent tax, levied on every dollar earned, spent, and saved in this country—and it is a regressive tax at that, because it affects the lower income levels the most.  But most people simply treat it as a fact of life rather than a factor of policy.

Skip ahead a generation, and we’ve got W. in the White House, the biggest megalomaniac since FDR. He made the Reagan and Johnson presidencies look like exercises in restraint, singing loud Te Deums of Why don’t we just bomb the sunsabitches?  Self-described fiscal conservatives credit him with cutting taxes, but again, the unpopular projects were paid for through monetary inflation.  And how much has that Medicare reform cost us? And the Every Child Left in the Dust Act? Bush II was a naive Wilsonian ideologue who rode the coat tails of the evangelists, the conservative Catholics, and the xenophobes (I use this last term in an unconventional, all-encompassing sort of way) into the White House. Or at least his close advisors were.  One wonders how we got from “No nation building” in the 2000 campaign to making the Middle East safe for dumbocracy.  These are expensive propositions, paid for by your retirement fund.  The tribal leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq thank you very much.

And here we are now, with a debt crisis, a Democrat sitting in the White House, and the GOP running the House of Representatives. This crop of elephants promised us in 2010 that they really meant it this time—they really were conservatives.  Small government this, fiscal responsibility that.  But even in the midst of this debt crisis, there are programs, sacred cows, that they refuse to touch.  Sure, Barack Obama, though he has compromised more than many thought he would, might be playing the same game, and we all know how expensive Obamacare will be, but he didn’t yammer on about small government in his campaign—quite the opposite, as we know.  What I wish to point out here is less the policy and more the hypocrisy of the Republican Party.  The GOP favors small government.  Ok, cut every non-essential, outdated portion of the defense budget.  Fat chance.  Stop chasing down drug users who are not committing violent crimes.  Ohhh but there might be something against that somewhere in the Bible.  Maybe it’s in Matthew 24. Et cetera, ad nauseam.

This is all a dog-and-pony show, my friends.  The Republicans don’t want a small government any more than I want to go country line dancing.  Their libertarian-flavored stance is a self-contradiction: If they believed government to be evil, they wouldn’t be so eager to exercise power when they can get it, and they wouldn’t so gladly be generous to fat cat contractors with the tax money of us mere proles.  I am reminded of the two-part question that Satan, as narrator, asks repeatedly in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (a fantastic book not so beloved by certain governments): 1) What kind of idea are you, one that compromises or holds firm when you lose? and, more importantly, 2) How do you act when you win?

Well, we have seen how the Republicans act when they win, and it can hardly be described as fiscally conservative.  If we could say otherwise, the present behavior of the Republicans might be defensible, even heroic.  But after years of pleading that politics is the art of compromise—and therefore we can’t be as conservative as we’d like—they have chosen the worst possible moment to pose as principled people.  I’m not convinced that John Boehner is the problem here; he may well have unenviable realities within his caucus to deal with.  But some people somewhere in the Republican party have chosen to thump their chests instead of beat their breasts, which is what they, along with the Democrats, should be doing.  They have both screwed us over, and—shame on us—most of us are dumb enough to believe it’s all one side or the other. The politicians feed on this Super Bowl mentality and use dire situations like this to score points with their base.

Compromise is a dirty word.  I myself hate it.  But someone needs to face up to the fact that this moment was arrived at through decisions that were made years ago.  If you dance with the devil, you have to pay the fiddler.  Well, dear reader, the violin case has been opened.  The real options here are limited, and all of them involve the implication that the political leadership of this country has been an abysmal failure. Wanna take bets on that happening?

To create electoral theatre, the leaders in Washington are playing with the future of this country. A default would send the dollar tumbling.  How far?  I doubt anyone knows, but in the inflationary days of the Weimar Republic, wheelbarrows full of Marks were required to buy a loaf of bread. Do you think the workers’ salaries rose at the same rate?  Hardly.  That spells destitution.  I’m no fan of social security, but why should old folks who have nothing left pay for this bumbling around?  I’m convinced that, from a practical perspective, it is an injustice. Starving welfare recipients with stubbornness is not the way back to Thomas Paine and John Locke.

Am I saying, “Raise, the debt limit?” Well, yes, if it’s what it takes to buy the time necessary to crash land rather than plunge directly into the ocean. We shouldn’t be in this mess, but we are.  The time for principle was eighty years ago, but every self-described fiscal conservative since Hoover has failed in this regard.  That milk has been spilled, the fat lady has sung, and it’s time to own up to it all. If the libertarian right insists on being brittle now, it will be broken forever. (Bulls of Excommunication from fellow libertarians can be sent to me via email. The tendency to orthodoxy is an affliction of the entire human race, even of the most freedom-loving.)

I get the impression that many on the libertarian right think that this is the dawning of a new age.  Good luck with that.  As much as I have advocated a stateless society, I have always felt that such an order would have to come from a foundation of ideas—a gargantuan task (laughably so, some smaller minds would argue), but all successful revolutions have been ones of thought and not of arms.  Violence and catastrophe only breed chaos, and more states. The dollar collapses and people live happily ever after in their little Agorist paradises? Uh huh.  I got some bridges for sale.  This week’s special: The Walt Whitman for two Diet Pepsis and cheesesteak.

Chaos breeds tyranny.  Always.  The nationalists will be whipping up fascist plans, and the Left Wing will be dreaming up socialist plans, and certain religious types will be chanting their epistles of theocracy from beyond the moat.  Who wins is anyone’s guess. Reason, surely, will not prevail; bread will decide the victor.  I forget who said that a hungry man has no principles.  ”We hold these truths to be….”  And the mob yells, Oh, shut up!

You think I’m over-reacting; I know you do.  When we read history books about the decline of civilizations, it’s easy to see the unhappy ending from afar.  Hindsight is a great benefit, and it also affects the imagination.  Look around.  The utilities still work. There are no ruins (except for the inner cities…).  Everything seems so normal.  I suspect that on the precipice of collapse many former societies thought everything was okay, too.  But ruin, like many fallings-out, comes both gradually and all at once.  Its approach becomes apparent, but the exact moment of its arrival is never certain, until it’s too late.

An important implication: This means that no one is in as much control over this as anyone might think.  More reason for the pols to stop fiddling. This, of course, assumes that they give a damn about us.

Liberty and Power

The Young Fogey has done a good job of covering a number of things in the wake of the election.  Spirits do seem to be running high in the libertarian camp this week.  Among the items I found fascinating was this video featuring a discussion from awhile ago between Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and Sarah Palin:

Judge Andrew Napolitano goes to great lengths to find out where these three politicians have common ground, where they can work together to build a practical political coalition.  Someone in the course of the conversation said that if another man agrees with you 80 percent of the time, he’s your ally and not your enemy.  I’d say it depends on how essential the other 20 percent is.  Even Ed Rendell, who was also interviewed, was able to agree with much of what was said in the earlier segment of the show.  Keep an eye on him as a potential challenger to Obama if the situation for the Democrats doesn’t improve.

There have been many fears that the whole Tea Party phenomenon could be co-opted by the mainstream corporatist right.  This is a possibility not to be discounted, and in fact it seems to me that it’s already happened to some undetermined extent.  Another seemingly as-yet unexplored possibility also looms, however:  Assuming a candidate with unassailable libertarian credentials is elected to the White House in 2012, will he or she be able to resist the allure of power?  Will anarchists like me suddenly begin to defend the State because there is someone in place with whom it’s easier to have a measurable degree of sympathy?  If this seems ridiculous, think of where the Reagan movement started, and where it ended.  The only thing holding it all together was a smug optimism about America being the greatest country on earth.

This is not to say that I find faults in the characters of the Pauls or even of Sarah Palin; I’m in no place to judge any of their souls.  But the corruption that comes from power is part of human nature.  Look at where the modern Left has placed itself:  some of the hippies burning draft cards in the 1960′s are now in the Congress, routinely voting to extend hopeless foreign military ventures.  Many of the other “draft-dodging” (good for them!) hippies are voting for these Congressmen, and with little sense of reluctance, to boot.  Will today’s libertarian movement end up the same way?  Ayn Rand’s libertarian credentials are highly questionable; nevertheless she’s certainly on the rightward side of the political spectrum and joined happily in the clamor for small government during her lifetime.  Yet, she ended her life advocating for compulsory military conscription.  Will today’s libertarians, after a possible political victory, go down in a similar moral defeat?

Literary intoxication: Jeffrey Tucker’s Bourbon for Breakfast

In times like ours, when fair is foul and foul is fair, the proponents of good causes can often lead a dour existence and indulge in a crankiness which, if less than charming, is certainly understandable given the long odds they face.  Unfortunately this doesn’t do much for their causes, since people—even smart people, or, rather, especially smart people—don’t want to hear how dumb their ideas and tastes are.  What every good cause needs, then, is a force of positive energy, a source of joy to show the followers that cause x is not only worthwhile, but necessary for human growth and happiness.

Meet Jeffrey Tucker, the happy anarcho-capitalist.  Libertarians, like philosophers and artists of all stripes, are not exactly known for their joie de vivre.  We are seen as party-poopers, twits who are too attached to their intellectual ideas and not willing enough to “get with it”—“it” being some fad that has gotten swept up into the Zeitgeist.  The insufferably officious late William F. Buckley once chided us for worrying about stop signs when there were evil Russian peasants to murder.  I wonder, though, what Bill Buckley would do with the writings of Tucker, who, rather than get into complicated syllogisms like Murray Rothbard, or rather than writing ridiculous Objectivist creeds like Ayn Rand (who is only thought to be libertarian anyhow), simply finds the absurdities of the State and laughs at them, even when the autobiographical details show that he has suffered under its iron fist (though perhaps in these inflationary times the State’s fist is now comprised of zinc).  Tucker has every right to be bitter, but instead, he makes merry, and this is to his credit.  I would even say that this book presents a model of how to live a fulfilling, rounded life as an anarcho-capitalist.

It is impossible to read Jeff Tucker’s work and not come away loving life more.  Here is a man with a wide range of interests and intense curiosity.  I know this because I’ve known the author for a number of years now, so don’t expect this to be an unbiased review.  No writer is unbiased anyway; the sooner we take the masks off the more we’ll benefit.  Lou Holtz, in his account of Notre Dame’s last national championship in football, said that the difference between where you are now and where you are five years from now is the people you meet and the books you read.  In Jeff Tucker, I have someone who is now in both categories.  Jeff got me into running, Chartreuse, and shaving without cream.  (The latter subject is covered in the book.)  Now, after reading Bourbon for Breakfast, I have a few more things to do, such as figure out how to take that environmentalist wacko washer out of my showerhead.

To cover every subject in this review that Tucker covers in the book would be onerous, so I’d like to select my favorite subjects and start with one of the most pressing issues of our time:  toilets. About ten years ago, I took a new job, and shortly after my arrival noticed a sign above the toilet in the office:  “Please do not throw any paper towels into the toilet.  We have already had problems with this toilet.  Thank you.”  The sign seemed to suggest that said toilet was relatively new and not performing up to its expected capabilities.  More and more, I’ve noticed these signs over the past decade.  They are commonplace now.  Someone could make a lot of money by mass-producing a sign which says “Caution:  Toilets don’t work as well as they used to.”  Etc.

I never realized the culprit until I read Tucker’s articles on it.  The U.S. government, during the environmentally crazed days of the early nineties, passed legislation requiring toilets to use no more than 1.6 gallons of water per flush.  This, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is not enough to get the job done, unless it is one of those jetpack toilets that sprays dirty water all over the bathroom.  Tucker relates some of his own experiences with this State-imposed health crisis and rightly points out that if there is any effort on which resources should be liberally spent, it is on safely getting rid of human waste, which is one of the deadliest substances known to history.

Advocating the safe removal of crap from our toilets doesn’t exactly require a wellspring of political courage, but another topic that Tucker addresses does:  child labor laws.  When modern man thinks of child labor, he thinks of practical slavery, but the laws in this country didn’t come about until the early twentieth century, and then, as Tucker recounts, had a number of curious exceptions built into them, child actors most notable among them.  Commoner children could only work if they were making Christmas wreaths or something.  Moreover, these laws were conceived while the necessity for child labor was receding into American history; in other words, it was the prosperity created by capitalism, and not the benevolence of the State, which freed children from the necessity of sitting at a sewing machine for twelve hours a day, since adults were making more money and no longer required the extra household income.

Less honorable forces were at work, too:  Women’s labor groups, for instance, disliked the cheap competition offered by the children.  Many, including a number of church organizations, opposed the new child labor laws because they regarded it as the nationalization of children (what has happened since with respect to public education proves that they were right), and at least one congressman prophesied that the lack of work would make future generations lazy.  Well, now!  Tucker carries this ball the whole way to the goal line in “Generation Sloth,” which is a discussion on the dearth of working skills in some of the current generations.  Of course, we don’t want to get too Protestant and think that work is the be all and end all of existence—and how curious it is that in such a Protestant country laziness has taken over—but there is more than enough food for thought in these chapters.  One practical consequence of it all is that you cannot pay a neighborhood kid to fix your computer.

Anarcho-capitalists are not well understood by the general public and are often lumped in with all the apologists for the corporatist pigs.  This misconception is even easier to pull off these days owing to the vague illiterate socialism that seems to control the mainstream public discourse.  Tucker reveals the lie in all this when he discusses one of his foremost passions:  Intellectual Property.  He is one of the first libertarians, perhaps second only to Stefan Kinsella, who has come out against these supposed “rights” and shows exactly how the whole IP concept is inimical to a libertarian worldview which respects private property rights and free exchange.  Tucker admits that past libertarians had not thought much about this issue and that the default position was in favor of IP, but the new trend is reshaping libertarian opinion in this area.  Offering items for free online which would normally be controlled by IP, such as books, Tucker insists, is actually better for everyone in the long run, including the author.  I have personally witnessed Jeff transform the viability of causes with this approach, and every time a book is offered for free online, its sales at the warehouse skyrocket at the same time.  The trouble these days is that the publishers have everyone, including the writers themselves, under their thumbs, and so books and ideas—perhaps ones deemed too dangerous?—are left to squander while the giant book corporations refuse to put items back in print but demand to hold onto the “rights” to the material.  There is a long history here, which Tucker recounts succinctly.

A hinge in Tucker’s thought occurred when he read Michelle Boldrin and David Levine’s book, Against Intellectual Property.  In this work they lay out the case for a freer dissemination of ideas.  It looks like something that ought to be added to my reading list, though I must offer a minor caveat based on what I’ve seen so far, and it concerns music, which happens to be my field of choice.  The authors posit that IP law is behind the stagnation in classical music over the past several decades.  This is entirely possible.  Musicians tend to be very territorial in their work in ways that are self-defeating.  A good example of this is the recent policy change by the American Guild of Organists, which now hides its job openings behind password protection, making it impossible for non-members to see one of the benefits of membership.  Twelfth century models like this are bound to fail.  All the same, I’d only add that the musical community itself often does everything it can to discourage normal people from liking classical music.  The fact that the term “classical music” makes us think primarily of stuff that is older than most countries rather than some of the truly great music of the past decade that has come from the pens of men like James MacMillan and Bo Holten is the foremost problem.  Add to that a pompously pious stern demeanor and you have the perfect recipe for total system failure.   The classical musical world is a caricature of itself.

On a more detailed note, Boldrin and Levine blame IP laws for the dearth of great music in England since 1750.  I am in no position to judge the laws in England of this time period, but I will say that much great English music has been written since 1750.  Could more have been written?  Quite possibly, but this is one quibble I must make.  Every time someone tries to assert that there have been no great English composers since Henry Purcell, I just want to scream, “Ralph Vaughn-Williams!”  And that’s only for starters. The twentieth century in particular saw a musical blossoming in those rainy lands; several of the composers, such as Charles Villiers Stanford, took after Brahms.  “No great music after 1750” is the kind of thing a musicologist would say so that he doesn’t have to study a school of composition that he doesn’t like.  It’s almost as laughable as the idea that anyone would actually want to listen to Purcell.

Speaking of Vaughn Williams, however, I will add a story here that strengthens Boldrin’s and Levine’s case.  John Weaver, organist, composer, and professor for many years at both Juilliard in New York and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, has written a wonderful little jazz arrangement of Vaughn Williams’ famous melody which is sung to the text For All the Saints.  He can’t get it published because—so I’ve been told by a reliable source—the heirs of the original composer find the piece to be objectionable and refuse to grant the necessary permission.  I can’t think of a reason why these heirs wouldn’t benefit from such a publication, and yet they use the IP laws to commit censorship.

Of course, laws of all sorts are used to harass people, and in the section on crime, Tucker gives us some pretty unpleasant glimpses of this ugliness.  There was a fateful stop sign in Jeffrey’s subdivision, mysteriously removed after causing much heartache and wallet damage, which serves as the main antagonist.  God only knows how many times he’s run this stop sign.  I’m tempted to take a pilgrimage to this fateful intersection.  Maybe we could raise money to erect a marker in memory of this red octagon which extols the virtues of liberty and the advantages of a rolling stop when no one else is around.  (I might add that South Philadelphians, including the cops, have perfected this art.)

Tucker begins this portion of the book by describing the harrowing experience of being arrested for failing to pay a ticket for running the aforementioned stop sign.  He forgot to pay it, no further notices were sent, and the next thing he ever heard about it was a dreadful knock at the door.  A probe into corruption on the part of local officials, which included FBI involvement, adds an interesting, if unsurprising, twist to the story, and the experiences of jail which he reports explode any myth of the accused being innocent until proven guilty.  In jail, you are an animal, as far as the Persons-in-Charge are concerned, and most people in the public go along with this attitude because they think they themselves will never be arrested for anything.

After discussing the pokey, Tucker moves on to a date in court to fight what is presumably a different ticket.  As he awaits his hearing, Tucker witnesses one poor person after the next being ushered in front of the judge to plead their case, only to lose big.  A particularly appalling example comes to us in the person of a woman who stole a pack of lunchmeat from Wal-mart.  For this petty theft she was fined $800 and had her license suspended.  In addition, she was banned from Wal-mart for life.  Interestingly, this was one of the few real crimes on the docket that day—some other poor chap lost his license for awhile for “public drunkenness,” even though he wasn’t anywhere near a steering wheel—but it was handled in perfectly unreasonable fashion.  The sad part is that the State has virtually stripped private business owners of the ability to handle these kinds of things in a more discrete and reasonable fashion.  Public access laws, for instance, prevent Wal-mart from banning this lady for a more reasonable time period, like a year or two; instead, they are forced to take the case to the State, which goes about blowing the crime out of proportion.  One wonders if this is an intended or unintended consequence of public access laws.   Anyone who thinks these laws are necessary needs to talk to a bar owner, who is one of the few businessmen left with much discretion over who patronizes his establishment.   “We don’t really get all the government that we pay for,” says Tucker, “and thank goodness.  Lord protect us on the day that we do.”

One of the things that everyone should know about Jeffrey Tucker is that he’s always pushing the people around him to become better than they are.  In fact, there is a  Facebook group called “Everything I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Jeffrey Tucker.”  One area in which I need to improve is dress.  Tucker’s remarks on this subject make me feel like a veritable slob; he contrasts the sharply dressed hobo on a park bench during the Great Depression with the polo-clad, cubicle-bound nincompoop of the past two decades.  I want to be better at this, but the effort is just overwhelming sometimes, and I feel like I’m trying to climb the proverbial greased pole that H.L. Mencken talks about.  Just the other day I ruined a shirt while ironing it.  It wasn’t the classic mistake of leaving the iron in one place for too long; it was far more complicated than that.  But it made me feel like a failure much like the inability to drink copious amounts of alcohol in the evening makes Tucker feel like a failure.  (This subject is also covered in the book.  The time to try this, he says, is when you are young and your body can handle it.)  It turns out that Jeff was in clothing retail and knows quite a bit about how to dress and how the clothes should fit, and he even knows how to find good deals on sharp outfits.  Read his advice carefully.  I just might have to follow through on this.  In the meantime, I plan to sound him out on why nine out of ten articles of clothing these days would do better as washrags.  I’ve noticed, for one thing, that even smaller-sized clothing assumes that the wearer will have a potbelly and a wide posterior, making me look like a floating cloud of whichever color it is that I’m wearing.

Tucker closes this compendium with a number of reviews of books and movies.  The depth of his comprehension is sometimes astounding; he can remember more from watching a movie once than many can from watching it ten times, and his book summaries are so excellent that he might want to watch out for the IP police.  Tucker’s discussion on Garet Garrett’s novel The Driver got my undivided attention.  The story features Henry Galt, a Wall St. financier who tries to wrest control of a failing railroad company.  This might not seem like much, but it’s certainly more exciting than late twentieth century novels about public housing projects.  A motif in the book is, “Who is Henry Galt?”  Tucker notes that many have speculated that Garrett’s novel inspired Ayn Rand’s character John Galt.  I think that’s putting it mildly, or perhaps putting it in a way that will keep all concerned parties out of court.

By now many are probably wondering what the title, Bourbon for Breakfast, has to do with any of these subjects.  On a basic level, and perhaps most importantly, it seems to indicate a worldview, an approach that would be sanctioned by diverse characters such as Richard Weaver, Joseph Pieper, and Murray Rothbard:  the idea that leisure is an important part of a life well-lived.  Tucker sat down at breakfast one morning with a Bible scholar friend who offered him some coffee—and then offered him some bourbon to go with it.  Mornings, to this man of Hebrew and Greek letters, were for contemplation, and not to be rushed.  Contemplation, or leisure, is necessary for freedom.  It keeps one’s mind from falling into a trance on the treadmill of the corporatist State.  More than that, though, a morning drink says, “I will celebrate; I will enjoy life and not let the taskmasters run me down.”  The State gives us to-do lists, but the morning drinker asks the real questions about life and reminds us of how good we really could be.  The morning drinker, unlike a messianic bureaucrat, doesn’t take life or himself too seriously.  He knows that if there is tragedy, there is also comedy, and sometimes the best way to ward off a demon is to laugh.  Nor does he feel the need to preach endlessly about the big, abstract issues.  He realizes that to know what the government is really like, we only need to observe how its agents act around toilets, stop signs, and stolen lunchmeat.

Of course, the idea of contemplation can become a double-edged sword, especially in the hands of the hopeless, who can turn isolation into pure anti-social misery.  Under the supervision of Jeffrey Tucker, though, it is a fountain of energy.  I don’t know how he accomplishes everything that he does.  I’ll grant that I’m a bit envious of the way he tackles seemingly lost causes with all the enthusiasm of a champion fighter; I myself, when it comes to expending energy, am like a finicky, health-conscious old woman in a buffet line.  There are days when I’m tempted to give up, to sign back up with some kind of limited government program, to find a local Kiwanis Club and live my life getting along just fine with Boobus Americanus.  But after reading this book I am just as convinced as ever that the struggle for a free society is not only worthwhile, it is worth engaging with a sense of joy and wonder and love of life.  In fact, it is the only way we will win the battle of ideas.

Ron Paul, the prospects for 2012, and an anarchist’s response

I like Ron Paul; I really do.  If I had the chance I’d take him to dinner.  He did a lot of good for me in the formation of my own thinking during his campaign in 2007 and 2008.  Please keep all of this in mind as I indulge in what some might consider to be counter-productive quibbling.

Dr. Paul has, of course, become the de-facto leader of the libertarian right and even an admired figure amongst many anarch0-capitalists.  His efforts have brought the Federal Reserve and its counterfeit money under the microscope of mainstream society.  He predicted the economic collapse which occurred in late 2008, though as yet Rudy Giuliani has not apologized for laughing at him like an immature jock during the presidential debates.

There is some chatter about Paul running for president again in 2012, and anyone who’s even remotely connected to libertarian circles has doubtless received umpteen invitations to join this or that Ron Paul group on Facebook.  This weekend he gave a speech at CPAC, and he even won the straw poll, which elicited boos from the advocates of the warfare State.  I took some time last night to listen to Paul’s speech, and while it contained lots of ear candy for the Old Right, I have to say that talk of constitutionalism, limited government, etc., just doesn’t do it for me anymore.

There is a certain naivete, in my opinion, on the part of libertarians.  Limited government sounds good; in fact, if we had a limited government, there would be no “market,” as it were, for the ideas of anarchism.  But limited government seems to be an historical and practical impossibility.  The same could be said for constitutionalism.  There is no good reason, therefore, to expect the situation in the territory commonly referred to as the United States to be any different, especially when one also considers the fact that the government is responsible for interpreting the very constitution which is supposed to limit its powers.

In addition, how can one expect political stability from a piece of positive legislation?  This is essentially what the constitution is.  It is not a statement of natural rights or of political philosophy; it is a document drawn up in part in response to Shay’s Rebellion, which caused the elites of this country to converge to create a stronger central government.  (So can we put all this nonsense about the founders being for small government to bed?)  It is ironic that the constitution gives the government the explicit right to tax; King George III, on the other hand, never enjoyed such a luxury, a fact which almost certainly contributed to the American revolution.  Are we really supposed to believe in light of things like this—and eminent domain, and…..well, let’s not be too pedantic—that the constitution is a founding document of a government that gives two shakes about individual liberties?

Contrast the constitution with the way monarchies were set up:  ”Divine Right” was not, at first, the right of a King to make up a law on his own whim; rather, it meant that all his laws had to be in accord with Divine, or “natural,” law.  It was a means of circumscription.  It, too, was eventually violated, but it took much longer than the constitution, which was “nothing more than a g*ddamned piece of paper” within a few decades, at the very most.

But I digress, a bit.  The point is that this system would seem to be broken, and that there’s no point in trying to work within it in order to rehabilitate order in our society, since its brokenness is related to intrinsic flaws rather than simple mismanagement.  Therefore I believe that Ron Paul could do much more good by being a thinker and speaker than by being a politician who asks neoconservatives at CPAC to consider his cause.  Do you really think he influenced so many people because he came in fourth place in some presidential primary?  Hardly.  It was the ideas he brought with him that did it, and ideas—not politics—are what move society from a lesser condition to a better one.

Congressman Paul seems to believe that working within the Republican Party is the way to promote his ideas.  He is probably in a better position than I am to make this determination.  I’m left wondering, though, if this doesn’t invite a certain kind of adulteration to take place.  Look at what has happened to the Tea Party Movement.  They went from End the Fed to Sarah Palin in only about a year.  Would Ron Paul be better off making himself out to be more on the fringe?  (I know that must sound ridiculous to some people, but from the anarchist perspective it makes sense.)  A sharper line in the sand just might help to prevent the kind of co-opting that political parties thrive on.  Think of the way the conservative movement was watered down and popularized in the late years of the 20th century.

Finally, is it a contradiction to use the political process as a means to promote liberty?  Politics, as Dr. Paul himself has noted, is the art of the majority voting to take away the rights of the minority.  This is anything but liberty and anything but private property rights, which are the foundation of individualism.

All that said, in a world in which Dr. Paul were president, we would be much better off.  Likely the American troops would be out of at least some of the 140 countries in which they are now stationed.  Taxes would be lower.  The first amendment might mean something again, depending upon who the attorney general would be.  This raises a question for the convinced anarchist, whether to side with gradualism or radicalism.  Both have their strong points.  For me, it would seem that radicalism is the answer.  If taxation under Bush at x percent is theft, and taxation under Obama at y percent is theft, then taxation at z percent under Paul—even if it were only hidden taxes such as tariffs showing up as part of the price of a good—would also be theft.  (But don’t think for a minute that Paul would actually be successful at eliminating the income tax.)

I guess it all boils down to the fact that, for me, government as such is the problem, and that it does no good for a good man to become a part of the problem.  Like I said, I like the man.  I’d take him to dinner.  I’d ask him questions about economics and political philosophy.  But not even a man as good as Ron Paul could get me into the political vortex again.

Ten Must Read Books for Your Christmas List

Here is a short list of selected books which I’ve read in the past year which I think are indispensable to anyone’s bookshelf. I have listed them in order of what would seem like a good progression from one to the next for the reader.

1. Richard Weaver: Ideas Have Consequences

With every turn of the page, Weaver clears out the angst of modern existence by fearlessly going after the “sicknesses” of modern society. Readers of this blog will be familiar with Weaver’s qualms over modern education, as well as what he calls fragmentation and obsession. He also discusses egotism in work and art, as well as the dissolution of hierarchy. Weaver devotes the last three chapters of the book to his proposed remedies for the elucidated societal ailments: restoration of property rights, language, and respect for tradition.

2. Frederic Bastiat: The Law

In this short work, Bastiat, who called out the Broken Window Fallacy, discusses some of the absurdities of democratic societies. His principal insight in this work is perhaps that the law is constantly being used by one sector of society in order to try to loot another sector. That might be one of the more accurate and pithy descriptions of politics ever formulated.

3. Albert Jay Nock: Our Enemy, the State

If you think limited government is the way to go, read Nock. He will quite quickly disabuse you of that notion. In this short work, Nock describes the parasitical nature of the State, mixing in surprising observations. One that sticks out in my mind is that term limits are an instrument, rather than a circumscription, of power, since a given term grants a sitting politician nearly free reign in what he does. This was the book that converted me from “limited government” libertarianism to anarcho-capitalism.

4. Buchanan: Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War

This particular book deserves a full length review. Suffice it to say that many in the press have not been friendly to it, but that Buchanan, while sparing the reader no piece of information, is eminently fair in his descriptions of the various power players who were behind the commencement of hostilities in Europe before both World War I and World War II. Buchanan does not look back longingly at what might have been, but rather lays out the mistakes made by the world’s leaders, and the prudent will no doubt take heed of the author’s warnings. Suffice it to say for now that, while Hitler was evil, the West was pulling all manner of diplomatic bloopers which only made the situation far worse than it needed to be. This book is the antidote to the kind of Americanism which always cites World War II as the fundamental moment in State Salvation History which justifies all manner of ill-advised 21st century military excursions.

5. Schall: The Regensburg Lecture

The Rev. James V. Schall, S.J. takes an in-depth look at Pope Joseph Ratzinger’s well-known lecture at Regensburg which sparked protests in the Muslim world. Schall elaborates Ratzinger’s central question of whether or not Islam can be a “reasonable” or “logos-based” faith. The theological opinion known as voluntarism–the belief that God is not bound by reason–is explored thoroughly by the author with respect to Islam. I only wish, perhaps, that certain fundamentalist Christian outlooks which are adding tensions to the world stage would have been discussed as well. In any case, Schall’s great contribution here seems to me to be a fearless exploration of the theological roots of the problems we presently face. The question might then dawn on the reader: Why are we dropping bombs instead of having an honest exchange? (I should add that I don’t know that this last point was Schall’s goal.)

6. Murray Rothbard: The Ethics of Liberty

You all knew I had to get Murray in here somewhere. This book is a tour-de-force, a thorough working out of a positive theory of anarcho-capitalism. The reader will not likely agree with everything Rothbard says, but the achievement here is a broad-based approach to dealing with the various issues that would come up in a stateless society. Rothbard has no fear: He relishes the opportunity to take on those very subjects which many would consider to be begging for the existence of the State, e.g. crime, courts and police.

7. Albert Jay Nock: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Nock did not think of himself as an interesting person, but whoever twisted his arm to write this autobiography certainly did, and to that nameless friend we all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude. This book is an account of the various impressions Nock put together in his mind over the course of his life. His “mind your own business” attitude is refreshing, and his mix of Toryism and anarchism is yields some fascinating results. This book will not offer eye-popping moments of astonishment at every page; it will feel more like sitting in an old man’s living room, listening to him yammer on about what he’s learned in life. But when you finish and put the book down, you will realize that your paradigm has shifted.

8. Mencken: Notes on Democracy

I will pick up and devour anything by Mencken from cover to cover in a matter of days. In this book Mencken fearlessly tackles the problems, triumphs, and absurdities of our sainted political system. Along the way he calls out Americanism, fundamentalism, and even the Rotary Club, and brings up the most unpopular point that a democracy, too, can wield a tyrannical kind of power. While ever skeptical, Mencken softens the blows of his more difficult material with his unique wit. Yet, there are moments in this book that are deeply serious which might indicate just how troubled Mencken was by any number of problems that needed to be faced. The book winds up to a grand conclusion, which explodes on a rhetorical question that will flabbergast the reader.

9. Richard Weaver: Language is Sermonic

This is a collection of a number of essays and other works by Richard Weaver. The first chapter, in fact, is the chapter on language from Ideas Have Consequences. Writers and speakers will find this volume to be indispensable, but this is no ordinary book about writing. Weaver tackles hard questions about the essence of language, and, in the process, seems to stumble, almost unintentionally, upon some of the more important subjects for our time. This is a great book to read on the front porch of a Southern manor. One can almost hear the masterful deliberateness of Weaver’s locution in these pages.

10. Dom Joseph Gajard: The Rhythm of Plainsong

What the hell is this book doing on here? Well, the truth is that Gajard’s book is about more than just Gregorian rhythm. He in fact discusses the most fundamental aspects of rhythm in such ways that all musicians could benefit from his insight. Much of rhythm boils down to arsis and thesis, i.e. the rising and falling motion, which mimics natural movements such as the rising and falling of the foot during walking. How many performances I have heard in which the musicians do not understand the principles discussed by Gajard! Often we over-emphasize rhythm until it is oppressive, or we add a facade of vitality to a piece of music by assaulting every single down beat. Gajard’s book is the remedy for this and many other musical problems. If you can so much as read music, get this book.

Watch the Rally for the Republic Live

At the Campaign for Liberty’s webpage.  Ron Paul is scheduled to speak tonight at 7:05pm CDT.