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Droning On

By on May 30, 2010 2

Oops! British Petroleum sends its flunkies to the Gulf of Mexico to carry out a dangerous and ill-conceived project without adequate safeguards, and a disaster results that claims eleven lives. British Petroleum gets a stern lecture from our President Incarnate.

predator drone

Oops! Our President Incarnate sends his flunkies to Afghanistan to carry out a dangerous and ill-conceived project without adequate safeguards, and a disaster results that claims twenty-three lives. I look forward to the President’s stern lecture to himself.

An economics prize for Krugman, a peace prize for Obama – they really give Nobels away like candy these days. (Yes, I know those two prizes technically come from different organisations.)

Selective Responsibility?

By on May 25, 2010 0

Just saw Jack Conway (Rand Paul’s opponent) on Olbermann, explaining that he can woo conservative-leaning voters away from Paul because “I’m fiscally responsible in certain areas.” So which are those other areas where he’s fiscally irresponsible?

Apparently foot-in-mouth disease is rife on both sides of the aisle in the Kentucky senatorial race.

C for Vendetta?

By on May 23, 2010 5
As we tear through the statute book,
we’ll do something no government ever has:
We will ask you which laws you think should go.
– Nick Clegg, to the British public
You’ll be free to do anything you wish.
If you don’t like controls – repeal them.
– Mr. Thompson, offering John Galt the job of Economic Dictator

Nick Clegg the liberator?

Nick Clegg is promising (CHT Tom Palmer) all sorts of libertarian goodies, including “the end of the controversial ID cards scheme” and “the scrapping of universal DNA databases.” Other state intrusions to be abolished include “limits on peaceful protest,” the “storage of … email records without good reason” (whatever that last means), and schools’ right “to take a child’s fingerprint without parental permission.” Clegg and his Tory allies are supposedly planning to inaugurate the “most radical redistribution of power from the state to the people for 200 years.”

Yeah, yeah, it all sounds sexy. But I remember the Reagan and Republican “Revolutions,” Bush I’s “no new taxes,” Clinton’s “era of big government is over,” Bush II’s “humble foreign policy,” and Obama’s “hope and change.” As for Clegg’s side of the pond, I remember Thatcher’s Hayekian rhetoric and Blair’s antiwar rhetoric.

Let’s just say I won’t be holding my breath.

If people want freedom, they should think about taking it rather than waiting for some politician to keep his promise to give it to them.

Fun Quotes from Rand Paul’s Website

By on May 23, 2010 4

Here.

(Admittedly, the line about how “the percentage of our federal budget spent on national defense would increase” could be misleading, since just about any minarchist wants to increase the percentage spent on defense – namely, by merely slashing defense spending drastically, while eliminating most other spending. But the line about “robust funding,” and his support for the Afghanistan adventure, don’t support a charitable interpretation.)

Electoral Race

By on May 19, 2010 43

Just saw Rand Paul on Rachel Maddow’s show doing a not very good job of explaining his opposition to anti-discrimination laws.

Rand Paul

Paul did make a few good points – like the one about how the liberal case for forcibly desegregating private restaurants backfires by bolstering the conservative policy of forbidding private restaurants to ban guns – but obviously thought their application to the issue was so obvious that he didn’t explain that application clearly enough for viewers new to such ideas to grasp. (I’m not even sure that Maddow understood that Paul was against forbidding private restaurants to ban guns.)

Paul seemed like he was evading the issue, because he was. Saying that the north has been desegregated since the 1840s was ludicrous; and calling civil rights legislation an obscure issue from a long time ago was like putting a gun to his head (presumably in a consenting restaurant).

I’m not interested in giving Paul any advice, exactly; since seeing this video I don’t even feel like giving him the kind of well-wishing non-support I gave his father. All the same, what Paul should have done is to argue that voluntary efforts at fighting discrimination are more effective than governmental efforts.

But to do that, Paul would have had to talk about a) the indirect (not just the direct) discriminatory effects of government policies, and b) the nonviolent means of fighting discrimination. (And I’m not even talking about the possibility of raising Rothbardian doubts about the legitimate property titles of the segregated businesses of the south. Baby steps, etc.) But he said nothing about either (a) or (b), and I suspect hasn’t thought much about them.

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