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Scott Morales 
There’s nothing wrong with capitalism
There’s nothing wrong with free enterprise
Don’t try to make me feel guilty
I’m so tired of hearing you cryThere’s nothing wrong with making some profit
If you ask, I’ll say it’s just fine
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live nice
So tired of hearing you whineAbout the revolution, bringing down the rich
When was the last time you dug a ditch, baby
What the hell? I’ve been swamped this passed week and haven’t been able to pay attention to the world as closely as I should. I just ran ocular first into this Washington Time’s headline: “White House: All questions answered on Benghazi attack”
Keine Schiesse!
h/t Andrew Wilkow and David Webb (I heard about this bumper sticker on the radio last week, but I think it was David sitting in for Andrew, regardless, I’m including them both)
Be sure to watch all the way to the end. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrjU-HBkmLE&feature=player_embedded
We’ve warned and received derision and dismissal in response. We’ve argued and received denouncements and sardonic denials. Our claims were decried and characterized as far right paranoid fantasy. We’ve been told that our observation of what happens with Big Gov are delusional scare tactics and are meant to instill a Mad Max world type fear on the “gullible” listener or reader. And that its baseless and irresponsible for us to continue to disseminate our ideas.
However, the irresponsibility is not the arguing for these ideas but the close minded instant refutation of the ideas based on who is making the argument and ignoring the argument itself.
Conservatives and liberty lovers have made such arguments in many areas that have simply been dismissed or ignored. My particular niche usually focuses on the explosion of debt, lack of morality, and government gigantism and their consequences (i.e., societal decay). One of the manifestations of those things was the passage of Obamacare. I touched on that wretched piece of legislation several times, but the one that I’d like to mention here was in a blog entitled, “Palin for HHS Secretary”.
(h/t NRO Cartoon of the Day)
“Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not: and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary … Read more
When the planners downshift into planning mode, they know all; they know best, and you best just do as you’re told and remain quiet. We’ll get there when we get there, just fasten your seat belt and don’t ask questions. Of course, most of the time things don’t go as “planned” and a thing known as “unintended consequences” side swipes or T-bones the planner and the plan into a ditch. An example of such an unintended consequence soiling the trousers of a planner was just reported a few days ago by the Washington Examiner.
Apparently, the gas tax isn’t bringing in quite as much as the spenders planned. (Is it ever enough? That’s rhetorical, we know the answer). It’s bringing in less. Why? One reason is that (or so it’s claimed–personally I don’t buy it, but I’ll play along), “President Obama’s push for fuel efficient cars has resulted in better mileage and fewer stops at the pump.” Which means there are less stops to fill up, less gas spilling into the tank, and less taxes to confiscate from the driver. Burn. One planner’s beast, is another planners feast. (I’m not quite sure what that means exactly, but I dig the rhyme.) But have no fear, when faced with an immovable object, the planner does what the planner does best: plan another way to fleece…errr… invest for the public.
I must depart from my recent, and not so recent, pattern of offering a kind of digital Quaalude for the Grok peruser and briefly touch on a truly remarkable event:
“The World Series of Beer Pong… VIII”!
Alas, as a society decays, its parts shrivel and wither in interestingly tragic ways. An exemplar of such decay occurred just the other day. Big Government’s bureaucratic sclerosis hit a Fire Department so hard that it felt it necessary for its, “…22 firefighters and six vehicles…” to remain idle on the shore and watch a man drown in icy water for 13 minutes, according to the Daily Caller. They “…didn’t launch an inflatable boat until just before he disappeared. The firefighters pulled Brown’s body out of the water roughly an hour after they arrived.”
“‘They followed our ice rescue guidelines pretty much to a T,’ Champaign Deputy Fire Chief Eric Mitchell told The News Gazette.”. Whew! Thank goodness. I’m sure they wouldn’t want to be cited for noncompliance. Allay your fears great citizens of Champaign, Illinois, there will be no lawsuits or fines today, only one less citizen, because our Fire Department followed the rules to a “T”. That sounds like a decent trade off, eh?
“Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.” Edmund Burke
Societal decay desiccates many if not all of its valuable features. Its atrophic crumble can be seen in desolate neighborhoods, abandoned youth, personal irresponsibility, and blithely glib leadership; its fetid smell wafts from spoiled brats, contagious selfishness, meretricious celebrities and the worshiping thereof, and narcissism; and it is heard in cravenous silence and ghoulishly giddy laughter at the harm of the innocent. At its root, its core, the essence of the decay is the culture itself. Never have I imagined what I saw this morning on YouTube would take place, let alone in this country. Maybe it’s naivete; maybe it’s the pervasiveness of information in the modern age, where these things have always occurred throughout my lifetime but previously I never heard about them unless it was local; or maybe it’s how I grew up and such horrors don’t penetrate my mind voluntarily. But what I saw is truly horrifying, not only in the brutal act itself, but the insouciant laughter and jokes that accompanied the images in the video.
I never formally placed libertarians into two classes. However, I did recognize a difference but considered one as libertarian and the other as conservative, conservative in the Anglo-American sense: conserving American’s independence, the recognition of unalienable individual rights coming not from man but beyond, and the freedom from tyranny in every form. Doing so because it’s right, and not doing so is a violation of nature, virtue, and morals. I looked at libertarianism as more of a technical means to getting to this conservative moral ground. So, as is usually the case when I read something from Robert Higgs, I’m forced to reconsider my understanding. Higgs’ essay, “Freedom: Because It Works or Because It’s Right?” discusses “…two broad classes…” of libertarians, “Consequentialists versus deontologists”.
Libertarians divide into two broad classes: those who espouse a free society because it gives better results than an unfree society, and those who espouse a free society because they believe that it is wrong to deny or suppress a person’s right to be free (unless, of course, that person is suppressing the equal right of others to be free). “Consequentialists versus deontologists” is the oft-encountered labeling of this difference. It is unfortunate that so much energy has been devoted to infighting between these two groups.
Taxpayer funded blog commenting? Maybe. If the loquacious Ray Guarino that mercilessly comments on the Nashua Patch, is the same Ray Guarino that’s a Transportation Planner at the Old Colony Planning Council in Brockton, MA, a government entity, then it appears so. It may not be. They may not be the same person, or he’s retired, on leave, or on break. But from what I gathered, I have a strong suspicion that taxes might have been used to fund political comments for the Patch; at the very least, if my suspicion is correct, there’s the appearance of it. I wonder if taxpayers in Abington, Avon, Bridgewater, Brockton, East Bridgewater, Easton, Halifax, Hanson, Kingston, Pembroke, Plymouth, Plympton, Stoughton, West Bridgewater and Whitman, Massachusetts know they may have funded content for the Patch. Not their local Patch, mind you, but Nashua’s Patch. Alas, I should include that this planning council also gets funds from various State and Federal departments, so you might have paid, too.
I usually don’t simply cite an article to read without offering something to say on my own. However, today, anything that I would offer would be superfluous. Steyn, brilliant as ever. The Massacre of the Innocents
This reminds me of the famous Nietzsche bathroom wall graffiti: God is dead. – Nietzsche Nietzsche is dead. – God
A cunning legerdemain is in the works, and, if it were me, I’d follow and do what Obama is doing. Think about the Fiscal Cliff/Sequestration for a moment. Faultless tax increases and faultless spending cuts, and, more importantly, among those spending cuts are juicy, delicious Defense cuts. This is a big spending Democrat’s wet dream. If you don’t believe me, ask Howard Dean, who said that the Fiscal Cliff:
“…is actually the best deal progressive Democrats are going to get. And here’s why. One, we get the Clinton tax rates on everybody. Will it cause a problem? Yes. There will be a short recession, and it will be painful. But two, we get Defense cuts. Republicans are never going to agree to that. And three, there are some human services cuts, which we’re not going to like. But it’s the least possible damage.”
So, if I was a big spender turned on by the sloppy inefficiencies of big government, why the heck would I not want to go over the cliff? And does anyone deny that Kaptain O is a big spender? The guy has racked up over $6 trillion in debt in one term and is on track to rack up more debt than all the other presidents combined. What’s even more impressive is that he has nothing to show for it! Try to do that if you’re fiscally prudent. You can’t. It can’t be done unless you’re awash in other people’s money and blow through it like a Secret Service agent blowing through a line of cocaine off a hooker’s belly. So, if I were a Obama, I’d do what I could to guarantee we careen well over the cliff and land somewhere well beyond the slope–pull a Thelma and Louise and jettison 80 mph into the canyon.
Ah, to have rose colored glasses. I wish I could look at life’s trials and just see lollipops, unicorns, and rainbows (or better yet, their adult counterparts: beer, football, and darkened rendezvous). I’ve made efforts to see lollipops and rainbows before and, once North Korea opens up, I plan on checking out those unicorns too, but it’s always been an effort to see the fluffy benignities. Most of the time, I see things as they are. And drek is drek. No matter how hard I squint, dress it up, and tell myself that it’s perrrty, it’s still drek. It’s like an Oliver Stone movie; the title is compelling, but if I submit to optimism’s seduction, I know that once I plop down the cash, sit in the theater and the strip starts-a-rollin’ out will spill retarded conspiracy theories stemming from Oliver’s American self-loathing and unrelenting mother crush (hey, he makes stuff up, so can I). They’ll spill like the putrid sewage from Eddie’s motorhome in Christmas Vacation, it’s dreck.
So to look at the situation in Cairo through bloodshot, rosy eyes and convince yourself that the Muslim Brotherhood is “moderate, regular old political” just after its leader, Morsi, declared himself above the law is beyond foolish and naive, it’s drek. But to the New York Times, it’s lollipops and rainbows.
In that it’s out there being discussed, it’s a very heartening read. I meant to get this out a few days ago, but I couldn’t get the time to write this up until now. Skip, thanks for finding and sharing Dr. Rahe’s piece. It reminds me of many things, I’ll touch on just a few.
First my answer to Skip’s last question in his post: there must be, if we’re to survive with liberty. I don’t believe that conservatives and libertarians are that far apart at our core. But I do believe there will always be a constant re-drawing of the line between what is and is not a function of the state when conservatives and libertarians debate. I think that’s good. Our dogma is not settled and probably, hopefully, never will be; that’s what makes us more vibrant than the left. And I think most of the disagreements can be resolved with Federalism. Now, onto a few thoughts.
Though F.A. Hayek is often claimed by the libertarians as one of their own, I believe for the exact reason mentioned in Rahe’s article he belongs in the conservative realm. He did believe in what he called the Extended Order, which, in a nutshell, is the application of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand to social traditions, mores, and virtues. It is the understanding that pieces of wisdom pass down through history because, by definition, they were beneficial to a society’s success. Society thrived and flourished because of innumerable things learned and inculcated into a society and eventually were done so subconsciously. Things that weren’t beneficial were pruned away and withered. Traditions, behaviors, and virtues evolved and hardened. It is precisely these traditions that enable a long and transcendent view of a society, and why they must be cherished. And resistance must be applied when it is sought to remove, deviate, or pervert them for the immediate illusory gain– which brings us to Burke and Montesquieu, but I digress.
“Angry New Yorkers say Obama pledge to cut red tape ignored by FEMA” reports Fox News.
Looks like FEMA isn’t working again. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. Those that are surprised deserve what they get. Big government can’t work, doesn’t work, can never work, has never worked, so to keep voting for it over and over again is a fools errand. Alas, given the results of the last election, there are evidently many fools en route.
“We are the people – we are the middle class, and we are getting the finger,” said fruhttp://granitegrok.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=40134&action=edit&message=1strated resident Scott McGrath, who personally spoke to President Obama and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo when they came to Staten Island to inspect storm damage earlier this month. “You were there when I met Obama, and I told the president … that the middle class was getting the royal finger. And he said, ‘FEMA works for me.’”
“FEMA ain’t doing nothing,” McGrath added. “They keep going around in circles.”