Liberty Maven

It’s quite amusing (if not nauseating) to hear McCain and Palin calling Obama a socialist at every turn if you pay the slightest attention to the ideas McCain embraces.  A nice little article at HighClearing.com successfully reams McCain for his hypocrisy:

The word “socialism” can mean many things to many people, anything from Western European style social welfare to state ownership of the means of production to the New Deal or the Great Society or a wide range of other usages. I’ll let those who know (or at least claim to know) more about the real meaning of the word have the debate over which usage is proper (mostly because I hate debates over whether somebody is using a politically-charged word correctly). Instead, I’ll engage the McCain rhetoric on its own terms.

McCain, just like Obama, believes that taxes should be levied for the purpose of funding social programs that redistribute income downwards. (We’ll leave aside, for the moment, the fact that both of them also believe that taxes should be levied for the purpose of funding a bloated military-industrial complex and other things that redistribute at least some of the income upward.) McCain and Obama may envision different forms and scopes for those programs, and those differences may or may not have profound consequences in practice. However, the McCain rhetoric is being employed to argue that just about any downward redistribution is a type of socialism. If it is (at least in McCain’s usage of the term) then McCain is a socialist. Maybe not as much of a socialist as Obama (we’ll leave aside welfare for the rich, for the moment) but a socialist nonetheless.

Read the rest here.

A hero of Liberty Maven, Thomas J. DiLorenzo wrote a fantasic article at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute discussing the detriments of central banking schemes that have put us into this economic crises.

Ask yourself this question: was the housing price bubble, which has burst, caused by (a) a Fed policy of too much liquidity, which caused artificially low interest rates, which in turn caused a great deal of malinvestment, or (b) a Fed policy of too little liquidity which caused high interest rates and a credit-starved economy? If you chose answer b, congratulations, you may have a future as a celebrated author, historian, and Wall Street Journal commentator.

Answer b is a theme of a truly ridiculous article by John Steele Gordon in the October 10 issue of the Wall Street Journal online entitled “A Short Banking History of the United States.” The article is an attempt to defend the Fed, its founding father, Alexander Hamilton, and the regime that it finances. (Gordon is the author of a book entitled Hamilton’s Blessing which sings the praises of a large public debt, something that Hamilton himself called a “public blessing.”)

Enjoy the rest of the article here.

D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

Quote of the Day: “When I was young American politics were fairly straightforward: conservatives let you keep all your money in return for telling you how to live your life, while liberals let you live as you pleased in return for all your money. Now the only difference is whether they want your money or your life first.” — D.A. Ridgely

Subject: Overcoming the “Charlie Brown Syndrome”

When people learn I’m working to downsize DC they assume I care about the coming election. They say things like, “This must be your busy season!” Actually, it’s our slow season. Our growth statistics tend to drop during elections.

People are distracted by the sport of the contest, and by the hope that things will be different this time. But this is like thinking Lucy will finally let Charlie Brown kick the football. You’ve got to hand it to Charlie; he’s not a quitter.

But given the evidence, maybe he should be.

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I wish I had paid more attention to politics in High School. I didn’t come to libertarianism until I was in my early twenties. A mock debate in a Michigan high school played out a bit like what the real debates could have been. Along with McCain and Obama, the mock debate included a student representing the views of Libertarian candidate Bob Barr. The student had never heard of Barr nor the Libertarian Party prior to planning for the debate.

Matt Tanyi, who played Barr, said it was important that students heard a different set of views.

“All you ever hear about is Democrats and Republicans. This opened my eyes to the need for an opposing view point,” said Tanyi, who’d never heard of Barr before the mock debate.

As Barr, Matt criticized government spending habits and talks of going to war with Iran.

“The government is money hungry. It’s going to spend as much money as it can get out of you,” Tanyi said. “Just because a country may have weapons of mass destruction is no reason to go to war. America is not the world’s police.”

The debate was put on by the school’s advance placement U.S. government and politics class.

Teacher Andy Nester said the debate helps students better understand the candidates.

“They learn the passion behind how these different groups believe the government should operate,” Nester said. “And when the students hear these things coming from their peers, it’s believable to them.”

The teacher, Andy Nester, deserves praise for including at least one of the third party candidates in the mock debate. That is more than can be said of the debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which strictly limits the participation of third party candidates with thoroughly un-American and unfair requirements.

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The Bob Barr factor was discussed at length on CNN’s Situation Room yesterday. Of course the entire segment was dedicated to Barr’s spoiler role rather than focused on the actual issues. Watch it below.

Judge Andrew Napolitano

Judge Andrew Napolitano is the Senior Judicial Analyst for the FOX News Channel, but he is not your usual FOX neo-conservative drone. He also co-hosts a FOX News talk radio show called “Brian and The Judge“. The Judge is a leading voice for strictly following the Constitution in all matters of law.

He called Ron Paul the “Thomas Jefferson of our day” at the Future of Freedom Foundation conference back in the summer of 2007. He has several wonderful liberty loving books including his most recent, “A Nation of Sheep” and his older one, “Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws“.

If you haven’t heard Judge Napolitano speak check out his radio show, read his books, and listen to this hour long interview he did with Kurt Wallace on Ron Paul Radio in November of 2007.

Also, highly recommended is his most recent (as of this writing) editorial in the Wall Street Journal, “Most Presidents Ignore the Constitution: The government we have today is something the Founders could never have imagined“.

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See all Liberty Maven Liberty Heroes on our Liberty Heroes page. We will continue to post them periodically until we run out of heroes.

Ron Paul appeared on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow tonight. He again answered the question about running as an Independent or Third Party candidate with the ballot access spending and marginalization arguments. What Paul doesn’t seem to realize is that his own candidacy on a Third Party/Independent ticket could have been a status quo breaker with the support he had.

He then has some strong words for Maddow’s liberal ears as he attacks Obama and McCain saying they both have the same ideas on foreign policy and monetary policy.

Bob Barr will join Ralph Nader and Chuck Baldwin at a debate in Ohio. All three campaigns have confirmed their attendance. The debate will be held tomorrow October 30th beginning at 4pm. It is being held at the City Club of Cleveland.

This is truly short notice. One wonders how many people will show up. No word yet on television outlets picking it up. Since it is scheduled for tomorrow it seems unlikely any will.

Invitations have been sent to Obama, McCain, and McKinney but they have yet to confirm.

This is being reported by Ballot Access News and it is on Barr’s public event schedule.

Reason Magazine asked several writers, associates, comedians, and people associated with the magazine in various ways five questions about the upcoming election. Drew Carey dodged the first question a bit which was,  “Who Are You Voting For In November?”.

The other questions are semi-serious, including the gem, “Leaving George W. Bush out of consideration, what former U.S. president would you most like to have waterboarded?”

I was pleased to see that Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt received their share of votes for the waterboarding question. I was quite disappointed in the many people choosing to vote for Obama. Well, it seems most are voting more against McCain than for Obama. Bob Barr received a few votes and even McCain got a few.

Here is Drew Carey’s response:

1. Who are you voting for in November? Anybody but McCain/Palin. Seriously. I’m begging you.

2. Who did you vote for in 2004 and 2000? I voted for the Libertarian candidate both times just to be puckish.

3. Is this the most important election in your lifetime? No. I believe the answers to all the problems we face as a society won’t come from Washington, it will come from us. So the way we decide to live our lives and our decisions about what we buy or don’t buy are much more important than who we vote for.

4. What will you miss about the Bush administration?

5. Leaving George W. Bush out of consideration, what former U.S. president would you most like to have waterboarded? None of them. The sooner we stop coming up with lists of people to waterboard, the better.

One of my favorite responses comes from Charles Oliver:

1. Who are you voting for in November? I won’t be voting for president. If I did, it would be for Bob Barr because, as imperfect as his candidacy is, he’s the only one who is at least talking about a noninterventionist foreign policy, rethinking the war on drugs, and shrinking the size of the federal government.

2. Who did you vote for in 2004 and 2000? To the best of my memory, the last presidential candidate I voted for was Ron Paul in 1988. I’d like to say I have some grand philosophical reason for not voting, but the reality is that no candidate since then has excited me enough to get out and vote.

3. Is this the most important election in your lifetime? No, because, while John McCain and Barack Obama may differ on some particulars, they share the same fundamental view of government. Whichever one wins, there will be an expansion in the size and scope of the federal government, especially if, as is likely, the Democrats increase their majorities in Congress.

4. What will you miss about the Bush administration? I’ll miss most all of those posts on National Review‘s The Corner that gushed over Bush (and Dick Cheney) like the diary entries of a school girl confessing her love for the Jonas Brothers.

5. Leaving George W. Bush out of consideration, what former U.S. president would you most like to have waterboarded? I guess I’d waterboard Woodrow Wilson because, among many other reasons, he led the United States into World War I and presided over the creation of the Federal Reserve. I’d say the world has been suffering from those decisions almost a century now.

Read the other numerous and mostly interesting responses here.

D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

Quote of the Day: “Bad ideas can only bear the weight of reality for so long.” — Greg Jesson

Today we’ll compare the cases of Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul, and John Stossel, beginning with this . . .

If you oppose fiat currency and centralized government banking, and would like to abolish the Federal Reserve and legal tender laws in favor of free market banking and free market money . . .

And you think the best way to achieve these things is to put the right people — people who believe as you do — in positions of power, then . . .

It would have been reasonable to assume, prior to seeing him in action, that Alan Greenspan was the “right person” to head the Federal Reserve.

You could have justifiably assumed, based on Greenspan’s previous writings and statements, that he would use his position to not only control the damage done by the Fed, but also to argue for its abolition.

None of these things happened. Instead, the opposite happened. Greenspan betrayed every economic principle he had previously professed. Putting a presumed “right person” in a position of power did not have the right result.

To contrast with this example we can compare the case of Ron Paul. Ron Paul has always said the right things, and done the right things too.

Two different “right people” have produced two different results. What are we to conclude from this?

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