Liberty Maven

Ron Paul used his five minutes during yesterday’s markup of a bill to recognize the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to showcase his foreign policy philosophy of neutrality and non-intervention.

Paul shines when he has more than a couple minutes to represent his position, especially on foreign policy. He makes a point to emphasize his philosophy is not one of isolation from the world, but one where we don’t stick our nose where it doesn’t belong.

Neo-conservatives like to use the expression “cut and run” when describing the Ron Paul-style non-interventionist desire to pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and close our many bases in other countries. If we embraced the “cut and run” strategy instead of the “surge” strategy we would already be well on our way to winning the so-called “War on Terror”. I use the words “on our way” to emphasize that such a war can never be won in the classic sense. There can only be varying levels of success.

The idea would be to trade in America’s my-gun-is-bigger-than-yours foreign policy for a more constitution-oriented, defense-focused effort. Sure, it would permit the terrorists to openly claim victory. So what? This is the kind of victory that, in the end, helps reduce terrorism. Once victorious, what is their recruiting incentive?

I know what you’re thinking: “But they hate us because we are free! They’ll just continue what they are doing!”

“They hate us because we are free” is the neo-conservative equivalent of the “truther” claim that “9/11 was an inside job”. Just because it becomes a convenient narrative for pundits on either side doesn’t necessarily make it true.

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Bear with me. This is going to be a long and random deluge of my thoughts on the state of politics in the USA as we begin the year 2010.

In 1773 it was Britain’s tea tax on the colonies that moved the American revolutionaries to protest by dumping tea into the Boston harbor. In late 2007 a tribute to that protest occurred on it’s 234th anniversary when $6.04 million was raised in a single day for Ron Paul’s Presidential campaign. In 2009 the Tea Party tribute reached some kind of critical mass with various protests all over America.

Did this happen because the U.S. citizens suddenly realized that their government no longer represented them? Or did this happen because they were just pissed that Barack Obama was elected President instead of Johnny “Maverick” McCain?

It’s important to look at the origins of this “movement”. It all goes back to Ron Paul, or rather, Ron Paul’s grassroots supporters. They were the nuts that commissioned a freakin’ blimp to fly up and down the east coast “advertising” their candidate. They were the nuts that littered America with signs (homemade and otherwise) in every city, town, and suburb. They were the nuts that organized following each debate to vote for their candidate in the post-debate text polls.

They were in your face and you either hated it, tolerated it, or loved it. No matter what your reaction, you can’t deny their dedication. I’m not sure I see that kind of dedication from the Tea Party movement yet. Even though they try to portray that they are angered at the growth of government, many seem to be dedicated to their dislike of Barack Obama and not much else. Bad-mouthing Bush now, comes off as merely lip-service or useless 20/20 hindsight.

Ron Paulers have been doing it since 2007 and are still doing it. The evidence is all around us. Ron Paul’s books are consistent best sellers. His Federal Reserve audit bill has 317 sponsors, including every House Republican and over 100 Democrats. That bill, in the form of an amendment, is contained within Barney Frank’s financial regulatory bill that passed the House and is now waiting for Senate action. Paul is omnipresent on main stream media outlets like CNN, FOX, and MSNBC. He’s a political celebrity that draws huge crowds for conferences and speaking engagements. Politicians seek endorsements from him. In a word, he is “hot” right now, politically speaking.

The best thing to conservatives was for Barack Obama to be elected President. It has galvanized and united many Republicans, libertarians, free market economists, and many independents disillusioned with America’s power elite. However, below the surface runs a very deep divide when it comes to foreign policy. This divide is between those like Ron Paul who support non-intervention and those that support our current policy, the Bush doctrine of preventive war.

Interestingly, this divide cannot be found between Democrats and Republicans. Fundamentally, both parties support the Bush doctrine of preventive war. They may disagree on the specifics of tertiary issues like which country to invade, but there is no difference on policy. This “invade or die” policy is the poison pill that will ultimately bring about our demise because we simply cannot afford it any longer.  Perhaps it should be rephrased, “Invade and die… eventually.”

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My consulting work at the Westin Grand in Georgetown absorbed each of five December days until early evening, so I thought I wouldn’t get to see much of D.C. on this trip. The first three nights I took long walks down M Street, enjoying the 40 degree air, such a contrast with L.A. (in the high 70’s that same week) and the holiday bustle in the shops. It wasn’t until Thursday, my last full day in D.C., that I realized that the National Mall was a short 20 minute walk to the south, straight down 23rd street, and off I went.

Shortly past George Washington University and down a gentle slope loomed the Lincoln Memorial, huge and compelling even from blocks away. I had been there years ago in the daytime, mingling with crowds, and was somewhat impressed, but I had not anticipated the nighttime effect. Approaching the broad steps, I started to feel some unusual, primal emotions as the visual impact took hold. The structure atop the mound is a faithful copy of a Doric temple, not unlike a restored Parthenon. The exterior is illuminated with floodlights, and there is somehow a dark interior contrast to the emanations of the shining white marble statue of Lincoln within, which seemed to me to glow with power, like a captured being of fire, and to reach out between the spaces of the 36 massive columns. I realized that ancient psychoactive architectural techniques had been used with impressive effect. In fact, designer Henry Bacon had used as his general model the Temple of Zeus in Olympia. On the steps were light crowds, laughing and lively, but people became silent within. The sheer size of the statue in its huge vault would be enough to engender reverence, whether it were of Zeus or a politician.

For a while it was enough to stand and gaze at the figure in silence. Then I started reading the inscriptions on the walls. First, the second inaugural address on the north wall, then the Gettysburg Address on the south wall. Finally I returned to the statue and read the inscription directly above Lincoln’s head (written by Royal Cortissoz, American art historian and art critic):

IN THIS TEMPLE
AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE
FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION
THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
IS ENSHRINED FOREVER

A temple! Here’s a quick review of what a temple is, per Webster: “ A building devoted to the worship, or regarded as the dwelling place, of a god or gods or other objects of religious reverence.”

I was almost dizzy at the implication: the unstated purpose of the Lincoln Memorial was to deify Lincoln. Was this kosher? I wondered. Certainly it went against the concept that “all men are created equal,” and separation of church and state, and the founding fathers’ break with monarchy, with its divine right of kings.

The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922, when the Civil War was still a living memory for many. Was deification of Lincoln a means to solidify the North’s victory, the unification of the country and the emancipation of the slaves?

I pondered the other well known presidential memorials.

The Jefferson memorial, completed in 1943, was patterned by its designer, John Russell Pope, after the Roman Pantheon, a temple dedicated to all the gods.

The Washington Monument was built by Freemasons in the 1880’s to be, in part, a “shrine of the ancient craft.” Webster on the original meaning of “shrine”: “A place regarded as holy because of its associations with a divinity or a sacred person or relic.” Washington, himself a Freemason, is referred to as a “Worshipful Master,” though the Freemasons go to lengths to explain that the epithet “worshipful master” does not deify a person, which would be blasphemous, but only designates him as “venerable.” Dan Brown’s elaborations aside, the oft noted phallic nature of the Washington Monument might be a more productive approach. The world’s biggest lingam stone!

Anyway, the question is: With all the importance we place on our humanistic origins, where do we get off sneaking in deification of our mortal politicians?

From a governance point of view, deification seems practical. We are a gigantic republic, and we often have to use whatever is handy to keep our people together and somewhat obedient. Certainly if our founding leaders are now gods, then national cohesion would behoove us.

What about modern practice? Do we still deify presidents? Perhaps all the pomp and expense surrounding presidents while they’re alive is a form of deification. If so, that would be a modern version. In 1840, Edgar Allen Poe is said to have knocked on the White House door to discuss a government job with President John Tyler. He did meet with the president, though he, Poe, was drunk and the appointment did not ensue. Can you imagine a drunken poet knocking on the White House door today, asking to see the president and then seeing him? Well actually, you’d probably have to be a drunken poet to try it. We have made the president into the most important person in the country, with his own fiercely guarded giant mansion, jet plane, fleet of limos and the rest, when in fact he’s just our top bureaucrat. Perhaps we need to believe in an exaggerated importance of leaders for the sake of national identity, but that’s a weakness in the state, not a strength.

I don’t know if we need a second American revolution to bring us back to our original humanistic concepts. Revolutions stray notoriously far from their stated intentions. We’d probably end up deifying the people who led the charge, analogous to encasing the likeness of secularist Jefferson in a pantheon.

Would it be too much to hope, though, that an American president now and then could personally dispense with the excessive trappings and just do his job? Of course, the downside might be that if he were at all successful we’d probably deify him.

Doug Lasken is a retired L.A. high school English teacher and freelancer. Write to him at doug.lasken@gmail.com

D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

If you want the Supreme Court to hear this argument please make a tax-deductible contribution for this purpose to the Downsize DC Foundation.

Why this is important

Statism is the belief that politicians and bureaucrats should have broad powers to use force against citizens. In its most virulent forms Statism killed more people in the 20th Century alone than all of the individual non-governmental murderers in the history of the world, COMBINED!

Professor R.J. Rummel estimates the total murderous death-toll of Statism at about 170 million people!

Not even the Black Death of the Middle Ages, or the Flu epidemic of 1918, can approach these numbers, even if you combine the totals from those two epidemics and reduce the estimate for the total number of murders committed by governments.

But the terrible statistics for Statist murder still only tell part of the story. We must add to them the statistics for the mass theft, imprisonment, and torture committed by governments against innocent people. These measurements of State criminality are even more vast, so much so that they are literally incalculable.

The State, and the belief-system that fosters its criminality — Statism — are the great scourges of human existence, against which no other source of death and destruction can remotely compare.

Of course, in reaction to all of these blood-curdling facts the fool argues that such things could never happen in this country. The same foolish belief was held by people in Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, and a hundred other places, before such things DID happen in those countries. But such naivety is also exposed by one other crucial fact . . .

Murderous and violent crimes by the State have already been committed by our government, on a massive scale. A partial list would include . . .
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Here is yet another example of why we should remove ourselves from Afghanistan.

Decorated Marine, Foreign Service Official resigns

Maybe we all should be asking ourselves what is the purpose of our interventionist foreign policy? What makes us think we can help (I use that term loosely) Afghanistan where others have failed miserably?

We’re lost — that’s how I feel. I’m not exactly sure why we’re here,” said Specialist Raquime Mercer

The soldiers’ biggest question is: what can we do to make this war stop. Catch one person? Assault one objective? Soldiers want definite answers, other than to stop the Taleban, because that almost seems impossible. It’s hard to catch someone you can’t see

The chaplains said that many soldiers had lost their desire to help Afghanistan. “All they want to do is make it home alive and go back to their wives and children and visit the families who have lost husbands and fathers over here. It comes down to just surviving,” said Captain Masengale.

Full Article

What an interesting discussion Judge Napolitano had with the wonderful Robert Higgs on Freedom Watch last Friday.  They discuss how Barack Obama is more easily compared to Herbert Hoover than FDR.

Speaking of Robert Higgs, he will deliver a lecture on Monday evening at George Mason University. The event is free and is hosted by the Mason Economics Club and the Future of Freedom Foundation. For more details see the FFF web site and scroll down to the events section.

One book near the top of my must-read list is Thomas DiLorenzo’s Hamilton’s Curse.  Having previously read The Real Lincoln and listened to DiLorenzo speak in person and on talk shows like Baltimore’s Ron Smith Show, I am already a fan.  Today at the Future of Freedom Foundation, George C. Leef references DiLorenzo’s book as he gives his own scathing rundown of how Hamilton and his legacy has greatly ruined this country.  Here’s a small piece:

…Hamilton looks pleasant enough in his portrait on our $10 bill, but he was an arrogant egomaniac.

Hamilton was a determined opponent of Jefferson’s laissez-faire philosophy at every turn. When it came to trade, he demanded high protective tariffs because he thought, in the mercantilistic tradition, that if a nation produced “its own” goods rather than purchasing them from “other countries” it would become stronger. Mercantilism was inseparable from economic nationalism — the foolish and destructive idea that political boundaries have great economic significance. (We still suffer grievously from this idiocy, of course.) Individual American consumers would be harmed by artificially high prices for items they might have bought less expensively from producers in other countries, but Hamilton was not concerned about the problems of individuals. His obsession was with “strengthening” the nation.

In the early years of the United States, Hamilton battled against Jefferson’s reading of the Constitution as placing severe limits on federal authority. To Hamilton and his Federalist allies, the wording of the Constitution, especially the enumerated powers of Congress, meant nothing more than an intellectual game of trying to invent interpretations that gave the government “inherent” powers that it was not specifically given. Contrary to the sensible, restrictive reading of the Constitution defended by Jefferson, Hamilton insisted that the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses were meant to give the federal government almost limitless powers.

Leef then goes on to discuss the traitorous presidencies of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and disasters in the form of the 17th Amendment, the income tax, and the Federal Reserve Act.  I highly recommend reading the entire article.

Judge Andrew Napolitano takes a look at the Wilson fiasco from a different angle than most of the mainstream media, which tends to focus on the “respect” that the [office of the] President of the Unites States “deserves”.  The Judge points out that Wilson shouted “you lied!” while the president was claiming that illegal aliens would not receive health care benefits under the “public option” proposal, and then examines this with respect to the Constitution’s “Equal Protection” provision.

The Constitution imposes on the government numerous burdens that we as individuals do not have. For example, I can tell my nephew to keep quiet at the dinner table because I don’t like what he said about grandma, but the First Amendment prevents the government from keeping him silent on a street corner when he criticizes it. Similarly, I can give a gift to some of my nephews and nieces because they are great kids, but I don’t need to give gifts of equal value, since I can spend my money on gifts however I wish. But the government has some burdens here that individuals do not. The Constitution requires that the government treat all persons similarly situated in a similar manner. This is the essence of “Equal Protection,” which the Constitution requires of the states and the federal government.

Napolitano goes on to cite case-law in which the Supreme Court has ruled that states may not deny people the right to an education based on citizenship status, and undoubtedly  “an education is in the same class of social benefits as providing health care.”  He points out that Obama with all his collegiate accolades certainly must know this.

Can anyone really suggest that the Harvard Law School-educated University of Chicago-employed professor of constitutional law did NOT know the law when he contended that the Congress can keep universal health care away from illegals? He must have known that, short of amending the Constitution to re-define “persons” and “Equal Protection”, whatever the Congress makes available by way of social services to the general population, it must make available to all persons.

There is no question that under the present law, Congress simply cannot pick and choose which “persons” to whom it will afford social benefits and to which “persons” it will not. How could the president not have known that?

Read Judge Napolitano’s article at FoxNews.com.