StephanKinsella.com

Nice article by David Swanson on TomDispatch.com. As noted there, Swanson is an “Organizer” and “founder … of the website AfterDowningStreet.org, [and] was long in the forefront of those calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — and now for bringing them to trial.” And he is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press, 2009). (And according to this post, his book due to a campaign to promote it on Amazon, caused it to reach “the #1 spot in nonfiction, knocking Glenn Beck’s bestseller briefly off its perch.”

[LRC cross-post]

The anti-corporatists nightmare!!

By “Fastidious,” in What I’m Reading/Thinking About: The Case Against Intellectual Property Rights.

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.” – Thomas Jefferson

The process of legal reform–say, of tax law, or patent or copyright law–by which the law ebbs and flows, and continually changes, provoking cries of doom and disaster from biased special interest chicken littles, calls to mind an analysis by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., in his book The Left, the Right, and the State (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2008), pp. xiii-xiv (emphasis added):

What is the state? It is the group within society that claims for itself the exclusive right to rule everyone under a special set of laws that permit it to do to others what everyone else is rightly prohibited from doing, namely aggressing against person and property.

Why would any society permit such a gang to enjoy an unchallenged legal privilege? Here is where ideology comes into play. The reality of the state is that it is a looting and killing machine. So why do so many people cheer for its expansion? Indeed, why do we tolerate its existence at all?

The very idea of the state is so implausible on its face that the state must wear an ideological garb as means of compelling popular support. Ancient states had one or two: they would protect you from enemies and/or they were ordained by the gods.

To greater and lesser extents, all modern states still employ these rationales, but the democratic state in the developed world is more complex. It uses a huge range of ideological rationales—parsed out between left and right—that reflect social and cultural priorities of niche groups, even when many of these rationales are contradictory.

The left wants the state to distribute wealth, to bring about equality, to rein in businesses, to give workers a boost, to provide for the poor, to protect the environment. … The right, on the other hand, wants the state to punish evildoers, to boost the family, to subsidize upright ways of living, to create security against foreign enemies, to make the culture cohere, and to go to war to give ourselves a sense of national identity. …

So how are these competing interests resolved? They logroll and call it democracy. The left and right agree to let each other have their way, provided nothing is done to injure the interests of one or the other. The trick is to keep the balance. Who is in power is really about which way the log is rolling. And there you have the modern state in a nutshell.

Ron Paul visited Loyola University-New Orleans last week–here is a picture of him (center) with Bill Barnett II (left, seated), Walter Block (seated, right), Dan D’Amico (left, standing) and John Levendis (right, standing). As Michael Barnett told me, “Heroic — the greatest living libertarian [Block], the greatest political figure of all time [Paul], and the greatest living economist [Barnett II] all together at one place!” Okay, he’s a little biased maybe, but each of these contentions is arguably true. What an amazing assembly!

Treehugger.com is thrilled at the effects of the recession: Amazon Deforestation Drops 46% In One Year reports that “2008-2009 was a better year for the rainforests, with logging rates dropping 46%. The lowest it’s been since these groups started monitoring in 2004.”

As a friend said, this just underscores the very real fact that environuts hate prosperity. And they hate energy too. As environut Paul Ehrlich infamously said, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

And this is the real reason the alleged environmentalists oppose nuclear energy, even though it is an obvious way to combat “global warming” and pollution. (See Green Nukes, where some greens actually admit it; Nuke Me; Nuclear Spring; Re: Nuclear Spring; Dam Nukes; Greenpeace to advocate nuking the earth?; Access to Energy.)

These fake “environmentalist” misanthropes basically believe humans are a cancer on the earth. These anti-human, anti-industrialist sickos are the real enemies of humanity.

Some good pieces:

• Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto, by Lew Rockwell
• The Toxicity of Environmentalism, by George Reisman
• Environmentalism Refuted, by George Reisman
• George Reisman’s Capitalism, chapter 3B, “The Ecological Assault on Economic Progress”
• Environmentalism or Individualism?, by Robert James Bidinotto

By me. From here (slightly edited):

Hey, I know–let’s trust the same government that imposes FDA costs, taxes, and regulatory roadblocks to set up a patent office to hand out patents to give you partial ownership of others’ property to incentivize you just enough to overcome the costs they imposed on you on the first place with the FDA and taxes and regulations. Beautiful! And if that’s not “enough” incentive, establish a government panel of “experts” to give you “enough” of a reward paid by taxpayers. Beautiful! I like it!

[On the latter point see See Libertarian Favors $80 Billion Annual Tax-Funded “Medical Innovation Prize Fund”; $30 Billion Taxfunded Innovation Contracts: The “Progressive-Libertarian” Solution.]

I’ve ranted before about conspiracy theorists — see, e.g., On Conspiracy Theories. I have several problems with such views.First, they are usually not needed; and they are usually maintained by people who have a naive view of the state. For them, if we can just get rid of the bad guys (and often they are Jews, bankers, capitalists) and elect good ones, things return to normal. Second, the state is evil on its face. It kills hundreds of thousands of people in the open. It is able to do this because it has succeeded in deceiving the people as to its legitimacy (see Hoppe’s Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order). Third, it ignores the fact that the state has internal rules (see Alfred G. Cuzán‘s classic paper “Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?, apparently “revisited” by Cuzán in 2007 [see draft]). People who rise inside the state are good at following these rules; and you can be sure opponents inside the state would latch onto violations of them (remember Clinton being impeached for someting minor?). Fourth, the ‘toids usually have no evidence.

Anyway, Vijay Boyapati brought to my attention this priceless reaction by Rothbard (in a 1989 Q&A after a speech) to a questioner’s suggestion that “the government” is trying to spread AIDS.

This starts about about 49:50:

Rothbard: I never heard of that.. I don’t know anything about that

‘toid: It sounds far out.

Rothbard: Yeah it sounds far out. I don’t see any evidence to that effect. My favorite story about the government medicine was the swine flu caper if anyone remembers that – (interrupted)

‘toid: – what’s the difference?

Rothbard: well that was documented.

[continue reading…]

As previously noted here, I presented a speech in July at Mises University 2009 on “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism.” The audio is available here and the video was just made available. It’s below. As previously noted, this presentation was different than others I’ve done in the past on IP, partly because, as it for students, I tried to start from the ground up, and also to integrate the proper approach to IP with the essential principles of libertarian political philosophy. Thus part of the talk summarized my view of what libertarianism is, and then applied it to IP; this summary view of the libertarian framework was distilled from a more elaborated version, contained my chapter What Libertarianism Is, which appeared in the Hoppe Festschrift, Property, Freedom and Society. An article based on my speech is forthcoming in Liberty magazine.

[Against Monopoly cross-post]