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Giving Up on Freedom: School Vouchers
Posted by M. C. on December 14, 2023
December 12, 2023
Vouchers constitute a direct violation of what is called the libertarian non-aggression principle, which is the core principle of the libertarian philosophy. That’s because vouchers are based on the initiation of force — i.e., taxation — to get the money to fund the vouchers.
Needless to say, vouchers are based on the continuation of the public-school system. They are simply a reform vehicle to enable some parents to use the coercive apparatus of the state to enable them to take their children out of the public-school system and place them in a private school, using the voucher to assist them with the private-school tuition.
Thus, vouchers are not freedom. They are actually antithetical to freedom.
One of the questions about libertarianism that has long fascinated me is: Why have so many libertarians given up on freedom? Everyone is given just one life to live. It seems to me that if there is anyone who would want to experience that one life as a free person, it is libertarians.
And yet, so many older libertarians gave up on freedom decades ago, and many younger libertarians have already given up on freedom.
Why?
Let’s look at one big example of this phenomenon. Let’s consider, for example, the massive governmental apparatus of public schooling, which is the crown jewel of American socialism at the state and local level. The state governments and local governmental school boards provide education for children. Students are there by state mandate. The state sets the curriculum and selects the textbooks. The teachers and administrators are employees of the government. Funding is through the coercive apparatus of taxation. Indoctrination, regimentation, and deference to authority are the name of the game, just like in the military.
In other words, there is nothing voluntary about public (i.e., government) schooling. As a socialist institution, it is the very antithesis of educational liberty.
What would educational freedom mean? It would mean the end of all governmental involvement in education, just as we have no governmental involvement in religion. No more compulsory-attendance laws. No more school taxes. No more government schoolteachers or administrators. No more government-approved curricula and textbooks. A total separation of school and state. A total free market in education.
How would the poor receive an education? How do the poor go to church? It’s the rich and the middle class who build and maintain the churches with their donations. No one excludes the poor. That’s the way freedom works in religion. It gives us an idea of how freedom would work in education.
Yet, freedom is not the position that many libertarians take. Many of them have settled on supporting the concept of school vouchers.
What are school vouchers? They are nothing more than a socialist reform measure, one that is based on the same principle of coercion on which public schooling is based. With vouchers, the state taxes one group of people and gives the loot to another group of people.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Freedom, Libertarian, non-aggression principle, school vouchers | Leave a Comment »
Doug Casey with Some Thoughts on Phyles, Islam, and Warfare
Posted by M. C. on December 14, 2023
by Doug Casey
An open-source guerrilla war (to use computer jargon) is a new thing and much worse from the nation-state’s point of view. For one thing, it’s almost impossible to win. That’s for the same reason the behemoth IBM had its lunch eaten first by Apple (founded by a couple of hippies in a garage), then the PC (with thousands of independents writing code, strictly on their own). It’s the nation-state fighting hundreds of what amount to phyles, whose main common denominator, at the moment, is that they’re all Islamic. But that’s going to change soon.
I trust you’ll excuse some “stream of consciousness” style writing on my part. My crystal ball showing what we’ll see in the years to come is a bit cloudy. But I think the concepts below will tie together in disturbing ways…
Let’s start with the subject of phyles.
The concept of phyles originated with the sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson, in his seminal book The Diamond Age. I’ve always been a big fan of quality science fiction. There’s no question sci-fi has been an excellent predictor of both social and technological trends.
The book, set mostly in China in the near-term future, posits that while nation-states still exist, they’ve been overwhelmed in importance by the formation of phyles. Phyles are groups of people who are bound together by whatever is important to them. Maybe it will be their race, religion, or culture. Maybe their occupation or hobby. Maybe their world view or what they want to accomplish in life. Or it might be a fairly short-term objective. There are thousands—millions—of possibilities.
The key is that a phyle might provide much more than a fraternal or beneficial organization (like Rotary or Lions) does. Phyles might provide insurance services very effectively, since a like-minded group—held together by peer pressure and social approbation—eliminates a lot of moral risk. It might very well offer protection services; a criminal who might not fear taking out a citizen “protected” by a state, would think twice before attacking members of the Mafia.
People are social. They’ll inevitably organize themselves into groups for all the reasons you can imagine. In the past, technology only allowed people to organize themselves by geography—they had to be in the same area. That’s changed over the last century, with the emergence of the train, the car, and especially the airplane. The same with communication. The telephone and television were huge leaps, but the Internet was the catalytic breakthrough. It’s now possible for people to reach out all over the world to find others that are their actual countrymen—those with whom they have a real kinship—not just some moron that shares a piece of government ID with them.
As things develop, people will discover—or create—places where their loyalties lie. The nation-state has mostly been an inefficient, counterproductive, and expensive nuisance; it’s rapidly becoming completely insufferable. And dangerous. The people living off the State (which is to say acting as parasites upon their “fellow citizens”) are, however, going to resist having their rice bowls broken.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: guerrilla war, Islam, Open-source, phyles, Warfare | Leave a Comment »
Ayn Rand ‘The Humanist Perspective”
Posted by M. C. on December 13, 2023
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Ayn Rand, Humanist | Leave a Comment »
Biden, Media Gaslight People about Inflation
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
by Ron Paul | Dec 11, 2023
Sadly, the increase in nominal wages gained by the recent series of strikes is unlikely to keep up with the declining real wages resulting from the Federal Reserve’s assault on the dollar’s value. This is why, contrary to the claims of many progressives, working people are the victims, not the beneficiaries, of price inflation.
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/biden-media-gaslight-people-about-inflation/
President Biden recently repeated the claim that high prices are caused by greedy businesses. Biden is not alone in trying to gaslight the people into thinking price inflation is rooted in the actions of private individuals and not the fiat money system Americans have lived under since 1971. In the media we see excessive consumer spending on luxury items, for example, being blamed for continued price inflation. The fact is that increased consumer demand can only cause prices to rise in those sectors of the economy subject to the increased demand. Prices increasing across the economy are always the result of the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy.
Trying to minimize the harm of inflation, some people in government and media will insist that, while many prices for goods are higher than they were pre-lockdown, they are still lower than were prices in the 1990s when you consider that the quality of these goods has increased. The argument is that buyers are getting higher value today than 30 years ago. Of course, any increased quality is because of market-driven innovation. If America had a free-market monetary system, instead of central bank-controlled fiat currency, prices would drop as quality increases.
It is also important not to ignore the fact that the Federal Reserve’s devaluation of the dollar’s purchasing power creates an incentive for individuals to spend money as soon as they receive it and a disincentive for them to save. This is because the dollar will have less value a year from now than today. Therefore, high levels of spending are a rational response to an irrational fiat money system.
High prices and supply shortages were inevitable after the lockdowns. However, prices would have adjusted back more if the Federal Reserve had not pushed interest rates to zero. While the Fed has raised interest rates, it has not raised rates to anywhere near where they would likely be in a free market. In fact, rates are not at historically high levels, yet many worry the Fed’s rate increases are pushing the economy toward a recession. This shows how addicted Americans are to the Fed’s “easy money,”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Biden, Gaslight, inflation, Media | Leave a Comment »
Why the United States Military is Clueless When it Comes to Ukraine
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
I fear that the U.S. politicians and military leaders still fail to grasp that the “war” in Ukraine really was a special military operation. Russia did not unleash its full capabilities. The Russian General Staff, following the guidance received from President Putin, took great pains to avoid massive civilian casualties. Russia left a majority of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in place. Russia declined to destroy Ukraine and the West’s ISR platforms and satellite systems. Those actions are what you would see if Russia went on a total war footing.
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/why-the-united-states-military-is-clueless-when-it-comes-to-ukraine/
The two-part Washington Post report on the failed Ukraine counter offensive was written primarily to blame Ukraine for the debacle and exonerate the United States. My analysis of those articles (here and here) highlighted astounding miscalculations and malpractice by U.S. and NATO advisors. The fundamental flaw is the U.S. military personnel are pretending to have experience that they do not have. The U.S. military is like a Driver’s Education school. They are qualified and competent to teach students how to drive a car on city streets. They can teach how to drive in reverse, how to parallel park and how to navigate getting on to a super highway. But they are not qualified to teach GT race car drivers how to be competitive at the 24 Hours of Le Mans or the Indianapolis 500.
The Ukrainian counter offensive required having trained soldiers with a mix of skill and competence similar to that required of professional race car drivers. But they were not properly trained. They got the equivalent of a driver’s education class. Guess what happens when you put those “students” in a race with professional drivers? Yep. Massive car wreck.
To extend the race car metaphor, professional drivers also have the best equipment and crew teams ready to service those vehicles if there is a problem. Ukraine was given a patchwork system of NATO tanks and personnel carriers that lacked standardization (several of us wrote about this earlier this year, including Brian Berletic, Doug MacGregor, Scott Ritter and me) and proved unreliable in combat conditions.
Another major flaw that sabotaged the Ukrainian attack at the outset was the lack of air power. No NATO army in history has successfully attacked a heavily defended position without the benefit of fixed and rotary wing aircraft providing close air support to troops on the ground. Russia controlled the air, not Ukraine and certainly not NATO. And Russia had something critical that Ukraine did not — first-class air defense and drone capabilities.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: US military, Why the United States Military is Clueless When it Comes to Ukraine | Leave a Comment »
What Just Happened?
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
“All these idiots whose ‘identity’ is literally a ‘protected class’ are not protesting anything. Their whole victim act is sponsored, enabled & signal boosted by every powerful institution. The entire elaborate charade amounts to power petitioning itself.” —Aimee Terese on X
And now, an even bigger question looms: with Wokery unraveling on campus, will it now also unravel the Party of Chaos — and its ability to act as Globalism’s fifth column undermining our country? Personally, I think it is indeed the beginning of the end of all that, especially the disgraced intellectual class of America’s ability to play along for mere social status brownie points.
James Howard Kunstler
If you haven’t discerned this yet, the Party of Chaos — Globalism’s “fifth column” in America — lost ground badly in early December even as the country supposedly enters its annual Christmastime coma. You know what a fifth column is? I will explain: it is a subversive enemy force operating inside a nation to sabotage its interests. The Party of Chaos, of course, is the party of “Joe Biden” the fictitious “president” euchered in plain sight to that position via flagrant chicanery in the 2020 Super Tuesday primary and then the free-for-all fraud-o-rama of the general election that year.
This subversive Party of Chaos (with Marxist characteristics), has worked overtime for years to mindfuck Americans into destroying their own country. Just think of the absurdities you are asked to swallow daily and the punishments meted out for opposing them. It all came to an interesting inflection point lately with the three presidents of exalted universities failing spectacularly to cover their asses in congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.
At issue was why, after years of grandstanding on the oppression of victim groups, and censoring, silencing, cancelling, and crucifying alternate opinions, they gave their students and faculty a pass in recent weeks on yelling for the extermination of Jews. Wow, did that business disorder the whole Woke cosmography! I’ll tell you why:
My people, the Jews, including a major chunk of the intellectual class, assumed leadership in the Woke crusade because the Holocaust of the 1940s established us as the world’s premier oppressed victim group. That badge of honor stuck for decades. Seventy percent of American Jews vote for the Party of Chaos, which used to be the Party of Civil Rights, which used to be synonymous with truth and justice. Thus, for decades, we American Jews were able to feel marinated in virtue.
Incidentally, the reason American Jews went all in for the Civil Rights movement was because after the big war and all its horrors they felt a victory for expanded tolerance and acceptance in America — the defeat of “Jim Crow” in particular — could only be a good thing for Jews, who, by the way, had demonstrated that a former “out” group could succeed spectacularly in 20th century America if permitted to try, which suggested that other “out” groups could too, and ought to be allowed to try. For Jews, America turned out to be the promised land, and one can easily see how that rhetoric jibed so well with Martin Luther King and his followers in the 1960s.
But the Civil Rights crusade is history now and American intellectuals, Jews especially, appear to be secretly disillusioned and rather ashamed at the less than satisfactory results, such as intractable black poverty and crime. Successful American Jews have been out of their own ghettos for decades, and they have no desire to live adjacent to any black ghetto if they can help it — though they would never dare admit it. However, they flocked to and flourished in the ghetto of elite academia, where they could make a good living in the commerce of ideas, luxuriate in enhanced social status (especially at Ivy League schools), with the bonus of fabulously easy work requirements (two classes a week and then summers off, what a deal!).
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: fifth column, Party of Chaos, Wokery | Leave a Comment »
Canadian Human Rights Commission Labels Christmas Celebration “Discrimination Grounded In Colonialism”
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
by Tyler Durden
Trudeau’s “Happy Holiday” present to Canada.
The cancerous spread of woke ideology into every facet of society and government is more obvious in some places compared to others, but every so often the movement crosses a line and sparks considerable opposition. In the US, the social justice movement seems to have hit a few snags; numerous companies adopting and promoting ESG related propaganda have been pummeled with successful boycotts, losing billions in profits and in stock value. Overall public sentiment is quickly turning against major universities as a root source of woke beliefs. And, government officials pandering to the extreme left are confronted with increasing vitriol from the populace.
It would seem that Canadians are also hitting their limit these days when it comes to the far-left, and it took a thinly veiled attack on Christmas to do it.
Part of the ongoing invasion of the woke movement involves regular attempts to undermine Christian holidays as “problematic” and archaic. Leftists argue that increasing diversity (mostly through open border policies or illegal immigration) requires increasing inclusion at the national level. Meaning, it is not for immigrants to adapt to the west, the west must adapt to them. National celebrations like Christmas are therefore a representation of “discrimination” because they are being given preference over minority holidays.
This was the message given by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) in a paper published under the radar in October. The treatise on “Religious Intolerance” was then condemned in a motion unanimously adopted on Nov. 30 by the House of Commons, the lower chamber of the Canadian Parliament. The paper cited Christianity’s two biggest holy days (Christmas and Easter) as examples of “present-day systemic religious discrimination” linked to colonialism because they are statutory holidays in Canada.
The CHRC was established by the Canadian government in 1977 and claims to be an “independent” watchdog. It is empowered under the Canadian Human Rights Act to investigate and to settle complaints of discrimination in employment and in the provision of services within federal jurisdiction. The group is similar to the ACLU in that its momentum is ever to the deepest reaches of the political left. Their ideological positions carry weight in the higher echelons of government; for example, their paper attacking Christmas has since been avidly defended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The woke all-or-nothing argument against state recognized religious holidays is built on a host of illogical demands. First and foremost, Canada is a majority Christian nation, with 53.3% of the population identifying as Christian, 34.6% identifying as non-affiliated, and around 12% identifying with several other faiths. The next largest religious group in Canada is Muslim, representing only 5% of the religious population.
But what about that 34% of people who are non-affiliated? Do they feel discriminated against by national Christmas celebrations? No, not really.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Canadian Human Rights, Christmas, Colonialism, discrimination | Leave a Comment »
US-Made Munitions Used In Israel’s White Phosphorous Attacks On Lebanon; WaPo
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
by Tyler Durden
#Napalm by any other name#
War crimes are OK if you are helping a “friend”.
The Israeli army used US-manufactured white phosphorous shells in a brutal attack on south Lebanon in October, the Washington Post reported Monday, citing an analysis of shell fragments found in the southern Lebanese village of Al-Dhahira.
A Washington Post journalist came across the remnants of three 155-millimeter artillery shells near the border. Production codes found on the shells indicate that they were made by ammunition depots in Louisiana and Arkansas in 1989 and 1992.
Residents told the journalist that the shells in question “incinerated at least four homes.” Nine people were injured in the white phosphorous attack, which reportedly took place on October 16, including three who were hospitalized.
Photos and videos verified by Amnesty International show the white phosphorus falling on Al-Dhahira on October 16. “Israeli forces continued to shell the town with white phosphorus munitions for hours,” trapping residents in their homes until 7:00 AM the next day, locals told the Washington Post, adding that they now refer to that evening as the “black night.”
Israel has used white phosphorous on southern Lebanon over 60 times since the war began in October, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). “The Israeli army fired artillery shells containing white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon, in military operations along Lebanon’s southern border between 10 and 16 October 2023,” Amnesty International said on October 31st, adding that the October 16 attack must be immediately investigated as a war crime.
Israel claimed its use of the banned munitions was in line with international law, given that they used them to create “smokescreens” and not for targeting, according to an army statement.
However, the October 16 white phosphorous attack took place at night, when “smoke would have little practical use … and [when] there were no Israeli troops on the Lebanese side of the border to mask with smokescreens,” Washington Post said.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Israel, US-Made, WaPo, White phosphorous | Leave a Comment »
New Orleans Restaurants Under Attack
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
The next time you hear that a private restaurant has not passed the review of a government agency, do not blithely assume there is something wrong with the former. It may well be due to the failure of the latter.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/139704332
The headline practically screamed: “30 New Orleans area restaurants fail health inspection, some for bugs or dirty kitchens.” Undoubtedly, many people in the Crescent City as a result reduced their take outs from these eateries, several of them world famous, and also decreased eating out in them. If so, they did so in favor of grocery stores, which now seemed relatively more reliable, health-wise. This might be somewhat of an exaggeration, since the story allowed that “… more than 16 … don’t have food safety certificates to ensure their kitchens meet health standards.” As far as we know, they were perfectly clean, but merely lacked proper government certification thereof. Should the local citizenry be worried?
The more discerning of us have to be forgiven for asking: Who do you trust more: the restaurants themselves, or the government health inspectors? The former can lose money from dirtiness, the latter cannot, at least not, personally, for failing to make accurate assessments.
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What is the solution to this conundrum? The course of action emanating from this present quarter is to substitute private certification agencies for the ones perpetrated by government. Is this the ravings of a radical free market advocate such as myself? Is this a mirage, something just plain crazy that can never be implemented? Yes and no. As to the former, this appellation certainly fits me. I hold an endowed chair in free enterprise economics at a local university. As to the latter, it is no concoction in my fevered brain. Rather, capitalist certification agencies are to be found all throughout the modern economy. Let us count some of the ways.
But, before I do, let me explain the difference between licensing and certification. In both cases, a test must be passed. But with the former, if you do not pass the exam, you may not legally engage in the industry. For example, if you fail the bar exam, you cannot work as a lawyer. If you do not pass the medical examination, and worked in the capacity of a physician anyway, you are a criminal and can be incarcerated. In sharp contrast, if you do not score high enough in the exam for Certified Public Accountant, you can still keep financial books for your clients; it would only be illegal to pass yourself off as a CPA.
Where else besides accounting is certification, not licensing, in operation? One aspect is brand names. McDonalds, Walmart, Microsoft, Toyota, and thousands of other companies large and small, stand by their wares and offerings. They are in effect insuring their customers that what they purchase from them is of a certain quality.
Another example is testing laboratories.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: licensing, New Orleans, private certification, Restaurants | Leave a Comment »
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