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Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Seneca, stoicism | Leave a Comment »
How to Solve the COVID Crisis – International Man
Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2021
First and foremost, we must hear from all sides in any scientific dispute. In “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mill went even further in this direction: not only must we hear from them all, but we must also be intimately familiar with their arguments. We must be able to articulate them as if they were our own. The last thing we would want to do is to shut them down.
https://internationalman.com/articles/how-to-solve-the-covid-crisis/
by Walter Block
How are we human beings going to be able to kick the butts of COVID creatures infinitesimally smaller than we are? Or are we going to be like Goliath, who fell to the Lilliputian David?
It all depends upon whether we embrace science or continue to denigrate it.
The powers that be are continually and boringly claiming to be the one side that embraces this discipline, while the other denounces it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What, then, are the relevant characteristics of the scientific method?
First and foremost, we must hear from all sides in any scientific dispute. In “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mill went even further in this direction: not only must we hear from them all, but we must also be intimately familiar with their arguments. We must be able to articulate them as if they were our own. The last thing we would want to do is to shut them down.
How do present practices comport with the absolute requirements of science? Not too well—scratch that—horribly. Doctors who disagree with the emerging consensus have been threatened with the loss of their medical licenses.
For example, “The Federation of State Medical Boards warned… that physicians and other healthcare professionals could be at risk of losing their medical licenses if they spread COVID vaccine misinformation on social media, online and in the media.” Misinformation? In this case, that is the considered opinion of licensed and duly qualified physicians! In some cases, doctors have not been disbarred but “merely” threatened with such sanctions. Nor are doctors the only ones to be so treated. Medical researchers cannot lose a physicians’ license, but they can be fired for spreading “misinformation,” that is, taking a non-consensus position on this matter. People in the field with alternative viewpoints are also viciously pummeled by major media for spreading what they claim is false information about COVID.
Thanks to Salk-Sabin, the dreadful polio disease is a thing of the past. Were any researchers who disagreed with Salk-Sabin’s methods treated in any such manner? To ask this is to answer it: of course not. We have not yet solved AIDS, merely wrested it to the ground. It is now, thanks to science, a chronic, treatable disease, not a death sentence. No diverging views on this, and indeed any other successful medical breakthrough, were dealt with in the manner accorded diverging opinion holders on COVID.
Second, although this cannot be found in official descriptions of science, reading in between its lines, we discern the requirement that we should do our best. We should not choose scientists on the basis of irrelevant criteria such as gender or color. If a person’s skin is pink with blue polka dots, it should not matter one whit. The scientist could be a giant or a pygmy, a Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist; good science regards irrelevancies such as these as, well, irrelevancies.
How does our fight against COVID stack up against this criterion? Again, not too well at all. Instead, we are treated to the usual litany of how important it is that the occupants of our laboratories “look like America.” There is now even a plan afoot to impose “affirmative action” on laboratory technicians and researchers. For example, this is the policy of the National Institute for Health in awarding investigation grants. Do we or do we not want to prevent COVID from spreading further and cure those already afflicted? If so, we have to send our first string into the fray, not the bench warmers. We didn’t put a man on the moon or accomplish any other such task with the second team, and we will not do so in this case either.
Then there is the sheer hypocrisy that must stick in the craw of the anti-vaxxers. Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the beauty parlor sans mask is only the veritable tip of this iceberg.
Let us stipulate, arguendo, that everything Dr. Fauci says about COVID is true, from God’s mouth to his ear and then on to the rest of us lesser beings. We pass over the annoying fact that he keeps changing his mind on these issues but not the vociferousness and assuredness with which he speaks about them. From his own point of view, it is imbecilic to sanction opposing viewpoints, to rely upon lesser qualified scientists, and for the folks in charge to continually engage in hypocrisy. When and if he and this ilk learn this lesson, we will have a much better chance of solving the COVID threat.
Editor’s Note: The 2020s will likely to be an increasingly volatile time. More governments are putting their money printing on overdrive. Negative interests are becoming the rule instead of the exception to it.
One thing is for sure, there will be a great deal of change taking place in the years ahead.
That’s precisely why legendary speculator Doug Casey and his team released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions for the Raging 2020s.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Anti-vaxxers, Covid crisis, Federation of State Medical Boards, John Stuart Mill, Salk-Sabin | 1 Comment »
From Press Freedom To Prison Systems, Everything Assange Touches Gets Illuminated – by Caitlin Johnstone – Caitlin’s Newsletter
Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2021
It’s been a constant throughout his life as near as I can tell, from when he was a young man using his technical prowess to help Australian police bring down distributors of online child pornography in the mid-nineties. This curious impulse to bring what is hidden in the dark out into the light where it can be seen is what gave birth to WikiLeaks and all the major revelations about the criminality and corruption of the powerful which resulted from its publications.
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/from-press-freedom-to-prison-systems
The US appeal of a British court ruling on the Assange extradition case has concluded, and the judges will probably not have a decision ready until at least January—a full year after the extradition was denied by a lower court. Assange, despite being convicted of no crime, will have remained in Belmarsh Prison the entire time.
During that time the judges will be weighing arguments they’d heard about the cruel nature of the US prison system, which formed a major part of the reasoning behind Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s rejection of the US extradition request. They’ll be considering the draconian policy of Special Administrative Measures, whose victims are cut off from human contact and from the outside world. They’ll be considering the brutality of the supermax ADX facility in Florence, Colorado whose inmates are kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, and where Assange could easily wind up imprisoned despite the prosecution’s flimsy assurances.
Assange probably never set out on this journey with the goal of calling attention to the abuses of the US prison system as his foremost priority, but, as is so often the case with anything his journey touches, those abuses keep getting pulled into the light of public awareness anyway. His case is now no longer just about press freedom, US war crimes, corrupt governments collaborating to stomp out inconvenient truth tellers, and the malfeasance of US alphabet agencies, but about the abusive nature of the US prison system as well.Consortium News @ConsortiumnewsChris Hedges: The Most Important Battle for Press Freedom in Our Time Chris Hedges: The Most Vital Battle for Press Freedom in Our TimeIf Assange is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting. By Chris Hedges in Washington, D.C. ScheerPost.com For the past two days, I have been watching the extradition hearing for Julianconsortiumnews.comOctober 29th 2021108 Retweets212 Likes
And this is a big part of what I find so endlessly captivating about the life of this extraordinary individual. No matter what he’s doing, no matter where he is, no matter how beaten down and silenced and immobilized they may appear to have him, his life keeps exposing things. Keeps bringing things into the light.
It’s been a constant throughout his life as near as I can tell, from when he was a young man using his technical prowess to help Australian police bring down distributors of online child pornography in the mid-nineties. This curious impulse to bring what is hidden in the dark out into the light where it can be seen is what gave birth to WikiLeaks and all the major revelations about the criminality and corruption of the powerful which resulted from its publications.
And as paradigm-shattering as those many bombshell revelations were, they were arguably small potatoes compared to the criminality Assange exposed by simply standing his ground until the most powerful institutions in the world conspired to drag him from the Ecuadorian embassy and lock him in Belmarsh Prison for telling the truth.
Assange created an innovative publishing platform which allowed whistleblowers to upload files anonymously on the premise that corrupt power needs to be able to communicate secretly in order to operate efficiently. Corrupt power responded by silencing, immobilizing, isolating, imprisoning and torturing him. In so doing, corrupt power exposed itself and its true nature far more than any WikiLeaks drop ever could.
Since Assange’s imprisonment there’s been a jaw-dropping deluge of revelations about the malfeasance of the power structures which rule over us which could not have been exposed to such an extent in any other way.
It was revealed that the US power alliance will openly jail journalists for telling the truth with as much brazenness and despotism as any other tyrannical regime, giving US-targeted nations the ability to rightly call out the hypocrisy of Washington’s concern trolling about human rights.Hua Chunying 华春莹 @SpokespersonCHNIf the #US truly defends freedom, why won’t they allow others to tell the truth when they are making up lies? Why has Mr. #Assange been thrown in prison after being forced to shelter in the #Ecuadorian Embassy in London for 7 years? May 10th 20211,154 Retweets3,307 Likes
It was revealed that because he inconvenienced the most powerful government in the world, Assange has been subjected to abuses which amount to psychological torture according to a UN special rapporteur on torture.
It was revealed that the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate Assange, an earth-shaking discovery we wouldn’t have been able to confirm for decades under normal circumstances, but due to a miraculous combination of partisan feuding and their frantic compulsion to silence him it was confirmed just a few short years after the fact.
It was revealed that CIA proxies spied on Assange and his lawyers at the Ecuadorian embassy and conspired to collect the DNA of his child from a soiled diaper.
It was revealed that the US prosecution relied on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester who collaborated with the FBI.
It was revealed that the western news media are so propagandistic and morally bankrupt that they will viciously smear a dissident journalist for years to manufacture consent for his arrest and imprisonment, and then act completely guiltless when the most powerful government on earth works to extradite him into its dungeons.
And now we’re seeing the same US government which has been plotting this man’s destruction and even death for many years humiliating itself by hilariously trying to argue that he would be safe under their care, just so they can get their claws into him. Like Count Olaf in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events taking on whatever disguise might allow him to nab the Baudelaire orphans.Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ @caitozThe Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most Transparent “So the prosecution’s legal argument here is essentially ‘We promise we won’t treat Assange as cruelly as we treat our other prisoners, unless we decide we really want to.'” The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most TransparentListen to a reading of this article: ❖ The first day of the US appeal of the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in a court of law that the US government could guarantee that it would not treat the WikiLeaks founder as cruelly as it treats its other prisoners.caitlinjohnstone.substack.comOctober 28th 2021406 Retweets789 Likes
The more they come after him, the more damage they do to themselves. It’s like Assange is standing in a beam of sunlight surrounded by vampires, and every time they reach in to grab him they wind up disintegrating their own limbs.
Their old tactics never seem to have the intended effect. The harder they struggle to keep him from being able to expose their crimes, the more of their own criminality they reveal.
It always reminds me of the lyrics to that Johnny Cash song: “Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand, workin’ in the dark against your fellow man/ But as sure as God made black and white, what’s done in the dark will be brought to the light.”
And the struggles of our world today really do seem to come down to a battle between light and darkness. I say this not in any kind of mystical or metaphysical sense, but in the sense that there are on all levels forces which wish to bring the unseen out of hiddenness and forces which have a vested interest in keeping things hidden.
On the global level there are vast power structures which have a vested interest in keeping their misdeeds out of public attention and making sure we all remain confused and misinformed about what’s really going on in the world. On a sociological level there are individuals who have a vested interest in keeping their personal actions out of the light and preventing anyone from clearly seeing what they’re really up to. On an internal level we’ve all got subconscious forces at play within ourselves whose existence depends on avoiding the light of conscious perception.
And on every level there’s a struggle to bring those things into the light. On a global level there are forces working to expose the corruption and tyranny of ruling power structures. On a sociological level there are forces working to expose liars, manipulators, abusers, crooks and psychopaths. On an internal level there are always forces working to bring the endarkened aspects of ourselves into consciousness.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/eJlN9jdQFSc?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
It’s a struggle that’s happening on every level of our species, and Julian Assange seems to be one of the very brightest points in that struggle.
It appears to be a very reliable principle of the human condition that if you firmly and sincerely resolve deep within yourself to desire truth above all else and to seek it at all cost, it causes everything your life touches to move into the light: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Hidden psychological tendencies become seen, understood and resolved. Abusive family dynamics, manipulative behavior patterns and everything untruthful around you and in you all starts to move into the spotlight. Some relationships end, others deepen. It upends your world while grounding you in something far more meaningful than the sources in which you’d formerly sought stability.
This movement into truth can be devastating, humbling, humiliating or downright terrifying, and sometimes all of them at once, because it’s a relinquishing of control and a surrendering to whatever’s true, no matter what that turns out to be, no matter how insecure or embarrassed or inadequate it might make you feel at first. But looking back there’s an immediate understanding that you wouldn’t have had it any other way.
I don’t know Julian Assange personally, but I suspect he may have signed an internal contract like this at some point in his life. The desire for truth, come what may, whatever the cost, whatever the consequences. Whether he did or did not, that has been the result of the luminescent path his journey has blazed through humanity during his time on this planet. And the world is a much better place for it.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Belmarsh Prison, Julian Assange, Press Freedom, Prison Systems | Leave a Comment »
The Misanthropic Bankers Behind COP26 and the Green New Deal – by Matthew Ehret – Matt Ehret’s Insights
Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2021
Following the royal decree, the Bank of England and some of the dirtiest banks in the Rothschild-City of London web of finance have promoted “green financial instruments” led by Green Bonds to redirect pension plans and mutual funds towards green projects that no one in their right minds would ever invest in willfully.
https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/the-misanthropic-bankers-behind-cop26
A vast sweeping change towards a “green economy” is now being pushed by forces that may make an educated citizen rather uncomfortable.
Of course, news reports flash daily showcasing the brave young movement of “eco-warriors” led by Sweden’s “forever 15 year old” Greta Thunberg or America’s 17 year old Jamie Margolin who have become a force across Europe and America leading such movements as the Extinction Rebellion, This is Zero Hour, the Sunrise Movement and Children’s eco-crusade. The young face of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez daily sells the idea that the only way for outdated capitalist forces that have plagued the world for decades to be replaced is by imposing a sweeping Green New Deal that priorities de-carbonization as a goal for humanity rather than continuing to allow the mindless forces of the markets to determine our destiny.
When EU President Ursula von der Leyen had stepped into her office, she lost no time attacking China’s Belt and Road Initiative (which is ironically representing a true 21st century New Deal) by saying “some are buying their influence by investing in dependence from ports and roads”… but “we go the European way”. What is the “European way”? Not the development plans of Charles De Gaulle or Konrad Adenauer who envisioned industrial growth and increasing population as positives, but rather a Green New Deal. Von der Leyen then announced that “I want Europe to become the first CO2 neutral continent in the world by 2050! I will put forward a Green New Deal for Europe in my first 100 days in office…”
Attacking the “mindless forces of the market” and vested power structures of capitalism are not bad things to do… but why must we de-carbonize? Re-regulating the too-big-to-fail banks is long overdue, but why do so many assume that a “Green New Deal” won’t just empower those same forces that have run havoc upon the world for the past half century and just cause more death and starvation than has already been suffered under Globalization?
One might only think to even ask such questions by first confronting the uncomfortable fact that behind such young cardboard cut outs as Thunberg, Margolin, Cortez or the Green New Deal are figures whom one would not associate with humanitarianism by any measure.
Green Bonds and Oligarchs
When we begin to pull back the curtain we quickly run into figures like Prince Charles, who recently met with the heads of 18 Commonwealth countries to consolidate climate emergency legislation which was promptly passed in the UK and Canadian Parliaments. At the end of the meeting Charles said that we “have 18 months to save the world from climate change” and called for “increasing the amount of private sector finance flowing towards the supporting sustainable development throughout the commonwealth”.
Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation .
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Bank of England, City of London, COP26, Goldman Sachs, Green Bonds and Oligarchs, GREEN NEW DEAL, Greta Thunberg, Rothschild | Leave a Comment »
Why Mises Rejected Common Notions of “Progress” | Mises Wire
Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2021
He says: “The term progress is nonsensical when applied to cosmic events or to a comprehensive world view. We have no information about the plans of the prime mover.” I must say that Mises has given rather short shrift to claims of cosmic design, but to him his point was obvious, and one can see why he makes it. His fundamental aim in all his economic and social writing is to defend the system of social cooperation through the free market from all attacks against it.
https://mises.org/wire/why-mises-rejected-common-notions-progress
Ludwig von Mises has some characteristically acute and important comments on the idea of progress in history, and in what follows, I’d like to address some of these. In the way he develops his views, one of the key themes of his notion of ethics plays an important role.
In contrast to those, like Herbert Spencer, who think that human history is progressive because it forms part of larger process of biological evolution, also viewed as progressive, Mises says that in biological evolution, what develops later is not “better,” or for that matter worse, than what has gone before. If natural selection results in one species’ supplanting another, that does not make the second species superior, even if it has traits that we prefer to those of the first. Mises puts the point in this way:
It was one of the shortcomings of nineteenth-century philosophies to have misinterpreted the meaning of cosmic change and to have smuggled into the theory of biological transformation the idea of progress. Looking backward from any given state of things to the states of the past one can fairly use the terms development and evolution in a neutral sense. Then evolution signifies the process which led from past conditions to the present. But one must guard against the fatal error of confusing change with improvement and evolution with evolution toward higher forms of life. Neither is it permissible to substitute a pseudoscientific anthropocentrism for the anthropocentrism of religion and the older metaphysical doctrines.
In what he says about evolution, Mises is in accord with the understanding of most modern biologists.
When Mises speaks of “pseudoscientific anthropocentrism,” what he means is that we human beings project our own importance to ourselves onto the process of evolution, so that we take ourselves to be the goal of history. But, he says, this is not part of science, which is purely descriptive.
As the argument stands so far, it contains a gap. From the fact that science is limited to describing and explaining change and cannot, within its own terms, properly speak of “improvements,” it does not follow that evolution has no goal. That would be true only if the standpoint of scientific description were the only way to assess what has occurred in the historical development of life or if no other way of assessment allowed room for a goal. In speaking of “goal” here, I have in mind a goal of the whole process, rather than the goals of individual persons. It is not part of descriptive science that such goals are precluded but only that they are not included within it.
Mises has anticipated this objection. He says: “The term progress is nonsensical when applied to cosmic events or to a comprehensive world view. We have no information about the plans of the prime mover.” I must say that Mises has given rather short shrift to claims of cosmic design, but to him his point was obvious, and one can see why he makes it. His fundamental aim in all his economic and social writing is to defend the system of social cooperation through the free market from all attacks against it. If people were to say that they have access to God’s plans for history, this might lead them to support interference with the free market, and it is Mises’s opinion that almost all those who did claim such direct access propose interfering with the market. For that reason, he opposes them. It doesn’t follow from this that Mises rejects religion, but to the extent he views it positively, it is religion that confines itself to individual salvation and avoids social doctrines that oppose the free market.
Mises takes aim also at another doctrine of progress. During the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many intellectuals thought that the growth of science and reason made progress inevitable. Mises rejects this view also, as it overestimates the influence of reason on human conduct. He says,
Eighteenth-century social philosophy was convinced that mankind has now finally entered the age of reason. While in the past theological and metaphysical errors were dominant, henceforth reason will be supreme. People will free themselves more and more from the chains of tradition and superstition and will dedicate all their efforts to the continuous improvement of social institutions. Every new generation will contribute its part to this glorious task. With the progress of time society will more and more become the society of free men, aiming at the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Temporary setbacks are, of course, not impossible. But finally the good cause will triumph because it is the cause of reason…. All these hopes were founded on the firm conviction, proper to the age, that the masses are both morally good and reasonable. The upper strata, the privileged aristocrats living on the fat of the land, were thought depraved. The common people, especially the peasants and the workers, were glorified in a romantic mood as noble and unerring in their judgment. Thus the philosophers were confident that democracy, government by the people, would bring about social perfection.
This prejudice was the fateful error of the humanitarians, the philosophers, and the liberals. Men are not infallible; they err very often. It is not true that the masses are always right and know the means for attaining the ends aimed at. ‘Belief in the common man’ is no better founded than was belief in the supernatural gifts of kings, priests, and noblemen.
You might think from all this that Mises has no use at all for the concept of progress, but that is not correct, and it is here that his view of ethics enters the scene. He thinks that ultimate ends cannot be rationally assessed. Nevertheless, almost everyone wants peace and material prosperity and these aims, we can show by strictly scientific, value-free argument, only the free market can achieve. To the extent that the free market is accepted, we can properly speak of progress; but we cannot say that the desirability of the market will lead to its general acceptance. That only time will tell.
In the foregoing, I have as usual confined myself to an account of Mises’s thought and have not sought to assess it critically. Author:
David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: anthropocentrism, Enlightenment, Ludwig von Mises, Progress, pseudoscientific | Leave a Comment »
Erie Times E-Edition Article-Founders knew individual liberty does not trump the greater good
Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2021
The author left out TB and polio. What the author also left out was what your reaction might be if after receiving the polio vaccine you were told you could still get polio, you could still transmit polio and you would have to wear a mask for the foreseeable.
https://erietimes-pa-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=1b38504fa_1345f7b
Maurizio Valsania Guest columnist
President Joe Biden has mandated vaccines for a large part of the American workforce, a requirement that has prompted protest from those opposed to the measure.
Meanwhile, a similar move in New York City to enforce vaccinations has resulted in more than a dozen businesses being fined for flouting the rules.
The basic idea behind the objections: Such mandates, which also extend to requirements to wear masks and quarantine if exposed to COVID-19, are a breach of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which states that ‘no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.’
The objectors ask: Aren’t mandates un-American?
As a scholar who has spent decades trying to unravel the hurdles that mark the beginning of this nation, I offer some facts in response to that question – a few very American facts: Vaccination mandates have existed in the past, even though they have similarly sparked popular rage.
No vaccination foe, no latter-day fan of the Gadsden flag’s ‘DONT TREAD ON ME’ message, would ever gain the posthumous approval of the American founders.
George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and the rest of the group cultivated different visions about America. But they agreed on one principle: They were unrelenting on the notion that circumstances often emerge that require public officials to pass acts that abridge individual freedoms.
Keen sense of civic duty Most of the founders, to begin with, were slave owners, not especially concerned about trampling over and abridging the rights of the persons they held in bondage. But even when they dealt with those they deemed to be their peers, American citizens, their attitude was rather authoritarian – at least by today’s standards.
In 1777, during the American Revolution, Washington had his officers and troops inoculated against smallpox. The procedure was risky. But for Washington, the pros outweighed the cons. It was an order, an actual mandate, not an option that individuals could discuss and eventually decide.
‘After every attempt to stop the progress of the small Pox,’ Washington explained to the New York Convention, ‘I found, that it gained such head among the Southern Troops, that there was no possible way of saving the lives of most of those who had not had it, but by introducing innoculation generally.’
During the summer of 1793 an epidemic of yellow fever struck Philadelphia, then the American capital. It shattered the city’s health and political infrastructure. Food supplies dwindled; business stopped. Government – federal, state and municipal – was suspended. Within just three months, 5,000 out of nearly 55,000 inhabitants died of the infection.
Public hysteria took off. Philadelphians at first pinned the outbreak on the arrival of refugees from the French colony of Saint-Domingue who were escaping that island’s slave revolution.
But there was also heroism. Black clergymen Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, for example, tirelessly transported the sick, administered remedies and buried the dead.
Urged on by Gov. Thomas Mifflin, the Pennsylvania state Legislature imposed sweeping quarantines. And almost everyone complied.
Henry Knox, then the U.S. secretary of war, didn’t object. Knox had fought during the Revolution. He had risked his life on many battles. He had developed a keen sense of what ‘civic duty’ means: ‘I have yet six days quarantine to perform,’ he wrote to President Washington, ‘which of the choice of evils is the least.’
‘Without a flinch’ The epidemic didn’t abate as quickly as expected. By September 1794 the yellow fever lingered in Baltimore, where it had spread from Philadelphia. In 1795 it reached New York City.
One John Coverdale, from Henderskelfe, Yorkshire, England, wrote President Washington a long letter. He advocated more drastic measures, including three weeks of quarantine and policemen strategically placed in every corner to hinder people from passing from zone to zone; and he wanted people ‘to carry with them certificates either of their coming from places not infected or of their passing the line by permission.’
In other words, a quarantine, lockdown and vaccine passports.
No politician we know of at the time considered such measures un-American. In May of 1796, Congress adopted, and President Washington signed, the first federal quarantine law. There wasn’t much controversy. In 1799, Congress passed a second and more restrictive quarantine law. President Adams signed it without a flinch.
‘Ambition’ versus public good So apparently it’s not certificates, quarantines and vaccine mandates that are un-American, as some maintain today.
The argument that individual rights trump the greater good is un-American, or at least out of step with American tradition. It’s an attitude that the founders would have put under the encompassing banner of ‘ambition.’
‘Ambition’ comes when individuals are blinded by their little – or large – egotisms and personal interests. They lose track of higher goals: the community, the republic, the nation. In the most severe cases, ambition turns anti-social.
Ambitious individuals, the founders were sure, are persons stripped of their membership in a community. They choose to relegate themselves to their solitary imagination. They have become slaves to their own opinions.
Alexander Hamilton was tired of being turned into the butt of endless accusations: ‘It shall never be said, with any color of truth, that my ambition or interest has stood in the way of the public good.’
When facing a quarantine, a mandate, or similar momentary abridgments of their liberties, many Americans today react the same way Hamilton did. Like Hamilton, they look beyond themselves, their opinions, their interests. They don’t lose sight of the public good.
Others remain ambitious.
Maurizio Valsania is a professor of American history at Università di Torino. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: mandates, Quarantine, smallpox, Vaccine | 1 Comment »
An Expanded Version of the NAP
Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2021
Regarded by many as the keystone of Libertarian philosophy.
https://an-expanded-version-of-the-nap-60.webself.net/
This essay offers an expanded version of the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). The traditional forms have been very useful as introductory statements into libertarian discussions. However, the Anarchist/Voluntaryist movement has matured to the point where the NAP requires formulations that are more sophisticated.
The simpler versions of the NAP
For the uninitiated, the typical NAP expressions have the advantage of simplicity, such as
“It is wrong to initiate force, threat of force, or fraud against others or their property, without consent”.
This speaks to a shared basic morality at the heart of human interactions. Moreover, it is highly comprehensive: a great deal is conveyed in a single sentence.
However, the expression fails in many cases. If I grab my watch back from a pickpocket, it may seem to a bystander that I am the thief. Relying strictly on simple forms of the NAP does not help, or at best creates confusion. It does not meet the needs at hand.
The need for an expanded formulation
Anyone who has engaged in conversations about the NAP has likely faced challenges, such as edge-cases or other difficult scenarios. Additionally, articles and blogs have been written presenting outright challenges to the NAP itself.
We can easily see the limitations of the simple form of the NAP, by examining what is not mentioned, or at best implied:
- The terms “force” or “aggression” imply coercion by direct human action. They do not specifically mention the words we use, or physical objects under our control. This leaves many actions open to interpretation such as verbal abuse, pollution and other nuisances.
- It does not account for degrees of force. Minor actions can be debatable, such as harmless threats.
- It does not allow for degrees of harm. Trivial aggressions can appear as NAP violations.
- Intent is only weakly implied. Pure accidents can appear just as egregious as willful coercion.
- The concept of consent itself can be misinterpreted; a fraud victim may appear to give consent.
- It does not address actions taken in defense of third parties. This leads to debates as to whether such defense is “initiated” force.
An enhanced version of the NAP
The author wishes to stress that this formulation of the NAP is by no means intended as definitive, complete or final.
The following is offered as an enhanced version of the NAP. It separates and emphasizes the fundamental concepts that underpin the principle, as it pertains to the actors and their actions. The concepts are: Initiation, Intent, Compromised Consent, Harm, and Causal Role.
To consider a human action as wrong, all components of the Non-Aggression Principle must be present:
- Initiation. An action is initiated by a person or by means of property they control
- Intent. The action is intentional, or its results are reasonably foreseeable
- Compromised Consent. The subject either lacks reasonable capacity to give consent to the relevant actions, or has such capacity but is deprived of the choice to freely opt out of the harm
- Harm. The subject experiences non-trivial harm to their person or property
- Causal Role. The action has a sufficiently significant causal role in undermining the subject’s consent.
This formulation has the advantage of being useful across various normal and abnormal human interactions. It attempts to eliminate controversy by detailing the NAP’s components, then applying the situational specifics to these components.
The alert reader will likely notice the use of several subjective terms, such as “reasonably”, “freely”, “non-trivial”, “sufficiently” and “significant”. These are used by design. The purpose of this particular version of the NAP is to simplify discussions about detailed, specific cases. If it is to succeed in this, it must use terms that are both broad enough to generalize, yet meaningful enough to make sense when applying them.
The spectrum of right and wrong actions
Human interactions fall along a spectrum that extends from purely peaceful voluntary actions, to acts of pure violence. My Super Bowl ticket changed hands when my wife purchased it…a purely peaceful exchange. It changed hands when she gave it to me as a gift…again, peaceful. I got into a brawl and hurt a bystander; the ticket changed hands again when I gave it to him…as restitution for the harm I caused. Later it changes hands again…when he is murdered for the ticket.
The issue is not that these examples are difficult to resolve; our common sense tells us exactly which cases are right and which are wrong. The problem is that simple forms of the NAP are not always useful when we try to apply them to specifics. Our time is spent debating how to interpret the NAP and its terms. It is not a failure of our common sense, nor of the spirit of the NAP as a principle. It is rather because the formulation is too broad to adequately handle specifics.
Refer to this supplemental essay for examples demonstrating the value of an expanded formulation.
DEFINITIONS
This essay’s use of the NAP terms is anarcho-capitalist, and based on contemporary scholarly understandings of property, consent, and Austrian economic theory.
Some terms used in the expanded NAP formulation…
“Initiated”
This addresses the particular action that “started it” and makes defensive actions easier to evaluate. For example, the thief “started it” by stealing the watch. If a week later the owner takes it back, the owner did not take an “initial” action even though the two events were spaced apart in time. Rather, he responded to the thief’s initial action.
“Initiated…by means of property they control”
This insures that if physical objects are a factor in the action, the person controlling or responsible for the object is culpable. A dog’s owner allows it to run free and the dog then bites a child. The owner cannot claim to be innocent on the grounds that he personally did not commit the act of aggression.
“Property”
Assumes the scarce-goods (rivalrous, conflictable) model, which includes a person’s body and justly acquired material objects. Ownership is essentially the right to exclude others from use.
“Action”
In general usage the word “action” appears to subsume all forms of human activity. In this essay, “action” implies intent and purpose…the exercise of will. “Action” is therefore contrasted with (and does not include) other human movement such as moving while asleep, or accidental motions. To be sure, the phrase “The action is intentional” is self-describing. However, it is retained to make explicit the importance of intent when evaluating specifics.
(Stephan Kinsella; Patrick Tinsley, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, 07/30/2014)
For example: there is no intent to harm if, while walking, I faint, stumble and injure someone. But if I drive drunk and then injure someone, my driving in this condition was intentional (and, of course, its consequences reasonably foreseeable). This is why intent is a component in affirming or rejecting a NAP violation.
“Compromised consent”
This helps clarify the victim’s ability to agree to the interaction and its outcomes. Any one of the following can be considered a victim, whether they appear to give consent or not: a person sleeping or comatose, a child, a mentally challenged person, a person unaware of the conditions at hand.
“The subject…is deprived of the choice to freely opt out”
The core element of consent is the freedom to opt out of the interaction altogether. Choosing between a 10-year Life policy and a 20-year policy actually entails three options, the third being the choice to opt out. But say a parent pays a ransom for their child’s life. Using the simpler version of the NAP, one might argue they “consented”. However the opt-out aspect is absent and thus consent is “clouded”. Inclusion of the choice to freely opt out makes clear there is no consent.
“Non-trivial harm”
This eliminates unreasonable claims of NAP harm. The traditional libertarian challenge case is shining a flashlight at someone, who then claims a NAP violation, as they did not consent to being struck by light photons. This is trivial harm.
“Sufficiently significant causal role”
The action must have enough significance in causing the harm. Several examples presented in the supplemental essay show the importance of this part of the expanded NAP.
Conclusion
The Non-Aggression Principle is already highly implied as a basis of traditional common law and civil law. As we move toward a stateless society, the NAP will be refined in ever greater detail. Eventually a free society’s legal code is likely to have a highly robust formulation of the NAP as its foundation. This will represent the moral and philosophical aspect of the NAP; but its utilitarian aspect will emerge with each individual application, where the particulars will be examined within NAP legal frameworks.
Mark Maresca
March 2020
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: anarchist, NAP, non-aggression principle, Voluntaryist | Leave a Comment »
Restaurant Inspections – LRC Blog LewRockwell.com
Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2021
Walter Block wisdom
Anacapistan
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/restaurant-inspections/
Subject: Ancapistan question
Good morning Walter,
If I may, I have a question or two about the fabled Ancapistan and the inspection of restaurants.
I’ve heard you mention inspections for various businesses would be well tended to by insurance companies. That makes sense and I follow that thinking.
Might it also be so that banks, accepting that in Ancapistan some kind of institution for lending and savings exists, would be a useful agent for ensuring restaurants are well maintained and don’t make the customers sick?
Perhaps a variable loan rate or adjustable payments according to some metric to be determined about sustained safe weeks or months?
Hope you are well in this very turbulent time. I find myself up and down day to day.
Thanks for your help,
Be well,
Dann
Dear Dann:
This is a contrary to fact hypothetical empirical issue. It is difficult to predict. My prudential judgement says that the probabilities are in this order:
1.private restaurant rating agencies, similar to Consumer Reports, or Good Housekeeping Seals of approval
2.insurance companies
3.banks.
Best regards,
Walter
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Anacapistan, restaurant inspections | Leave a Comment »
The Middle of the Road Leads to Socialism
Posted by M. C. on October 30, 2021
https://mises.org/library/middle-road-leads-socialism
middle_of_the_road_leads_to_socialism_mises.pdf
The fundamental dogma of all brands of socialism and communism is that the market economy or capitalism is a system that hurts the vital interests of the immense majority of people for the sole benefit of a small minority of rugged individualists. It condemns the masses to progressing impoverishment. It brings about misery, slavery, oppression, degradation and exploitation of the working men, while it enriches a class of idle and useless parasites.
This doctrine was not the work of Karl Marx. It had been developed long before Marx entered the scene. Its most successful propagators were not the Marxian authors, but such men as Carlyle and Ruskin, the British Fabians, the German professors, and the American Institutionalists. And it is a very significant fact that the correctness of this dogma was contested only by a few economists who were very soon silenced and barred from access to the universities, the press, the leadership of political parties and, first of all, public office. Public opinion by and large accepted the condemnation of capitalism without any reservation.
1. Socialism
But, of course, the practical political conclusions which people drew from this dogma were not uniform. One group declared that there is but one way to wipe out these evils, namely to abolish capitalism entirely. They advocate the substitution of public control of the means of production for private control. They aim at the establishment of what is called socialism, communism, planning, or state capitalism. All these terms signify the same thing. No longer should the consumers, by their buying and abstention from buying, determine what should be produced, in what quantity and of what quality. Henceforth a central authority alone should direct all production activities.
2. Interventionism, Allegedly a Middle-of-the-Road Policy
A second group seems to be less radical. They reject socialism no less than capitalism. They recommend a third system, which, as they say, is as far from capitalism as it is from socialism, which as a third system of society’s economic organization, stands midway between the two other systems, and while retaining the advantages of both, avoids the disadvantages inherent in each. This third system is known as the system of interventionism. In the terminology of American politics it is often referred to as the middle-of-the-road policy.
What makes this third system popular with many people is the particular way they choose to look upon the problems involved. As they see it, two classes, the capitalists and entrepreneurs on the one hand and the wage earners on the other hand, are arguing about the distribution of the yield of capital and entrepreneurial activities. Both parties are claiming the whole cake for themselves. Now, suggest these mediators, let us make peace by splitting the disputed value equally between the two classes. The State as an impartial arbiter should interfere, and should curb the greed of the capitalists and assign a part of the profits to the working classes. Thus it will be possible to dethrone the moloch capitalism without enthroning the moloch of totalitarian socialism.
Yet this mode of judging the issue is entirely fallacious. The antagonism between capitalism and socialism is not a dispute about the distribution of booty. It is a controversy about which two schemes for society’s economic organization, capitalism or socialism, is conducive to the better attainment of those ends which all people consider as the ultimate aim of activities commonly called economic, viz., the best possible supply of useful commodities and services. Capitalism wants to attain these ends by private enterprise and initiative, subject to the supremacy of the public’s buying and abstention from buying on the market. The socialists want to substitute the unique plan of a central authority for the plans of the various individuals. They want to put in place of what Marx called the “anarchy of production” the exclusive monopoly of the government. The antagonism does not refer to the mode of distributing a fixed amount of amenities. It refers to the mode of producing all those goods which people want to enjoy.
The conflict of the two principles is irreconcilable and does not allow for any compromise. Control is indivisible. Either the consumers’ demand as manifested on the market decides for what purposes and how the factors of production should be employed, or the government takes care of these matters. There is nothing that could mitigate the opposition between these two contradictory principles. They preclude each other. Interventionism is not a golden mean between capitalism and socialism. It is the design of a third system of society’s economic organization and must be appreciated as such.
3. How Interventionism Works
It is not the task of today’s discussion to raise any questions about the merits either of capitalism or of socialism. I am dealing today with interventionism alone. And I do not intend to enter into an arbitrary evaluation of interventionism from any preconceived point of view. My only concern is to show how interventionism works and whether or not it can be considered as a pattern of a permanent system for society’s economic organization.
The interventionists emphasize that they plan to retain private ownership of the means of production, entrepreneurship and market exchange. But, they go on to say, it is peremptory to prevent these capitalist institutions from spreading havoc and unfairly exploiting the majority of people. It is the duty of government to restrain, by orders and prohibitions, the greed of the propertied classes lest their acquisitiveness harm the poorer classes. Unhampered or laissez-faire capitalism is an evil. But in order to eliminate its evils, there is no need to abolish capitalism entirely. It is possible to improve the capitalist system by government interference with the actions of the capitalists and entrepreneurs. Such government regulation and regimentation of business is the only method to keep off totalitarian socialism and to salvage those features of capitalism which are worth preserving. On the ground of this philosophy, the interventionists advocate a galaxy of various measures. Let us pick out one of them, the very popular scheme of price control.
4. How Price Control Leads to Socialism
Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that he called praxeology.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: British Fabians, communism, Interventionism, Karl Marx, Middle of the Road, Socialism | Leave a Comment »
Watch “Racism and Wokeness | Africa Brooke | Mikhaila Peterson Podcast | #120” on YouTube
Posted by M. C. on October 30, 2021
Mikhaila, Africa Brooke, and Dr. Peterson talk about the disappointments and social pressures that made them second-guess “wokeness” and how, instead, one can lean on the backbone of individuality – even when surrounded by a culture that’s not so keen on that idea.
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