MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Don’t Kid Yourself About the Ignorance of American Voters

Posted by M. C. on October 26, 2024

“Immediately before the 2004 presidential election, almost 70 percent of U.S. citizens were unaware that Congress had added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, though this was a giant increase to the federal budget and the largest new entitlement program since President Lyndon Johnson began the War on Poverty.”

“In 1964, only a minority of citizens knew that the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO…the organization created to oppose the Soviet Union.”

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/dont-kid-yourself-about-the-ignorance-of-american-voters/

by Joseph Solis-Mullen

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A couple weeks back, the managing editor here at the Libertarian Institute, Keith Knight, posted on Twitter/X about voter ignorance. The post, which featured the headline “Monetary Policy by the Taylor Rule,” along with the associated equation, concluded with the comment: “What % of voters know this and can comprehend this? How long would it take to teach everyone? Democracy is a joke, privitize [sic] everything.”

While voters might be forgiven for not being able to parse the arcane occult of highly mathematized macroeconomic policy—no matter their other scholastic qualifications, those lacking graduate training in economics are unlikely to be able to do so—a survey of voter competency across a broader range of metrics provides no great comfort.

Indeed, Knight’s criticism and prescription stand.

Consider the following recent examples a quick search revealed:

  • 2017 Annenberg Public Policy Center Study: This found that only 26% of Americans could name all three branches of government, while 33% couldn’t name any branches at all, underscoring a lack of basic civic knowledge.
  • 2010 Pew Research Center Knowledge Survey: Around 45% of respondents did not know that the Republican Party was generally considered more conservative than the Democratic Party, indicating a basic lack of understanding about the ideological differences between the major parties.
  • 2018 National Election Studies: A significant number of voters misidentified which party controlled Congress. Despite widespread media coverage, many voters were confused about which party had the majority in the U.S. House and Senate, demonstrating low political awareness.
  • 2010 Survey by Xavier University: This survey found that one-third of voters did not know that the Bill of Rights is part of the U.S. Constitution, revealing a gap in basic constitutional knowledge.
  • 2019 Quinnipiac University Poll: This found that a significant percentage of Americans, over 50%, believed that Social Security was funded by a government trust fund rather than through a pay-as-you-go system where current workers’ payroll taxes fund current retirees’ benefits.

These instances illustrate a wide range of voter ignorance, from misinformation to a lack of knowledge about key political processes, policies, and historical facts. They highlight the challenges voters face in making informed decisions in elections—and this is hardly new!

Consider these earlier instances of voter ignorance, provided by the political scientist Jason Brennan in his Against Democracy:

See the rest here

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Questions That Only Libertarians Are Asking

Posted by M. C. on October 26, 2024

by Laurence M. Vance

It is only libertarians who are asking these questions and getting to the real issues. It is only libertarians because libertarianism is based on the timeless principles of individual liberty, economic freedom, private property, and a government limited to the protection of these things. Libertarians don’t just hold to these principles when it is expedient or popular to do so. This is what sets them apart from the proponents of every other political philosophy.

Questions That Only Libertarians Are Asking

Although on the surface, Democrats, liberals, socialists, and progressives seem to be ideological opposites of Republicans, conservatives, nationalists, and constitutionalists, and although both groups are often contrasted with moderates, populists, centrists, and independents, in reality, every one of these groups has something in common: their opposition to libertarianism.

Libertarianism

Libertarianism is the philosophy that says people should be free from individual, societal, or government interference to live their lives any way they desire, pursue their own happiness, accumulate wealth, assess their own risks, make their own choices, participate in any economic activity for their profit, engage in commerce with anyone who is willing to reciprocate, and spend the fruits of their labor as they see fit — as long as their actions are peaceful, their associations are voluntary, their interactions are consensual, and they don’t violate the personal or property rights of others.

Libertarians maintain that as long as people don’t infringe upon the liberty of others by committing, or threatening to commit, acts of fraud, theft, aggression, or violence against their person or property, the government should leave them alone and not interfere with their pursuit of happiness, commerce, personal decisions, economic enterprises, or what they do with their body or on their property.

Libertarians thus believe that —

Individuals, not society or the government, should be the ones to decide what risks they are willing to take and hat behaviors they want to practice.

Everyone should be free to pursue happiness in his own way — even if his choices are deemed by others to be harmful, unhealthy, unsafe, immoral, unwise, stupid, destructive, or irresponsible.

Every crime needs a tangible and identifiable victim who has suffered measurable harm to his person or measurable damages to his property.

Markets should be completely free of government regulation, licensing, restriction, and interference.

No industry or individual should ever receive government grants, subsidies, loans, or bailouts.

The functions of government should be limited to prosecuting and exacting restitution from those individuals who initiate violence against, commit fraud against, or violate the property rights of others.

Contrary to Democrats, liberals, socialists, progressives, Republicans, conservatives, nationalists, constitutionalists, moderates, populists, centrists, and independents — who all may claim to believe some of these things — libertarians believe these things consistently and without exception.

The issues

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Criminalizing Privacy (Al Jazeera Interview)

Posted by M. C. on October 25, 2024

In this interview from Al Jazeera on October 16th, 2024; I discuss the current state of global privacy legislation, ways that we can encourage free speech without censorship, and strategies for the future of privacy around the world.

In an era where the web has converged on just a handful major companies that wield immense control over speech, we are seeing many independent voices drowned out. Instead of suppressing ideas, we can actually call out bad ideas for what they are and we can provide counterpoints. The best way to conquer bad ideas is with better ideas, not by suppressing ideas.

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Elon Musk: “What Is Coming In The Next 20 Days Is UGLY And May DESTROY America…”

Posted by M. C. on October 23, 2024

Essentials are between 1:00 and 2:00.

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The Ultimate Con of a Government “Rules-Based System”

Posted by M. C. on October 22, 2024

By Karen Kwiatkowski

This world of manners is what we are all told is the “rule-based system” whereby the US serves as kindly globocop, who only occasionally takes a little kickback from the “protected” souls.  Like with the US soldiers in northern Syria, guarding Conoco oil extraction.  This is why when a US president ordered troops withdrawn from Syria, the permanent bureaucrats just patted him on the head. They always know better than the people.  They prefer a brain dead president, like Biden, and if not that, one with a head filled with a fluffy self righteousness and just a touch of fascism will do just fine.

The Ultimate Con of a Government “Rules-Based System”

The US puppet in Ukraine is feeling hot and sweaty.  Europe has lost interest, his UkroNats have lost patience, and Russia is plodding steadily to Kiev and Odessa.  The solution?  Zelensky wants “his” nukes back from Russia, and if he keeps this up, perhaps he will get them, pointy end first.

Meanwhile, the moral high ground always claimed by US government – whether in Ukraine or the Middle East or Taiwan or Central America or the flyover states – has collapsed like the I-40 in North Carolina.

The scam kings and consorts in Washington, DC have created a royal world of manners in which they live and function.  The presidency is Potemkin, and in our elections, as James Bovard explains, “voters merely have a cameo role to sanctify the nearly boundless power of officialdom.”

This world of manners is what we are all told is the “rule-based system” whereby the US serves as kindly globocop, who only occasionally takes a little kickback from the “protected” souls.  Like with the US soldiers in northern Syria, guarding Conoco oil extraction.  This is why when a US president ordered troops withdrawn from Syria, the permanent bureaucrats just patted him on the head. They always know better than the people.  They prefer a brain dead president, like Biden, and if not that, one with a head filled with a fluffy self righteousness and just a touch of fascism will do just fine.

As Americans, we have two problems.  First, we the people didn’t design these rules, didn’t agree to them, and frankly would never consent to them, if we knew how they worked.  That’s kind of a big problem.  Second, the power exerted by government “embeds” – the media kind, the business kind, the protective racket kind – is for lack of a better word, octopussified.  But unlike the James Bond thriller, the thieves and racketeers Mischka and Grischka operate out of DC.

I won’t blink if anyone notices who these criminals literally resemble in Washington, DC.  Our own Mischka and Grischka have been hard at work, and like the twin criminals in the employ of a global syndicate, they are part of a crime army with big desires.

Actual rules exist in all armies, including criminal armies.  These rules are Machiavellian, but the leaders we have in DC today are not Machiavellis.  While no doubt immoral, they distinctly lack the objectivity, mental discipline and ability to actually manage a tabletop army, sacrificing where needed and advancing conservatively.

The US-based international order, a “ruled-based” system, is nothing more than a simple and straightforward con.  The rest of the world, perhaps five billion people, understand and accept this Washington vanity for what it is.  They see it, on a good day, as a shroud covering the raw greed and the strange and wondrous insecurity of the Washington political machine.

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Case Study, Taiwan: A Nation is the Story We Tell Ourselves

Posted by M. C. on October 22, 2024

by Joseph Solis-Mullen

While all things being equal it is in Beijing’s interest to play the waiting game; Washington’s relative power in the region is in steady decline, and Taiwan’s real security rests on the possibility that Washington might intervene using both military and economic weapons. But things are not standing still, and Taiwan’s porcupine strategy, to eventually be too costly to conquer, might just provoke the kind of military solution it is purportedly meant to deter.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/case-study-taiwan-a-nation-is-the-story-we-tell-ourselves/

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In his famous 1882 lecture “What is a Nation?” the French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan emphasized the role of collective memory and even fictitious or selective historical narratives in the creation and maintenance of national identity, writing “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.”

What Renan was arguing is that nations are built not only on shared history but also on the myths and selective memories that bind people together. This selective forgetting often involves downplaying or erasing divisive events or highlighting certain aspects of a past to create a sense of unity and continuity. Even if that narrative isn’t entirely historically accurate, that isn’t the point. This selective memory allows a state or nation to foster a sense of unity and purpose among its citizens.

This past Thursday Taiwan’s President, Lai Ching-te, gave a highly anticipated speech on the occasion of Taiwan’s “National Day” celebrations—and Renan could hardly have been more impressed.

As one might expect of such a speech, Lai’s first on this occasion since taking office, it was full of paeans to the greatness of the state and its people, as well as the kind of dubious historical assertions, the nationalist myths, that everywhere buttress state power.

For example, Lai connected the current government on Taiwan to those presumably brave heroes who over a century ago “rose in revolt and overthrew the imperial regime,” with the intent to “establish a democratic republic of the people, to be governed by the people and for the people.” Naturally, Lai neglected to mention that the actors in question were a combination of ambivalent bureaucrats, ambitious warlords, opportunistic gangsters, and disaffected intellectuals who quickly fell to usurping and warring with one another.

Lai did not trouble himself with burdensome explanations of how after that glorious revolution the “dream of democracy was engulfed in the raging flames of war.” Rather, he skipped over how the eventual authoritarian government of the Kuomintang (KMT) was so corrupt, inefficient, and generally evil that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) looked preferable by comparison. Instead, he jumped to solemn remembrances of the last battles as the KMT were driven off the mainland and to the island of Taiwan, and how “though we arrived on this land at different times and belonged to different communities, we defended Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu. We defended the Republic of China.”

One notes here the subtle conflation between the regime’s flight for self-preservation and defense of those on the island who very definitely did not want them to come and bring war to their shores.

See the rest here

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FEMA Still Paying $9,000 For COVID Funerals, Billions On Pandemic Payouts

Posted by M. C. on October 22, 2024

by Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey

The favoring of one cause of death over another isn’t the only winners-and-losers dimension of the funeral program: There’s no reimbursement for those who’d planned ahead via pre-paid funerals. Echoing the grievances of people who saved up to pay for college only to see their neighbor’s student loans forgiven by vote-buying politicians, some families say they feel like they’re being punished for having planned for the future.

It’s All About Free Stuff and Votes

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/fema-still-paying-9000-for-covid-funerals-billions-on-pandemic-payouts/

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As the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) carries out widely-criticized responses to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, officials say the agency’s Disaster Recovery Fund is incapable of handling a third major storm.

While some are circulating false accusations that disaster funds have been diverted to immigrants or poured into the proxy war in Ukraine, a review of the agency’s 2024 outlays reveals a different, ongoing drain on FEMA’s coffers: Long after the end of the declared COVID-19 emergency, FEMA is still pumping out billions of dollars to pay for pandemic expenses— icluding, believe it or not, up to $9,000 each for funerals.

As previously detailed at Stark Realities, governments’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic was disastrous on many fronts. While the Pandora’s box of collateral damage included widespread harm to the physical and mental health of individuals, it also dealt a blow to the nation’s fiscal well-being, as the federal government recklessly showered trillions of dollars it didn’t have on people, businesses and state and local governments—with much of that money intended to offset the effects of government’s own tyrannical and counterproductive policies.

While all but the most diehard Branch Covidians have moved on from that dark chapter, the federal government has a distinct version of “long COVID.” Though it’s not clear where all the money is going, FEMA is paying up to $9,000 each to reimburse funeral expenses for those who die from COVID.

That’s an especially odd example of government picking winners and losers. As Stanford University School of Medicine professor and prominent COVID-regime critic Jay Bhattacharya said in a social media post that drew my attention to this giveaway program and its hyper-longevity, “There are apparently more and less worthy ways to die in the U.S.”

See the rest here

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Tough Times Ahead No Matter Who Wins — Tariffs Will Make Them Tougher

Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2024

I think Rothbard or Mises would say tariffs favor a select few while making products more expensive for the rest of US. I recently mentioned elsewhere that if memory serves auto makers tend to boost their prices to just below tariffed prices. Not that all US manufacturers would do this but it illustrates the usual blowback when government “helps”.

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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Opposing The Western War Machine Is The Most Important Thing You Can Do

Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2024

Caitlin Johnstone

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/opposing-the-western-war-machine

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/fsCyVlmWgMw?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

If there’s one thing this past year has made clear, it’s that opposing the foreign abuses of the western empire is the most important task you can undertake if you care about truth, justice, and human rights. There are other important fronts upon which this struggle takes place, but opposing western warmongering, militarism and empire-building is the most important.

It’s the most important because it’s the most consequential. Western warmongering is responsible for the most death, destruction, displacement and human suffering out of any of the abusive policies our governments inflict upon people. 

As abusive as domestic issues can be, nobody here at home has to worry about western bombs being dropped on their houses. 

Foreign abuses get less attention than domestic issues because they are inflicted upon strangers in other countries instead of upon our friends and neighbors, and because the imperial media work tirelessly to convince us that those foreign abuses are good and necessary. But they are the worst.

Foreign abuses also get less attention than domestic issues because opposing foreign abuses puts you at odds with all mainstream western political parties and everyone who supports them. Your progressive friends who might be on your side with regard to racist policing policies or LGBT rights will be uncomfortably at odds with you when you start calling Kamala Harris a genocidal monster. This makes standing against the imperial war machine less fun than other more widely supported expressions of activism.

It’s also less egoically gratifying. In a western “left” that generates so much of its energy from identity politics, where everyone wants to see themselves as part of some marginalized minority who can finger-wag about the privilege of non-marginalized groups, it’s a bit deflating to realize that as a westerner you’re a part of the problem, and that you receive a fair amount of privilege yourself just from living where you live. 

Depending on what your politics are like, it can be a kick in the ego to get real about the fact that however underprivileged you might see yourself, you still directly materially benefit from the imperialist extraction of the global south that all this warmongering is meant to protect. It can be a hard pill to swallow that even if you’re an autistic biracial trans pansexual, you’re still sitting a lot more comfortably than any straight cis man in Gaza, and your concerns for your safety and security are much less urgent than his.

But the biggest reason why foreign abuses get less attention than domestic ones is because of the propaganda. War is the glue that holds the empire together, so our rulers do everything they can to keep us arguing about domestic policy and ignoring foreign policy. The imperial spinmeisters wildly exaggerate the differences between the two mainstream political factions while downplaying the empire’s foreign abuses as normal and nothing to worry about, because the last thing they want is the rise of a robust antiwar movement in powerful western countries.

If you take your stand against the imperial war machine, you are standing against the very most abusive and tyrannical injustices in our world — but you are also standing against what everyone around you has been trained to believe is the truth. If you oppose the imperial war machine consistently and forcefully, you are setting yourself up to look like a kook, a traitor, or a weird contrarian in the eyes of other westerners. Not because anything you are saying is wrong, but because they have been indoctrinated to believe the opposite of what you are saying about the nations and groups that are being targeted for destruction by the western empire.

The other day some liberal American author retweeted an anti-war thing I wrote with the comment, “This is one of the most fascinating accounts on Twitter. She’s like an AI programmed to say the opposite of what everyone agrees makes sense. Everyone crazy on the left AND right follows her. 400k people! The replies people are like her — well-considered, reasonably informed, and totally off the rails.”

This stood out for me, because it’s like a condensed version of all the criticisms I’ve received from denizens of the western empire over the years. Look at this weirdo! She’s saying the exact opposite of everything we all agree is the truth! 

At no time has it ever occurred to this person to seriously examine why it is that everyone he knows agrees with the narratives which support the geostrategic objectives of the US government and its allies, thereby making anyone who contradicts these narratives look like a deranged nut. He just takes it as a given that all the information he ingests about international affairs aligns perfectly with the foreign policy objectives of his government because his government is simply on the side of truth and virtue. The well-documented fact that the mass media administer propaganda to advance the information interests of the US empire never crosses his mind as a real possibility.

That’s the current you are swimming against when you take your stand against western warmongering. The current of the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed.

It can be challenging to consistently speak the truth in this way to a civilization that is deeply indoctrinated to believe in lies. But it is also the very most important work you can do, because it helps spread awareness of the single most urgent and egregious injustice in our world today.

And that’s how you change the world: spreading awareness. Problems don’t get fixed until enough people see them and understand them. Once enough people do, using the power of our numbers to force real change becomes a real possibility. And there is nothing more urgently in need of real change than the end of western warmongering.

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Elon Musk: ‘We Need to get the Government OUT OF PEOPLE’s Lives’

Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2024

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