Libertarians are a Joke!

Topher Morrison

PurpleSerf.com

I tried to find another picture,
but this is Mr. Bitterface's best.

Today's Daily Drivel: in one of the most bizarre reads of the morning Dan Agin, we shall call him Mr. Bitterface, concocts a theoretical tragedy, which unfortunately takes place in a very real world.  I will attempt to refrain from the all too easy and hopefully obvious ad hominem attacks - eh never mind.

          There is a great joke in America and according to Dan Agin its "libertarian hypocrisy."  Might be a joke, but its not very popular.  Sorry Dan we libertarians don't get a lot of press, but we're getting more - thanks for the ink!  

          On Sunday, at the HuffingtonPost, Mr. Agin wrote "The Comedy of Libertarian Hypocrisy."  It's not exactly Shakespear, but it is fiction.  Apparently the libertarian movement is an ill defined "-ism", which covers a sordid spectrum of antigovernment individuals from "terrorist and bomb-thrower[s]" to "proto-fascists", my heart goes out to those poor libertarian souls in the middle!  

          While I tend to agree those who claim the libertarian banner do cover the gamut of political inclination in this country, doesn't every "-ism"?    It is an odd critique indeed for Mr. Agin to group together members of an ideology based on individualism and then indite the whole based on its range or extremities for that matter!    

          No doubt, those who capture libertarian ideas also graft on non-libertarian ideas, those who use:

“…libertarian buzzwords to achieve a political agenda that would actually involve more government intrusion and not less government intrusion - intrusion to foster business and protect wealth at the expense of the unwealthy.”

          This is a classic, but awkward attack against capitalism and libertarians and unfortunately for Mr. Bitterface (whoops I did it again) a bit of a straw man argument.  Using government to buttress corporations and private companies, by extension the "wealthy", from inefficiency, competition or recessions is called crony capitalism (or government, j/k) and is antithetical to libertarian and capitalistic ideals.  

          Moreover the institutions, funding and mechanisms with which to accomplish this task are not available to a libertarian government; government departments are few and their powers limited, taxes are low and enforcement methods are locally or regionally based.  Ron Paul, the ostensible leader of libertarianism in this country, is beyond reproach on this subject as he has time and time again excoriated the incessant intervention on behalf of banks, insurance, and the auto industry by special interests and their puppets in Congress and 1600 Penn.

          We turn to Mr. Agin's tragic comedy:

“Consider a "libertarian" named Self Reliant [love this name!] Mr. Reliant, fifty-five years old, suffers a sudden heart attack.  He calls 911, and when the paramedics arrive he directs them to the best hospital in town, which happens to be the university hospital attached to a state university.  Mr. Reliant is rushed to this hospital and receives treatment in the emergency room that essentially saves his life.”

          Brilliant, par for the course!  Yet another way of lambasting libertarianism, find the most innocuous government program, which has absolutely nothing to do with printing money, forced medical procedures, soaring debt, foreign wars or unpopular bailouts (you know the big stinking issues) and have a libertarian defend his position on limited government.  Gladly. 

          Self Reliant apparently commits a libertarian sin, according to Mr. Bitterface (dang it!), by "dialing 911 and asking for paramedics."  Let's begin with the telephone (1876) used by Mr. Reliant to call for help, incidentally not a government invention (albeit heavily regulated by the FCC), but due entirely to the ingenuity and gumption of many scientists, most notably Alexander Graham Bell.  The switchboard (1876), patented by a innovative Hungarian, Mr. Tividar Puskas, connected the call to the Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), which eventually saves Mr. Reliant.  

          The first EMTs were called emergency care technicians (ECT) in 1961 and worked in the emergency department at Alexandria Hospital, VA (now called Inova).  Inova recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of their private innovation known then as the "Alexandria Plan", which set the standard nationwide for 24-hour emergency room care.  It was only when these ECTs moved outside the ER and into their shiny life saving trucks (invented in the private sector, see "Puffing Devil") were they called paramedics or EMTs.  

          EMTs are often employed privately, but are predominantly employed by local government regularly as an adjunct of local fire department.  But is calling an EMT necessarily asking for "help from local government"?  Whether or not Mr. Reliant got a hold of a private or public EMT is based on his community not his ideology and in the end both public and private EMTs cost appropriately, an arm and a leg.  Who pays for that?  Oh yeah, Mr. Reliant.

          The chosen hospital in Mr. Agin's story was, especially in the case of a heart attack, based on proximity, availability and capability.  It is not always the case, as I have just shown, that the best hospital fits this description, nor are state sponsored hospitals the best as Mr Bitterface alludes.  Take a look at this comparison between three hospitals near where I live, whom deal with heart attacks, this took me 5 minutes to look up.  The Mayo Clinic received an 88% approval rate from its patients (19% higher than the national and state average) while Arizona Regional Medical Center ratings are below at 58%!  

          How Mr. Agin came to the conclusion "the federal government...funds nearly all the research and development in cardiac infarction (heart attack) emergency care" is anyone's guess, he provides no source.  But I did do a little research on who invented the first defibrillator used to resuscitate victims of serious heart attacks.  Guess what?  A private research university named Case Western Reserve University employed the first internal defibrillator!

          At the end of Mr. Agin's odd little story is his apparent view that libertarians subscribe to some kind of secular Christian Science wherefrom they refuse to use modern technology to save their lives, merely because government invariably meddles with it:

"Were Mr. Reliant a true libertarian, he would treat his heart attack himself (and most likely die), or at the least, when the paramedics arrive, he would direct the ambulance into the woods to die among the trees. (Actually, the woods may be off-limits also, since they may be maintained by a local, state, or federal forestry service.)"

          Mr. Bitterface you make my point for me!  Wherever we turn government is there regardless if we need it or not.  The aforementioned examples show whether it be telephones, cars, medical devices, new innovative service models or even privately managing public forrests that private industry can and will make society better by offering a myriad of options and greater efficiency, a trend which never ceases, but merely slows as government moves in.  Libertarians don't hate government, to the contrary we need government we simply just don't need it to be as big as it is.

The Spirit of 1776 in 2011

Topher Morrison
PurpleSerf.com

"Spirit of '76" by Archibald Willard

Image Source: The Post Mail

"Spirit of 2011" by Milt Priggee

Happy 4th of July America!  We have so much to celebrate here in the land of the free and home of the brave don't we?  Then why does this 4th seem to ring a little hollow?  Sure, family and friends are abundant, fireworks large and small are anxiously awaiting a match, BBQs are being meticulously cleaned and loaded with charcoal, the red white and blue adorn every fixture, and libations await to conduct the entire affair. 

America is 235 years old today, but what will the next 200 years bring?  The next 100?  If the last 10 years can provide us with a reasonable trajectory one could arguably predict a rough road ahead.  From a metastasizing national security apparatus and 4 foreign wars to an economy on life support and massive debt we find ourselves in a uniquely precarious situation.  This Independence Day may also ring especially hollow for over a quarter of Americans who can't quite put their finger on who we declared independence from, let alone for what reasons. 

This may seem shocking to you, but it is true!  What is equally true is that most Americans have forgotten that our independence was not just from Great Britain, but from its oppressive government.  We fought a war, you know killing people with armies, in order to free ourselves from its tyrannical systems.  Let me be clear, King George III and his government were by no means herding our forbearers into concentration camps or enslaving colonists for work in hard labor, lack of representation and one too many taxes was all it took for us to start ending the lives of British soldiers.  This is representative of how greatly our forefathers cherished our inalienable rights and liberties and how little they would tolerate others trampling over them.  

In the last 10 years we have seen exponential growth in government under both parties, Republicans and Democrats.  Our systems of governance have verifiably broken down under the "silent artillery of time", through the purposeful dismantling of constitutional safeguards, and the ensconcing of aberrant and unelected agencies (i.e. the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Reserve, two inherently mischievous and unconstitutional bodies) amidst our free society.  This multitude of vulnerable governmental entities is incalculable enabling powerful interests to easily penetrate the halls of democracy and usurp regulatory posts via the hordes of private influence mercenaries known as lobbyists.   

At every turn we pay through taxes to be searched, stopped, fondled, monitored, and categorized by these supposed departments of freedom.  The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its loyal dog the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the domestic equivalent of our foreign legions.  While our troops are away fighting unending warfare in numerous countries, known and unknown, the Pentagon has grown, here at home, a grossly self serving and powerful private intelligence and R&D community who's ultimate obsession is with the literal manufacture of not only weapons and war technology, but also the bogeymen to fight them with.  

Meanwhile, our economy struggles.  It is laden with regulation, taxes, over 20% unemployment, and operated under the new paradigm of crony capitalism our government has been put in the position of picking the winners and losers instead of the objective and invisible hand of the free market.  Bad firms with their worse ideas and antiquated business models are kept afloat by the largesse of government intervention creating a tempestuous business environment where instead of investing money in growing brands and hiring new workers companies cautiously hoard cash and ship jobs overseas. 

What will it take for today's Americans to rise up and say enough is enough?  According to our Founders they knew the tendency of most nations throughout history is to roll over and submit to tyranny and governmental overreach, but as far as our founders were concerned Americans are duty bound to abolish and reestablish a new and more free government!

"...Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." - Declaration of Independence

Aside from our charge as individuals to be vigilant in our mission of freedom, the Declaration of Independence is nonpareil in one important aspect, it was the first document ever referred to as a declaration of independence.  It is this singular document, this public example (not our armies), which over the last 235 years has recreated the world in our image, that is to say, has turned the world from a static amalgam of empires into a dynamic juxtapositional collage of independent nation states.  While nations have attempted to grow their power and influence by invading and/or attempting to control other countries through various vehicles causing much war and tumult this world of independents is still thankfully the status quo.  It however may not always be so.   

The growing role of the United Nations threatens to throw America and the rest of the world back into the dark ages with regard to decentralized independent control of our nations and their peoples.  Regardless of the intoxicating prospects of perpetual peace envisaged by the UN's proponents it nonetheless is a superstructure with the incredible potential for apocalyptic failure. 

Real peace is achieved through the free market of governments, the right of free humanity to emigrate to wherever they may find the most happiness.  The question this 4th of July is: is America still that destination and if we are not, how do we restore our Republic?

The End of History

Editors Note:  Not to be confused with Purple Serf's "End of History for the Middle East?"


Free Radical
Zero Hedge
5/18/11

There is properly no history, only biography - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was famously proclaimed that what we were likely witnessing was

… not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such; that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

In reality, however, what we are witnessing is the ideological exhaustion of “Western liberal democracy” and therefore the last gasp of the fraud upon which it rests: the state, even its best form.  No longer able to hide behind the Jeffersonian dream of constitutional freedom and order or the Lincolnian myth that the dream could be preserved at the expense of the principle upon which it was founded, the American state’s demise proves that “the final form of human government” has not yet arrived – not because a final form shouldn’t have arrived but because, for those who have had so much fun during historical times, the aftermath won’t be any fun.  On the contrary, it will be “a very sad time”:

            The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract 

            goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage,     

            imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless 

            solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of 

            sophisticated consumer demands.

How sad, in other words, that if people were in fact freed from “the worldwide ideological struggle” (though of course they have not been), they would at long last be able to live their lives on their own terms. How sad that without “the struggle for recognition,” people would not have to endure another Pharoah, Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Clinton, Bush, or Obama, and would instead be left to while away the hours in the peaceful pursuit of their own happiness. How sad that without the “purely abstract goal” of one or another statist ideology, grandparents, parents, spouses, children, and grandchildren would not know the “daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” that continues to send their loved ones home in flag-draped cartons. How sad that “environmental concerns” could actually be solved, rather than perpetrated by governments and perpetuated by their bloated “regulatory” agencies. And how sad that “economic calculation and the endless solving of technical problems” – i.e., the day-by-day work of an increasingly complex and thus more richly rewarding world – would not be complicated by the relentless onslaught of the state.

Yes, there is the hope that “centuries of boredom at the end of history might serve to get history started once again,” so that murder and mayhem can once again spice up the dreary “satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” What is a cell phone, after all, compared to a land mine? What is communication compared to mutilation? With “no struggle over ‘large’ issues and consequently no need for generals or statesmen,” how much attraction can life hold?  What’s the use of living, in other words, if you can’t make a killing killing people?

And a twofold killing it is – over 15 billion people “since the beginning of authentic history,” at a cost of over a thousand trillion dollarsi  – according to the research published in a 1914 New York Times piece that also makes the following observation:

Brilliant deeds on the battlefield are done by the man who will take the greatest risks in support of an ideal; the man who will take the greatest risks is, ordinarily, the best of men. So these are least likely to escape. …

… And even though large numbers of the best of men are left, many are destroyed, and of those remaining many have been deteriorated physically by the effort, by the wounds, by the diseases, of wartime; while the economic course of every man participating in a war is interrupted by his service, and, in the majority of cases, such an interruption harms his industrial or professional or mercantile future, thus directly affecting the opportunities that he may offer to the rising generation, which, for a time, depends upon him.

And thus does the killing of the best in war also kill “a certain portion of the incalculable social and educational effort of the ages.”

But no matter. For as war is its very health, the state will have a war if it wants one, never mind how much the people, understandably, do not:

Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.  … But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same in any country.

But why? The answer is as old as Plato’s Dorians:

[I]t is immaterial for the citizens of any nation where the frontiers of their country are drawn. It is of no concern for anyone whether his country is big or small, and whether it conquers a province or not. The individual citizens do not derive any profit from the conquest of a territory.

It is different with the princes or ruling aristocracies. They can increase their power and their tax revenues by expanding the size of their realms. They can profit from conquest. They are bellicose, while the citizenry is peace loving.

The “princes and ruling aristocracies” will object, of course, that they are not bellicose at all and only want to increase their power in order to be of greater service to humanity. They are public servants, after all, seeking only to do good on their constituents’ behalf. What they do not understand, however – what they dare not even contemplate – is that because Men are cruel, but Man is kind, no men are more cruel than those who would do good with mankind’s money – with the proceeds, that is, of the legalized theft by which “Western liberal democracy” and every other manifestation of the state perpetuate themselves. For as easy as it is to make this theft legal, it is impossible to make it moral, the resulting assault on society being all the worse for the pretence upon which it is based: namely, that legalized theft is the price that must be paid for a civilized society.

And it is because of this vast charade – the biggest of all big lies – that its perpetrators fail to realize that they are but the latest incarnation of the iniquity that has prevailed from time immemorial, that however much the forces of history have been debated over the centuries – are they blind, cyclical, progressive, eschatological, dialectical, etc. – there are actually no forces of history; there is only the history of force. In fact, there is only history as force, the absence of which is not history but biography – the ability to graph, as it were, one’s own bio in cooperative association with one’s fellow human beings.

Its perpetrators do not understand, that is, that their role in history is history, for history is nothing more than the biographies of those who have used the political means to trump the economic means, the producers of which have had their biographies expropriated in the process. As such, history is merely a chronicle of conquest, subjugation, and confiscation, and therefore a glorification of perpetual war for perpetual war. And just as war and the state are one, so, then, are the state and history one.

Therefore, the end of the state will be the end of history.

STEP ONE: Admit There is a Problem.

Is there any doubt at all that when Janet Napolitano and Co. sat down and formulated the recent policy to backscatter x-ray and patdown airline passengers that an ideal model would have seen the American public enthusiastically compliant?  Put another way, if Big Sis and her bureaucratic automatons wanted a debate they would have asked Congress to mull it over.

Let us make no mistake about it; radiate and fondle first, ask questions later, is a bureaucracy’s modus operandi.  Testaments to this fact are found on every line of the Federal Register’s staggering 70,000 plus pages of yearly rules and regulations amassed by the arbitrary decisions of an alphabet soup of government agencies.  If anyone thought sifting through a Wikileaks dump or reading over 2500 pages of HR 3590 i.e. Obama Care was daunting I’d suggest an aspirin regimen and a few Five Hour Energies to chase before attempting to tackle this legal juggernaut.  Bills have been introduced that would force Congress to vote on these laws individually, thus mitigating their volume, and be held accountable for their promulgation, but appropriately they have never enjoyed an up or down vote.

These agencies stand outside the Constitution and as our de facto fourth branch of government – unelected, entrenched, and relentless.  Bi-partisan in the most nefarious way, transcending administration after administration and retaining the modern day status of oracles these agencies (recently doubled in size by the passage of HR 3590) have effectively usurped all three branches of government.  They enjoy undue autonomy legislating, judging, and enforcing virtually anything they please.  For Congress they are sometimes a political whipping boy other times a trophy.  For the Courts they alleviate bottle necking and are deferred to for “technical expertise.”  For the Executive and its countless Czars they are, in aggregate, the iron hand of American democracy, a zombie relic, built over the years by countless executive orders and maintained under constant deference by Congress.

For those of you unfamiliar with Thomas Hobbes perhaps Transformer’s Devastator is a better metaphor for what has increasingly come into view.  What was once out of reach and buried in the monotonous layers of government white papers, internal memos, the Federal Register, and obscure declassified documents is now easily accessible and out in the open.  The foreign and domestic arms of American governance have clasped around the people.  The byproducts of our “Global Force for Good” and its military adventures over seas are being used literally in our own backyard.  The seamless connections from the military industrial complex buttressed by a private amalgam of domestic defense contractors to their ties and influence on these domestic agencies is simple to trace and easy to understand.

You couldn’t write this stuff any better than how it is unfolding… Pre-crime software is being used in Baltimore, Philidelphia, and DC, multi-million dollar insect spies are an order away from swarming all over the US, the very same military spy blimps ordered by our military “for use overseas” will be used against/for us very soon here at home laden with field-tested military technology that will scan 3000 license plates per hour, see at night, are easily retrofitted with facial recognition cameras, and will tie into hundreds if not thousands of external cameras in a real-time virtual “crime” network. 

The information gathered is capable of being stored and shared with threat fusion centers (admittedly ran without Congressional oversight) easily disseminated to DC or what will be, for all intents and purposes, NSA West, a 1.5 million square foot Cyber Security Center that might even make the Pentagon blush.  Do we want to become like England, where this type of surveillance is soon to become commonplace?  Has Orwell’s clairvoyant Nineteen Eighty Four become just another benighted warning?

Airport patdowns were just the beginning!  Homeland Security (DHS) and its Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams have rolled out in “pilot” programs industrial grade radiation units for use on America’s highways, backscatter x-ray vans have been sold in the US able to “image vehicles and their contents” as well as “penetrate clothing”, a veritable Google Van on steroids.  Mobile interrogation trailers saturated with Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) developed in cooperation with “industry leaders” for headline events are on standby, portable DNA scanners are in beta testing and are able to identify a human being in under an hour. 

Our young ones aren’t safe either, the government has been successfully sued for taking and cataloging newborn DNA, the only problem is that it’s essentially legal to do since the “Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act” was singed into law.  Incidently this passed unrecorded by voice vote in the House and unanimously in the Senate, also unrecorded.  Sometimes even when Congress does vote they make sure it is a secret!

If DHS doesn’t stop you in the airport or on the streets, they have invaded Walmarts all over the country with thousands of government-sponsored screens inundating a routine grocery run with their exhausting “See Something Say Something” campaign.  In another nauseating example of "agency initiative" was in 2007 when Congress revealed DHS created, without approval, the National Applications Office (NAO) charged with turning spy satellites on the US.  Recently, in a totally unrelated vein, the US and Germany (US occupied territory) under the popular guise of an innocuous “commercial program” are planning on deploying multiple billion dollar spy satellites in 2012 and 2013.  One has to wonder why the US would need another set of cutting edge multibillion dollar spy satellites since they have already launched into space “the largest [spy] satellite in the world” and plan on sending more.

I was going to include more on internet kill switches, internet IDs, and how the US Air Force has been soliciting persona software management in order to operate an army of fake virtual people replete with their own IP address, hair color, significant others, but most importantly opinion.  Yes, they're planning for a potential clandestine campaign to “manufacture consensus” or to be used for “cognitive infiltration.”  These you’ll have to look up on your own!

This barrage of information is just a smattering of what we encounter on a weekly if not daily basis and is almost too much to cover and Purple Serf and Free Humanity need your help.  It would be like sand through our fingers if it wasn’t for archival technology and hyperlinks.  Many of us have started to report on what is going on ourselves, turned off our TVs and along with it the obnoxious graphics, $1000 suits, and 10,000watt smiles that used to represent legitimacy and which still propagandize and compartmentalize our information.  This is only the first step – admitting and we have a problem and talking about it.