Is Private Property in America Ever Justly Acquired?

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Property acquisition in the Americas begins.

Back to the critique of Ron Paul’s libertarian principles that I began with this post. We’re onto principle number 3:

3. Justly acquired property is privately owned by individuals and voluntary groups, and this ownership cannot be arbitrarily voided by governments.

–from The Ten Principles of a Free Society

[Aside: There’s that word “voluntary” with groups (associations) again! ]

As I’ve shown in my previous critiques, Paul’s principles are half-baked by-products of social contract theory. They want to assert that rights precede government (which even social contract philosophers have to take on faith) and then do away with the government that those philosophers posited as a necessary evil for preserving those rights in society with other individuals. Really? Do away with the government, you might ask? Doesn’t Paul, like Jefferson, for example, just want to keep the government to a size that isn’t able to overwhelm the individual with its potentially arbitrary and despotic power? I would argue that the way these principles are phrased–and this one in particular is a very good example–Paul seeks to postulate a society that operates according to natural rights, with or without a government. He seems to believe that rights in themselves, if we would only just respect them, are sufficient for self-government.
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“If you put people back to work, you are cutting spending.”

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Unexpected wisdom from rank and file Republicans:

“Cutting spending is important, but getting people back to work is more important,” said Diane Sherrell, 56, a Republican from Erwin, N.C. “If people are working, they are more productive. There is less crime, there is less depression, there is less divorce. There are less hospital and medical bills. If you put people back to work, you are cutting spending.”

Stanley Oland, 62, a Republican from Kalispell, Mont., said that the government needed new jobs to generate the economic activity and the revenue it requires.

“That revenue supports the basic foundation for the economy, creates more jobs and stimulates the economy,” he said. “Unless you have working people you don’t have revenue from taxes. If you cut spending, jobs will be eliminated and you won’t get any revenue. Every dollar spent creates jobs.”

Now if they would just apply this wisdom at the polls that allegedly count in November!

Random Double Feature: Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Le Doulos

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I wasn’t expecting to watch either Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) or Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos (1962) last night. Almost randomly, I selected each just seconds before watching them from my Netflix instant watch list, where both had been sitting for perhaps a year or possibly more. Each made a surprisingly provocative complement to the other on my random double feature bill. Continue reading →

The Austerity of Hope

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I call myself a Democrat because that’s how I’ve been registered all of my voting life. In fact, the older I get, the more disconnected I feel from that label. I don’t want to register as an independent because, Bernie Sanders notwithstanding, I can’t get over the prejudice that American independents are all right-wing at heart. Was it George Wallace’s American Independent Party that instilled this in me? Who knows? It’s beginning to feel, however, that the correct radical stance in this disintegrating context is to not register or vote at all. A vote begins to feel like acquiescence to the corruption.

Did Democrats or any other Obama supporter vote for the fiasco of the last month, culminating in the supreme surrender by our audacious leader last night to the anti-democrats of the Republican Party, bypassing the leaders of his own party to give the (fictional) partisanship-loathing centrists of the electorate  the White House is courting for 2012 the illusion of “operational bipartisanship?” Well, yes, we actually did vote for it, unfortunately, and that’s where the whole problem lies. Continue reading →

Why Is This Debt-Ceiling Hike Like No Other?

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Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge makes a point overlooked by almost everyone who talks about this debt-ceiling limit compared to previous ones (his emphases):

While everyone and their grandmother is foaming at the mouth how both republicans and democrats hiked the debt ceiling for umpteen times over the past x years, the truth is that never before has the ratio of the proposed debt ceiling to the tax receipt ratio been as high as it is now. At nearly 6 times, this means that the top line (forget bottom line) cash inflows into the Treasury are 6 times lower than the current debt ceiling. And following the upcoming $2.5 trillion this number will surge to almost 8 times.

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Dueling Armageddons of TeaParty Rep. Steve Pearce

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How many Armageddons?

The leaders of US business in the form of the US Chamber of Commerce, the New York Times reports, spent millions of dollars last election cycle electing the extreme right-wing dynamos now holding the Chamber and the rest of us hostage for the sacred Republican principle of a balanced federal budget (well, sacred except to Reagan, the Bushes, and the Congressional Republican leaders of the last 30 years). One of these intellectual giants the Chamber was particularly generous toward displays the kind of logic these new leaders (and, by implication, the rest of us) are at the mercy of:

The chamber spent $436,953 helping to elect Steve Pearce, a New Mexico Republican, almost 20 percent of the total that he was able to raise and spend on his own.

This month, Mr. Pearce told the radio program “News New Mexico” that cutting federal spending was just as important as increasing the debt ceiling.

“We have talked a lot about Armageddon if we don’t pass the debt ceiling,” he said. “There’s an equal Armageddon on the other side if we don’t start curing the spending problems.”

Set aside that the debt-ceiling “Armageddon” is pending next Tuesday and the other has been pending since Bush and Congressional Republicans spent the Clinton-era surplus on tax breaks for the rich, Pearce evidently wants us to believe  that in order to hold off the second already held-off Armageddon, it’s necessary to bring on the first.

Hey, Chamber, thanks for sending us this leader. Thanks a lot.

Beginning of a New American Revolution? #OccupyWallStreet

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The following is a public service announcement on behalf of Occupy Wall Street. To participate, go here. Of course, if you’d like to discuss it with me in the comments area right here, please do. Continue reading →

Profiling in Oslo

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I just came upon this amazing paragraph from a right-wing blog, referring to yesterday’s terrorist attacks in Oslo and Utøya:

I happened to be listening to the radio this morning, as the periodic news updates about the tragedy began coming in.  The first report said that the police had apprehended a “blue eyed suspect’.  A later teaser described the suspect as “an anti Islamic Fundamentalist”.  By noon they referred to him as a “Christian fundamentalist”.  Switch any of these descriptions and tell me if the narrative would fly.  What media outlet would ever dare to describe a suspect as a Middle Eastern, anti Christian, Muslim fundamentalist, even if the evidence overwhelmingly pointed in that direction?

You’ve got to be kidding, even though this is no subject to kid about. Continue reading →

“Executed in cold blood, as a possible political strategy to cripple a political party decades in the future.”

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Internet civil libertarian Rick Falkvinge of Sweden’s “Pirate Party,” which stands for, among other things, copyright minimalism, has written a chillingly perceptive post on his blog about yesterday’s slaughter of the innocents on Utøya by Norwegian Christian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. Continue reading →

Fruits of One’s Labor: Possession and Property, Use and Usury

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Jan C, a self-described “prioritarian” and “voluntaryist” (new terms on me, I confess) who inspired the previous post, opened another can of worms in his comments that I’d like to look into more deeply. He was responding to this assertion of mine:

“The difference between possession and private property in real anarchism, is the difference between use and usury. Real anarchists believe that what a person uses, a person possesses”

He asked:

So if you don’t use ‘your’ hammer, I can pick up and walk away with it?

I really don’t understand you people. If you’ve worked your ass of and got something for it in return (money, or goods), than you simply own it, and that means you can do with it whatever you like (either use it, trade it, give it away or destroy it). How can anybody not agree with that?

I do see that there are grey area’s. What constitutes property is not always clear-cut in every case. But I find ‘fruits of labour’ a much better rule of thumb than ‘use’. Continue reading →