Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

The evil collectivism of the belief that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are “ours” has always outraged me. In fact:

• The troops belong to the federal government, not you.
• The government does not do what you want it to do, nor does it listen to your advice.
• The troops don’t obey your orders.
• The troops don’t protect you nor serve your interests.
• The troops are not sacrificing for your freedom, etc. or for any common good.

So what sense is there in “patriotic” bromides about supporting “our” troops?

I’ve always been convinced that statism is a counterfeit religion which endows Caesar with the attributes of God, such as omnipotence, omnipresence, infallibility, perfect goodness, loving concern for us mere mortals, and the like. “Our” poor dearest troops are just like Jesus, sons of the state, dying for us unworthy sinners out of obedience to their solemn duty and perfect compassion. What idiotic blasphemy.

Well, I voted for Ron Paul today.

Here’s what I think of the other candidates:

Obama: a fool, a clown, a buffoon.
Hillary: a witch, unstable and self-hating.
McCain: he has no idea what’s going on; a blind man leading the blind.

What do you think are the reasons for the $1.3 billion fine?

(1) Microsoft’s rivals’ envy and failure to be competitive on the marketplace.

(2) Intellectual failure to recognize all anti-trust legislation as harmful to the economy and the consumers.

(3) The desire on the part of the state to humiliate Microsoft, show it who’s boss, beat it into submission so that they know who’s in charge and whom to pay tribute to.

In other words, we have a familiar 3-pronged attack compised of special interests, evil intellectuals promoting a bad ideology, and the state.

Daniel Larison, a blogger at The American Conservative magazine’s website, wants, according to this writer (at Andrew Sullivan’s blog), “to see the United States splinter into a half-dozen or more pacifist agrarian republics.” That’s way too few. But pacifist is awesome, and as for agrarian, if Daniel knows any economics, he will reply that in a free society the consumers, by their buying and abstention from buying, determine whether a particular region will be predominantly industrial, agrarian, information-processing, or anything else.

Lew Rockwell writes that “[e]nvironmentalism has long been a counter religion, with roots in ancient pagan nature worship.” And George Reisman distinguishes between the greenies who “merely… like to see flowers bloom on open meadows and love trees, whales, and polar bears, and the like” from their more destructive cousins.

It used to be that most of nature was pristine, because humans lacked the power to subdue it. Now that most of nature has been to an extent civilized and put under control (though make no mistake: nature always seeks to break free and kill us), people suddenly clamor for patches of unspoiled wilderness in the midst of urban jungles. Fine. But isn’t it interesting that environmentalism has not reached the conscience of the common man pretty much until now, when technology has advanced to the state when non-polluting power production is economically viable, and the market stands almost ready to provide power sources whose operation has no negative externalities?

In other words, the drive, in particular, to switch over to clean cars has come from two directions. First, people have become so wealthy that they are now willing to spend money on “clean consciences,” that is, on secure knowledge that they are not harming their neighbors by polluting the air they breathe. Second, the technology has matured to the extent of being able to be incorporated into cars that are presumed to be attractive to the regular consumer, that is, to you and me. Both are equally necessary, representing the demand and supply respectively.

It is therefore not the government nor even the environmentalist ideologues who should get the credit for this and similar innovations, though I agree that a certain awareness of air quality has played a role in the process of developing and converting to clean cars. It is private entrepreneurs who have made choosing such cars and devices an easy thing to do. The explanation is not difficult to find. In business there is employed the phrase “good will” which differentiates trusted brands and companies from those considered to be less trustworthy. If a firm is seen to care about what Murray Rothbard calls the unowned and probably unownable “general conditions of human welfare” such as air or to spend money trying to eliminate the negative externalities of the products it offers for sale, though it does not “have to,” then people understandably come to trust it more, to consider it a “good corporate citizen,” and themselves to feel good about owning its goods. There is even such thing as socially responsible investing. Thus, no government intervention is needed to spurn this kind of progress.

In other words, producing clean cars not only simply satisfies the demand but also makes the job of the company’s PR department easier.

(All this, assuming, of course, that neither homesteading nor negotiation can resolve pollution problems.)

It may be objected that even taking ideology and good will into consideration, clean cars will be underproduced. Two points must be made here. First, absent market prices we can never know the optimal number of such cars that ought to be produced. The political test is too crude to be useful. Second, the factors mentioned will still be sufficient to get the majority of the population to switch to the new technology. You’ll see.

I fully endorse flowers blooming on open meadows (though not the assumption that meadows must be owned by the state), useless though such things are. But not if this obvious luxury interferes with economic progress and general happiness. Perhaps the new crop of “zero-emission” cars will shut the environmentalists, or at least most of them, up, such that the near-insane “moralists” who consider humans to be a virus to be eliminated for the sake of the Earth Mother or some such thing will be relegated to the fringes of the genuinely lunatic left. As Reisman writes, “The green movement, in other words, is the red movement stripped of the veneer of reason and science and bent on the destruction of reason and science rather than take the trouble to learn what reason and science actually are. The green movement is the red movement no longer in its boisterous, arrogant youth, but in its demented old age.” (Capitalism, 102)

Socialism always ends up with an inhuman face (on the part of both the rioters and the police). What strange happenstance!

Isn’t it interesting how each president seems worse than his predecessor? I’m nostalgic for Bill Clinton, and I know that I’ll miss W under the next fuhrer, provided, of course, it’s not Ron Paul.

In politics you are always waiting, watching for signs of a capitalist revolution, yet it never seems to come. It’s an awful way to spend your time, even as a hobby, because nothing happens, at least in the short-run. But even long-run hopes should morph into some kind of short-term success, and they never do. The “revolutionary moment” does not come. So, I pledge to care about politics less than I so far have.

In Raymond Smullyan’s puzzle book called The Lady or the Tiger? there is a puzzle, the right answer to which is “1 honest congressman and 99 corrupt ones.” That’s how it works in the real world: Ron Paul is only good member of Congress. Everyone else is pretty much beyond salvation. What can one man do? Not a thing. The only reason to bother is to help those people who are called and chosen to learn the truth about economics, political philosophy, and the related subjects. One thing they should learn not to hope for from day one, and this is temporal victory. Perhaps our kingdom is indeed not of this world.

You’ve got to love the guy calling Paul “reactionary.” The idea is that he is against “progress,” progress being defined in the Marxian manner of social systems replacing one another either gradually or by way of a revolution according to a mystical Hegelian dialectic and the alleged law of the unfolding of history: the slave-owning society giving way to feudalism, feudalism being replaced by capitalism, then socialism, and finally communism. Human actions, guided by reason, do not participate in this process; history is cunning enough to work its way to the final bliss and perfection of communism despite “reactions” which are merely temporary setbacks. But that does not mean that reactionary (defined in this manner) politicians are not to be condemned.

My “reaction” to this, no pun intended, is to argue that it is precisely capitalism and liberty and free markets which constitute the highest stage of human development. There is nothing better than them or beyond them. It is socialism that is a highly reactionary and primitive ideology. Murray Rothbard notes that “Socialism, like liberalism and against conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc.” Therefore the verdict that Rothbard pronounces of conservatism, namely that “Pessimism, however, both short-run and long-run, is precisely what the prognosis of conservatism deserves, for conservatism is a dying remnant of the ancien régime of the preindustrial era, and, as such, it has no future,” applies equally well to socialism, because of the its similarly to conservatism.

Rothbard declares that it is socialism that is a reaction in this impassioned way:

When I was growing up, I found that the main argument against laissez-faire, and for socialism, was that socialism and communism were inevitable: “You can’t turn back the clock!” they chanted, “you can’t turn back the clock.” But the clock of the once-mighty Soviet Union, the clock of Marxism-Leninism, a creed that once mastered half the world, is not only turned back, but lies dead and broken forever. …

One of the authors of the Daniel Bell volume says, in horror and astonishment, that the radical right intends to repeal the twentieth century. Heaven forfend! Who would want to repeal the twentieth century, the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide, who would want to repeal that! Well, we propose to do just that.

With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done. We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the twentieth century.

One of the most inspiring and wonderful sights of our time was to see the peoples of the Soviet Union rising up, last year, to tear down in their fury the statues of Lenin, to obliterate the Leninist legacy. We, too, shall tear down all the statues of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Harry Truman, of Woodrow Wilson, melt them down and beat them into plowshares and pruning hooks, and usher in a twenty-first century of peace, freedom and prosperity.

HT: lewrockwell.com blog.

Ron Paul has doubts about evolution. Andrew Sullivan writes that “I could handle his legion of whacko supporters, I could handle his extreme libertarianism, but I’m afraid I can’t handle this.” Why? Because “He has now demonstrated the ability to look away from reality when it proves inconvenient to his own beliefs.” Did you get the “whacko supporters” bit? He, the great homosexual, supports Paul for good and decent reasons only. The rest of the Paulists are just weirdos, yucky people. Anyway, what could be more disrespectable than dissenting from the status quo? Everybody knows that the status quo is normal, and any questioning it is a sign of mental imbalance. Right? Give me a break. The status quo exists in order to be questioned, both in politics and science, including the theory of evolution.

I’d like to indulge for a moment in psychoanalyzing evolutionsists. I am convinced that the NT evolutionists despise the idea of design in nature, of God’s bestowing grace on biological structures in order to create the sophisticated, information-rich, elegant robots within cells and organs and so on for one reason only: they cherish their autonomy and self-sufficiency and attack anything that appears to threaten them. They trash the defenders of intelligent design, because they cannot stand the idea of depending on anything, even if the thing on which they depend is God. It’s pride and vainglory coupled with rebellion. They can’t stand the idea that unaided nature plus chance are unble to make either the body or the soul. They think of grace as violence. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth: grace perfects nature, it does not abolish or violate it. Thus, we can conclude that evolutionists are both intellectually and morally depraved people.

… the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce. Have the Jews become the PC Nazis, committing the contradictory sins of policing thoughts and deathly fearing the pogroms, in the US and theocratic nationalists (who have, I so heard, learned a great deal about military strategies from Hitler) in Israel? Come on, folks, stop telling people what to think, stop being afraid (”The wicked man flees though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.” (Prov 28:1)), and, for goodness sake, go before a judge and resolve your ridiculous real estate disputes you are having in the Middle East. (Here is a key to success in this endeavor: private property.)

HT: lewrockwell.com

Noam Chomsky, besides his revolting communism, also confuses Ron Paul with Pat Buchanan the “paleo-conservative.” Buchanan is a sort of nationalist who wants to stay out of foreign entanglements, unless it is in the interest of the feds to intervene. I don’t trust Buchanan for two reasons. First, because I think he is a political schizophrenic, unequivocally supporting the present war in Iraq and the police state, saying, for example, that he is OK with being deceived by the US government, when it is in its interest to deceive him and others for the sake of the war effort: “deception, misinformation, disinformation, deceit, propaganda — these are all instruments of war.” (interview on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Dec 1, 2005) (I’m not OK, and I wrote to him in an unsent letter that “since, according to your own collectivist conservatism, ‘we’ are at war, this means that you are at war. As such you are a deceiver. Hence everything you write is worthless. I am not going to believe anything you say from now on.”) Second, he refuses to learn basic economics, decrying, absurdly, “a free-trade fanaticism that is denuding America of manufacturing jobs, sinking the dollar, and growing our dependence on foreign goods and foreign loans,” and so his policy prescriptions are awful. As all nationalists, he fails to grasp the facts that (1) American prosperity is tightly linked with the prosperity and destiny of the rest of the world, and (2) the nation-state as such has proven itself bankrupt as a form of political organization — throughout its sordid history it has been the vehicle for killing and impoverishing far too many people. Unlike Ron Paul.

Once again, non-interventionism does not entail nationalism both in principle and in fact in the case of Ron Paul. If anything, I predict that Americans will take greater interest in foreign cultures under the Paul administration. The hope is that most people prefer peaceful relationships over bullying and murdering and destroying.

HT: LRC blog.

You see, the vast majority of Americans are, just like David Bernstein himself, basically clean and pure folk, full of love and goodness, sort of like Moses. God forbid that the worthless subhumans like “9/11 and various other conspiracy theorists, southern secessionists, Nazis and fascists, anti-Semites and racists” be ever attracted to Ron Paul. I mean, if these guys like Ron Paul, then the normal people — you know, those who are like Moses, the saints and the prophets, beautiful to behold — will start distrusting him. I mean, why, to be associated with all these (equally?) disreputable sumbitches is so not respectable. And it is the respectable people who will decide the elections; the bad people, like the boogiemen of our author’s imagination, don’t count.

Look, I could point out the obvious, that Paul has nothing to do with the red-state fascism of all the other Republicans.

Fascism is protectionist and champions the absurdity of “self-sufficiency”; Paul is a genuine small government free trader and free marketeer, who holds that one doesn’t need government treaties to have free trade; all we have to do is unilaterally take down all of our own trade barriers.

Fascism requires a surveillance state; Paul is against the Patriot Act and for much greater privacy against the state.

Fascism depends on the preeminence of the executive power; Paul wants to restore the checks and balances (while shrinking all three of the branches of the federal government). As a corollary, Paul is pro-states’ rights. Hey, maybe with him as president, those yucky “southern secessionists” will reconsider!

Fascism is militaristic; Paul is unequivocally pro-peace and anti-empire.

Fascism scapegoats various unlucky races and nationalities; Paul welcomes everyone’s support. (Even, according to our author, the beyond the pale 9/11 conspiracy theorists and so on.) Further, Paul is, I imagine, pro-freedom of association in all of its numerous manifestations, including for the rights of businessmen and employers, land- and building owners, and lending institutions to dispose of their properties as they see fit. But, according to David, being against the outlawry of “discrimination” makes you a racist.

Fascism subordinates the individual to the state; Paul is pro-freedom, both “economic” and “personal,” and pro-secure private property, all the way to eliminating the IRS.

Fascism uses public schooling to instill the desired values and beliefs in the young people; Paul wants to abolish the Department of Education.

Crucially, Paul is pro-sound money, hardly a fascist plank. As Mises writes, “Inflationism, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is only one piece in the total framework of politico-economic and socio-philosophical ideas of our time. Just as the sound money policy of gold standard advocates went hand in hand with liberalism, free trade, capitalism and peace, so is inflationism part and parcel of imperialism, militarism, protectionism, statism and socialism.” (On the Manipulation of Money and Credit, 48)

Finally, it is true that Paul wants secure borders, but only in order not to swell the ranks of welfare recipients.

But why should I explain these things? David Bernstein should just speak to God face to face and have them revealed to him. But I suppose that he’d rather throw the first stone.

In short, if Ron Paul’s positions are fascist, then boy is fascism sweet. Take it from a self-hating Jew (by ancestry, Catholic by faith) and count me in!

On the Glen Beck’s CNN show Horowitz said: “There are plenty of, unfortunately, libertarian websites which are indistinguishable from the anti-American lefties: lewrockwell.com and others like that. They are totally in bed with Islamo-fascists and have turned against this country.”

What an asshole! It goes to show: once a communist, always a communist; or, to be more precise, once a fanatic in thrall to a bad ideology, always a fanatic in thrall to a bad ideology. It is true that his ideology has changed; but it has remained bad. In short:

1. LRC.com has nothing to do with the “lefties,” anti-American or not, except insofar as the libertarians and the left-liberals share certain few ideological positions and can therefore enter into limited and temporary alliances.

2. LRC.com is not anti-American but one of the most patriotic publications in the US. It is cosmopolitan in its outlook, but its love of liberty presupposes the love of the countries in which that liberty is to flourish. In other words, it wills nothing but good to America, even though it criticizes the evils that, thanks in part to dorks like Horowitz, have crept into it.

3. There is no such thing as an “Islamo-fascist” (that is, fascist due to the tenets of Islam).

4. The libertarians have not turned against this country; they have merely turned against Horowitz and his fellow neocons. One can only mock Horowitz’s delusions of grandeur by which he thinks he is America.

5. Ron Paul is not “against” things, nor does he appeal to the “disenfranchised.” His campaign has always emphasized what he is for, such as peace, sound money, small government, and such like.

HT: LewRockwell.com blog.

Isn’t it amazing how the media puts down Ron Paul every step of the way? They used to think: He will never even be noticed. Well, he got noticed, but he’ll never get the money he needs. Ok, so he got the money, but the “challenge” for him is to translate it into votes, and he’ll fail to do so and therefore lose the primaries. And then they will be saying: Oh, he won the primaries, but he will never get nominated. Alright, he got nominated, but he certainly won’t win the general elections. And now in the ABC story Lew links to: “Paul, even if he were to be elected president, probably would not have the votes in Congress to revamp the financial system, much less abolish the Fed.” You want to bet?

… is that it has not conquered Canada, says Michael Medved. Also, check out his reference to the “insurgent” Ron Paul campaign.

Oh year, and the “immortal toast,” “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!” is pretty much the same toast that might be uttered by Don Corleone, with “family” replacing “country.” Criminal nationalist, Medved is. A patriot loves what is good about his country and hates what is evil in it. Everything that I love about America has nothing to do with the doings of presidents and politicians and judges, because almost all of the latter seek to ruin this country, though whether from malice or stupidity is not always clear. Ron Paul is an exception to the rule.

And as for his main thesis, isolationism does not mean absence of commerce and other peaceful intercourse; on the contrary, as Ron Paul has repeatedly emphasized, he and his supporters are not isolationist but non-interventionist, something completely different. As I have written elsewhere,

In condemning wars, libertarians are not being isolationist. On the contrary, they want to engage the entire world into social cooperation under division of labor. They want all barriers to trade and to free movement of capital and labor to disappear. They want international travel to be as hassle-free as possible. They support the gold standard, in order to further unify the world by making gold and/or silver the single international currency not subject to manipulation by political elites in every country in the world. It is our acts of war that isolate us and make the rest of the world hate us.

And even from my admittedly limited knowledge of history I can say that in the past 50 years the US has been far more interventionist than it had been at all the times before. To quote Rothbard, America was “conceived in liberty” and, after seceding from Britain, also in peace.

But suppose we grant Medved’s point. The Golden Age of minding our political business in the distant past never existed. So what? Does it invalidate the ideal of non-interventionism? I think not.

And you thought Canadians were all welfare and no warfare.

There is “an anti-interventionist wing of the GOP“? When I asked Lew: “The Republicans have spent the last 6 years building an empire and a police state at a much increased rate; why would they nominate someone who pledges to dismantle both?,” he replied with “only if it is a revolutionary moment.” Well, is it a revolutionary moment? I think it’s definitely possible for Paul to get elected, and I don’t just mean “true in some possible world,” ha ha. I mean, he has a real chance in this wretched world. Go, Ron! I don’t even want to imagine having to choose between the about equally atrocious Giuliani (if the neocons need their weekly new Hitler, here’s one, and he doesn’t even need to be bombed; just refused the nomination) and Hillary (she’s just a Frankenstein’s monster). May both of these scumbags get their asses thoroughly kicked.

“America’s Police Brutality Pandemic” by Paul Craig Roberts.

No, it’s the same old world. The only differences are: the World Trade Center is gone, 3,000 people are dead as a direct result of the attacks, and the US government has used this tragedy as a pretext to do what it had always wanted to do: start wars in the Middle East (thereby killing over a million people, directly and indirectly (and that’s just since 2003) — thanks, of course, to Lew for finding these data) and clamp down on domestic liberties. Other than these, everything is pretty much the same. Oh, the computers are better, don’t forget about that.