Vietnam, Students and U.S. Failure

As of 1969, a massive movement spread like wild fire across the nation. Unrest, anger and fear filled the hearts of the young people, not against the “evil communists” lurking around the corner of which Joe McCarthy warned, but instead the evil fascists of the draft boards and progressive Johnson Administration.

“The Libertarian,” a pro-individualist newsletter, published in May of that year read, “the student revolution has spread to campus after campus, even to the most conservative and the most apathetic (Rothbard, 1969).” Their assessment? “These rebellions are spontaneous and spur-of-the-moment; they take inspiration and heart from rebellions on their fellow campuses, but they are in no sense manipulated by any arcane forces from outside. They stem from the deepest yearnings and values of the kids on campus (Rothbard, 1969).” The yearnings these “kids” felt are plain: self-ownership.

These students were not saints pursuing a selfless cause; they instead wanted the right to control their own destinies, preserve their own lives, and determine their own futures. Contrary to popular neo-conservative opinion (and L.B.J. was as much a neo-con as any Bush or Clinton), it is not wicked or vile to protect one’s own interests from being trampled upon for the “greater good,” particularly when that purported good is a foreign and illegal war.

This desire for self-preservation, coupled with the public’s distaste for war, went hand-in-hand with the 1968 victory of the reform candidate Richard Nixon, attributed most likely to his promise to end the war in Vietnam. Although it took him some time to accomplish this goal (and some speculate that he had little real interest in making it reality), the fallout of Lyndon Johnson’s war policy, such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, contributed to a heightened distrust of American politicians both domestically and abroad.

Richard Nixon’s own transgressions and failure to withdraw from Vietnam in a timely fashion made up the minds of the American public. The Office of President received a permanent black eye thanks to the one-two punch of Johnson’s truth mangling and Tricky Dick’s power-seeking, deal-cutting ways. Public opinion of U.S. leadership hit rock bottom.

Johnson and Nixon were two sides of the same coin, not just for their faith in the Vietnam War (regardless of Nixon’s political propaganda and stumping) and preventing an imaginary domino effect in Southeast Asia, but also for their addiction to the welfare state. Johnson’s failed Great Society was buttressed and extended during the Nixon Administration (Besiger, 2006). Of course, Nixon didn’t just aid and abet L.B.J. in looting the American taxpayers’ savings with Great Society programs; he went several steps further, promoting corporate welfare, and, in his most wicked of sins, cut the tie between gold and the dollar.

Inflation resulted not only from the deficit spending of the warfare-state, but from the same in accordance with the welfare state. More dollars were siphoned out of the economy and into the government coffers. Then as the Federal Reserve generated more false currency and artificially low interest rates at the behest of both former Presidents, the economy tanked, the dollar started to crash and the prices of commodities rose at alarming rates.

During the Vietnam War students developed a healthy distrust of their contemporary administration, unfortunately, many did not embrace the truth, that governments are incapable of solving real-world problems because their only answer is to add more government. For example, race relations grew worse after interventionist judges. National security diminished with the declaration of the Cold War. American lives were lost for no reason in Vietnam and Korea (and Japan and Germany, but we’ll refrain from going into that). Inflation grew worse with the invention of the Federal Reserve. The New Deal extended the Great Depression. The list goes on.

Ideally, a people should learn from the mistakes of the past, but instead the United States has perservered in its pursuit of the welfare-warfare state and it finds itself now ensnared in another pointless, endless conflict and is ready to open the door to a new one. It has destroyed both the nation’s and possibly the world’s economies through endless government spending and loose monetary policy. In the end, of course, if the people have their freedom, and the government ever learns not to interfere, recovery could come quickly. Only time will tell.

REFERENCES
Bresiger, G. (2006). George W. Bush’s Nixonomics. The Ludwig von Mises Institute. Retrieved August 17, 2007 from http://www.mises.org/story/2172.

Rothbard, M. N. (1969, May 1). The Student Revolution. The Libertarian, p. 1-2.

Anarchy Defined

What is Anarcho-Capitalism anyways? This post will answer a few basic misunderstandings people may have with the idea of anarchy. Anarchy is not chaos. It is very different from chaos. If a person were to say that an anarchist is an advocate of chaos he would, of course, be mistaken but on more than one level. They first define anarchy as chaos which is not the case. Anarchy is simply no government (government is a monopoly of coercion in a geographical areal). Secondly they would be mistakenly concluding that government is the author of order. This too would be a terrible mistake.

Dictionary.com has four definitions for anarchy. The first definition is "a state of society without government or law." Well, an anarchist society would definitely have law. The definition is not specific enough and therefore misleading. A better definition would be "a state of society without government or government enforced law." The second definition is an absurd definition, it doesn't fit the word. It is "political and social disorder due to the absence of governmental control." This definition is flawed because order is not a characteristic of government but a characteristic of freely interacting individuals.

The third definition of anarchy could be considered a good definition if not interpreted as a socialist ideal but free interaction. The third definition is "a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society." Cooperation is not a necessary part of anarchy but a part that will naturally form because people are self interested. Forced cooperation brings about chaos and would be another state. Cooperation itself must be voluntary in order to achieve and anarchist society.

The last definition, "confusion; chaos; disorder," is absurd. If people want to use this definition of the word they cannot mean the political system. They would necessarily have to mean an environment in which there is government. It is sort of absurd to define a word as antonyms but who am I to judge the people who mistakenly evolve words into something they are not. The best definition of anarchy is "a society without government where government is a geographical monopoly of coercion."

Is an anarchist society a utopia and therefore unattainable? Murray Rothbard addressed this criticism in the last chapter of For a New Liberty. He claimed that limited government was the utopian ideal and only anarchy was defendable. What would a free society look like anyways? A free society is a society where people are free to cooperate or dissociate from whoever they please. It is a society in which property rights prevail because people own the product of their labor. A free society is a society in which people can buy and sell the products of their labor; they are not tied to it by government edict like they are in a feudalist or communist society. A free society is not a democracy or monarchy or any society that has a government.

The definition of anarchy as stated above is the definition that this site endorses. If a person critiques anarchy in any of the ways mentioned above they are not critiquing anarchy at all, they are critiquing government.

--George Edwards

Modern Rascism

One of my closest mentors in college was a Lt. Col. Harris from the ROTC department, who was not only a highly intelligent, thoughtful, and honest man, but was also meek in the truly Christian sense; in the sense that he saw the bigger picture, and while he did not falsely belittle his own accomplishments, he also put them into their proper perspective, and never showed the slightest sign of arrogance to me or anyone else. When the cadets needed help, he was the one to volunteer to make the time. When a cadet was misprioritizing, he was the one who was able to point it out to them and help them make it right. When my internal crisis with the Church was at its worst, he was the one who was able to remind me of my own sanity. As it so happens, he was a black man.

One of the politicians I respect the most is a woman named Condoleeza Rice. While some other people of her skin color were doing their damnedest to take incriminating photographs of policemen who were just trying to defend themselves and do their jobs, demanding that the state impose racist hiring quotas on employers, trying to hijack the free market economy by interfering in private business choices, and squabbling over the distribution of public works that never should have existed in the first place, she was out earning her Phd, landing teaching positions in such prestigious institutions of learning as Stanford University, and becoming the most powerful woman in American politics, and becoming an accomplished concert pianist (just for the fun of it(!)). While I strongly disagree with her views on foreign policy, I must admit that she is one of the most impressive and respectable individuals in the world of politics. She also happens to be a black woman.

One of the people I enjoyed working with the most was a man named Bobby Williams. I was still in highschool, and it was my first summer job. Bobby was middle aged, but you wouldn't have thought so from looking at him. After working out in the field all day, he would go lift weights and run. He was there early every morning. He always evaluated what needed to be done, and worked harder than anyone else there. He'd always been with the company we worked for -- in the beginning, when there was nothing on the property but trees to be chopped down, and stumps to destroy -- in the hard times, when everyone else was jumping ship and abandoning the company before their jobs disappeared -- in the fallow times, when there were severe shortages of equipment and manpower. He was steady, strong, compassionate, brutally honest, and deeply pious. He didn't have much, but what he did have was his. He never complained, and found happiness in spite of numerous troubles brought on by those who would take advantage of his overabundant generosity. He was not a perfect man, but he was a righteous one. As it so happens, he was also a black man.

I am not a racist. I have no right to be. I have seen firsthand why racist ideas can hold no water.

I am not a racist, but I do understand how it is possible to be one.

I work security at an apartment complex (What can I say? It's paying the bills for now.). This complex receives government funding; it is subsidized housing for welfare recipients. At least 90% of the people who live there are black. There are several crack-houses in the complex, and we're always having to kick crackheads off the property (who are also mostly black). Many of the residents there deeply resent our presence, which is at the behest and pay of the owners of the property (which they seem to feel entitled to as a matter of course), and those that do are almost all black.

Much of modern black culture glorifies theft, murder, and recreational drug use (which, while I believe it should be legal, I do not believe it should be viewed in a positive light (it is damaging, stupid, and low)).

We pay people to sit on their ass and have kids, and call it "welfare." These welfare recipients wait until they are 16 and then do their best to have kids so they can drop out of highschool and collect a check for doing nothing. Most welfare recipients are black.

White and Asian men and women are finding that they are being rejected from Universities and jobs in favor of less qualified black and hispanic students because schools and employers have genuinely racist quotas that favor the black man. Meanwhilst, "luminaries" such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton scream in self-righteous indignation about the white man keeping black people down.

Given this, it's hard to believe that racism (among whites) isn't far more prevalent than it already is; it's practically pandemic among black people nowadays. Most white people are not racist against black people, not primarily because of the outstanding black individuals that they know, but because of the guilt complex instilled into them by today's system of public education and politically correct thought. In the far backwoods of Nowhere, America, there still linger a very few individuals who genuinely believe that being black of skin makes one inherently inferior, but those are so few in number, and so utterly insignificant in person, that it hardly bears mentioning. Yet, there are a great many today that are racist for other, more rational reasons; all the reasons listed above.

Our culture has so earnestly striven to counter injustices of the past, that it has inadvertently (or perhaps even purposely) committed true atrocities in the present against white men and women whose only crime was to be born to white parents.

The reason things have gotten so out of hand is that as a result of our decades of counterracist policies, the black community has come to develop an entitlement complex. Not all black people have this complex, obviously, but a great many of them do; they're used to special treatment at the hands of a society that has been guilted into providing it. Make no mistake: affirmative action is special treatment. It is the most racist trend in legislation since Jim Crow. The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people will do the bare minimum to get by. If you start handing out freebies based on race, then the majority of the people of that race will continue to stagnate -- the basic motivation for survival is no longer present. This is the root cause of racial stagnation; not the racism of white people. Modern racism is not the disease; it is merely a symptom of the welfare state applied to race.

The solution to the current dilemma is simple, yet hard. And it is the only solution:

We must stop taking race into account in the legislative process. Skin color must not have any relevance to public policy. There can be no such thing as a "hate crime." A crime is a crime; nothing more or less. You cannot force people to act fairly, and you shouldn't try; though discrimination is self-destructive in the long run. The only way to kill racism is to demonstrate its stupidity. The only way to do that is to step aside and let outstanding individuals shine, without the help of the state, and demonstrate the irrelevance of skin color. DO NOT HELP THEM! This will only belittle their accomplishments. DO NOT HINDER THEM! In the end everyone will see you for the fool that you are. This is the ONLY solution.

--P.J. Composer

Contra Hobbes- Private Defense in a Free Society

The biggest argument against privatized law and police force is that natural law must come from some higher power. It is the idea that without state there would be no order. The idea is that humans are naturally chaotic without a higher power telling them how to act there would be only chaos.

Applied to any scrutiny, though, this idea is quickly proven to be false. Humans act without the intervention of a higher force all the time. You only have to look as far as the nearest charitable bake sale to see that people can interact without killing each other. In fact you will even see that when an exchange, such as the brownie for a dollar happens both parties involved in the interaction walk away happier people.

On the occasion that something does happen at a function of this sort people actually avoid involving higher authorities unless it becomes absolutely necessary. They attempt to handle the situation themselves. When a function that involves the exchange of highly valued items takes place people will have a tendency to try to protect their property using private, not invasive state forms of security. In the year 2000 $64.5 billion was spent to ensure the safety of private property useing private security. The private security industry is flourishing despite of the government

From this statistic we can infer a few things. The first is that people are not naturally chaotic and in fact value security a great deal and second that people are losing confidence in this higher authority to provide for them a working security force.

In 2002 congress approved a budget of $300 billion dollars to go towards defense. This year homeland security was approved a 7% increase in budget to $46 billion. All of this is being paid for by the people who claim citizenship to the US. It is astounding then that after having spent over $346 billion dollars on security that people would still feel the need to spend another $64.3 billion on security that should already have been paid for. Private security is bought and sold on the market and has good reason to be efficient and conducive to their customers wishes. Coerced security is not bought and sold on the market; it does not have a real price or a reason to be efficient. Government produced “goods,” especially security could easily be relabeled “institutionalized property theft with no real check or balance.”

People know that a good society cannot function without the protection of private property. Realizing this people spend billions to protect the private property the state is unable and incapable of protecting. People are capable of thinking objectively and calculating the cost of security versus the destruction of their private property.

With no confidence in the state police forces and the increasing realization that there is a more than suitable alternative out there, it is only a matter of time before people completely abolish state police forces and turn to a better way of life. A life which security is provided without the security controlling the activities of those it is meant to serve. Private security does exist, and it is better.

--Andrew Edwards

aedwardsone@yahoo.com

Important For Anarcho-Capitalists on the fence

Vote for Ron Paul! I have come to the firm decision that voting is NOT immoral and that there is nothing wrong with voting, the problem lies with democracy. Lew Rockwell said that the act of voting is superfluous, and I agree, that no one vote will matter. Tom Woods on the other hand countered Lew Rockwell (in an unrecorded session at the Mises Institute) that Ron Paul is worth voting for. His counter is based on his view that 5 or 6 people could be dissuaded from voting because of what Lew Rockwell was saying. Don't get me wrong, Lew Rockwell fully supports Ron Paul, he is just not willing to vote for him. It sounds rather strange unless you happen to be an anarcho-capitalist who believes that the best policy for individuals is disengagement from the government.

There is no rational way, at this moment, to fully disengage. The state is wound so tightly into our lives that disengagement would require starvation. Furthermore an anarcho-capitalist society does not spawn from the breakdown of the state. When states have collapsed in the past no anarcho capitalist society ensued. What I propose is a different path to a more anarcho-capitalist society. A way to wean us off the milk of the state (the sour nasty virus filled milk). We should all vote for Ron Paul! Ron Paul has an outside chance of winning. Momentum IS building. Two things have happened to me in the past two days that have convinced me.
First, I was talking to a regular customer in Tipton's Gas America (where I work) and asked him, out of the blue, who he was going to vote for. He replied that "Ron Paul is his man." I was slightly stunned. I then told him that I too was a Ron Paul fan and the roundabout way that I heard of Ron Paul. Most people know Ron Paul apart from the sound Austrian School of economic thought, they know him as a politician and a libertarian who ran in the 80's. I know Ron Paul only through the Ludwig von Mises Institute. I explained that Paul has sound economic doctrine which he derived from Mises. The old guy went on to say the he used to read a lot of Mises in his younger years. What a surprise.

Today I went to Indiana University Kokomo to start research for a paper I plan on writing about Wallstreet and it's formation. On my way out I met this lady who was sporting a Ron Paul t-shirt and pin handing out papers about Ron Paul. I thought this was incredible and went on to say that I didn't need a paper because I was already going to vote for Ron Paul. Needless to say (if you know the passion that goes in to supporting Ron Paul) she gave me a handful of papers and bumperstickers.... and business cards to distribute.

Unfortunately I let a few of those bumperstickers slip into the hands of some 9-11 truthers that are also my friends. After giving them about 10 of them they told me they were going to put them on a bunch of people's cars (without their knowledge). Fortunately I convinced them to limit their sticker rampage to public property only, something the Ron Paul campaign would be utterly against but may catch the eye of other young people. (Edit note: The bumper stickers are safely stowed away from distructive influence)

There is something more to be said of these young and old people leading this dispersed campaign. The leaders of meetup groups are held in high regard and in high esteem. These guys are the people who are going to get the anarcho-capitalist movement, or minarchist movement, going in the right direction. This campaign is already More than legendary. For some people it is their last shot at something great. Older people see that liberty in their lifetime MAY be possible. Younger people are also taking this seriously in a way that young people often do. It is sad that we have to fight this hard to free ourselves from the clutches of government interventionism, but, ALAS, Ron Paul seems to be our only hope. By saying Ron Paul I really mean all those who care about liberty and sound economics, he is an idea, NO LONGER A PERSON.

--George Edwards