If traditional music be the food of law and order, play on?

Over the pat few years local authorities in the US, UK and New Zealand have started using the tactic of playing classical music near shopping areas and other public places to deter teenagers from gathering in large groups and making a nuisance of themselves. And apparently this technique is proving pretty effective - a lot of teenagers are really getting turned-off by listening to traditional classical music that sounds totally alien to the simplistic Afro-American hip hop that they usually listen to.

While this is probably a good tactic, if it proves effective, It's a little sad to see classical music, being portrayed as the music of the establishment, when in today's liberal order, it's nothing of the sort. In today's world, where market populism reigns supreme, the classical scene music is more like an endangered species, which gets a modest government subsidy to broadcast on community radio and provide the odd concert. If the modern liberal establishment has a signature sound, it's more like the easy-listening pop, rock and electronica heard reverberating around shopping mall food courts and automated help lines.

I have a pet theory that one of the reasons why classical music is stuck in such a marginalised cul-de-sac, is the persistent campaign by Marxist music critics to drive a wedge between popular music and traditional musical genres like classical music and folk. From the 1930s to the 1970s there was a sizeable popular demand for crossover-music like jazz and progressive rock with musicians from George Gershwin and Miles Davies to Robert Fripp held in high regard by the popular music press and the Stuff White People Like crowd. However, with the arrival of punk in the late 1970s, there was an aggressive campaign to strip popular music of any links to traditional western music and culture.

Progressive rock in particular, came in for savage attack, with music critics accusing it of being bourgeois and pretentious (as in the case of ELP) disturbingly politically apathetic (as in the case of Yes which championed spiritual enlightenment over leftist politics) or even "crypto-fascist" (as Canadian rock band Rush were labeled for using Ayn Rand-influenced lyrics). Indeed, some leftist music critics savaged just about any band which deviated from the prescribed 3 minute, 3 cord, sex,drugs and rock n roll formula set down in the late 50s. Not surprising, in such an anti-bourgeois climate popular musicians from middle-class backgrounds ( like Joe Strummer of The Clash)  went to elaborate lengths to prove their proletariat credentials by adopting fake accents, working-class personas, and denying having any formal musical training.

This sustained and largely successful attack on cross-over music means that today's young people have little or no exposure to music with traditional sounds and instruments or complex structures, and popular music that’s been stripped of folk, choral and classical influences is proving to be bland and unmelodic.  Hip hop music is particularly alien to the western musical traditional since it offers almost no instrumental virtuosity, which was one of the main factors that made heavy mental music so popular with working-class white males from the 1970s to 1990s.

The Conservative Dilemma in America: Turf Wars, Fusionism or Alliance?

With the two major election losses of 2006 and 2008, the Republican Party has respectively lost Congress and the Presidency and now finds itself adrift and in search of a new identity. It seems at this point, with the Tea Parties and anti-ObamaCare movements, that conservative leadership is coming more from the grassroots than from the Republican Party. But while I’ve supported third parties in the past, when conservatives were in power instead of a statist left wing regime, this is not a time for such advocacy if conservatism is to survive, as the statist transformation of American society and government promoted by the Obama administration is in the process of inflicting irreparable damage on the Republic. At its inception in the 1950s, the conservative movement had a common foe in Soviet Communism abroad and Progressive statism at home. I think we live in similar times, although the threat at home is currently drowning out the threat of Islamic jihadism abroad.

In the 1960s, Frank S. Meyer, a communist before converting to libertarianism and joining the staff at William F. Buckley’s National Review, promoted the theory of “fusionism”: a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and conservatism (See Wikipedia). Meyer argued his theory in his book, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (1962), although he had not yet dubbed his theory “fusionism.” It is fair to say that Meyer’s thesis was not received with undiluted acclaim as none other than Russell Kirk, one of the father’s of American Conservatism ‘retorted that “individualism” (the term then used for libertarianism) was “social atomism” and even anti-Christian. The political result of individualism, he said, was inevitably anarchy.’ Kirk also criticized Meyer’s fusionism and individualism for its rationalism, and countered that ‘Custom, tradition, and the wisdom of our ancestors . . . constituted the firm foundation upon which a society should be built.’ (Lee Edwards, “The Conservative Consensus: Frank Meyer, Barry Goldwater, and the Politics of Fusionism,” Heritage Foundation, January 22, 2007, p. 1). Meyer had previously criticized Kirk’s seminal The Conservative Mind (1953) for lacking any “clear and distinct principle,” or a comprehension of the institutions of a free society (Ibid.).

Friedrich Hayek joined in the fray with his essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (The Constitution of Liberty, 1960), where he criticized Kirk and fellow conservatives for not understanding economics, for “strident nationalism,” and for a lack of “any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments” (Edwards, p. 2). Needless to say, while fusionism wasn’t perfect, it worked well enough to help nominate Goldwater in 1964 and elect Reagan to the Presidency in 1980. I’ve written previously in “Political Definitions: Conservative, Liberal, and Libertarian” about how I think Hayek’s classical liberalism or libertarianism can be reconciled with conservatism, as Hayek was an admirer of Burke, the father of Anglo-American conservatism, and his theory of “spontaneous order” was respectful of traditions that evolved historically. George Carey has also written about the compatibility of Hayek’s “evolutionary” theory of society with traditional conservatism (“Conservatives and Libertarians View Fusionism,” Modern Age, Winter 1982, Vol. 26, No. 1, p. 12).

Reflecting upon my own political philosophy, which combines elements of conservatism and libertarianism, there is an uneasy contradiction inherent in such a point of view. For the modern libertarian, freedom or liberty is the highest virtue, including political, economic, and social liberties, whereas for the conservative, while freedom may be important, tradition has earned a higher place in his sentiments. Of course in America, where our tradition is one of classical liberalism, liberty and freedom are at the core, making it a bit easier to entertain inconsistencies. We, after all, do not have a tradition of Toryism or monarchism, as do the Europeans. But there’s definitely a difference between classical liberals, such as Edmund Burke, a Whig who was also religious, and modern Progressive Liberals, who are influenced by Marxism and other socialisms, and tend to be irreligious. But even classical liberals or libertarians are often irreligious and ready to overturn traditional cultural institutions when they obstruct economic freedom or individual liberty, and there lies the rub. It is also significant that those of us on the Right always have to consider this contradiction between freedom and tradition, some of us embracing one or the other, but many of us struggling with the contradiction, while those on the Left almost universally embrace equality as the primary political virtue. Thus, rather than a contradiction, their thought exists on a continuum of Statist egalitarianism, from Progressivism and social democracy on one end to democratic socialism and the absolutism of communism on the other end of the scale. As my readers may have observed in their own experience, for the left, the enemy is always to the right, seldom if ever on the left.

Contemporary internecine disputes are complicated by the ascendency of Neo-Conservatism in the Republican Party power structure, although with recent election defeats, the Neo-Con standard has been in some disrepute, as Bush’s foreign policy was largely designed by Neo-Con strategists. While in the course of my own conversion to conservatism in the late1980s, as an avid reader of Chronicles magazine, I have felt more affinity for the traditional conservatism espoused there by Thomas Fleming and fellow travelers such as the late Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried and Pat Buchanan, than I have with Neo-Conservatism, but I must say, I’ve never liked the term Paleo-Conservative and find the conservative infighting between the Paleos and Neos to be rather tedious. Beyond a few well-known examples, I’m often not sure, nor do I care, who is a Neo and who is a Paleo. (I confess as well to disagreeing with the Paleos about Israel, while I agree with their stance on illegal immigration, and to some degree, on economic matters. But to complicate my own political affinities further, I was also influenced by so-called Paleo-Libertarians such as Murray Rothbard and his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, Hayek as I’ve previously noted, and Ron Paul.) That aside, the average conservative American voter really doesn’t give a damn about the Neo-Paleo conflict, and such academic politico squabbling reminds me of Freud’s phrase, “the narcissism of minor differences,” which he used to describe “the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other” (Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 61). This is not to say that there are no real points of contention between Neo-Cons and Paleo-Cons, but disagree or not, if they don’t unite to battle their common foe of left wing statism, the battle will be lost before it begins.

That said, what are some of the policy implications inherent in a Republican coalition that includes traditional conservatives, libertarians, and neo-conservatives? Several issues emerge. In the economic sphere, the conservative dilemma is whether to pursue a global free trade policy despite the fact that the U.S. has a huge trade deficit with China and Japan, or whether to pursue a more nationalistic economic trade policy. Paleo-Cons tend to prefer the latter course whereas Neo-Cons and Libertarians tend to prefer the former policies. Both sides do believe in free markets; the Paleos however, want reciprocal trade agreements. As I’ve said elsewhere in “Is the Republican Party Really Conservative?” Adam Smith did not promote the idea that a free market nation should tolerate huge trade deficits. But as we’ve all discovered with the recent global financial collapse, when it comes to modern global economics, nothing is simple. I recently began reading David Smick’s The World Is Curved (2008) because I wanted to understand, from an insider’s point-of-view, what happened in the economic meltdown of 2008. While I am personally in favor of some kind of return to the gold standard and have been influenced by Austrian economics (see “Inflation, the National Debt, and Monetary Reform”), Smick does make some good points: For example, without all the easy capital flows and credit, the global economic expansion of the past 25 years would not have been possible. That doesn’t change my views as to the need for monetary reform because I don’t think the bubble to bust cycle is good for the average American, but it does point to the fact that now that we have a Democratic Congress in favor of increased government regulation of the economy, redistributionism, and protectionism, there could be drastic unintended consequences following economic tinkering by clueless politicians. Smick wrote:

The problem, however, is that in a highly entrepreneurial economy, it is difficult, if not impossible, to micromanage wealth distribution without negative countereffects. To some extent, the system must tolerate a certain amount of ugly distributional “unfairness” with the greater goal of producing an explosion in wealth creation, greater job creation, and broad-scale poverty reduction. (p. 88)

Another area of dispute between Paleo-Cons, Neo-Cons, and Libertarians is in foreign policy where Neo-cons tend to prefer an internationalist/interventionist and Pro-Israeli foreign policy whereas Paleo-Cons and Libertarians prefer a more Nationalist America First policy in the case of the former and an anti-war policy in the latter case, both of which tend to be non-interventionist. These are real differences that won’t disappear in the near future. Both sides of the conservative movement do, however, believe in a strong national defense.

In summary, all of these policy differences make a right wing coalition government much more problematic than a left wing government, which is at least fairly united in the goal of increased statism and greater government control in the lives of individual Americans: On the left the question is generally how much and how fast to increase government power, not whether to be for or against globalization or illegal immigration or interventions in the Middle East. While these differences do exist on the left, particularly on the issue of globalization, they do not generally elicit the passionate infighting that is apparent on the right. Of course, we shall see, with Democratic control of Congress and the Presidency, how Obama will handle the dissatisfactions of the extreme left, and more moderate Dems on the center-left of the Party.

While I think it’s essential to have thinkers who take principled Paleo-Con, Neo-Con, and Libertarian positions, to win an election in a democratic republic like the United States involves winning over a broad coalition to your point-of-view. So while a fusion of the three positions may not be possible, after all, people with differences do not melt into a common stew, a coalition that includes Paleos, Neos, and Libertarians is possible: a coalition or alliance against a common enemy, left wing statism. As I argued in “Is the Republican Party Really Conservative?” we can agree about our values in favor of individual liberty, economic freedom, limited government, opposition to political correctness in our cultural institutions, and pro-American rather than anti-American foreign and domestic policies, despite the significant disagreements enumerated above. Without such an alliance, which as I’ve argued in “Conservative Populism,” must also include Reagan Democrats, an appeal to youth, and hold on to most of the Religious Right, America will end up being a mere shadow of its former self, a socialistic mess of a third world banana republic.

Quote for the week

Great line from View from the Right on the strange desire of Britain’s elites to continue promoting immigration in the crowded post colonial era:

“The British couldn't afford an overseas empire any longer, so they brought the Third Worlders to Britain, imagining they could continue benignly leading them at home just as the had done in the former empire.”

New Zealand’s third world fisheries

Fisheries are one of the few productive sectors which most developed countries still run along nationalistic lines. Generally only financially desperate third-world governments open up their fisheries to foreign vessels. An exception to this is New Zealand, which as part of its apathetic attitude to fishing resources  and later a neoliberal commitment to free trade, has allowed foreign vessels from around the world to fish in its territorial waters since the late 1970s.

Initially foreign vessels were allowed into New Zealand waters to fish for deep-sea species which local fishermen were unable or unwilling to fish for. However, after a collapse in numbers of deep-water species such as Orange Roughy in the 1980s, a quota system was introduced which meant foreign vessels were only permitted to fish for quota on behalf of New Zealand companies.

Unfortunately there are two standards when it comes to policing this quota system. New Zealand-run ships are carefully policed by on-board fisheries officers, but foreign vessels are often left totally un-supervised. The reason for this lapse monitoring of foreign vessels was revealed in a programme entitled the Great New Zealand Fishing Scandal  which aired on the Documentary Channel earlier this week.

Apparently, conditions on many of the foreign-owned vessels from countries such as Thailand, Myanmar and Russia are so bad that New Zealand Fisheries Officers refuse to stay on them for health and safety reasons. Subsequently, we have little idea if these boats are confirming to local regulations or not. And even when it is proven that they are breaching fisheries regulations, it is often easier for them to pay the relatively modest fines than abide by the rules.

Defenders of the current system, argue that New Zealand wouldn't need to employ foreign vessels if New Zealand were willing to go and get the fish themselves, rather than rely on keener, harder-working foreigners to do the job for them. However, this doesn' t really apply  when you are taking about a shrinking resource for which demand is increasing. Even if New Zealanders under-exploit the resource in the short-term, this isn't really a serious problem as the resource will therefore last longer, and the total value of fish taken in dollar terms will be higher, as a fish not caught today can be caught and sold for a higher price tomorrow. And in any case, that's likely to be an academic problem, as there are now sufficient New Zealand boats around to catch the existing quota (which has recently been cut dramatically for many species) without needing to call on foreign vessels.

The end result of this rash experiment in laissez-faire fisheries management is that many New Zealand fisherman are unable to compete with foreign vessels and hundreds have left the country for jobs in better managed fisheries in Australia and North America.

For a developed country with a small population of 4 million people, and thousands of kilometres of relatively unpolluted coastline, this is a situation of third-world incompetence.

Former Labour prime-minister David Lange once had the audacity to say New Zealand was run like a Polish shipyard. However, in the case of fisheries, he and successors have turned it into the equivalent of a Nigerian shipyard.

Subsidising market populism

With state-owned Television New Zealand facing increasing pressure these days to cut staff and compete with Sky TV, perhaps the government should be putting some thought into whether taxpayers should continue to subsidize mass-market entertainment.

Most of the programming on TV2 for example is popular soap-opera entertainment like Shortland Street, which is little different to the kind of television viewing produced by the private sector. And if such programmes can be made successfully in the private sector, then there's little justification for the public sector producing them as well.

The original rationale behind public broadcasting was to provide high quality content that the market was unable or unwilling to deliver. This relatively elitist approach to public broadcasting reached its cultural apex in the 1960s and 1970s, with the BBC in particular, delivering a number of excellent dramas, documentaries and comedies, which in many cases have not been bettered.

In the 1980s though, market populism began to take hold as an odd alliance of left-liberal egalitarians and neoliberal managers decided public broadcasting needed to take account of mass market tastes, i.e., the tastes of those US commentator Steve Sailer refers to as "people who like movies with big explosions."

Market populism, for better or worse, has also spread through the Anglosphere's education establishment with its notorious "communications" and "studies" majors, and through cultural institutions like museums which switched from being relatively hi-brow cultural repositories to kid-centric pop culture centres, guaranteed to insult the intelligence of anyone with an IQ north of a 100.

This was kind of sad, since in the 70s and 80s many had struck a pretty good balance in their displays, which made them accessible to the average person, while still being interesting to the well- educated.

In the new millennium public broadcasting reached further lows as public radio became little more than a left-liberal propaganda vehicle and public television sunk to the reality TV lows of Treasure Island, Big Brother and I''m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.

From a conservative perspective, it would make sense for the commercially orientated TV2 to be privatised, and to reserve the limited state funding for the more educational and high-brow, but less commercially viable, Television One.

As far as Radio New Zealand goes, this should either be privatised, or made to present a more diverse range of political viewpoints.

A good start would be to include a few conservative and libertarian guests on its interview shows. If we have to listen to interviews with leftists like Howard Zinn or Naomi Klein, then why not interviews with independent right-wing figures like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan?

The Concert Programme arguably deserves to stay, as its about the only arm of state broadcasting that's focused on preserving western culture and providing a genuine alternative to populist commercial media.

Political Definitions: Conservative, Liberal, and Libertarian

Liberalism, Conservatism, and Statism

So-called “Liberalism” is in the very air we breathe; it permeates the air with the media, newspapers, TV, the entertainment industry, movies, and music. Schoolchildren are imbued with the air of liberalism from their first day of school right through to their graduation from colleges and universities. Unless one is brought up in a deliberately conservative Christian environment, it is the worldview we grow up with. But what is often forgotten is that liberalism has a history; a history marked by a dramatic change in the meaning of liberalism and how it is defined. Prior to the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, liberalism in America connoted belief in liberty and limited government, the Rule of Law in which equality before the law was a core principle but equality of condition was not because only by government intervention and redistribution of wealth could the latter be achieved, at the cost of economic freedom. Political liberalism first arose out of the English “Rule of Law” tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was this tradition that was transplanted to the American colonies, and eventually gave birth to constitutional government in America. Hayek wrote that the rule of law is “sometimes confused with the requirement of mere legality in all government action”:

The rule of law . . . presupposes complete legality, but this is not enough: if a law gave the government unlimited power to act as it pleased, all its actions would be legal, but it would certainly not be under the rule of law. (The Constitution of Liberty, 1959, p. 205)

Unlike the French tradition of 1789, the Anglo-Saxon tradition did not trust absolute power in the hands of a legislature (as in majoritarian democracy), and thus set up a system of judicial review, to limit legislative power (Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty). Thus, liberty or freedom was the dominant abstract principal, whereas with the ascension of the Progressive movement, liberalism was redefined to include and even to prefer, the ideas of socialism and Marxism, so that equality became the guiding light of the new liberalism. As the well known American historian, Will Durant, has commented (I think he took the notion from Tocqueville), freedom and equality, taken to their logical extremes, are contradictory.

In Suicide of the West (1964), James Burnham described how classical liberalism, with its belief in individual liberty, had been transformed (or morphed) into modern liberalism, with its primary principle of egalitarian social justice (and hence influenced by Marxism and other socialist doctrines):

This difference in human character type corresponds to a theoretical conflict within the ideology of modern liberalism: the conflict between the principles of free speech and the other individual freedoms on the one hand, and the principle of egalitarian social justice on the other. Essentially, it is a conflict between individualism and regimentation: the individualism that the liberal ideology derives from its past and the regimentation it has absorbed in the present. This conflict is real, and can be hidden but not solved by discussion, negotiation and compromise. It is a fact that liberalism’s inherited principles correspond to individualism, and a highly atomistic individualism at that. It is equally a fact that the Welfare State and plebiscitary democracy mean a good deal and an increasing deal of regimentation. One or the other must give way; and, on the evidence of the past generation, there is little doubt which is the tottering horn of that particular dilemma. (p. 171)

In the 1960s, the New Left established an even closer allegiance to Marxism, with the Civil Rights movement, the anti-War movement, radical feminism, the counter-culture, with an ideological spectrum that spanned the distance between Progressivism on one end, to Maoism on the other. The political correctness movement also appeared on the scene at American colleges in the 1960s, as campus radicals argued which Marxist ideology was the most politically correct. According to Wikipedia, the term can be traced back to Mao’s Little Red Book. What many, perhaps most, Americans are unaware of, is that the Conservative movement did not exist prior to the 1950s and did not really become a political force until the 1960s, with the Goldwater for President Campaign. Nixon was elected for a second term in 1972, largely as a reaction to the 1960s New Left and counter-cultural movements, which supported McGovern. With the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979, the New Right came to the fore as a political force, helping to elect Reagan in 1980. But throughout the Progressive era, World War II and the early post-War era, there really was no Conservative movement. There were of course, libertarian and conservative thinkers, and a few conservative politicians, such as Robert Taft, but there was no large-scale Conservative Movement.

Conservative Libertarianism

America was founded as a noble experiment. Once independent of Great Britain, we had no monarchy, no titled aristocracy. We were to be a “government of laws, not of men.” Liberalism, as stated above in its original meaning, was the ideology of the republic. The orthodox way of presenting the political spectrum is based on the French model, originating in the Estates General which seated from right to left, First Estate (clergy), Second Estate (nobility), Third Estate (bourgeoisie and commoners). That arrangement eventually became obsolete, but in Europe, monarchists and the Church came to represent the right wing whereas the capitalist bourgeoisie became the left wing, espousing liberal ideals. Eventually, with the advent of the socialist movement in the nineteenth century, the proletariat became associated with the left and the liberals moved to the right. The Libertarian Party has argued that this old world political spectrum no longer applies to the modern world, that in fact Hitler and Stalin had more in common than not (for example, the Hitler-Stalin Pact), and shouldn’t be on opposite sides of the spectrum. For the libertarians, the political spectrum should run from the government with the most individual liberty, on one end, to the most state control at the other. A liberal republic with limited government would be at one extreme, and totalitarianism would be at the other extreme. (While some might argue that anarchy should be at the extreme end of complete liberty, I would argue that without the Rule of Law, it would be survival of the fittest, and the thug with the mightiest gang would prevail. For those who would argue that that is our current system, I suggest they move to a country were such conditions actually prevail, such as Somalia, and report back.) So my argument would run thus: since we had no tradition of monarchy and America was founded as a liberal republic, to be a conservative in America is to conserve that tradition of liberalism. Conservatives in America are, for the most part, classical liberals. New “Liberals,” on the other hand, tend to embrace various forms of statism, from social democracy, to democratic socialism, to political correctness and Marxism.

As a result of confusion around the term “liberal,” classical liberals in the modern age have adopted the identity of libertarian. There are, indeed, differences between libertarians and conservatives, in particular, libertarians tend to be more socially liberal and less religious. But both groups do share similar roots. For example, Gary North, has argued in an article entitled “Robert Nisbet on Conservatism” (LewRockwell.com, April 1, 2005) that both the conservative, Robert Nisbet and the classical liberal, F. A. Hayek had roots in the Whiggism of Edmund Burke, generally considered to be the father of conservatism. Although Hayek includes an essay entitled

"Why I am Not a Conservative?" in his Constitution of Liberty (1959), he concludes that he would rather be called a Whig, after Burke. Hayek was a classical liberal, but so was Burke (he was a Whig, after all, and not a Tory). Burke was also an admirer of Adam Smith, generally considered the father of free market capitalism. So there are many points at which conservatism and libertarianism (or at least the classical liberal version of it) converge, and one could argue that most American Conservatives are actually classical liberals, that being our tradition going back to the Founding Fathers. Unfortunately, the label "liberal" has been polluted by the Progressives and socialists, who have re-defined it to mean something entirely different. While New “liberals” are constantly accusing conservatives of Orwellian Newspeak, changing the meaning of the political term “liberal” from one who believes in the Rule of Law, limited government, and economic liberty to one who believes in unlimited state power to micromanage the economy, redistribute wealth, and privilege certain classes of people before the law to the detriment of others, is a classic case of Orwellian Newspeak known as doublethink. And yet, the redefinition of liberal is seldom challenged.

What the conservative brings to the table (in addition to the above), a respect for tradition, can peaceably coexist with Hayek’s classical liberalism because traditions due tend to evolve naturally like Hayek’s “spontaneous order.” Traditions evolve through trial and error, and they continue to exist because, from a pragmatic perspective, they work (even though they may be in many ways irrational). Robert Nisbet in his Quest for Community (1953) has emphasized the importance of intermediate (local) associations, such as families, churches, guilds, and community groups as a necessary buffer between the individual citizen and the absolute power of the State. This notion also came from Tocqueville, who was a French classical liberal theorist if we are to venture a political categorization, and it is also a conservative position. It is also perfectly consistent with libertarianism (although not often emphasized) because by creating a buffer between the individual and the state, freedom is furthered. Unfortunately, many Enlightenment and modern liberals have actually looked askance at intermediate associations such as religious organizations because, particularly during the Enlightenment, such associations were considered to be enslavers of mankind, whereas the modern liberal state would become the guarantor of liberty (see Voltaire, for example). Remember that in the eighteenth century, the Church and the aristocracy were on the right in Europe, in opposition to the liberal bourgeois class that was on the left. It should have become abundantly clear, however, with Twentieth Century totalitarianism that the State could not be trusted to be the sole guarantor of liberty.

Two Types of Rationality

Another way to distinguish the classical liberal from the new statist “liberal” has to do with their stance towards rationality. As both the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) and the economist Friedrich Hayek have stressed, the left tends to rationalize economic and political systems to a degree that is incompatible with human freedom. (It should be mentioned that Oakeshott and Hayek had their differences, as Oakeshott rejected all forms of rationalism while Hayek did not. As Oakeshott said of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom: “A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics” Ibid., p. 26). Hayek, on the other hand, believed that there were different types of rationality, some more conducive to freedom than others. North noted that “Hayek argued in his 1952 book, The Counter-Revolution of Science, that there are two kinds of social rationalism: "constructivist" rationalism, or top-down rationalism, and the rationalism of the free market, a bottom-up rationalism.” I think this gets to the difference between the Rationalist and the believer in reason as a necessary tool of human intelligence. The “constructivist” Rationalist always believes that he or she can design the perfect socio-political and economic system to order all human behavior. This is what the utopian socialist or Marxist, or the Jacobins of the French Revolution believed. Hayek wrote: “Those who believe that all useful institutions are deliberate contrivances and who cannot conceive of anything serving a human purpose that has not been consciously designed are almost of necessity enemies of human freedom. For them freedom means chaos” (The Constitution of Liberty, p. 61). As Austrian economists, such as Hayek and Ludwig von Mises demonstrated, you cannot perfectly plan an economy because there are too many variables. No central planner can have perfect and complete information required to manage a whole economy. The Soviet Union always produced too much of what people didn’t want and too little of what they did because they had no way of pricing goods according to market demand. It was a command or top down economy. Surplus food often rotted on trains and eventually the system broke down (see The Economist, “A Survey of Perestroika,” April 28, 1990). An old Soviet quote was, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Hayek, on the other hand advocated “spontaneous order,” an order that naturally evolved over time through the trial and error of human experience, often from the bottom up. I think a similar logic applies to social and political arrangements. When government thinks it can legislate or order by judicial fiat such arrangements, individual freedom is lost.

Depressing burglary stats

Press columnist Peter Luke highlighted some depressing statistics on burglaries this week (not online).

Although the upper North Island continues to be New Zealand’s burglary capital, there were 7033 burglaries reported in Canterbury (population about 450, 000) last year with only 15.6 percent burglars being caught. In central Auckland the burglary rate is about 130 burglaries per 10, 000 residents.

Perhaps the most worrying statistic is the low number of burglars being apprehended, which although higher than in the late 90s, is stubbornly stuck at below 20 percent.

One of the reasons why New Zealand had a low property crime rate in the past was because it was a small, mono-cultural and well-organised country in which it was difficult for criminals to avoid being caught. Now that burglars are increasingly aware they have an excellent chance of getting away with burglaries, they may be more inclined to commit them.

The use of burglar alarms and private security firms seems to be helping check burglaries in affluent areas, but there is little (other than dangerous dogs) to deter burglars in low to mid-income areas, with students in particular, being frequent victims of break-ins.

New Zealand, like Britain, also has a relatively low rate of gun ownership. By constrast, burglary rates in the pro-gun United States are comparitively low, and significantly fewer burglars attempt to break in houses when they are occupied.

Political Correctness: A Vast Left Wing Conspiracy?

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, Hillary Clinton used the phrase “vast right wing conspiracy” to describe and label her husband’s political enemies on the right. While there may have indeed been a concerted effort on the right to bring Clinton down, in point of fact, if any conspiracy in American politics deserves to be called “vast” it would be the “vast left wing conspiracy,” which has at least since the Progressive era attempted to redefine American politics in a leftward direction. While the early Progressives had some success in that effort, the left in America really came into its own during Roosevelt’s New Deal. As I have stated elsewhere in “What’s in a Word?” , the very term “liberalism” was redefined by Progressives during that period to mean something entirely different. As James Burnham so aptly described this redefinition in Suicide of the West (1964), classical liberalism, with its belief in individual liberty, had been transformed into modern liberalism, with its primary principle of egalitarian social justice (based on the influence of Marxism and other socialist doctrines). I’ll risk quoting Burnham again because he so appropriately describes that redefinition of liberalism:

This difference in human character type corresponds to a theoretical conflict within the ideology of modern liberalism: the conflict between the principles of free speech and the other individual freedoms on the one hand, and the principle of egalitarian social justice on the other. Essentially, it is a conflict between individualism and regimentation: the individualism that the liberal ideology derives from its past and the regimentation it has absorbed in the present. This conflict is real, and can be hidden but not solved by discussion, negotiation and compromise. It is a fact that liberalism’s inherited principles correspond to individualism, and a highly atomistic individualism at that. It is equally a fact that the Welfare State and plebiscitary democracy mean a good deal and an increasing deal of regimentation. One or the other must give way; and, on the evidence of the past generation, there is little doubt which is the tottering horn of that particular dilemma. (p. 171)

Of course, why rely on the opinion of a conservative about the nature of that transformation when we have no lesser authority than that perennial candidate for the Socialist Party, Norman Thomas, who said in a speech in 1944:

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of “liberalism,” they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” He went on to say: “I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.”

But it was with the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left that the vast left wing conspiracy really came into its own. The anti-Vietnam War protests really pitted the New Left against the Old Left social democracy of LBJ, while conservatism did not really become a prominent political force in America until a reaction emerged to the excesses of the 1960s New Left and Countercultural revolts. The Political Correctness movement was both a cause and an effect of the New Left in that the origins of the New Left can be traced back to the cultural Marxism that was Political Correctness, and it was the triumph of the New Left that brought Political Correctness to the fore in American cultural and educational institutions such as schools, universities, and the media.

In 2004 the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank, published “Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology, Edited by William S. Lind. Lind, who wrote the Introduction to that work, stated the following:

While some Americans have believed in ideologies, America itself never had an official, state ideology – up until now. But what happens today to Americans who suggest that there are differences among ethnic groups, or that the traditional social roles of men and women reflect their different natures, or that homosexuality is morally wrong? If they are public figures, they must grovel in the dirt in endless, canting apologies. If they are university students, they face star chamber courts and possible expulsion. If they are employees of private corporations, they may face loss of their jobs. What was their crime? Contradicting America’s new state ideology of “Political Correctness.” (p. 2)

In Chapter II of the above mentioned work, “Historical Roots of ‘Political Correctness,’” Raymond V. Raehn has defined the problem of Political Correctness as follows:

America is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that we have come to know as “Political Correctness.” Political Correctness seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature. Its roots lie in a version of Marxism which seeks a radical inversion of the traditional culture in order to create a social revolution. (p.1)

How did this come about? Lind and Raehn trace the origins of Political Correctness to the cultural Marxism of the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, with his theory that to be successful and dominant in the West, Marxism needed to “march through [take over] the [cultural] institutions” of the West, and Georg Lukacs, a Hungarian Communist who in 1923 with other fellow Communist Party intellectuals founded the Frankfurt School in Germany. Lukacs, stated its purpose was to answer the question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilization?” (Lind, ‘What Is “Political Correctness”’? p. 5). Their goal was to undermine and destroy the foundations of Western civilization: Christianity, capitalism, and the so-called patriarchal-authoritarian family. The Frankfurt School became very influential in American universities after its leaders fled to the United States in the 1930s to escape Nazi Germany. Members of this group included Theodore Adorno (co-author of The Authoritarian Personality), Herbert Marcuse (author of Eros and Civilization and mentor of Angela Davis), Erich Fromm (author of Escape from Freedom), and Max Horkheimer. The Frankfurt School blended Marx and Freud and in the ferment of American universities in the 1960s, gave birth to “Critical Theory” and Political Correctness. The term Political Correctness has a long usage with the Communist Party and is synonymous with “the General Line of the Party” (Lind, Introduction, p. 2). I recall first hearing the term used in the 1970s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in disputes between various Marxist factions – Maoists, Trotskyites, and radical feminists – as to which group was most politically correct. What Political Correctness as cultural Marxism shares with classical, economic Marxism is the vision of a “classless society”: A vision which, since it “contradicts human nature,” must be forced. Thus, Lind concludes that both classical and cultural Marxism “are totalitarian ideologies”: “The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness can be seen on campuses where ‘PC’ has taken over the college: freedom of speech, of the press, and even of thought are all eliminated” (‘What Is “Political Correctness”’? pp. 5 - 6). In a similar vein, Raehn has concluded: “Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order and, ultimately, a totalitarian state” (p. 5). For those who express disagreement with the politically correct status quo, the left has been masterful at using name-calling – racist, sexist, homophobic – as a substitute for rational argument, especially when their Marxist agenda is exposed.

Another parallel between classical and cultural Marxism is that both “declare certain groups virtuous and others evil a priori, that is, without regard for the actual behavior of individuals” (Lind, p. 6). Thus, white males are automatically oppressors while members of acknowledged minority groups, such as blacks, Latinos, women, homosexuals, the Third World, are automatically deemed to be oppressed victims, and therefore, by race, gender, or ethnicity, granted the moral high ground. This is the morality of victimology: your moral status is assigned according to which oppressed or victim group you belong to and has nothing to do with your personal conduct. As Charles Sykes calls this “politics of victimization” a form of Orwellian doublethink, he poses the question: “How else can one describe the insistence that victims not be held responsible for their personal behavior conjoined with the belief that all members of so-called oppressor groups are responsible for crimes they themselves did not commit?” (A Nation of Victims, 1992, pp. 204 – 05). In other words, if you are a member of a victim group, as O.J. Simpson was, and you commit the crime of murder, you cannot be held responsible, but if you are a member of an oppressor group, you are held responsible for crimes you did not personally commit, such as the enslavement of African-Americans in the nineteenth century. For Political Correctness to succeed, belief in the Rule of Law, defined as equality before the law as principles universally applied to all citizens, must be undermined and eliminated. Both Affirmative Action and Hate Crimes are contrary to the rule of law and equality before the law, because they privilege certain favored (victim) groups.

Despite its championing of minorities, the oppressed, and victim groups, Political Correctness did not originate with such groups. Rather, it originated with Frankfurt School émigrés to the United States, as stated above, and their protégés on American university campuses. Christopher Lasch in The Revolt of the Elites (1995) has argued that unlike the 1930s, when Ortega y Gasset wrote The Revolt of the Masses (1930), which inspired the title to Lasch’s work, the current revolt was a revolt of the elite classes from the norms of Western and American civilization. Lasch has argued that despite Affirmative Action and the pretence of a socially mobile meritocracy of the educated elite, the “New Class” of what Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, has called “symbolic analysts,” this new class of managers, professionals, and policy makers has become increasingly isolated from the rest of American society (Lasch, pp. 28 - 41):

The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational debate, as to create parallel or “alternative” institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all. (Ibid., pp. 20 – 21)

While the evidence, as I have been arguing thus far, contradicts the claim that the left wing elite “seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority,” the point is well taken that they do view the unenlightened with disdain and seek to isolate themselves from contact with this majority. The electoral victory of Obama has given this class new found hope that they can indeed remake America into their own image of what they think it should be. Of course Lasch is not entirely ignorant of the proselytizing tendencies of this new class of upper-middle class “liberals” who “have mounted a crusade to sanitize American society” of tobacco, pornography, “hate speech,” and various chemical additives and pollutants. Lasch continued: “When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, they betray the venomous hatred that lies not far below the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. Opposition makes humanitarians forget the liberal virtues they claim to uphold” (p. 28). As I’ve argued here and elsewhere, there’s nothing liberal about this new elite, at least to the extent that they subscribe to the tenants of Political Correctness and kowtow to the establishment of their peers. So the point being that the new elite, despite their professed belief in radical egalitarianism, do not themselves often rub shoulders with the great unwashed and unenlightened masses, but rather prefer to stay in their enclaves of privilege.

The current phase of Political Correctness is Multiculturalism, which advocates that our own Western and American cultures should not be privileged above any other world cultures, a form of cultural relativism. As undermining as that might be for our own culture, in point of fact, Multiculturalism privileges all non-Western cultures while it denigrates the Western and American cultures it intends to destroy. I will conclude with a statement from a previous article I wrote, “The Clash of Civilizations or the Suicide of the West?” :

Although Multiculturalism claims to promote diversity (of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender), what it does not promote is diversity in thought. Instead, it promotes a New Left, Marxian version of race, class, and gender warfare against America and the West; a new left wing monoculture that excludes, prohibits (when able to), and condemns all opposing viewpoints. As this ideology, through Political Correctness or the idea that one must conform to its tenants or be ostracized, has become dominant in American universities, schools, media, government, and even businesses, one could argue with some confidence that while America won the Cold War with the Soviet Union, she lost the war at home with Marxism.

I hope that I’m proven wrong in the near future.

Conservative opposition to the war in Afghanistan

A recent Telegraph post in support of Britain’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan drew a lot of intelligently-argued criticism from commentators.

Few people were buying the neo-conservative argument that the best way to protect Britain from terrorism was to try and remove the terrorist threat at its supposed source.

Most responders seemed to echo the US paleo-conservative argument that the West will never be able to establish a stable pro-western state in the country and should either pull out of the region altogether, or re-direct military assistance to neighboring Pakistan.

However, while it’s great to see a lot of well-argued commentators turning up on comment threads at British newspaper sites, it’s a bit disappointing there’s so few decent conservative blog sites coming out of the UK at present (Laban and and a few others excepted).

Compared with the US, which has generated a plethora of independent conservative sites and blogs, as well as several popular webzines like Taki’s Magazine and American Conservative, Britain appears to be a bit of independent conservative wasteland.

A View from the USA: Bush, Palin, and the Attack of the Snarks

Isn’t it ironic that the far left, who promote laws against hate (Hate Speech) are so filled with hate? No President in recent memory has been the recipient of more anger, rage, and hatred than George Bush. While not a Bush supporter myself, as a conservative I always became strangely defensive when exposed to the anti-Bush vitriol of friends and co-workers on the left. The blogosphere was and is, of course, filled with angry diatribes from both sides. It’s so easy to attack your opponents anonymously with name calling and slurs when you don’t have to meet them in person. In a review of anthropologist Peter Wood’s "A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now," George Will wrote in 2007:

Many people who loathe George W. Bush have adopted what Peter Wood describes as "ecstatic anger as a mode of political action."

Wood . . . says the new anger "often has the look-at-me character of performance art." His book is a convincing, hence depressing, explanation of "anger chic" -- of why anger has become an all-purpose emotional stance. It has achieved prestige and become "a credential for group membership." As a result, "Americans have been flattening their emotional range into an angry monotone." (“Anger Is All the Rage,” realclearpoliltics.com, 3-25-07)

In another review of Wood’s book by Stanley Kurtz, Kurtz quotes Wood’s characterization of the New Anger, which he deems is applicable to the blogosphere:

[New Anger involves] deriding an opponent for the sheer pleasure of expressing contempt for other people....New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics come to an end....Whoever embraces [New Anger] is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression." (“Angry Talk,” eppc.org, January 2, 2007)

The left has long embraced anger: the self-righteous rage of angry feminists, angry demonstrators against war or the latest political cause, “primal scream” therapy. There’s a bumper sticker now that proclaims “If You’re Not Angry You’re Not Paying Attention.” The belief that anger is good probably has roots in Romanticism and the belief that “feeling is all,” expressed fully in the bloodbath of the French Revolution. And now we have the new Romanticism of the Countercultural left. “Rage Against the Machine.” Limp Bizkit and the violence at Woodstock 1999. Rage is good, violence is good. Kurtz maintained in the above article that the “formative political moment” for the New Anger was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and it took until the Clinton era “to bleed over to the Right.” The Right has tended to favor the old American ideal, “the modest heroism of Gary Cooper's Sargent York” rather than “something much closer to the Incredible Hulk.” But if the left has its Al Frankens, the Right can now boast its Ann Coulters.

It seems that once Bush was on his way out, the left needed someone else to transfer their hatred and anger to and who better to serve their purpose than Sarah Palin: She looks like the All-American girl, the former prom queen, the girl who wouldn’t date you in high school, as Douglas MacKinnon opined in a recent Huffington Post. A strong woman that could “do it all,” family and career, as a conservative woman she was a poke in the eye to radical feminists, who react like black radicals to a black conservative: any deviation from politically correct gender and racial politics is viewed as a heinous betrayal.

'It's not that they're ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so.'

New Yorker film critic David Denby recently wrote Snark, a book that takes a swipe at “snark,” which in my humble opinion (I confess I haven’t read the book although I have seen Denby promote it on Book-TV) typifies the kind of smirky ad hominem attacks perpetrated on Palin by such darlings of the left as Bill Maher or David Letterman. Amazon.com had the following definition of “snark” in a review of Denby’s book:

What is snark? You recognize it when you see it -- a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone's mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness.

I think people like Maher and Letterman prefer or are reduced to ad hominem attacks on conservative figures because that way they don’t have to address conservative arguments. I doubt that either one has ever read a conservative or libertarian author such as the Founding Fathers, Burke, Hayek, James Burnham, Robert Nisbett, or Thomas Sowell. In fact, I doubt that either one has read much of anything that isn’t contemporary book-of-the-month club type pabulum. Their half educated smirkiness doesn’t give one the impression that they’ve ever bothered to read the classics of history and literature. Brent Bozell, in an open letter to Oliver Stone, that well known leftist director of anti-American movies, wrote the following:

You were back on [Bill] Maher's show the other day talking about historical figures. Maher wanted to know why you haven't done a film about Ronald Reagan, since "that is the type of character you could do very well with." God only knows what he meant by that, but when you gave your answer, you were pretty blunt.

"Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch," you said, and the audience laughed, and you smiled and decided to take that statement further by agreeing with it. So you said, "You know, I think that he was," and the audience cheered and hooted and applauded.

See what I mean when I say you're a lousy historian? Don't take my word for it, Oliver.

I turned to Frank Donatelli, the White House Political Director under President Reagan from 1987 through 1989. I asked him what he thought of your observation. Here's what he has to say:

"Bill Maher and Oliver Stone have both made careers of ad hominem attacks on their political opponents. As Reagan would say, 'It's not that they're ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so.' The literature as written by conservative and liberal observers is overwhelming in concluding that Ronald Reagan was fully engaged in implementing policies during his presidency that resulted in the longest economic expansion in our history and the end of the Cold War and the defeat of communism. His presidential reputation is growing and history will remember Reagan as one of the great presidents in our nation's history."

I went to Richard Allen, Reagan's national security advisor and asked him what he thought. Apparently he didn't think much.

"Every respectable academic and popular analysis in the large and growing literature of the Reagan presidency and Reagan's presence on the national scene proves beyond any doubt the utter foolishness of the Oliver Stone remark. Stone has made an unsuccessful career of falsification, especially when it comes to Ronald Reagan. The actual dumbsumbitch is easy to identify." (“Oliver Stone, Lousy Historian,” Townhall.com, July 3, 2009)

If you fill your mind with half truths and falsehoods of a partisan political nature, there’s no room left for the real thing. One’s world view becomes one vast self-fulfilling delusion, but because it is shared by others, maybe by everyone you know, there’s no reason to question it. And with enough money to secure a plush lifestyle, reality can hardly intrude; there’s no cognitive dissonance to rear its ugly head. As Harry Stein has written in I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican, many upscale New Yorkers have never met anyone who thinks differently, and certainly not a Republican.

Immigration and housing shortages in Britain

Last week there was a lively exchange at the Guardian website, on a comment thread for a blog post by Simon Fletcher, about access to public housing in Britain.

In response to the author’s claim that the difficulties low-income native Britons are finding in obtaining affordable housing “have nothing to do with immigration,” a commentator under the name Zac Smith, weighted in with a public housing allocation list from Birmingham City Council, showing most housing in Birmingham was indeed going to recent immigrants. Then about half way through the thread a commentator named Monnie hit on the main reason why recent immigrants were more likely to receive council housing:

“…migrants jump the queue because they tend to have bigger families and that means they are deemed to have greater priority for housing.”

Family size is a key criteria for preferential treatment by local government authorities and native Britons, with smaller families on average than African or South Asian immigrants, are more likely to lose out.

Unlike skilled middle-class Britons who are able to deal with overcrowding by voting with their feet and moving overseas, the country’s disgruntled working-class natives can’t just up and leave if they can’t find a house.

Traditional blue-collar destinations like Australia only want a limited number of educated and skilled workers from the motherland, while economic stagnation, illegal immigration and language barriers mean Continental Europe is unlikely to appeal to most working-class Britons. Subsequently they have little to lose by supporting immigration restrictionist  parties like the much-maligned British National Party.

Criminality and voting

An issue that doesn’t seem to be discussed much in this part of the world, is whether convicted criminals should be allowed to vote.

In New Zealand convicted criminals serving a sentence of three years or more are unable to vote, but in the US, all prisoners, and ex-prisoners on parole, are barred from voting in most states.

It’s been estimated that preventing criminals serving sentences from voting may well have had a significant impact on the outcome of some state and national elections. For example, the Democrats may well have lost the 2004 presidential elections, because 400,000 Black males in the crucial state of Florida were unable to vote due to criminal convictions (in Florida both currently serving, and previously convicted, felons are barred from voting).

Although criminals are likely to have a high rate of apathy in regard to voting, their low socio-economic status means they are much more likely to vote for centre-left parties than those on the centre-right.

With centre-right parties in many western countries struggling to come up with ways of taking the initiative away from the centre-left,  perhaps those with liberal voting laws (such as Canada, and a number of European states) should take a leaf from America, and consider restricting voting rights to law-abiding citizens only.

From common sense to PC nonsense

With Peter Dunne’s one-man United Future Party showing less than one percent support in current opinion polls, the so-called champion of common sense politics has ditched his pragmatic centrism for media-friendly PC waffle.

In a recent press release he’s proposed that New Zealand establish a “Multicultural Act” to give formal recognition to the country’s increasingly multicultural status. Exactly what would be achieved by such a vague sounding act is left unstated.

He also says New Zealand should establish more “family friendly” immigration laws and allow in more relatives of existing permanent residents.

Given that many of the elderly relatives of recent immigrants are unlikely to have pension plans provided by their host countries, especially those coming from third world countries, such a nice-sounding policy could prove very costly for New Zealand taxpayers.

Feminists ignore “man-cession”

US commentator Christina Hoff Sommers points out that US Feminist groups have been complaining that too much stimulus spending is going on male dominated areas of employment.

Subsequently, the stimulus spending has been reviewed and 42 percent will now be re-directed towards jobs held by women.

This is despite the fact that males have incurred 80 percent of jobs losses in the recession (hence the phrase man-cession) and that males are much more numerous in the run-down transport and communication sectors, which are arguably most in need of government investment.

(Hat Tip: Glen Sacks)

Thoughts on Liberty: The Rule of Law, Individual Responsibility, and the State

In a previous post about the Republican Party in America, I stated that “If the Republican Party is to represent true conservatism, then it must return to its core principles . . . . of liberty and freedom, including economic freedom, and [it] must be in favor of limited government and oppose statism in all its forms

I think that that is primarily true, and that when the left speaks of liberation, they generally mean liberation from the inequalities of capitalism. How do we do away with economic inequality? By doing away with economic freedom; by having an all-powerful state redistribute wealth so that all are equal, except the redistributors themselves. (As in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) Of course, this kills the goose that lays the golden egg, because the leftist assumes that the economic pie is finite and stagnant, and all we have to do is divide it up more equally. But in fact, a capitalist economy is almost (I know, we’re in a recession) always growing, so that the poor in America are generally better off than the average citizen in a communist state. The proof: The communists had to build a wall in Berlin to keep people in; we might have to build a wall to keep people out.

But our prosperity and opportunity is generally not enough for the leftist. What the leftist wants is freedom from the vicissitudes of life. As Mike Adams wrote, Franklin Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing a right to a job, to a decent living, to a home, to adequate medical care, to a good education, and so on. Adams concluded:

These are, of course, not rights in any sense of the word. This is a promise of Utopia from a Statist president seeking to justify unlimited intrusion upon the right to own property. It is a false promise from a president who fails to understand what separates man from the lower animals.” ("Liberty and Tyranny," Townhall.com 5/06/09)

But the American left also views freedom in another way that is essentially Romantic in its origins. In this rather anarchistic view, freedom is freedom from all restraint, from all laws, authority, and social institutions. The Constitution of the United States, by way of contrast, was conceived of not as a document to restrain individuals – state and local judiciaries could adequately handle such cases – but rather to restrain any excesses and abuses of power by the federal government. It was designed to limit the power of the state. So Constitutional Law in America is not so much a restraint upon individual freedom as it is protective and constitutive of our freedom. I was an undergraduate in the mid-eighties (a slow learner no doubt) when I first realized that law, in a Constitutional Republic like the United States, was actually constitutive of liberty, and not the enemy of freedom. Hayek quotes John Locke on the role of the law in the preservation of freedom:

The end of the law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others. . . . (Constitution of Liberty, p. 162)

Hayek argued that it is the law that makes us free, but this is true only of the law of abstract general rules, which can be applied equally to all citizens. This is what is known as “the Rule of Law,” which differs from laws as specific commands, emanating from a legislative authority (Constitution of Liberty, pp. 155 – 6). When Obama states that he wants Supreme Court Judges who specifically have “empathy” for minorities, he is arguing for applying the law unequally, and privileging certain members of society to the detriment of others. As Hayek wrote: “The true contrast to a reign of status is the reign of general and equal laws, of the rules which are the same for all, or, we might say, of the rule of leges in the original meaning of the Latin word for laws – leges that is, as opposed to the privi-leges” (Ibid., p. 154). Both Affirmative Action and Hate Crimes are contrary to the rule of law and equality before the law, because they privilege certain favored (victim) groups. One might ask, why should it be anymore heinous to brutally murder a gay or lesbian or a member of some other privileged minority than anyone else?

There is also another sense in which the Romantic leftist view of freedom as “freedom from all restraint” proves to be inadequate. In the Burkean sense, it confuses liberty with license, which is freedom without responsibility. Again, if we turn to Hayek, he states, “Liberty and responsibility are inseparable” (p. 71). If we are free to act as we please then we must also be responsible for our actions. Hayek justifies “assigning responsibility” because it also benefits us by teaching us what we “ought to consider in comparable future situations” (p. 76). Taking responsibility for our actions is how we learn from our experiences; otherwise, we’re condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

In the modern “therapeutic state” (see Philip Rieff’s critique of the same in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 1966), which subscribes to the Romantic view of human nature, individual responsibility is discounted in favor of social responsibility. With origins in Rousseau’s thought, the belief is that we are born good and that it is society that corrupts us. A personal standard of behavior, or what we might call morality, ceases to matter; what counts in the new morality are what politically correct causes one espouses. What I call “bumper sticker morality” is proudly displayed on the rear automobile bumper of most card carrying leftists. When one deviates from the new morality, it is usually pathologized, as witnessed by the Soviet gulags or books by leftists such as Theodore Adorno et al, who published The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. The latter was a rather bogus study that argued that conservatives exhibited an authoritarian personality type. Funny coming from a group that rarely meets a totalitarian dictator they don’t admire: Stalin, Mao, Castro, all wonderful examples of humanity! This tendency to pathologize deviance and crime also extends to what I would call a “misplaced compassion” for career criminals and thugs. Such admiration is also amply displayed on bumper stickers: Free [input the latest celebrity criminal of the left].

But the bottom-line, so to speak, is that the new morality (some call it moral relativism) destroys individual responsibility. And while some determinists might contend that free will is a fiction, and if so, we cannot be held responsible for our actions, as William James has famously argued (The Will to Believe, 1896), the belief in free will and responsibility has great pragmatic value: How can one possibly be effective and successful in life if one does not believe that one has the freedom to act? To expand the point, just compare how successful and free societies are that believe in free will versus societies that ascribe to some form of determinism or fatalism. Also, to absolve the individual of freedom and responsibility devalues, de-humanizes, and infantilizes the individual. Without free and responsible individuals, how can we expect our democracy, which depends upon such individuals, to survive? Hayek quoted F.D. Wormuth as follows:

It is doubtful that democracy could survive in a society organized on the principle of therapy rather than judgment, error rather than sin. If men are free and equal, they must be judged rather than hospitalized. (Ibid., p.71)

The German thinker, Goethe, was rather prescient, when he wrote in a letter to Frau von Stein (June 8, 1787): “I think it is true that humanity will triumph eventually, only I fear that at the same time the world will become a large hospital and each will become the other’s humane nurse” (Quoted in W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 369).

A society of invalids and victims does not a free democratic republic make.

Government opposes amnesty

Amnesties for illegal overstayers have a poor record of success in most countries where they have been tried (see here, here and here).

Now the New Zealand Department of Immigration admits that they’ve haven’t been very successful in New Zealand either.

Immigration Minister Jonathan Coleman told a government select committee last week the government is not considering another amnesty for overstayers as the previous amnesty in 2000 had proved to be a failure.

New Zealand currently has about 16,000 overstayers, with about a third coming from Samoa and Tonga.

More EU insanity

Back in the 1990s, I thought the European Union was a sensible, pragmatic way of dealing with the challenges of economic globalism, but my naive view soon changed when it went on a crazy expansion drive in the early 2000s.

Instead of being a trading block between a select group of western European countries with a similar level of economic development, it's now become a massive and unworkable mish-mash of vastly different countries with major disparities in wealth and welfare levels.

The problems in trying to integrate countries with big differences in income levels have come in sharp focus in Spain, which has been had been hit particularly hard by the recent global recession.

Despite unemployment running at a staggering 17 percent following the collapse of its recent building boom, Spain still has large numbers of unemployed migrant workers from Eastern Europe. For example, there are estimated to be at least 70, 000 unemployed workers from Romania who are still in the country. This is in spite of the fact that the unemployment rate in Romania is about 5.5 percent - only a third of what it is in Spain.

The most likely reason why unemployed Romanians are unwilling to return home isn't hard to find. As a Romanian expat points out:

"...the Spanish unemployment benefits are higher than a Romanian salary, so it's better for them to stay here in Spain than go home to Romania."

Nor has the Spanish government had much success in encouraging unemployed migrant workers from Latin America to return home.

So far only 4,000 migrants have taken up a government offer of returning home for three years in exchange for financial handouts.

I don't know whose been the main drivers behind Spain's recent immigration boom, but it seems likely middle class Spanish taxpayers will be ones paying for most of its negative externalities.

Conservative Populism: An Alternative to Obama’s Road to Serfdom

In a previous post, “Is the Republican Party Really Conservative?” I raised the question of whether the Republican Party in America was really conservative, and whether the Party should either become more moderate (left leaning) or focus on conservative social issues. I concluded that instead of the latter, Republicans should align themselves with conservatism by focusing on core conservative principles, including individual and economic freedom, limited government, and the rule of law. In addition, I advocated that if the Republican Party is to represent true conservatism, they must fight to take back the culture by opposing political correctness in the media, the schools, and the universities, they must advocate a pro-American foreign and domestic policy, and they must advocate the reformation of our monetary and financial system. As I’ve addressed core conservative principles in previous posts at GM’s Place, as well as the problem of inflation, government debt, and the need for monetary reform, this article will focus on the need to take back the culture and advocate pro-American foreign and domestic policies.

As I pointed out in the previous post cited above, conservatism had not been a dominant force in American politics until quite recently, in particular, since the Reagan Presidency. Aside from the fact that McCain was a poor candidate, and not a conservative, I attribute the Republican loss in 2008 to a poor showing with three groups: libertarians and fiscal conservatives, the so-called Reagan Democrats, and the youth vote. It seems that the Republicans have thrown their lot in with Wall Street and the Religious Right, a rather uneasy alliance to say the least. Wall Street, as is rather obvious, will support whoever has political power, and with today’s cultural climate, business schools are as likely to turn out leftists as conservatives. Witness the huge corporate contributions to the Obama campaign. The Religious Right, on the other hand, should find the Republican Party even more conducive under true conservative leadership, instead of a party establishment that pays lip service to their causes but seldom follows up with anything substantial. But unfortunately, the Religious Right cannot provide the intellectual fire power to articulate a vision necessary to counteract the huge advantage in numbers and money that benefits the left. As I stated in my previous post: Conservatives are “losing the Cultural War to the left: we lost the universities, the schools, and the media, all the organs of cultural transmission. What the Republican leadership seems to have overlooked is that you can’t stay in power politically if you lose the culture. Today, the left attacks with impunity Western Civilization, America, Christianity, and now, even the goose that laid the golden egg, capitalism.” To engage in this battle and win, a new generation of conservative and libertarian intellectuals is called for.

While there are contradictions in the policies desired by libertarians and conservatives, and between the Religious Right and Reagan Democrats, these groups do have enough in common to make alliance against a common enemy, the “soft despotism” exemplified in the socialistic policies of the Obama administration. We must remember also that individuals are usually more complex than their group affiliations.

To appeal to both the Religious Right and Reagan Democrats, the Republican Party needs to abandon its loyalty to Wall Street and take up the cause of Main Street, or in other words, the American Middle Class. Main Street is actually a lot more conservative than Wall Street. But to win over Main Street, Republicans must implement pro-American foreign and domestic policies. To accomplish the latter change, Republicans must embrace pro-American, America First, domestic and economic policies, which means opposing many of the open border and global free trade policies of the Wall Street crowd when they conflict with the interests of American citizens and workers. The Republican establishment has marginalized Pat Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, and Ron Paul, who have advocated ending illegal immigration, even though a majority of the rank-and-file are opposed to open borders. Illegal immigration offers a constant pool of cheap labor which serves to keep the cost of labor low, and along with global free trade, results in American workers losing their jobs to foreign competition. Giving tax breaks to multinational corporations that move overseas in search of cheap labor also contributes to the demolition of America’s manufacturing capacity, which would be disastrous if this country again found itself in a situation like World War II, in addition to the fact that America is hemorrhaging money due to its trade deficits with China and other Asian countries. While I don’t mean to oversimplify the complexities of international trade, or to take an unqualified stance in favor of protectionism, I do think that American trade policy must consider what is fair to the national interest and to individual Americans, and allowing other countries to have unfair trade advantages with America, or to allow American companies to continue to benefit from low taxes while moving overseas, is not conducive to such fairness. As I said before, Adam Smith did not promote the idea that a free market nation should tolerate huge trade deficits. On the other hand, to implement policies that are not detrimental to American workers and manufacturing does not necessitate that conservatives should be enthrall to the unions, and should not oppose coercive union practices such as closed shops. Neither does it necessitate continuing the Obama “class warfare” policies of taxing the rich. Lower tax rates are economically beneficial for all Americans.

Finally, American foreign policy should be pro-American, in opposition to the left’s Anti-Americanism. Instead of compromising American sovereignty under the auspices of international treaties, with the goal of relinquishing our sovereignty to international agencies or world government, debate should focus on where America’s real foreign policy interests lay. A strong national defense is necessary, but as to what extent America should be the policeman of the world, should be part of that debate. And while we must continue to oppose Islamic fascism and terrorism both at home and abroad, it makes little sense to rely on an overextended military to fight overseas while America and her European allies allow Islamic jihadists to subvert Western civilization from within.

The views stated above reflect a kind of conservative American populism, which is necessary if the Republican Party is to be a party that embraces the middle class, Reagan Democrats, and the Religious Right. Former Washington Times correspondent and Chronicles columnist Sam Francis wrote many columns about right wing populism, citing Donald Warren's work on Middle American Radicals (MARs), The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation. And of course, Pat Buchanan had his "pitchfork brigade" in the 1990s. Francis also made the point that Marxism didn't succeed in America until the New Left came along and followed the advice of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who advocated a long “march through [take over] the [cultural] institutions” of the West. In other words, the left wouldn't succeed until it took over the cultural institutions of the West: education, the media, and foundations in particular, and destroyed the culture of capitalism, individual freedom, and Christianity. This is precisely what political correctness and multiculturalism are intended to do.

This leads us back to the Culture Wars, which conservatives are losing to political correctness and multiculturalism, which is also connected to the youth vote. I think one of the difficulties we, as conservatives have to overcome, particularly with youth, is the perceptual distortion that we represent the “Establishment.” We certainly don’t. Since the Progressive Era and the New Deal, the Left has generally controlled politics, media, academia, and education. But they really didn’t control the culture, at least not to the extent that they do now. The 1960s revolution was really a revolt of the New Left against the Old Left (LBJ), and it so alarmed Middle America that there was a backlash: beginning with the election of Richard Nixon, the founding of The Moral Majority and the Conservative Movement, Goldwater, and eventually, the election of Ronald Reagan. So conservatives (or at least, Republicans) were able to dominate the Executive Branch for most of the past 36 years, and finally, with the Gingrich revolution, they were also able to control Congress for a relatively brief 12 year period. Now we’re back to the status quo before Nixon walloped McGovern. So how can conservatives be considered the establishment, when they control only one cable TV channel and none of the major networks, the school and university systems are both controlled by the left, and most major newspapers are controlled by left-leaning editors and writers?

So the question is: who are the real radicals? With its belief in human freedom, both economic and individual, I would argue that America was the most radical of nations. While both the French and Russian Revolutions were more radical in their destruction of the existing social order, I would contend that in implementing statist, totalitarian systems, both the French and Russian regimes became regressive, whereas the American constitutional system, by limiting the power of the state over the individual with a written constitution, and trusting individuals and societies to evolve without coercion, was the more radical. And yet, despite the left’s attack on our liberal institutions of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and academic freedom, they are still perceived as the champions of human progress. This is one of the great ironies of history: that the youth of this nation are taught to believe that the left is the champion of freedom and progress, when in fact, they are also taught in our schools and universities to have a passion for Big Government control of everyone and everything, a passion for servitude (or Serfdom, as Hayek put it). With one exception of course: you can have sex with whomever or whatever you want, and you can pollute yourself with whatever drugs you want.

To take back the culture, conservatives and libertarians must appeal to the next generation. I quote Barry Goldwater: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom was often criticized by left wing critics for proposing that all forms of socialism eventually lead to totalitarianism. While this is a much slower road for European, democratic socialism, than it is for communism, I agree with Hayek that you eventually end up in a similar place; maybe not 1984, but very likely a Brave New World. And totalitarianism may be revolutionary, but it is nothing if it's not also regressive, a return to a form of government absolutism, much worse in fact than feudalism. Aldous Huxley wrote rather prophetically:

To deal with confusion power has been centralized and government control increased. It is probable that all the world’s governments will be more or less completely totalitarian even before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be totalitarian during and after the harnessing seems almost certain. Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism. At present there is no sign that such a movement will take place.

There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. . . . A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. (From the 1946 Forward to Brave New World)

The love of servitude described above is typical of “Soft despotism,” a term that was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville: “Soft despotism gives people the illusion that they are in control, when in fact they have very little influence over their government. Soft despotism breeds fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the general populace” (see Wikipedia). The blitz of statist, socialistic programs promoted by the Obama regime is a perfect example of “soft despotism.” In “Revisiting Hayek,” Andrew Foy and Brenton Stansky (American Thinker, May 25, 2009) had this to say about the soft despotism associated with democratic socialism:

To many who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters the connection between the two systems has become increasingly obvious, but in the (Western) democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something utterly different - the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: ‘What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.' (F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, United Kingdom: Routledge Press, 1944)

The current economic crisis provides just the right kind of excuse for believers in statism to seize greater power for the government that, once attained, will never be relinquished. As Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanual so eloquently let another truth slip: "Never let a serious crisis go to waste." Leftist economists like Paul Krugman have advocated that the only problem with the New Deal was that the government was not active enough in “stimulating” the economy (read: take over the economy). Thus, the current economic crisis is being used as an excuse for the government to take over major portions of the U.S. economy. This is the Brave New World we now face. The question conservatives must pose to America is: Do you really want to give up your freedom for what is essentially the false security of Big Government control over your lives?

Cognitive enhancement vs hedonism

A British medical ethicist argues that adults should be free to take the popular stimulant drug Ritalin for cognitive enhancement.

Professor John Harris, of the University of Manchester, says many adult students are already taking the the drug which is illegal in the UK without a prescription. He says that if it is safe for children with ADHD to take Ritalin over an extended period for a non-life threatening condition, there was there is reason to prevent healthy adults using it to.

The problem with making stimulant drugs more freely available though, is the likelihood that a large segment of the population will prefer to use them for getting high instead of performing smarter.

In the first half of the 20th Century, stimulant drugs were quite widely used among professionals and the military for cognitive enhancement. Even the original Coca-Cola was advertised as a red-bull-style pick-me-up which contained a small amount of cocaine.

However, the fallout from hedonistic sixties in which the use of pharmaceutical drugs for recreational purposes was widely popularised for the first time, has done considerable damage to the cause of those wishing to promote stimulant drugs for improving mental performance.

The image of stimulant drugs was further damaged  in the 1970s when dextroamphetamine was used in large concentrations as a sliming aid for women, with the result that a number of prominent female celebrities suffered from stimulant-induced heart failure.

Since then authorities in most developed countries authorities have been severely cracking down on the use of stimulant drugs, which are now are now primarily abused by the underclass. Ritalin for example, is often taken from children to which it's been subscribed and ground down and smoked or snorted for a quick rush (slow-release versions have been developed to get around this problem, but not without significantly increasing the cost).

The demise of smoking though, has created a large gap in the market for a relatively safe stimulant, that's only been partially filled by the renaissance in ground coffee products.

Over the next few decades it's going to be interesting to see whether the needs of the middle class for increased cognitive enhancement options will win out over the needs of the therapeutic state to contain the pathologies of the underclass.

At this stage my money's still on the therapeutic state.

Is the Republican Party Really Conservative?

This article is a post that appeared in GM’s Place, an American Conservative website, on May 17, 2009.

In an LA Times Op-Ed piece (May 10, 2009) entitled “What Republicans need is a mutiny,” Richard Viguerie wrote:

Two major debates face conservative Republicans about the future of the party. The first, rekindled by Sen. Arlen Specter's switch to the Democratic Party, is whether the GOP should move further leftward. The second is whether conservatives should tone down their advocacy on social issues. History is on the side of outspoken conservatives in both debates.

A little history is in order to give perspective to the future of the Republican Party. The modern conservative movement formed in the 1950s (William F. Buckley founded the National Review in 1955). Prior to that, various classical liberals (libertarians) such as Albert J. Nock, H.L. Menken, Frank Chodorov, and John T. Flynn had opposed the New Deal. Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom in 1944. Traditionalists and agrarians such as Southerner Richard Weaver and Northerner Russell Kirk were also influential. Kirk published The Conservative Mind in 1953. In the 1950s, Anti-Communism was the focus of conservative opposition. The purpose of this very brief historical overview of conservatism as an intellectual movement is to place its inception in the late Progressive and Post-War eras (Source for the above paragraph: Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement, 1993). In other words, it was a rather recent development, from an historical perspective, and it did not have much impact politically until Goldwater’s campaign in 1964, and finally, Reagan’s ascendancy to the Presidency in 1980.

The New Right, of which Mr. Viguerie is a representative, did not come onto the national scene until the anti-abortion movement galvanized evangelicals, fundamentalists, and conservative Catholics in the 1970s.

If one briefly analyzes Twentieth Century U.S. Presidents from the perspective of what their economic, social, and national security policies were, Reagan was really the first conservative President since the era of Harding and Coolidge. Teddy Roosevelt was a Progressive, as was Hoover to a large degree; Eisenhower was non-ideological and a military man; and while Nixon was conservative on social issues and a Cold War Hawk, he admitted to being a Keynsian on economic policy. He instituted wage and price controls, and terminated any relationship between the dollar and gold standard. Bush I and Ford were both moderates, and while Bush II was conservative on social issues and a hawk on defense, his economic policies were a mixed bag of too little and then too much intervention. His focus was, of course, the war in Iraq.

Viguerie’s conclusion to his LA Times article was that the Republican leadership has lost touch with the grassroots and that to move further leftward would be a disaster. The focus should rather be on revitalizing the base by focusing on social issues. While I agree with Viguerie’s first conclusion that the party should not move further leftward, I think he’s out of touch in the latter case. First of all, the time to move the agenda on social issues was when the Republican Party was in power; other than Bush’s two Supreme Court appointments, the Republicans have little to show for pushing their social agenda, unlike the Democrats when in power. The national attention is now focused on the economic crisis and if the Republicans do not challenge Democratic policies and offer better alternatives, they will not convince fiscal conservatives, independents, and libertarians to rejoin the party, without which they will surely be consigned to minority status.

Let me explain what I think the Republican focus should be: If the Republican Party is to represent true conservatism, then it must return to its core principles. 1) We must be the party of liberty and freedom, including economic freedom, and we must be in favor of limited government and oppose statism in all its forms. 2) A limited government is a government of laws, the Rule of Law, and not of men, which is the opposite of Obama’s vision of the law. When Obama states that he wants Supreme Court Judges who have “empathy” for minorities, he is arguing for applying the law unequally, and privileging certain members of society to the detriment of others. 3) We must fight the Marxist political correctness movement in our schools and universities. We’re already losing the next generation by a margin of 2:1. We are losing the Cultural War to the left: we lost the universities, the schools, and the media, all the organs of cultural transmission. What the Republican leadership seems to have overlooked is that you can’t stay in power politically if you lose the culture. Today, the left attacks with impunity Western Civilization, America, Christianity, and now, even the goose that laid the golden egg, capitalism. And that’s not all; our liberal institutions of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and academic freedom are also under attack by the left. To counter this, we must stand up for American and Western values, and the freedom to speak our opposition to the leftist orthodoxy. 4) We must continue to advocate a pro-American foreign and domestic policy: America First politically and economically, in opposition to the left’s Anti-Americanism. To me, this means that we do not promote global free trade and open borders when the result is that the average American loses his job to foreign competition and cheap labor. Adam Smith did not promote the idea that a free market nation should tolerate huge trade deficits. We must also continue to oppose Islamic fascism and terrorism both at home and abroad. 5) We must advocate the reformation of our monetary and financial system, with sound currency and curtail the ability of the Federal Reserve and banks to create fiat money out of thin air. (More on this on a later blog.)