Archive for the 'Politics' Category
June 2nd, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
The scandal over the lewd photo of U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D – New York) sent from the Congressman’s Twitter account has received much press the last few days. But no one seems to have identified what should be the most scandalous part of the scandal: this statement by Weiner.
I think that what people really want to talk about are things like the debt limit vote tonight or things like — like the — the oppressive disparity between the very well-to-do in this country and people that don’t have as much or the fact that it’s more and more difficult being in the middle class in this country. [Emphasis added.]
Am I oppressed because I “don’t have as much” as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or even a run-of-the-mill millionaire (who earned his millions while I did not [added 6/6/2011])? And who are my oppressors? Since any millionaire is free to share his millions with me but has not done so, every millionaire must be—by Weiner’s premise—my oppressor and an oppressor of millions of other Americans. What punishment is too severe for an oppressor of millions of people? Or, to rephrase the question from a more reasonable context, what oppression of millionaires is too severe to be advocated by Weiner and his ilk?
Weiner is nothing special, just another liberal Democrat—who accepts the basic premises of socialism whether he realizes it or not—like the others in Congress and the White House.
May 26th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
Peace is not the answer. War is the answer.
President George W. Bush never asked for or followed my advice, but I sent him this letter on April 6, 2002:
Dear Mr. President:
I urge you to make a radical change to your policy regarding the conflict of Israel against the dictatorial and murderous regimes in the Middle East.
Peace is the wrong goal. Remember the words of Patrick Henry, when he disdained the goal of “peace” and declared, “Give me liberty, or give me death.” The correct goal is liberty—the preservation of liberty for Americans. And the liberty of Americans demands that we take the side of the defenders of liberty against its enemies.
There is only one government in the Middle East that defends liberty: Israel. Every individual, Jew and Arab alike, deserves freedom. But no Arab regime defends freedom for Arabs any more than it defends freedom for Jews. Arabs have a right to exist; the current Arab regimes do not.
We should not be seeking the amoral, impossible goal of peace between good and evil. We should be standing for the conquest by good over evil. America and Israel, for our own preservation, must conquer the Axis of Evil, which includes Arafat and his “Palestinian Authority.”
You should fire [Secretary of State Colin] Powell the appeaser, and kill Arafat the mass murderer of Israelis, Americans, and Arabs. America, with the support of Israel, should conquer the entire Arab Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, using our nuclear arsenal and our other military might. We must seize the oil properties that the Arab governments robbed; these stolen properties are the source of the wealth these regimes spend on terrorism. The entire region should be made a colony of the United States. You should encourage brave and adventurous Americans (and others) to settle and develop this colony, as those in the 1800’s settled and developed the American West.
This policy is the only way to defend the rights of Americans from the savages who will otherwise continue to use Western wealth and technology, which they robbed from us, to finance and engineer their terrorist acts.
This policy has the additional benefit of being the only way to bring freedom to all those now living in the region. But freedom for other peoples should not be America’s primary concern. Our primary concern should be freedom for Americans, which is why I urge you to adopt this policy.
Very respectfully yours,
Ronald Pisaturo
What has changed since my letter nine years ago? Israel has relinquished control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians; in return, the Palestinians launch rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel daily. Arafat is dead, but his political party, Fatah, is now the less ruthless of the two Jew-hating factions running the Palestinian territories. The other faction, Hamas, is a terrorist organization funded by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other Islamist states. Israel has also withdrawn from South Lebanon; in return, Iran-backed Hezbollah has launched thousands of rocket attacks from that territory into Israel.
Then last weekend, U.S. President Obama said this:
Since questions have been raised, let me repeat what I actually said on Thursday—not what I was reported to have said.
I said that the United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state [which, by plane geometry, would entail a non-contiguous Israel].
…
And since my position has been misrepresented several times, let me reaffirm what “1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” means.
By definition, it means that the parties themselves—Israelis and Palestinians—will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. That’s what mutually agreed-upon swaps means. It is a well-known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation. It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place over the last 44 years. It allows the parties themselves to take account of those changes, including the new demographic realities on the ground, and the needs of both sides. The ultimate goal is two states for two people: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people and the State of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people each state in joined self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated repeatedly, the 1967 lines—which leave a central part of Israel only eight miles wide—are indefensible and would mean the destruction of Israel. Obama seems to acknowledge this fact in his qualification of “mutually agreed-upon swaps.” But Obama’s qualification is absurd: it calls for the destruction of Israel as the starting point of ‘negotiations’. Imagine how much Israel would be forced to ‘negotiate’ away if the status quo is Israel’s destruction. Imagine how much a man would be forced to ‘negotiate’ away to a would-be murderer who hated the man and was already pointing a gun at the man’s head. This call for 1967 lines, along with the qualification about swaps, illustrates the absurd extreme to which Obama will push his evil premise, stated by Obama above: that the solution to the problem between Israelis and Palestinians should be based on “the needs of both sides.”
For Obama and a long line of American Presidents before him, right and wrong, good and evil, earned and unearned are irrelevant considerations; what counts is need. Since Palestinians need just as much land and wealth as Israelis do, and since Israelis currently have more of these things, it is Israel that must make concessions. Obama’s policy is the moral equivalent of Obamacare for Israel and the Palestinians.
Obama has stated repeatedly that he is dedicated to the security of Israel. But these statements are empty, because they are accompanied by acceptance of Israel’s enemies. These statements are like saying, “We support America, but we also support Al Qaeda”; or, “We support Jews, but we also support Hitler”; or, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, but your doctor will now have to treat these additional patients in order to make a living.”
To his great credit, Prime Minister Netanyahu explained—in his speech Tuesday to a joint session of the U.S. Congress—that Israel is the only truly free nation in the Middle East:
This path of liberty is not paved by elections alone. It’s paved when governments permit protests in town squares, when limits are placed on the powers of rulers, when judges are beholden to laws and not men, and when human rights cannot be crushed by tribal loyalties or mob rule.
Israel has always embraced this path in a Middle East that has long rejected it. In a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted, Israel stands out. …
We have a free press, independent courts, an open economy, rambunctious parliamentary debates. …
We’re proud in Israel that over 1 million Arab citizens of Israel have been enjoying these rights for decades.
Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights.
Now, I want you to stop for a second and think about that. Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of 1 percent are truly free and they’re all citizens of Israel.
This startling fact reveals a basic truth: Israel is not what is wrong about the Middle East; Israel is what is right about the Middle East.
Unfortunately, Prime Minister Netanyahu stopped short of drawing an explicit ethical conclusion: that Israel is good and the Palestinian National Authority—and the whole society that this organization springs from—is evil. Of all the well-known commentators I have read and heard, only Glenn Beck (on May 24) drew the proper moral conclusion when he asked rhetorically, “Who’s on the side of good? Who’s on the side of evil?”
Nevertheless, Netanyahu was clear and correct in this passage about Iran:
But while we hope for the best and while we work for the best, we must also recognize that powerful forces oppose this future.
They oppose modernity. They oppose democracy. They oppose peace.
Foremost among these forces is Iran. The tyranny in Tehran brutalizes its own people. It supports attacks against American troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq. It subjugates Lebanon and Gaza. It sponsors terror worldwide.
When I last stood here, I spoke of the consequences of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Now time is running out, the hinge of history may soon turn, for the greatest danger of all could soon be upon us: a militant Islamic regime armed with nuclear weapons.
But here is the tragic part of Netanyahu’s position. Though he explained that Israel has always wanted peace while the Palestinians have always wanted the destruction of Israel, Netanyahu still called for a peace process and a Palestinian state side by side with Israel:
Two years ago, I publicly committed to a solution of two states for two peoples: a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state.
I’m willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historic peace. As the leader of Israel it’s my responsibility to lead my people to peace.
Now, this is not easy for me. It’s not easy…
… because I recognize that in a genuine peace, we’ll be required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland. And you have to understand this: In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers.
We’re not the British in India. We’re not the Belgians in the Congo. This is the land of our forefathers, the land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath, and where Isaiah saw a vision of eternal peace.
No distortion of history—and boy, am I reading a lot of distortions of history lately, old and new—no distortion of history could deny the 4,000-year-old bond between the Jewish people and the Jewish land.
But there is another truth: The Palestinians share this small land with us. We seek a peace…
… in which they’ll be neither Israel’s subjects nor its citizens. They should enjoy a national life of dignity as a free, viable and independent people living in their own state.
The tragic error of this position is that it bases Israel’s claims to land on the ancient history of the Jewish people. But on this premise, the Palestinians also have a claim to Israeli land.
Israel’s valid claim to Israel’s land is most emphatically not the ancient history of the Jewish people. By such reasoning, American Indians would have a claim to all of American land, savages throughout the world would have a claim to land everywhere, and everyone alive would have a claim to the Nile Delta.
Israel’s valid claim to its land is that Israel is essentially a free nation that offers freedom to those who live there. Period. And that is why the Palestinians have no legitimate claim to sovereignty over any land: the Palestinians, through their oppressive regimes that have murdered their own as well as their civilized neighbors in Israel, have proved themselves unfit to govern. Where their ancestors—or parents—were born is irrelevant. Where their religious relics are located is irrelevant: as individuals must not be discriminated against solely for religious beliefs, neither do they deserve special favors for such beliefs.
Contributing to this tragic error is Netanyahu’s use of the term ‘democracy’ when ‘liberty’ would be a far better term. ‘Democracy’ is a euphemism for mob rule. Moreover, Netanyahu’s praise for the idea of ‘democracy’ lends credence to the wrong notion that Palestinians have a right to elect their own government. But only individuals in a society with a basic understanding of individual rights have a right to vote.
If the Palestinians did have any valid claim of sovereignty—and they do not—it would be for the land occupied by the oppressive regimes surrounding Israel: Syria, Eqypt, Jordan, Saudia Arabia, Lebanon, and—most of all—Iran. But then, any moral society has a right to conquer these regimes, because these regimes have no right to exist.
With this understanding of principle, policy becomes clear. One of the few things that Obama was right about in his speech to AIPAC was, “The status quo is unsustainable.” That is true in spades. The United States and Israel should immediately declare war on Iran and wipe that nation off the map, seizing or destroying all of Iran’s energy assets and turning the valuable parts of that country into a colony of the U.S. That action alone would go a long way toward solving Israel’s problems, since so much of the terrorism in the Palestinian territories is supported and financed by Iran. After the destruction of Iran, over the course of a few days, the Saudis would probably be so frightened that they would surrender without a fight. If not, we should destroy them too. Ditto for Syria.
As for the Palestinians, we should oblige the aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who called Netanyahu’s speech to Congress a ‘declaration of war’ against Palestinians. The U.S.—in return for some land or other payment—should help Israel retake the Gaza strip, all of the West Bank, and South Lebanon. We should have no qualms about bombing civilian neighborhoods from which rockets are being launched; Israel should not risk Israeli lives for the sake of the lives in an enemy territory. After conquering these territories, we should figure out how many surviving Palestinians we can afford to assimilate, do our reasonable best to sift out the civilized ones and allow adoption of children of the others, and forcibly march the others out of these territories, sending them crashing through the borders of Egypt and Jordan.
Oh, and the ‘peace process’ and a ‘two-state solution’ should be repudiated.
Of course, what I propose will not happen. But it is the way to save Israel—and America.
May 2nd, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
… because we are still acting like police and social workers while our enemies are fighting a war, and because our political leaders still do not recognize the enemy: Islamists, especially Islamic governments.
The evil monster Osama Bin Laden has been killed (shot in the head) by American military heroes. Good. But centuries from now, if civilization survives or is reborn, historians will write of this event as follows:
Even in announcing America’s killing of the leader of the particular terrorist organization that had committed the September 11 massacre, America’s President Obama reiterated and emphasized two notions that would lead to countless more American deaths. The first notion was “that the United States is not—and never will be—at war with Islam. (I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam.)” The second notion, derivative of the first—but one that even the ineffectual apologist for Islam, President G. W. Bush did not hold—was that the fundamental enemy of America was al Qaeda.
The non-conceptual, concrete-bound mentality that believes that America’s fundamental military enemy is al Qaeda is the same kind of mentality that on September 10, 2001 thought that everything was hunky-dory. Al Qaeda is just one of numerous terrorist organizations supported by Islamic governments—above all, Iran—and other Islamists. And terrorism is just one thrust of these Islamists in their fight to conquer the world for Islam.
In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa—a holy war—calling for the execution of Salmon Rushdie (author of The Satanic Verses) and, by implication, his publishers and booksellers. As a result, American bookstores and an American newspaper were bombed, and American publishers needed expensive private security in response to death threats. Recognizing this attack on Americans’ freedom of speech as an act of war, Leonard Peikoff (long-time associate of Ayn Rand) placed an advertisement in the New York Times calling for strong military action against Iran. I am proud to have been one of the signers of the ad, publicly endorsing Dr. Peikoff’s statement.
Al Qaeda was founded just around the time of the fatwa against Rushdie, and was undoubtedly emboldened by America’s non-response to the fatwa. Had America heeded Peikoff’s advice, and had America destroyed Islamist governments including Iran and Saudi Arabia, there never would have been a 9/11 attack. Nor would there exist the Islamist threats we face today.
Though America has killed Osama Bin Laden, we are much worse off against the Islamists than we were on September 12, 2001. Ten more years of wealth from oil assets robbed from the West have given Iran, Syria, Saudia Arabia, and its allies more power to kill Americans and our allies. Our enemies have grown and spread terror networks and insurgencies. Iran’s nuclear weapons program is much farther along and much more widespread. Islamist ideas—in the form of Sharia law—have infiltrated into Western governments. Our enemies have advanced in the Middle East, in Europe, and probably even within America’s borders.
As in domestic policy, and his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, President Obama in foreign policy is essentially the same as his predecessor Bush, only worse. (See my youtube presentation from 2008.) Regarding the threat from Islamists, this article of mine, written in 2003 shortly before America invaded Iraq, is still timely today. I predicted the outcome in Iraq, and the only thing I got wrong is the name of the boiler-plate Democrat who succeeded George W. Bush as President. Some of my predictions still lie in the future, unless we change course. Most importantly, my analysis of—and solution for—the ongoing problem remains unchanged:
America’s problem with Islamic fundamentalists began when Americans, failing to defend their rational self-interest, put the fruits of rationality in the hands of the irrational by letting Islamic savages nationalize Western oil properties in the Middle East. For centuries, Middle East Muslims had been killing each other, but were not a threat to anyone outside their region until the West enriched, emboldened, and empowered them by letting them rob this wealth and spend it on wider-range killing. America could have ended the problem any time before its fall if it simply had the moral self-confidence to use its military might, including its nuclear arsenal, to crush the evil governments, seize the oil properties that the savages were using to finance their military and terrorist operations, and make the territories of the Islamic Middle East into American colonies, thereby enabling American adventurers to exploit and civilize this new frontier just as American adventurers had exploited and civilized the American West in the 1800s.
(See also this post, which I read while finishing my own.)
February 10th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
For the past two weeks, since the political protests in Eqypt began, Americans have been arguing about how to handle Egypt. The way to handle Egypt is to handle Iran.
During the rioting in Iran in June 2009, I wrote the post Now is the Time to Strike Iran. Of course, any time is a good time to strike Iran. Note these excerpts from the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2009, Chapter 3: State Sponsors of Terrorism:
Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism. Iran’s financial, material, and logistic support for terrorist and militant groups throughout the Middle East and Central Asia had a direct impact on international efforts to promote peace, threatened economic stability in the Gulf and undermined the growth of democracy. …
Iran provided weapons, training, and funding to HAMAS and other Palestinian terrorist groups, including Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). Iran has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in support to Lebanese Hizballah and has trained thousands of Hizballah fighters at camps in Iran. …
Iran’s Qods Force provided training to the Taliban in Afghanistan on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives, and indirect fire weapons. …
Iranian authorities continued to provide lethal support, including weapons, training, funding, and guidance, to Iraqi Shia militant groups that targeted U.S. and Iraqi forces. The Qods Force continued to supply Iraqi militants with Iranian-produced advanced rockets, sniper rifles, automatic weapons, and mortars that have killed Iraqi and Coalition Forces, as well as civilians. …
Iran’s government is an oppressive regime that seeks to establish a worldwide caliphate, governed by Islamic (Sharia) law, destroying the U.S. (which it calls “the Great Satan”), Israel (which it calls ‘Little Satan’), and the rest of Western civilization in the process. The regime has tremendous wealth from oil assets it confiscated from Western companies. The regime is seeking nuclear weapons, and certainly will use such weapons at the earliest opportunity.
The longer we delay military action, as we have delayed for decades, the more time there is for Iran and its terror networks to strengthen and to murder more Americans, Israelis, and innocent people everywhere. But the current protests in Egypt provide a particularly good time for the U.S. to declare war and launch an overwhelming military assault on Iran.
Such an assault might include destruction of government centers in Qom and Tehran (possibly with the use of nuclear weapons in order to avoid U.S. casualties), confiscation or incapacitation of all Iranian energy assets (most of which are in the Persian Gulf region), and seizure or incapacitation of all Iranian ports in the Persian Gulf, especially the Strait of Hormuz.
Of course, the probability of our government taking such action is zero. But it is always good to know what the right course of action is.
Such action now would be particularly beneficial:
– Iran surely has many of its military and leadership resources currently deployed in trying to bring an Islamist state to Eqypt, and would now be particularly vulnerable to attack.
– The best way to help any Egyptian pro-freedom elements, such as may exist, is to destroy evil outside forces such as Iran. Instead of dishonorably propping up bad guys and dubious guys, we should do what our military does best: kill the worst guys.
– Controlling the Strait of Hormuz removes pressure of temporarily losing access to the Suez Canal if the worst happens in Eqypt.
– Destroying Iran destroys Hezbollah and HAMAS, freeing Lebanon and defanging Gaza, thereby giving Israel breathing room if the worst happens (temporarily) in Egypt.
I write ‘temporarily’ above, because attacking Iran would establish a rational American policy in the Middle East, and would make clear our policy to Eqyptians: If you become a free nation, we will embrace you as we embrace Israel. If you become an Islamist state, we will conquer you forthwith, seize your ill-gotten assets (such as the Suez Canal), and leave you to die by your pre-Western ways, as we did in Iran.
January 15th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
Immediately after the monstrously evil, murderous rampage in Tucson last Saturday, leading voices on the political Left in media and government blamed the political Right. In particular, they blamed the TEA Party, along with commentators such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, for its lack of civility, for its hate-filled, “vitriolic rhetoric” that allegedly leads to violence. Leftist writer Paul Krugman has even claimed that the political Right has made many “calls, explicit or implicit, for violence.”
The one piece of evidence that Krugman offers is refuted here. I have watched Glenn Beck’s television program almost daily for more than a year, and have never heard him say anything even remotely resembling the many uncivilized statements from prominent voices in the mainstream, Leftist media. Moreover, Leftists have recently called for violence not in anger or in jest, but in cold, sober terms. See this interview, with an approving interviewer, on MSNBC. And note this passage from an article by City University of New York Prof. Frances Fox Piven, a long-time politically influential Leftist, in The Nation last week:
Local protests have to accumulate and spread–and become more disruptive–to create serious pressures on national politicians. An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.
In the riots in Greece, people have been killed. In the “student protests” in England, police were injured and hospitalized.
Harry Binswanger has an excellent philosophical summary of the aftermath to the massacre in Tucson, explaining that the TEA Party is ideologically against the initiation of force, while the Left is ideologically for it. I want to add just a personal point.
In criticizing the political Right on television on Thursday, Galina Espinoza, co-president and editorial director of Latina Media Ventures, asked rhetorically, “Do we want to be promoting hatred and violence?” Many on the Left expressed similar sentiments, as in the aforementioned piece by Paul Krugman entitled “Climate of Hate.” Indeed, Leftists seem to hate hate.
Since a basic premise of Leftist political philosophy is that most individuals are incapable of reason and are instead driven by emotions—therefore requiring the government to do the important thinking and decision-making for us (and then forcing us to comply)—it is natural for Leftists to assume that emotions such as hatred cause acts of violence. But it is not hatred per se that causes violence; it is the choice not to think, the choice to reject reason and instead indulge one’s emotions (even emotions such as love), that causes violence.
Do I hate socialism and all its fascist, communist, and Nazi variants? Yes. Do I hate America’s current President and those in his Administration for moving America significantly closer to a socialist/fascist/Nazi state? Yes. Would I consider committing acts of violence against these people, or violating their individual rights in any way? Of course not. I would not, for the same reason that I hate them: My reason has taught me to hold individual rights as a profound value, to respect the individuals rights even of those I hate. In the absence of a society that respects individual rights, most if not all of the people I love would be dead; if by some miracle I remained alive for a while, I would not consider my life worth living.
I hate many of my political enemies because their actions are violating individual rights. But my hatred is not blind and indiscriminate, and it does not direct my actions. My actions are directed by reason.
As my colleague Glenn Marcus says, a rational man will have violent emotions.
I—along with far less radical right-wing individuals such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and virtually all TEA Party Americans—are exemplars of citizenship, civility, and civilization. I exemplify the principle that no matter how much anger or even hatred he feels, a civilized individual respects individual rights and does not resort to coercion of any kind. All may see and learn from my example and the example of the TEA Party.
Moreover, I will not attempt to hide or subdue my anger and hatred. Doing so would sanction evil. To be polite and respectful toward those who engage in tyranny implies that tyranny is reasonable and respectable, which it is not.
It is good to hate evil, and I do.
June 30th, 2010 by Ron Pisaturo
On Sunday, June 27, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman—I state his credentials at the risk of being accused of ad hominem—wrote this in his piece, The Third Depression:
… over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.
… officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, …
Rather than allude to unspecified speeches, I cite this data from the U.S. Government:
Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables
Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses
Source: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/hist.html
Hoover was President from March 1929 to March 1933. His successor, Franklin Roosevelt, accelerated Hoover’s wild spending (and other interference in the economy by government), prolonging the Great Depression for well more than a decade.
For many important facts about government’s role in the Great Depression, see Great Myths of the Great Depression, by Lawrence W. Reed.
For an essentialized refutation of Keynesian theory, which underlies Krugman’s position, see my post (perhaps my best), The Jobs Job: I explain that Keynesianism, like Marxism, denies the role of the mind in production.
June 21st, 2010 by Ron Pisaturo
Private Property is the Solution
For this blog entry, let me leave aside the following facts, which are oil and water under the bridge.
BP’s off-shore oil leases, like all off-shore oil leases, are leases to use federal property. (Hat tip to this article in The Freeman.) The land and water are owned by the government. Federal bureaucrats—that is, mediocrities and incompetents with no ownership stake in protecting property that they have not earned, could never earn, do not understand, and have no market-based means to value objectively—decide what to lease, to whom, and under what terms. No regime, Obama or otherwise, could teach anyone—let alone the power-lusting, incompetent scoundrels who become regulators for the government—to do this job well. (Update, June 24: (For background on the evil of regulation and regulators, read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand. If you’ve already read that book, also see here and here.)
Federal law—see Clean Water Act Section 311 and the Oil Pollution Act of 1990—makes it the U.S. President’s responsibility to stop an oil spill and clean up the mess, and also limits a company’s liability for an oil ‘spill’ such as BP’s to $75 million plus cleanup costs. (Hat tip, via Flopping Aces, to Mike’s America, which has much useful information about the disaster.)
BP’s campaign to plug the oil leak has been a fiasco. (By the way, the only thing I knew about BP before the oil spill was from its incessant environmentalist commercials, which had persuaded me to avoid BP gas stations if I ever would encounter them.) BP, evidently performing economic calculations and making business decisions based on the above-mentioned laws, clearly was unprepared for such a disaster. In its attempts to plug the leak, BP spent weeks—while more oil gushed— building needed equipment that could have been in inventory before the blow-out occurred. Like financial institutions before the housing crisis, BP apparently counted on the government to bail it out in case of disaster.
As it bailed out AIG and other financial institutions in the housing crisis, the government stepped in to manage the cleanup of the oil spill. But, as with AIG and other financial institutions, the government changed the rules after the fact, and punished the company it had promised all along to bail out. The legal limit of $75 million on liability notwithstanding, the government has shaken down BP (video here) into putting up a $20-billion escrow account for future claims.
Meanwhile, though it blames BP in particular for the oil spill, the government has declared a moratorium on all deep-water drilling.
The government’s management, with BP, of the oil spill has been a fiasco. As of Thursday, June 19, sixty days after the blow-out, the government reports (“more than”) 6,100 “active response vessels.” The size of the oil slick is now roughly (by my estimate from the map I link to) 20,000 square miles, so the government has roughly one vessel for every three square miles of oil slick. As of May 20, thirty days after the blow-out, the government reported that “more than 1,000 vessels are responding on site.” That is, more than 5,000 of the 6,100 vessels now on site did not show up until the second month. Of the more than 6,100 vessels now deployed, “more than 440” are skimmers; that’s less than one skimmer for each 40 square miles of oil slick. The government—probably from loyalty and subservience to labor unions—has declined to suspend the Jones Act, thereby declining assistance from much-needed specialized vessels owned by foreign companies.
In his speech from the Oval Office on June 15, Obama said, “We now have nearly 30,000 personnel who are working across four states to contain and clean up the oil.” Meanwhile, a half million people are deployed to take the census.
(For some other good sources, see my News page.)
So much for the oil and water under the bridge. What should we do right now, at this moment, to deal with the disaster?
What we desperately need is capitalism—that is, private property.
We should take all of the federal land in the Gulf of Mexico—and all the water on top of that land—and declare it one large block of private property owned by one new corporation. The new corporation—let’s call it Gulflandia—would in turn be owned by the individuals and businesses that currently exploit the Gulf; such individuals and businesses would include oil companies, fisheries, and owners of beachfront property. Ownership of Gulflandia could be apportioned according to the amount in taxes paid by its owners over the past decade. (The precise rule for apportioning ownership is less important than that the property be owned privately instead of by government; those who value the property most highly would soon buy the shares of initial owners.)
As the owner of the property on which the oil spill exists, Gulflandia should be allowed to request a court injunction to remove the inept and obstructionist federal government from the clean-up effort, and to hold authority over BP in BP’s effort to stop the leak. (BP and the government are the two best organizations to blow up another oil rig, but not to solve the problem from the last blow-up.) Gulflandia’s assets would be worth hundreds of billions—perhaps trillions—of dollars, which means that it would have the financial means to entice greedy entrepreneurs from all over the world to devise ways to stop the leak, clean up the mess, and preserve the value of the property. (In contrast, the government currently relies mainly on government agencies and volunteers working for free or for daily wages.) Overnight, virtually all of the world’s entrepreneurial engineering firms would turn their attention to solving this problem.
At the same time, all of the individuals and businesses suffering from the loss of fishing, tourism, and oil drilling (because of the moratorium), would have immediate relief. Their share of the new multi-trillion dollar asset would be something they could sell or take to the bank.
For more depth and details on the reasoning behind such a capitalist solution, see my article on applying the capitalist principle of private property to the challenge of space exploration; that article, Mars: Who Should Own It, is in turn based on an idea by philosopher Harry Binswanger. Also see Ayn Rand’s essay, “The Property Status of the Airwaves,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
That no one in government is discussing a solution remotely like mine illustrates how far from capitalism we are.
April 26th, 2010 by Ron Pisaturo
In his remarks on Wall Street Reform last Thursday, April 22, at Cooper Union in New York City, President Obama said this:
I’m going to quote: “Through the great banking houses of Manhattan last week ran wild-eyed alarm. Big bankers stared at one another in anger and astonishment. A bill just passed… would rivet upon their institutions what they considered a monstrous system… such a system, they felt, would not only rob them of their pride of profession but would reduce all U.S. banking to its lowest level.” That appeared in Time Magazine in June of 1933. (Laughter and applause.) The system that caused so much consternation, so much concern was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, also known as the FDIC, an institution that has successfully secured the deposits of generations of Americans.
If Obama had been President in 1860, perhaps he would have also mocked this statement made by John Jay generations earlier, in 1786:
It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.
–John Jay, letter to R. Lushington, March 15, 1786
Perhaps Obama would have spoken of slavery as an institution that had successfully secured the assets of generations of plantation owners.
As John Jay was right, the “big bankers” cited by Time Magazine in 1933 were right. The FDIC violates individual rights, forcing individuals to pay for the failure of others. The FDIC, along with the Federal Reserve System (begun in 1913) and all the other government controls of the banking industry, has turned Americans—including bankers—into complacent dependents on the government for assessing and guaranteeing the solvency of banks. What American today assesses the solvency of a bank before deciding to deposit with that bank? What banker doubted that the government would ultimately back the toxic mortgages bought and sold by the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were created expressly to carry out the government’s welfare-statist policy of making homes affordable to more people?
In the same speech, Obama said this:
we‘ve produced a proposal that by all accounts is a commonsense, reasonable, non-ideological approach to target the root problems that led to the turmoil in our financial sector and ultimately in our entire economy.
By all accounts!? Could such a statement, in a prepared speech, possibly be honest?
I might grant that Obama’s proposal is, in a sense, “non-ideological”—that is, unprincipled. But, by my account, and by many accounts surely known to Obama (see here and here from just one day of The Wall Street Journal earlier that week), the proposal certainly is not commonsense or reasonable.
What does Obama think the “root problems” are? This paragraph offers his assessment:
Now, one of the most significant contributors to this recession was a financial crisis as dire as any we’ve known in generations—at least since the ’30s. And that crisis was born of a failure of responsibility—from Wall Street all the way to Washington—that brought down many of the world’s largest financial firms and nearly dragged our economy into a second Great Depression.
And what was this “failure of responsibility” born of? It was born of the Federal Reserve System, the FDIC, and what I described above: the complacent dependency on the government for assessing and guaranteeing the solvency of banks.
What is Obama’s solution? His solution is fifteen hundred more pages of regulations, so that Americans can be even more complacent and dependent on government to do their thinking for them.
Is anyone surprised that, of the fifteen hundred pages of proposed new regulations, not a word applies to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac? As I wrote in February 2009,
The essential cause of the housing crisis was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—directed by long-standing welfare-state policy, and in effect using banks as their sales reps—making trillions of dollars in loans (“they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market” [The New York Times in 2008]) to people who could not afford to buy a home in free society.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are GSEs—government sponsored enterprises. The government turned them into pseudo-corporations solely for the deception of removing their expenditures from the official federal budget. The GSEs are agents of government welfare-state social policy.
In the past decade, Democrats (such as Bill Clinton and Barney Frank) in the federal government encouraged these GSEs to run amuck, and fought against attempts to regulate the GSEs. So here is Obama’s “logic”: Government failed to regulate government; therefore we need more regulation of citizens. Obama has the mentality of a tyrant. He makes no distinction between limiting government and limiting freedom of citizens.
Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps Obama does make a distinction: he will not limit government, and he will limit freedom.
Consider one more, revealing statement from Obama’s speech:
We do not have to choose between markets that are unfettered by even modest protections against crisis, or markets that are stymied by onerous rules that suppress enterprise and innovation.
Obama opposes “markets that are unfettered”; that is, he is for “fettered” markets. But how does one fetter a market? A market is an association of consenting individuals, as are friendship and romance. The only way to fetter an association is to fetter the individuals who would associate.
When politicians, economists, and commentators depersonalize the idea of freedom, when they speak of free or unfettered markets but never of free or unfettered people, then freedom becomes easier for them to attack or more difficult for them to defend.
April 7th, 2010 by Ron Pisaturo
Rob a man who fishes, and you feed yourself for a day. Trade with a man who fishes, and you have a potential source of food—and so many other things that this free, thinking man might create—for a lifetime.
Of course, trading requires that you work to produce something worth trading for. Well, that’s life. Life requires work. Fortunately, though, you have a mind. Use it.
March 29th, 2010 by Ron Pisaturo
This is from a press release by the Florida Attorney General on Tuesday, March 23:
Attorney General Bill McCollum today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Labor alleging the Health Care Reform bill signed into law by President Obama this morning is unconstitutional. …
The Attorneys General from South Carolina, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington, Idaho, and South Dakota joined Florida’s lawsuit … .
The complaint alleges the new law infringes upon the constitutional rights of Floridians and residents of the other states by mandating all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage or pay a tax penalty. By imposing such a mandate, the law exceeds the powers of the United States under Article I of the Constitution and violates the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, filing a similar suit, said this:
The unconstitutional aspect is that the individual mandate on Americans that they must buy health insurance or face penalties overreaches the authority of the Congress under the commerce clause.
In short, the States object to forcing people to buy insurance policies that those people don’t want to buy. But the States don’t object to forcing people to sell insurance policies that those people don’t want to sell.
Why do these lawmakers not object to forcing insurance companies to sell policies to people with pre-existing conditions? Where have these lawmakers been for the past decades, while insurance companies have been mandated by States to include expensive coverage—for ‘illnesses’ such as drug addiction and pregnancy—that many customers don’t want?
The sad, obvious truth is that the lawmakers against Obamacare are not against coercion on principle. They are not in favor of an individual’s right to liberty—which includes his right to trade with others by mutual consent—on principle. Evidently, they think of ‘rights’ only for the largest voting group: the group consisting of patients, not insurers or doctors.
Perhaps these lawmakers would say, “No one is coercing insurance companies, because they always have the option of not selling insurance to anyone.” Of course, constraining the insurers’ liberty to such an alternative is a violation of rights, akin to saying, “Unless you will sleep with every man, we won’t let you sleep with your man.”
Indeed, under socialized medicine, if the state cannot afford to give a certain medical treatment to everyone, it gives the treatment to no one—except perhaps someone with political pull.
Yesterday, Florida Governor and U.S. Senate candidate Charlie Crist, a Republican, said this:
I think one thing that’s very important—and I think everybody agrees on this, Chris [Wallace of Fox News]—that preexisting instances should not be a discriminatory tool that’s used by insurance companies to not give people insurance.
Note Crist’s phrase, “give people insurance.” Could Crist have sustained his evasion if he had used the more appropriate phrase, “sell people insurance”? Clearly, selling health insurance to people who are already sick is a money-losing proposition. As I have noted, selling health insurance for sick people is a contradiction in terms, like selling life insurance for dead people.
If the Republicans somehow manage to repeal or overturn Obamacare, expect them to enact something else that violates individual rights almost as much. Virtually all Republicans agree with the evil notions that ‘health care’—forcing others to care for your health—is a right; that if insurance companies insure some people, they must insure all people; and that taxpayers should be forced to pay for everyone to be insured. (See my post, Republicans to the Rescue of Evil , from September 2009.)
What courses of action then remain for rational individuals? I can think of two: a strike in the style of Atlas Shrugged, and/or civil disobedience.
