Libertarian Angle: Trump versus Clinton

What Sparked Your Interest in Liberty?

# RICHARD M. EBELING

I suppose I can date my interest in both libertarianism and Austrian Economics from the day I was born. The doctor grabbed me by my little feet, turned me upside down and spanked my tiny bottom.

I began to cry out. That is when I realized the fundamental axiom that, “man acts.” In addition, I appreciated that what the doctor had done was in violation of the “non-aggression” principle.

The rest is history. Well . . . maybe not quite.

For some reason, I had found history and current events interesting when I was in my early ‘teens in the 1960s. I had a part-time job at the Hollywood Public Library in Los Angeles when I was in high school. Part of responsibilities was to maintain the magazine collections on a balcony in the building. I would finish my work, and hide up in the balcony reading new and old political and news publications.

But I soon was confused. When I read “left-of-center” publications like “The Nation” or the “New Republic,” they always seemed to have the moral high ground, making the case for “social justice,” “fairness” and morality.  On the other hand, when I read “right-of-center” publications like “Human Events” or “National Review” the argument was made that all that “bleeding heart” stuff just did not work. There was a “bottom line”: it cost too much, screwed things up, and socialism and communism seemed to kill a lot of people.

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Libertarian Angle: Abolish the Income Tax

WHY PROGRESSIVES DON’T UNDERSTAND AND ARE ENEMIES OF LIBERTY

by Richard M. EbelingApril 4, 2016

What does freedom mean? What is the purpose of government? And what should be the government’s relationship to each of us as individuals and as members of society as a whole? These issues recently came up during a dinner conversation with a new acquaintance with whom I’d not previously had such a discussion.

The views that I expressed in the calm and friendly and enjoyable exchange are those usually labeled as classical liberal or libertarian. My dinner companion reasoned from what is the “modern” liberal or “progressive” point-of-view. Like myself, he has been a professor in higher education, and he is widely read and very knowledgeable.

What became clear, both during the conversation and from reflecting on it afterwards, are some of the following conclusions.

Conflicting Meanings of Freedom

For a classical liberal, freedom means that each individual possesses as a human being certain inviolable rights, those being rights to his life, liberty and honestly acquired property. And that human relationships should be based on voluntary consent and mutual agreement.

For my interlocutor, freedom means “empowerment” or the ability to do or achieve certain things, without which “freedom” is not complete. These include a minimum or “decent” standard of living and the ability to attain certain potentials in life, which are everyone’s “right” as a member of society.

For my fellow conversationalist, society is a shared “community” of human beings each of whom owes certain things to the others, just as the others owe certain things to us. Society might be viewed as an extended family, from this perspective, all the members of which have certain required obligations to support and give assistance to their social “relatives.”

I suggested that society is a network of human relationships formed between individuals based upon opportunities for mutual betterment, including both the economic and the cultural in the widest sense, the fundamental foundation of which derives from those essential individual rights.

The “Social Contract”: Individualist or Collectivist?

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BIG GOVERNMENT FUELS INCOME INEQUALITY

LIBERTY, COMPETITION, AND FREE TRADE ARE KEYS TO PROSPERITY

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  By Richard EbelingMar 07, 2016

WHAT ROAD FOR AMERICA — LIBERTY OR POLITICAL PLUNDER?

PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFULS RUNNING ON PROMISES THEY’LL NEED SOMEONE ELSE’S MONEY TO FULFILL

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  By Richard EbelingFeb 22, 2016

Presidential election years, more than many others, focuses our attention on politics, those running for political office, and the promises the competing candidates make to sway our allegiance and votes toward one or some of them in comparison to others. They want us to give them political power by promising to use that power to benefit some of us in ways that can only come at the expense of others in society.

This fundamental truth about the reality of modern-day politics gets blurred in the hoopla of whose ahead in the public opinion polls, which candidate has the most charm or cunning, and what forms do their attacks on each other take.

We need to step back and look at things in terms of “first principles” if the entire process and its consequences are to be put into focus and perspective. Otherwise, we get lost in all the minutia of daily media news spins, and forget what it is really all about.

Political Means vs. Economic Means to Betterment

A little over a hundred years ago, the German sociologist, Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943), in his book, The State (1914), explained that there are fundamentally two ways to obtain the things you desire in society. What Oppenheimer called, “the political means” or the “economic means.” By the political means, he meant the use of political power and force to acquire from others what you want. By the economics means, Oppenheimer meant the use of peaceful methods of production, either through producing directly things you want and desire, or to obtain them through voluntarily and mutually agreed-upon trade and exchange.

Through history, Oppenheimer said, people had often used the political means. He suggested this has been the origin of governments. Roving bands of thieves and plunders would invade and conquer lands to seize the wealth of others. If they settled down to more permanently rule over and live off the productive efforts of those now under their coercive control, there would be born what today we call a “State.”

Oppenheimer’s analysis of the origin and nature of the State has been more recently developed by the noted economist, Mancur Olson (1932-1998). He, too, argued that the origin of the State could be seen in the replacement of roving bands of plundering thieves by stationary bandits who settle down to rule over a territory over a prolonged period.

The roving band cares nothing for what happens in the area it has looted and then moved on. But the stationary bandits who want to live off the conquered area permanently have to take into consideration the conditions and the incentives of their “subjects” if they are to keep producing and therefore creating something for the stationary bandits to plunder through taxation year-after-year.

– See more at: http://www.epictimes.com/richardebeling/2016/02/what-road-for-america-liberty-or-political-plunder/#sthash.gNg31vIR.dpuf

AMERICA’S NATIONAL DEBT BOMB CAUSED BY THE WELFARE STATE

EVERYONE SHOULD BE TREATED EQUALLY BUT NOT EVERYONE SHOULD BE EQUAL

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  By Richard Ebeling Feb 07, 2016
• Tagged:
  Big Government, Budget Deficits, Joseph Schumpeter, National Debt, Welfare State

The news is filled with the everyday zigzags of those competing against each other for the Democrat and Republican Party nominations to run for the presidency of the United States. But one of the most important issues receiving little or no attention in this circus of political power lusting is the long-term danger from the huge and rising Federal government debt.

The Federal debt has now crossed the $19 trillion mark. When George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, Uncle Sam’s debt stood at $5 trillion. When President Bush left office in January of 2009, it had increased to $10 trillion. Now into seven years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Federal debt has almost doubled again.

And it is going to get much worse, according to the Congressional Budget Office. On January 26, 2016, the CBO released it latest “Budget and Economic Outlook” analysis for the next ten years, from 2016 to 2026.

Continuing Deficits and Growing National Debt

The economists at the CBO estimate that the Federal budget deficit for the fiscal year, 2016, will be $544 billion, or $105 billions more than Uncle Sam’s budget deficit in fiscal year 2015. And each year’s budget deficit will continue to be larger than the previous year from here on. Indeed, the CBO estimates the Federal government’s annual deficits will once more be over $1 trillion starting in 2022 and thereafter.

Between 2016 and 2026, the Federal debt, as a result, is projected to increase by a cumulative amount of almost $9.5 trillion, for a total national debt of around $30 trillion just ten years from now.

The reason for the continuing ocean of Federal red ink is the fact that while government revenues are projected to be around 49.5 percent higher in fiscal year 2026 ($5,035 trillion) than in fiscal year 2016 ($3.376 trillion), government spending will be over 63 percent more in fiscal year 2016 ($6,401 trillion) than in fiscal year 2016 ($3,919 trillion).

Understanding the Fiscal History of America

– See more at: http://www.epictimes.com/richardebeling/2016/02/americas-national-debt-bomb-caused-by-the-welfare-state/#sthash.1EsaIsLi.dpuf

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT

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  By Richard EbelingMay 26, 2014

For millions of Americans the Second Amendment and its guarantee of the right of the individual to bear arms appears irrelevant and practically anachronistic. It seems a throwback to those earlier days of the Wild West, when many men, far from the law and order provided by the town sheriff and circuit judge, had to protect their families and land from cattle rustlers and outlaw bands. Such people are wrong.

If in our contemporary world the law fails to do its job of seeing that the guilty pay for their crimes, we take solace in the fantasy of extralegal solutions. We imagine that somewhere there is a Clint Eastwood on a metropolitan police force who uses some “magnum force” to see to it that the perpetrator of a crime doesn’t go unpunished. Or we want to think that there is a Charles Bronson occasionally roaming the streets of a large city at night fulfilling the “death wish” of the street criminal whom local law enforcement is not able to punish.

The crime once having been committed, it is some breakdown in the judicial system that prevents justice from being served. If only the law didn’t coddle the criminal or allow his defense attorney to use “loopholes” in the law, no criminal would ever escape his just deserts.

This popular conception of the legal system, law enforcement, and government, however, suffers from two fundamental flaws: first, it focuses on the legal process (and any supposed weaknesses in it) only after a crime has been committed; and second, it ignores completely the fact that it might be the government itself that is the potential perpetrator of crimes against the American citizenry.

The Tragedy of the Unarmed Victims

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PAPER MONEY VERSUS THE GOLD STANDARD: AN EXPLANATION

NEWS

• By Richard Ebeling Dec 07, 2015

We are living in a time that can only be considered monetary chaos. The U.S. Federal Reserve has manipulated key interest rates down to practically zero for the last six years, and expanded the money supply in the banking system by $4 trillion dollars over that time. And with the true mentality of the monetary central planner, the Fed Board of Governors are now planning to manipulate key interest rates in an upward direction that they deem desirable.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has instituted a conscious policy of “negative” interest rates and planned an additional monetary expansion of well over a trillion Euros over the next year. Plus, the head of the ECB has assured the public and financial markets that there is “no limit” to the amount of paper money that will be produced to push the European economies in the direct that those monetary central planners consider best.

We also should not forget that it was the Federal Reserve that earlier in the twenty-first century undertook a monetary expansion and policy of interest rate manipulation that set the stage for the severe and prolonged “great recession” that began in 2008-2009, in conjunction with a Federal government distorting subsidization of the American housing market.

The media and the policy pundits may focus on the day-to-day zigs and zags of central bank monetary and interest rate policy, but what really needs to be asked is whether or not we should continue to leave monetary and banking policy in the discretionary hands of central banks and the monetary central planners who manage them.

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THANKSGIVING: CELEBRATING THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE

• By Richard EbelingNov 22, 2015

This time of the year, whether in good economic times or bad, is when Americans gather with their families and friends and enjoy a Thanksgiving meal together. It marks a remembrance of those early Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the uncharted ocean from Europe to make a new start in Plymouth, Massachusetts. What is less appreciated is that Thanksgiving also is a celebration of the birth of free enterprise in America.

The English Puritans, who left Great Britain and sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, were not only escaping from religious persecution in their homeland. They also wanted to turn their back on what they viewed as the materialistic and greedy corruption of the Old World.

Plymouth Colony Planned as Collectivist Utopia

In the New World, they wanted to erect a New Jerusalem that would not only be religiously devout, but be built on a new foundation of communal sharing and social altruism. Their goal was the communism of Plato’s “Republic,” in which all would work and share in common, knowing neither private property nor self-interested acquisitiveness.

What resulted is recorded in the diary of Governor William Bradford, the head of the colony. The colonists collectively cleared and worked the land, but they brought forth neither the bountiful harvest they hoped for, nor did it create a spirit of shared and cheerful brotherhood.

The less industrious members of the colony came late to their work in the fields, and were slow and easy in their labors. Knowing that they and their families were to receive an equal share of whatever the group produced, they saw little reason to be more diligent in their efforts. The harder working among the colonists became resentful that their efforts would be redistributed to the more malingering members of the colony. Soon they, too, were coming late to work and were less energetic in the fields.

Collective Work Equaled Individual Resentment

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