There are numerous short sentences and chants that come from libertarians. Most of them simple and direct but even the most simple in terms seems to get lost to some. So I am here to help work out what these few slogans for libertarian minded folks mean. To do this I will throw out my own definitions well as link into others who have written on these topics as well.
End The Fed
This was a favorite of the Ron Paul followers (myself included) for almost the entire 2012 campaign. It is the title of a book authored by Dr. Ron Paul in 2009 and a position that Dr. Paul holds adamantly. To many outsiders (outside the libertarian mindset) it is a chant that holds very little weight as they may not comprehend the entirety of what the Fed is and what it does.
In brevity ending the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States would return money to a competitive and harder to manipulate tool of the economy. When the US Government needs money it borrows these electronic 1’s and 0’s from the ledger (with interest added) of the Federal Reserve, this debt is then sold by the Fed to foreign and domestic investors. The money supply is manipulated by the Fed by the practice of Quantitative easing and artificially held interest rates.
Paul says,”Inflation is the most vicious and regressive of all forms of taxation. It transfers wealth from the middle class to the privileged rich. The economic chaos that results from a policy of central bank inflation inevitably leads to political instability and violence. It's an ancient tool of all authoritarians. Inflating is never a benefit to freedom-loving people. It destroys prosperity; feeds the fires of war; & is responsible for recessions. It's deceptive & addictive, and causes delusions of grandeur. Wealth cannot be achieved by creating money by fiat. Depending on monetary fraud for national prosperity or a reversal of our downward spiral is riskier than depending on the lottery. Inflation has been used to pay for empires since ancient Rome. And they all end badly. Inflationism and corporatism engender protectionism and trade wars. They prompt scapegoating: blaming foreigners, illegal immigrants, ethnic minorities, and too often freedom itself for the predictable events and suffering that result.”
Source: End the Fed, by Rep. Ron Paul, p.134 Sep 29, 2010
End The IRS
The Internal Revenue Service, should be the most hated Government Bureau in existence, but it is anything but. It is actually one of the most protected and ideological inconsistent stances most American’s have. In essence most people want taxes, they feel they need taxes, they will in some cases say that one tax isn’t needed or warranted but will mostly follow it up with a new tax or higher tax somewhere else. It is this inconsistency that many libertarians try to remedy with the statement to Abolish the entire administration and codification of taxes across the board with no repentance. It is not an tenet of a free people to be forced to fund that which they see no value or that which they oppose on moral or other reason. Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation wrote in May of 2013, “One might propose to remove the government’s arbitrary power by ending tax exemption. But that would make the tax burden worse. And besides, politicians aren’t likely to agree, because they would be giving up the power to dispense favors that manipulation of today’s tax code affords.There’s a better way to go that’s demanded by liberty and justice. Since taxation is nothing less than the confiscation, under threat of force, of what belongs to productive individuals, it has no place in a free society. In other words, everyone should be exempt from income and other taxation. (Americans lived without income taxation for more than 125 years — except for ten years beginning during the Civil War.) If something can’t be accomplished through consent, contract, and cooperation — without aggressive force — we should ask whether it is worth doing.When the income tax was first proposed in America years ago, opponents always had the same word of warning: inquisitorial. How right they were.”
End The Wars
What can be said negatively about wanting to end all wars, but then there are some that would call us crazy and maybe we are, but if peace for all people isn’t worth the effort than nothing is. War is the most brutal display of nationalism and imperialism that this world has ever, and I hope will ever know. It is not the wish of every man to be at war with his neighbor as well as extended neighbors of the world. And it is not the wish of these men that they be pulled into a conflict of governments, to kill and to die, in defense of a government that has made enemies in the citizen's name. In 1973 Murray N. Rothbard sat for an interview for Reason Magazine. In this he responds, ” The State thrives on war – unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed – expands on it, glories in it. For one thing, when one State attacks another State, it is able through this intellectual bamboozlement of the public to convince them that they must rush to the defense of the State because they think the State is defending them.
In other words, if let’s say, Paraguay and Brazil are going to get into a war, each State – the Paraguayan government and the Brazilian government – is able to convince their own subjects that the other government is out to get them and loot them and murder them in their beds and so forth, so they are able to induce their own hapless subjects to fight against the other State, whereas in actual practice, of course, it is the States that have the quarrel, not the people. The people are outside the quarrels of the State and yet the State is able to generate this patriotic mass war hysteria and to call everybody up to the colors physically and spiritually and economically and therefore, of course, aggrandize State power permanently.
Most conservatives and libertarians are very familiar with – and deplore – the increase in State power in the American government in the last 50 or 70 years, but what they don’t seem to realize is that most of these increases took place in giant leaps during wartime. It was wartime that provided the crisis situation – the spark – which enabled the States to put on so-called "emergency" measures, which of course never got lifted, or rarely got lifted.”
With the call for the ending the wars the next point comes in...
Bring The Troops Home
It is well enough to call off the brutality and futility of war, from every angle, but yet another libertarian bumper sticker position is the return of all troops to their home countries. This is a call that comes from a few different angles. On the financial conservatism side it is not a strong position to say you oppose increased spending or taxation, and at the same time call for spending on the placement of military peoples or machines, bases and outposts. All of this of course comes with an enormous cost. The United States spends approximately $250 billion annually to maintain troops, equipment, fleets, and bases overseas. That includes the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and the rebuilding afterwards as well as foreign aid to other nations.
From the standpoint of anti-imperialism one would have to look at the impact of having a base in every country and wars in many that do not yet have permanent residence. There are many that say that America is not Imperialistic but defined by the Merriam-Webster it makes the standard short saying true. Webster’s Definition : “the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas; broadly : the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence”
And of course with bringing the troops home the wars would naturally have to end and production could be diverted back into domestic consumables and international tradables instead of weaponry and foreign ventures.
End The War on Drugs
The War on Drugs, signalled formally by President Richard Nixon in 1971, has been the most costly war ever waged directly on the people of the United States. Costly not only in the monetary waste of enforcement but also in the lives ruined and ended in an effort to punish the decisions and behavior of the people. The War on Drugs is essentially by proxy a formal war of the freedom of people to harm them own self without harming any others. It is a war waged in suburbs, cities, towns and municipalities across the country and around the world. One of my favorite writers on this issue is Laurence Vance, he has written extensively on this subject and always seems to point out the obvious in new ways. An article published in August of 2011 laid out one of the best breakdowns of why the war on drugs is such an absolute failure in the effort to curb use or proclivity of possession and sale.
“ The war on drugs is a failure. It has failed to prevent drug abuse. It has failed to keep drugs out of the hands of addicts. It has failed to keep drugs away from teenagers. It has failed to reduce the demand for drugs. It has failed to stop the violence associated with drug trafficking. It has failed to help drug addicts get treatment.
But the war on drugs has also succeeded. It has succeeded in clogging the judicial system. It has succeeded in swelling prison populations. It has succeeded in corrupting law enforcement. It has succeeded in destroying financial privacy. It has succeeded in militarizing the police. It has succeeded in hindering legitimate pain treatment. It has succeeded in destroying the Fourth Amendment. It has succeeded in eroding civil liberties. It has succeeded in making criminals out of hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Americans. It has succeeded in wasting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. It has succeeded in ruining countless lives.
Clearly, the financial and human costs of the drug war far exceed any of its supposed benefits. Clearly, the drug war violates the Constitution and exceeds the proper role of government. And clearly, the drug war is a war on personal freedom, private property, personal responsibility, individual liberty, personal and financial privacy, and the free market.”
These are but a few examples.
All the one liner responses and bumper sticker philosophy libertarians share do have meaning behind them and if we are to effect real change we need to be prepared to expose that true meaning of what we are saying. Making sure those we interact and conversate with are left with more than just a vague slogan of what libertarianism is is vital to growing support and cooperation for these goals. If people don’t know what you support or why you support it they cannot make a connection and start to bridge their own beliefs to yours.
No comments:
Post a Comment