RAG Perspective: An American Pro-Liberty Conservative: Miscellany: 10/31/14

Friday, October 31, 2014

Miscellany: 10/31/14

Quote of the Day
The best argument against democracy is a five minute talk with the average voter.
Winston Churchill

Chart of the Day: The College Student Loan Bubble Under Obama

Courtesy of mygovcost

Image of the Day

The Fascist Dems Are Trying to Intimidate People to the Polls
Courtesy of Liberty Vital

Frightening Government Spending

Democrat Voter Fraud Goes Beyond the Cemetery

Reason Halloween Parody

Am I Continuing To Shift My Perspective?

I've noticed my readership numbers have been lighter than usual the last couple of weeks at least on some days, particularly yesterday's post, which depending on lagging hits would be the lowest read post in several weeks. As I've written before, I don't write this blog for the hits; I do appreciate when others seem to respond to certain posts, but I do have a seemingly eclectic set of positions which few others seem to concurrently hold: I am pro-markets, pro-liberty, pro-life, pro-immigration, pro-traditional marriage and family, for instance. The faithful reader probably knows I'm not just battling liberal/progressive trolls, but over the past week I've actually been taking hits from conservatives calling me in effect a liberal, an Obama apologist. (Anyone following this blog who confuses me with a social liberal or thinks I'm a secret Obama supporter is not paying attention. However, even Obama can't be wrong 100% of the time.)

There is, broadly speaking, a divide that divides American politics that Tom DiLorenzo and others have discerned: the philosophical split between Hamilton and Jefferson. Hamilton was in favor of a strong central government and protectionist/mercantilist policies while Jefferson believed in more decentralized government, strong individual rights, and free markets/free trade: as Rothbard observed, "Even though he himself had done much to prepare the way for war with Great Britain in 1812, Jefferson was disillusioned by the public debt, high taxation, government spending, flood of paper money, and burgeoning of privileged bank monopolies that accompanied the war. He had concluded that his beloved Democratic-Republican Party had actually adopted the economic policies of the despised Hamiltonian federalist."

As Wikipedia notes about the Second Party System (Democrats and Whigs):

The Democrats represented a wide range of views but shared a fundamental commitment to the Jeffersonian concept of an agrarian society. They viewed the central government as the enemy of individual liberty. The 1824 "corrupt bargain" had strengthened their suspicion of Washington politics....Jacksonians feared the concentration of economic and political power. They believed that government intervention in the economy benefited special-interest groups and created corporate monopolies that favored the rich. They sought to restore the independence of the individual--the artisan and the ordinary farmer--by ending federal support of banks and corporations and restricting the use of paper currency, which they distrusted. Their definition of the proper role of government tended to be negative, and Jackson's political power was largely expressed in negative acts. He exercised the veto more than all previous presidents combined. Jackson and his supporters also opposed reform as a movement. Reformers eager to turn their programs into legislation called for a more active government. But Democrats tended to oppose programs like educational reform mid the establishment of a public education system. They believed, for instance, that public schools restricted individual liberty by interfering with parental responsibility and undermined freedom of religion by replacing church schools.

Whigs favored economic expansion through an activist government, Democrats through limited central government. Whigs supported corporate charters, a national bank, and paper currency; Democrats were opposed to all three. Whigs also favored more humanitarian reforms than did Democrats, including public schools, abolition of capital punishment, prison and asylum reform and temperance. Whigs were more optimistic than Democrats, generally speaking, and more enterprising. They did not object to helping a specific group if doing so would promote the general welfare. The chartering of corporations, they argued, expanded economic opportunity for everyone, laborers and farmers alike. Democrats, distrustful of concentrated economic power and of moral and economic coercion, held fast to the Jeffersonian principle of limited government.

By the 1850s most Democratic party leaders had accepted many Whiggish ideas, and no one could deny the economic modernization of factories and railroads was moving ahead rapidly.

The key point is that that we started seeing blending of Federalist/Whiggish ideas--and more importantly, centralist/authoritarian means. This is why the libertarian perspective that I've sometimes highlighted in my FB Corner segments that the issue isn't so much between Democrats and Republicans but between libertarians and authoritarians. On the conservative side, the authoritarian side can manifest itself in many ways: e.g., immigration enforcement, deference to law enforcement or the TSA, etc.

I've grown increasingly critical of Bill O'Reilly in the blog, but he recently managed to hit three points where I substantively disagree with the authoritarian conservatives: immigration, ISIS and Ebola quarantine. I'm not going to review the first 2 topics which I have outlined in several posts, but quite frankly I've been hinting at my position on the third in terms of images and the like; I have not liked the hysteria over the Maine nurse who was quarantined by Chris Christie and then under observation of Maine troopers ensuring other people kept a "safe distance" away from her. I have posted multiple unpopular FB posts on the topic (continued below) and I could have taken a hit from readers who are pro-quarantine. I recently responded to one troll who called me an "idiot" and when I returned fire, he hypocritically accused me of an ad hominem attack. (Now I've found myself going after trolls quite bluntly, but they tend to be strident progressives spamming the thread. But what I've noticed when Reason, Cato Institute, or Judge Napolitano publishes a more libertarian view of the big 3 issues above, the anti-immigrants, neocons, and health Nazis promptly flood the comment threads, not with reasoned disagreements but hostile, judgmental talking point, and the wolf pack will attack anyone mildly supportive of the thread owners' positions.

The bottom line is that I find myself increasingly alienated from so-called right-wing authoritarian allies. It doesn't make me want to flip to the leftist authoritarians... I'm like a man without a party.

Facebook Corner

(continued from yesterday's Judge Napolitano's thread on the Maine nurse then under quarantine)
Are you really willing to gamble the lives of you and your family and ...well hell let's just say ANYONE that woman comes into contact with ...or even indirectly (ie if she sneezes) and someone in her area has a compromised immune system. For instance a child with some form of cancer. There is a MYRIAD of possibilities with this disease for unchecked spread. A NURSE should know that and you'd think a NURSE would want to take EVERY precaution to avoid that happening. Even if it means sitting around the house a little longer to make ABSOLUTELY SURE she's NOT infected. She MADE THE CHOICE to go over there and expose herself to this.
To the new troll: yes, I am fully comfortable with the nurse being in public. She has tested negative multiple times, she is asymptomatic, I do not know how long she served in West Africa, but if she was there any length of time over 3 weeks, it attests to the effectiveness of related protocols up to that time, and it is highly unlikely she would have knowingly exposed herself just prior to returning to the States. Keep in mind that Ebola has been an issue for some time and we had multiple flights from West Africa over that period. One person, Duncan, was diagnosed from all those flights, and he was asymptomatic during that flight; none of the people he was in contact with before he checked into the hospital has been diagnosed. The nurse is highly competent; she knows her own life is at stake if she develops symptoms, and she has professional ethics and knows better than expose others: the fact she went to help other people in need speaks volumes of her character and concern for others. Quite frankly, we need more people like her.

You need to stop being influenced by the irrational hysteria being whipped up by fear-mongers. Lots of other healthcare volunteers have served and returned without issue; why are you persecuting this poor lady? Because she returned after Duncan? Do you honestly think people wait to get exposed just before returning to the States? Not everybody in West Africa has developed the infection; you can't assume everyone who has been there is infected and somehow got infected unless they can prove otherwise. It's unreasonable and unfair.
Better safe than sorry, especially when the potential benefit so clearly outweighs the potential harm.
Says the troll who is willing to sacrifice another person's liberty for his own arbitrary sense of safety...

Political Cartoon