Clearing Up Some Misinformation, Part 1

President Obama gave a speech at Osawatomie High School on December 6, 2011, where he declared freedom and free markets to be dead, unworkable ideas which have been tried and proven to fail.  The President claims that free people making decisions about how to allocate their labor and resources (the free market) is a simple theory that appeals to our rugged individualism, but that it does not work and has never worked:

… there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker.  But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.  I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.

With all the misinformation contained in these two paragraphs, I am not sure where to begin. 

Rothbard's Ways to Promote Liberty on Campus (Part II)

Time for Part 2 of Rothbard's Ways to Promote Libertarian Ideas -- on campus! (Here is the link to part 1.) There are supposed to be 101 ways, but all I can find online are parts 1 and 2, which go up to #35.  Sorry folks, only a few of the remaining ones are still relevant -- but check the rest out anyway. Oh well, we can come up with well over 66 more ways ourselves!  Here are just a few:

30. Hold a Libertarian Festival -- a “teach-in” on libertarian views on a dozen subjects.

31. Is your university giving an honorary degree to a prominent politician, soldier, or corporation executive? Prepare a research profile on his career from a libertarian perspective. To what extent has he contributed to the preservation and extension of liberty?

Calling out Conservatives at the Tea Party

This past wave of tea-parties I was honored to give the keynote speech to over 2,500 people at a tea-party in Winston Salem, NC. 

My speech, however, was distinctly different than others given that day; in fact, I made it a point to call out the injustices of the GOP in recent years. The best part, though, is that the speech was delightfully eaten up by the crowd and I spent hours after the speech talking to people about the message I aimed to convey... and they all overwhelmingly agreed with me.

It's one thing to be right, it's another thing to convince someone you're right; it's not only about what you say, but how you say it. 

Watch the speech below; in my humble opinion, this is the way we can win over the right.

Hey An-Caps, I've got a question for you.

Those who've been reading my posts here for the year and a half or so that I've been making them (an impressive feat which I don't necessarily recommend) may have gleaned that I'm more of a minarchist libertarian than an anarcho-capitalist.  Yes, I very much appreciate Rothbard et al. -- read and learn from their works, and agree with many of their ideas, etc. -- but I'm not totally on board.  Nonetheless, YAL bloggers fortunately make up a broad spectrum of libertarianism, no doubt representing variations of anti-government thought on all sides of my own position, which is awesome and makes for a much, much better blog.

Anyway, enough prologue.  This morning I read this article by Dan McCarthy on his blog at TAC.  McCarthy (also not an an-cap) questions what he sees as some underlying egalitarian assumptions in anarcho-capitalism:

If the ghost of Murray Rothbard pressed a magic button and made the state disappear tomorrow, the result would not look like a Lockean state of nature, or even Nozick’s picture of a highly developed state of nature in which property and protective associations and whatnot exist....All the social power and leverage built up by groups that have benefited from or manipulated the state would still exist, and the reservoirs of wealth in these groups could readily be applied to creating a new justice system that would serve the same de facto ruling class as exists now.