Posts in "politics"

Dan John's picture
By Dan John at 6:07PM
Aug 7, 2010

The Two-Headed Leviathan

A gigantic monster has taken over our country, a two-headed sovereign that controls our federal, local, and state governments. This two-headed creature, which has one head of a donkey and the other of an elephant, has a monopoly of power in the political economy of these United States.

The most simple and well-known fact about the political economy in America is that it is ruled completely by the same two political factions. This widely known fact itself is often overlooked in most political debates. Almost all federal, state, and even local government officials are members of one of these two parties.  Interestingly, the modern day Democratic Party was referred to as the "Democratic-Republican Party" until the late 1820s.

This sovereign's power lies not just within the government itself, but within the barriers of the two-party paradigm. The barriers of this realm go as far "left" as the mainstream left would go, and as far "right" as the mainstream right would go. Ron Paul's truly conservative view on foreign aid, for example, is outside the barriers of both the mainstream right and the mainstream left, leaving it thus outside the barriers of mainstream politics and not eligible for debate.


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Seth Mann's picture
By Seth Mann at 12:01PM
Apr 22, 2010

Genius Political Tool of the Day: Pop-Up Video

This should be mandatory for all political speeches.

H/t Hotair:

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Bonnie Kristian's picture
By Bonnie Kristian at 12:05PM
Jan 17, 2010

Why, indeed?

image

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Seth Mann's picture
By Seth Mann at 6:21AM
Oct 15, 2009

The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America

The Ominous Parallels

This book by Ayn Rand's heir, Leonard Peikoff, is an arresting depiction of the "ominous parallels" between America today and the chaos of pre-Hitler Germany.  I highly recommend it to my fellow liberty-lovers.  This review via LewRockwell.com sums it up rather well.

 Here's what Ayn Rand had to say about it:

If you do not wish to be a victim of today's philosophical bankruptcy, I recommend The Ominous Parallels as protection and ammunition. It will protect you from supporting, unwittingly, the ideas that are destroying you and the world.

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Seth Mann's picture
By Seth Mann at 5:34PM
Oct 6, 2009

Albert Jay Nock: Forgotten Man of the Old Right

A fantastic article from Jeffery Tucker at the Mises Institute:

For an earlier generation of American dissidents from the prevailing ideology of left-liberalism, a rite of passage was reading Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which appeared in 1943. William F. Buckley was hardly alone in seeing it as a seminal text crucial to his personal formation.

Memoirs of a Superfluous ManHere it is in one package, an illustration of the level of learning that had been lost with mass education, a picture of the way a true political dissident from our collectivist period thinks about the modern world, and a comprehensive argument for the very meaning of freedom and civility — all from a man who helped shape the Right's intellectual response to the triumph of FDR's welfare-warfare state.

It was destined to be a classic, read by many generations to come. But then the official doctrine changed...

Read the rest here. 

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Seth Mann's picture
By Seth Mann at 9:16AM
Oct 5, 2009

DiLorenzo on the Revolution of 1913

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Seth Mann's picture
By Seth Mann at 9:15AM
Oct 5, 2009

Sir Antony Fisher Blocked the Road to Serfdom

One of the most inspiring individuals of the post-war free-market movement is Sir Antony Fisher.  He was one of the most influential background figures in the global rise of libertarian think tanks after World War II.  In 1945 after flying in the Royal Air Force during the war, Fisher read The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek.  He met Hayek in 1947 and was inclined to enter politics to defend individual liberty against creeping socialism, but Hayek proposed another idea.  Instead of directly entering the political system, Hayek believed changing the climate of ideas would be the only way to make real change possible.

The video below is the first of two parts explaining Sir Antony Fisher's role in the free-market movement.


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Seth Mann's picture
By Seth Mann at 10:41AM
Oct 4, 2009

A Free-Market Guide to Fixing Healthcare

This free-market guide to fixing healthcare was made possible by the good people at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

ObamaCare Symbol

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Seth Mann's picture
By Seth Mann at 10:41AM
Oct 4, 2009

The Necessity of an Independent Free Press

A vigorous, independent free press is essential to the American republic, but for many nefarious reasons the Fourth Estate has become lapdogs to the political-technocratic complex.  What would have happened if the Liberty movement hadn't had the internet to organize and communicate?

Below is just one of the pages from The Illustrated Road to Serfdom. 

Road to Serfdom - Propaganda

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Seth Mann's picture
By Seth Mann at 7:30AM
Oct 3, 2009

Is it a counter-revolution?

Kevin DeAnna at Taki's Magazine asks, "Is it a revolution?"  It's an important and prescient question at this most propitious moment.  I hope it is a revolution, or more accurately, a counter-revolution that would restore the relationship between the State and society that existed from 1789 to the Revolution of 1913.

To define revolution, I turn to Frank Chodorov:

The replacement of one ruling regime by another does not in itself measure up to a revolution; that can be accomplished by a gang fight or an election. A revolution is an effective change in relationship between rulers and ruled, a shifting of the incidence of power from society to the state, or vice versa. The American Revolution was an effective one not because it got rid of the British crown, but because it set up a weaker state, vis-a-vis society.

...we cannot argue with a fact: the Constitution of 1789 charted the course of the new state-society relationship as nearly as a political document could, and thus became the profit-and-loss statement of the preceding rebellion. The going ethos was individualistic; in his pursuit of happiness the early American felt quite satisfied to go it alone, accepting restraint only insofar as restraint was necessary for the security of property and the maintenance of peace. He would tolerate coercion to restrain coercion, and no more.

While being rightfully skeptical of the "newly found anti-system mentality of the GOP," DeAnna seems to want to answer his question affirmatively.  He sees that "the Tea Parties are what conservatives can do when all aspects of the movement are working together and are united in opposition around issues that everyone agrees on.  It will not change policy, but it has mobilized a constituency that wasn’t mobilized before."


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