The Left-Rothbardians, Part I: Rothbard

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/content/12938

In “Libertarianism: What’s Going Right,” I mentioned Left-Rothbardianism as one possible basis for finding areas of agreement between market libertarians and the Left. I’d like to go into that in more depth now.

In 2004, I was extremely heartened by the “Era of Good Feelings“ between the Libertarian Party’s Michael Badnarik and the Green Party’s David Cobb. It gave me some hope for the revival of an even more hopeful project of some 30-odd years before.

Beware Splits in UKIP

by Stephen Crowther

Note: As a matter of policy, the Libertarian Alliance does not endorse or support any political party. However, so far I can tell, every one of our Officers is a UKIP voter or even member. We therefore draw this notice to the attention of our readers. UKIP may not be perfect, but it is our only mainstream political party with any degree of libertarianism in its policies. Nigel Farage is our only mainstream politician who remotely counts as a libertarian. We take a very dim view of efforts to disrupt UKIP. SIG

The Joke of Democratic Accountability

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/content/13076

Note: Since I don’t have to pay his taxes, or be beaten up by his uniformed thugs, or impoverished by his money printing, or live through his cultural revolution, I can appreciate Mr Obama’s comparative lack of enthusiasm for starting wars. SIG

The “Football Association” is now a “Court” – official.

David Davis

A private “Sports Governing Body” (whatever that is for) has set itself up as a “Sondergericht”. It has issued a “judgement – a Fatwah, if you like -  and attached a “fine” – a strange sum: £220,000….Makes you wonder how it was arrived at? No?

When I’m Principal Secretary of State For War, in the Democratic-People’s-English Revolutionary-Liberalist-Party’s*** first government (minimal-statist, conservative, libertarian) private institutions that have previously and triumphalistically-set themselves up as “judges and juries” under the current climate of rampant GramscoFabiaNazism, will find themselves “under investigation”.

I do not believe in amnesties for socialist behaviour, adopted and deliberately pursued with malice-afforethought, and in the face of all empirical evidence that such behaviour was designed on purpose to kill, destroy the effective lives of or otherwise harm as many people as possible.

The FootBallAssociatioNazis will be “hauled in for questioning” by the War Secretariat’s “Operational Services Department Personnel (Domestic Division)”. A version of a reverse-PPI-Claim will be applied to their staffs, who will be “invited to re-imburse John Terry the sum of £220,000 plus interest plus 8% plus a “sum to be decreed” for “damages”.”

I said something similar on Facebook a couple of minutes ago. In case any blogreaders here can’t read Facebook, I have posted the text of my piece there:-

Twin Demons

by Lew Rockwell
http://mises.org/daily/6207/Twin-Demons

[This talk was delivered at the Mises
Circle in New York City on September 14, 2012.]

The 20th century was the century of total war. Limitations on the scope of war, built up over many centuries, had already begun to break down in the 19th century, but they were altogether obliterated in the 20th. And of course the sheer amount of resources that centralized states could bring to bear in war, and the terrible new technologies of killing that became available to them, made the 20th a century of almost unimaginable horror.

Book Review: The DIM Hypothesis

by David Gordon
http://mises.org/daily/6215/The-DIM-Hypothesis

[The
DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out.
By Leonard Peikoff. New American Library, 2012. xvi + 378 pages]

Whatever the failings of this book, its author has a sense of humor. Peikoff writes of his unusual name for his main hypothesis,

In order to refer to all three modes [of integration] together, I have coined the acronym DIM.… Given my symbolism, I myself can be identified, even ridiculed, as a DIM-wit, “wit” in the old sense of intelligence. I accept this designation and even boast of it on my license plate. (p. 65)

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies: The Best is Yet to Come

by C.M. Sciabarra

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/notablog/archives/001776.html

The new issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies will be on its way to subscribers within the next couple of weeks. And with it comes an announcement of a major breakthrough for the journal and for Rand scholarship as well.

First, let’s take a look at the new issue, which is coming out in the thick of the U.S. Presidential campaign, and which includes a few essays that try to make sense of contemporary politics:

Thirdhand E-Cig Vapour: Yes, It’s Apparently A Concern

by Disk Puddlecote
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DickPuddlecote/~3/3w0i9s4HTOc/thirdhand-e-cig-vapour-yes-its.html

Thanks must go to the kind fellow jewel robber who forwarded me a copy of the aforementioned unavailable study which Raving Mad Stan tweeted about on Friday.

On first skim, it takes itself very seriously so I’ll have a closer look at it when I get time. But, for now, I thought you’d like to see this stand-out gem from the preamble.

New book by Libertarian Alliance Author

N.G. Meek: Conservative Party Politicians at the Turn of the 20th/21st Centuries.
(London, Civic Education & Research Trust, 2012, 390 pages, ISBN 9781471700804.)

The book is an objective, quantitative, multi-focus analysis of the attitudes, behaviour and background of Conservative politicians at the turn of the 20th/21st centuries. Respondents were MPs, Peers, MEPs, Scottish MPs, Welsh and Greater London Assembly members, and local councillors in Scotland, Wales and England. Topics include: business, labour relations, welfare and the economy; the environment; Britain, Europe and the wider world; the United Kingdom, ethnicity, citizenship and national identity; society and culture; the conduct of politics; the political parties; religion; the 2001 Conservative Party leadership contest; and general political ideology.

There is a foreword by Dr Syed Kamall MEP.

It is already on the shelves of leading academic institutions. It is now available for sale from Amazon and other online retailers priced £55: http://tinyurl.com/c2njkfa.

WHY LIBERTARIANS SHOULD SUPPORT A LAND VALUE TAX

by D.J. Webb

Libertarians support low taxation on principle, in order to free people and the economy from the burden of the state. If the writings of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill are anything to go by, however, there is an important exception: land taxation. Land taxation is not just a necessary evil that affords the state some revenues with which to perform the very few necessary functions of government; it is a positive good, in that it tackles monopoly and speculation, and should ensure efficient use of land. If land taxation had remained the key source of government revenue in the UK, the current economic crisis would not have taken place.

Politically incorrect film reviews – God Bless America

by Robert Henderson

Note: Mrs Gabb and I hve not been to the kinematograph since 1999. We do not seem to have missed much. SIG

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/politically-incorrect-film-reviews-god-bless-america/

Politically incorrect film reviews – God Bless America

Main Cast
Joel Murray as Frank Murdoch
Tara Lynne Barr as Roxanne “Roxy” Harmon
Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait

This is a very confused film . At one level it is a shoot ‘em up murderfest, on another a road movie, on a third a political polemic. There are elements of Michael Douglas in Falling Down, Bonnie and Clyde and a Michael Moore documentary.

A Month Of Australian Miserablism

by Dick Puddlecote
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DickPuddlecote/~3/ABXtgZ9pnT0/a-month-of-australian-miserablism.html

Note: I’m rather glad I never did emigrate Down Under. It seems an even nastier place than the Imperial Motherland. If I had my time again, and I were single, I think I’d settle in somewhere like the Republic of Filtheria – a place in the sun that had its “revolution” three generations ago, and where the unshaven pigs slouch round in dark sunglasses, contenting themselves with the occasional bribe from pimps and streetvendors. Sadly, the Americans appear to have bombed all such places into prohibitionist tyrannies even more joyless than their own accursed lair.

There are several dozen pieces by Kipling that put a lump in my throat. Here’s one of them:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be —
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!

He’d never seen modern Singapore. SIG

The Regulatory State — Behind the Myth

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/content/13061

A colleague at Center for a Stateless Society recently brought to my attention a story from late last year about unusually high concentrations of severe illness in the area surrounding a Crossett, Ark. paper mill. Members of eleven out of fifteen homes on Penn Road have died of cancer, and respiratory distress is common.

Digital Technologies vs. Truth Suppression

http://www.garynorth.com

Digital Technologies vs. Truth Suppression
Gary North
Reality Check (Sept. 21, 2012)

I am going to tell you some stories. To make it interesting, I will begin with one which could make one of my readers the deal of a lifetime. It ends on September 30. He who hesitates is lost.

I begin with the obvious: the falling cost of Internet communications is revolutionizing the spread of knowledge. In doing so, it is undermining every establishment. Every establishment rests much of its power on official views of the past. This is seen in the novel by George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The tyrant who enforces the totalitarian state says this. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

The cost of controlling the past has risen exponentially since 1995: the year that the graphics browser was introduced. Then came Google.

I know Orwell said this, because I just verified it on several websites. That took under one minute. There is some debate over punctuation: period, colon, or semicolon. I think I will not go to the trouble of looking it up in my library, which is in a special room miles away.

Should British Citizens ever be Extradited?

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2012-09-25-extradition-sig.mp3

Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance, debating with Alex Carlile on BBC Radio 5 on the 25th September 2012.

Also, in the same hour, Sean on BBC Radio London, arguing alone:

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2012-09-25-extradition-2-sig.mp3

Also on BBC Radio Wales:

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2012-09-25-extradition-3-sig.mp3

The question was whether British citizens should ever be extradited to face trial in other countries. This was prompted by the decision of the European Court of Human Rights not to block the extradition of several men, including Abu Hamza and Babu Ahmad, to the United States for alleged terrorism offences.

Sean argues these points:

Sock Puppetry 101 (More on Fake Charities)

by Dick Puddlecote
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DickPuddlecote/~3/yZbd_nupZ_Q/sock-puppetry-101.html

Busy times at Puddlecote Towers so content will be sparse, but this IEA ‘bite-size’ infographic on state-funded Sock Puppetry was worth reproducing, I thought (click to enlarge).

Government lobbying government is a phenomenon which should be more widely known, so please do share generously.

The Funniest YouTube Video of the Year

Actvists – probably lefties, but so what? – gatecrashing a dinner held to honour the retiring head of HMRC – a man who has personally let rich corporations off £25bn of tax, while making sure the rest of us are squeezed like grapes in a press.

“You will depart immediately, before we set the dogs on you” – a classic ruling class line!

Of course, the scumbag bureaucrat should be stripped of his cushy pension and left to find out what life is like for the superannuated serfs he and his sort have been milking. SIG

Thanks to D.J. Webb for bringing this to my attention.
“

And here’s an article from The Daily Mail, kindly supplied by Peter Watson:

Obituary: David Alec Webb, 1931-2012

Obituary,
David Alec Webb, Actor and Legal Reform Campaigner,
6^th March 1931-30^th June 2012
Prepared by Sean Gabb
First published in The Libertarian Enterprise

 

David Alec Webb, wit, raconteur, well-known actor on stage, screen and television, and tireless – and ultimately successful – opponent of the laws against pornography, died on the 30^th June this year, at the age of 81

The son of a car worker, he was born in Luton in 1931. He attended LutonGrammar School, where he did well academically and became Head Boy. After national service in the Army Education Corps, where he became a sergeant, he got a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). From here, he embarked on a long and successful career that began on the West End stage, but soon migrated to television. He was a prominent character in the early days of Coronation Street. Worried about the dangers of typecasting, he soon moved on, and, between the 1960s and the beginning of the present century, made well over 700 appearances in television programmes. These included Upstairs, Downstairs, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Tales of the Unexpected, Doctor Who, and The Avengers. He also found time for the cinema, appearing in, among much else, The Battle of Britain. In a profession which, notoriously, has an unemployment rate of 80 per cent, he was never out of work.

And the War Came

by Ralph Raico

Note: I’d have ignored Belgium and stuffed the French. By now, we might have planted the Union Flag on Mars! SIG

The Scandal of Foreign Aid

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2012-09-23-sig-aid.mp3

Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance, debating with Tom Levitt of Concern Worldwide (UK) on BBC Radio Ulster on the 23rd September 2012. He makes these points against foreign aid: