Wednesday, November 21, 2018

The Caravan Cometh--and Then What?

                The Caravan Cometh--and Then What?

                                                          Eric Paul Nolte


If, as so many believe, our borders should be open to the coming Caravan and everybody else, how is this notion any different from the idea that a thousand migrants should be free to board five big airliners and fly into, say, Stinking Holler, Arkansas, and then just slither into the woods unmolested forever?  Or worse, imagine these thousands on their dozen airplanes flying unannounced into the ginormous international airport at Dallas-Ft. Worth, and expect to deplane and then melt into the city unchallenged? 

I just don't get it.  What other country in the world has such open borders?  Apart from some ruined, chaotic pit like the anarchy that was Somalia under their competing warlords?

Well, seriously, there are many countries without borders, but most of these are either island nations throughout the world or a region like the European Union, which in 1985 opened their borders to residents of the Schengen region. 1.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around the notion that so many people believe that our borders should be, in essence, abolished along with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 2.

Mind you, I do believe that immigration should be seen as an aspect of human nature, like the rights of all individuals to their own life, liberty, and property.  

Why shouldn't we be able to live anywhere we want to?  I believe we should enjoy the freedom to live wherever we want to, so long as we are peaceful and self-responsible.

Historically, national borders tended to be relatively open, especially in Europe during the second half of the 19th century when the expanding railroads and sea travel allowed so many more people to travel abroad.  This freedom of movement remained pretty much the norm until the bloody wake of the First World War, when fears for national security throttled the reality of free passage around the world.

But this freedom of movement is certainly not the norm today through most of the world.

Given that among the most legitimate purposes of government is to defend its citizens from foreign aggression, and given that we live in a world where many people do indeed want to kill us for their various reasons, mad-hatter and otherwise, it does not seem unreasonable to impose some government restrictions on who can enter America.  

While I believe that the US should be vastly more open than it is, it strikes me as a completely unhinged policy to allow just anybody to cross over our borders willy-nilly and expect to live here (much less come here and then take advantage of our government services without paying taxes.)

As with so many other vexing issues, I believe the best answer lies in more freedom--blessed liberty, the elixir of life, love, and abundance.

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1. Kristoffer Barks, "Which Countries Don't Have Borders?" 

found at Quora.com:
 https://www.quora.com/Which-countries-dont-have-borders

2. According to the New Jersey-based Monmouth University Polling Institute, as reported in USA Today, a large percentage of Americans believe that the so-called "caravan" trudging towards the US border should simply be allowed to cross into the US and live their lives unmolested by any authoritarians clucking over their dubious status.

The poll makes clear that most Americans believe at the very least that the migrants should all be given the opportunity to make their case for asylum here.  The breakdown of the politics of those polled shows this belief is held by 89% of Democrats, 73% of Independents, and 43% of Republicans.  A much smaller percentage of Americans believe the migrants represent any real threat to us.





Monday, November 12, 2018

More Thoughts on the US, Vietnam, and the Middle East

More thoughts on the US, Vietnam, and the Middle East Eric Paul Nolte Yesterday was Veteran's Day. I posted a blog piece with some thoughts on my experience as an Army veteran during the Vietnam war. A friend upbraids me for not commenting more knowledgeably on the history of Vietnam, but the history of Vietnam was not the point of my essay. Of course there is much more to be said about the sad history of Vietnam and whether we should have gone into Vietnam in the first place after France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Here I have some more thoughts on the Vietnam War and our wars that followed in the Middle East.  Now, Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam during the war, turns out to have been an interesting character with whom we might have dealt as an ally.  Yes, he was a communist, but growing up at the time when Marx's idea of "scientific socialism" could have seemed most plausible, Ho came of age and embraced his socialist politics during his studies in Paris, in the years from just before and after the First World War. After his studies in Paris, he came back home to Vietnam filled with a passion to make his country a better place.  He does not appear to have been a doctrinaire Marxist because his ideas also included an admiration for the intellectual origins of the American project, and especially for Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.  In the early 1960s, the US government blew the chance to establish a good relationship with Ho, apparently because of the widespread fact that communism was rapidly spreading throughout the world and because we were becoming increasingly afraid of the communist menace, based on the facts then emerging about the genocides that were taking place in communist regimes like the Soviet Union and Red China. And yet Ho Chi Minh was a saint, compared to Pol Pot and some other Asians who came of age in the early 20th century, when a Marxian ethos hung over Paris.  While Ho came back to southeast Asia as a communist, he also had a broadly humanist conception of what a good society might look like. 
On the other hand, Pol Pot's dogmatic Marxism focused on establishing an absolute equality of outcome, and when his faction grabbed the levers of power, they gave us the killing fields of Cambodia.
The US approach to the war in Vietnam seems to have been, as I said in my last blog post, a confused, sometimes cynical, sometimes merely dizzy, pose intended to… intended to do what?  Until the last year of the war, it was certainly not strategically or tactically set up to win a decisive victory in Vietnam. The US has long been sadly committed to rules of engagement that are guaranteed to get our soldiers needlessly killed. Another factor was that our will to win was never plainly established.  We never actually declared war in Vietnam.  It was considered to be a police action. The problem with suicidal rules of engagement for our troops would become even worse when the US became involved in the wars in the Middle East. When we somehow lurched into peace talks with the North Vietnamese in 1972, they walked away from the table. As I cited yesterday, Bruce Herschensohn, senior fellow at Pepperdine University, provided this account of what actually happened at the end of the Vietnam War and afterwards. After North Vietnam walked away from the Paris peace accord in 1972, the Nixon Administration found its way to mounting a serious effort to achieve a decisive victory in Vietnam: the US therefore started bombing Hanoi and Haiphong with the intention of crippling their industrial and military power. The effectiveness of this bombing shortly brought the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table and they signed the peace accord that ended the war and gave South Vietnam the assurance that they could continue as an independent country recognized by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. This peace stood without challenge for more than a year. Then, after the disgraced Nixon was ousted from the White House in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Democrats won both houses of Congress and immediately put an end to our supply of military goods to South Vietnam, thereby reneging on the US promise to help South Vietnam remain an independent country. The North Vietnamese attacked the South and shortly defeated them while the US officially abandoned them with the consequences I described in my essay, leading to the deaths of some half a million South Vietnamese as a result of summary execution, death by starvation, disease and, among the refugee Boat People who were attempting to escape from Vietnam by sea, death by drowning, exposure, and murder by pirates in the South China Sea.   As for all our other foreign military adventures since Vietnam, I largely agree with the libertarians who state that the purpose of government is to protect every individual's right to life, liberty, and justly acquired property.  This purpose must include a constitution to spell out these rights, a police force to restrain domestic predators, courts to adjudicate disputes between even well-meaning parties, and--to the point here--a military to protect us from foreign attack. One might ask, well, we were attacked on 9/11/2001, so shouldn't we defend ourselves? They attacked us! Okay, but now who are "they?" Hmm. Seems like the attackers were mostly Saudis backed by a lot of Iranian money. Oh, right, so now we should attack Iraq, of course!  And Afghanistan, although their government policy had nothing to do with the attackers. Afghanistan was merely a place in the desert where Bin Laden's guys set up a training camp.

Another thing should be clear: w
e should not be engaged in the hopeless and ruinous effort to make ourselves into the world's police force. We can lend moral support to those who are fighting the bad guys (and citizens can do more) but unless the United States is threatened, we should not get involved in foreign entanglements. Had we held to such an idea of the purpose of government, we might never have suffered the horrible attacks of 9/11, and we certainly would not have so many American troops committed abroad. (Footnote: According to a 2016 Pew Research Center report that draws on US Defense Department data, we have more than 1,000 troops deployed in each of 16 countries around the world, with only one of these, Afghanistan, being in an active war. An interesting fact is that only about 9,000 of these troops are in Afghanistan, while 38,800 are in Japan, 34,000 in Germany, 24,000 in South Korea, 12,000 in Italy (for crying out loud--Italy has a third again more troops than in Afghanistan!), and 8,300 in the UK (almost as many as in Afghanistan, the actual war zone.)  Of our 1.3 million troops on active duty, 193,000 are deployed abroad, 15% of the total number of troops.) While it seems clear that our efforts were crucial to defeating ISIS, in the long run, it seems likely that our wars in the Middle East are hopeless, given our benighted understanding of the Islamic part of that region. One might ask, but shouldn't we have struck back at our attackers of 9/11/2001? Yes, of course, we should defend ourselves against them! Hmm... but exactly who are "they" who attacked us?  Seems like the attackers were largely Saudis backed by a lot of Iranian money. Oh, right, it was Saudi Arabia and Iran, so, of course, we should attack Iraq!  And attack Afghanistan too! But it was not the Afghan government's policy to attack us, it simply happened that a bunch of Bin Laden's Islamists chose a place far out in the desert to make a training camp that was beyond almost anybody's awareness. In 1977 (just before the Iranian revolution) I spent a year working for a Saudi company, flying over much of the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.  I am here to tell you that an appalling number of Muslims hate each other's guts, want each other dead over trivial differences of religious opinion, which they treat as unforgivable differences that must be punished by death.  But one thing unites many of them: the belief that the US is, as the late Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini put it, the Great Satan, and Israel, the Little Satan. Nothing we do will turn these Muslim countries into models of liberal democracy.  We should leave them the hell alone unless they attack us, and hope that they will create an Islamic reformation and an enlightenment comparable to the secular European Enlightenment that largely lifted the brutal Christian factions out of the devastating wars which in the 16th century alone resulted in the deaths of something like a third of the population of Europe--every man, woman, and child--murdered in the name of God. We can hope that a Muslim reformation and enlightenment will affirm such basic ideas (not yet universally affirmed among their most faithful adherents) as these: That flourishing and rational happiness are better than suffering; That truth is discovered by the light of logic applied to the evidence of experience, and that such knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance; That a mere difference of opinion is not a legitimate reason for killing somebody; That health and life are better than sickness and death. Osama bin Laden famously said that those in his circle love death more than the infidels love life. That there are many more powerful life-serving ideas to be found in the works of such thinkers as Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises. Not to point fingers at the Muslim world as singularly benighted, I should point out that Alex Epstein has recently commented that never before in history has so much astonishing and life-serving knowledge been available to humanity.

The existence of this cornucopia of true knowledge is the good news.

The bad news is that never before in history has it been so damned hard for average people to figure out which is the true and life-serving knowledge and which are the claims to true knowledge that can only lead us ultimately to destruction. Never before in history have there been so many crazy, destructive, and false claims to true knowledge! We have to work on ourselves first, of course. And we should beware of trying to convert other parts of the world when we ourselves still have such a long way to go. In the end, much of our foreign policy in the Muslim world is akin to taking a meter-long hardwood dowel and beating up on a buzzing hornet's nest as if it were a pinata. E P N 2018.1112
Rev. 2018.1201

Sunday, November 11, 2018

My Thoughts as a Veteran

           My Thoughts as a Veteran, on Veteran's Day

                                                      Eric Paul Nolte



Today I saw a short video that was produced as a "thank you" to American veterans who were in the military to defend our country, all of whom were vulnerable to being put in harm's way, even if we were not actually at war during the years of our service.  As many National Guardsmen discovered at the start of the Gulf War, they could be activated at any time and sent overseas to fight.  The little film caused me to well up with emotion.  We've fought so many pointless wars!  In my opinion, almost all wars are insanely pointless.  But not all of them.

During the Vietnam War, I was on active duty in the Army.  I could have been deployed to Vietnam, but I had the good fortune to be sent to Germany instead where, in my spare time, I spent most of my pay on flying lessons, and thereby put myself on a good track to become an airline pilot while acquiring a taste for good German beer.

When the Vietnam War began for the US in the mid-1960s, I was a barely pubescent boy in junior high school.  I remember that everybody thought that surely the war would be over long before those of my age became eligible either to join or be drafted into the military.  

There were anti-war slogans in the air.  Make love, not war.  Hell no, we won't go!  Bring 'em home!    

My generation, or, more correctly, those in my circle of politically and religiously liberal youth were agreed on our opposition to the war, in general, and to the draft in particular because, we argued, it was the draft that made it possible for our government to engage in this hare-brained, hopeless, foreign military adventure that was being carried out with no plan actually to fight the war in a way that stood any chance of achieving anything like victory.  In my circles, we thought the war was a cynical pose on the part of our government to give the impression that we could actually stop the spread of communism while refusing to do what it would take to "win" the war.  Meanwhile, the war became a bloody meat grinder of the flesh of our young men (and more than a few women as well.)

This week, I came across some more of the facts of the matter.

Yes, we engaged in a long war that was often conducted with futile strategy and tactics.

But at the end of the day, as pointed out by Bruce Hershensohn, senior fellow at Pepperdine University, we get to the truth about the war we allegedly lost:

When the North Vietnamese left the Paris Peace talks in 1972, the US announced that in December 1972 we would begin serious bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the capital and major port cities of North Vietnam.  

We did bomb them, and within a month, the North Vietnamese, militarily devastated, came back to the negotiations in Paris and a peace accord was signed by the USA, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong.

As of January 1973, we had won a decisive victory in the Vietnam War. 

The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong agreed by their signatures that their defeat had been decisive.

Therefore, the US celebrated on January 27, 1973, our Victory in Vietnam Day.

South Vietnam was to be left protected from assault by the North and the Viet Cong.

This peace accord entailed an agreement in which the US pledged to replace any military hardware that South Vietnam might require in its defense against aggression from the North.

Let me restate this more simply: 

Our incontestable victory in Vietnam was dependent upon our promise to back up the South Vietnamese with replacement hardware, should this be required in the face of attack from their enemies. 

But then a year later Richard Nixon was disgraced by the Watergate fiasco and was forced out of office.  

In the elections that followed in 1974, the US Congress was decisively taken over by the Democrats.

Despite the impassioned pleas of Republican President Gerald Ford and others, the Democrats then voted to end all funding for our aid to South Vietnam.  

The North Vietnamese then immediately invaded the South.  When they advanced without opposition that could replenish the South's equipment, North Vietnamese forces shortly took over the whole country.  Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City and the whole country fell under the rule of the communist dictatorship from the north.

The whole affair of American involvement in Vietnam has proven to be a searing, intellectually and morally vertigo-inspiring episode, like no other in our history.

It might not have needed to be so terrible if the Democrats had not abandoned our former Vietnamese allies.  

Our abandonment of South Vietnam resulted in the "re-education" camps in which more than a million South Vietnamese were interned, and where a quarter-million of them died by summary execution, disease, and starvation.  

The Boat People were another two million people who fled the country for fear of their lives, and among them, another quarter million died from weather, accidents, and at the hands of pirates.

Reasonable people can argue over whether we should ever have been in Vietnam in the first place.  

But no one of goodwill can reasonably argue that our outright reneging on our promise of protection to the South Vietnamese people was a terrible betrayal that resulted in at least another half million deaths and the destruction of the lives and prospects of countless millions more.

Ironically, in a move not unlike the transformation of the communist dictatorship of China, Vietnam has since evolved into much more of a market economy than almost anyone might have imagined possible, and it is now engaged in lively trade with the United States and much of the rest of the world.

As an interesting footnote, I find it fascinating that Jane Fonda, the infamous "Hanoi Jane," has come forward with a heartfelt apology for her behavior during her two-week visit to North Vietnam at the height of the war.  Jane Fonda was accused of treasonously giving our enemies a propaganda bonanza because of her being exploited in such photographs as the one of her sitting, smiling, on an anti-aircraft gun used for shooting down American airplanes. 

The Democratic party, vastly more culpable here than Jane Fonda, given its murderous abandonment of our allies in South Vietnam, should long ago have come forward to apologize for their despicable, pragmatic action.  Hmm.  Actually, it would be fitting if some of them were in jail for this kind of horrible behavior.

The death toll here, obviously caused by the Democratic party's betrayal of South Vietnam, is five times larger than the deaths caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima or by the fire-bombing that resulted in the destruction of the German city of Dresden.


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2018.1111, Armistice Day, commemorating the end of the First World War, the War to End All Wars,
and now renamed Veteran's Day.

Saturday, November 10, 2018

I Voted. So What?--Who is Counting the Votes?

           I Voted. So what? Who is Counting the Votes?

                                                    Eric Paul Nolte




Something is rotten is Arizona (and Florida and elsewhere.)

Now, let's be clear about some of what's at stake here.  

We have, on the one hand, the Democratic candidate, Krysten Sinema, whom I heard in an extended interview, stammering, but adamantly refusing to condemn Americans who go fight for the Taliban. On the other hand, we have Martha McSally, a decorated female fighter pilot who flew in combat for her country, risking her life to defend us against the likes of that very same Taliban who want to kill her and the rest of us as well. There is much more to be said about their political differences, but let us focus here on what is happening in the counting of the ballots for and against them. The Associated Press reported on the day after the mid-term election that 99 percent of the vote had been counted in Arizona.  McSally was ahead of Sinema by one percentage point.

The numbers are confusing to me.  

About 1.7 million votes had been cast, with 49.4% for McSally, 48.4% for Sinema, and 2.2% for the Green Party candidate.

So think about this: 1% of 1.7 million = 17,000.  McSally was ahead by about one percentage point.

Am I confused here?  There were 99% of the votes counted. One percent remaining to be counted?  

Doesn't this make it sound like all the votes were in the hands of the counters and that only some of these remained to be processed?   

Do I have this right?--that the authorities reported that there were only 1% of the votes remaining to be counted?  So doesn't it make sense to conclude that there were only ~17,000 votes yet to count?

Now, days later, we are told that suddenly, in Maricopa County alone, there are at least another 345,000 additional votes that have suddenly appeared out of Zeus only knows from which Arizonan hamlets and now need to be counted. 

If there were only 17,000 votes to be counted on Wednesday, and now we have another 345,000 votes to count, this amounts to about 1,700% more votes than were previously said to be waiting for counting. 

Far more of these new votes have gone in favor of the Dems.  Hmm.

According to the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, we learn that Adrian Fontes, the Maricopa County Recorder (and a Bernie Sanders supporter) who is in charge of supervising the counting of those votes, was instructed by the statewide voting authorities to be sure to preserve and keep separate the votes of those whose votes were problematic (for whatever reason) and those whose votes were properly made.

It would seem that Fontes defiantly piled these two columns of ballots together and destroyed them.  Fontes destroyed the evidence of "voting irregularities" in the county where more than 60% of the state's population resides.

Huh?

Is this a banana republic?

Joseph Stalin famously declared that it matters not at all who votes for whom.  

What matters is who counts the votes.

Surely there is something I do not understand about this appearance of hundreds of thousands of Immaculate Votes miraculously popping out of the ether. 


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Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Ponder Geo. McGovern, Accidental Libertarian Hero



                   

                         Ponder George McGovern,

                     Ironically Accidental Libertarian


                                                            Eric Paul Nolte



Here we are on the day of the 2018 elections, with the cultural atmosphere crackling with hate-charged electricity from the far sides of the political spectrum.


I long for more civilized discourse in the political arena. 


With the polls still open for many more hours, I've been thinking about a worthy man of honor who was a politician, George McGovern, the Democratic Party's nominee for President against Richard Nixon in the 1972 campaign.  He achieved notoriety among those on the right and was widely denounced for his promise to enact a universal basic income for all citizens.  But whether we agree with his politics in this respect, now think about how McGovern led his life, especially the intellectual honesty and willingness to engage with his experience that he wore as a well-deserved badge of pride.

I wrote a blog piece on McGovern shortly after he died in 2012.  I'm reposting it below:


George McGovern, Ironically Libertarian Hero, R.I.P.


The Associated Press and the CNN wire staff published articles on George McGovern, the day after the Senator’s death.  I was disappointed to find not one syllable in recognition of what I believe is the crowning insight of this man's life. 

 It is well known that McGovern lived by his own lights with principled and passionate devotion to doing the right thing always and everywhere in the world. 

 It is not well known that long after his political life ended, he briefly entered the business world and was rudely awakened to the actual nature of government intervention.  He wrote, in effect, that his life as a politician would have displayed far more wisdom, if he had been able to bring to the floor of Congress something of his experience of wrestling helplessly with the armies of regulators whose interventions contributed so much to bankrupting his little business.

In these mainstream articles on McGovern’s life, there was no mention of the outrage among liberals that McGovern caused by his 1992 letter to the Wall Street Journal, where he wrote an honest and unflattering account of his disastrous experience in trying to run his Connecticut hotel.  McGovern’s account of this experience reminded me of the old saw that says a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged (and, of course, in fairness, the flip side of this cranky old chestnut is that a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.)  So McGovern was the liberal who got mugged by government regulation. 

In McGovern's venture into the hotel business, he sank much of his savings and lost it all, largely due to the strangling web of government regulations--federal, state, and local--layer upon layer of sometimes conflicting regulations, written as arbitrary edicts, guided by the principle that one-size fits all, and imbued with the regulators' righteous attitude that we know better than you how to run your life, and, moreover, you will comply or else you're going to pay ruinous fines and maybe even go to jail.  (He stated the matter with less unflattering language, but the essence is the same as my description.) 

No matter what anyone may think of the uber-liberal politics McGovern brought to his doomed presidential bid in 1972, the man stuck up for what he believed and remained true to his own evolving thought and experience, no matter how it unfolded, and no matter what anybody else thought of him.

The way I frame my opinion of McGovern's legacy is to praise him for his plain spoken and searing honesty, and for the great courage it takes to maintain such public allegiance to his own sight, especially in the face of attacks, even by his allies.  He displayed the high virtues of courage, independence, and integrity. 

For me, there are at least three bright lights that McGovern aimed into the darkness of this world. 

Here is the Army Air Force First Lieutenant George McGovern, whose heroic actions as a B-24 bomber pilot won him the Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and saved his crew and battle-damaged airplane more than once, during his 35 combat missions.  His horrifying experience in war led him on the Senate floor famously to snarl his exasperation with "old men dreaming up wars for young men to fight."  He was not a doctrinaire pacifist, but rather a principled citizen concerned that we not engage in war for the wrong reasons.

Here he is again, writing a deeply introspective book on the wrenching loss of his youngest child, who froze to death in a snow bank, in an alcoholic fog.  Later, thinking more widely, he wrote of the central importance to any civilized society of the personal freedom we need in order to put together lives by our own lights, no matter who is offended or what anybody else thinks.  He wrote again about these matters in a 1996 New York Times Op-Ed piece, "Whose Life Is It?"  Here he spoke out on the crucial matter of personal choice, responsibility, and against paternalistic intervention from both the political left and right, in their attempts to control the lifestyles of individuals through "the tyranny of the majority or the outspoken minority."

And again, here is George McGovern, speaking out with the voice of hapless personal experience, writing in the Wall Street Journal of the unintended but nevertheless terrible consequences of the good intentions that created those multiple layers of paternalistic legislation that are largely to blame for bankrupting his hotel business.

I do not agree with much of McGovern's politics, but I must say that, in the end, George McGovern was a special kind of American hero.  I see a man whose honest introspection and allegiance to his own mind and experience led him eventually to praise freedom and individual rights, and to caution against overweening government intervention, however ironic this may have been, coming from a man whose whole life had been devoted to making overweening statist government ever more powerful and intrusive.

This is not a view one would predict from a man whose life was otherwise devoted to hyper-liberal welfare statist and bossy bureaucratic government central planning of everything.  But it is a view one would predict of a man who evinced the awe-inspiring courage, integrity, and strength of character to be so intellectually independent. 

There is another crucial aspect of George McGovern's life which I have never heard anybody else mention:  I believe that McGovern must have had a most unusual ability to stare down his own confimation bias, that godawful tendency all of us embody, that psychological and intellectual mechanism that turns us into our own intellectual echo chambers and thereby renders us nearly deaf and blind to anything we don't already believe to be true and right. 

George McGovern, life-long Big Government Liberal statist, was a man of principle.  When he became sort of an accidental tourist in the business neighborhood of the Land of Liberty, he actually changed his mind on this foundational belief on the purpose government.  Because he had the integrity to look at his experience of life with unblinking honesty, and to tell the truth he saw, even when these truths were not always flattering to himself or others, he declared in public that he had come to oppose unfettered government intervention into the free market.  

How ironic.  But what a mensch!


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 2018.1106


·         CNN wire staff article on McGovern:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/21/us/george-mcgovern-dead/index.html …


·         Here is the link to McGovern’s article, with introductory comments, as it was entered into the 102nd Congressional Record:



·         Here is a link to McGovern’s piece in the NY Times:




     *    Here's a link to a very good piece on this part (and other important aspects) of McGovern's career, by Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason Magazine. 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-21/george-mcgovern-s-legacy-as-a-libertarian-hero.html






Vote! Or Else You Have No Grounds for Complaint!

Vote! Or Else You Have No Grounds for Complaint! Eric Paul Nolte It is 0720 hours in Arizona as I write this on Election Day morning.  Nobody can know now what the outcome of this election will be. But I suspect that the Republicans will keep both houses of Congress, given the behavior of pollsters and voters in recent years. 
To the outrage of my liberal friends, I hope the Republicans win everything. 
Notwithstanding that the Pubs tend to be clueless on many matters, I believe that a vote for any Democrat looks like a vote to outlaw free speech, to ban guns, to continue the relentless march towards government control of damn near everything, and to promote the outright thuggery of fascist Anitifa (yes, how ironic, but it's true!) and Black Lives Matter. 
Among the defining characteristics of a Progressive is the belief that it is right for government to solve every problem.  Moreover, to be a progressive one must also believe that the state actually has the power and the knowledge to solve our problems.  In fact, the bloated state, meddling in every aspect of our lives, is at the heart of so many of our problems! 
Progressives do not see that freedom works.  At the very least, freedom works a damn sight better than coercion. 
Voluntary exchange gives us the best we can hope for.  It ain't perfect, but it's the best anybody can hope for at any given moment in time.
The absence of government regulation does not mean the absence of regulation.  Government regulation imposes the judgment of a small pool of unelected bureaucrats on the hundreds of millions of us--by force! 
Absent government regulation, we the people, in our hundreds of millions, by our every choice of what to buy or not, regulate the behavior of every business. 
As Ludwig von Mises pointed out long ago, in a free market, the consumers are the kings and queens who control the fate of every enterprise.  It is we who determine the flow of scarce resources into those ventures that stand the best chance of satisfying what real people really want in this world.
Freedom is the difference between the iPhone and the government-made $900 toilet plunger. 
Freedom is the difference between the Wright brothers' astonishing success and Samuel Pierpont Langley's government-subsidized airplane that crashed into the Potomac River every time it flew off the top of its houseboat launching pad. 
Freedom is the difference between your life, your choice of how you want to live, versus some far-flung government bureaucrat bossing your around against your will. 
It's North Korea's grinding poverty versus South Korea's prosperity and flourishing--which was the same situation in Soviet East Germany versus the much freer West Germany.
If you fail to vote, you have no grounds for complaining about how awful things are in our country. 
If you vote for Republicans, you are indeed part of the problem.
If you vote for Democrats, you are a vastly bigger part of the problem.
If you vote for Libertarians, at least your vote will show up on the political radar as a vote for the bedrock, indispensable virtue of freedom for all.  Moreover, since Libertarian voters are more likely to take votes away from Republicans, a vote for the Libertarian is usually like a vote for the Democrats. 
If you vote for the Greens, you demonstrate that you have likely been seduced by the ubiquitous, jaw-dropping swindle which is the kind of Environmentalist religion we see among the supporters of such data-altering frauds, liers, and ideologues as James Hansen, Michael Mann, Bill McKibben, Paul Jones (of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit) and the summary writers of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The ambition of all these people is essentially to take over industrial production in the name of social justice (former French President Jacques Chirac actually said precisely this in his address to the last Kyoto Protocol conference at the Hague.)
If you vote for the Socialist Party of America or the Communist Party of America, I suggest that pack up all your stuff a move to Venezuela, where the citizens are enjoying the fruits of actual socialism.  Don't tell me that true socialism has yet to be tried.  Don't tell me that democratic socialism works in Scandinavia. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have much greater economic freedom than we have in the US. Their system combines massive welfare statism on the productive back of capitalism.  But among these countries, only Norway, thanks to its huge oil inventories, is not now in a descending economic spiral as a consequence of the welfare statism.  Maggie Thatcher rightly said that socialism can work only until it runs out of other people's money.  Sweden and Denmark are  now running out of their productive citizens' money. E P N 2018.1106