Some Optimism About Trump's Election

Some Optimism About Trump’s Election

Believe it or not!

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Many people in my circle and all their liberal friends are feeling wounded, afraid, and appalled by the election of Donald Trump because they feel he is such a bad person.  Some of these young people are rioting in the streets, burning flags and other property, and physically attacking some individuals who voted for Trump.

One of my liberal friends expressed her deep sadness that Secretary Clinton, this wonderful person, this superbly capable, credible, and brilliant woman of such great experience would now be denied the presidency for which she is so admirably well qualified.

Well, yes, I do see Secretary Clinton’s long experience, but I see it as long experience of political log-rolling, packaging, pay-for-play deal-making, and of the kind of reprehensible lying that is so vividly captured by her abandonment of our hapless Ambassador Stevens in Libya.  Ambassador Stevens died at the hands of attackers whom Hillary called peaceful civilians who were spontaneously aroused into an angry protest because of a movie made by a man in Los Angeles who said bad things about Muhammed.  The film maker was subsequently jailed for this offense!  What?  Brazen, bald-faced lies, all of it.  For weeks, Ambassador Stevens had pleaded for help, help which was readily available but was denied nonetheless.  The truth was that the mob consisted of organized militants intent on doing what they did, namely murdering those several brave Americans who were abandoned by the Secretary and our president.    

Then there is the whole horrible descent into chaos and the even greater threats to us created by the Arab Spring, with terrible outcomes in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and the ill-advised circumstances of our withdrawal from Iraq (not that we should have been there in the first place, but having gone there, surely some better consideration of how to withdraw should have been made?)

Then there was the terrible bribery and cluelessness of our deal with Iran, allegedly in order to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.  

For the last four decades, our State Department has called Iran the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, and here we are, far from preventing this country from acquiring the Bomb, we have now assured that Iran will be free to build a bomb in 10 years after signing the agreement.  And, oh, by the way, the mullahs are laughing at us and doing what they want to do anyway.

So, now what about Secretary Clinton’s wonderful character and political experience?  

I confess that I heaved a long and deep sigh of relief that Hillary Clinton was defeated. 

To me, it is clear that Donald Trump’s election marks the end of what I am persuaded is the worst presidency in the history of the American republic.  

I hasten to add that my sense of relief does not mean that I admire Donald Trump for his opinions on many issues. He is a man whose character and beliefs are not well aligned with many of my beliefs.  But I feel relieved nonetheless because, for one thing, I find Trump to be so much less reprehensible and threatening to the safety of the country than other side.  

At the very least, as the Green Party candidate Jill Stein observed, the election of Secretary Clinton would have provoked a shooting war with Russia because of her proposed no-fly zone in Syria.  Trump’s election may have saved us from the imminent start of WW-III.  

Almost all our pundits and pollsters were staggered by Trump’s win, but I must say that I was not surprised because, for one thing, there is a striking parallel here to how the opinions of nearly all the British and European pundits and pollsters were upset by the Brexit votes last June, which saw Britain’s leaving the European Union.  Ordinary Britons finally rose up and declared their anger against the rule of Britain by armies of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, who were wielding life and death power over their country.  Likewise, millions of Americans outside the ranks of pundits and liberally skewed pollsters (who were surveying unrepresentative samples of voters) finally rose up and resoundingly said no to the rule of arrogant, imperious, holier-than-thou politicians who always believe they know better than we how to run our lives.

My liberal friends are aghast at these assertions of mine.  Some of them wonder how on earth we can possibly remain friends now.

Thomas Sowell, in my opinion, one of the wisest and most thoughtful souls on the planet, wrote a book called A Conflict of Visions which shows how the foundational ideological visions of different people lead them to the conviction that only their own view is right.  This may be the explanation for how we come to be deaf and blind to others’ conflicting points of view, and is surely the root of that terrible personal echo chamber which is our own confirmation bias.  Sowell quotes Bertrand Russell, “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”  We can subdue our confirmation bias only by thoughtfully engaging with those who have a different vision of reality.  I have listened to my liberal friends and, in the end, I am still relieved by Trump’s election.  Now consider some of my other reasons for this sense of relief:

Trade, Regulation, and Taxes

Trump is no deeply principled advocate of the libertarian policies of live-and-let live, but he does offer a contrast to the Democrat party’s last eight years of imperious rule by armies of unelected bureaucrats wielding life-and-death power over us, unilateral rule by bossy politicians practicing top-down regulation, and he seems to understand much better than the progressives how lower taxes contribute to the growth of wealth.

Now, I don’t agree with Trump that protectionism and tariffs are the best means for growing the American economy, but some of his observations made more sense than those of the Democrats.  

Certainly scaling back the choking vines of ever-growing regulation can help dramatically.  

In my sector of the economy, the airline business, the deregulation of the Civil Aeronautics Board in 1978 finally gave airlines the ability to choose routes and set their own fares, with the result that today airline traffic is more than twice as big as before the dismantling of the CAB. Before deregulation of routes and fares, only rich, fat cat executives and the occasional vacationer could afford to fly.  Now flying is everybody’s normal mode of long distance travel.  

Unfortunately, the simultaneous growth of airline regulation in other areas of the business has had a senselessly repressive effect too.  

For example, the FAA has now taken over the ability of long-haul pilots to judge when and how to manage their own sleep!  Our judgment is deemed good enough to steer hundreds of passengers safely from New York to Hong Kong over the north pole, but we are not allowed to decide for ourselves when to sleep!  The FAA has written yet another long chapter of regulations that micro-manages every aspect of when and how we are commanded to sleep.  Insanity.  

The 2012 edition of the Federal register was over 78,000 pages long and shows the government’s growing eagerness to dictate damn near every aspect of the lives of people and business.  

Trump’s election promises to cut back some of these oppressive regulations.  I believe this is a good thing because these regulations mostly do less for improving safety than for empowering big companies to enlist the power of the law to put their smaller competitors out of business without having to win over their customers through better services and products. 

Lowering taxes, especially corporate taxes will attract foreign companies and repatriate great numbers of American companies who have been driven out of the country in order to protect themselves from the deeply hostile policies of this gang of progressives that is now being removed from office.  American corporate taxes are at 35% and are therefore higher than any other major industrialized country.  Moreover, these taxes are just another factor of production which are all paid for by, guess who?—you, the customer.  Corporate taxes are just another income tax on us, but they are popular because “soak the rich” policies appeal to the economic ignorance of many envy-ridden people who believe that economic equality is not only possible but morally ideal (Footnote: the only possible equality is what can be, but is not often, granted under the law… see Don Watkins and Yaron Brook’s Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality.)  

It is too much to be hoped that Islamo-Marxists like the outgoing president will soon be shunted into the dustbin of history because they are everywhere in the ranks of academe and among lefty politicians, but Donald Trump’s election may go some way towards discouraging them.  Until now, they have largely been able to boss us around and bully us with impunity.  Now they may think twice before uttering their liberal views, confident that nobody could possibly challenge them on matters of logic and history.  

While I know that I can’t change their views, when I am in a room of progressives who are waxing happy over their mutual politics, I sometimes tell them that I don’t agree.  There is rarely room to mount a big enough argument to persuade.  The totalitarian-minded heirs of Plato, Kant, and Marx are everywhere!  But even if these folks were to be open to persuasion, sometimes the mere statement of my disagreement is enough to send a little chill over their confidence and righteousness.

Environmental policy  

The NY Times today reports that Donald Trump has called human-caused climate change “a hoax” and vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form.”  

I say, hallelujah!  This may be the most important thing about Trump’s election, even though the issue of environmentalism comes in dead last among the surveys of most citizens, but it is indeed a new religion that appeals to the hearts of so many.  It is important too because the matter represents a profound threat to liberty.  

The likes of NASA and NOAA’s James Hansen and Michael Mann, 350.org’s founder, Bill McKibben, and the vaunted “97%” of scientists who are said to be behind the affirmation of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are all largely in agreement with Jacques Chirac, the former president of France, on this matter.  About a decade ago, Chirac declared at the last Kyoto Protocol conference (at the Hague) that the theory of AGW represents the very best opportunity for these like-minded politicians and scientists to impose global governance for the purpose of creating social justice in the world, meaning, of course, the socialist hijacking of the industrial world.  This is a profound threat to freedom and the possibility of the personal unfolding of the gifts of the world’s peoples, especially those of the bottom billion, whose prospects are so threatened by the righteous environmentalist leaders who want to deprive them of the chance to use the cheap energy that is available to us today, namely fossil fuels (see Alex Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.)  

For the first time in two decades, I see a chance for a loosening of this death grip of the environmentalist ideologues and social justice warriors who want to take over the world.  

My hope is that intellectual freedom will be emboldened here by having the president of the US declare war on these data-altering frauds and liars at NASA, NOAA, the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (who were caught red-handed trying to fudge the data in order to hide two decades of declining temperatures.)  Scientists who see the careers of others ruined by daring to break ranks with these politically powerful ideologues may feel encouraged to raise their dissenting voices from now on.  

For 20 years, the academic and political elites have largely dispensed funds, grants, and tenure only to those who keep in line with the ruling narrative, that global warming is unprecedented, caused by humans, and portends a climate catastrophe unless governments take over industrial civilization.  Is it any wonder that this staggering flood of money has bought studies that attempt to prove this narrative? 

Immigration and National sovereignty

I do not agree with Trump that building a wall across our southern border will answer the problems engendered by tens of millions of illegal aliens (Footnote: my younger daughter tells me that she finds the term “illegal alien” offensive.  Her political clique calls them “undocumented immigrants,” which is fine with me, but I can read nothing offensive into this simple statement of legal fact.  I believe that, ceteris paribus, immigration in a free economy leads to good things!  I believe that liberty is an inherent aspect of human nature [not an arbitrary convention of governments granting goodies to citizens] and I can see nothing wrong saying that this liberty should surely include the liberty to decide where in the world one wants to live.  

(Footnote: Is it not true there is nevertheless a question of a nation’s sovereignty?  What is sovereignty and what are its limits?  One would have to give a better answer than I am hearing in political discourse today on the matter of the legitimate relation between the individual citizen and the state.  These are matters for another time and place…)

In short, I have no problem with immigrants who are peaceful, self-responsible, respectful of the rights of others, and productive.  I don’t believe that Trump can possibly attempt to send armies of police into homes in order to deport undocumented immigrants.  

Neither is he now proposing sending in armies of police to deport tens of millions—what he is proposing is the deportation of those criminals among this population who are already in jail or who are hiding in sanctuary cities.  I have no problem with this.  I don’t even see this as an actually racist dismissal of Hispanics because it is not the race of those among them who are violent criminals, it is those among them who are violent criminals.

Neither do I have a problem with the policy of assuring that we do not allow hundreds of thousands of improperly vetted refugees from war-torn countries with large populations of Muslim terrorists who want us dead.  I say we repudiate the suicidal policies of Germany, Sweden, France, Holland, and others which, among many sad developments, have turned Sweden in to the rape capital of Europe, where before Sweden experienced almost no rape.  Instead, we should lend a helping hand to these refugees so that they may remain in their homelands or in neighboring countries which share their cultures and values.  They should not be uprooted and brought here willy nilly. 

Health Care.

It is clear now to anybody who looks at it soberly, that Obamacare was never intended to work well, it was intended to provide an excuse for the progressives to look at its wreckage and say that capitalism has once again failed, so now we have to turn the health care system over to a single payer system, like that in Germany and other countries in Europe and elsewhere.

Respect for Women… the Glass Ceiling… and Gays?

Is Donald Trump a misogynist?  It would seem so, although his views on women are outright benevolent compared to the Islamic hundreds of thousands of refugees Secretary Clinton wanted to bring to our shores.  Ditto for the LGBTQ community.  The glass ceiling, said to be holding down women in business?  I would like to see a comparison between the salaries and status of the many women holding high positions in Trump organizations compared to those in the Clinton circles.    

Conclusion

While I do not agree with all of Trump’s beliefs, or believe that he is always  a man of exemplary personal character, I am nevertheless relieved by his election, which is a finger in the eye to the arrogant, petulant, bossy elites who have made such an even bigger mess of things during the eight years of Obama, and which promised to become even vastly worse, had Secretary Clinton taken over the reins of power from Obama.

Certainly not my choice for president, but my guy did not win.  And Trump’s election promises to shake things up and stimulate some deeper thought on how we can make things better for all of us… at least for those of us who are not advocating the destruction of America and all the other quasi-liberal (classical liberal, the old definition, namely free) countries around the world.

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2016.1111a

Our Vote for President in 2016

Our Vote for President in 2016

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Without rehearsing every issue being stated by all the candidates here, let me discuss a few matters that I believe are most important to my decision on whom to vote for today.

First, I try never to talk about politics before establishing the philosophical basis for the subject.  Politics is, after all, a late and derivative branch of philosophy, and these matters rest on a foundation of one’s ethical or moral beliefs.  One’s politics is the social embodiment of what one believes is right and wrong.  One’s ethics can only be rationally formed on the basis of what one believes to be true and false in the universe.  One arrives at these views based on the nature of reality, the human place in the world, and on the nature of how we come to know anything at all.  In short, one’s view of metaphysics leads to a view on epistemology, which leads to views on ethics and thereby to one’s opinions on politics.  Postmodern philosophy denies all these views I just stated.  I derive my views from the Aristotelian stream of philosophy which culminated in the thought of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

So, in short, the standard by which I judge politics is rooted in Objectivism.  This means that human beings are endowed with rights which are inherent in our nature.  We have a right to our own life, liberty, and property, and it is right for us to pursue our own happiness, guided by reason, meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience.  So long as we are self-responsible, productive, peaceful, and respectful of every other person’s equal rights, it is the ultimate good to put together lives by our own lights for our own happiness.  No one has a right to use you against your will for any predatory purpose.  You are not an expendable cell in the greater organism of the state, to be disposed of according to the judgment of your country’s leaders and against your own opinion.  You are not a sacrificial animal to be slaughtered on the alter of the lives of others.  Socialism is therefore bad, not to mention that it is also impossible to implement fully for a variety of problems.  Reason, purpose, and self-esteem are the ultimate values to pursue.  The chief virtues, corresponding to these values, and the means by which one can hope to achieve those values, are: rationality (logic), independence (of mind), integrity (walk your talk), honesty (recognition of the facts of reality), productiveness (self-responsibility), justice (treating others as they deserve), and pride (a well-earned pride for achieving one’s rational values by means of putting these virtues into practice.)

Now, this philosophy implies an ethics of dealing with each other by good will and the peaceful, voluntary exchange of goods and services to mutual benefit.  Force wielded against others is wrong.  Coercion is wrong. Using other people against their will for predatory advantage is the fundamental evil, and every bad thing in society is an example of this terrible policy: murder, genocide, rape, slavery, theft, and the predatory, fraudulent use of others against their will.

So, again, all individuals are endowed by their nature as human beings to the right to life, liberty, and property.  Rights precede the formation of governments.  Rights are not goodies handed out by generous governments.  Government therefore should have the purpose of protecting the rights of every individual.  Governments which stray from this principle are therefore bad.

By this standard, all socio-political systems now existing in the world are bad in varying degrees.  All governments today use other people against their will for predatory advantage.  The worst governments have been the brutal totalitarian socialist dictatorships of the last century: Communist, Nazi, Fascist, and then the assorted nasty, ruthless one party dictatorships like Uganda’s Idi Amin and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.

Liberty and individualism are the supreme values; without these, everything else is compromised, which is why the world is in such a mess.

Now, how do the current American presidential candidates measure up to my standards?  Not very well at all.  

Four candidates stand a theoretical chance of winning the Presidency on the basis of being on the ballot in enough states to garner enough electoral college votes.  

There are other candidates who are on the ballot in more than one state, among whom is Alyson Kennedy, the Socialist Workers Party candidate, who is on the ballot in only seven states and therefore does not stand even a theoretical chance of winning the election.  

Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate is on the ballot in 48 states.  In my opinion, Jill Stein represents everything wrong with socialism—it is the elevation of good intentions over outcome and the facts of reality and history.  Good intentions count for everything, given how ruinously the idea of socialism has played out in the world.  Everywhere the socialists have actually gotten their hands on the levers of power, they have created not their socialist workers’ paradise of heaven on earth, but a stinking slaughterhouse hell on earth.  The so-called social democracies of Europe are in reality mixed economies, partly free and partly government controlled.  They are financially in trouble today because of their armies of unelected bureaucrats who boss everybody around and pursue stupid policies that drag them down in many ways.  (Footnote: Sweden ran into terrible financial trouble about 20 years ago, and so scaled back on government spending and  promoted more economic freedom for business, with the result that today they are doing much better than the economies of their neighbors.  Incidentally, Sweden also enjoys greater freedom and less government regulation than the US!) 

Since the Green Party’s centerpiece politics is about climate change, let me briefly address this issue:

The idea that global warming or climate change is caused by the human creation of industrial CO2 is a crackpot notion promulgated by lying, data-altering ideologues like NASA and NOAA’s James Hansen, Michael Mann, and Bill McKibben, of 350.org.  Then there are also the likes of the frauds and cheats at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit who were caught red-handed attempting to hide the decline in temperatures of the last two decades.  Punish scientists who disagree with the anthropogenic theory of climate change, pour enough money on scholars and tie their tenure to finding a human cause for global warming, and one can expect to see a lot of research reflecting this narrative.  Anybody who can read a graph, however, can plainly see that there was a Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago, in which temperatures were three degrees warmer than today. Wine grapes were grown in the north of Scotland, which can’t be done today.  The Vikings farmed the southern shores of Greenland and buried their dead in soil which today is a permafrost that will not allow one to push a Viking shovel a millimeter into the soil.  One can also see that the Earth has been through hot house periods in which the polar ice cap was completely melted while the atmospheric saturation of CO2 was much lower than today.  Conversely, the Earth has also been through periods in which atmospheric CO2 was greater than 4,500 parts per million, more than 10 times higher than today’s 400 ppm, while at the same time the Earth was going through an ice age!  Jacques Chirac, the former president of France once told a Kyoto Protocol meeting that the theory of anthropogenic global warming represented his like-minded politicians’ best chance ever for implementing global governance for the purpose of social justice, meaning socialism, of course.  THIS is what this gang is up to, not the man-eating and absurd chimera of saving the earth from humans.

So I reject Hillary on this point just I did Obama and the Greens.  They want to take over industrial civilization and hand it over to control by armies of bullying politicians and unelected bureaucrats.  In short, Hillary’s policies on climate change are really no better than the Green Party’s.  

While Gary Johnson affirms that global warming is a problem and that it is caused by humans, he points to his record as governor of New Mexico to show how he would address the matter: a company on a river was pumping toxic wastes into the river, so the EPA was called in to stop them on the grounds that this pollution was a species of trespass into the rights of citizens not to be poisoned by an industrial firm.

Alone among third party candidates, the Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson, is on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Johnson has been reviled for his embarrassing lapse of not knowing about current events in Aleppo, Syria.  Now, I worked for a Saudi Arabian company for a year, flying business jets all over the Middle East and much of Africa.  I often flew to Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Tehran, and to many other cities in the area.  While Aleppo has a long history, it began a long decline after the Suez Canal was built in 1869, and by 1977, when I moved to the Middle East, the city was in such bad shape that I never even heard of it the whole time I was there!  I knew of nobody who even spoke of it.  The current battle of Aleppo which began four years ago was not among the biggest news from the Middle East until maybe a year or two ago, and even then other news from the region seemed much bigger. 

The point about Johnson’s foreign policy is that he actually has a much better grasp on the nature of the Islamic world than any of the other candidates.  His beliefs on the purpose of government is much closer to my own than any of the other runners in this election, namely, that it should confine itself largely to the protection of individual rights.  He knows that when we back Sunnis, we shortly get mass murder of Shias, and when we back Shias, we soon have mass murders of Sunnis.  He knows that our recent deal with Iran is sheer suicidal madness.  Hillary does not; Hillary was all in on that deal.  Hillary represents a continuation and even a worsening of the awful policies of Obama.  Trump makes much more sense than Hillary on this matter.

Now, speaking of the Middle East, I find one fact so appalling that it trumps (so to speak) everything else:  If Secretary Clinton wins the election and follows through with her threat to impose a no-fly zone in Syria, then the United States will be shooting down Russian airplanes, which means war with Russia, for crying out loud!  

Dr. Stein therefore concluded that the election of Secretary Clinton would be vastly more dangerous for us than that of Donald Trump!

Along these lines, Mikhail Gorbachev recently commented that Russia and America are closer to outright war than at any time since the Cold War.  Think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and now wrap your mind around the idea that we are closer to war than at any time since then.

Think about that when you go to the polls today.

Clinton is unacceptable for other aspects of her foreign policy too.  Not only will she get us into a war with Russian over Syria, as Secretary of State, she has already made a much bigger mess of things in the Middle East by emboldening our enemies and abandoning our only genuine ally through her antisemitism.

If Hillary were an Army officer, the scandals of her handling of the Clinton Foundation and her email server would have stripped her of the security clearance she would need even to be put in charge of a motor pool in Montana—much less to become the Commander in Chief of the US military!  Talk about poor judgment!  Hers is much worse than Trump’s  The career of General Pretraeus was ruined by his mishandling of classified material, an offense that was not nearly so egregious as Secretary Clinton’s crimes.  Other officers have been jailed for lesser offenses than Clinton’s. 

There are so many more reasons to reject Hillary for president!

Hillary recently said that the world leader she most admired is Angela Merkel, whose ruinous handling of Muslim refugees has turned Germany, like Sweden, into one of the rape capitals of Europe.  It is horrible that Hillary plans to bring into the US hundreds of thousands of Muslims from countries known to have large populations of terrorists.  It is absurd to think that it is a good idea to bring these people here instead of helping Middle Eastern countries to protect them in their own countries or neighboring countries of the same culture.

I believe it is ridiculous that the Democrats are against having voters show proof of their citizenship and identity as a condition for voting.  But Democrats have famously encouraged immigration as a means of enlarging their voter base.  Some Republican business people also want this immigration as a means for enlarging their access to cheap labor.  But one has to show an ID for so many other things!  Why not have to show an ID to vote?  You can’t buy a beer or board an airplane without proving your identity!

But enough about Hillary.

Finally on to Donald Trump.  The man is egocentric and apparently misogynistic.  He is a Type A, boorish Alpha male who is not well spoken.  He is accustomed to getting his way and not above using the government to help him succeed in business, which makes him at least somewhat of a crony capitalist.  But he is also advocating policies that in my view promise to be significantly less ruinous than Hillary Clinton’s.  Trump will not begin to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, although he will rightly deport those who are already imprisoned criminals.  He will close down funding for sanctuary cities that harbor illegals who are violent criminals.  His foreign policy promises to be much less harmful to the US than Clinton’s and his handling of the military will promote our country’s strength in the world, empower our allies and strike a better pose against our enemies.  His policy of reducing taxes on business will attract foreign businesses to the US and repatriate so many businesses that were driven away by outrageous taxation.  The envy-driven policy of soaking the rich through business taxes is insane, as one can plainly see when it is understood that business gets its money solely from its customers—so, in other words, it is customers, name you, who pay the taxes of business, just as we pay for every other factor of production. A tax on business is actually another tax on your income.

Alright, enough already!  There is so much more to mention, but it’s time for me to go vote. 

In the end, I think Trump may be a bit of a loose cannon, but Clinton is a battery of heavy artillery aimed at the heart and soul of America.

All right, so here's the bottom line:

I'm voting for Gary Johnson.  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

All the smart folks I follow believe that Trump will win, in the same way and for the same reasons that the Brexit vote prevailed in the UK.  And I hope he wins.

Hillary represents the horrible continuation of Obama's ethos, and I hope that she sinks.

    

    

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2016.1108

Thoughts on D'Souza's film, Hillary's America

Hillary's America: 

the Secret History of the Democratic Party

Thoughts on Dinesh D'Souza's New Film

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Last night we saw Dinesh D'Souza's Hillary's America: the Secret History of the Democratic Party.

Don't miss this film, no matter what your politics.

In this circus of a presidential election, a little perspective from history might bring a measure of sanity.

If you don't know Dinesh D'Souza's work, it might help to place him as an author and film producer who has been called the Michael Moore of the right.

Now, in 2012, D'Souza produced 2016: Obama's America, which was, among other things, a biography of Obama's communist and Muslim family, roots, and mentors. In this film, D'Souza condemned Obama for his penchant for rule by edict and his cavalier disregard for the constitution. The film greatly angered Obama and his circle.

Recently, D'Souza observed that if one attacks the empire, one can expect "the empire to strike back." Knowing the habits of the thin-skinned Obama and his friends at the IRS, one might not be surprised to learn that in the wake of D'Souza's donating a few thousand dollars to the political campaign of a friend, he was indicted for some commonly practiced irregularity in this campaign contribution and was sentenced to eight months in jail. He was further compelled to give community service for another period, and, get this!-- he was compelled to undergo a course of psycho-therapy, as if he needed to be psychologically brought back from the road to perdition! To my nose, this punishment smells like the view that only the mentally ill could oppose Obama, and has the whiff of a Soviet-style practice of justice. To my eye, D'Souza's "crime" has the appearance of the recent and infamous IRS attacks on political groups that were known to oppose the ruling party's policies, and it was only those groups that were thus assaulted.

D'Souza's new film reveals the Democratic Party from the early days of the republic as a trail of tears and tyranny (as the term was used to describe Democratic president Andrew Jackson's murderous policy of relocating Indians to reservations out west.) The Democratic Party grew out of shameful roots as the party of slavery, broken treaties, oppression and murder of the Indians. In addition, they were the party of the KKK, the Jim Crow south, and they were the righteous defenders of negro lynchings. I knew that Woodrow Wilson had shamefully maneuvered the US into World War I, but I did not know of Wilson's approval of the KKK and other racist sentiments (which I just looked up and is corroborated by among other sources, a PBS episode of The American Experience.)

Since FDR, the Democratic party has been the more statist party (notice that I don't give the Republicans a pass on this matter of collectivism and statism.) But the Democrats have done far more than the Republicans in dragging us ever farther down Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom by savaging the rights of individuals to their own lives, liberty, and property. The Republicans in recent decades may have been rather toothless in their defense of the liberty and other rights of individuals, but they have not been such active crusaders against these rights as the Democrats.

D'Souza's new film is dramatically told with stunning, big-screen production values (sometimes a little over-the top, I must say...), guided by the artistic eye of Gerald Molen, famous for the films, Schindler's List and Jurassic Park.

The New York Times' review of this film is so snarky and sarcastic that any intellectually honest viewer should feel irresistibly drawn to see it!

It is shameful that this year the Republicans have failed to offer an inspiring alternative to the criminal, lying, corrupt party of Hillary. But see the film anyway!

http://hillarysamericathemovie.com/

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2016.0722

End War!--Put the Old Geezers in the Trenches! Or Not?

End War!—Put the Old Geezers in the Trenches! Or Not?

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Recently, we were sitting around the fire pit after dinner at a friend’s house when our host, a retired doctor and a passionately avowed leftie, offered his opinion that the way to decrease the likelihood of war is to impose a universal draft, on the assumption that if we can conscript the old geezers who now pull the levers of power, and send them out into the trenches to die, fighting our crazy wars, then surely the country would be less inclined to engage in the kind of blockheaded, cockamamie wars we now know only too well.

This is a provocative idea—threatening to make the old farts pay for their stupid wars by making them have to loft a rifle in the trenches and thereby put themselves in the line of fire! 

It is superficially plausible, as a means to reduce the likelihood of war, if we  make the old guys put their asses in the line of fire, instead of allowing them glibly to issue orders sending our treasured laddies and lassies out into the awful pit of death. 

But now what else happens if such a policy is imposed?  As usual, the lefties are deaf and blind to the consequences of their well-intentioned dictates.

Henry Hazlitt’s marvelous primer, Economics in One Lesson, shows us that the essence of clear thinking about any policy requires us not merely to ask what happens in the short term to the first group of people affected by a policy, but to look at how that policy affects everybody from the moment it is imposed until it plays out in the far future, and not only on the first group of people affected by that policy, but on all groups so affected.

I’m always impressed how left liberals seem to be oblivious to the actual results of their policies—that what truly matters to them is not the effects of their policies, but how well-intended their policies are. How their prescriptions play out in the future doesn’t seem to show up in the calculus of evaluating their policies. But it matters crucially whether one’s policies work in reality or not! Lefties, however, tend not even to notice what actually follows the passage of their piously motivated legislation. Self-congratulation for their lovely intentions is everything, as anybody can see from reading anything that Thomas Sowell has written.

What comes immediately to mind here are the well-known, unintended and perverse effects of policies like the minimum wage and rent control. 

Because it sounds plausible, at first blush, we believe that if only we raise the minimum wage, salutary effects must inevitably follow. But the reality is that when higher minimum wages are legislated, it causes unemployment to rise among the very workers the law is intended to help, and it hurts them more than any other group. 

If it’s a good idea to raise the minimum wage to $15, why not set it at $150? Or $1,500? The consequences are said not to be a problem, because, for one thing, wages are presumed to be extracted from the hides of greedy employers.

According to both Marx and Adam Smith—from whom Marx got his Labor Theory of Value—employers are parasites living on the backs of labor!

Now, when we piously pass legislation for rent control, to staunch the flow of blood going from renters to greedy landlords, we find that suddenly affordable housing is retreating into short supply. Sober economists tell us that if we actually want to destroy the housing stock, the only policy more effective than rent control is outright aerial carpet bombing. Think of the south Bronx, circa 1978, which looked like bombed-out Berlin in 1945--thanks to panicked landlords trying to wriggle free of their own destruction at the hands of New York City’s draconian rent control laws. Landlords were condemned by the City's rent control laws to losing money, so these property owners couldn’t hope even to sell their buildings because no sane investor would be stupid enough to buy properties that by law were condemned to losing money. In huge numbers, the landlords finally rebelled and burned the buildings to the ground. 

One could also point to the effects of almost any government regulation and note the similarly unintended and destructive consequences of these policies. 1.)

Now, back to the conversation with my friend and his argument for a universal draft that would make the powerful old guys go fight our wars. There are several ineluctable problems here.

For the sake of argument, if I grant that the rulers would be less inclined to start wars if it were they, instead of the sons of their poor constituents of color, who would be vulnerable to death in the trenches, this does not address the most terrible problem with this policy.

The essence of the problem here is that there is no acknowledgment of human rights! Every individual's rights!  

The doctor would appear not to care about the little matter of rights.

Apart from the revolution itself that followed its issuance, we have never institutionalized Jefferson’s formulation of human rights, in the words he formulated it in the Declaration of Independence. This crucial value never showed up explicitly written into the Constitution. Our Constitution does not embody this core value of the Declaration!

This arresting thought deserves a book, a movement, a political party that does not exist today! Our Constitution never explicitly embodied this ideal, unprecedented before John Locke, and so memorably captured by Jefferson’s formulation of it, that our rights are rooted in our nature as human beings, not as a gift from government, and are therefore unalienable.  

It has been a century since this idea was rejected by those who embraced the notion, promulgated by the likes of Oliver Wendall Holmes, Louis Brandeis, and Woodrow Wilson, that we have in our constitution, not a timeless North Star in our founding document, but instead a “living constitution,” in which the changing circumstances of history are said to allow us to rewrite the original document. By this intellectual sleight of hand, our country abandoned any unyielding idea that individuals possess rights to their own life, liberty, and property which are inalienable. Instead, rights are now seen merely to be conventional, merely the arbitrary gifts granted by the opinions of one's tribe. Rights, therefore, are the coincidental and generous blessings granted to us by the largesse of governments—which can be changed, added to, or revoked altogether, according to the whims of whichever gang has its hands on the levers of power, in this election cycle or the next.

So, at the end of the day, my friend’s suggestion that we send the old geezers to fight our wars is a chimera. Like almost everything else about contemporary politics, we are led to fascism—which means the nominal private ownership of the means of production, with Machiavellian control over every detail of that production, using others against their will for predatory advantage, and all of which is, in my humble opinion, the essence of evil. 

Think of the whole range of evil—genocide, murder, rape, slavery, robbery—every one of these evils is an example of a bad guy using other people against their will for predatory advantage. 

Where is Lady Liberty?  Where is the ideal of freedom? Far in the future, it would seem.

E  P  N

2016.0601

1.) for starters, think of Henry Hazlitt’s book I mentioned above, Economics in One Lesson; and for a more wide ranging, scholarly, and current account of these matters, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980.
   

Despite Everything, Let Us Honor Memorial Day!

Despite Everything, Let Us Honor Memorial Day!

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Yesterday, Memorial Day, I was brooding over the terrible situation that we Americans have created for ourselves with all our crazy wars abroad. I wrote nothing about it then. Today, a friend posted a picture of the grave stone of his grandfather, who was an Army veteran who bravely went ashore at Normandy in 1944. I wrote the following on my friend's post (and have since considerably elaborated on it below):

I honor our veterans, I treasure their service, as an aspect of the legitimate purpose of government, namely, the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property.

Now, I myself am an Army veteran of the Vietnam era. I was drafted--which hijacked my college career, because college deferments were abolished that year. I thought of immigrating to Canada as an expression of my loathing of the Vietnam War and what I deemed to be the immoral slavery of conscription, but I didn't go to Canada because, among other things, this would have meant that, as far as anybody could have known in 1972, I would never again have been able to see my friends and family unless they came to see me abroad.

I am increasingly troubled by how mindlessly our collectivist-altruist leaders squander the lives of our gallant young soldiers in crazy foreign military adventures that yield us worse than nothing--all guided by our leaders' insane, suicidal rules of engagement which are drawn from the marching orders they created for themselves in the doctrine of "Just War Theory.”

Nevertheless, let us honor Memorial Day. 

Let us honor those who gave their all to the unique, unprecedented, and crucial idea of America! 

Think of it!-- The idea of America: your life belongs to you! The good is to live it! Live and let live, and let those who can, voluntarily lend a helping hand to those who can’t! Let us deal with each other by mutual consent as traders, exchanging wonderful values for other wonderful values, all of it to our mutual benefit! 

This ethos never appeared anywhere else on Earth before America! These ideas certainly began here imperfectly, but for all their warts today, you have to conclude that they have nowhere played out any better anywhere on the planet, and nowhere do these ideas portend a more promising realization in the future! Heaven on Earth belongs to the future, but the idea of America is as close as we have come to it today! 

By the way, for those among you who "Feel the Bern," let the record show that Heaven on Earth is not to be found in Cuba or in Venezuela, or in the social science departments of American universities which lend themselves to these views. 

2016.0531

Limiting Government is Like Converting a Hyena to Vegetarianism

A Properly Limited Government 

Seems as Likely as 

Converting a Hyena to Vegetarianism 

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I am coming to believe that effectively and permanently limiting a government to its legitimate powers, namely, to the protection of individual rights, may be as likely as converting hyenas to vegetarianism.

But I am not prepared to give up this ideal of a proper government altogether! 

I agree that a proper government is required to sort out our disagreements and to restrain the predators and invaders, so long as its purpose is nailed down to the protection of every peaceful individual's right to life, liberty, and property.  And yet, in the blood red miasma of history, how can one not grow more pessimistic about the very possibility of restraining the government to such limits?  

In fact, history shows that in every attempt to create this vision of a properly limited government, this benevolent night watchman has always turned out to have hobnail boots and a swastika up his sleeve.  Well, sometimes it's a hammer and sickle in his pocket.

The specter of communism looms over the world's discussion of the social fabric--in spirit anyway, if not so much in this very term these days (outside of Italian and French politics, of course, where outright communist parties still exist in name.)  But few recognize this spirit in so many words, not as such anymore.  Even fewer people understand the moral problems inherent in socialism, in the way that Ayn Rand makes clear. 1.)  Few people even begin to understand the hopeless economics of socialism, as Ludwig von Mises so clearly analyzed it. 2.)  Fewer still know any antidotes to this ubiquitous socialist ethos.  

Moreover, even if one knows Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises down to the marrow, one should read the books of our most influential enemies, namely Marx, Kant, Plato, and perhaps their lesser acolytes... and throw in both the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, and the Koran too ... all in an effort to combat our own inevitable confirmation bias, to prevent us from being deafened by the echo chambers of our own minds.  If we don't read the work of those with whom we know we will disagree, we put ourselves in danger of remaining deaf and blind to any ideas we don't already know and approve of.

But we don't know Rand and Mises down to the marrow.  The common public discussion of Rand tends to be as sophomoric and ignorant as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's opinions of her.  Both Obama and Clinton have, in effect, dismissed any serious acceptance of Rand's ideas because, they say, while she may appeal to youthful naifs, one then grows up and gets over it.

Liberals tend to believe that there are no facts of human nature that might in any way limit their grandiose idealism in creating heaven on earth (hope and change for a fundamental transformation of the American system, as one of those recent presidential candidates put it...) with the result that when their uber-liberal soul mates, the socialists, get their hands on all the levers of power and completely substitute socialist central planning for capitalist markets, they create not a heaven on earth, but a stinking, slaughterhouse hell on earth.

And here is Bernie Sanders, avowed socialist supporter of communist causes from the time he was a wet young pup--Sanders does invoke a moral vision, but his vision is of the imposition of top down, holier-than-thou policies based on how government knows better than you how to run your life.  Sanders' socialism is a breast-beating policy of coercive, eat-the-rich collectivism and statism.  In a word, Marxism.  Righteous Marxism.  Morality as self-sacrifice for the lives of others, at least for those others who are smiled upon by the official, statist powers.  This is government by those who are eager to collect self-sacrifices from the polity, enforced at gunpoint by the police power.  Not to mention that this vision of government is run by people who have not the first clue about what material wealth is or how it is created--or even that it is indeed created, and not merely plucked from trees, like fruit, and that market freedom is a necessary precondition for the creation of wealth, or that menacing government edicts can never be the engine of creating real wealth. 

Republicans are no better, with respect to championing a secular, rights-respecting, life-serving morality for living on earth.  For example, take the comments of Ed Hudgins on the last Republican debate, in which he observes how none of the debaters argued for any of the foundational, crucial moral principles that should steer the ship of state on a proper course. 3.)

Conservatives tend to believe that there was some Halcyon past to which we should appeal, and all we need to do is to re-create this glorious past and model ourselves on that.  But the American founders' model was flawed from the start, as we can see in retrospect, in that it failed to recognize the rights of blacks or women, or the evil of slavery (not to mention the little Indian problem.)  And also not to mention that the founders' vision particularly failed to restrain the tyrannical growth of government.  Conservatives believe that wisdom and knowledge, including knowledge of right and wrong, come from God as revealed knowledge, and not as a consequence of secular, objective reason and observation of the facts of reality.  

Some libertarians understand that a proper defense of liberty must be based on foundational philosophy, but many others do not.  Ayn Rand despised libertarians because she mistakenly conflated all of them with anarcho-capitalists.  But you should read the luminous prose of Murray Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty, and then tell me how we should address this withering problem of limiting the government to its proper functions—to the protection of these rights to our own life, liberty, and property.  We are endowed with these rights by our nature, we are entitled to protect ourselves, and we are thereby entitled to delegate the defense of these rights to others, which delegation is the moral source of legitimate government.  

Alas, governments have always grown like Topsy.  

So how do we nail government down to size? —put it a short leash, chained to a thick wall based on objective principles that go all the way down to objectivist metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics?

I believe Rand was right in her belief that a proper government is necessary to secure our legitimate rights. I agree with her that without such a government, anarchy prevails, which must result in gang warfare, such as what they have recently enjoyed in Somalia.  Of course, Rand also rightly observed that having no government would be preferable to a totalitarian government, with its inevitable death camps for dissenters and its other perceived enemies.

So where does this leave us?

I believe the better day is yet to come, and must depend on the elevation of consciousness--on our coming explicitly and better to understand our situation in the universe.  The state of this global elevation of consciousness will be greatly enhanced when more people have come by their own lights to understand the life-serving and crucial work of Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and their extended circles.

E   P   N

1.) See, for example, Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Ethics" https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1961/01/01/the-objectivist-ethics/page6 

2.) See, for starters, Ludwig von Mises, Socialism,

http://www.amazon.com/Socialism-Sociological-Ludwig-von-Mises/dp/0913966630/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1454210210&sr=8-1&keywords=Ludwig+von+Mises%2C+Socialism

3.) Edward Hudgins,  http://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/5934-trump-less-gop-debate-still-missing-moral-principles

2016.0130