Free kibbles

Iranian President Ahmadinejad laughs at Obama's desire to talk while he unveils a new plant for producing nuclear fuel. Let's make the Iranians look more reasonable to our allies and more powerful to their enemies by rewarding them with talks. No wonder every Arab country is starting crash programs to build the bomb.

US is negotiating with pirates holding US freighter captain. I thought we didn't negotiate with terrorists. I guess you can talk as long as you don't give up anything. This sounds like an easy negotiation. Let our man go or starve. Pretty soon Navy Seals will be on the scene, at some point they'll be in the water and then it will be over.

I'm unimpressed with this supposed weakness in international law on piracy. People have known how to deal with pirates since our ancestors invented sailing. To say that we've erected an institution that keeps us from dealing with them now is absurd. Natural law tells us any ship can defend itself from any pirate and common sense tells us any nation can sink or capture pirates and try them if there's no local authority or the local authority doesn't police its own waters. Free people and sovereign nations do not have to defer to international aristocrats to protect themselves from pirates.

[The Law of the Sea], in article 105, does permit the seizure of a pirate ship, but article 110 lays down that, in order to establish that a ship is indeed a pirate vessel, the warship - and it may only be a warship - has to send a boat to the suspected ship first and ask for its papers.

What a bunch of baloney. We should put Reapers in the air and sink any pirate ship that threatens another ship off the coast of Somali and charge the ship we saved for the cost of the mission.

Mises scholar says the real estate market hasn't hit bottom yet because commercial property is just starting to collapse. He also says this real estate correction will be worse than the S&L crisis of the 80s.

I think much like the Bush administration was crippled by 9/11, so were the people. 9/11 was so horrendous that Americans couldn't see anything but the external threat of terrorism. We lost what little was left of the American principle of healthy distrust of government. Americans couldn't see that the titanic growth of our own government was a far more significant threat to our way of life than the terrorists could possibly be. But now that Obama has taken over and is attempting to amass more debt than all other presidents combined, the people are finally waking up to the greatest threat America has always faced - our own government. Unfortunately, it's almost too late. We are racing toward an economic crash that will make the Great Depression look like a weekend in Vegas. These tea parties are a tiny first step, but they're not going to be nearly powerful enough, soon enough to stave off this collapse. In order to stave off collapse, Americans must completely reject the aristocrats of the same 2 failed parties who have brought us to the brink of destruction and start electing the only people who honestly and unapologetically stand for freedom and smaller government - libertarians. If we don't, we won't be able to fight terrorism, deal with Iran, deter Russia, out-compete China, afford health care, get an education or fuel our car. No issue facing America is anywhere near as significant as dramatically reducing the size and scope of government.

I plan to go to the Cincinnati Tea Party on 4/15.

Educational essay that's actually an introduction to a book describes how in the modern world people have come to accept that the state is society and that individuals are nothing but replaceable cogs in the machinery of the state. Even in the US, where citizens tell themselves government is limited and subordinate to the individual, we are far closer to a Marxist society than the free country created by the Founding Fathers, and that's the common denominator and most significant factor in all our major problems today. This was written in 1959, and you can see how it's even more valid today.

The present disposition is to liquidate any distinction between State and Society, conceptually or institutionally. The State is Society; the social order is indeed an appendage of the political establishment, depending on it for sustenance, health, education, communications, and all things coming under the head of "the pursuit of happiness."
...
In the operation of human affairs, despite the fact that lip service is rendered the concept of inherent personal rights, the tendency to call upon the State for the solution of all the problems of life shows how far we have abandoned the doctrine of rights, with its correlative of self-reliance, and have accepted the State as the reality of Society. It is this actual integration, rather than the theory, that marks off the twentieth century from its predecessors.

We've given away the house. We won't admit it to ourselves and as a result our government is on the verge of destroying our country. This paragraph describes how liberals and conservatives both feed this concept of the state controlling our lives:

One indication of how far the integration has gone is the disappearance of any discussion of the State qua State — a discussion that engaged the best minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The inadequacies of a particular regime, or its personnel, are under constant attack, but there is no faultfinding with the institution itself. The State is all right, by common agreement, and it would work perfectly if the "right" people were at its helm.

Lesser evils voters and those who hold their nose and vote for the guy their party tells them to fit in here.

It does not occur to most critics of the New Deal that all its deficiencies are inherent in any State, under anybody's guidance, or that when the political establishment garners enough power a demagogue will sprout. The idea that this power apparatus is indeed the enemy of Society, that the interests of these institutions are in opposition, is simply unthinkable. If it is brought up, it is dismissed as "old-fashioned," which it is; until the modern era, it was an axiom that the State bears constant watching, that pernicious proclivities are built into it.

Because we won't admit that government itself if the greatest danger to our way of life, we may well have elected that demagogue. Barack Obama thinks its OK for his friends to bomb the US and to be spokesmen for terrorists. He wants to draft Americans into a "civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military. Michelle Obama told us that Barack would force us to work. Even if Obama isn't that demagogue, and lets all hope he's not, the demagogue is coming if we don't start tearing down the government apparatus that threatens us, and he can come from either of the 2 big-government parties. And the people who voted for either of the 2 parties, whose presidential candidates and other than Reagan and a handful of congressional candidates, invariably think the state is more important than the individual, brought us to this point by building the government apparatus that threatens us.