Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

How the government plans to seize control of the internet and how WikiLeaks plays into that.

TAX AND SPEND:

I think the animosity and anger surrounding this supposed tax deal is phony. I think this whole thing is a charade. Both sides are pretending to fight for their bases when in fact this bill is nothing but a nod to the status quo and an an excuse for big pork-barrel spending by both sides. So the real reason Obama caved on extending tax rates for the rich is not enough Democrats supported raising those taxes. What this tells us is Republicans didn't have to cave to any new spending. They did it because they want to share in the looting, like always.

Class war can only lead to reduced revenue because you have fewer rich people to tax.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

This chart comparing the economy from 2003 to 2006, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, to 2007-2010, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, sure make Republicans look good. But that's only because this chart ignores the role of the Fed, which was inflating the post 9/11 bubble when Republicans were in control of Congress, and the bubble burst after Democrats took over. The party controlling Congress was immaterial. The Fed is far and away the major culprit.

HEALTH CARE:

Life expectancy in the US has dropped. For those people who believe the US is not in decline, maybe this will change their minds. The more government dominates our society, the faster we will decline. Increased economic freedom leads to increased health, wealth and happiness. Decreased economic freedom, and ours is decreasing fast, leads to decreased health, wealth and happiness.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Harry Reid steals $450 million from American taxpayers and gives it to a Chinese company to build a wind farm in Texas.

POLICE STATE:

Ron Paul on WikiLeaks linked by Boortz without commentary. Maybe Boortz is coming around.

Even the GAO is skeptical of the value of TSA's nude-scanners.

Famous feminist Naomi Wolf write satirical open letter to "World's Dating Police" for capturing Julian Assange.

"Thank you again, Interpol. I know you will now prioritize the global manhunt for 1.3 million guys I have heard similar complaints about personally in the US alone – there is an entire fraternity at the University of Texas you need to arrest immediately. I also have firsthand information that John Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, went to a stag party – with strippers! – that his girlfriend wanted him to skip, and that Mark Levinson in Corvallis, Oregon, did not notice that his girlfriend got a really cute new haircut – even though it was THREE INCHES SHORTER."

Too funny.

On Janet Napolitano's request that Americans spy on each other:

"In addition to Walmart, DHS is partnering with federal, state, local and private sector entities, as well as the Mall of America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, sports and general aviation industries and state and local fusion centers across the country."

Yikes.

"Rest assured, when and if Americans start turning each other in, the motives will often be no different and the result will be the same: we will be the ones guilty of having erected a police state, one that marches in lockstep with corporate America. Moreover, as a result of the ultimate collusion between the corporate elite and DHS, not only will Americans be persuaded to spy on each other but corporate employees will be pressed to act as the eyes and ears of the government. In fact, the government has even provided stores with training videos for their clerks as to what they should monitor and report about you when you are shopping in their stores."

We have nobody to blame but ourselves.

WAR:

WikiLeaks confirms what we already knew: Saddam Hussein had WMD. It wasn't the stockpiles some had feared, but he indisputably had WMD. He had remnants of the old WMD he'd used in the past. He had WMD labs. He had yellowcake. Just as Bush claimed. We've had lots of confirmation of this, but WikiLeaks provided even more confirmation.

Rothbard claims:

"The task of revisionism has been to penetrate beneath these superficialities and appearances to the stark realities underneath – realities which show, certainly in this century, the United States, Great Britain, and France – the three great "democracies" – to be worse than any other three countries in fomenting and waging aggressive war. Realization of this truth would be of incalculable importance on the current scene."

I hope he does more than assert this. I want some evidence.

"In World War I, the United States and Britain went to war partly to help Russia expand into the part of Eastern Europe then dominated by Austria-Hungary and Germany. This act of meddling on our part, at the cost of untold lives, both West and East, and of an enormous increase in militarism, statism, and socialism at home, led to a situation in Eastern Europe which brought the United States and Britain into World War II, to keep Germany from dominating Eastern Europe."

According to this, Russia was the aggressor in WWI and Germany in WWII, not the US, Britain or France.

"As soon as World War II was over (with its enormous consequent increase in statism, militarism, and socialism in the United States), the US and Britain felt they had to launch a Cold War to oust Russia from the dominance over Eastern Europe which it had obtained as a natural consequence of the joint defeat of Germany."

And this statement makes it clear the Soviet Union was the aggressor by seizing control of Eastern Europe. It's one thing to claim we should not have entered these wars. I understand and have great sympathy for that point of view. And while it's important to understand the role aggressive and bullying foreign police played in bringing these conflict to the point of war, it's irresponsible to blame the wars themselves on the US, Britain or France when the violence was initiated by other nations.

I get tired of these people apologizing for stuff like the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Soviet seizure of eastern Europe. They blame Roosevelt for boxing the Japanese in and prompting them to attack. True, but where's the blame for the attack itself? Let's put the shoe on the other foot. Supposed Japan had blocked us in and in response, our military had sneak attacked Midway. Do you think they would have blamed the Japanese government? Of course not. They would blamed the US for initiating violence. They can't have it both ways. They can't condemn the US for having client states but dismiss the Soviet domination of eastern Europe as a "natural consequence of WWII" and refuse to acknowledge it was the act of aggression that started the Cold War. It's hypocritical. It's a double standard.

Here's another example:

"Like Americans in general, this man takes the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the German declaration of war on December 11, 1941, as dispositive evidence that Japan and Germany started the war that ensued between these nations and the United States, and therefore he concludes that they should be held responsible for it."

That's because he's right. Before Pearl Harbor, the US and Japan were jostling for position in foreign policy. Foreign policy is not war. Bombing Pearl Harbor is war. Japan started it. Germany followed by declaring war on the US. While it's important we understand how our foreign policy set up the conditions that led to Japan starting the war, and we should learn the lesson so that in future we don't adopt aggressive foreign policy because it does set up the conditions that lead to war, we must never confuse that foreign policy with the clear fact that Japan started the war.

"Many people are misled by formalities. They assume, for example, that the United States went to war against Germany and Japan only after its declarations of war against these nations in December 1941. In truth, the United States had been at war for a long time before making these declarations. Its warmaking took a variety of forms. For example, the U.S. navy conducted “shoot [Germans] on sight” convoys, which might include British ships, in the North Atlantic along the greater part the shipping route from the United States to Great Britain, even though German U-boats had orders to refrain (and did refrain) from initiating attacks on American shipping."

If Higg's is claiming that the US was the initiator of violence by attacking a German U-boat before any German U-boat had killed Americans, I'd like to see the evidence. That would be the first I ever heard of that.

"The United States and Great Britain entered into arrangements to pool intelligence, combine weapons development, test military equipment jointly, and undertake other forms of war-related cooperation. The U.S. military actively cooperated with the British military in combat operations against the Germans, for example, by alerting the British navy of aerial or marine sightings of German submarines, which the British then attacked."

I understand why the Germans didn't like this, but this isn't waging war. The US is free to enter into agreements with any country it wants. If the Germans didn't want the US reporting on their subs, they should have kept their subs away from US shipping. It's not our responsibility to aid the Germans by keeping their positions secret.

"The U.S. government undertook in countless ways to provide military and other supplies and assistance to the British, the French, and the Soviets, who were fighting the Germans. The U.S. government provided military and other supplies and assistance, including warplanes and pilots, to the Chinese, who were at war with Japan."

As a sovereign nation, the US can trade whatever we want with whomever we want. We had no responsibility to allow Germany to dictate who we traded with and what we traded. I understand why the Germans and Japanese didn't like it, just like we didn't like them trading weapons and materials with each other and Italy, but this isn't war. War is bombing, invading and conquering other countries, and Germany and Japan did that first.

"The U.S. military actively engaged in planning with the British, the British Commonwealth countries, and the Dutch East Indies for future combined combat operations against Japan."

It would have been grossly irresponsible not to have made those plans since there was a very real possibility this war would spill over into America, which it did when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

"Most important, the U.S. government engaged in a series of increasingly stringent economic warfare measures that pushed the Japanese into a predicament that U.S. authorities well understood would probably provoke them to attack U.S. territories and forces in the Pacific region in a quest to secure essential raw materials that the Americans, British, and Dutch (government in exile) had embargoed."

If the US feared being attacked, then these moves would make sense too. If US forces feared an attack from Japan, it makes sense to put the US in the best possible position and Japan in the worst possible position for a future war. While it's clear Roosevelt worked to invite an attack so he could enter the war against Germany, claiming the US government was a monolith that did these things to provoke an attack without allowing that some people in the government feared an attack and maneuvered to put us in the best possible position if that happened is irresponsible.

"Pearl Harbor is more fully accounted for as the end of a long chain of events, with the U.S. contribution reflecting a strategy formulated after France fell. . . ."

I'm sure this is true, but Japan still started the war. These maneuvers to get to that point were not war. If Japan had not attacked, the US would not have entered the war then. If no attack had occurred, the US would never have entered the war.

"The claim that Japan attacked the United States without provocation was . . . typical rhetoric."

The without provocation part is surely dishonest, but the provocation was no excuse for starting a war. It was an excuse for maneuvering on the part of the Japanese. It was an excuse for diplomacy. But it was no excuse for attacking the US. I don't accept apologies for the Japanese attack. There was no excuse for that attack. This doesn't absolve the US government, but what it did was still no excuse for Japan's attack. And you can bet if the situation was exactly reversed, Higgs would still blame the US for initiating violence.

This is important because it applies to today. There was no excuse for 9/11 just like there's no excuse for Pearl Harbor. 9/11 was an act of blowback for 60 years of US meddling in the middle east, and if we hadn't toppled governments, bullied governments, and invaded countries, 9/11 would never have happened. But there's no excuse for 9/11. It was an act of war, we won that war by driving al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, but we should hunt down and kill or capture Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri and anybody else involved. But we should do it intelligently. We should do it by issuing letters of Marque. We should do it by employing the power of the free market in security organizations. We should do it by making peace with middle eastern Muslims, unleashing the power of all the American people to influence the world in a free market, so we can trade with them, develop a mutually beneficial relationship, collect intelligence and turn them against the terrorists, isolating and weakening them so we capture or kill bin Laden and hold him accountable for his attack. Invading and nation-building in the middle east empowers bin Laden and the terrorists, makes us less safe and keeps us from getting the people responsible so we can try them for war crimes.

Back to the essay:

"Expecting to lose a war with the United States—and lose it disastrously—Japan’s leaders had tried with growing desperation to negotiate. On this point, most historians have long agreed. Meanwhile, evidence has come out that Roosevelt and Hull persistently refused to negotiate. . . . Japan . . . offered compromises and concessions, which the United States countered with increasing demands. . . . It was after learning of Japan’s decision to go to war with the United States if the talks “break down” that Roosevelt decided to break them off. . . . According to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Roosevelt said he hoped for an “incident” in the Pacific to bring the United States into the European war."

This doesn't make any sense. If Japan was "Expecting to lose a war with the United States—and lose it disastrously", then why would they make the "decision to go to war with the United States if the talks “break down”"? Did they just think it would be fun to disastrously lose a war to the US? Were they suicidal? Did they want to lose face, lives and their country? They obviously weren't expecting to lose, or they would never have started the war. They were expecting something else, generally assumed to be a negotiated settlement.

And none of the things Roosevelt did to invite an attack changes the claim that this was a "good war" in the sense that the enemies were phenomenally evil. Hirohito and Hitler were among the most evil leaders in history. The murderous nature of their regimes is well documented. In that sense, it was indisputably a "good war" just as the Cold War was a "good war" in the sense that the Soviet Union was one of the two most evil empires in history. The murderous nature of that regime is well documented. I'm not saying entering WWII or the Cold War was smart, or that our policies were good, but they were "good wars" in the sense that the enemies were phenomenally evil.

"...the major outcome of the war was to leave Stalin and his puppet regimes astride the greater part of the European continent in an area that stretches from the Urals to Bohemia and from Estonia to Azerbaijan. In short, if anyone deserves to be recognized as the war’s “winner,” that person is Stalin. Somehow this fact has never seemed to me to fit comfortably into a characterization of this horrible conflict as the “Good War.”"

In that regard, it was most definitely not a "good war". It's important to note the other most evil empire in history, Mao's China, collapsed of its own weight just like the Germans, Japanese and Soviets all would have done without US intervention, and very quickly if we had kept the burden of government in the US small.

"Yet, any honest account of U.S. foreign policy reveals that this country’s government has engaged again and again in foreign interventions whose official justifications cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Many of these interventions amounted to little more than armed errand-running for privileged American business interests seeking to beat foreigners into line and, not coincidentally, to line their own pockets. This aspect of U.S. foreign policy famously led General Smedley Butler to declare that war is a racket."

Another important point.

"...whenever the U.S. government launches a new war abroad, we would be well advised to look into what happened in that part of the world previously, perhaps over the course of several decades. We may well discover that the locals have legitimate grievances against our government or some of its corporate cronies. Or we may simply discover that the situation is more complicated than it has been made out to be. We know one thing for certain at the outset, however: we cannot rely on the government to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Unvarnished truth is to our rulers as holy water is to vampires."

A great conclusion.

MISC:

Any essay that wishes for more "policy entrepreneurs" is a bunch of baloney.