A couple of weeks ago I traveled to New York and New Jersey to spend some time with a good friend and the family of my fiancée. The trip turned out to be truly edifying because I have not been to the East Coast in many years, and I ordinarily have very few chances to talk with the types of people who – well, let’s just say, the types of people who would vote for egomaniacs of truly heroic proportions. After all, the people of New York and New Jersey seem to have a particular skill in locating the most egomaniacal liars, criminals, and self-righteous scumbags in their states and then elevating them to public office.

Virtually every conversation that I had with the good people of New York and New Jersey revolved around guns, for the simple reason that I had seriously considered bringing one with me on the trip. Woodchuck season was open in New Jersey, and I figured I should probably take the opportunity to shoot one. We don’t have woodchucks in Colorado (although we do have marmots, which are similar), and I wasn’t sure I would ever get the chance again.

In the end, my fiancée talked me out of the idea, saying she thought it rather unwise to tote a rife through New York City in order to shoot what amounts to a very large New Jersey rat. Her good sense convinced me to leave my guns at home, which saved me from almost certain jail time. It turns out that you need a license to bring guns into New Jersey in order to shoot this large plague-carrying rodent. Who knew?

In any event, the conversations about guns that I had in both New York and New Jersey seemed to gravitate inevitably toward assault rifles. Upon learning that I am a hunter, the listener would inevitably insert the following leading question: “But, assault rifles – how are those necessary?”

I have to admit that I was not prepared for this type of question. The question assumes from the start that all legitimate guns are for hunting purposes only, and that we ought to make a determination about a gun’s permissibility based solely upon whether it can be used to shoot an elk or a woodchuck. My replies at the time focused on the fact that so-called “assault rifles” can indeed be useful and effective hunting rifles. The AR-15 and the much-maligned Mini 14 can be exceptionally good coyote guns, for example. Whether or not any of the guns that are designated as “assault rifles” can be effectively used to hunt game is highly debatable and is a question that each hunter has to answer for himself.

Having given the question more thought, however, I now realize that I ought not to have focused on the effectiveness of these guns for hunting purposes. As I just said, very few hunters are likely to agree about whether or not the AK-47 or the M-14 are effective guns for taking game, and that question is actually beside the point. The question that everyone kept asking me is not actually a fair question at all, and I ought to have set my sites on the concept of “necessity” itself.

The idea that some guns are “necessary” for hunting purposes while others are not is actually completely ridiculous. It is possible to hunt game with nothing more than a knife or a piece of string or one’s bare hands, for example, which means that guns in general are not “necessary” in order to hunt. Since guns are not even necessary in order to hunt, any distinction between “necessary” and “unnecessary” guns is completely arbitrary and thus absurd. Scopes and expanding bullets are also not “necessary” to hunt, so does that make them unacceptable too? Any line we might want to draw would be completely arbitrary, and would certainly result in more animals getting wounded by less lethal weapons.

The concept of “necessity” is almost always dangerous and insidious in political matters. Asking whether vanilla is necessary for a specific cupcake recipe is very different from asking whether guns or tobacco or beer or soda or cocaine is “necessary” for a person’s life. People place different values on different things, and it is supremely arrogant and insulting for a person to look at a particular product and think that he can decide for the rest of humanity whether it is “necessary” to own.

It is true that certain guns are not “necessary” for human beings, in the sense that without them people will immediately perish, but the same can be said of almost anything. Art and dancing and tennis, for example, are not necessary for human beings in order to stay alive. Does that mean that they can be brushed aside as inconsequential trivialities that the fat governor can and should take away from us?

If every person is going to try to decide what is “necessary” for his neighbor’s life, does that not take us down a dark and dangerous road? I love guns and beer but my neighbor does not. Shall he try to take those things away from me because he views them as “unnecessary” superfluities? He may love modern dance and American Idol, which I loathe. Shall I try to take those things away from him because I view them as “unnecessary” superfluities? Where will this type of thinking take us?

It is precisely this type of thinking has basically created a nation chock-full of hypocritical meddlers and a government so bloated and overbearing that people don’t even know what freedom means anymore.

Far better, I think, is to adopt the philosophy of liberty. As long as a person does not aggress against his neighbors’ lives and property, he should be free to live his life as he sees fit. You don’t have to like what your neighbor does with his life in order to recognize his natural right to chart his own course. You don’t have to like cocaine, assault rifles, modern art, Jerry Springer, hunting, plastic surgery, or prostitution, but, unless you want everyone else picking through your own flawed life, have the decency to leave the lovers of these things alone.

After all, the next fat governor or megalomaniacal mayor may decide that the things you like in life are “unnecessary” and thus fair game for being banned.

The Best of Mark R. Crovelli

No single issue in the American political arena illustrates the similarity of American liberals and American conservatives than the issue of gun control. This claim will no doubt appear counterintuitive, because conservatives and liberals have been bickering over gun rights for as long as anyone can remember. Liberals love gun control and conservatives loathe it. The difference between the two groups couldn’t be starker, right?

What all the superficial bickering between the two groups conceals, however, is a fundamental agreement that gun control can actually work. Starry-eyed liberals believe that government is indeed capable of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, as if would-be-armed-robbers actually care whether or not it is legal to own guns. Conservatives innocently fear that government is capable of keeping guns out of the hands of all ordinary Americans, as if government prohibition has ever actually worked. Both groups, in other words, believe that if the government chooses to control or outlaw something, its laws will actually make that thing disappear.

It doesn’t take a degree in economics, however, to realize that both groups are hopelessly mistaken to think that gun control can actually work. Conservatives are wrong to fear that government can effectively control or prohibit anything, including guns, and liberals are wrong to believe that government gun control will keep guns out of the hands of would-be criminals.

In order to see why this is true, one need only take a look at how well drug prohibition has been in the United States. Certain “drugs” have been prohibited in the United States for generations, and yet they are still so plentifully available that you even find them in American prisons. Marijuana got to be so plentiful and cheap in the early 1980’s, in fact, that drug smugglers had to start looking around for more profitable drugs to sell, like cocaine. The same thing happened later on to cocaine as more and more smugglers (including Ronald Reagan’s CIA and Bill Clinton’s buddies in Arkansas) stepped in to supply more cocaine, and prices fell through the floor to the point that crack cocaine was available virtually everywhere. The same was true of alcohol during prohibition. The point is; if the government’s laws have completely failed to eliminate the market for drugs, what on Earth could make anyone believe their laws will actually eliminate the market for guns? Sure, prices will be higher than they otherwise would be without asinine gun laws, but let’s at least be honest and admit that the gun market in the United States isn’t going away anytime soon.

In addition to the obvious failure of drug prohibition in the United States, there are dozens of examples of how gun control has failed internationally. In Brazil, for example, more than half of the guns in the country are estimated to be unregistered – which is to say, they are illegal. In Mexico there is exactly one legal firearm dealer in the whole country, while there are approximately 250,000 guns smuggled into the country every year illegally. I was told by several Palestinians in the West Bank during a recent trip (where guns are basically completely illegal) that you could even buy American-made M-16’s if you have enough money, or settle for cheaper AK-47’s if you don’t. If people want guns, there will be people who are willing to sell them. Duh.

These points should be obvious to anyone who has ever been around gun people in the United States. To be sure, there are some Americans who own guns (usually inherited from their fathers) and who don’t care about them or don’t even know how to use them. These people would probably even hand over their guns to the government unhesitatingly if they were told to do so. But there is a different type of American gun owner who is not about to hand over his guns, no matter what the laws say. To this type of gun owner, the spread of gun laws is interpreted as a sign that he needs to buy more 6″ PVC pipe to bury in his yard. To think that this type of gun owner will be disarmed by a bunch of thieves and blowhards in Washington is beyond naïve. His guns may go in the ground or in the wall for safekeeping, but they sure as hell won’t wind up in a government scrap heap.

Liberals who think this type of gun owner can be disarmed by government fiat are completely delusional, and so are conservatives who fear that gun control is going to lead to widespread surrender of arms. Gun control laws will only disarm those that don’t care about guns in the first place. Everyone else will be able to find and buy guns just as easily as they can find and buy crack cocaine or meth, which is to say that it will still be insanely easy. You will probably even see guns popping up alongside drugs in prisons, like in Latin America, if gun control is ever really enforced in the United States. If history is any guide, the ATF and the CIA will probably be the biggest black market suppliers, as they were with heroin and cocaine.

None of this is to downplay either the sheer idiocy or the other evil effects that gun control laws will have on the United States if they continue to proliferate as they recently have been. Inducing Americans to bury the guns that they use to protect their homes and their families will definitely lead to more needless robbery and murder. Inducing Americans to make their firearm purchases from the same people that try to sell meth to their children will definitely and needlessly hurt a lot of people. Inducing the gun market to go black will definitely raise prices for guns above their current level. And arresting people for “illegally” carrying guns to defend themselves is the very definition of tyranny.

The point is simply that gun control cannot and will not eliminate the market for guns in America. Since this is the major selling point for gun control, the debate will continue to be an idiotic and pointless mess until people start to realize guns can’t be eliminated by government fiat. If libertarians and conservatives concede that government prohibition can work, (as many foolish conservatives who believe in drug prohibition have to), they will lose the argument. Drug prohibition has been a complete and utter failure, and gun control will be too.

This is the most effective and honest argument that libertarians and conservatives can make.

The Best of Mark R. Crovelli

Few issues highlight the gaping philosophical divide between libertarians and modern conservatives more starkly than the issue of guns. This might seem counterintuitive, because libertarians and modern conservatives often stand shoulder to shoulder against liberals and progressives to defend individual gun rights. The convenient alliance between modern conservatives and libertarians in the political trenches, however, conceals a fundamental and serious philosophical disagreement.

In order to fully grasp the division between libertarians and modern conservatives on this issue, it is important to understand why libertarians and conservatives think gun rights are so important. At the most general level, both libertarians and modern conservatives agree that all men have a natural right to defend themselves against aggression. More specifically, every man has a natural right to repel with violent force any unjust aggression against his life or his property. Libertarians and modern conservatives do not defend individual gun rights out of some bizarre and loony obsession with a 200-year-old piece of parchment called “The Constitution.” On the contrary, they hold that the Constitution of the United States merely articulated something about man’s nature that has always been and always will be true.

The logical implication of this, both libertarians and modern conservatives agree, is that individuals have a natural right not just to defend their lives and their property against aggression from individual murderers and thieves, but that they have a natural right to defend themselves from unjust aggression by government. Hollow indeed would be the right to self-defense if it did not include the right to defend oneself against aggression by government –including one’s own government, because governments have killed and robbed exponentially more people than have private criminals. Recognizing this fact, libertarians and modern conservatives agree that the natural right to self-defense must include a right to defend oneself against unjust government aggression, and that doing so usually requires more than simply a stick or a slingshot. A population armed with modern guns is not easily cowed, robbed, or massacred unless governments resort to wildly immoral and indiscriminate tactics or weapons of mass destruction.

So far so good. Libertarians and modern conservatives agree that the right to keep and bear arms stems from the natural right to defend oneself against aggression, including unjust aggression by governments. From here on out, however, libertarians and modern conservatives scarcely agree at all, and the conservative position on guns becomes more and more self-contradictory and absurd.

Libertarians hold that armed individuals are indeed capable of effectively resisting and defending themselves from aggression by their own government. If this were not so, then there would be no point whatsoever in defending the right to bear arms so vehemently. If individual gun ownership does not offer a real and substantial defense against our own government, and guns are merely symbolic or for hunting or self-defense against burglars, then why the big fuss over laying down our M-14’s and AR-15’s? Why not, as the Vice President suggests, keep only double-barreled shotguns for hunting and defense? Why would we care about losing the ability to own an AR-15 any more than we care about losing the ability to buy incandescent light bulbs? The government is constantly restricting our ability to buy and sell all types of things, so what makes guns so sacred if they can’t even effectively be used to defend ourselves against our own government?

The libertarians’ answer is that well-armed populations can indeed effectively defend themselves against their own governments, and this is precisely why we value the right to own powerful firearms so dearly. Gun ownership is not merely a symbol, but a real and effective means for people to protect their lives and property from private criminals and from tyrannous government. The libertarian understands that the nature of asymmetrical warfare today is such that even very small bands of determined and principled people can fight a purely defensive war against a vastly more powerful foe and come out victorious. In fact, in a guerrilla fight, the odds are in favor of the smaller group of determined and principled fighters, as the U.S. and Soviet militaries discovered in Afghanistan.

Contrast this consistent libertarian position with the absurd position of the modern conservative. The modern conservative holds two contradictory ideas about guns simultaneously. On the one hand, he is likely to agree with the libertarian that individual gun ownership is not merely symbolic, but rather a real and effective means for the American people to protect themselves against aggression by their own government. At the same time, however, he is bound to say that a strong military is needed to protect the American people against foreign threats. In other words, the modern conservative implicitly believes that our guns are insufficient to protect us against the Chinese or the Irish or whomever.

The absurdity of these two positions should be patently obvious, because if the American people are capable of effectively defending themselves against aggression by their own government – the most powerful and heavily armed government in the history of the world – then the American people obviously don’t need help from a military to defend them against aggression from relatively dinky powers abroad! The modern conservative would have us believe that We The People are capable of repelling the aggressions of the most powerful government in the history of the world, but that we somehow miraculously lose this capacity if the soldiers or politicians we are confronting have a different uniform or speak a different language.

While the modern conservative is bizarrely capable of simultaneously entertaining these two contradictory positions in his head, it should be obvious that only one of them can possibly be true. If the American people are not capable of effectively defending themselves from their own government with their guns, then gun ownership is merely symbolic and surrendering our AR-15’s to Barry Obama is completely meaningless. If, on the other hand, the American people are indeed capable of defending themselves against their own insanely powerful government, when they finally choose to do so as the libertarian asserts, then the extravagant and wasteful military that they finance is totally superfluous and unnecessary, because no foreign government can possibly pose even a fraction of the threat to the American people that the powerful American government and military do.

The modern conservative has gotten himself into this quandary because he has allowed himself to become irrationally terrified by nonexistent foreign bogeymen that are no real threat to him (as if the Chinese or the Iranians could ever be a threat to Coloradoans!), while ignoring the massive danger to life and property that his own government poses. He has ignored the history of the 20^th century, a century in which people were slaughtered by the tens of millions by their own governments, and has allowed irrational fear of Koreans, Afghan shepherds, communists, Vietnamese, Chinese and Iranians to overwhelm his rational thinking. His fear has blinded him to the phenomenal hatred that his own government has engendered around the world by meddling with, terrorizing, and killing people everywhere. He has forgotten the danger of a standing army that the Founders warned us about, and he has lost confidence in his own ability to defend himself.

Thus, when the government finally comes for the modern conservative’s guns, he will no doubt puff out his chest and scream out that he’d rather die than surrender them. However, the modern conservative’s irrational fear of foreigners and his idolatrous love affair with the American military will prevent him from putting up much of a fight. After all, the military and the chickenhawk politicians that lead it around are what the modern conservative believes keep him safe and “free.” His delusional belief in the invincibility of the American military will paralyze him with fear of ever defying it. In the end, he will surrender his arms, and he will learn to call it “freedom” in due time.

At that point, the fight will be left to the true lovers of liberty, the libertarians, who understand the fragility and absurdity of the fascist American economy, the unsustainability of the American military empire, and the perfect beauty and justness of individual liberty.

Few issues highlight the gaping philosophical divide between libertarians and modern conservatives more starkly than the issue of guns. This might seem counterintuitive, because libertarians and modern conservatives often stand shoulder to shoulder against liberals and progressives to defend individual gun rights. The convenient alliance between modern conservatives and libertarians in the political trenches, however, conceals a fundamental and serious philosophical disagreement.

In order to fully grasp the division between libertarians and modern conservatives on this issue, it is important to understand why libertarians and conservatives think gun rights are so important. At the most general level, both libertarians and modern conservatives agree that all men have a natural right to defend themselves against aggression. More specifically, every man has a natural right to repel with violent force any unjust aggression against his life or his property. Libertarians and modern conservatives do not defend individual gun rights out of some bizarre and loony obsession with a 200-year-old piece of parchment called "The Constitution." On the contrary, they hold that the Constitution of the United States merely articulated something about man's nature that has always been and always will be true.

The logical implication of this, both libertarians and modern conservatives agree, is that individuals have a natural right not just to defend their lives and their property against aggression from individual murderers and thieves, but that they have a natural right to defend themselves from unjust aggression by government. Hollow indeed would be the right to self-defense if it did not include the right to defend oneself against aggression by government — including one's own government, because governments have killed and robbed exponentially more people than have private criminals. Recognizing this fact, libertarians and modern conservatives agree that the natural right to self-defense must include a right to defend oneself against unjust government aggression, and that doing so usually requires more than simply a stick or a slingshot. A population armed with modern guns is not easily cowed, robbed, or massacred unless governments resort to wildly immoral and indiscriminate tactics or weapons of mass destruction.

So far so good. Libertarians and modern conservatives agree that the right to keep and bear arms stems from the natural right to defend oneself against aggression, including unjust aggression by governments. From here on out, however, libertarians and modern conservatives scarcely agree at all, and the conservative position on guns becomes more and more self-contradictory and absurd.

Libertarians hold that armed individuals are indeed capable of effectively resisting and defending themselves from aggression by their own government. If this were not so, then there would be no point whatsoever in defending the right to bear arms so vehemently. If individual gun ownership does not offer a real and substantial defense against our own government, and guns are merely symbolic or for hunting or self-defense against burglars, then why the big fuss over laying down our M-14's and AR-15's? Why not, as the Vice President suggests, keep only double-barreled shotguns for hunting and defense? Why would we care about losing the ability to own an AR-15 any more than we care about losing the ability to buy incandescent light bulbs? The government is constantly restricting our ability to buy and sell all types of things, so what makes guns so sacred if they can't even effectively be used to defend ourselves against our own government?

The libertarians' answer is that well-armed populations can indeed effectively defend themselves against their own governments, and this is precisely why we value the right to own powerful firearms so dearly. Gun ownership is not merely a symbol, but a real and effective means for people to protect their lives and property from private criminals and from tyrannous government. The libertarian understands that the nature of asymmetrical warfare today is such that even very small bands of determined and principled people can fight a purely defensive war against a vastly more powerful foe and come out victorious. In fact, in a guerrilla fight, the odds are in favor of the smaller group of determined and principled fighters, as the U.S. and Soviet militaries discovered in Afghanistan.

Contrast this consistent libertarian position with the absurd position of the modern conservative. The modern conservative holds two contradictory ideas about guns simultaneously. On the one hand, he is likely to agree with the libertarian that individual gun ownership is not merely symbolic, but rather a real and effective means for the American people to protect themselves against aggression by their own government. At the same time, however, he is bound to say that a strong military is needed to protect the American people against foreign threats. In other words, the modern conservative implicitly believes that our guns are insufficient to protect us against the Chinese or the Irish or whomever.

The absurdity of these two positions should be patently obvious, because if the American people are capable of effectively defending themselves against aggression by their own government — the most powerful and heavily armed government in the history of the world — then the American people obviously don't need help from a military to defend them against aggression from relatively dinky powers abroad! The modern conservative would have us believe that We The People are capable of repelling the aggressions of the most powerful government in the history of the world, but that we somehow miraculously lose this capacity if the soldiers or politicians we are confronting have a different uniform or speak a different language.

While the modern conservative is bizarrely capable of simultaneously entertaining these two contradictory positions in his head, it should be obvious that only one of them can possibly be true. If the American people are not capable of effectively defending themselves from their own government with their guns, then gun ownership is merely symbolic and surrendering our AR-15's to Barry Obama is completely meaningless. If, on the other hand, the American people are indeed capable of defending themselves against their own insanely powerful government, when they finally choose to do so as the libertarian asserts, then the extravagant and wasteful military that they finance is totally superfluous and unnecessary, because no foreign government can possibly pose even a fraction of the threat to the American people that the powerful American government and military do.

The modern conservative has gotten himself into this quandary because he has allowed himself to become irrationally terrified by nonexistent foreign bogeymen that are no real threat to him (as if the Chinese or the Iranians could ever be a threat to Coloradoans!), while ignoring the massive danger to life and property that his own government poses. He has ignored the history of the 20th century, a century in which people were slaughtered by the tens of millions by their own governments, and has allowed irrational fear of Koreans, Afghan shepherds, communists, Vietnamese, Chinese and Iranians to overwhelm his rational thinking. His fear has blinded him to the phenomenal hatred that his own government has engendered around the world by meddling with, terrorizing, and killing people everywhere. He has forgotten the danger of a standing army that the Founders warned us about, and he has lost confidence in his own ability to defend himself.

Thus, when the government finally comes for the modern conservative's guns, he will no doubt puff out his chest and scream out that he'd rather die than surrender them. However, the modern conservative's irrational fear of foreigners and his idolatrous love affair with the American military will prevent him from putting up much of a fight. After all, the military and the chickenhawk politicians that lead it around are what the modern conservative believes keep him safe and "free." His delusional belief in the invincibility of the American military will paralyze him with fear of ever defying it. In the end, he will surrender his arms, and he will learn to call it "freedom" in due time.

At that point, the fight will be left to the true lovers of liberty, the libertarians, who understand the fragility and absurdity of the fascist American economy, the unsustainability of the American military empire, and the perfect beauty and justness of individual liberty.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

The Best of Mark R. Crovelli

As a graduate student and construction worker in San Diego from 2003-2005, I was afforded an up-close view of the inflation of the last real estate bubble. It was a truly exciting time to work in the building industry in Southern California because there was so much money sloshing around. I literally couldn't even walk into Home Depot without being accosted by hordes of greedy homeowners and slippery contractors offering to pay cash to anyone willing to do construction work.

Everyone I knew was making piles of easy money buying and flipping homes, and I often heard that I was just plain stupid to not be buying and flipping some of my own. I was content to just be able to finance graduate school without debt, however. I decided to move back to Colorado to finish graduate school at almost precisely the moment that my friends started making really big money in real estate. They all thought that I was insanely stupid to leave.

A year later, I wrote an article predicting the collapse of the real estate bubble. A year after that, my friends in Southern California started losing their jobs, and a year after that many of my old friends started losing big money. My decision to avoid real estate investment looked a lot less stupid at that point.

Only six years have passed since the largest housing bubble in world history imploded, and I am once again receiving investment advice from my friends involving real estate. Instead of buying and flipping homes, they are now promising me piles of easy money if I purchase "investment homes" to rent out. My friends are not quite as exuberant as Californians were in 2006, but the pitch of their excitement is definitely rising.

I am not sold on the idea at all, however. In fact, I think my friends who are piling into "investment properties" right now are setting themselves up for losses on a scale only surpassed by the losses suffered in the last real estate crash. Real estate is still extremely dangerous, and only people with a solid financial cushion and who are willing to take gargantuan risk should be moving into it.

PROPERTY TAXES

In order to see why this is the case, first consider the role of property taxes in real estate investment. Quite obviously, the higher the rate at which a property is taxed, ceteris paribus, the lower the value of that piece of property. This much is obvious. But what most real estate investors do not consider at all is the fact that property taxes can change. The fact that taxes have been X amount for the past ten or twenty years is completely irrelevant if a government decides to raise or lower the rate at which it taxes property.

Given this, the important consideration from an investment standpoint is the rate at which real estate will be taxed in the future. In order to make an informed guess about future property taxes, however, the investor must attempt to forecast the financial condition of the government that taxes the real estate in any given area. Governments facing serious financial difficulty in the future should be expected to try to gouge property owners to make up for budget and pension shortfalls.

The problem is, however, that it is almost impossible to figure out the financial health of any given municipality. The municipal bond market, which is a decent proxy measure of municipal financial health, is one of the most opaque, illiquid and misleading markets out there. Even the incompetent SEC admits this, by the way. Not only that, but many municipalities that are seemingly healthy, and which are still able to borrow massive amounts of money at low rates today, are completely bankrupt from a long term perspective. Many school districts in California, for example, have been engaging in myopic borrowing schemes that basically ensure their future insolvency. More accurately, these municipalities will assuredly be bankrupt in the future if they don't raise property taxes dramatically.

To think that these bankrupt municipal governments and the hoards of government workers and pensioners they parasitically support are going to just file for bankruptcy and lay off massive numbers of teachers, police officers and firemen is just plain silly. Of course they are going to try to pry as much money out of their tax bases as they can. If you are a property owner that means you, and your property taxes are going up — potentially substantially — at some point in the future.

If you think this is merely idle speculation, it is useful to note that the largest tax revolt in U.S. history occurred during the Great Depression primarily over property tax rates, as David Beito has documented. The obvious reason why real estate stuck out as an easy target for government pilfering during the Great Depression was, as Beito notes:

[R]eal property could not be effectively hidden from [the government's] purview, the assessor and collector did not have to engage in costly and unpopular detective work. For all intents and purposes, taxpayers could not conceal their taxable real estate from the authorities. When real estate taxpayers, either by choice or necessity, lapsed into arrears, their delinquency became apparent for all to see.

Owners of visible and immovable wealth are prime targets for bankrupt governments looking for low hanging fruit. Greek homeowners found this out the hard way last year. Hence, investing in real estate at a point when huge numbers of governments are about to go bankrupt is just an invitation for them to rob you. When the municipal bond bubble bursts, and municipal governments are en effect barred from borrowing money to finance their "services" and pension schemes, where do you think they will turn for money? The answer, of course, is real estate owners.

In short, unless you are some sort of expert on the financial wellbeing of the municipality in which you are planning to purchase property, which is almost impossible for anyone to be, you are making a gigantic wager on future tax rates over the next 30 years. That, to me, is the definition of reckless stupidity.

INTEREST RATES

Property taxes are not the only worrying factor for prospective investors in real estate. Another fantastically troubling issue is the fact that interest rates are bound to rise at some point. Even setting aside the question of whether rates will rise in the next few years, they are bound to rise at some point before that 30 year mortgage you are considering taking out is fully paid off. No one with even a modicum of brain matter could possibly think that we could have near zero rates for the next thirty years.

What this means from an investment standpoint is that you will probably be underwater at some point if you buy an investment property right now. In plain language, being "underwater" means is that the value of the home will be less than the amount you owe on the mortgage. The reason why you are likely to get underwater is that when interest rates rise, fewer people are either willing or able to purchase homes at existing prices. While a mortgage payment on a $200,000 loan at 5% is $1282, the payment on the same mortgage is $1675 if rates rise to just 8%. A move of just 3%, which is not large from an historical perspective, results in almost a $400 rise in a mortgage payment. This means that fewer and fewer people are willing or can afford to buy houses at existing prices as rates rise. Hence, home prices will inexorably fall as a result of a rise in rates.

Also note that when a person is paying off a mortgage, even a mortgage on an investment property, he is paying off mostly interest at the beginning of the loan term. So, even though you might be thinking that you are building up equity in the home that will offset the risk of being underwater at some point, you are probably not building up equity nearly as quickly as you think. If the value of the home falls 20%, which is perfectly possible in a market manipulated by government as much as this one is, you are very unlikely to have built up enough equity to be able to get out of debt if you have to sell the home before you pay off the mortgage. This means you are stuck with this "investment home" until home prices rebound, assuming that the ever do.

This is not a problem for rich investors who buy homes outright with cash, but, as was noted above, what kind of a lunatic would want to park hundreds of thousands of dollars in an investment that can't be hidden from government and should be expected to be heavily taxed by bankrupt municipalities looking for easy targets in the future?

The popular imagination takes it for granted that it is smart to move into real estate when rates are low, but the picture is much more complicated than that today. Prospective homeowners, especially young ones, should realize just how much of a hindrance real estate investment can become. Almost 40% of younger homeowners are already underwater today, and that number will grow when rates rise and home prices fall again. When that happens, these homeowners are stuck with the investment. Moving away from the home becomes more difficult, selling it almost impossible, and they are in even bigger trouble if they lose their jobs. Under such circumstances, renting out the property can be the only option, but, as we will see below, the future of rental prices in this country is far from rosy.

A final consideration that seems to be slipping everyone's minds today is that rising interest rates will mean that other investment opportunities are opening up in other sectors of the economy. There will be opportunities in CD's, corporate bonds, and money market funds, for example, to earn a very good return on one's money without the need to tie up one's money in a 30-year investment. These opportunities will be opening up at precisely the time that home prices will be falling due to rising rates. Today's investors in real estate will have their money tied up in an investment that is falling in price, and they will not be in a position to capitalize on these opportunities.

INFLATION

One of most frequently citied issues influencing real estate investors today appears to be a fear of inflation. As a devotee of the Austrian School of economics, I view it as a positive thing that inflation fears are more widespread than ever before in my lifetime, but I worry that these people are not viewing the situation with a wide enough lens.

The popular line of thinking when it comes to real estate and inflation runs something like this: If you purchase a home today with a fixed loan at 5%, you will wind up paying off the mortgage with dollars that are worth much less than they are today. You will thus wind up paying much less for the home than it is actually worth.

This line of thinking is correct, as far as it goes, but it does not capture the entire picture. Specifically, this simple line of reasoning fails to capture the fact that banks would be massively hit by such inflation. The banks and other investors holding mortgage-backed securities would soon discover that they were holding an investment that was turning out to yield much less than they expected. Instead of earning, say, 5% from the interest on these mortgages, they would soon find out that they were holding a security that was earning negative returns, taking inflation into account. This much is just obvious, since inflation inexorably benefits debtors and harms creditors.

Where things get interesting, however, is how the banks and other Wall Street investors are bound to respond in the face of these massive real losses on their mortgage portfolios. Prospective real estate investors today must just assume that the banks and other Wall Street investors are simply going to sit back and say "Hey, we are suffering huge real losses on those mortgages from before the inflation. I guess we just have to take it. Too bad for us."

More realistic, I think, is to assume that the banking cartel is going to do everything in its vast power to weasel out of the mortgages, and that Congress and the judicial system are bound to help them to do it. The last six years were basically a gigantic practice run for the bankers in how to save their sorry asses through legal obfuscation, threats of "systemic failure," and using their corrupt buddies in government to screw ordinary Americans. If you think the banks are above doing this again when they start taking massive inflation hits to their portfolios, you are a much more trusting person than I.

The legal basis for weaseling out of these mortgages is already in place, and it is called "calling in" the loans. Virtually every mortgage contract has provisions for calling in loans, which means that the lender is allowed to demand full repayment of the loan prior to the loan's completion date. Usually, these clauses involve situations when the debtor has failed to make a payment or to pay his property taxes. All the banks need to do is encourage local governments to raise property taxes, which they are bound to do anyway since most of them are broke, and this will put more and more homeowners in arrears in paying them. This is almost exactly what happened in the Great Depression. At the same time, the banks will immediately call in all loans that involved any missed payments in the past (and there are massive numbers of people who have missed payments over the last six years), and you have a perfect escape hatch for the banker scumbags to get out of these loans.

There are surely other ways than this for the bankers to save their own asses, but the point is that investors in real estate are just plain kidding themselves if they think that they are going to outsmart the American banking cartel and the corrupt American congress when it comes to inflation and real estate. After all, what good is a cartel if it can't act in times of crisis to save its own members' asses and screw everyone else?

RENTAL PRICES

The final nail the real estate coffin, from my perspective, is the fact that rental prices in the future can't possibly live up to current expectations. Rental prices and home prices in general are currently inflated due to the "extraordinary" number of vacant homes all around the country. The artificial restriction of supply that has occurred by having these homes sitting vacant simply cannot last. One way or another, these homes are eventually going to be occupied by Americans or foreigners. Some of them will simply be "homesteaded" by squatters. Others will be bought by starry-eyed investors hoping to rent them out. Still others will be bought by foreign gangs hoping to launder money with the assistance of the National Association of Realtors. No matter how these homes wind up being occupied, they will put downward pressure on both home prices and rental prices going forward.

This issue is compounded by the normal problems associated with renting properties, like finding reliable renters who are not going to trash the place, regular maintenance costs on cheaply built houses, and finding renters who will pay their rent on time. Add to this the fact that the insurance companies that insure these homes are sitting on piles upon piles of government debt, which will obviously be devastated by the bursting of the bond bubble, and you have a recipe for the next real estate catastrophe.

CONCLUSION

It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that the bursting of the largest real estate bubble in world history is bound to last for more than a handful of years. This is especially true when it occurs at a time when governments all over the world, including the supposed hegemon, are completely broke. To think that investing one's money in an asset that can't be hidden and that can't be moved at such a time is "smart investing" is sublimely naive.

Now is a time for protecting and, for a lack of a better term, concealing one's assets from the prying eyes of bankrupt governments. Money that looks too easy to make probably is, and money that's parked in a manner that looters can see, (and government is the best looter in history), will probably be stolen.

Keep this in mind the next time you dental hygienist or your brother in law tells you that you are going to become a millionaire if you just start buying houses today.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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The school shooting in Connecticut last week has provoked a slew of hysterical calls for gun control in the United States. Big surprise, I know. What makes the calls for "regulation" and "sensible gun laws" somewhat unique this time around is the focus on mental illness. The fact that the Connecticut shooter is alleged to have been mentally ill is being used by some as an argument for further disarming the mentally ill in general. (It is also interesting that so little focus has hitherto been placed on the dangerous drugs these shooters are all taking, rather than mental illness itself).

Gun rights groups have understandably steered clear of the mental illness issue. On first glance, it just seems like common sense that people with mental illness should not be running around the streets with guns, and groups like the NRA have sidestepped the issue in order to focus on other concerns, like making sure an assault weapons ban is not reinstated. This looks like a politically savvy move by these groups, but it is also a cowardly way to avoid having to stand up for a very vulnerable and voiceless group of people. If these gun rights groups had any worth at all, or if they had one shred of moral fortitude, it would be time for them to stand up for the rights of this extremely vulnerable group of people. Since there is virtually no chance of this happening, it is important for us as individuals to stand up for the gun rights of the mentally ill.

Tackling the issue of mental illness and guns is not nearly as politically dangerous as gun rights groups think. On the contrary, there are so many people in the United States that could potentially be classified as "mentally ill" by the state that it is politically dangerous for these groups to not stand up for them. As much as 20% of the adult population in the United States could be classified as having a mental illness in 2011 alone! With that many people at risk of being disarmed, (if they haven't been so already), the gun rights groups are just plain crazy not to stand up for them.

In addition, the entire case for disarming the mentally ill is based more upon fear and misconceptions rather than rational argument. In the first place, there is the gigantic problem of deciding who is to be considered mentally ill. Most people probably have in mind disarming delusional schizophrenics walking around in bunny slippers, an image the gun control crowd has fostered, but mental illness is a much broader concept than that.

For example, if a medical student suffers a panic attack due to stress and is institutionalized for a day or two, does that mean that she is mentally ill and should be disarmed? If so, for how long will she lose her right to bear arms, and who is to decide if and when she is to recover her ability to defend herself? Or, what about the estimated 11% of Americans who are taking antidepressants? Are these people also mentally ill, and will they be disarmed as well? What if a person took antidepressants years ago, but has since stopped taking them? Is he mentally ill, and will he be disarmed? Or, even more dangerous, what if a prescription-happy doctor tells you to take antidepressants, but you don't want them and don't even take them? Would you still be classified as having been diagnosed with mental illness and lose your right to own guns? These are just a few of the fantastically insidious implications of disarming the mentally ill even more than they already have been.

The implications of disarming the mentally ill go far beyond merely the civilian population, because our armed services are absolutely chock filled with people who could and probably would be classified as mentally ill. The astounding rate at which soldiers are killing themselves testifies to this fact, as does the astounding 110,000 soldiers who are taking powerful antidepressant, sedative and antipsychotic medications. Are these people to be disarmed as well? If so, where would that leave our military? What about when these soldiers return home with emotional and other mental problems, are we going to add insult to injury and tell them that we are going to disarm them as well? Thanks for sacrificing your mental health, soldier, your reward is to lose your right to own guns.

These are just some of the practical implications that would flow from completely disarming the mentally ill in this country, but there are still other ethical problems that would flow from it as well. Many of the more seriously mentally ill persons in this country are incapable of holding down remunerative work, and many thus live in poorer parts of the cities in this country that are far from safe. To disarm these people, many of whom are already easy targets of crime, is to make them even more vulnerable for exploitation and injury. To disarm these people completely would be to broadcast from the rooftops to the criminals of this country that it was open season on the mentally ill. Want an easy mark that you know is not armed, just pick out the nearest mentally ill person!

Also bear in mind that, because there are so very many people in this country who can be classified as mentally ill, and current laws for restricting their gun rights are ineffective, there are currently millions upon millions of mentally ill people with guns in America. This fact alone should alert us to the fact that mentally ill people are overwhelmingly capable of owning guns responsibly, just like people without mental illness. These millions of responsible mentally ill are completely overlooked, as if it is impossible for a mentally ill person to refrain from shooting people, which is just plain silly.

The firearm is the great equalizer for weak and vulnerable people, like the mentally ill and the elderly (many of whom are depressed, and could thus also be classified as mentally ill!). To take away a weak or vulnerable person's right to defend himself is self-righteous, cowardly, and wrong. All people have the right to defend themselves against aggression. This is just as true of the mentally ill as it is of anyone else. Getting sick, whether physically or mentally, should not mean that you lose your right to defend yourself.

If this doesn't convince you, remember that there has been a long tradition in the United States of using psychology as a weapon against the weak and vulnerable. If the mentally ill are disarmed today, you could easily find yourself diagnosed as mentally ill tomorrow. When that happens, you will wish that you had stood up for the rights of the weakest among us.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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I was walking home from the bars in Boulder, Colorado one night in 2002 when I saw a street fight about to occur. There was a large and boisterous group of guys on one side of the street who looked like they were about to pound the snot out of two guys who were standing in the middle of the street. Everyone was screaming at one another, and the situation looked to me like a mob of drunk hooligans trying to stir up a fight with two random guys making their way home from the bar.

I watched the situation escalate for a minute and then decided that I had better jump in on the side of the two guys who looked like they were about to get pounded. At the instant that I took sides in the fight, punches started to be thrown, and I found myself in a full-fledged brawl in the street.

The fight did not play out as I had anticipated. The two guys I was trying to help, and whom I thought were the victims of this large mob, turned out to be almost expert fighters. The mob of screaming guys turned out to be a just a group of drunk frat boys who didn't really want to fight, and most of whom were screaming "what are you doing?" when punches started flying.

After a few minutes of vigorous fighting the group of frat boys took to their heels, and I was left with the two guys that I thought were victims. After talking with them for less than a minute, however, I could tell that they were the ones who had actually started the fight, and that they had set out to intentionally pick a fight with someone that night.

Thoroughly disgusted with myself, I left them and resumed my walk home.

The next morning I felt extremely guilty for what I had done, even though I had only tried to do what I thought was right at the time. It did not make me feel any better to think that I had acted with the right intentions, however. I felt embarrassed for having gotten involved in such a fight, guilty for having hurt blameless people, and, most of all, just plain stupid for thinking that I could tell who was "right" in a fight that did not involve me at all.

What I came to realize as a result of this shameful episode in my life is that human beings have an innate and almost always stupid desire to take sides in fights. When other people are arguing with each other, shooting at each other, or punching each other, we have an almost pathological desire to turn one side into the "good" side and the other side into the "bad" side. It rarely occurs to people during a conflict to analyze whether the side they are cheering on or joining is really the "good" side. Even more rarely still does it occur to people to think that both sides could be in the wrong. One side of a fight must be "good" to our silly little minds.

There is an obvious reason for this. We all find ourselves in conflicts with other people from time to time, and we are quite naturally predisposed to think that our own side of an argument or a fight is the "good" or "right" one. Few indeed are the people who enter a fight or an argument thinking that their side of the argument is the "bad" or "wrong" one. Even the thugs I had stupidly backed in the street fight thought that they were in the right because smug little frat boys "deserve to get their asses kicked from time to time." Our natural bias toward believing we are in the right predisposes us to view conflicts involving other people through the same black-white filter.

This natural tendency would be less of a problem for us if all fights and arguments between people were simple and clear-cut. If there was always an obvious "good guy" and "bad guy" in every fight or argument, we could easily take sides and fight for good (although we would still have to question whether it is a good thing to expand conflicts to involve more people).

The problem is that conflicts and arguments between people are almost always more nuanced and complicated than they initially appear. Some fights involve groups of people that are fighting for a just cause but are using immoral means to achieve it. Some fights involve groups of people that have impeccable intentions but who are actually fighting against the values they claim to support. Some fights even involve two groups of people that are both "wrong" or "bad," such as the fight between the mass murderer Hitler and the mass murderer Stalin. Our natural inclination to think that one side of these types of fights is "good" or "right" will necessarily get us into moral hot water.

The antidote to this natural inclination is just to think a little bit before we join fights or arguments on one side or another. When real fighting and killing is involved between people we don't even know, we should obviously just keep out of it altogether. Our chances of picking the "right" side of such a fight — if there even is a "right" side — are extremely small, and the moral hazard of accidentally backing people whose actions we deplore is extremely high. It is not our moral responsibility to look into every fight around the country or the world, try to pick a side that looks "right," and pick up a rifle to start killing people. Staying out of it keeps the casualties lower than they otherwise would be if every nosy person in the world were arming himself to pitch in with the killing. No one benefits by having armed conflicts expanded and more people killed or maimed, and we are protected from irrevocably staining our hands with the blood of people we don't even know.

We are rarely tempted as individuals to try to involve ourselves in conflicts between groups of people we don't know, however, and it is rare for us to be walking down the streets and witness a street fight about to occur. Instead, we are usually tempted to get involved in conflicts far removed from us by politicians who try to convince us that one group of people in the world is "good" and another group of people is "evil." The need for caution and skepticism is even greater when other people are trying to convince us to bloody our hands — especially when lying politicians are the ones trying to convince us.

The moral problem for us is all the more acute since people in other countries are not all the same. Some of the "good guys" favored by politicians can and often do turn out to be genocidal lunatics, fanatical racists, and even maniacal terrorists. Some of the "bad guys" condemned by politicians can turn out in retrospect to have been simply misunderstood or mistranslated, or even peace lovers. Worse still, the politicians who are agitating to get us involved in conflicts are often operating behind the scenes in ways that complicate the situation at best, or are inherently wrong at worst. If it is almost impossible to know if anyone in a street fight is "right," how much harder is it to judge the nature of people thousands of miles away that you will never meet, and that may be completely misrepresented by politicians? The answer is that it is almost impossible to judge them or their conflicts.

None of this is going to change anytime soon. All that we can do as morally responsible people is to think a little bit. Recognize that there is rarely a "good guy" to root for or arm in a fight you know nothing about six thousand miles away. Recognize that you can irrevocably stain your hands with blood if you unthinking back a group of people who turn out to do unconscionable things. Most importantly, recognize that you don't need to take sides in fights that don't directly involve you.

Your conscience will thank you for minding your business.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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A few weeks ago, I was lounging on the edge of a beautiful corn field in Eastern Colorado having one of the most interesting conversations of my entire life, although I didn't realize it at the time. My friends and I were in the field that day in the hope of doing some dove hunting, but there were virtually no birds flying. As a consequence, I was sprawled out in the hot grass with my shotgun tossed out in the dirt. My friends and their shotguns were similarly situated, which left us completely unprepared for the two or three birds that did show up.

We had plenty of time to chat, since there was nothing to shoot at, so I eventually managed to bring the conversation around to anarchism, as is my habit. A few of them were not aware that I am an incorrigible anarchist, so I took the opportunity to explain to them why I think free-market anarchism is ethically and economically superior to every other conceivable social arrangement.

Their response to my arguments, unsurprisingly, appealed to the Hobbesian idea that men would act like barbarians or beasts in the absence of government. Without cops, everyone would be running around robbing, raping and killing one another until the species died out completely.

Now, setting aside the fact that anarchism does not imply an absence of law or defense, and setting aside the fact that Hobbes' ideas about the state of nature are completely ridiculous, just consider how interesting their claim was in that particular situation. Five armed men sitting in a field dozens and dozens of miles from a police officer having a civil chat about anarchism without any one of us trying to rape, rob or kill any of the others is a rather remarkable thing if Thomas Hobbes is right about human nature. Equally interesting is the fact that none of us feared or even contemplated the possibility of being raped, robbed or killed by anyone out there in the wilds of the Colorado plains that day. Like Coloradoans of the 19th century, we met scores of armed men over the course of the day, none of which we personally knew, and yet it never even crossed any of our minds to be concerned for our chastity, our wealth or our lives.

What is more, none of my friends grew fearful when they learned that I was an anarchist. If Thomas Hobbes is right that men are wolves, one would think that my friends would have sprung to their feet, seized their shotguns, and slowly backed out of the field upon learning that there was a man who despises government in their midst. If government is necessary to keep men from butchering one another, then how could my friends have ever turned their backs on a savage like me who despises cops, detests politicians, and thinks government judges are below contempt? How could such a man ever be trusted — especially out on the lawless plains of Colorado, where cops are about as scarce as doves were that day?

Yet, my friends did not bat an eye when they discovered I am an anarchist. It's true that they found it intellectually startling, but we all nevertheless continued to laze and chat in the hot prairie grass, sipping cold beer and looking for birds that never arrived.

This situation starkly illuminates the fact that Thomas Hobbes is wrong about human nature, and he is wrong about what keeps men from robbing, raping, or killing one another. It is simply absurd to think that what keeps thousands of heavily armed men on the Colorado prairie from raping or killing one another is fear of some hick police officer fifty miles away eating grits in a diner, or fear of the politicians in the Colorado State Capital Building who are busy writing legislation to pad union pension plans. What keeps the men on the Colorado prairie from raping and killing one another is the fact that men are by nature cooperative and peaceful, for the most part. If this were not so, no quantity of hick cops and corrupt politicians could possibly keep the hoards of armed men on the Colorado prairie from butchering one another.

Defenders of government, including Thomas Hobbes himself, seem to intuitively understand this, because they intentionally avoid talking about real government actors. They talk about government only in the most abstract terms, as if they know instinctively that their argument would be transparently absurd if they allowed real cops and real politicians into the debate.

They use terms like "government," "police," and "courts" only in the most abstract and evasive sense. They never point to real politicians and say things like "Man, without that Nancy Pelosi in Washington telling us what to do, we would all be raping and killing one another." They never point to real police officers and say things like "Well, it's pretty obvious that without Larry — he's the heavy-set guy in the blue costume with the mustache eating grits over there — you and I would probably be fighting to the death right now." And they never point to real government courts and say things like "You have to admit, Mark, that the judgments handed down by government courts in Colorado are always as fair and just as can be humanly imagined. No judicial arrangement could ever be better than what we have right now."

If you live in a city, as I do, and you are surrounded by cops giving speeding tickets, government teachers "educating" your children, government regulators with their hands on the throat of your business, and slimy politicians hassling you for your vote, it is understandable that you might come to accept and rationalize the existence of these parasites. They are so deeply embedded in the life of the modern American city that it almost seems impossible to conceive of life without them.

That's why it is so important for a man's mind to get out of the city from time to time with a posse of his friends carrying guns. There is nothing more freeing than sitting in hot prairie dirt with a shotgun and a cold beer hundreds of miles away from smarmy politicians, government teachers, corrupt cops and judges, and, worst of all, tax collectors. It's not just the sense of physical liberation that this engenders, but the mental freedom that comes with it. To be able to look back at the tax collectors, politicians and cops with a free mind and ask whether such parasites are even necessary is a spectacular thing.

Give it a try, and see if it doesn't make you an incorrigible anarchist too.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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An important characteristic of both crimes and fires is the impossibility of knowing where either will occur. Firemen may have a general sense of the buildings that are at a higher risk of burning down, but they have absolutely no idea about which particular house will be the next one to catch fire (unless the firemen are the arsonists). Similarly, cops may have a general sense of what neighborhoods have a higher crime rate than others, but they have absolutely no idea which person will be the next one to commit murder or rape (unless the cops themselves commit the next murder or rape).

Given that cops and firemen are both concerned to respond to events that cannot be predicted, it is extremely odd that they act so differently from one another. Firemen do not "patrol" neighborhoods in the hope of spotting the next house fire or car accident. They wait until someone calls them, and they respond accordingly. Cops, on the other hand, do "patrol" neighborhoods, hide under overpasses, dress up in "undercover" costumes and otherwise skulk about their communities looking for crimes that are being committed.

What gives? Why don't cops and firemen use the same strategy? Crimes can be predicted no better than fires, so why don't cops just wait to be called instead of driving around looking for something that is impossible to predict?

The answer is to be found in the fact that the United States is no longer a free country. When almost everything people do is either illegal or "regulated," there is an overabundance of so-called "crimes" being committed at every moment of the day. Murder and rape, like house fires, are relatively rare events, but when the state has criminalized all sorts of normal and non-aggressive actions, like consuming certain plants or driving one's car over a certain arbitrary speed, the cops have a glut of criminals to deal with. They can't just sit in their offices and wait to respond to murders, thefts, rapes and assaults because they have to deal with millions of other people that the political class has labeled "criminals."

At this very moment, for example, there are literally thousands of "criminals" in the United States who are driving around in their cars without seatbelts on, and thousands of other "criminals" who are ingesting substances that the politicians in Washington don't like. In other words, the streets are literally crawling with "criminals" at all times, which means that cops have no time whatsoever to go back to the station to rest. The 24-hour patrol is thus necessitated by politicians' ever-expanding definition of crime.

In other words, the police are no longer in the business of protecting people from rare and costly events, and thus have nothing whatsoever in common with firemen. They are in the business of cracking skulls and enforcing the political class's dictates on the people. Firemen, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly volunteers who simply wait to respond to accidents. Firemen are a form of voluntary social insurance against accidents, while the police are merely thuggish tools of the political class.

In a truly free society, the police act just like firemen (if they exist at all), and they wait to be called upon to protect people's lives and property. That's it. There is no room in a free society for laws and regulations that criminalize normal, non-aggressive actions to the point where policemen must be on patrol 24 hours a day. If the police feel overwhelmed with "criminals" and they have no time to simply go back to the office for doughnuts, this is a sure sign that liberty is dead.

If the police are out in the streets beating schizophrenics to death instead of waiting to be called on to protect people, liberty is completely dead. If the police are hiding under overpasses trying to "catch" people to fine instead of perfecting their reaction time to real emergencies, liberty is completely dead. If the police are required to run around spraying non-aggressive people in the face with pepper spray instead of locating stolen property, liberty is completely dead. If the police are breaking into innocent people's homes and filling them with bullets in front of their children instead of solving all of the rapes in their precincts, liberty is completely dead. In fact, if the police are doing anything other than sitting in their offices waiting for a call for help or working on solving past crimes, they are thereby destroying liberty. A free society has no need for antisocial thugs that will do whatever the political class tells them to.

Real crimes like murder, rape, theft and assault are relatively rare, just like fires. They would be even rarer if we lived in a free country and the police were in the business of reacting to and solving these crimes instead of wasting their time and energy (and our money) shoving Washington's vision of morality down our throats. We Americans don't need policemen to beat us and fine us into doing the right thing any more than we need firemen to beat and fine us into doing the right thing. We just need them both to protect our lives and property.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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Nothing in the academic world reeks more revoltingly than the man who labels anyone who disagrees with him a shoddy scholar. Such a desperate act of intellectual dishonesty is a sure sign that the man who resorts to it possesses not a shred of intellectual integrity and is utterly incapable of honest discourse. The fact that few scholars ever stoop so low is primarily due to the fact that their peers are readily capable of recognizing the tactic for what it is: puerile name-calling masquerading as argumentation.

Nevertheless, there do exist a few simple-minded souls in the academic world who are undaunted by the crassness and fallaciousness of the ad hominem and the non sequitur. For men of this ilk, scoring cheap points against an opponent is more important than forming sound arguments or even clear thinking.

For this low breed of "scholar," Michael Emmett Brady must be something of a hero. Not only is he undaunted by the crassness of hurling unfounded insults at his opponents, he is willing to do so in a way that reveals his own barefaced hypocrisy. Few men, let alone scholars, have the chutzpa to embarrass themselves so completely.

Brady accomplished this ignoble feat in a short article (i.e., "pamphlet") that he penned for Amazon.com. His aim was to demonstrate that Murray Rothbard had — God forbid! — misinterpreted J.M. Keynes's theory of probability. Rothbard's interpretation in Keynes, The Man shows that, according to Brady,

Rothbard was either a master of deceit and deception or an ignorant fool.Either case is good grounds for eliminating M Rothbard from serious consideration as an economist or philospher.M Rothbard was a pamphleteer. [All errors in original]

Think of the abject hypocrisy involved in writing such a thing! This man, who claims to have a PhD in economics just like Murray Rothbard, has the gall to denounce Rothbard as a "pamphleteer" in a self-published online pamphlet! Not only that, but his own pamphlet is so badly organized, spelled and punctuated that it makes one long to read something by Thorstein Veblen. Now that takes chutzpa — and it's just the second sentence!

Things only get worse from there. Brady then goes on to list eleven ways (there are two number nines) in which he thinks Murray Rothbard misinterpreted Keynes's theory of probability. The first four of Brady's criticisms are aimed at Rothbard's claim that Keynes "championed the classical a priori theory of probability, where probability fractions are deduced purely by logic and have nothing to do with empirical reality" (Keynes, The Man, p. 8). This characterization, according to Brady, is completely mistaken for the following reasons:

The first 4 errors occur in Rothbard’s claim that ” Keynes’s Treatise championed the classical a priori theory of probability, where probability fractions are deduced purely by logic and have nothing to do with empiricalreality.” First,Keynes’s logical theory of probabiity is based on George Boole’s 1854 The Laws of Thought.It has nothing to do with the Classical theory of Laplace,whose Principle of Non Sufficient Reason Keynes decimated in the A Treatise on Probability in chapter 4.Second ,all of Keynes’s probabilities are conditional .Third,the hypothesis,h, is always related to empirical evidence,e.Thus , a probability is always of the form P(h/e).Fourth,the claim that the ” probability fractions are deduced purely by logic and have nothing to do with empirical reality.” is simply bizarre as Keynes’s probabilitiies ,in general, are intervals and are not sharp or point probabilities(fractions)except in the limiting case where the weight of the evidence,w,= or approaches 1.The condition that w=1 or approaches 1 only occurs in the physical and biological sciences. [All errors in original, unfortunately]

When you recover from the headache this nauseatingly poor prose no doubt gave you, you should notice that Brady is attacking Rothbard for characterizing Keynes's theory in the standard way. It is standard practice to characterize Keynes's theory as one of the many "a priori" or "logical" interpretations of probability. Rothbard is certainly not alone in doing so. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, characterizes Keynes's theory in virtually the same way:

Logical theories of probability retain the classical interpretation’s idea that probabilities can be determined a priori by an examination of the space of possibilities… Early proponents of logical probability include Johnson (1921), Keynes (1921), and Jeffreys (1939).

Now, Brady may disagree with characterizing Keynes's theory in this manner, but it is completely unfair to criticize Rothbard alone for doing so. Why, for example, does Brady not call the author of this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy a "master of deceit and deception or an ignorant fool"? Why does he not rail against other philosophers of probability, such as Roy Weatherford, who very similarly characterize Keynes's theory? He does not do so because he is trying to score cheap points against Rothbard by giving the asinine impression that Rothbard alone described Keynes's theory as an a priori theory.

Nor is it at all legitimate to respond to Rothbard's characterization by claiming that Keynes's theory derived from George Boole and not from Laplace. In the first place, Rothbard never made any claims that Keynes's theory derived from Laplace or that Keynes's probabilities are not conditional. That alone makes Brady's first two objections irrelevant and thus completely ridiculous, but they are even more so if we observe that it was virtually standard practice for frequentists (and often still is standard practice, for dogmatic statisticians today) to think of everyone before John Venn or even Richard von Mises as a "classicist." This obviously includes George Boole. Again, Brady may not like this standard classification (although it would be nice if he would explain what possible difference this could make), but it is absolutely moronic for him to insinuate that Murray Rothbard is unique in so classifying Boole. Why, for example, did he not choose to call Richard von Mises, the very man who can arguably be said to have originated this line of thinking, a "master of deceit and deception or an ignorant fool"? The answer, of course, is that Brady is trying to score cheap points against Rothbard alone by implying that he has outlandish views on Keynes.

The same is obviously true with regard to Brady's fourth criticism of Rothbard. Rothbard is chided for ignoring Keynes's supposedly important "interval approach to probability":

Fourth,the claim that the ” probability fractions are deduced purely by logic and have nothing to do with empirical reality.” is simply bizarre as Keynes’s probabilitiies ,in general, are intervals and are not sharp or point probabilities(fractions)except in the limiting case where the weight of the evidence,w,= or approaches 1.The condition that w=1 or approaches 1 only occurs in the physical and biological sciences. [All errors in original]

This criticism and Brady's tenth criticism, however, do not explain to the reader how Keynes's "intervals" make his theory of probability an empirically-based theory and not logically-based theory, as Rothbard claims. That alone is a grave and inexcusable oversight, but it also gives the impression that Rothbard is unique in neglecting Keynes's supposedly important "intervals." What Brady does not note here is that he has criticized virtually everyone in science, from philosophers to economists, for neglecting Keynes's supposedly important "intervals"! Even the famed probabilist Henry E. Kyburg is criticized by Brady for having misunderstood this esoteric element of Keynes's thought. But does Brady call Kyburg a "master of deceit and deception or an ignorant fool"? Of course not, because Brady is a partisan hack who only unfairly savages Austrians like Rothbard, but not everyone else that he disagrees with.

That Brady is trying to score cheap shots can be most clearly seen in Brady's sixth and seventh criticisms of Rothbard:

Sixth,it is not true that Keynes’s approach to probability was part ” … of his continuing campaign against Christian morality “.It was part of Keynes’s campaign against the hypocrisy of Victorian Morality,which was a far cry from being Christian.Seventh,Keynes never linked “… rationality to expediency. The circumstances of an action become the most important consideration in judgments of probable rightness “. Keynes argued that all of the evidence,not merely statistical frequencies, had to be considered.This would mean that unique and infrequent circumstances would have to be taken into account in making a judgment of the probable amount of goodness. [All errors in original, unfortunately]

At no point, however, does Brady note that it was Robert Skidelsky, not Murray Rothbard, who made these claims! Rothbard merely cites Skidelsky on these points. Again, Brady may disagree with Skidelsky, but how is it fair or even rational to criticize Rothbard for merely citing Keynes' famed biographer? Is Brady intellectually consistent enough and brave enough to call the famed biographer of Keynes a "master of deceit and deception or an ignorant fool" for his claims? Of course not, because Brady is trying to score another cheap shot against Murray Rothbard alone. There goes one fifth of Brady's criticism of Rothbard right out the window.

Brady's last four criticisms of Rothbard are similarly misguided:

Eighth,the claim that “,,, Keynes’s a priori theory was demolished by Richard von Mises (1951) in his 1920s work, Probability, Statistics, and Truth.” is a bad joke .Richard von Mises incorrectly identifies Keynes as a subjectivist and committed the fatal error of overlooking Keynes’s requirement that all probabilities require that w > 0.Richard von Mises claim that Keynes specified probabilities for the case where w=0 means that he never read the book he claimed to be discussing.Nineth,Rothbard’s claim that” Mises demonstrated that the probability fraction can be meaningfully used only when it embodies an empirically derived law of entities which are homogeneous, random, and indefinitely repeatable.” had already been done by Keynes in chapters 8 and 33 of the TP.Keynes would have added the terms uniform and stable as he did in his debate with Tinbergen in 1939-40 in the Economic Journal.Nineth, the claim that ” probability theory can only be applied to events which, in human life, are confined to those like the lottery or the roulette wheel.” is only correct if one is using mathematical probability.Keynes includes interval probability as the main way in which people use probability.Tenth,”For a comparison of Keynes and Richard von Mises, see D.A. Gillies [1973: pp. 1--34]… ” makes no sense because Gillies never discusses Keynes ‘s interval estimate approach to probability. [All errors in original]

Note that the first three of these criticisms (yes, there are two number nines) are not criticisms of Rothbard per se. They are, rather, attacks against Richard von Mises, whose definition for probability necessarily implies that probabilities not derived from "collectives" of events are not numerical probabilities at all (pdf). Rothbard, like many statisticians today, was a proponent of von Mises's frequentist definition for probability, but it was Richard von Mises who came up with it, not Rothbard. Similarly, it was Richard von Mises who argued that Keynes was a subjectivist, not Rothbard. Only someone who is hopelessly confused or intentionally aiming to mislead would criticize Rothbard for the claims of Richad von Mises.

Incidentally, Richard von Mises's characterization of Keynes as a subjectivist is not without some merit. When is came to probability, Keynes's thinking was every bit as muddled and contradictory as his economic thought. On the one hand, for example, Keynes talks out of one side of his mouth about probability being subjective:

[I]t is without significance to call a proposition probable unless we specify the knowledge to which we are relating it. To this extent, therefore, probability may be called subjective. (A Treatise on Probability, p. 9)

and

A definition of probability is not possible, unless it contents us to define degrees of the probability-relation by reference to degrees of rational belief. (A Treatise on Probability, p. 13)

On the other hand, Keynes constantly hedges statements like these with others to the effect that probability is not strictly subjective. The point is, Richard von Mises did not fabricate the idea that Keynes was a subjectivist out of whole cloth. Keynes was simply unclear about this, as usual. (Also, Brady's suggestion that Richard von Mises did not read Keynes's treatise is especially rich, given Keynes's admission that his German was not good enough to understand Richard's brother Ludwig's Theory of Money and Credit. The irony of this is perhaps lost on a "scholar" such as Brady).

To sum up, Michael Emmett Brady, the serial pamphleteer on Amazon.com, has no case against Murray Rothbard. He has patched together a series of criticisms that should properly be directed towards other people or the entire community of statisticians and probabilists and somehow concludes that "Rothbard’s scholarship can only be characterized as pathetic." Disagreeing with Rothbard's perfectly standard take on Keynes's theory is no justification for condemning all of his work. I, for example, have criticized Richard von Mises's definition of probability (pdf) as being inconsistent and self-contradictory. I was not, however, brazen or foolish enough to call into question all of von Mises's other work in applied mathematics, simply because he misunderstood the definition of probability. Nor was I crass enough to call anyone who adopted Mises's definition of probability a "master of deceit and deception or an ignorant fool."

Only the simplest of minds could succumb to such a bald non sequitur. This would be like condemning the entire corpus of Keynes' work on the basis of his rabid anti-Semitism.

I somehow doubt, however, that even a mind as simple as Brady's would be willing to toss out that particular baby with Keynes's filthy bathwater. And that is the hallmark of a partisan hack.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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My inbox over the past few days has been absolutely inundated with emails from people from all over the world who took time out of their busy lives to denounce me as "crazy," "delusional," and, my personal favorite, "smoking the good stuff." What got so many people fired up and so eager to diagnose my mental health was my article "How Iran Could Whip the U.S. and Israel without Firing a Single Shot." In that article I made the suggestion that the Iranians have the ability to avoid conflict with the U.S. and Israel by doing exactly what is demanded of them. Instead of allowing themselves to be dragged into a bloody war with two of the most powerful nations in the history of the world, I suggested that the Iranians hold a trump card that will allow them to escape that outcome by abandoning their nuclear program in toto. This suggestion, according to many people who wrote to me, is a sign that I have fallen off my rocker.

Before anyone runs out to secure a court order to have me committed (or drug tested), allow me to make some additional observations in defense of my argument.

The first thing that I would note is that my argument is really just a different way of saying that the Iranian government can and will try to avoid a brutal and bloody war with two of the most heavily armed countries in the history of the world. Duh. They will try to avoid this outcome not because they particularly care about the wellbeing of their citizens, (of course they don't, they're politicians after all), but because they are acutely aware that wars with the United States eventually result in "regime change." Two of their neighboring governments were overthrown by the U.S. military in just the last ten years, despite the fact that those governments had nothing to do with 9-11 and did not attack the United States, and they just watched the U.S. help to overthrow the Libyan government. Surely the Iranian government is aware that war with the U.S. and Israel will produce a similar outcome for themselves. If they are foolish enough to allow a war to develop, they would have to assume that would meet a fate similar to Saddam Hussein or Mullah Omar.

While obvious, this point is critical for understanding why the Iranian government could eventually scuttle its nuclear program and secure peace. Many people, for example, wrote to me with doubts that the Iranian government would ever be willing to "lose face" with their own people by dismantling its nuclear program. What these people fail to consider, however, is that the Iranian government has to consider not only the disposition of its citizens, but also what is likely to happen if they allow a war to develop with the U.S. Losing face with one's own citizens is usually a bad thing for a politician, but when the alternative is getting overthrown by a powerful foreign military and being executed like a dog in the street, losing face doesn't look nearly such a bad alternative.

It is not clear, by the way, that the Iranian government would lose face by scuttling its nuclear program. After all, as I noted in my previous article, the Iranian government has surely made the Iranian people aware that even the American intelligence agencies and the IAEA agree that it is not developing nuclear weapons, which means that the Iranian people are no doubt aware that the U.S. and Israel are provoking Iran for reasons unrelated to nuclear weapons or nuclear power. To save face, the Iranian government need only say to the Iranian people "Look, these guys are trying to do to us what they did to Iraq, and we are going to do everything we can to avoid foreign occupation. If that means scuttling our nuclear program, so be it, because foreign occupation by the lawless and brutal Americans is worse than almost anything." The hordes of Iraqi refugees, orphans and widows in Iran would no doubt testify to the truth of this statement, in case the there are any Iranians who are stupid and chauvinistic enough to want to fight the Americans in order to "save face."

Some of my critics argued that even if the Iranian government was to scuttle its nuclear program completely, it would still face bombing or invasion, and they pointed to Iraq and Libya as examples. What these critics fail to notice is that "appeasement," to use their pejorative word, did in fact work for Libya. When Gaddafi scuttled his own nuclear program the U.S. sponsored sanctions on Libya were lifted! Of course the U.S. eventually took advantage of Gaddafi's weakness and intervened after he lost control of "his" people, but that was eight years after the UN lifted sanctions on Libya. If Iran can buy eight years of sanction-free détente by scuttling their nuclear program today, do you really doubt that they would seize the opportunity? Is their civilian and medical nuclear program so vital to their existence that they can afford to jeopardize their entire economy, including the solvency of their central bank, in the naïve hope that the Americans and Israelis will leave them alone? Who's being crazy now?

The case of Iraq does not support these critics' case either. Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons or WMD, just like Iran does not have a nuclear program, but he thought he could stand up to the Americans and intimidate the Iranians by refusing entry to UN weapons inspectors. This decision, which is precisely what my critics think the Iranians will do today by continuing their civilian nuclear program at all costs, gave the Americans and their lapdogs a reason to invade in 2003. Had he relented and renounced WMD and nuclear weapons completely, (as Gaddafi was doing the very same year!), things might have turned out very differently in Iraq.

The Iranians, having intently watched both of these scenarios play out in Muslim countries in their backyard, are surely less forgetful of the circumstances surrounding American invasion than my critics. How else can we explain the Iranians' almost blasé response to Israeli/American terrorism within their borders, overt threats of war, aggressive American drone missions, and American naval posturing in the Persian Gulf? One would expect, if my critics are right that the Iranians would never consider "appeasing" the Americans, that they would have already closed the Straits of Hormuz, as they recently claimed they are capable of doing. Instead, all they have done is to send a "letter of protest" to the U.S. to complain about American-sponsored terrorism on their soil. Can you imagine that? Their only response to terrorism, of all things, is to send a "letter of protest" to the terrorists? Isn't that a sign that the Iranians are reasonable people who truly do want to avoid a murderous war at all costs?

Another important consideration that eludes my critics is the fact that the Iranian government is no doubt aware of the strategy of Osama bin Laden. The Iranians are certainly no fans of bin Laden, (he being a Sunni, while the Iranians are Shiites), but you don't have to be coreligionist to recognize good political strategy when you see it. Bin Laden's strategy was to draw the Israeli's rich uncle, the United States, into a conflict that would eventually bankrupt the Americans just like the Russians were bankrupted in Afghanistan. Having watched the American economy nearly topple over the edge of the abyss in 2008, and watching the Americans' lapdogs in Europe teetering on the brink of economic catastrophe today, the Iranian government is surely aware that time is on their side. They merely need to bide their time before the Americans, Israelis, and the Europeans are hamstrung by their incredible economic problems, not the least of which are their costly wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, etc. Given this, why would the Iranians risk a murderous war and its attendant "regime change," when they can simply suspend their nuclear program completely today and wait out the Americans? My critics must think that the Iranian government has the time preference of a 13-year-old girl!

Still another thing to bear in mind is the fact that the United States government went to great lengths in the lead-up to the Iraq war to secure an "international coalition." They hoodwinked the gullible Colin Powell into showing up and lying at the United Nations in order to convince foreign governments that their proposed war was a "just war." It wasn't, of course, but the fact that the U.S. government felt obliged to try to secure international approval before invading is important. It means that if the Iranians publicly disavow their nuclear program in toto, the U.S. and Israel are going to have a hell of a time securing an international coalition. While this might seem trivial, remember that Iran is a much bigger and much more militarily powerful country than Iraq was, so if there is an invasion without an "international coalition," the U.S. and Israel are going to have to bear the costs of this gigantic catastrophe alone. This alone could prevent a war from breaking out, because the costs will be huge in both lives and treasure.

In conclusion, it is not as easy to determine what a foreign government will do as my critics assume. Governments are made up of people, just like you and me, and they will no doubt weigh their desire for domestic approval against their fear that they will wind up being hanged on an American-constructed gallows.

Foreign governments are capable of reading Sun Tzu just like anyone else, after all, and here is a quote from him that they might be taking to heart right now: "Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance." (HT Michael LaBelle)

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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To the outside observer, the intensifying conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran (along with some lesser bellicose nations, like Britain) may appear like a classic "prisoner's dilemma." The best option for both sides seems to be to pacify their domestic constituencies by escalating the conflict, which will ensure the worst possible outcome. The Israeli right-wing government is seemingly beholden to its extremist and terrorist voting blocs, while the American government is seemingly fenced in by the Israel lobby, neoconservative candidates vying for the imperial throne, the US empire and merchants of death, and the Israeli government itself. Meanwhile, the semi-totalitarian Iranian government is seemingly obliged to "stand up" to the aggressive Americans and their "Zionist client state," lest it be seen as "soft" or "weak" by its own citizens.

As in a classic prisoner's dilemma, both sides are ostensibly ensuring the worst possible outcome by focusing on their own domestic political agendas at the expense of the bigger picture and saner solutions.

If this conflict did indeed represent a classic prisoner's dilemma, we would have little reason to think that the conflict will not worsen dramatically in the future. We would have to assume that both sides would continue to escalate the conflict to a point from which it would be completely impossible to pull back. World War III would be virtually assured.

Fortunately, however, the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran is not a prisoner's dilemma situation, because the Iranians hold a trump card that they can eventually use to unequivocally "win" the conflict. The trump card that the Iranians hold, and one prays that they are aware that they hold this card, is to completely dump their nuclear program.

Before you guffaw or snort at this suggestion, recall that this conflict between the Americans and Israelis on the one hand and the Iranians on the other is not about nuclear power or nuclear weapons. As the American intelligence agencies and the American government itself have assured us, to say nothing of the IAEA's redundant assurances, there is absolutely no evidence that the Iranians are currently attempting to build or acquire nuclear weapons. Nor is the Iranian government an "existential threat" to Israel even if it did acquire nuclear weapons, as even the head former head of the Mossad has assured us. Nor still is there any need for the United States to aid in the defense of Israel, as Benjamin Netanyahu himself informed the American congress.

Bearing all this in mind, the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power or nuclear weapons. Instead, the pointless conflict is all about cold, hard political power in the Middle East, with the Israelis hoping to secure a vice-like grip on the region.

The Iranian government itself is surely aware of this, and you can bet your last dollar that the Iranian people are aware of it too. The media in Iran is run by the government, which means that the government has undoubtedly informed the Iranian people that it is complying with IAEA regulations and that even the American intelligence agencies say that the Iranian government is not pursuing nuclear weapons.

Why should the Iranian people doubt the sincerity of the Iranian government's pleas of innocence, when even the IAEA and American intelligence agencies assure them that the Iranian government is not pursuing nuclear weapons? More importantly, why should the rest of the Islamic world doubt the sincerity of the Iranian government's pleas of innocence, when even the IAEA and American intelligence agencies assure them that the Iranian government is not pursuing nuclear weapons?

The answer is that they have absolutely no reason to doubt the Iranian government's sincerity, and therein lies Iran's trump card in this conflict. The Iranian government will not lose face with the rest of the Islamic world if it decides to terminate its nuclear program completely, as Israel and Washington demand, and diffuse the entire situation. Obama and Netenyahu would be so caught off guard by such a move that peace would be virtually assured, and the reputation of the Iranian government would be magnified a thousand fold in the region. The Iranian government would be viewed as a sane, peaceful and, most importantly, trustworthy government by the rest of the Islamic world.

Instead of toppling their regional rival, the Israelis would find themselves confronting a newly lionized giant. Forget the Arab Spring of 2011; the Iranian Spring of 2012 would transform the world.

The Americans and their European underlings would have little reason to continue their unjust and bellicose sanctions if the Iranians did precisely what was demanded of them. Continuation of the sanctions would only appear to be unjust and Iraq-like meddling in the Islamic world in the arrogant hope of "regime change" for Washington and Tel Aviv's benefit. The reversal of sanctions, on the other hand, would almost instantaneously revive Iran's economy, as petrodollars once again flooded the economy. Hillary Clinton and her chickenhawk confreres would no doubt still whine that the Iranians don't "recognize" Israel, (as if it matters to the nuclear-armed Israelis whether another country "recognizes" them, whatever that even means), but poor Hillary would be at a complete loss as to what else to do.

For the sake of the entire world, especially including the hapless citizens if Iran, Israel, and the United States, one can only pray that the Iranians are politically savvy enough to recognize that they can win this conflict without even firing a shot. They don't need to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, and they don't need to fire a single Silkworm missile at an American aircraft carrier. All they need to do is shut down their nuclear programs in toto, and they will emerge from this conflict as the dominant and respected regional power of the Middle East.

Most importantly, they will thereby avert World War III and the spilling of much innocent blood.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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Republicans sure have short memories. It was just four years ago that they went to the polls in the primaries and elected the most "moderate" and "electable" candidate they could find in the hope that they had a man who was palatable to the general population. Their reward for their unprincipled pragmatism was an ass-kicking in the general election that few Americans will ever forget. John McCain and Sarah Palin certainly won't forget it.

Four years later, having learned absolutely nothing from the election of 2008, Republican voters are once again lining up behind the most moderate and supposedly "electable" candidate that they can find in the pragmatic hope that they can beat Obama in the general election. They have become so unprincipled and pragmatic, in fact, that they are lining up behind the very man who brought European-style socialized medicine to our fair shores, simply because they have been told that he is more "electable" than anyone else in the field. How they can expect an outcome that's better than four years ago is difficult to fathom, unless they think that their new moderate's plastic hair can compensate for his obvious blandness.

In one respect, moreover, the selection of this particular "moderate" is even more ridiculous than the selection of the kooky moderate four years ago. This guy came in second place in the primaries to the "moderate" who got his ass handed to him in the general election. Think about that for a minute. This guy was moderate enough to come in second in the primaries four years ago, when the Republicans first decided to eschew principle and select a moderate, and yet he was deemed less "electable" than the guy who lost so badly.

In other words, if the more "electable" moderate got his ass kicked four years ago, how badly is the second-place moderate going to do this time around?

Here's a novel idea for Republicans: Vote based upon principle, not based upon whatever the bobble-headed morons in the media establishment say is strategically expedient. Your strategic pragmatism got you nowhere four years ago. Young people and independents in this country are not any more impressed with bland flip-floppers from Massachusetts than they are impressed with nut-job moderates from Arizona. These guys don't even impress Republicans themselves. If they want a "moderate" who stands for war and socialized medicine, they might as well stick with the moderate, warmongering socialist they already have.

How about nominating someone who has a record of standing up for individual liberty for once? How about nominating someone who believes in the Constitution for once? How about nominating someone who opposes liberal nation-building and warmongering for once? How about voting for a real capitalist for once?

In other words, how about voting based upon your own damn principles for once, instead of voting like pragmatic Trotskyites taking strategic orders from the political-media establishment? Forget this ridiculous, immoral and futile idea of "electability" and vote for Ron Paul and the principles of your own party.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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When I talk to self-identified "conservatives" today, I am surprised how many of them have finally awakened to the fact that governments all over the Western world are bankrupt. It has taken a long time for them to do the math, but it is finally dawning on them that when a government's debts and liabilities massively outweigh its current and future assets and "income" (a more accurate word would be "loot"), that country is headed for disaster. While they cannot be praised for their quickness in recognizing something so blatantly obvious, at least these "conservatives" have bested their "liberal" friends in solving the problem, since most of the latter are sadly unable to add and subtract numbers with 12 zeros.

While I am pleasantly surprised that many so-called "conservatives" can now spot an obvious bankruptcy when they see it, I am less than impressed with their understanding of what bankruptcy entails for a government. Almost invariably, they naively assume that government bankruptcy is analogous to the bankruptcy of a private company. Just as a bankrupted company like Enron shrivels up and disappears from the economic stage, they assume, bankrupted governments will shrivel up and, if not disappear from the world stage, at least take on severely limited roles. The bankruptcy of governments is thus assumed to be a positive development for individual liberty, according to many so-called "conservatives," because governments will be forced to live within their means and abandon most of their unsustainable and meddling schemes. A golden age of liberty and respect for the Constitution is assumed to be right around the corner.

This idea that government bankruptcy is a positive development for individual liberty is just plain wrong, however. More than that, it is just plain delusional. Governments are not in any way analogous to private companies, and it cannot be sanely assumed that they will shrivel up or disappear like private companies just because they are bankrupt. Governments obtain their wealth by "taxing" people, and bankruptcy in no way impedes their ability to seize wealth (unless they, like the Romans, stupidly neglect to pay police and military salaries). On the contrary, their desperate need for money during bankruptcy should be expected to induce them to try to suck even more money out of their subjects than they did before.

And why shouldn't they? A politician's job always entails spending other people's money. Some of this money is seized in the form of taxes from the hapless taxpayers of the country, some is printed out of thin air, and some is borrowed from people or politicians in other countries that are too stupid or economically ignorant to know better. When a government goes bankrupt, as Greece and Italy are currently in the process of doing, and the flow of funds from the suckers abroad dries up, the government only loses one of these three sources of other people's money. It can still tax the daylights out of its own subjects and it can still print money. What's to stop it?

The example of interwar Germany is instructive in this regard. As a result of the disgusting Treaty of Versailles following WWI, the German government was made insolvent in exactly the same way that today's Western governments are insolvent. The gigantic war "debt" foisted on the German government's books was literally impossible to pay off, just as most Western governments today have debts and future liabilities on their books that cannot possibly be honored. What was the result of this de facto bankruptcy of the German government in the 1920's? Did it automatically usher in a golden age of individual liberty and limited government in Germany in the 1930's? Did the German government stop taxing its subjects or printing money? Did the German government learn its lesson about wasting its people's money on pointless and extravagantly wasteful wars? (NB: if you don't know the answer to these questions, you are about as bright a "conservative" as Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney.)

The problem with assuming that governments will shrivel up just because they are bankrupt is that governments, unlike private companies, can still strong-arm people into giving them money even when they are bankrupt. When Enron went bankrupt, it was not in a position to send armed thugs to the homes of its investors to hustle-up more money. Nor was it able to simply print a pile of money in order to pay off its mounting debts. In other words, it went down, as it should have gone down, because it couldn't force people to keep funding its idiotic and wasteful operation. Government, by contrast, does have a literal army of enthusiastic and sadistic men on the payroll that will follow orders to kick in doors, bust heads, and gas people in order to hustle-up money to keep the wasteful operation rolling along. (NB: if you think people pay their taxes out of the kindness of their hearts, instead of out of fear that cops will haul them away to the American gulag, you, too, are about as bright a "conservative" as Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney).

Moreover, governments are very careful to continuously waste a very large chunk of money on the military and the police. After all, governments claim that their primary purpose is to "protect" their subjects from foreign threats, so they are mindful to spill a nice chunk of their budget on these strongmen when times are good. (Whether government does in fact "protect" its subjects from foreign threats can be gauged by the fact that governments often bankrupt themselves trying to fund their militaries. With a "protector" as financially irresponsible as Enron, how much protection are we really getting?)

So, when a government goes bankrupt, there exists a giant horde of armed men in the military and police who expect to get paid, and who will not take kindly to budget cuts. Ever mindful that a horde of armed men is a constant threat to the civilian government when they are unpaid and unhappy, the political class should be expected to do whatever it takes to keep paying the salaries of the horde. And where, do you suppose, will this money be hustled-up when the government has bankrupted itself and can no longer borrow money from foreign suckers? (NB: If you don't know the answer to this question, you are definitely as bright a "conservative" as Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney).

Hustling enough money up to pay the salaries of the military and police (and other privileged and militant bureaucrats, as in Greece) is not always easy, however, because subjects don't often appreciate have more and more of their money confiscated by wildly irresponsible politicians. Fortuitously for governments, shaking people down ain't what it used to be. They no longer need to send their armed thugs to kick down doors, crack skulls and gas their subjects in order to confiscate money. They can simply print money out of thin air and — Voila! — now they can make payroll! If their subjects are stupid enough to trust paper money, then why not skin them a little in order to "solve" the government's problems? Do you really think that an organization with a budget problem that has the ability to print money will not choose to do so for its own benefit? Do you really think Enron would have refrained from printing money to prop itself up if it had had the ability to do so?

The reason so many so-called "conservatives" cannot grasp these obvious and foreseeable consequences of a government bankruptcy is that they do not have a true understanding of what government is. Government is not a private company or a charitable organization. It does not abide by the same laws as the rest of society. It can continue to exist — nay, thrive — even when its debts vastly outweigh its assets and income. It can print its own money and continue to tax its subjects even when it has bankrupted itself. Hence, government cannot be likened to an Enron or a Lehman Brothers as a relatively benign entity when it goes bankrupt. It is an economic vampire that will not shrivel or die easily. It can continue to suck and nourish itself even when the absurdity of its balance sheet is evident to everyone.

Hence, if you are a self-identified "conservative," and you are sick and tired or scared to death of the government we have today, you should not look to our government's impending bankruptcy as some sort of cathartic and purifying event that will usher in a new age of liberty. It will not. More than likely, if history is any guide, the slew of government defaults that are in the pipe in the Western world will usher in a golden age of government.

Government bankruptcy is not a substitute for the hard work of liberty-minded people to advance the cause of freedom. In and of themselves, a thousand government defaults would not advance the cause of liberty one iota. What is needed in the time leading up to the government's default is a cadre of devoted, almost fanatical, freedom-fighters who are willing and able to teach the masses about the nature of government and the nature of money (PDF). Only with the persistent help of this devoted cadre, will there be any chance of fighting the growth of government and the devaluation of money that government default will inevitably tow in its wake.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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I have to admit that I was somewhat disappointed when the Ron Paul campaign decided to skip the Republican "debate" being staged by Donald Trump. I was looking forward to seeing the most distinguished and honorable politician in the last fifty years making a fool out the megalomaniacal "moderator" with the appalling toupee.

It turns out, however, that Ron Paul didn't even have to show up in order to make a fool out of Donald Trump. Trump is one of those rare individuals who can't help making a complete ass out of himself when there is no one else around to do it for him, and this occasion was no different. Trump took the Paul campaign's bait and spectacularly embarrassed himself.

The Paul campaign declined to attend the "debate" precisely because Donald Trump had been named the so-called "moderator." In the Paul campaign's words:

The selection of a reality television personality to host a presidential debate that voters nationwide will be watching is beneath the office of the Presidency and flies in the face of that office's history and dignity. Mr. Trump's participation as moderator will distract from questions and answers concerning important issues such as the national economy, crushing federal government debt, the role of the federal government, foreign policy, and the like. To be sure, Mr. Trump's participation will contribute to an unwanted circus-like atmosphere.

The true brilliance of this press release should not be overlooked, whether it was intentional or not. The press release was careful to identify Trump alone as the sole deal-breaker as far as Ron Paul was concerned. The campaign did not name Newsmax, a neocon propaganda outfit that could not possibly be expected to give Ron Paul a fair shake in any "debate" it sponsored, as a reason for opting out.

Again, whether the Paul campaign knew in advance that Trump is a gigantic buffoon who couldn't help making an ass out of himself is unknown, but the press release could not have produced a better result, because it clearly hurt the flop-haired billionaire's feelings. He must have been relishing the idea of having all the Republican presidential candidates sitting in front of him, intently listening to his pompous voice somehow finding its way out of those peculiar lips, as if he was back on The Apprentice. He was finally going to be someone important in politics, someone the Republicans were going to have to listen to.

The Paul campaign's press release dashed the poor billionaire's hopes by announcing publicly that Ron Paul was refusing to attend. What is worse, the Paul campaign listed Trump alone as the reason for Ron Paul's refusal to attend, calling him a television clown, in effect, because of the "circus-like atmosphere" he would generate. Good Lord, what an insult!

His feelings hurt, Trump could no doubt have avoided making a complete ass of himself by expressing his regret that one of the forerunning candidates was not going to show up to his big event and leave it at that. But acting gracefully and honorably is not Trump's style, and so he decided to open his big mouth (metaphorically speaking in Trump's case, of course). What came out of his mouth must have made the head honchos over at Newsmax cringe.

Trump lashed out at the Paul campaign, saying he was "glad [Ron Paul] and Jon Huntsman, who has inconsequential poll numbers or a chance of winning, will not be attending the debate and wasting the time of the viewers who are trying very hard to make a very important decision." Since Newsmax and Trump had extended invitations to both Huntsman and Paul, which they did not have to do, Trump was playing the part of the spoiled child who, upon learning one of his classmates won't be attending his birthday party, screams out "Good, I didn't want him to come anyway." If Donald and Newsmax really didn't want Paul and Huntsman to attend, they wouldn't have extended invitations to begin with. After all, why would Donald agree to moderate what he considered to be a badly conceived debate that was scheduled to include distracting nobodies? Did he agree to moderate a badly conceived debate that included distracting nobodies just because he wanted to be on TV?

If he had limited himself to stating that he was pleased that Huntsman and Paul were not going to attend, Trump would not have made a complete ass of himself. Sure, he would have looked classless, which of course he is, but he would not have completely embarrassed himself. But Trump could not help tacking on some additional comments to ensure he looked ridiculous. It's his style. It's what he's known for.

Having a big mouth (again, very metaphorically speaking), Trump decided it would be a good idea to attack Ron Paul's chances of being elected. Now, setting aside the fact that Ron Paul has risen to be a top-tier contender in the polls, Trump made his comments as the scheduled moderator of this so-called "debate." Think about that for a minute. Trump is scheduled to "moderate" the debate to ensure that it is fair, and that each candidate has a chance to get his message through, and yet he decides it would be a good idea to attack one of the candidates before the event. Does that sound like something a moderator would do? Not only that, but the Paul campaign had specifically questioned Trump's ability to moderate as their reason for opting out of the debate, and yet Trump could not help but say something anathema to moderators everywhere. The poor guy walked right into the Paul campaign's trap!

All this would be bad enough, but Trump really went out of his way to viciously attack the Paul campaign. He did not, by contrast, go out of his way to insult Huntsman, beyond saying that he had no chance of winning, even though Huntsman was also choosing not to attend. He called Paul "clown-like," (a childish way of returning the Paul campaign's observation that Trump is a television clown), and he specifically attacked Paul's poll numbers, even though they are top-tier at the moment. Think about that for a minute. Would it really be necessary to viciously attack a candidate that had no chance of winning, just because he refused to attend a debate? If so, then why didn't Trump attack Huntsman? Isn't the act of responding lengthily to a "fringe candidate" an admission that the candidate is truly consequential?

Donald's mention of Paul's poll numbers is the real kicker, however. How Trump, the named "moderator" of a Republican debate, can be unaware of how well Ron Paul is polling right now is absolutely beyond me. Not only that, but if poll numbers are what are important, then why did Trump not ask for the rest of the candidates with pathetic poll numbers, like Bachmann, to be excluded from the debate? If poll numbers do matter, however, (and Trump's completely delusional claim that he has polled better than Ron Paul seems to indicate that he knows they do matter), then how can he claim with a straight face, as he always does, that Paul has no chance of winning?

The answer is that Donald Trump is a moronic television clown, just like the Paul campaign insinuated, who was not sharp enough to sidestep an obvious trap. A more brilliant political maneuver could not be conceived to take down a megalomaniac with a penchant for embarrassing himself. It's truly a shame that Donald Trump is not bright enough to realize what just happened.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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Maybe it is the fact that most Americans are educated in socialistic quasi-prisons today. Whatever the reason, it seems to be virtually impossible for Americans to conceive of an economy devoid of invasive government regulations and manipulations. The idea of completely freeing the economy of these burdensome government contrivances, which is precisely what free-market anarchism means, is thus completely incomprehensible to them. A totally free market for anything is assumed from the outset to be impossible, unworkable, and dangerous.

And yet, there is at least one sector of the American economy that is already about as anarchistic as could possibly be imagined. I am talking about the thousands of businesses that install roofs and rain gutters in this country. It is an industry that is exciting, dynamic and thrillingly free. The industry offers an important economic lesson for unimaginative Americans who blithely assume that free-market anarchism is impossible, unworkable, and dangerous.

That the roofing industry could be as anarchistic as I claim may seem absurd at first glance, since there are layers upon layers of laws "regulating" it. There are licensing laws in some jurisdictions governing who may or may not install roofs and gutters. There are myriad federal and state laws governing worker safety and workers' compensation. There are laws governing the minimum wage and restricting the hiring "illegal" immigrants. And finally, there are laws and "codes" governing the installation of the roofing system itself.

How can an industry be considered virtually anarchistic when there exist thousands of federal, state and local laws "regulating" it?

The answer, quite frankly, is that the vast majority of roofing companies don't give a rat's ass about the governments' laws. Most don't care a whit whether the rich scumbags in congress don't want them to hire Mexicans. They hire them in droves in order to drive down their prices. Most don't care one iota whether fat OSHA office workers want them to wear unwieldy and dangerous harnesses. They simply don't force their workers to wear them, as if the law were voluntary. Most don't give a damn what the federal minimum wage laws say. They pay their workers as little as the workers will accept in this bad economy and the workers are fantastically happy to have the job. And most don't give even a moment's notice to the licensing laws for roofers in certain jurisdictions. They simply have licensed people pull permits for them as quickly as they please. Call me if you need one pulled!

They don't care at all about these laws because they know the trump card is in their hands: bankruptcy. If the jackasses down at OSHA try to go after one of them for not wearing harnesses, the company will miraculously go under that day only to reemerge two days later with a new name and a new proprietor. If the immigration bureaucrats come after them for hiring so-called "illegals," the remaining "legals" will hang out drinking beer for a few weeks until their other guys are able to get back over the border to get back to work. No big deal. (I once worked with a Mexican in California who was deported early one morning and made it back to work before lunchtime!) What's the worst the bureaucrats can do to you as a roofing business owner? Take your compressor or stick you with some fines? Ha! See you in two days!

This refreshingly rebellious attitude toward the governments' asinine laws does not mean that roofers do not care about the quality of their work, however. The key to staying in business and making money in the roofing industry is installing quality roofs and having zero leaks. Either that, or you run from state to state putting up bad roofs for suckers and then get out of town as quickly as possible. (If you ever wondered what kind of person is falling for those ridiculous Nigerian email scams, it's the same idiot who's hiring a cheap, out-of-town roofing company. He no doubt wonders how he keeps getting scammed).

Roofers care about putting up good roofs because much of their business comes from word-of-mouth. If you put up a bad roof, you can be sure to have lost that entire neighborhood for once and for all. Also, since any decent roofer has liability insurance against leaks (it is in fact required to do work for insurance companies), he cares passionately about not having to make claims against his insurance. Nothing will put you out of business quicker than making claims against your insurance that will either astronomically elevate your premiums or even cause insurers to refuse you coverage. The free market is thus virtually the only reason why roofers put up good roofs that don't leak.

Hey, wait a second! What about those building codes and roofing inspections that states and cities have instituted in order to make sure that roofers put up decent roofs? Aren't these regulations a major reason why roofers do a good job?

I am terribly sorry to have to burst your bubble if these objections are running through your naïve little head, but city roofing inspections and building codes are a complete and utter joke. In the first place, as far as building codes and roofing codes are concerned, cities basically lift the codes from manufacturer instructions or from non-profit organizations, like the ICC. Most commonly the "codes" are simply awkward bureaucratic rehashes of what roofers can read for themselves on the felt rolls or shingle bundles. In other words, the cities basically tell roofers to follow the instructions on the package. If you think that telling roofers to follow instructions is the reason you are getting a good roof, then I have a bridge I'd like to sell to you!

The city roofing inspection racket is no less of a joke. Here's an example. I was recently doing some carpentry work at a house when the roofing inspector showed up, so I offered to let him use my ladder in order to get up to inspect the roof. He declined, saying "I can tell that it's ok from here." I have seen that occur more times than I can count. I have also seen roofing inspectors being bribed, as if that should surprise anyone.

More importantly, city roofing inspections are completely unnecessary when the roofer has liability insurance (and anyone stupid enough to hire a roofer, or anyone else for that matter, without liability insurance deserves whatever disaster befalls him). If the roof is installed incorrectly and leaks as a result, the homeowner can make a claim against the roofer's insurance. The roofing inspector and the city, by contrast, will give the homeowner absolutely nothing if the roof leaks. Of what use, then, is the roofing inspector? This is all the more true since the homeowner's insurance company will often inspect the roof itself in order to assure that it is installed correctly. Also, some roofing manufacturers, like Genflex for example, will inspect, certify, and guarantee the roof themselves. Given this, why on Earth are these nosy and lazy bureaucrats necessary? The cost of the roof is higher than it otherwise would be without them, and they do nothing that is not already being done better by the insurance companies.

The good news is that it has probably never been easier to get a fantastic and affordable roof in this country. This is due to the rebellious and sunburned anarchists in the roofing industry itself, not to the politicians and bureaucrats who have bankrupted this country.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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While Dr. Johnson was no doubt correct to write that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," he just as easily could have written that patriotism is the last refuge of an idiot. The latter phrasing is arguably more useful to commit to memory, given the higher likelihood of bumping into patriotic idiots on the street than of bumping into patriotic scoundrels (outside of Washington D.C. and New York, of course).

The catchphrase of the patriotic idiot is "love it or leave it," which means, in the parlance of idiots everywhere, that anyone who happens to doubt the government's greatness or legitimacy should expatriate. The phrase is invariably used in a last-ditch attempt to avoid having to confront political ideas that are challenging or uncomfortable. Unfortunately for the idiot, and I suppose this is part of what makes him an idiot to begin with, the phrase is as absurd as it is hackneyed.

In the first place, it is instructive to note that even idiots do not use the phrase "love it or leave it" on every occasion. For example, the idiot never shrieks out "love it or leave it" during a simple discussion of Roe v. Wade or current tax law. Even an idiot is aware that he will sound like a complete fool if he tells people they should either love Roe v. Wade or get out of the U.S. The fact that idiot cannot utilize the phrase on all occasions without looking like a fool ought to be a sign to him that there is something terribly wrong with it in general.

It is in the context of discussing fundamental political questions involving the government's legitimacy that the idiot believes the phrase "love it or leave it" constitutes a powerful argument. If the debate turns to the question of whether taxation is morally and legally synonymous with robbery, for example, the idiot thinks that anyone who doubts the government's legitimacy should simply leave. It completely escapes the notice of the idiot that the question of what dissenters can or should do is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the government is legitimate.

What also escapes his notice is the circularity of his reasoning in trying to use the phrase "love it or leave it" as a serious argument. The question at hand, after all, involves the legitimacy of the government, not some trivial question about government policy. But, the phrase itself assumes that the government and its policies are legitimate from the outset, because it assumes 1) that dissenters are the ones who should leave, and 2) that the dissenter's only legitimate options are to love the government as it now stands or to leave. If these are not assumed to be the dissenter's only legitimate options, then what's the problem with hating the government? But, how could those be the dissenter's only legitimate options unless government itself is assumed to be legitimate? In other words, the idiot's only argument to defend the legitimacy of the government boils down to nothing more than saying "government is legitimate because government is legitimate." Needless to say, unless one is speaking to an idiot, this sort of circular reasoning is silly and absurd.

The phrase "love it or leave it" is sometimes used in a pathetic attempt to demonstrate that people "consent" to live under their particular governments. According to this moronic line of thinking, because most people do not flee their countries for…well, somewhere else, they have thereby "consented" to their government's existence. "Since they haven't left," the idiot blusters, "they must love it." That the conclusion does not follow from the premise is obvious to anyone with a working brain, however. A person might stay in his country of birth for many different reasons unrelated to "consent." He may not have the money to move, or he may not be permitted to leave, as in North Korea. Or, he may be aware that every piece of inhabitable land on Earth is claimed by governments more or less similar to his own, so his situation will not improve by moving abroad. Like the branded slave, he has no place to go where he will not be recognized and treated as he is right now. He has been branded with the word "taxpayer," and every government in the world will treat him as such. However, finding oneself without a place to run does not constitute "consent" to being raped, robbed or taxed.

Perhaps the most obvious problem with the idiot's catchphrase, however, is the fact that he has no way to make people either "love it" or "leave it." He lacks the muscle to deport people who disagree with him, and he lacks the mental abilities to convince them to "love" the government. The best that his feeble brain can muster is to rub the government's existence in the face of his intellectual opponents as if that resounded to his own glory. It is tragic in the true sense of the word, since the poor idiot cannot see that the institution he mindlessly defends is his true enemy, not the lonely government dissenter.

Interestingly, governments themselves are every bit as impotent as the idiot to enforce the phrase "love it or leave it," because they have no way to force their subjects "love it," and they cannot possibly hope to deport or incarcerate everyone who doubts their legitimacy. They are reduced to making their presence and brutality known by stomping on minorities that can't fight back, and, like the idiot, making asinine and propagandistic statements about their own magnificence and beneficence. Once a significant number of people wake up to the fact that governments everywhere are nothing more than unnecessary criminal gangs, however, there is nothing governments can do to keep from being smashed to pieces.

When that glorious day arrives in the West, as it has in the Middle East, the idiots of the world who mindlessly defend their governments with the phrase "love it or leave it" will finally have a chance to heed their own advice.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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One of the most important functions of religious faith, observed St. Thomas Aquinas, is to allow people of limited intelligence and people with limited time for study to know important truths about God without having to investigate them personally. After all, few ordinary people are in a position to spend years rationally investigating the tenets of their faith, so, if they are to have any chance at finding Truth during their lives, they need to have it prepackaged for them to swallow on faith alone with the assistance of the Church.

This infinitely wise observation is just as true today as it was in the thirteenth century, and the Christian churches would do well to remember it during these especially turbulent political and economic times. In fact, with the world's masses aflame with revolutionary ideas at the very same time that governments are going bankrupt, the need has never been greater for the Christian churches to remind their unthinking, gullible, and emotional flocks of what is true and just and good. If they fail to do this, and right quick, there is a very real and dangerous possibility that the Christian masses will get swept away by exciting and profoundly immoral ideas that will doom Western civilization for the foreseeable future.

Specifically, the Christian masses desperately need to have the foundations of Christian ethics beaten into their dense skulls to keep them on the right path during these hours of intellectual temptation. Since many of the ideas floating around the world right now are both alluring and morally dangerous, the Christian masses need a simple set of criteria by which to judge what is right and what is wrong. Fortuitously, God was provident enough to provide Christians (and Jews and Muslims) with a list of ten moral criteria so undemanding that even the most intellectually challenged among them should be able to determine right from wrong.

The list contains two ethical commandments of especial importance today because of the extreme danger that the Christian masses will unthinkingly violate them. The first and most important is that it is wrong for Christians to kill people. One would think that the Christian masses would have been able to memorize and abide by this simple proscription in the two thousand years that Christians have been walking the Earth, but apparently the density of the mass man's mind continues to defy penetration. Christians in recent years are definitely no less likely to kill than any other peoples, and the danger is that they will kill even more frequently in coming years as economic and political conditions deteriorate further.

Thus, the Christian churches must intervene right now to remind the Christian masses that it is wrong to kill human beings and it is wrong for other people to kill in one's name. The Christian flocks are increasingly angry, frightened, and impoverished by the political classes' extravagances, and the temptation will only grow to take out their frustrations on other groups of people, such as the wealthy, Muslims, immigrants, or even their own neighbors. This is all the more true today, when it is so easy to aid in killing other people simply by voting. The majority of Christians do not need to bloody their own hands by shooting unarmed women and old men, for example, but they do irreparably stain their consciences by supporting such killings and paying for them with their tax money. And let's not forget about the hordes of professional "Christian" killers (i.e., "soldiers") that are presently plying their bloody trade in the three immoral wars that the supposedly "Christian" West is prosecuting in the Middle East.

The task of reigning in Christian killing before it gets even more out of hand will be impossible, however, unless the Christian churches simultaneously reign in their flocks' nationalistic sentiments. Like most peoples today, Christians have come to worship their own governments with religious fervor, a serious Christian sin in its own right. They thus do not view killings by "their" government soldiers and police as morally analogous to killings by rapists and robbers. Unless this nationalistic moral blindness is corrected by the Christian churches, or by human reason, by emphasizing that the lines drawn on maps identifying different countries are completely morally irrelevant, Christians will never curtail their killing, because they will inevitably view government-sponsored killing of "other people" as somehow morally acceptable. Without help from the Christian churches, the unthinking Christian masses will continue to value, not human life as such, but their "own" people's lives, and to hell with the rest of the people of the world.

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The Christian churches must also urgently emphasize that Christians should not torture, imprison, beat, or otherwise physically abuse other human beings. Nor should they countenance such depraved activities done in their name by their governments. This proscription follows directly from the prohibition against killing, because to put a man in a cage deprives him of his life and dignity during that time just as surely as killing him would, and torturing him makes him envy the dead, which is worse than actually killing him. It should go without saying that Christians ought not to do these things or accept that they be done in their name with their tax monies, but the Christian masses keep approving of them nonetheless. This will only increase as political and economic turmoil increases, and the Christian churches will be morally responsible to a certain extent if they do not do all they can to head it off now.

The second important ethical precept that the unthinking Christian masses urgently need to be reminded of is God's prohibition against stealing. It is unequivocally wrong for Christians to take property from other people without their consent, and it is equally wrong for them to encourage or to pay other people (e.g., tax collectors or mob strongmen) to do the same thing. Like the prohibition against killing, God's prohibition against stealing is about as clear as man could possible desire: "Thou shalt not steal." One might be tempted to think that the Christian masses would be able to comprehend something as simple as that, but apparently God vastly overestimated the mental abilities of His progeny. The Christian masses accept stealing, by governments in particular, just as much as any other people, and they tend to particularly approve of stealing from (i.e., taxing) the rich. They apparently think that it is morally acceptable for their government to take money from rich people by force just because Jesus was poor and defended poor people. The fact that Jesus' own Father explicitly forbade them to steal — even from rich people — does not seem to enter into their moral reasoning. The Christian churches desperately need to undermine this invidious tendency before the increasingly impoverished and desperate Christian masses fall on their rich prey with a vengeance. Failure to head this tendency off will doom Western civilization for the foreseeable future, as the rich take flight with their capital to places that actually care about God's Commandments. The loss of this valuable economic capital at a time when it is most needed to rebuild after the government created recession will send the Christian West back to the stone age.

Along a similar vein, there is an urgent need for the Christian churches to remind their mindless flocks that it is immoral to counterfeit money. It is just as wrong for me to print fake money to buy your car, for example, as it would be for me to steal it from you outright. The need for the Christian churches to emphasize this ethical precept does not, however, stem from a danger that the Christian masses will resort to the printing press themselves. Instead, the danger lies in the likelihood that the Christian masses will have their entire life savings and livelihoods wiped out by profoundly immoral economic idiots working in collusion with government who believe that prosperity grows on trees. Again, one would think that the Christian masses would already be aware that counterfeiting money is sickeningly immoral and economically destructive, but Christians of all stripes have done virtually nothing to stand up to this form of robbery. This testifies, yet again, to the appalling stupidity of the Christian masses — even when they themselves are being victimized, and the desperate need for the Christian herd to be morally guided by the Christian churches.

One hopes that the Christian churches will begin to lay seeds in the minds of their followers that will counteract these deadly immoral trends. With economic conditions deteriorating and political "leaders" plumbing new moral depths, the need has never been greater for the Christian churches to lead their herds back to the ethical path laid by Jesus and His Father. And that means, first and foremost, that the Christian churches must do their best to stop Christians from killing and robbing other people. One shudders to think that the Christian Churches even need to be reminded of something as fundamental as this.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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It is a curious thing that people in the modern world have come to worship democracy at the very same time that they have come to abhor genocide. One would think that if democracy is such a wonderful thing for giving majorities the right to do what they will, then genocide is wonderful for that very same reason. After all, genocide is usually nothing more than the brutal expression of majority opinion in a given territory that some minority population ought to be exterminated. Is there anything more sublimely democratic than that?

There is more than passing resemblance here. The concept of democracy and the concept of genocide are identical in every ethically relevant way. Democracy is a system for reaching political solutions that are deemed to be acceptable to a majority of the population. This is precisely what genocide typically is. It is a political solution to a perceived problem that is deemed to be acceptable to the majority of the population in a given territory. Sure, there are some people in a genocidal bloodbath who don't really have their hearts in it, but the same is just as true of any democratically derived outcome. Just think about all those people who voted for Hilary Clinton in the Democratic primary in 2008, but settled half-heartedly for Obama in the general election.

It is of no use to object that the concept of "democracy" is nonviolent by definition. The same used to be commonly said of the concept of "socialism," which was also claimed to be nonviolent by definition – at least, that is, until the socialists' death count reached a point where it was too embarrassing for honest men to ignore. The death count for democracies hasn't quite caught up to the impressive death count of the socialists, but it is certainly large enough that it should embarrass anyone out of claiming that democracy is nonviolent by definition. This is in addition to the fact that defining something as nonviolent by no means makes it so in reality.

It is also of no use to object that democracies sometimes have constitutions to protect minorities from attack by majorities. This objection overlooks the glaring fact that constitutions can be amended or abolished by…majority vote! A constitution will thus only protect minorities as long as the majority accepts the idea that minorities have rights; a fact conspicuously highlighted by the American constitution's defense of black slavery. Should the majority change its mind about minority rights, it always has the ability to amend, abolish or simply ignore the constitution standing in the way of its intentions. In other words, there is no reason why a majority in a given population could not commit genocide with the explicit sanction of the democratically-created constitution.

Given this fact, it is an intellectual error of gargantuan proportions to assume that democracy and individual rights go hand in hand, or to assume that democracy and genocide are antithetical to one another. Democratic government, even representative democratic government, is merely a means for the majority to impress its will on minorities. It is mob rule dressed up in fancy legal livery. Genocidal bloodbaths committed by majorities around the world may lack the legal finery and the fancy ballot boxes, but they are thoroughly democratic nonetheless. In fact, genocide approaches the ideal of "participatory democracy" even more closely than the effeminate, representative form of democracy practiced in the West, since the majority of people in a genocidal bloodbath actually participate in the action.

If you happen to believe that individuals have God-given or nature-given rights that mobs should not violate, then you should have no business defending a system of government that makes the law dependent upon what the democratic mob happens to think from moment to moment. In fact, if you believe in individual rights, then you should detest the very idea of so-called "majorities" doing anything whatsoever. For, acceptance that majorities can legitimately create law or select "leaders" or do anything else is only one step removed from acceptance of majorities deciding who should live and who should die. Encouraging democratic mobs to do what they will in one area of the law only encourages them to do what they will across the board.

If you defend democratic mob rule today when it suits you, on what grounds will you object when its impulses turn ugly or murderous? At best you will be rightly labeled a hypocrite for only defending democratic government when it benefited you, as is the case with so many pro-democracy types in Washington who weep about Rwanda's democratic genocide at the same time that they attempt to export democracy around the world. At worst, you may find that you are one of the minorities the democratic mob has its sights set on, and you may find yourself rotting in prison or an unmarked mass grave. After all, the democratic mob used to target the blacks just because they were black and it currently has its sights set on drug-users, many of whom find themselves pointlessly locked up in cages because the mob doesn't like certain plants, but the democratic mob could just as easily change its mind and target minority groups of which you are part.

For the sake of intellectual consistency and of human civilization in general it is critical that man lose his reverence for democratic mob rule. He must come to appreciate that his own rights and dignity should never be subject to majority opinion, and that he should not participate in mob decision making that robs other men of their rights through voting or any other means.

The essence of human civilization comes not from arbitrary, mob-created democratic law, but rather from voluntary contract, voluntary exchange, peaceful coexistence, and private property rights. The defense of the values and the creation of law to support them does not require ballot boxes or of mob decision making of any kind. It only requires that individual men come to believe in peace, prosperity and property, and that they reject individuals and organizations that destroy these values. This includes, first and foremost, the taxing, war-making, regulating and suffocating democratic state.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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I have been traveling in India for the last week, and I have been following the hunger strike of Anna Hazare with great interest. Anna Hazare, for those who don't know, is the Indian anti-corruption crusader who told the Indian government last week that he was fasting until anti-corruption legislation was introduced in the Indian parliament. Hazare was so serious about this that he was reportedly prepared to die rather than be ignored or denied.

After fasting for four and a half days — without food or water — the Indian government reportedly caved in to Hazare's demand by promising to introduce anti-corruption legislation during the next monsoon parliament. As a result, the nation is awash with excitement, and marches and celebrations are taking place all over India. Hazare is already being hailed as the Gandhi of this generation, and people are talking openly about a "new age of participatory democracy" in India. One commentator actually called Hazare's triumph an "epic victory for the Indian people."

It would appear that things are turning up roses in India, what with Hazare's so-called victory on top of India's victory in the ICC Cricket World Cup several weeks ago.

The problem is, as anyone with even cursory knowledge of Indian political history can tell you, fighting "government corruption" in India is about as impossible as holding back the sea. The fact that a man had to almost starve himself to death to get the supposedly democratic government to even promise to introduce anti-corruption legislation tells us something about the likelihood that real change is at hand.

Think about that for one minute. The Indian government let this very old man publicly starve himself for almost five days before they would even agree to only introduce the bill in parliament. Moreover, it's not like Hazare was asking for the Moon. He was only asking the government to abide by its own laws, and it took five days for the government to agree to consider it next monsoon season. The long time frame to introduce this "change Indians can believe in" gives the government plenty of time to figure out how to placate the gullible public with a bill that will change absolutely nothing. It will be hailed by the government as a radical bill, and they will publically praise Hazare for his role in bringing it into existence, but India's government at this time next year will look exactly like it does today.

The fact that Mr. Hazare is being beatified before the Indian government has even done anything at all does not bode well. Promises of political reform are as cheap as Indian tobacco, and that is all the government has deigned to grant so far. What happens when, as should be expected, the Indian government does nothing more than pass a token bill in six months to placate the already beatified Anna Hazare? What then? Will millions of Indians publicly then starve themselves to death to try to rid the country of corruption? Big deal. That's a daily occurrence here. When has the Indian government ever given a damn about Indians starving to death?

Anna Hazare and the rest of the Indian people who are celebrating in the streets today are missing the forest for the trees. They are under the Western-inspired delusion that democratic government itself is never evil — only individual leaders or specific laws are ever "corrupt" and in need of reform. Following his "victory," Hazare himself counseled the Indian people "to have faith in democratic government." This from a man who had to almost commit suicide solely in order to convince the democratic government to consider following its own laws. The depths of human naiveté sometimes boggle the mind.

You really would think ordinary Indians would recognize this, because the government here does nothing that is of use to ordinary Indians. The infrastructure, if indeed it deserves the name, is a shambles. The water the government provides people to drink is literally poisoned with super-bacteria. The sanitation and sewage systems that the government is providing the people of this country are laughable to the point that it will make your eyes water — and your nose burn. What the hell do the Indian people need this fantastically corrupt government for anyway? Why try to "reform" something that is completely incompetent, corrupt, and unnecessary?

From the perspective of an outsider without patriotic prejudices, it is clear as day that Hazare's crusade will reform nothing about the Indian government. The Indian government, even though it is called a "democratic," does not exist to further the interests of men like Anna Hazare, and it does not exist for the beggars on the streets of Jaipur. It only exists to extract money and privileges for itself out of the Indian body politic just as surely as the leaches in the Ganges exist to suck blood out of pilgrims. It's been doing it since time immemorial, after all. Just have a look at the splendid gardens and marble inlays at the Taj Mahal that were paid for by hungry and poor Indian taxpayers in order to build a tomb for a dead politician's wife.

As long as a government exists in India, even if it is "democratic," the Indian people will continue to get fleeced. Democratic government is only a method for deciding which liar will put his hand in your pocket. It is being given the right to choose which pickpocket in the Varanasi train station is going to nab your wallet. It does not matter one whit whether the money that is demanded from the Indian people comes in the form of supposedly "corrupt" bribes or supposedly "legitimate" taxes. It does not matter at all whether the arbitrary rules that Indians must abide by are made by so-called "corrupt" officials or whether they are made by parliament.

I wish that I was wrong about this. I wish that Anna Hazare had truly won an "epic victory for the Indian people." But he has not and will not so long as he and his followers seek only to rid the country of corruption. An "epic victory for the Indian people" will only occur if the Indian people decide to squash their giant government leach, instead of asking it to behave itself while it's sucking.

It is the one animal that these poor and pious people should not hesitate to put to the knife.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

The Best of Mark R. Crovelli

Few people in the world seem to appreciate just how awful it is to be a government police officer. It's not that the job involves particularly physically demanding work, or that the job is particularly dangerous. In fact, the work is not nearly physically demanding enough (as the cop fatness problem demonstrates), and neither is it particularly dangerous (being a cop doesn't even make the top ten most dangerous jobs). Nor is the job terrible because of the unstated obligation to wear a tawdry mustache in public. Instead, what makes the job so horrific is the fact that it requires living a completely contradictory moral life.

Unlike normal human beings, whose jobs require adherence to the same moral standards that apply in their private lives, police officers are required to act in ways they would never even consider in their private lives. For forty hours a week (or more, if they are trying to milk their departments' overtime rackets), police officers are required to forget the moral standards that govern their private interactions with their own friends, families and neighbors and adopt the moral outlook of the sociopath and the gangster.

Specifically, the job of the police officer involves giving orders to strangers and locking them up in cages if they choose not to obey. Unless the police officer is a complete sociopath, he would never consider acting in such a way in his private life. With his blue polyester in the closet, for example, the off-duty police officer would never consider putting his grandpa in a cage if he refuses to obey orders. He would never consider electrocuting his children or his grandmother for refusing to do what he tells them. He would never consider beating up his neighbor if she refused to stop her car and show a picture of herself embossed on government plastic. But he is expected to do precisely these types of things to people he doesn't even know in his "professional" life if they refuse to do what he and his bosses tell them.

The fact that many, many police officers are indeed complete psychopaths should thus not come as a particular surprise. Indeed, the job is tailor made for the psychopath and the sociopath who is comfortable with feelings of cognitive dissonance. People with normally calibrated moral compasses would shudder to think that they would be required to lock people up in cages, electrocute them, or beat them with clubs for not doing as they are told. It would confuse and trouble the normal person to think that by putting on a blue polyester suit, mustache, and riding boots it was suddenly morally acceptable to order people around at the point of a gun (not to mention the icy shudder they would feel at the thought of wearing the ridiculous kit itself). It would horrify the normal person to think that part of his job involved smashing down strange people's doors, taking their children, shackling them, locking them in cages, stealing their drugs and guns, and shooting them if they happen to resist.

The man with a normally calibrated moral compass is equally disturbed to contemplate that the purported justification for acting in these barbaric ways was that politicians, of all people, told them to. It is not as though God Himself or the Pope gives the police officer sanction to lock people in cages and to order them about. Quite the reverse, the sanction comes from people of such sterling moral character as the coke-snorting drunk driver, Bush II, and the drug-cartel-connected perjurer, Clinton I. The sociopath and the psychopath are not troubled by the fact that their only justification for ordering strange people around is that a pack of corrupt millionaires in Washington or Denver told them to, which is what makes such people sociopaths and psychopaths in the first place. The normal person, in contrast, is not willing to do things to other people that they clearly resent or despise, or to order them to do things they oppose, just because a politician says so.

The person with a normally calibrated moral compass would begin to wonder why the moral standards that govern his private life with friends and family, and which produce relative peace and harmony in that sphere of his life, do not apply to all situations. Why, the normal person will inevitably wonder, is there any peace in his family, when no one wears a special blue suit or has the right to order everyone around and shackle resisters? How is it possible that he can get along with his friends at the bowling alley, when none of them is assigned to break into cars to search for substances the politicians dislike, and none of them has a right to steal anyone else's children? In short, the normal person will begin to wonder why the people who claim to "protect us" are not held to the same moral standards as everyone else.

The answer to these questions is simple, even if the person with a normally calibrated moral compass often cannot see it through the clouds of propaganda that have been spewed over police officers and politicians. The answer is, quite simply, that the defense of people's lives and property is a job just like any other, and it ought to be provided on the free market just like every other good and service by people who are held to exactly the same moral standards as the rest of the civilized world. The uneasiness that the normal person feels when confronted with the existence of a group of fat blue-polyester-clad thugs who are not bound by normal moral standards is completely understandable and justified. There is no need for these thugs at all, and there is definitely no justification for exempting them from the moral standards we hold every other person to.

The provision of bread and chairs and computers does not require exempting anyone from moral standards, or empowering them to beat people up and order them around. All that is required is to open the door to competition, and people fall over backwards trying to please customers in their quest to make money. The same is just as true of defense services, which can and ought to be opened to competition between private providers so that consumers of these services can choose what kinds of defense services they want to purchase. In that case, the providers of the services can be held to exactly the same moral standards as everyone else. Their sole purpose would be to protect their customers' lives and property — not to enforce arbitrary and unjust rules written by rich politicians on unwilling strangers.

The key to liberating the police officer from the contradictory and perverted moral life he currently leads is simply to privatize the provision of defense services. Freed from the need to push arbitrary and unjust rules written by rich politicians on strange people, the police officer would then be a moral equal to everyone else in the world who was striving to make money by serving consumers. He would also, one hopes, be liberated from the requirement to wear the most ridiculous bureaucratic costume ever devised by man.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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In the world of financial "journalism," CNBC's Rick Santelli stands out as a refreshing and intelligent antidote to the hoards of perma-bulls, fed apologists, and chart sorcerers that otherwise pollute the financial airwaves. Apart from his wonderfully energetic and quirky manner of speaking, and apart from his fantastic last name, Santelli is never afraid to challenge economists, Fed officials, and other mainstream talking heads. Talking points that are taken for granted or left unchallenged by Santelli's mind-numbing colleagues are passionately attacked by the bond-tracking Italian dervish.

Just as important, Santelli stands virtually alone among his colleagues as someone who knows and emphasizes that interest rates, monetary policy and the international currency markets are always centrally important to future economic conditions. Whereas his colleagues feel at home making asinine prognostications about companies or economic conditions that ignore these vital factors, Santelli never shies from shoving them to the forefront where they can't be ignored.

The trouble with Santelli, however, is that his political and economic philosophy is inconsistent and incomplete, and does not offer a viable alternative to that being peddled by his Keynesian opponents. His attacks on smug Keynesian hacks like Steve Liesman, Frederic Mishkin and Larry Meyer strike a chord with audiences who can sense that there is something seriously wrong with the medicine the Keynesians are peddling, but attacking the medicine alone is no cure for the disease.

Moreover, without a consistent political and economic philosophy to guide his attacks, Santelli lacks the weaponry to attack Keynesianism in a way that his opponents can't dodge or turn back on him. Steve Liesman, for example, is keenly aware that Santelli lacks consistent alternatives to the statistics Keynesians worship (especially inflation statistics), and he takes obvious pleasure in forcing Santelli to try to come up with alternative measures. Without a consistent political and economic philosophy to guide him, Santelli can't help stumbling in the face of such a challenge.

What Santelli needs in order to beat arrogant Keynesians like Liesman, Meyer, and Mishkin to a pulp is a consistent and complete political and economic philosophy to guide his attacks. Armed with such a weapon, he would be able to go beyond pointing out what should be obvious to everyone in the wake of the Great Recession (namely, that men like Liesman, Mishkin and Meyer are backward-looking pseudo-scientists), and offer a viable alternative to Keynesianism. What he needs, in other words, is to arm himself with the formidable philosophical weaponry of Austrian economics, and use it to smash the Keynesians to bits.

Here are just a few of the powerful arguments underlying Austrian economics that Santelli could bludgeon men like Liesman with:

1) Statistics are completely irrelevant in the realm of economic theory. This is so because human beings, unlike rocks and trees, act based upon ideas and can thus choose to act differently tomorrow from the way they are acting today. Just because Liesman's statistics show that inflation expectations or corporate hiring was X yesterday by no means proves that it will be X tomorrow, or that such relationships can be accurately modeled in any realistic way. Instead of focusing on statistics that are irrelevant to future human action, economic theory must be deductive; which means that we start with propositions we know to be irrefutably true and deduce all of their logical implications. For example, if we start with the apodictically true proposition "human action is purposeful" we can deduce that every conceivable trade in the free market is anticipated to be beneficial by both parties to the trade ex ante, otherwise the trade would not occur. The entire corpus of economic science can be deduced in this way. For more on the powerful Austrian criticism of empiricism, the most powerful potential weapon against Liesman's statistics, Rick Santelli should read these important books and articles:

Economic Science and the Austrian Method, By Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The Epistemological Problems of Economics, By Ludwig von Mises

Theory and History, By Ludwig von Mises

Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics, By Murray Rothbard

The Mantle of Science, By Murray Rothbard

Human Action, By Ludwig von Mises

Man, Economy and State, By Murray Rothbard

2) Interest rate fixing by the Federal Reserve is always misguided, not just when interest rates are artificially lowered. Unlike his empty-headed colleagues, Santelli seems to be largely aware that artificially lowered rates are a recipe for economic disaster, but he does not seem to be aware that interest rate manipulation is always misguided. Interest rates are prices; specifically, they are prices to borrow saved capital, and when credit is created or destroyed out of thin air by a central bank in order to either lower or raise interest rates, this distorts the entire structure of production, and indeed creates the business cycle. So, while Santelli is justified in complaining about artificially low interest rates around the world today, he should follow this through to its logical conclusion; namely, that price-fixing rates at any level other than the market-established level is simply idiotic. What is needed is a purely free market for credit that is not manipulated in any way by any government body. Here are a few books for Santelli to read on this topic:

America’s Great Depression, By Murray Rothbard

The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle, Edited by Richard Ebeling

The Case Against the Fed, By Murray Rothbard

The Theory of Money and Credit, By Ludwig von Mises

3) Like interest rates, money should be completely freed from the manipulating grip of government and allowed to be completely determined by free markets. At times, Santelli appears to be almost on-board with this proposition, but he has yet to come out explicitly against government paper and for market-determined currencies. If he did, he could absolutely smash Keynesians like Liesman who would be forced to defend not only Fed manipulation of the credit markets, but also the monopolization of currencies. In other words, instead of trying to fight Keynesians like Liesman, Mishkin and Meyers on their own turf, by assuming that such men have either the right or the ability to determine the "proper" amount of money in the economy, Santelli would drag them into the unfriendly and unfamiliar position of having to defend monetary socialism. He would also be in a position to consistently and powerfully attack deficit spending by governments that simply borrow newly-printed money from central banks. Here are some books on that topic for Santelli to peruse, in addition to those already mentioned:

What has Government Done to Our Money? By Murray Rothbard

A History of Money and Banking in the United States, By Murray Rothbard

4) Socialism is economic insanity. Santelli seems to be very much on board with this proposition as well, but he does not seem aware of the sheer logical power of the proposition. It is not, as Reaganites and supply-siders like Larry Kudlow would have us believe, solely applicable to command economies like the former Soviet Union. Instead, it means that the government provision of any good or service, from the post office to fire departments, is economic lunacy. If socialism is an economic disaster for the provision of bread and tires, it is for that very same reason a disaster for the provision of anything else. If Santelli would internalize this truism and use it against men like Liesman, he would again take the fight to the Keynesians and not allow them to relax on their own turf. If you concede to a Keynesian like Liesman that government is economically justifiable in one area, you can rest assured that he will rub your face in it if you, for example, inconsistently argue against government entities like Fannie and Freddie. Instead, be intellectually consistent in your criticism of all socialism, and you will strike a blow they will not soon forget. Here are a few books and articles on the topic of socialism that Santelli should consult:

Middle-of-the-Road-Policy Leads to Socialism, By Ludwig von Mises

A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, By Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Socialism, By Ludwig von Mises

Economic Calculation in the Soviet Commonwealth, By Ludwig von Mises

The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, By Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Were Rick Santelli to internalize these simple ideas, he would become a formidable foe to Keynesians like Steve Liesman, Larry Meyer, and the insufferable Frederic Mishkin. He would be in a position to make not only more persuasive arguments against Keynesianism, but he would also be in a position to offer a positive economic system to replace it; namely, unbridled and unadulterated capitalism. One only hopes that Santelli will eventually make use of this philosophical weapon to give Steve Liesman the intellectual whipping he so richly deserves.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

The Best of Mark R. Crovelli

As predicted, the Egyptian revolution has been quickly and thoroughly betrayed by cunning politicians and generals within the existing Egyptian political establishment. They have placated many protesters by simply promising to hopefully hold free elections in six months, while keeping themselves in power in the interim. Never mind that these men achieved their positions of authority by faithfully enforcing Mubarak's brutal laws on the hapless Egyptian masses. Never mind that the chief torturer under Mubarak is still standing within reach of the helm of the Egyptian police state. Never mind that the barbaric state of emergency laws which helped to spark the protests are still in place.

What happened? Why were the generals and existing political classes able to keep their jobs in the face of millions of protesters in the streets? Why were the millions of protesters unable to oust these tools of Mubarak and purge the country of dictatorship completely? Why did the Egyptian police state not starve on the vine, forcing Mubarak's depraved cronies in the military, police, and bureaucracies to go home and make livings for themselves that did not involve robbing, killing or intimidating ordinary Egyptians?

The facile answers to these questions that have been seized upon by the media involve the Egyptians' supposed respect for the military, and the funding that has continued to flow into the country from the United States. Both of these answers are unsatisfying, and ultimately question begging.

On the one hand, while the Egyptian people may have respect for the ordinary soldier in the street, who was forced to pick up a gun by Mubarak's conscription laws, it is hard to believe that the Egyptian protesters could be naïve enough to believe that the military command under Mubarak was not intimately involved in the creation and implementation of the laws they despised and were protesting against. The military command had to have acceded to the blockade against Gaza, for example, or else it would not have been brutally implemented and enforced. Egyptians simply cannot be foolish enough to think that the military command was an unwilling participant in Mubarak's 30-year reign of terror. Surely they despise the military command for its role in the dictatorship almost as much as Mubarak himself. On the other hand, the money that the United States, incredibly, continues to pour into the Egyptian military, also cannot explain how these men have kept their jobs. After all, the U.S. was pouring money into Mubarak's personal accounts for decades, and yet this did not protect him from being overthrown. So, U.S. money cannot explain how these tools of Mubarak were not also similarly thrown out on their blood-soaked asses.

The real reason for these men's ability to keep their jobs and effectively maintain the Mubarak-inspired police state is that the Egyptian people neglected the most important aspect of protest in the modern world; monetary protest. In the modern world of fiat currencies printed by governments like Mubarak's, it is not enough to say "get out and stop oppressing us," even if millions of people are saying it. It is not enough to storm the presidential palace and string up the dictator like a hog, as the still-oppressed people of Romania know all too well. It is not enough to demand elections, and it is not enough to demand freedom. Instead, what is ultimately needed is to cut off the beast's funding and starve it to death. No dictatorship, junta or even republic in the world can survive if it cannot finance itself. The mantra of the revolution ought to have been "Down with Mubarak money!"

The protesters thus ought to have made dumping the Egyptian pound and adopting a non-governmental currency the central plank of their protest. They should have enjoined their fellow countrymen to sell their Mubarak money for gold or silver or anything else that's real, and the value of the pound would have plummeted instantly and massively, which would have spurred even more selling. The patriots who participated in this monetary revolt would have protected themselves from losses by getting out of the pound, while the traitors to freedom in the regime and those who supported the regime by holding onto Mubarak's pounds would have lost everything. Moreover, the police and military that are paid with Mubarak's crooked paper money would see an instant and massive de facto pay decrease. This would have forced Mubarak's central bank to print even more money to finance the military, police and all other bureaucracies, which would have turned the Egyptian pound into toilet paper. The coup de grce of the monetary racket would then be for the protestors to simply use the worthless paper the junta and Mubarak printed to pay their taxes. A hefty dose of their own crooked monetary medicine would be all that is needed to collapse the regime without even one shot being fired (by the protesters, anyway).

There is no doubt that the collapse of Mubarak's money printing and taxing racket would entail much short-term hardship for Egyptians. Money plays a role in every transaction in an advanced economy, and the collapse of Mubarak's money would undoubtedly throw the economy into a temporary tailspin. But, it is not as though the economic outlook for Egyptians is bright as long as they continue to use Mubarak's crooked money while living under a military dictatorship. The inflation rate in Egypt is cripplingly high as it is, which means that the protesters are losing massive purchasing power to the military junta every hour (that will be used to finance and enforce the laws they despise) whether they undertake this monetary revolt or not. This will only get worse as the economy worsens and the junta is forced to finance more and more of the budget through Mubarak-money printing. The protesters would simply be accelerating the process.

On the other hand, the long-term prospects for Egypt are tantalizingly bright if they overthrow Mubarak's crooked money-printing and taxing machine. With their means of financing themselves by simply printing and seizing money in a shambles, the military junta would be forced to drastically curtail spending or else increase taxes. In the wake of seeing millions of irate people in the streets ready to storm the presidential palace to hang Mubarak, however, it is hard to think they would be stupid and rash enough to raise taxes (which the Egyptians would pay with worthless pounds anyway). They might be able to prop up their regime for a short while with funds donated by the United States government, which tends to be the lender of last resort of brutal dictatorships, but the three billion dollars a year that the U.S. is committed to take from its own citizens to prop up the Egyptian dictator de jure is a drop in the fiscal bucket.

With the Egyptian pound sunk, the military dictatorship bankrupted and impotent to enforce the laws that have made Egypt an economic nightmare, and the people shifting to non-governmental currencies, Egypt would finally be in a position to become an economic powerhouse. Freed from the shame of allowing Mubarak's crooked cronies to remain at the helm of the state, and freed from the apparatus of monetary slavery that Mubarak created and the junta still utilizes, the Egyptians could finally start to make decent livings for themselves. Freed from the shackles of a currency that constantly loses value against their food, they could finally start saving and investing for the benefit of themselves and their children. Indeed, they would stand alone in the world as a people that finally possessed a money that their government could not manipulate, depreciate and confiscate.

The existing power of the Egyptian military junta is a direct result of the Egyptian protesters' neglect of Mubarak's monetary monopoly, which still operates as before. Until they do address this central feature of Egyptian dictatorships throughout the past half-century, the Egyptian protesters will never, ever win true freedom for themselves.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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Imagine for a second that you are a financial analyst, financial advisor, institutional investor, or trader who specializes in municipal bonds. Your goal, presumably, is to determine which municipalities in the United States are creditworthy enough to justify lending money to them.

Ideally, you hope to be able to pick up bonds that are dirt cheap, have a high rate of return, and that have very low chance of defaulting. This goal is usually difficult to achieve, because bonds with the lowest risk of default usually have the lowest rate of return, and vice versa for those with the highest rate of default.

Under certain circumstances, however, it is sometimes possible to pick up low-risk bonds at bargain-basement prices. If, for example, thousands of banks are forced to sell off their bond portfolios to cover losses they are suffering on other toxic assets on their balance sheets (mortgage backed securities, for instance), bond traders like yourself can take good bonds off their hands for a pittance.

As another example, if people become unreasonably bearish about the creditworthiness of municipal governments and start liquidating their bond portfolios, (because, say, a financial analyst that people trust makes a completely idiotic call), you can pick up the bonds they are stupidly selling at ridiculously low prices.

As a professional investor, you love it when these rare events present themselves. Since you know the market, and you have an insider's view into the creditworthiness of municipal governments, you want nothing more than to be able to buy up good, dirt-cheap bonds and make a veritable killing off the interest. Early retirements are secured in such ways.

Given that you stand to make a fortune by buying up bonds that people stupidly sell under rare circumstances, is it conceivable that you would go on television and try to talk people out of selling their bonds cheaply to you? The answer, of course, is that you would never do such a thing as a professional investor. That would be like a homebuyer going out of his way to publicly talk sellers into charging him higher prices, or an art dealer going on television to tell his artists to charge him more. Bankruptcy and unemployment are secured in such ways.

Yet this is precisely what we are being asked to believe about bond traders, financial analysts, and other supposedly enlightened personalities in New York and Washington, who have smeared Meredith Whitney in droves in the wake of her bombshell call on the municipal bond market. Whitney is predicting "50 to 100 sizable defaults" in the municipal bond space this year alone.

The tamping down of Whitney's call has been truly remarkable, given that the majority of the people blasting Whitney stand to make an absolute fortune if she is wrong. Indeed, the only groups who do not stand to make money off of Whitney's call, if she is wrong, are the municipal governments themselves and investors who are too dumb or slow to take advantage of it.

Think about it. If Whitney is right about this call, smart investors will all get out of municipal bonds immediately, if they are not out of them already. If she is wrong, however, and people flee municipal bonds unreasonably just on the basis of her reputation (she accurately predicted the collapse of Citigroup before anyone), the smart investors will still get out of municipal bonds immediately so that they can buy back the same bonds in eight months for half the price. Either way, smart investors will get out now, and they will not try to talk other people out of selling. This is especially true if Whitney is wrong, because smart investors will want other people to sell off massively so that they can buy back the bonds as cheaply as possible.

Given this, the fact that so-called professional investors are trying to smear Whitney and stop a sell-off reeks of a con. At best, they are trying to prop up a collapsing market long enough to get themselves out. In other words, they are public liars at best. At worst, they realize that Whitney is right, are holding massive amounts of this toxic paper, and are praying to God for either a miracle or a bailout.

This is not going to turn out well for the little guys who are taken in by this con and hold onto their municipal bonds. Especially since Meredith Whitney is right.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

The Best of Mark R. Crovelli

There is nothing in this dark and cynical world that is more beautiful than when a people rises up en masse against its suffocating and predatory political system and tells its murderous "leaders" to get the hell out of the country. Such a scene is all the more inspiring when it is motivated solely by the hope for freedom and prosperity, and the participants resort to the protest instead of the assault rifle. In the face of such a powerful grassroots lunge toward liberty, it is a foregone conclusion that the "leaders" of the country will eventually be forced to abdicate power and run for their lives. When this happens, the victorious and free people will fill the streets and countryside with joyous and uproarious song. They will have won the battle for liberty.

The truth is, however, that running the bastards out of town is at most only half the battle, because there are always plenty of bastards waiting in the wings to betray the revolution and assume power themselves. In fact, chances are that the new bastards have already made powerful contacts within the military and police and quiet agreements with foreign governments to reinstate a moderated form of the old system even before the old bastard is finally ousted. They will assume the throne and re-enslave the people, perhaps slightly less onerously than before, but enslave them nonetheless.

The people are usually unaware of these betrayals, caught up as they inevitably are in the mania of the struggle to oust the old tyrant. Their entire focus has heretofore been on making sure the old bastard actually leaves and doesn't come back, and they have developed a natural sense of camaraderie with their countrymen who participated in the revolution. They are thus open to being duped by betrayers who claim to be revolutionaries just like everyone else, but who actually have their own self-interest in mind, not the people's freedom.

As soon as the old bastard leaves town, and with him the raison d'tre of the protest and revolution, the people inevitably emerge in an intoxicated state. They are drunk on patriotism and chauvinistic nationalism, which they imbibed during the struggle to oust the old bastard. They observed that the victory of the revolutionaries was a result of their collective action, and they swell with pride for their nation and their countrymen. They let pride and collectivist thinking blind them to their individual vulnerability at the most critical moment of all. They are prideful sitting ducks.

The new bastards waiting in the wings will use this pride-induced blindness to maneuver themselves into the presidential palace. They will sing sweet songs to the revolutionaries, and claim to be the "representatives of the revolution," but they will now be sleeping under the same roof as the old bastard. Soon, the old representatives of the military and police will come to pay their respects at the presidential palace. Next, the representatives of various foreign governments will come to pay their respects and congratulate the new bastard, to be followed by the representatives of the labor unions, bureaucracies, and powerful corporations. They all come singing the praises of the new bastard, and they all come bearing gifts of various kinds. If he accepts their gifts, and he will, the death of the revolution is thereby consummated.

The people's pride will not be quickly extinguished, however. They will boast for years, if not centuries, about their glorious revolution, and they will naively assume that any old bastard that lives in the presidential palace is a representative of the "revolution." They won't even realize that the revolution was lost at the very moment that the old bastard fled town. The people's pride and complacency allowed it to be lost.

One day, long after the revolution, some of them will look around and realize the new bastard is exactly the same as the old bastard they chased out of town so long ago. The new bastard imprisons and tortures people just like the last bastard. The new bastard and his cronies are rich beyond belief, while the people suffer in poverty, just as it was before the revolution. A few of them start to realize that they are serfs of the new bastard even though almost no one realizes it.

The only remedy to this Sisyphean outcome is for the revolutionaries to remain vigilant when the old bastard is finally forced to flee the country. There is no time for singing and rejoicing when the apparatus of government remains open to being commandeered by slick-talking revolutionary imposters, or, worse, by military apparatchiks or secret police thugs. Kicking out the old bastard by no means ensures that his replacement will be any better.

This can only be accomplished, however, if the people disembowel the government entirely as soon as the old bastard boards a plane. The bureaucracies must be gutted and dismantled from top to bottom, government buildings commandeered, and the sociopathic police forces, military forces, and intelligence services must be completely dismantled. The loyalty of these institutions to the people's liberty simply cannot be trusted, since they were the sadistic musclemen behind the old bastard's reign of terror. Without their collaboration, the old bastard would not have been able to do any of the brutal things for which he is being forced to flee. They may say that they stand for liberty once their old boss gets the axe, but the people should see through this as a transparent ploy to keep their lucrative jobs. After all, they enforced the old bastard's brutal laws for years without qualms, so what's to stop them from enforcing them again if someone else tells them to, or even on their own initiative?

The key to accomplishing this purge of government leaches and sadists is for the people to take stock of their strengths as individuals, and jealously guard their individual liberty from self-proclaimed "leaders" or "representatives." The movement to depose the old bastard did not need a "representative" or a "leader," so why should it need one now? Why give a new bastard a chance to do exactly what the old bastard did? Having suffered for years under the oppression of the sadistic and corrupt police, military, and intelligence services, why should the people reinstate such forces? Any protection individuals might need can be paid for, although without a brutal and corrupt police force out there persecuting, imprisoning and torturing them, the people will need much less protection.

The key for revolutionary success, in other words, is to carry through the revolution to its logical conclusion before relaxing or celebrating. Free individuals do not need a "president" or a "prime minister." Nor do they need an armed taxing and police force roaming through their neighborhoods as a constant and mortal threat to their lives and freedom. They don't need prisons, gulags, public schools, regulatory agencies, or any other corrupt and inefficient government agency. The only thing that free people need to find happiness, peace and prosperity is anarchic freedom itself. Anything less represents a betrayal of the revolution and a putrid seed that will sprout nothing but future oppression, misery, poverty and shame.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

The Best of Mark R. Crovelli

One of the
most curious facets of the ongoing Wikileaks saga is the conspicuous
silence of the American military about the Bradley Manning case.
The military's silence is absolutely deafening, for example, on
the pages of Stars and Stripes, where only two
articles in the turbulent month of December have even deigned
to mention Mr. Manning. One would expect that, in a case involving
the largest leak of classified documents in the history of the world,
the armed forces would be staking out a concrete position on this
case for the entire world, and especially the armed forces, to see.
After all, it was one of the armed forces' own who allegedly released
the documents to Wikileaks, and other active-duty servicemen with
access to classified documents may be considering doing the very
same thing as Manning.

This silence
emanating from the armed forces regarding Manning raises a fascinating
and important question: What position should the armed forces
take with regard to the Manning case? We all know what stance
the Pentagon is likely to take, given that many of the embarrassing
documents actually refer to people in the Pentagon, but the question
that truly needs to be answered concerns the position the armed
forces should take — especially the position that average soldiers
should take on Bradley Manning.

The answer,
it turns out, cannot be discovered by facilely pointing out that
it is illegal under military law for soldiers to release classified
information to the public. This is true, because the document classification
system has been manipulated by political and military elites in
a way that is extremely prejudicial to average soldiers. Ironically,
this fact has itself been revealed by the Wikileaks releases,
because it is clear that political and military elites are over-classifying
documents in order to protect their own asses. They have been classifying
documents "secret" even when they involve nothing more
than gossip about foreign diplomats and royalty, for example. Peruse
the Wikileaks files for two minutes and you will get a good sense
of just how absurd the document classification system in the United
States has become.

Insofar as
the document classification system in the U.S. has been absurdly
extended and abused, this has created a serious moral problem for
conscientious soldiers in the armed forces. For, by over-classifying
documents, political and military elites are able to hamstring their
subordinates and make the exposure of what they are doing virtually
impossible, unless it is leaked. Any unsavory, illegal, untruthful
or even just plain embarrassing information can be hidden from public
view simply by stamping the offensive document "secret."
It is also a way for political and military elites to avoid prosecution
for crimes in the United States by claiming that their defense involves
"sensitive" or "secret" documents that cannot
be revealed in open court. This strategy is so common in our corrupted
day and age that it even has a name: "greymail."

In essence,
then, the document classification system in the United States has
warped into an instrument of intimidation against average, conscientious
soldiers who might be appalled by their superiors' words or deeds.
Superior officers and civilian bureaucrats can preempt dissent by
simply stamping incriminating documents "secret," and
use that tiny word as a threat against conscientious soldiers that
they had better keep their mouths shut — or else. This threat
is all the more unconscionable while two wars are going on that
are killing average American soldiers, not political and military
elites, in droves. When lies are used to get American soldiers killed,
and soldiers are intimidated to preempt the exposure of those lies,
you have a recipe for tragedy on a massive scale.

It is important
to bear in mind, moreover, that we are not talking about documents
upon which the safety of the United States rests. No high-ranking
officers would be stupid or reckless enough to share such sensitive
documents with low-level officers and enlistees. If they were
that mind bogglingly idiotic, then the entire Pentagon and officer
corps ought to be forced to resign for incompetence immediately.
In addition, the fact that people in Washington routinely leak documents
to the press that are far more sensitive to national security than
those Manning released, like
the National Intelligence Estimate, testifies to the existence
of a revolting double standard being applied to political and military
elites as compared to the standard being applied to average soldiers
like Mr. Manning.

Bearing these
observations in mind, it ought to be obvious that average soldiers
should celebrate Bradley Manning as a hero who stood up to this
unconscionable intimidation from above. He didn't just reveal to
the world that the upper echelons of the political and military
establishment are engaged in outright
crimes and deception;
he revealed and took a stand against conscientious soldiers being
silenced by asinine document over-classification. He is, in other
words, a defender of the honor and integrity of the average soldier
and the Army's own core
values, which stands in stark contrast to the depravity of the
political and military elites that we meet in the Wikileaks documents,
and who are now trampling
on the constitution even in their detention of Mr. Manning.

Thus, average
soldiers ought to be the first in line to defend Bradley Manning.
They ought to insist that he only be punished if it can be proven
beyond a reasonable doubt that the documents he released were indeed
of vital importance to the security of the United States. If this
cannot be proven, then Mr. Manning ought to be immediately and unconditionally
released. (Proving this in Mr. Manning's case will be extremely
difficult, however, given that Defense Secretary Gates has already
asserted that the
documents have harmed no one, and the fact that the Pentagon
didn't even think it necessary to redact names from the documents).
The assumption going forward, now that we know for a fact that documents
are being over-classified in abundance by political and military
elites, is that any released document is not vital to national
security until conclusively proven otherwise. If average soldiers
were to operate under this assumption, moreover, political and
military elites would be forced to take the time to actually hide
any truly sensitive documents from the view of hundreds
of thousands of people, as they should have been doing
from day one.

It was long
overdue for someone to stand up against the practice of over-classifying
documents in order to intimidate average soldiers. Bradley Manning
has courageously done so, and all members of the armed forces should
rejoice for it.

December
22, 2010

Andrew Mason
is a former corporal in the U.S.M.C. Mark R. Crovelli [send
him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

The
Best of Mark R. Crovelli

Question:
What kind of people do you think will be attracted to the American
military, now that it is common knowledge that the armed forces
will only tolerate soldiers who keep their mouths shut about serious
crimes, and that politicians in Washington want to hang
or assassinate soldiers who conscientiously expose serious crimes?
The answer, of course, is that only the moral scum of the
nation will be attracted to this profession in the future, since
only the most morally bankrupt and intellectually challenged among
us would ever voluntarily allow themselves to be put in a position
where they would have to choose between abetting serious crimes
or being hanged.

The depraved
chickenhawks in Washington who are calling for Bradley Manning
to be executed (without so much as even a show trial), and for Julian
Assange to be assassinated (even though he is an Australian
citizen), ought to be aware that their calls for human blood will
have serious consequences for this country. They may think that
they are only blustering and posturing in order to get themselves
reelected, which is their singular purpose in life of course, but
announcing to the nation that military whistleblowers ought to be
executed sends a powerful message. To morally conscientious Americans,
the message is: The American military is a place where men are expected
to lie about or cover up war crimes and felonies, or where they
will be hanged if they do what their consciences dictate. To depraved
and sociopathic Americans, the message is: Whoopie! The armed forces
are a place where men can commit all the crimes they want without
any fear of exposure! Bonanza!

The effect
that these perverse incentives will have on military recruiting
is so obvious that even hysterical, pea-brained politicians ought
to be able to foresee it. Good and honorable men will choose not
to enlist, while depraved and sociopathic men will. The U.S. armed
forces — the guys with all the big guns and nukes in America
— will gradually be filled solely with scumbags and degenerates
who are all too happy to have politicians punishing whistleblowers
on their behalf. And remember, we're not talking about a profession
as harmless as the teamsters or plumbers becoming a refuge for the
depraved — we're talking about a profession that involves automatic
weapons, killer
robot planes, tanks and nuclear weapons.

The effect
of these politicians' calls for blood will be equally as perverse
on any good men who are currently enlisted in the armed forces.
Soldiers are being told, in essence, that their oath to uphold the
Constitution of the United States is completely null and void, and
that they are subject to a new oath that they never knew about.
The new oath, which none of them ever swore, says that soldiers
must hide or keep silent about crimes being committed in their midst
or especially by their superiors. Should they violate this unstated
oath, politicians and generals will call for their execution. The
message is clear to both good soldiers and degenerate ones: If you
so much as let out a squeak because of your conscience, everyone
in the government, from the President on down, will try to get you
hanged. How do you like them apples?

It
is no use to object that soldiers still have the opportunity to
simply go to their superiors to report crimes, and keep everything
in the chain of command. When the crimes are being committed by
the very top of the military establishment and executive branch,
how reasonable is it to expect a PFC to go to his superiors and
say "Hi there, I'd like to report that all levels of the military-congressional-executive-industrial
complex are engaging in outright deception and overt crimes — sometimes
even heinous war crimes. Is there a form I should fill out to get
them indicted, or what?" Any soldier that naïve belongs
in an asylum. Things are far worse now, however, since conscientious
soldiers cannot even find refuge in leaking the crimes to the American
people without the politicians trying to hang them. They will shut
up for good now and watch the crimes expand.

Nor
is it any use to object that soldiers have no right to question
the decisions of their superiors and leak documents that are above
their heads. In the first place, American soldiers are, first and
foremost, Americans, and their only duty is to protect the American
people and uphold the Constitution of the United States. If this
is not their purpose, then what in the hell are we paying them for?
That is why they took an oath to defend the Constitution and protect
the country from threats foreign and domestic. They did not
take an oath to do whatever Hilary Clinton and Robert Gates want,
and then help them to cover up their lies and crimes. They serve
America and Americans, not the current political and military establishment.

The
future looks bleak for America with a military in this state of
moral decay. When soldiers do not object to invading foreign countries
that never
attacked us, and do not object to bombing
and shooting foreign civilians, it is a symptom of serious moral
decay already well advanced in the armed forces. When politicians
tell soldiers that any dissent or leaking of the truth will be punished
by hanging, it is a symptom that a country will shortly degenerate
into a totalitarian nightmare. It is a sign that the American armed
forces have finally and totally given up on defending the people
of America, (if
they ever did), and are on the way to becoming the largest gang
of Brown Shirts the world has ever seen.

May
God protect us all from this group of people whose allegiance is
to secrecy, immoral war, and lying politicians, instead of to defending
the people of the United States. Better yet, may anarchy
protect us all from this nightmarish future!

December
14, 2010

Mark R.
Crovelli [send him mail]
writes from Denver, Colorado.

The
Best of Mark R. Crovelli

On the other hand, if he has a job in the free market, the average man witnesses on a daily basis how the economy really grows and expands. If he is an employee, he sees his boss trying to cut costs and expand production of things people actually want, thereby making more money for everyone involved with the firm and cheaper or better goods for consumers. If he is a boss himself, his whole professional existence consists of trying to make his company more productive and thus more profitable by producing something that at least some people in the economy want to buy. In other words, the average man’s uncelebrated work is wholly responsible for growing the economy, not the arrogant clowns who claim that they have special knowledge about the economy, just because they went to Princeton and know how to run multiple regressions.

Nothing illustrates this point more clearly than the Federal Reserve’s recent idea to flood the American economy with green paper in order to "create" jobs. This idea is so harebrained that only a self-delusional and arrogant "intellectual" could possible entertain it. More green paper does not create jobs. More un-backed credit does not create jobs. Inducing the federal government, average Americans and American companies to take on more debt (by artificially lowering interest rates) does not create jobs. Discouraging people from saving money (because they will earn virtually no interest on their savings) does not create jobs. More fundamentally, "intellectuals" with a printing press do not create jobs, howsoever much they might like to delude themselves into thinking they do.

Whenever the economy does create jobs, it is always because of average men going out and making something that people want to buy. This process of average men creating jobs can only be impeded by intellectuals and politicians standing in their way. They do not need intellectuals and politicians to give them "incentives" to do this; the motive to earn profits is all the incentive they need. They do not need the intellectuals to flood the economy with green paper in order to have an incentive to earn profits. They do not need politicians to regulate and tax them to death in order to have an incentive to earn profits. Quite the reverse, anything the intellectuals do to confuse the average man’s business calculations (e.g., by tinkering with interest rates and flooding the economy with green paper), and anything the politicians do to reduce their profits (e.g., by taxing them to death or regulating them into oblivion), will only reduce their incentive to try to earn profits.

If the arrogant intellectuals and power-drunk politicians cannot create jobs, then how will this economy ever improve? What can be done to create jobs and increase production in order to increase our standard of living if the intellectuals and politicians cannot help us?

The answer is so simple that it escapes the notice of almost everyone: The intellectuals and politicians need to get the hell out of the average man’s way and let him do what he instinctively knows how to do — try to earn profits for himself. This is the one and only way to improve the economic situation in the United States and around the world.

Examples of how the economy would improve by getting these intellectual and political parasites off the average man’s back are almost infinite, but one example in particular is so blatantly obvious that even people from Princeton ought to be able to grasp it. This would be to get government completely out of the business of regulating who may or may not be a taxi driver. Getting government out of the business of regulating taxis might appear to be such an insignificant alteration in the economy that it is not even worth thinking about, but its effects would actually be profound. Indeed, the two main effects of this simple change would be to drastically reduce drunk driving and put enormous amounts of people to productive work in the economy.

The effect on drunk driving in this country would be so profound that it would probably eradicate the problem entirely. If anyone was free to drive people around for profit, the quantity of cheap cabs around the country would literally explode. This is especially true in the current economic environment, in which we have a massive pool of unemployed vehicle owners available to ferry drunks around. With a massively increased supply of cabs competing for fares from drunks, the price of cabs around the country would consequently plummet. Many people who live in urban areas would probably get rid of their personal vehicles completely, since they could so easily catch a cheap cab to wherever they needed to go, as is the case in many developing countries where the taxi industries are less regulated. People who knew they were going to imbibe would thus have an extremely cheap way to get themselves to and from a bar without risking their lives or risking spending the weekend in jail by driving drunk. As is universally the case, economic freedom in just one small area would alleviate a problem that has plagued American highways for decades.

The effect of getting government out of the taxi industry would not be limited to merely wiping out the drunk driving problem. It would also put enormous numbers of people to productive work, since virtually any unemployed person with a car could make money as a cabbie. In fact, if I were an unemployed young person right now with few job prospects, I would immediately set out to create an "illegal" cab company for myself. I would investigate the prices being charged by the "legal," monopolistic cab companies, and I would charge people, say, 15% less than that price. I would contact all my friends and family and tell them that I was available throughout the week to pick them up and drive them home from the restaurants and bars. By doing this, I would be both making money for myself (all cash, I would add!), and I would be helping to keep my friends and family safe on the weekends. If it were legal to do this, the number of people who could be put to productive work is absolutely mind-boggling.

A further consequence of this small dose of economic freedom would be to eradicate an entire parasitical industry from the American economy. Taxi companies who have protected their monopolistic positions for decades, and who have indirectly caused untold numbers of DUIs by doing so, would have to actually compete in the free market for once. The jails and prisons in this country would be emptier by having fewer inmates in them for DUI, and prosecutors and police could actually do something productive with their lives, (like investigating robberies and murders for once), instead of hunting down people for DUI’s in order to take their money. Yes, many of these people would be out of work, but no one would cry for them anymore than they would cry if the entire cancer industry were put out of work by finding a cure for cancer. These people would actually have to become productive members of society like the rest of us.

As this tiny example shows, creating jobs and increasing economic productivity is a consequence of economic freedom. The more freedom the average man has, the more productive he is and the richer we all are for it. Intellectuals and politicians are fundamentally different, because they get richer and more powerful to exactly the same extent that the average man is less free. There is no hope for economic recovery unless we get these intellectual and political parasites off our backs by recognizing the profound role of the average man in creating wealth, and the abject immorality of the intellectuals and politicians who strangulate him.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

The Best of Mark R. Crovelli

There are other times in a man’s life, however, when his intellectual opponent poses no challenge whatsoever, because it is he that carries the broadsword and his opponent the fish knife. In those cases, a man need not summon all of his powers of ratiocination to enter the arena. He had still better gird his loins, though, because an idiot wielding a fish knife can safely be assumed to be ready to stick that knife wherever he — or she — can. The concepts of fair and foul play should be assumed to be beyond the grasp of an idiot.

A prime example of just this type of idiot is Ms. Lisa Richards, who writes for David Horowitz’s NewsRealBlog. Ms. Richards is apparently vying for the title of "liar par excellence" at NewsRealBlog, which is the second most coveted award at Horowitz’s site — the first being, of course, "lunatic par excellence." Richards is a truly remarkable idiot, in that she can almost effortlessly shift gears between making fallacious arguments and lying. One minute she will tell outright lies, and the next she will gracefully and almost imperceptibly construct the flimsiest straw man argument you can possibly imagine. It is an art, of sorts, and I would encourage Horowitz to give her the award.

Her recent article attempting to link libertarian anarchism to Saul Alinsky, contains not even one sentence that is not either an outright lie or a preposterous non sequitur. Take her opening paragraph, for example:

Radical libertarians are equivalent to leftist Saul Alinskyites. Both despise government and the Constitution, seeking to destroy America. Alinksy wanted a community government; radical libertarians want Rothbardian uprisings to destroy government and wealth altogether for communal equality. To accomplish this, radical libertarians demand anarchy.

This paragraph contains so many non sequiturs that it makes one think Richards is clinically insane, instead of just a run-of-the-mill idiot. First, we libertarian anarchists do indeed despise government, but from this premise how does it follow that we seek "to destroy America"? What does "destroy America" even mean? Is she really suggesting that we anarchists want all the people of America dead? If she is suggesting this, then she truly is insane. The second assertion about Rothbardian anarchists is even more ridiculous. To suggest that Rothbard or his followers seek to "destroy…wealth altogether for communal equality" is the most preposterous thing I have ever read. Richards is apparently unaware that Rothbard was an economist, and thus wrote voluminously about wealth creation, not wealth destruction. He also wrote Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, and was thus no fan of "communal equality," if this awkward phrase is used by Richards as a synonym for some variant of egalitarianism. Finally, the idea that libertarian anarchists "want Rothbardian uprisings" to eliminate the state is a bald-faced lie, if she is suggesting that we Rothbardians endorse violence. We, unlike her publisher, don’t endorse aggressive violence.

Moving into the body of the article, one finds even more outright lies and non sequiturs. The next big lie comes in the form of a citation from my recent article discussing anarchism. She cites my article in the following way:

Americans assume Human nature is so intrinsically evil and depraved that, without cops walking the streets, judges locking up potheads, and politicians buying hookers and crack in Washington, the entire world would devolve into a horrifying bloodbath.

When I really wrote this:

It usually goes something like this: Human nature is so intrinsically evil and depraved that, without cops walking the streets, judges locking up potheads, and politicians buying hookers and crack in Washington, the entire world would devolve into a horrifying bloodbath.

Did you notice what she did here? She changed the first part of the sentence to read "Americans," when I never even mentioned Americans before this sentence, or even in this sentence. This gives the impression that I am "anti-American," in order to scare the easily terrified kooks who read Horowitz’s blog. For all they know from this quote, I must be an Islamo-fascist with an Italian last name (like Mussolini!) who wants to blow up the moon.

When she turns to discuss my argument, Richards, taking off her liar hat and donning her idiot hat once again, lets loose with a barrage of non sequiturs. I am charged with the following:

Crovelli’s argument is sheer stupidity. Without laws, mankind disintegrates. Society can’t survive and thrive without leadership and checking [sic] and balancing leaders [sic]. Yet Crovelli claims human nature lacks depravity, man is not "brutish," and society would work better without laws and with "the absence of police officers."

Setting aside how horribly written this is, take a gander at the gigantic non sequiturs these sentences contain. Never did I claim in my article that man needs no laws. Never did I claim in my article that man does not need "leadership" (by which, I assume, she means we need philosopher kings like Bush II). Richards is simply jumping to the conclusion that anarchy means "no laws and no leadership," but this simply does not follow from my argument. Anarchists of the Hoppean variety, like myself, do not condemn all authority, and libertarian anarchists of all stripes do not condemn laws. What we do condemn are laws that do not apply to all people equally, (e.g., don’t steal, unless you’re a tax collector), and "authority" that is rooted solely in aggression (e.g., if you smoke that plant, I will lock you up in a cage). Since this is so, Richards’ entire argument is nothing but an oh-so flimsy straw man.

Things only get worse from here, both in terms of reasoning and in terms of writing. Richards cites and responds to a Rothbard quote discussing the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian movements by claiming that the Declaration of Independence wasn’t an anarchist document. Not being content to limit her fallacious reasoning to non sequiturs, she apparently decided to mix in a little red herring for good measure. Needless to say, it is completely irrelevant to discuss the meaning of the Declaration of Independence in a discussion about the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian movements.

Richards then cites another Rothbard quote discussing the hideous immorality of war and somehow manages to describe the quote as follows:

Alinsky and Rothbard used social justice tactics — no one is evil except government and wealth. Government and laws create crime, not lawless people. Destroy both and all will be free. Radical libertarianism is anti-Jeffersonian conservative [sic]; it is Marxist.

Now, even for a person with as modest a level of intelligence as Ms. Richards, it should be obvious that Rothbard’s quote has absolutely nothing to do with "social justice tactics," whatever that phrase is intended to mean. Not only that, but to claim that Rothbard is saying that "no one is evil except government and wealth" can only be described as a non sequitur of the most childish and crassest variety. Once again, Rothbard never, ever claimed that wealth is "evil," and he never, ever claimed that only governments are "evil." He often distinguished, following the likes of Augustine and Lysander Spooner, between what he called "private criminals" and "public criminals," the latter being richer and more dangerous than the former, but existing nonetheless.

The claim here that Rothbard, and later that Ralph Raico, are Marxists is the most interesting of Richards’ many fabrications, because it reveals that she is either ignorant beyond repair or a liar of the most extreme sort. She appears to hold the sociopathic view that any people who oppose war are dangerous "leftists." She claims Raico is a Marxist because he wrote an article in 1991 (not quite his most recent article, I would hasten to remind her) celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union. How a person could think that an article celebrating the fall of the U.S.S.R. was "Marxist" is difficult to fathom, and tends to reinforce the idea that Richards is more an idiot than a liar. The same is just as true of her claim that Rothbard, the vocal critic of socialism and Marxism, was a Marxist. Pulling in the other direction, however, that she is more a liar than an idiot, is her next non sequitur; that libertarians "insist terrorists are not criminals. Instead, the military and police are." Only a liar could claim with a straight face that libertarians, the people who claim that life, liberty and property are inviolable, "insist" that terrorists are not criminals. We do say that politicians, police and soldiers are often the biggest terrorists of all, but that hardly means that "private" terrorists are less vile to us.

The rest of the article is filled with even more horrendously written, foaming at the mouth, lies and non sequiturs. The purpose of the last few paragraphs seems to be to reassure the Neocon readers of Horowitz’s loony blog that the cold war is still going on. Today’s libertarian anarchists are the new Red Menace that the Neocon crowd needs to justify the gigantic war-making and social engineering machine in Washington that all Neocons worship.

Libertarians should rejoice in her article, however. Few writers are less eloquent than Ms. Richards, and fewer still are capable of reasoning as badly as she. She has done the libertarian world a great service by exposing, even more pointedly than my article, the absolute absurdity of government. On behalf of the libertarian anarchists of the world, thank you, Ms. Richards.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

The Best of Mark R. Crovelli

It usually goes something like this: Human nature is so intrinsically evil and depraved that, without cops walking the streets, judges locking up potheads, and politicians buying hookers and crack in Washington, the entire world would devolve into a horrifying bloodbath. Murder and rape would run rampant as soon as the "criminals," (that is, all of us, as per our shared evil nature), got word that the police were no longer in the business of shooting, beating and incarcerating them. Virtually everyone and everything would be killed or destroyed in the ensuing mayhem. Cannibalism would probably even reappear for the barbaric survivors of the initial anarchic bloodbath. That’s right, cannibalism.

So, as you can clearly see, the fragile fabric of society is held together ultimately by the simple police officer, whom we all take for granted, and whose life is spent deterring the innumerable "criminals" out there from butchering one another, like you and me. Without police officers, given human nature’s intrinsic depravity, life would indeed be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

The sheer stupidity of arguments along the lines that human nature is so totally depraved that society would devolve into cruel chaos in the absence of police officers is almost difficult to fathom. One can forgive the flat-Earthers of yesterday for not being gifted enough in astronomy and mathematics to determine that the giant hunk of rock they stood on is spherical, but how can one forgive the people of today for thinking that that guy wearing blue polyester with mustard in his mustache in the corner of the deli is the very linchpin of human society? How can one forgive an intellectual error as large as the one that presumes that you and I would probably fight each other to the death if it wasn’t for that woman with a mullet and a radar gun under the highway overpass? How will future generations be able to comprehend an intellectual error as large as the one that holds that our very lives and our entire civilization hang oh-so tenuously from a 56-inch braided duty belt?

If our lives and fortunes were indeed dependent upon protection from a handful of people swaddled in hideous blue polyester, mankind would have long ago lost them. If human nature were truly as depraved as these arguments would have us believe, then the chubby blue line would long ago have been annihilated by its vastly numerically superior criminal adversaries. No "criminal" worth the name would be deterred from committing his favored atrocities by a small group of lightly-armed fat people, whose national reputation is tied inextricably to the donut. To even suggest that this 300 million-strong horde of savage, would-be criminals are kept at bay only by some irrational fear of blue polyester is so asinine that it makes the flat-Earthers look like geniuses by comparison.

This intellectual error is all the more inexcusable in America, where the population is armed to the teeth with high-powered rifles, pistols, and shotguns. If the American population were truly as depraved as this argument would have us believe all people are, then its bloodlust could hardly be contained by a few pudgy men and women carrying small caliber pistols. The thought is as laughable as would be an argument to the effect that the hardened and rifle-toting farmers of Mayberry were deterred from slaughtering one another by Andy Griffith and his slow-witted sidekick.

On another level, moreover, arguments to this effect are deeply insulting to people like you and me, for they insinuate that you and I are savage beasts that are only kept in check by those enlightened and portly souls who populate the local police force. Unlike those ultra-civilized "public servants," you and I would like nothing more than to cut each other’s throats, if only the peace-loving police officers of the world weren’t holding us back. The truth, as anyone with eyes in America should be able to tell you, is precisely the reverse, since police officers and soldiers are often the most depraved perpetrators of the very crimes they claim to "protect" Americans from. The police are people just like us, after all, even if their waists are often larger, and they are capable of the same brutality as any other people.

There are some intellectual errors that one can excuse, or at least understand. The people of antiquity could not see that the Earth was round, so one can understand that they did not grasp that seemingly obvious truth There are other intellectual errors, however, that are so idiotic and so self-evident that they smash to pieces any sense of superiority we might be foolish enough to entertain over other peoples. Such is the magnitude of the error of dismissing the sublime idea of free-market anarchism by assuming that the geniuses in blue keep us savages from killing each other.

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

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