Listen, Kerry!by
Walter
Block
For God’s sake, we’ve got to get rid of that imperialist war-mongering socialist fascist George Bush! You’ve got to go the Gene McCarthy route. It’s not too late. You can jettison that baloney about getting the U.N. involved in the carnage. No! The only way to get elected is to pull out now, and offer reparations for the many sins of the U.S. government (previous administration, of course). So far, at least as President, you haven’t murdered a single solitary innocent person. Let’s try to keep it that way, shall we? Enough with this me too-ism on Iraq. The Republicans can out-war you any day. In that direction lies the fate of Gore, Humphrey, ... Don’t you want to win? Surely, you’d like to be President, wouldn’t you? Wasn’t that the whole purpose of the primaries? Now look. Full disclosure here. I’m a libertarian. I don’t like your socialism any more than I like the Bush variety. In some ways, you’re even worse, beholden as you are to some of the worst elements in the domestic polity: teachers, unionists, welfare queens, and Hollywood, as well as organized, victimological gays, women, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, etc. But I’m willing to overlook all that. Anything, to see that the monster Bush gets his just deserts come election time. I don’t much care if you wreck health care by imposing that wicked and inefficient Canadian system. It bothers me very little that you’ll pack the Supreme Court with judges who will take affirmative action to new and presently unimaginable depths. I fully expect that the first step in your administration will be to force helmets on bicyclists; heck, even on joggers, or people who merely go out for a walk. You can even make Barbra Streisand your Secretary of Labor and Jane Fonda your Secretary of Commerce. I’m willing to tolerate all of this and more, if only you stop this mass murder of innocents in the Middle East, and of course the potential for it everywhere else. So here’s the deal. I will root for you in the coming election if you just borrow a leaf from Washington’s "Farewell Address" or read, digest, and act upon that of John Quincy Adams speaking on the Fourth of July, 1821, who stated: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own... She well knows that, by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the color and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlets upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished luster the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit". I can’t vote for you; sorry. I never vote; it just encourages them. (Ok, when I was young and foolish, I voted for Barry in 1964; but that was the last time! Honest!) In any case, if I voted, I’d have to vote for Michael Badnarik, the candidate for the Libertarian Party. It’s an aesthetic thing, you wouldn’t understand. But I will root for you, at least vis a vis that monster, Bush, if you make a 180 degree turn in your foreign policy. Think Switzerland. The U.S. as a sort of gigantic Switzerland, which offends no one, which minds its own business. So here’s what you’ve got to do. Pull out all our troops from everywhere. Now! (Ok, ok, wait until you are elected). If you learn we’ve got some soldiers on the moon or Mars, this goes for them as well. No more foreign military bases. Ok, ok, you can have as many foreign military bases as Switzerland has. Tell you what I’ll do: I won’t even insist you disband all our consulates abroad. This goes to show you just how moderate a libertarian like me can be. And they call me an extremist! Faugh! I hope and trust you appreciate my forbearance on this matter. Then, socialism, glorious socialism. Onward and upward! Nationalize the steel mills. They are just a bunch of slobs who for far too long now have been hiding behind tariff protections. Take over the auto industry! Surely, the people who run the motor vehicle bureau offices and the post office can make better cars than Toyota? Raise the minimum wage to, oh, about $100 per hour. The present levels are unconscionable for a "progressive" such as yourself. Go green: prohibit people from exhaling; it ruins the environment. The only reason full-bore socialism didn’t work in the U.S.S.R. is because they didn’t have the right leaders. But I have every confidence in you (and Jane and Barbra). Just stop the mass murder, ok? (Said in the tone of voice employed by the guidance counselor in South Park).
Dr. Block [send him mail] is a professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. See his Autobiography Archive. Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com |
July
8, 2004