Walter Block: Free Market Environmentalism

There are at least two things I like about the encounter recorded in this video. The first was the use of righteous defensive force against an armed aggressor in uniform.

The second was the fact that the individual who interposed against the cop’s aggression then intervened to prevent serious injury when someone else decided to pile on once the primary aggressor had been put down. We will never see a “good cop” intervene in similar fashion to prevent a punitive beating of a resisting Mundane. This is why thugscrums coalesce around prone, defenseless victims — and why genuinely decent people like former Officer Regina Tasca, who earnestly want to be peace officers, are purged from the ranks for trying to protect victims of police violence.

The prelude to this altercation wasn’t captured on video, but I don’t consider that matter to be terribly important. The officer wasn’t intervening to prevent a crime, and he deployed a reliably deadly weapon to carry out a punitive strike against an unarmed citizen. The man who intervened showed much greater restraint in responding to a genuine crime of violence.

Shiller blamed the 2007-2008 financial crash on “animal spirits”, writing “It is now time to keep our eye on the ball and set clear targets to fix a system that broke when our animal spirits got out of bounds.” This is a non-explanation. It does not explain the timing of a bubble and subsequent recession and their linkage and their severity. It doesn’t explain those instances when bubbles do not occur. A doctor who cannot diagnose a patient cannot prescribe proper remedies. For a detailed Austrian diagnosis, see here. Excessive credit creation originating in the banking sector accompanied by a deterioration in loan quality and often stimulated by government policies are key factors that Shiller doesn’t mention.

Professional football has long dragged its feet in getting with the program because, well, because it’s so heterosexual male oriented.  But the NFL is making progress.  For the past two weeks players have been wearing cute little pink booties and glovies to make the statement that “We Are Aware of Breast Cancer.”  What?  Huh?  Breast cancer?  Never heard of it.  Thank God the NFL alerted me to this newly-discovered plague.  Has anyone else out there ever heard of it?

Then there’s the frowning declaration of disapproval that King Obama made over the fact that the Washington Redskins are known as the Redskins.  Redskins owner Dan Snynder heroically gave the king a big middle finger (figuratively speaking), causing USA Today and other Official Pronouncers of Acceptable Opinion to throw a hysterical fit.  Mr. Snyder may eventually back down, but I hope not.  But if he does, here’s my recommendation for a new name for the team that I think will completely satisfy the cultural Marxists:  How about the Washington Gaylesianhispanicblacktransvestites?  That covers at least some of the Official Mascot Groups of the cultural Marxists.

UPDATE:  Emailers have suggested “DC Honky Scalpers” and “Washington Drones” instead of “Redskins.”  The latter suggestion came with a recommendation to put a tiny drone icon on the helmets.  The former correctly pointed out that “Washington” must also go since it is the name of a famous White Male Oppressor, the ultimate evil in the world of the politically correct.  Along those lines, I would also suggest changing the name to , perhaps, the Anacostia Gaylesbianhispanicblacktransvestites.

Yet another suggestion: ”The Washington Foreskins to acknowledge all the dickheads in D.C.”

The Redskins’ stadium is actually in Landover, MD, not Washington.  Before it was built there were rumors that the site might be Savage, Maryland and that the team’s name was to be changed to “The Savage Redskins.”

This story – and the accompanying video – is one of the most brutal I have ever seen. The woman had actually pulled over to get off the road and fall asleep because her good judgment told her that she was not capable of driving. She was arrested while sitting in her unmoving car and for making the best available choice by avoiding potential (real) criminality by way of an auto accident. The whole video – which is brilliantly produced – must be seen. Not only did the woman not resist arrest, she completely submitted to all demands. This piece of garbage cop, who is twice her weight and 3-4 times her strength, threw her into a holding cell with full force, flinging her face first into a concrete bench. She ended up with reconstructive facial surgery, multiple broken facial bones, and a titanium plate surgically imbedded in her face. Why isn’t this bullying piece of shit being arrested for attempted murder?

Here’s Richard Nikoley on this story and incarceration nation, and why we should all hate hate hate the police state.

UPDATE from Jim Glaser:

Lew, One time I wanted to buy a gold coin for each of my three children.  I called Camino Coin and for some reason Burt answered the phone and we got talking about Lewrockwell.com and politics, and when we finally got to the coin purchase he said, “let me pick out three nice ones for you.”  He did and they sure were nice old gold coins.  The man was so easy to talk to.  When my column from your page was published in Pravda, he sent me a silver dollar, and I still have that.

UPDATE Once when I called I asked Burt, why are you answering the phone? “I wanted to put down the mop,” he said.

Stand up for our veterans? I think I’d rather sit down.

Want to hear something even more ridiculous? That Catholic priests would serve as chaplains for the U.S. government’s murder squad in the first place.

As noted earlier, prisoners at Guantanamo held indefinitely are getting no justice. The government doing this, led by obama and before him bush, is undermining norms of argument and civilized behavior.

Kelly Vlahos has an article about the kangaroo court trials of several Guantanamo prisoners who are, in fact, getting trials. “…the defense attorneys assigned by the military itself say they are being spied on, their files and emails missing and/or ending up in the hands of the prosecution, their conversations listened to, their clients’ mail being confiscated and read by military officials.” Confidentiality is part of not testifying against oneself and part of the presumption of innocence. There cannot be a candid conversation between an accused person and a defense attorney under these conditions. Any innocent or inadvertent piece of information obtained by such spying can be used against even an innocent person in innumerable ways.

Attorney General john ashcroft in 2001 issued an order allowing taping of lawyer-client conversations. The California Supreme Court subsequently overturned a 1982 ruling and allowed the admission in a trial of secretly taped conversations between lawyers defending their clients.

Totalitarian trends such as these are an ineluctable consequence of government, depending on conditions that can slow them down or speed them up. 9/11 was the condition that speeded up the already existing assault by government on freedom and rights, which is its natural behavior, built into the beast.

Due to its lack of skyscrapers, few people consider central Washington when they envision America’s best downtowns. But height isn’t everything, and D.C. more than makes up for it by having a downtown that is both vibrant and clean.  Many of the United States’ most important buildings are contained within its limits, including the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial. Downtown Washington has office space that rivals New York and Chicago, along with a spill-over residential vibrancy that is perhaps only equaled by Philadelphia.  In addition, it has the National Mall and the Potomac in its front yard, and it is largely bereft of the highways that slice apart all too many downtowns.

Yes, The Toilet – the deification of the state - is #2, and it beats out such amazing downtowns as Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. The most depressing place ever. You couldn’t attract me to this dungeon by tripling my salary. Personally, my two favorites are my hometown, Detroit, and glorious Chicago. Cities that lack vintage history, such as Miami and Seattle, don’t appeal to me beyond a visitation. Cross-posted at my blog “Detroit: from Rust to Riches.”

Corner of Griswold and Grand River in Detroit.
Photo by Karen DeCoster

The real tragedy, however, is that the mission of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) “is to return and identify the 83,000 missing service men and women from World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The agency is identifying the dead at a rate of fewer than 80 per year, at a cost of more than $1 million per identification. Bodies now wait in the JPAC lab an average of 11 years before being identified, according to an internal report released this year.”

Beg, plead, and cry to keep your loved ones out of the military. Fifty years after they disappear from a place they should never have been, pieces of their bodies in some lab may still be unidentified. And that is if they even find any body pieces. Oh, but the risk is worth it since my son or daughter can’t find a job and will get money to go to college while they defend my freedom–to be dumb enough to make such a statement.

“The media debate surrounding the question of whether to launch a military attack on Syria in August and September of 2013 was dominated by defense industry-backed experts and think tanks. These individuals and organizations are linked to dozens of defense and intelligence contractors, defense-focused investment firms, and diplomatic consulting firms with strong defense ties, yet these business ties were rarely disclosed on air or in print.”

That the Washington Post reported on this study is a revelation. Not because we didn’t already know the mendacity of that endless queue of ex-generals and connected neocons and “humanitarian interventionists” who parade in front of us telling us about cakewalks and the need to project US power or the importance of removing the horrible dictator of the day. It was a revelation because it was published in the Washington Post, one of the chief enablers of these war profiteers.

Indeed, the Washington Post’s own editorial page editor, the  hyper-interventionist neocon Fred Hiatt, was incriminated in the article. Hiatt, who from Africa to the Middle East to Russia to Asia has never seen a conflict to which he didn’t want to send other Americans’ kids to fight, published former George W. Bush’s national security advisor Stephen Hadley’s bombastic opinion piece demanding that President Obama enforce his red lines in Syria.

Hadley is not a man to mince words when war is the question. He wrote in the Post on September 8, as a US attack on Syria seemed all but inevitable:

“Every American committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon should urge Congress to grant President Obama authority to use military force against the Assad regime in Syria.”

It was all about US interests, Hadley argued solemnly. In reality, it had a lot to do with Hadley’s own interests. As in investments. As the Post piece pointed out today:

“While Hadley’s role in the Bush administration was always noted, there was no mention of his ties to Raytheon, manufacturer of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which likely would have been fired from Navy destroyers stationed in the eastern Mediterranean in strikes against Syria. Hadley has been on the board of directors of Raytheon since 2009 and, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing from June included in the new report, owned 11,477 shares of Raytheon stock, now worth about $875,000. Hadley was also paid $128,500 in cash compensation by the company last year, according to a filing with the SEC.”

Likewise, the Public Accountability Initiative study cited in the Post found at least 22 other “experts” featured in the media on over 100 occasions pushing for war on Syria who had direct financial stakes in the outcome. Additionally, “think tanks” like the Institute for the Study of War, which gave us undercover war cheerleader Elizabeth O’Bagy, are funded to the tune of millions of dollars by the military industrial complex. Neocon think tanks are well funded to come to the conclusion that war is not only the best option always, it is the only option ever.

It is unfair, though, to suggest that Hadley and his fellow warmongers are only motivated to promote murder and mayhem by the promise of personal profit. A more accurate analysis would find that Hadley and his ilk, who are allowed exclusive access to the American public by the corporate media (ever seen a peace expert featured in these “news” pieces?) are true believers first and profiteers as a consequence of that philosophy.

If Jeff Bezos wants to turn the Washington Post around, perhaps he might think about cleaning out the cesspool inhabited by the likes of Fred Hiatt and his editorial page. Bezos understands how the market works, to be sure, and he might start putting two and two together to see why readers have abandoned the Post in droves…

On Twitter and Facebook.

Here is a preview.

The latest issue of my professional journal arrived in the mail last week, and as usual, I skimmed the abstracts of posters scheduled for the upcoming annual dietetics conference. To my surprise, a few dozen described research on children’s diets, eight reporting outcomes from programs targeted for preschool or grade-school age groups.

One group of researchers stated that because 75% of children are in organized childcare, it is the ideal setting for promoting healthy behaviors; a second group agreed that childcare settings are a prime environment for early intervention. I was reminded of my own dietetic internship, where I had to sing to Head Start pupils about the merits of low-fat milk while entertaining them with a cow puppet. Nutrition and health lessons directed to preschoolers are commonly delivered in the form of games and songs, but researchers are now studying the effectiveness of other methods.

Quicken Loans Founder and Chairman Dan Gilbert has maintained that if he is going to build a parking garage in downtown Detroit, it is not going to be another drab, concrete structure.

On Friday, Gilbert’s Bedrock Real Estate Services will unveil a project in collaboration with the Library Street Collective that the company said will make its “Z” development parking garage not just a place to stash cars, but a downtown Detroit a destination.

This 535,000 square foot structure includes 10 floors, 1,300 parking spaces, 34,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, and the work of 27 different mural artists from around the world. The painted murals are 130 feet wide. The Crain’s article includes an amazing photo display of the murals. First time ever that I’ve thought: I can’t wait to park here. This is cross-posted at my blog “Detroit: From Rust to Riches.”

But it so happens…it so happened!

According to the equally hysterical CBS News, the craft beer industry is “going flat during the government shutdown.” Here is the intent of the article: “what a dirty trick for the evil tea party responsible for the shutdown to play on the American people!”*

As ever, a quick read between the lines reveals the rest of the story — a much more interesting lesson in the perniciousness of the government in the first place:

“…the shutdown has closed an obscure agency that quietly approves new breweries, recipes and labels, which could create huge delays throughout the rapidly growing craft industry…”

What? There is a government agency that actually approves the recipes and labels of American craft brewers?

Yes indeed, and without the federal government these breweries cannot come out with new beer concoctions, cannot bottle already approved recipes in 22 ounce bottles instead of 12 ounce bottles, cannot open a new tasting room on the premises, cannot put already-approved recipes into new labels, etc.

But…surprise surprise: the big multinationals are not affected:

“The closing isn’t expected to have much effect on industry giants such as MillerCoors or Anheuser-Busch. They can continue to produce existing products as usual.”

From the petty federal government closing of parking lots at privately-owned Mt. Vernon to US park police holding busloads of senior citizens and foreign tourists hostage at a private concession in Yellowstone park (Not even a potty break! Jawohl!), the real lesson is to how many obscure and seemingly private places the federal government has applied its jackboot.

Careful American readers may (hopefully) start thinking to themselves, “hmmm, maybe the problem is not the government shutdown, but the government in the first place.” Wouldn’t it be nice if this was the takeaway from this very silly episode — a few more recruits for our position?

*This is not to imply that this writer accepts in any way the binary paradigm of “R” vs “D,” by the way. Just to explain the media spin.

Thanks to Brother Norman for the story.

I’m on Twitter.

But the main point I wanted to make is that the terms democracy and democratization, which are what the U.S. seeks for many countries that are riven with factions, really means a one-state political solution for these lands. There are no good reasons why such a solution is a good idea for all sorts of disparate countries that have unique problems and societies. There is no good reason why imposing or pushing for such a solution, to the point of engaging in multiple wars, does anything good for the people of America.

Democracy and democratization are being used as semi-holy goals, but in standing in for support of a single monopoly State, they preclude all sorts of other political solutions, from secession to autonomous regions to exterritorialism to federations. This is another case in which democracy is in opposition to a more far-reaching political freedom, one that supports freedom of association.

Change and motion are virtually laws of nature and the universe. There is nothing sacrosanct about the State. Its sovereignty and territoriality are going to be broken down. The major danger during this process is that a few large states by themselves or in conjunction with the U.N. consolidate into a worldwide power. This is a danger because smaller groupings are more vulnerable militarily and economically. The world cannot move forward toward greater justice without clearly recognizing those rights that are natural and rejecting those so-called positive rights that have been snuck in under various banners. This is because all attempts to create positive rights are going to lead right back to oppressive government.

Second, the American public are not the looting, vandalizing hordes of unwashed masses the government would make us out to be. While I’d prefer he started at the Jefferson Memorial, here’s an unnamed American who took it on his own initiative to make sure the monuments stay maintained. The g-men obviously turn a blind eye to the “Adopt A Highway” programs where thousands of miles of government roadway receive free maintenance from civic minded groups who clean up the trash for free, all for a little sign. Imagine the sponsorship rights to be had for maintaining the National Mall or Yellowstone! Let’s lay off all National Park rangers permanently and auction the maintenance rights (and the parks themselves while we’re at it!)

Third, the only value the Federal Government actually brings to the long suffering American people is the National Parks. Consider this – the shutdown has given them an excuse to punish the serfs for daring to elect a few “radicals” who are concerned about implementing a Soviet-style medical insurance scheme on top of $200+ Trillion in off balance sheet federal debt, and are making an issue of it. The only “service” the administration can actually shutdown that 99% of Americans give a damn about is the national parks, and even then most people are only indirectly affected. Shutdown at the EPA? Yawn. Shutdown the IRS? Yes, please! CDC? Meh. NSA, TSA, CIA, FBI, and Globally deployed military forces – We should be so lucky.

Think of the colossal waste of over $3.5 Trillion dollars a year on all this government and when push comes to shove, the best they can do is take away some nature preserves. Government is a deadly, wasteful scam with negligible tangible benefit.

Do you remember the early days of the Bushobama Wars, when the government and its obsequious media refused to show the planeloads of flag-draped coffins bringing dead soldiers back to America? Such pictures would pose a cost to the war system that were swept under the rug. But when such images could be used as a benefit to the state in pressuring for congressional approval of a budget, such were quickly made available for public viewing via television “news” coverage! Families are anxiously awaiting their $100,000 payoff, we are told, and the checks are being held up by a few days due to the “shutdown.”

During the Vietnam War – whose end was facilitated by daily pictures of scores of returning flag-draped coffins – there was a popular bumper-sticker that read: “war is good business: invest your son.”  The truth of this proposition is now being trotted out for political advantage. What is next? Shall we soon have “dead soldiers” as a commodities market, with prices reported alongside those of soybeans, pork-bellies, and cotton? Will such prices fluctuate in accordance with delays in receiving payments?

I don’t know whether the capacity for sociopathic crudeness is a formal requirement for working in government and the mainstream media, but such qualities would definitely be a benefit to anyone seeking such careers!

Yay, Liberty! Go, PANDA! Dissidents in the areas surrounding Albany should mark it as a refuge when the Feds begin rounding up patriots. And those of you living in less Progressive regions can take inspiration from freedom’s victory here to push anti-NDAA legislation there. If it can prevail in Albany, it can prevail anywhere…well, except maybe New York City…

(Mr. Johnson also told me PANDA was not involved in California’s passage of AB351, as I had erroneously reported. My apologies.)