Chris Lihou writes:

The Federal Government is trying to close down the Atlantic Ocean because they (USGOV) have no money to keep it open. (Yellow tape on all the beaches? Obama wearing a crown and sitting on a golden throne at the water’s edge commanding the tide to obey him?)

What comes next? Will the EPA prohibit us all from breathing because they have no money to keep oxygen in the air? Will they prohibit us all from saying our prayers to God because the NSA has no money to eavesdrop on what we say? Is the sky falling because they have no money to keep it up there?

Maybe they should shut down Europe? How about they shut down China? I sure hope they don’t tell North Korea their country is closed because we have no money to keep it open. Kim Il whatever-the-latest-one’s-name-is-now just might be more dangerously crazy than our circus team, although that’s doubtful.

I always knew our politicians were egomaniacs. Talk about an exaggerated sense of their own importance. Shutting the Atlantic Ocean down. They going to stop the next hurricane from coming ashore because they are out of funds to deal with it? Ah! Now that would be really useful…..

The TV-neocons have been feigning outrage — OUTRAGE!!! — over the fact that taxpayer-financed “death benefits” paid to families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past week have been delayed for a couple of days during the bogus “shutdown.”  Families of recently-deceased soldiers have been dragged out onto television studios like props, no different from potted plants, to express their “outrage” that, why, it’s been almost a week and they’ve received no big check for thousands of dollars from the government!  (The government “death gratuity” is $100,000 tax free).  A whole week and no “death benefits.” Why, if they would have known it would take so long to get “their” money, they might even have discouraged their loved one from joining the army to go and murder citizens of foreign countries who have never threatened or harmed them or anyone else in their country.

Promises of “death benefits” to family members  is one of the tools used by government to dupe mentally-challenged eighteen-year-olds to become paid killers for the state.

The TV-neocons are only interested in embarrassing Obama, while these families are fighting for that money like so many wild African dogs fighting over a rotting carcass.

UPDATE: Charles B. writes to ask how the death benefit paid to U.S. soldiers killed in the Middle East differs from the death benefit that Saddam Hussein reportedly paid to the Iraqi families of suicide bombers.  And on CNN last night Montel Williams (himself a military veteran) appeared crying and sobbing over the two-day delay in the hundred grand “death gratuity” for dead soldiers who he said died ”protecting our democracy.”  Has there ever been a more untrue statement uttered on international television?

Dr. Ruth Benerito, who invented wash and wear cotton, has died at her home in Louisiana at age 97.

“NSA Director Welcomes Surveillance Transparency, Oversight” proclaims the headline at Leviathan’s house-organ, US News and World Report.

“While [Gen. Keith 'Jean-Luc Picard'] Alexander said during a speaking event in Washington, D.C., that he is open to suggestions about ways to improve oversight and transparency on the surveillance program, he defended the authority to collect and use data to track terrorist threats.” There’s a surprise! “The balancing act that the NSA faces is how to maintain public confidence in the programs while still keeping enough information confidential to maintain a [sic] intelligence advantage, Alexander said.”

Umm, Jean-Luc? No sweat, dude: the only confidence the public has in the NSA is that it spies on everyone, all the time, to destroy  every shred of privacy and freedom. You needn’t worry about “balancing” so immense a pile of excrement, believe me. Rather, you might better fear that it could one day reverse course and slide over you instead of us.

Meanwhile, “There is now a growing stack of bills in Congress to reform the NSA, with increased transparency measures as the most popular option. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has proposed a bill to add oversight and transparency measures to the NSA’s programs, while maintaining its surveillance programs. Stricter reforms proposed by Senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Mark Udall, D-Colo., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., would prohibit bulk collection of phone and metadata records by the agency. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., is also considering a legislative package of reforms to be unveiled before the end of the year.” Why can’t these nincompoops ever get anything right? ABOLISH, not reform. ABOLISH.

Finally, no doubt emboldened that Congress will continue forcing us to finance his sorry rear end, Jean-Luc added, “‘I am the biggest advocate of the Internet, I think we should have privacy and civil liberties…”

Don’t make me retch, you unconscionable wretch.

Guess where “Michael V. Hayden, a retired Air Force general who headed the [NSA] from 1999 to 2005″ now “works”: at the “Chertoff Group, a private security and intelligence firm…” Yes, the very same company formed by Michael “Shirts-Off” Chertoff, the voyeur who lusted to foist porno-scanners on us as Chief Deviant at the DHS. Small world, isn’t it, particularly for fascists.

Meanwhile, pervs of a feather flock together: ole Mike harbors the same sociopathic philosophy as Shirts-Off. Listen to him conflate hijacking our computers to spy on us with “security” as he defends the NSA: “‘There are vulnerabilities [in computers, software, etc], and then there are vulnerabilities,’ [he said] … If a vulnerability can be exploited only by U.S. agencies for technical reasons, Gen. Hayden said, ‘That is not a vulnerability that we are legally and morally obliged to patch. That is a vulnerability that we are legally and morally obliged to exploit in order to help keep the American people safe.’”

Oh, sure. Sorta like sexually assaulting passengers after photographing them naked in order to help keep them safe.

Speaking of the NSA’s new — but broken, alas — center of espionage in Utah, James Bamford, “the author of several books on the NSA, … said it’s not surprising … that [the agency is] encountering problems considering how much data they are trying to store and make available around the world via fiber-optic cables. ‘There’s never been a time in U.S. history where they’ve tried to collect so much data in one place and then try to access it from other places on a cloud,’ Bamford said.”

Or, I daresay, in world history, either.

We’re dealing with generalities here, I know, but when you think of truckers, you probably don’t envision political dissidents. These are folks so known for their “patriotism” [sic for "nationalism"] that the Department of Homeland Stasi-sorry, Security cynically enlisted them to spy on us in nonsense it calls “First Observer.” But then the TSA unleashed TWIC on its hard-working serfs, compelling them to pay $135 for background checks and fingerprinting and God-knows-what-all to obtain a second license, in addition to the license the State already requires, before pursuing their livelihoods. TWIC has temporarily idled some drivers, impoverished others, cost many their jobs, and inconvenienced all.

I don’t know whether TWIC pushed them over the edge or whether these victims of the police-state are as tired of its persecution, criminality, and atrocities in general as the rest of us. At any rate, truckers are hosting a “Ride for the Constitution” on DC from October 11-13 (yes, that’s this weekend). The reasons they cite for their Ride include some of the regulations with which Leviathan smothers their industry as well as such horrors as NDAA, Obummercare, and the TSA (be still, my pounding heart!).

What can we do to aid these heroes? “Organizers of the ride are asking Americans in support of the convoy to buy nothing between October 11 – 13, the dates of the convoy to DC, in order to show support. Truckers say they will ride the beltway around the capitol and ‘shut down DC until the congressmen obey their oaths. They ask supporters to write #t2sda on their windshields and on signs (‘truckers to Shut Down America.’)”

Go, guys and gals! And thanks so much. Indeed, “let these issues be the beginning of where we take a stand, not just as The American Drivers, but as Free and Independent Americans, protecting what our Constitution preserves for us”!!!!!

Mark Thornton discusses the unintended consequences of gun control legislation as an illustration of prohibition economics:

Thornton refers to this Mises Daily article in his remarks.

Bill Martin forwarded this magnificent column by a woman determined not to bow to Obummercare. It follows an equally magnificent one he sent about a week ago, which another blogger quoted and endorsed, entitled, “I Will Not Comply.”

I encourage all of you who are in my situation — uninsured free-lancers — to take heart: opposition to communistic Obummercare is not only growing but hardening. Our first columnist lists the penalties with which the extortionate Feds threaten us for snubbing their nationalized insurance, but others say the IRS can only withhold your tax refund (not a problem for those of us who seldom or never receive refunds!). Whatever, if millions of serfs reject Obummercare, Leviathan is outa luck.

Meanwhile, those of you who are insured but facing steep hikes thanks to Obummercare’s nationalization of the industry might want to cancel your policy and enroll in a “health care sharing ministry.” Such membership exempts you from Obummercare’s clutches. “A HCSM is founded on the biblical mandate of believers to share each other’s needs. Our goal is to apply Galatians 6:2, ‘Bear one another’s burdens, and thus fulfill the law of Christ’ to the ever-rising medical costs which can be quite burdensome for anyone, single or married, young or old. …” HCSMs require you to pledge that you live a healthy, Christian life (i.e., you’re not visiting brothels every night), and they should never be confused with insurance. But they offer a fine rebuke to the State, and I suspect most employers would be happy to pay their far lower costs for you instead of Obummercare’s stratospheric expenses.

Some in the media are portraying this as two divergent sides getting together, but they are peas in a pod: champion of the omnipotent presidency, the police state, the welfare state, perpetual war in the Middle East, and the global empire.

UPDATE from Monnie:

Lately, many liberty-minded folks seem to be rallying around Mark Levin, the eternal advocate of the omnipotent POTUS. Levin has for many years ridiculed & marginalized the real champion of freedom, Ron Paul. I don’t get it. I don’t think Levin is one to trust—seems to me he’s just a big-government neocon occasionally masquerading as a liberty advcate to fool as many folks as possible. Thanks for your website, Lew.

Here I debate Monetarist Stephen Kirchner at a Mises event in Australia. The debate was scheduled to be on the business cycle. However we also debated Mises’s views, Rothbard’s views, Milton Friedman’s views, The Federal Reserve and much more!

Walter Block vs. Stephen Kirchner Debate on Austrian Business Cycle

Used to be, we needed the TSA to abuse victims this badly. Now, with Leviathan’s faux “shutdown,” park rangers step up to the plate and brutalize a bus of older folks, many of them foreign tourists, caught inside Yellowstone National Park when said shutdown began:

The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, [Ms. Pat Vaillancourt, one of the passengers] said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest. When finally allowed to leave, the bus was not allowed to halt at all along the 2.5-hour trip out of the park, not even to stop at private bathrooms that were open along the route. “We’ve become a country of fear, guns and control,” said Vaillancourt… “It was like they brought out the armed forces. Nobody was saying, ‘we’re sorry,’ it was all like — ” as she clenched her fist and banged it against her forearm.

The article later mentions that “The Washington Times quoted an unnamed Park Service official who said park law enforcement personnel were instructed to ‘make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.’”

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute tyranny, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government…”

The NSA constantly pleads that it isn’t listening to our phone calls or reading our emails; it’s simply collecting the “metadata” about them.

To my knowledge, the agency has yet to make a major statement that isn’t later exposed as a lie; only a fool would believe these bureaucrats aren’t eavesdropping and reading over our shoulders. But OK, even if they were mining metadata alone, this article shows how thoroughly you can know a man through that medium.

P.J. O’Rourke wrote a book about 20 years ago about the U.S. government called Parliament of Whores. I couldn’t help but think of it when I was informed that the Washington Redskins football team might have to change its name because the name Redskins is so “racially insensitive.” Why is it that no one seems to mind that the military names its weapons systems after Indian tribes:  Apache, Comanche, Black Hawk, Chinook, Iroquois and Kiowa helicopters and Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Thanks to DJ. (I don’t follow football at all so I had no idea.)

“The NSA facility, located 30 miles south of Salt Lake City in a town called Bluffdale, continuously uses 65 megawatts of electricity — enough to power a small city — at a cost of more than $1 million a month…”

And yet the bloodsucking bureaucrats at the EPA fret over our light bulbs’ wattage while Congress criminalizes Edison’s invention.

“…NSA has this year been inundated with 1,054 percent more requests for information under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)…”

Have you demanded your records from these voyeuristic criminals yet?

Meanwhile, 10 electrical “meltdowns” have hit the NSA’s new headquarters for espionage against us in Bluffdale, UT, over the past 13 months. These surges “have destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery” and are “known as arc fault failures, [which] create ‘fiery explosions, melt metal and cause circuits to fail,’ one official told the [War State Journal]. ‘Documents and interviews paint a picture of a project that cut corners to speed building,’ the Journal said. Backup generators have failed several times and the cooling system has yet to be tested, according to the newspaper.”

Yee haw!

October 10th is the 40th anniversary of the death of Ludwig von Mises. He was one of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century who created an integrated, deductive science of economics. He based system on the fundamental axiom that human beings act purposely to achieve their desired goals. Mises left a legacy of books and articles that continue to teach and inspire people in a method and science that makes an undeniable case for a society based on freedom and peace.

Many have tried and failed to grasp the enormity of Mises’s contributions. I have been asked many times about “how to read Mises.” For a long time my only answer was “don’t start with Human Action,” Mises’s magnum opus. Then, a few years ago, I set out to produce The Quotable Mises where I collected quotes from all his books. This book gives readers quick access to Mises’s contributions and viewpoints. It also serves as a handy tool for researchers and journalists.

It also gave me some insight into the question of how to read Mises. My suggestion now is to begin reading his shorter, popular articles, as well as audio and video lectures on Mises.org. Then proceed to his shorter books like Bureaucracy and Planned Chaos before moving to longer treatments such as Liberalism, A Critique of Interventionism, Omnipotent Government, and Nation, State, and Economy. Next take on the big four: Theory of Money and Credit, Socialism, Epistemological Problems, and Theory and History. Finally, you are ready for the centerpiece of Mises’s system of economics, Human Action.

I believe that this approach to reading Mises works because Mises system was comprehensive and cohesive, but his writings represent a building process in which economics is constructed and where concepts are repeated in finer and more elaborate detail. What you might not understand at one level becomes increasingly clear, coherent, and relevant for understanding his overall system.

Cross post from Circle Bastiat Blog

No surprise here as government is inherently wasteful, inefficient, and incompetent. The NSA’s super-spying center in Utah has had multiple electrical issues over the last 13 months. The best quote from the article: ‘The Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing construction and promised to make sure the data center is “completely reliable” before allowing it to go online.’ – recall that this is the same Army Corp that brought us New Orleans’ levee system.

The government has moved beyond all pretense of popular consent for its programs. That the construction of this massive NSA datacenter continues in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA spying shows how disconnected the state has become. It no longer bothers with even the fig leaf of popular consent for its actions.

H.L. Mencken used the phrase Boobus Americanus to describe, well, ignorant boobs who actually believed just about every lie told to them by the state.  They keep voting for and thereby legitimizing the same old gang of crooks, conmen and clowns, year in and year out, as long as they have their Bud Light, wings, and mind-numbing, asinine television “reality” shows featuring young Hollywood millionaire females with large asses.

AOL “news” today demonstrates this point with its lead headline about how the daughter of the “rapper” known as “Eminem” was recently voted homecoming queen at her high school.  The second big headline, right behind that one, was about how today is the “international day of the girl.”  Meanwhile, the entire nation waits in suspense to learn who will be next to be kicked off “Dancing with the Stars.”

And all the current DC statists, too, with your winning bid for Ron Paul’s historic little Chevy Chevette. The current leading bid is $15,000, which would be a tax-deductible gift to Ron’s FREE foundation for his Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. The bidding closes at midnight on October 15th, and surely the winner will offer at least $25,000.

Foreign aid will still be paid. By the way, in case you forgot, Republicans love foreign aid.

Writes a high-school junior:

I am loving it here in Russia! Moscow is much different (better) than I thought it would be. Russia is such an up and coming place and Moscow is right at the heart of the booming economy, so there is such an air of prosperity and youth. There is also such a range in buildings here. New skyscrapers are being built next to a communist apartment building on the left and a 1700s mansion on the right. It’s absolutely amazing. One thing that shocked me is how free they are in so many situations. The Russians can just go ahead and do something that’s illegal in America… It was quite the shock to realize how many laws and rules regulate our lives in America.

Today and every day, there is news that amazes me. It doesn’t amaze me compared with what I expect of today’s crazy America or of the American Empire. It amazes me compared with what I used to expect some years back, when America was sane and a bit less expansive and militaristic than now. My mind is in the present but it’s also in the past America that I remember, grew up in and lived in. I won’t link to each item. They are all here. And I won’t give details.

Item #1. A woman gets shot and killed by police near the White House. She’s unarmed and there’s a baby in the car. The police had her stopped at one point. The whole area is barricaded. The behavior of the police is crazy. The barricades are crazy. You used to walk up to the gate and look across the lawn to the White House, or drive through the area unimpeded.

Item #2. In New York, there is a tragic incident involving a driver and bikers. It turns out that two [now upped to three] of the bikers are undercover police. Crazy.

Item #3. Near Damascus, the CIA is openly running a training program for Syrian rebels. This amazes me because there is no detectable outcry, and no war has been declared by Congress or even emperor obama. In fact, he may even have said he’s staying out of the war. The whole thing is amazing.

Item #4. U.S. Delta Force made a raid in Libya. This brought back my amazement at the whole Libya War in which the U.N. provided cover for the U.S. to lead foreign military intervention into Libya. After Bush’s blunder in attacking Iraq, one would have thought that obama might have thought twice about attacking Libya, with all the potential ramifications for other African countries. This decision amazed me. obama’s foreign policy constantly amazes me by its utter stupidity.

Item #5. U.S. SEALs made a raid in Somalia. This served to remind me of the U.S. involvement in a slew of African countries. This is all amazing and crazy. The U.S. government cannot even govern this country and yet it’s busy all over the world attempting impossible missions.

Item #6. Two young men in Georgia are arrested because they had forbidden equipment in their automobiles at school. One had a pocket knife, and another had fishing gear and knives. In Georgia, they face expulsion from school, 2-10 years in prison, and a big fine. Totally crazy. All such matters under the rubric of political correctness are crazy and amaze me.

As I said, none of this is surprising in the present as this is what states, empires and police states do. They flout their own laws. They pass inane laws. They over-regulate. They act according to the whims and limited intelligence of those in power. They cater to special interests and lobbies.

It surprises that part of me that’s still living in the past when I was blithely unaware of the state’s craziness and hanky-panky of those earlier times. My little world was largely insulated from such matters, until it came time for me to be drafted. The awakening began right then and there.

The Republican-controlled House has passed the “Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act” to provide “for compensation of federal employees furloughed due to any lapse in appropriations that begins on or about October 1, 2013, for the period of such lapse in appropriations.” The vote was 417-0. This means that every Republican in the House that voted (13 Republicans did not vote), voted for the bill. Forget all their talk about fiscal conservatism, reining in government spending, eliminating unnecessary government programs and agencies, limited government, etc., etc., etc. The Republican Party is pure evil (just like the Democratic Party). It cannot be reformed. It cannot be taken over. It cannot be made libertarian. It cannot be restored. It should be abandoned. There is no difference between the parties when it comes to our life, liberty, and property.

No, I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for overpaid, underworked, and unecessary federal workers, 95 percent of whom help carry out unconstitutional activities of the federal government.

Might not be a good idea. It turns out that “British wartime girls married dashing U.S. soldiers to start new life in America… only to find their men were drunks, womanisers and thieves.”

Brian Dunaway wonders how Francis Fukuyama can still show his face in public after his 1989 essay “The End of History“. He wonders why that essay wasn’t the end of Fukuyama.

It was in that essay that Fukuyama referred to “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism”. LOL. He didn’t even understand that liberalism had been on a course of decline for 200 years, as Arthur E. Ekirch, Jr. had documented in his 1955 book “The Decline of American Liberalism”. America has neither economic nor political liberalism.

One might wonder the opposite, why genuine intellectual geniuses and scholars like Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises have been almost entirely ignored while being so accurate and innovative in so much of their analyses.

Once an intellectual makes it into the establishment or is accorded celebrity status therein, with proper credentials as a person whose ideas support the empire and do not challenge it, as a person who basically accepts the empire’s dogma, he won’t be thrown off the team unless he becomes a whistleblower and tells some uncomfortable and threatening truths. Being right or wrong in analyses and predictions makes no difference. Truth is not the criterion for admission to the elite, which is why Mises and Rothbard were never admitted, even within academia. Playing along is what matters. Being a team player. By all means, what establishment intellectuals do is talk and write, write and talk, while maintaining the presumptions of the State and empire through every word they speak or pen. Lately, for example, Fukuyama has been writing about how to make bureaucracy in goverment work better (so-called good government vs. bad government). He’s finally woken up to the existence of principal-agent problems, but he is fast asleep on the kinds of issues raised by Mises and Rothbard that challenge government root and branch.

Most intellectuals who write on politics, like Fukuyama, or who sometimes take on government posts where they have the power to implement their ideas, like McFaul, have no incentive to change their basic outlook or even question it. They have every incentive to maintain the core political ideas that they absorbed when they got their degrees. This is how they get grants, how they become known and respected, how their travel opportunities multiply, and how their opportunities for better pay and jobs come from. This is how they gain access to those in office or to powerful members of the government’s bureaucracies. If they become critical of government, they will be cut off. They will be marginalized and viewed as rebellious kooks or radicals.

(Thanks to Chris Rossini)

The basic beliefs of Fukuyama and McFaul concerning freedom are representative of an overwhelming number of intellectuals and politicians in western societies, and they are attempting to spread their views to all other societies. Their view also permeates western societies, because vast numbers of people mistakenly accept the (democratically) legal as what is (naturally) lawful, even though the naturally lawful is based on opposite premises to the democratically legal.

Most intellectuals think of freedom as being the liberty of a citizen who has an equal participation in a democratic whole. But since a citizen is a legal role, not a person, not a natural person, and not even thought of as a human being, these intellectuals have a de-humanized conception of the human being. They reduce the human being to a citizen role or to a number of similar categories like worker, farmer, gay, policeman, soldier and gun-owner. Each category then has different “laws” that apply to it.

To most of today’s intellectuals, liberty within that citizen role is thought of as freedom. They do not conceive of freedom as a condition in which a person belongs to himself and to no one else. Instead, as they see it, either the citizen belongs to everyone else and everyone else to him in a communist-style collective or citizen state with a general will (see Rousseau); or else every citizen is a subject who belongs to the rulers of the State (see Hobbes). However, they think of such citizens as being “free” because they have a vote.

By contrast, the libertarian idea of freedom is that human beings are natural persons who belong only to themselves (see Locke). Such persons have societies that are based on freedom among likes. Everyone is naturally a self-owner who possesses his or her own free will, body, mind and separate humanity from anyone else. Each person is unique.

Rather than thinking of human beings as possessing this kind of freedom and likeness (and the justice that flows from them), most intellectuals are thinking of freedom and equality as arising through legalities constructed by democratic procedures and institutions. Actually, those procedures and institutions produce inequalities and destroy the freedom of natural human beings.

I am doing no more than explaining and paraphrasing some of the thought of Frank van Dun, who has analyzed the logic of law in the most precise way I have ever seen. He writes

“The vigorous currents of egalitarian and collectivist thought in the twentieth century and the strident rhetoric of ‘solidarity’ indicate the enduring popularity of the mereological conception of the human person as an integral and dependent part of a larger whole. So does the conception of his liberty as equal participation in the ‘democratic self-determination’ of that whole. It obviously does not bear any resemblance to a person’s freedom within the natural law. As far as a seemingly overwhelming majority of Western intellectuals is concerned, the idea of justice as freedom among likes holds no attraction at all. Even many ‘liberals’ cannot break free from the modern conception of liberty and equality as nomocratic legal constructs that must be democratically validated, regulated and enforced.”

Fukuyama and McFaul believe that democracy reduces conflicts and warfare. This is why they say “If democratic regimes ruled all countries in the [Middle East] region, conflicts between states would be less likely…”

A democracy can be militaristic, however, and prone to warfare, while an autocracy can be non-militaristic and avoid warfare. Large numbers of Americans relished going to war against the Spanish empire and then Germany in World War I. No lack of American martial spirit and support for wars, misleadingly but often termed patriotism, can be found in other cases.

An early example that contradicts the Fukuyama-McFaul thesis is the behavior of the empire of democratic Athens. However, the history of the U.S. provides many examples closer to home. Fukuyama and McFaul regard the U.S. as a democracy, but virtually every war that the U.S. has fought has been either aggressive, or avoidable, or instigated in one way or another by the U.S., or carried to an extreme degree. This includes the War of 1812, the Indian wars, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Grenada War, the wars in Yugoslavia, the Iraq Wars, the Afghanistan War, and the Libyan War. America’s “democracy” has not apparently succeeded in reducing its proclivity for war.

Great Britain has had a parliamentary democracy for centuries. It is far from clear that this ever restrained that nation from building up an empire and engaging in numerous wars while doing so.

On the other hand, it is not clear that the lack of democracy in the Soviet Union and Red China gave rise to aggressive wars by these governments. The Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia on its periphery, but then think of the U.S. invasions of countries in this hemisphere, including Canada and Mexico. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, but then so did the U.S. The Russian Federation is democratic, certainly more so than the Soviet Union, and it has had wars in Tajikistan, Chechnya (twice) and Georgia.

“Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?” is the title of an article published in 2007 by Francis Fukuyama and Michael McFaul (currently the U.S. ambassador to Russia). They are learned scholars in their fields of political science and international relations. There is close, mutual and long-term interaction between them and government officials and policies, i.e., symbiosis.

Both these gentlemen belong to the establishment elite. Their efforts, careers, beliefs, attainments and influence are case studies in how the democracy that they espouse and strongly support actually works, which is through oligarchies (small numbers of people with power over many.) They belong to America’s education oligarchy. America also has corporate, military and political oligarchies. Taken together, they make up the establishment oligarchy or ruling class.

There is no surprise then in finding that Fukuyama and McFaul have the opinion that democracy should be promoted. They believe in it. They argue for it enthusiastically. McFaul’s life and livelihood revolve around it. At the same time, how convenient it is that the term “democracy” is a currently Pavlovian stimulus word that triggers responses from citizens in support of official policies propagated by the oligarchy. Democracy has been made into apple pie through the usual techniques of repetition from figures of authority.

The surprise to many Americans is likely to be how such scholars can be so biased, so blind, so mistaken and so shallow in their thinking. The surprise is how such intelligent and learned men can harbor so many misconceptions as to extol democracy. Maybe their educations are not all that their degrees symbolically represent. Maybe the academic journals in which they publish are not the founts of knowledge that they are reputed to be. Maybe there are whole fields of study in universities that rest on the shakiest and shallowest of foundations.

Reading this article of theirs is an exercise in detecting fallacies and misconceptions. For example, they mistakenly equate freedom with democracy. They wrongly place American democracy into one category and totalitarian or other autocracies into another, when in fact they differ only in degree, not in kind. They want the American empire to help construct democracies in 50 to 100 foreign lands when American democracy, such as it is, was not originally the constitutional form of government of the federal government or the states. And, to the extent that democracy has become American government, it has failed and has become oligarchy. Fukuyama and McFaul are operating under the false assumption that democracy somehow reflects a “public” interest, preference, and good. “Democracy promotion is intended only to help reveal public preferences in the society itself,” they say. This has been shown by Kenneth Arrow, for one, to be impossible; and certainly Mises and Rothbard have said the same in other frameworks of analysis.

The democratic dream world of Fukuyama and McFaul exists solely in their minds, as transferred onto paper in such improbable statements as this: “First and foremost, democracy provides the best institutional form for holding rulers accountable to their people.” I’d like to know how these scholars can declare that democracy is “best” when they do not even consider and evaluate important alternatives. The superiority of democracy is clearly not factual, not when the people or the oligarchs that “represent” them in actuality rule them as subjects and get to decide on laws that may delve into any area that the rulers want them to. Alternatives are available that are likely to be better. One institutional form is kritarchy. Another is anarcho-capitalism under natural law. Another is panarchism. Hoppe has argued persuasively that even monarchy is superior to democracy.

Another mistaken view of theirs is that democracy promotes economic welfare: “Second, democracies tend to provide more stable physical and economic welfare for their people than do autocracies.” Robert Barro has evidence that this is not so. We need only examine America over the past 25 years or to look at the fiscal instabilities that lie ahead to see that this is incorrect. Fukuyama and McFaul mistake the benefits of free markets with democracy.