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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. ~ H. L. Mencken
The former Texas college economics teacher Dick Armey is retiring as Republican majority leader of the House. Armey has been a peculiar character in Washington. From time to time, he remembered that he is supposed to be a libertarian. So, on October 21, he told an interviewer, concerning John Ashcroft’s Justice Department: More than any other federal agency, [it] seems to be running amok and out of control...This agency right now is the biggest threat to personal liberty in the country. Bravo, and how come other Republicans don’t realize this? But a few weeks earlier, on Chris Matthews’s TV news program, Armey proposed the "ethnic cleansing" of the Palestinian Arabs, Muslims and Christians alike, from the West Bank and Gaza. That would mean the expulsion of some 3 million people from the last sheds of what has been their ancestral home for at least the past 1300 years. How many would die in this ruthless drive, what unimaginable suffering, what destruction of families and private property it would entail – why should any of that matter in the slightest to the Republican majority leader of the House? But to an alleged libertarian? Of course, Armey has endorsed every Israeli levy of tribute on the American taxpayers, all those tens of billions of dollars. Now, an item from the Washington Post, October 8: Furious at how the Dallas Morning News covered his son’s failed congressional bid this year, House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) is trying to insert language in a military spending bill that would force the newspaper’s parent company to sell off one of its Dallas media properties. This is how the self-proclaimed libertarian chooses to leave public life? Peculiar. ~ Sheldon Richman and Ralph Raico
Do you ever get the idea that the State acts in ways so as to create factions, turning those who may have had mere differing interests into enemies? Then "those people" step in posing as helpers? The State operates like a driver who hits a pedestrian, then gets out of his car and says to the victim, "It’s sure lucky for you I was here to help!" ~ Alan Turin
According to the IRS the top 50% of income earners (with family income above $26,500 annually) pay 96% of all federal income tax; the bottom 50 % pay only 4%. The top 1% ($293,500 or more in family income) pay 36%, while the top 5% ($121,000) pay 55%. What this means is that America is now sharply bifurcated into taxpaying and tax-consuming classes, with tens of millions of Americans paying no income tax at all while receiving myriads of government benefits, from educational subsidies to day care, to everything else. The bottom 50 percent have every incentive to provide a powerful political force for higher and higher taxes on the upper 50 percent in order to finance ever more subsidies for themselves. Those libertarians who advocate placing even more middle-income Americans off the tax rolls ignore the political dynamics of tax plunder in which the most productive members of society are increasingly enslaved by the less productive. ~ Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The best history of socialist thought, highly valued by Murray Rothbard, is the work by the classical liberal economist Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin (1946). The mention of Moses in the subtitle, incidentally, is an example of Gray’s wry-donnish humor. In fact, he argued that, contrary to many fuzzy-minded collectivists, there is nothing in the Old or New Testaments that can legitimately be called socialist. Here is a quote from The Socialist Tradition appropriate to these times: A State that is at war, or that is perpetually organized for war, dare not tolerate individual liberties which may be in conflict with the general interest; and if the crisis becomes acute so that the very interest of the State is in danger, there always will be a tendency to sacrifice the individual; and this means one of two things, either despotism or state socialism. ~ Gregory Bresiger
Michael Bellesiles, professor at Emory University in Atlanta and acclaimed author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, has resigned his tenured position. This was after Emory accepted as authoritative the conclusions of a panel of three eminent historians from Chicago, Princeton, and Harvard that Bellesiles’s work showed "evidence of falsification," "exaggeration of data," and "egregious misrepresentation," and that he had "willingly misrepresented the evidence" – academic-speak for a scholarly fraud. Arming America received the most prestigious award available to a work of history in the United States, the Bancroft Prize, given out by Columbia University. It was wildly praised by reviewers when it appeared in 2000. Not surprising, since its theme was that guns were very rare in colonial America and during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Silly fantasizing us, who imagined gun-savvy frontiersmen, colonials who fought the Revolution equipped with firearms, and in all those early years the musket (or whatever) over the mantelpiece. "America’s gun culture is an invented tradition," Bellesiles averred. The erosion of Bellesiles’s corrupt structure of phony scholarship began on the Internet, with Clayton Cramer and other amateur experts (our own Joseph Stromberg helped). At first they were dismissed with contempt as typical Internet conspiracy theorists and, in this case, laughable gun-nuts. But a few scholars like the calm and brilliant Joyce Lee Malcolm began to be heard from, and the profession at large was forced to dig into Bellesiles purported evidence. They found it to be fatally flawed: crucial elements in his argument were not accessible to anyone else (he claimed there was a flood in his basement); probate records in New England didn’t say what he quoted them as saying; the records he cited in San Francisco had been destroyed in the earthquake of 1906, they simply did not exist; and, directly contrary to his claims, authoritative sources in colonial and early nineteenth century America remarked on the near-universal ownership of guns. And on it went. Practically every time anyone checked on Bellesiles’s citations, they proved to be bogus. Arming America is a work of pious fraud, pious because it supports, and was taken to support, the reigning civil religion, which hates private ownership of guns, as bureaucrats and their media puppets all over the world hate it. The book was published by Knopf, probably the most distinguished imprint in American publishing. Its editor is still in place at Knopf; so much for editorial responsibility. On September 10, 2000, the trumpeting of Bellesiles’s book covered the whole front page of the New York Times Book Review, without question the most important space in American publishing: Gun Culture? What Gun Culture? The freedom-loving gun-toting yeomanry of 1776 never really existed, according to Arming America, by Michael A. Bellesiles. Reviewed by Garry Wills. Wills’s piece, titled "Spiking the Gun Myth," shot through with the sneering tone that is his trademark, begins: For many Americans, the gun is a holy object, the emblem and guarantor of their identity. Without it, they would not be the self-sufficient persons they consider themselves, the very models for all lovers of freedom. To take away this external prop would tear out of them their very essence….Bellesiles deflates the myth of the self-reliant and self-armed virtuous yeoman of the Revolutionary militias. According to Wills, "only in the Civil War did Americans generally acquire and become familiar with guns. But even so it was not the lone gunman’s revolver but the government’s cavalry rifle that ‘tamed’ the West…" Here Wills continues his mocking of individual and voluntary associational efforts in our history – the very idea that Americans might be self-sufficient and self-reliant – as against the power of the agents of his beloved central state. Wills concludes, "Bellesiles has dispersed the darkness that covered the gun’s early history in America. He provides overwhelming evidence that our view of the gun is as deep a superstition as any that affected Native Americans in the 17th century." Nowadays Wills is making a career out of vilifying the Catholic Church, to which he says he belongs. A recent book of his is Papal Sins, a skewed, ahistorical account of the oldest institution in the world. But what about Wills’s own professional sins? What about his misleading hundreds, probably thousands, of readers by his gushing endorsement of Bellesiles’s piece of garbage? When is he going to apologize for that? Wills is what is called a "public intellectual." Publicity-wise, in our decadent culture, he takes his lead from Hollywood, where the watchword is, "Never explain, never apologize." But I wonder what Murray Rothbard’s old buddy Frank Meyer, wherever he may be, thinks of Garry Wills, whom he promoted as a neophyte writer by running his early pieces as book editor of National Review. And, by the way, what must poor despairing Frank think of the ignorant fools who have taken over his magazine, and of his comrade Bill Buckley who has nonchalantly permitted it? ~ Ralph Raico November 11, 2002 The Passing Scene is edited by Ralph Raico. The
Passing Scene Archives: Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
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