Erick Erickson is still too wet behind the ears to appreciate how National Review made purging conservatives from the movement its persona, Twitter just puts that on steroids

Catholics excommunicate. Protestants self-excommunicate. Get with it, Erick.

 

 

 

 

 

National Review’s Own Struggle With “Ideological Diversity”:

For Murray Rothbard, the history of National Review was largely a story of exclusion. “And so the purges began,” Rothbard recounted in a 1992 article. “One after another, Buckley and the National Review purged and excommunicated all the radicals, all the nonrespectables. Consider the roll call: isolationists (such as John T. Flynn), anti-Zionists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, the John Birch Society, and all those who continued, like the early National Review, to dare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil-rights revolution after Buckley had changed and decided to embrace it.” 

That policy of excommunication continued to the present. Over the years, the magazine has fired or stopped publishing figures like Joseph Sobran (an editor who should have been fired for his anti-Semitism and racism but was not let go until criticizing Buckley in 1993), Peter Brimelow (an editor who was excessively anti-immigrant) and Ann Coulter (who was fired in 2001 after writing a column arguing saying that the United States should “invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”).

Libertarian anarchist Murray Rothbard ripped off Christian idealist G. K. Chesterton

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

-- G. K. Chesterton, WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD? (1910)

“Liberty has never been fully tried in the modern world."

-- Murray Rothbard, FOR A NEW LIBERTY (1973)

Perhaps The Most Important Argument Against Consumption Taxes

Perhaps the most important argument against consumption taxes is Murray Rothbard's critique of them here, noting their time-preference prejudice:

"The major argument for replacing an income by a consumption tax is that savings would no longer be taxed. A consumption tax, its advocates assert, would tax consumption and not savings. The fact that this argument is generally advanced by free-market economists, in our day mainly by the supply-siders, strikes one immediately as rather peculiar. For individuals on the free market, after all, each decide their own allocation of income to consumption or to savings. This proportion of consumption to savings, as Austrian economics teaches us, is determined by each individual's rate of time preference, the degree by which he prefers present to future goods. For each person is continually allocating his income between consumption now, as against saving to invest in goods that will bring an income in the future. And each person decides the allocation on the basis of his time preference. To say, therefore, that only consumption should be taxed and not savings is to challenge the voluntary preferences and choices of individuals on the free market, and to say that they are saving far too little and consuming too much, and therefore that taxes on savings should be removed and all the burdens placed on present as compared to future consumption. But to do that is to challenge free-market expressions of time preference, and to advocate government coercion to forcibly alter the expression of those preferences, so as to coerce a higher saving-to-consumption ratio than desired by free individuals."

Rothbard goes on to ascribe this prejudice to "Calvinism", which may be entertaining to the libertarian who is interested in wine, women and song now and has a devil may care attitude about present frugality as a defense against want later. But this assumes there is no moral difference between savings and consumption, which there certainly is when the penniless old man turns up on your doorstep, hat in hand. The libertarian has his own time preference prejudice, were he to admit it, which life teaches us has serious consequences, more often than not.

Be that as it may, it is important to recognize that standard measurements of economic activity in the United States have for some time shown, in something like the following formulation, that "70% of GDP consists in consumer spending", and were it not for schemes like Social Security and Medicare there would be far more ringing of the bell going on at the front. This is quite a remarkable fact in a supposedly Calvinist civilization, a fact which argues for the moral superiority of savings over consumption because despite our better natures we in reality live otherwise. This suggests that we still ought to do everything we can to encourage the former and punish the latter, for the simple reason which the observation of human nature teaches. We are mixtures of good and evil, but unfortunately too often it turns out to be a bad mixture.

The ancient Greeks, among other things, notably taught us "nothing too much", by which we may infer that the preponderance of present spendthrifts demonstrates individual and social excess which ought to be remedied by tax policy encouraging the increase of savers. To right the ship would mean achieving a better balance between the two, and to Rothbard's main point, which is that under a consumption tax savings would inevitably be taxed in the long run anyway just as consumption is in the present because that is what savings becomes, we therefore ought to have no compunction about taxing savings in the end. That is what the death tax accomplishes, the final message to an excess of savings.

In the present context this recommends taxation of consumption in some form to encourage marginally less of it, better mechanisms of rewarding savings of which we have too little, and a death tax which approximates the same level as a consumption tax would operate at. This means that draconian schemes of estate confiscation by the government at death are in principle unjust because as consumption taxes we would never think of imposing similar levies on the living.

Unless, of course, we subscribe to The New Republic.

"The Sons of Liberty and Nullification of State Power"

The nullification of the power of the British state during the American "Revolution" actually prevented a revolution as far as the founders were concerned. The only thing revolutionary going on was Britain's attempt to deny the colonies their chartered rights as Englishmen.

(Click here for the source)

In 1765 the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act. This act was applicable to Britain's North American colonies. The act called for a one cent tax on all newspapers, wills, codicils, manifests, contracts, paper, glass, lead and paint. The act was part of a larger plan of the British government to tighten its hold on its American colonies after the Seven Years War with France, which ended in 1763. The object of this essay is to give a history lesson. This lesson has been lost, but provides an excellent example of what an oppressed and determined people can do to resist tyrannical government power and actions.

What did the colonists do? They did two very important things. They formed into secret organizations like the Sons of Liberty, and they forcibly resisted and nullified the Stamp Act. Yes, I said "nullify". This word makes statists the world over gasp with trepidation. Through the actions of the Sons of Liberty, protests, mass meetings, inflammatory news articles, and sometimes violence were employed to thoroughly disable and nullify the act. Many conspiracy theorists will also gasp and fret that the birth of the American Revolution was started by a secret society. Yes, the Sons eventually came out publicly, but even today we do not know their full membership. Let's examine some of their tactics.

Secret Meetings

In Boston, Newport, New York, New Haven, Ct, Savannah, Ga, Philadelphia and Charleston men calling themselves "Sons of Liberty" (after the name given to the colonists by Colonel Issac Barre in the British Parliament) organized themselves to resist the hated Stamp Act. Many of these men came from the upper classes, but a large section of them came from the colonial middle and lower classes. In these meetings they vowed to oppose the Stamp Act and prevent it from being enforced in America, effectively nullifying it. Stamp collectors were threatened, beaten, tarred and feathered, harrassed, and in some cases had their property destroyed. Many were made to sign pledges to refuse to collect the tax, and were threatened to be labeled "enemies to their country" if they didn't reject their new positions. Many Marxist historians, while praising the resistance of the Sons of Liberty, condemn them as rich white men who only cared about their own liberty. Of course in any mass movement there will be people who are myopic and concerned only with their own interests. To broadly paint the leaders of these secret societies as selfish only furthers the Marxist myth of class warfare. The fact is, no revolution can survive without leadership. This leadership generally comes from the upper and middle classes, and all revolutions up to our day have proven this. What revolutionary leaders cannot do is continue any revolution without the mass support of the populace. Let's examine this further.

Support of the Masses

When one truly examines the American Revolution it is apparent that it was a mass movement of the colonial population. Murray Rothbard, in his four volume history of the American colonies, Conceived in Liberty, details this in full. Men in the Sons of Liberty, Masonic Lodges, and colonial churches lead the charge, but it was the people who made the Revolution possible. From 1765 through 1776 the American people were subjected to increasing tyranny from the British establishment in America. Higher taxes, impressment of sailors, nepotism in the colonial governments, dual officeholding, enforcement of mercantilist laws, like the Navigation Acts, suspension of several legislatures, particularly New York and Massachusetts, and the keeping of a standing military in the midst of the civilian population all contributed to the restiveness of the colonial population. The Boston Tea Party, the burning of the British warship Gaspee in Rhode Island, tarring and feathering of royal officials, threats and protests against Stamp agents, are just a few examples of the actions of the people. The people were lead by men like Samuel Adams, Charles Thomson, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Warren, John Adams, most of whom were members of secret societies like the Masons and Sons of Liberty. These men lead the populace in nullifying the power of the British government in America.

The Nullification of British Power

Throughout the period of the American Revolution, royal governors and officials routinely complained about the violence of the populace and how their authority was threatened by the revolutionaries. They recognized that their power was slowly evaporating. They saw laws like the Stamp Act repealed due to pressure and threats, the Townshend duties resisted by nonimportation agreements, mass meetings in defiance of law, and confrontations with soliders, like the Boston Massacre, and colonial assemblies asserting their power. This nullification movement was lead by secret societies like the Sons of Liberty, behind closed doors. Masonic lodges met and developed plans and agreements for their members to utilize for resistance. Leaders met in taverns and coffeehouses to discuss resistance measures and plot, yes plot, future actions. These combinations effectively nullified and eviscerated British power. We could learn from their examples. Americans should use non violent means to resist the following:

1) Any attempt to submerge the USA into a North American Union with Canada and Mexico

2) A war with Iran

3) Increased power for the UN or WTO

4) Continued abuse of eminent domain

5) Fascistic measures destroying American liberties

6) Any gun control legislation

7) Any attempt to increase the power of the federal government

8)Any attempt to institute a draft or civilian conscription

9) Any law or act that further restricts liberty

10)Any attempt by the federal government to suppress a secession movement within the USA

11) Further evisceration of our constitutional rights and liberties (particularly the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments). The Bush Administration's attack on attorney-client privilege is particularly appalling.

I am in no way advocating any violence. I do not believe that we are at that stage. Non violent protest and action should always be a first step.

The New Stasi

The Stasi was the feared and ruthless secret police of the German Democratic Republic, or more appropriately, Communist East Germany. In America today the neocon rightwing and leftist groups are building a new despotism in our nation of liberty. In the growing power of the Federal government are the building blocks of a new Stasi, so to speak. The FBI, DIA, ATF, and DOJ are amassing great power through laws like the PATRIOT Act, The Real ID Act, and the definition of some American prisoners as "enemy combatants". People may laugh, joke or wave my comments aside as paranoia, but the building of this massive power structure is real. A new "Sons of Liberty" type movement is needed.

Liberty and freedom are not free. Both are typically destroyed by the overpowering hand of the state. It doesn't matter if you are rightwing, leftwing or libertarian. Our freedoms are ours to have, not government's to grant.

POSTED BY DL AT 7:58 AM

FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 2008