Headline horrors; papa government to the rescue

The morning news brings the usual assortment of troubles and proposed government solutions.

A mysterious virus is killing pigs, raising the price of bacon as an anxious nation waits for the USDA to approve a vaccine.

A new (government) study indicates as many as 60 percent of returns processed by tax preparers contain errors, partially because so many states do not regulate the tax preparation industry.

Newly released test results suggests students whose families received vouchers to attend private schools did not score as high as their peers in public schools.

All of the stories are based on the assumption that the government knows better and is best equipped to take care of us and solve our troubles. Ah, the sweet naivete of the morning news.

The one thing all dystopias have in common

Just finished watching Catching Fire, the second of the four films in the “Hunger Games” trilogy (Don’t ask). The series gets much more compelling as it goes along. In this installment, the country grows increasingly discontented with the idea of having young people kill each other in a lethal reality-TV show after 75 years, and people veer toward violent revolution.

Having inhaled the three books a couple of years ago, I’m impressed at how well the first two have been adopted to the screen, this second one better than the first.

I am a big fan of dystopian fiction – Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and any number of other great books and films – and you know what theme they have in common?

A government that believes it knows better than the rest of us. Government officials who believe they are made of superior stuff than the rest of us. A government designed to shepherd the lives of the rest of us.

No matter how well intentioned, the more government tries to run our lives the more it messes our lives up – and the more well intentioned, it seems, the more terrifying the result.

Here we go again: The drumbeats of war

I am always amused by the silence that overtakes "anti-war" activists when a member of the Democrat wing of the State Party is holding the executive branch. When a Democrat sends good American lads and lasses to sacrifices their lives, limbs and minds to the cause of the state, it's not nearly as egregious as when a Republican does.

And so here we are, rattling the sabers again while squirrels who have never tasted life in a combat zone chatter on the sidelines. The next time a member of the Republican wing of the State Party wages an undeclared-by-Congress-and-therefore-illegal war, the chipmunks of the Democrat wing will regain their voices, but this is not that time.

Are the pending incursion into the Ukraine and whatever subsequent response by the United Nations/States part of what Barack Obama meant when he famously told Valdimir Putin that he'll have "more flexibility" after the election? The two state leaders reportedly talked on the phone for 90 minutes the other day; the official transcripts suggests it was a long exercise in saber-rattling, but of course the officials transcripts would.

It's hard to sustain "You're being an idiot/I know you are, but what am I?" for more than a minute or two. That's not how you spend an hour and a half. You spend 90 minutes with someone making plans, setting goals, or talking about your fantasy football teams. I'm guessing the conversation was about the scenario for the next few days, weeks, months and perhaps years.

Some wag back in the 1960s asked, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" We're still waiting for the answer.

My name is Brian Richardson

My name is Brian Wilson Richardson. I am told I was conceived while the Beach Boys’ new album, “Pet Sounds,” was playing on the stereo. I try not to think too much about that, because who wants to envision what your parents were doing when you were conceived? TMI, says I. TMI.

The name Brian suits me, I think, but most of my friends call me B.W.

I was raised in a small state on the East Coast somewhere between New York and Delaware, then packed off to a private college out here in, well, the state where I am now. There, a rodent with a walrus moustache tried to indoctrinate me into the ways of the collective, but I am my father’s son, and my father was an individual.

One of the first thoughts I remember having along the lines of the way the world is: The folks who signed the Declaration of Independence did not believe they were forming a new country.

“We, therefore … solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states …”

Notice the plural? States? What’s the difference between a country and a state? In 1776, there was no difference. United states, yes – one nation? Not so much. More like a federation, like our United Nations today. That’s why the first contract between the states were articles of confederation.

My ideas about The Way Things Are kind of riff off that thought. “Libertarian” describes my philosophy better than “republican” or “democrat” or “conservative” or “liberal,” and if you suggest that I sometimes veer toward anarchy, I don’t take that as an insult. Just keep in mind that my heroes are people like Gandhi and Thoreau and King – people who used their minds and their creativity to change the world, not their fists or other physical weapons.

If there is a battle between two dichotomies in this world, I suggest it is between the individual and the state. Call me an anarchist, and I respond that I fear a world without individuals more than I fear a world without states. But I don’t necessarily believe the institution of government is bad, if that government is an organization created by individuals to serve individuals, not rule them. I’m just not aware of any government that functions under that code.

I was murdered four years ago. All right, that is not exactly what happened. My father put me to sleep, believing that I had outlived my usefulness.

It’s time to wake up.


P.S. You think you know who my father is, and who I am. Maybe you don’t. In any case remember Tom Paine’s words from “Common Sense”: “Who the Author of this Production is, is wholly unnecessary to the Public, as the Object for Attention is the DOCTRINE ITSELF, not the MAN.”

Maybe we're all ambidextrous

As someone who came to libertarian thought from the right-hand side of the dial, I find the various discussions in the blogosphere about the Libertarian Left fairly interesting. Near as I can tell, I have moved from being a right-wing Republican wack job to being a leftie lunatic, without really budging much from my core beliefs.

When I recently discovered Murray Rothbard's seminal exploration "Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal," I learned that I am not the first to experience this phenomenon. "Twenty years ago I was an extreme right-wing Republican, a young and lone 'Neanderthal' (as the liberals used to call us) who believed, as one friend pungently put it, that 'Senator Taft had sold out to the socialists,'" Rothbard wrote. "Today, I am most likely to be called an extreme leftist, since I favor immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, denounce U.S. imperialism, advocate Black Power and have just joined the new Peace and Freedom Party. And yet my basic political views have not changed by a single iota in these two decades!"

I am bringing a water pistol to a nuclear conflagaration, because while all of these writers have sped through the works of Rothbard and Mises and a whole slew of other deep-thinking philosophers, I have always preferred to curl up with a good novel, an album or a movie, and fill my head with ideas that way. As you can guess by the top of my page, my influences are not the great essayists but Heinlein, Bradbury and Orwell, most significantly "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984."

I don't know how important it is to define one's self as left, right, moderate or whatever. The lines between them have blurred to the point where they're all advocates of what John Twelve Hawks calls the Vast Machine anyway. The "left" I have always known created the Great Society, a lumbering bureaucracy that claims to care about the poor and downtrodden. The "right" seduced me with the absolute truth that "government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem," but when it defeated the "left" and took the power, nothing changed except the priorities for which the lumbering bureaucracy is deployed. Our supposedly limited-government administration, confronted with 9-11, expanded the power of the Vast Machine and created two new Cabinet posts. Much like the ancient Mickey Rooney shorts where the solution was "Hey! Let's put on a show!" the answer to the challenges that confront us has become "Hey! Let's create a new government agency!"

I don't believe in left or right anymore. I don't look at the pigment of a man's skin and decide what I think of him, and I don't look at a big business leader or an aging hippie and make assumptions about their thought processes. The key to understanding a person lies in getting to know that person as an individual, not in knowing what category he belongs to. The real divide in America is not between left and right, which have turned out to be different flavors of the Vast Machine, but between those who trust government and those who trust individuals.

Am I left or right? I despise abortion because I see human life being flushed out of existence as if he or she was a cancerous tumor. I despise the death penalty because two wrongs don't make a right and state executions make my skin crawl. I don't think it's the government's business to license marriage, and if some church wants to declare a gay couple married, more power to it. I think the larger any organized human venture becomes -- church, state or business -- the more dangerous it becomes and the less it nurtures the best of humanity.

Again, maybe better thinkers than I have already come to these conclusions in scholarly tomes, but it comes down to this: If you think the state is the best vessel for solving our dilemmas and challenges, you've lost my attention. If you think we as individuals can work together to find solutions -- voluntarily and nonviolently -- I'm listening.

It's a huge task. Ninety-nine percent of those participating in last year's election voted for a candidate who advocated state solutions and expansion of the American empire. Most of the time it seems the best we can do is keep talking about these ideas and stay out of the way of the Vast Machine.

I guess I now belong to the libertarian left, having watched the nation lurch to the right around me as Rothbard and many others did before me. But I'm also still a Reagan Republican in many ways -- with the emphasis on Reagan's words, not his administration's actions (and deleting any references to asserting the American promise at the point of a gun). What is "left" and what is "right" seem to vary with the seasons. Maybe we're all ambidextrous in the end. The real eternal theme seems the individual versus the state. I'll trust the person next to me as opposed to the amorphous bureaucracy every time.