Watch in amazement as George W. Bush, President of the United States, explains that we must refrain from punishing lawbreaking telecom firms because if they get punished for breaking the law, they might not be willing to break it again in the future. There's certainly a part of that analysis I'm prepared to endorse.
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The Case for Immunity
29 Feb 2008 09:06 am
Comments (21)
That press conference was so far from reality he might as well have been wearing a clown suit. The $4 gas was also priceless.
wandering by's post is an example of what anonymous responses in blogs leads to.
Yeah, Matt, why are you so hard on these telecoms who come to our country impoverished? I am so damn tired of all these hospital emergency rooms taken up by those danged telecoms. And my labor used to be worth something before my boss could pay some telecom under the table to do work.
Bush should be hanged. 1% of the population may be incarcerated yet a very prominent sociopathic murderer is allowed to roam free. Those clamoring for impeachment have set the bar far too low.
most of us ARE anonymous -- but the tag lines just make it easier to identify messages.
Still reconciling the indefensible.
- jeffrey davis (in lower case)
can anyone find the disconnect between MYs high-dudgeon on two different issues
hopefully my emphasis will guide you toward the answer you seek.
Perhaps it's like the disconnect between wandering by's high-dudgeon on two different issues. This is what the "party of ideas" has come to. Newt Gingrich must be so proud.
1) lawbreaking telecoms and electioneering politicos and 2) illegal immigration.
if you say "rule of law", you are clearly racist.
What a curious species we have here in the US: the Authoritarian Libertarian. You wouldn't think there could be such a thing. It's Mussolini-esque.
Each time in recent years Bush and Cheney have patently wiped their asses with vital parts of the Constitution, I've wondered where my LP Libertarian friends' outrage is. The response from them is always so similar: we're too far gone already, so it doesn't matter; the Second Amendment! so it doesn't matter; immigrants! so it doesn't matter. The fake argument is that 'all Amendments and laws are of equal importance, so..why should this bother us?'; the real argument is, 'so what if we abuse the basic rights of Aliens and potentially un-American Americans'? It takes a fundamentalist to so-spectacularly misunderstand their own text.
almost missed this thread...
I'm not certain what jonnybutter is really saying but I'll infer freely. I'll accept full responsibility for errors in my inferences.
This libertarian has always seen the Patriot Act as problematic from a civil liberties standpoint. As well, our immigration policy (without respect to its enforcement) as inefficient and inhumane. The lack of (or maybe more accurately, weirdly selective) enforcement of immigration law is also inhumane and unfair (imagine how unfair it is to a legal immigrant following the law and paying the legal costs that illegal immigrants are NOT paying).
Both major parties have utterly failed to rationalize immigration policy and have similarly bent-over on trading our civil liberties for short-term political gain (or at least political defense).
I am all for civil disobedience but if we go through the process of making laws how about making some sensible ones?
I'm not certain what jonnybutter is really saying but I'll infer freely.
I'm talking about the avoidance of Bush's Unitary Executive concept by Libertarians. You avoid it too; you mention the 'Patriot' act rather than the subject at hand. I'm talking about the sweeping powers Bush/Cheney have assumed they have, very different from any modern president (although Nixon liked the idea). I never hear very much outrage from US Libertarians about that. When questioned, they tend to rationalize it in an unconvincing way. Therefore, I have to conclude that crucially dictatorial powers seized by the Executive doesn't bother them much (and I can't include you, since I don't know you). That that can be called 'libertarian' is bizarre.
...and, yes, parts of the Patriot Act are 'problematic' to put it mildly. But I'm talking about powers that the president has simply assumed; I'm not talking about congress vis a vis the pres., I'm talking about the pres. superceding congress, in his own mind.
JB - I see your point about Bush/Cheney's disregard of executive bounds (and even presupposed it in my argument) and I have certainly seen lots of outrage from fellow libertarians -- please don't mistake conservative talkies to real libertarians. Of course, there aren't enough of us out there to matter to the media but include me among the outraged.
Congress, too, has systematically abdicated its co-equal role to shape the laws -- didn't they (and by extension, we) pass the patriot act? iraq war resolutions? immigration laws and appropriations for enforcement (not really)? You don't think taking 12 months to put together umpteen-earmarks, finance their next reelection and investigate major league baseball takes a toll? The more congress does, the less effective vis a vis its constitutionial duties it has become.
...because if they get punished for breaking the law, they might not be willing to break it again in the future.
The logical extension of this argument: No member of the American military or intelligence services should be punished for torture of whomever the President declares is an Enemy -- because, in the future, when Jack Bauer really needs to save lives ... he might not be willing to waterboard you.
I see your point about Bush/Cheney's disregard of executive bounds (and even presupposed it in my argument) and I have certainly seen lots of outrage from fellow libertarians.
I haven't, and I know quite a few LP members. Unless it's all presupposed. What I hear about is immigration.
The 9/11 Commission said we lost a huge opportunity that must not be duplicated again when the FBI failed to understand what was going on with Arabs in Flight School not so interested in landings and takeoffs, only steering planes in mid-air.
The Commission said if the "dots had been connected" then there might have been enough time to get Mohammed Atta and others records from the Flight Schools, records of where their finances came from, and phone numbers called, and addresses. Enough even though no probable cause existed to look, to detain them as aliens, and STOP 9/11.
Enemy rights lovers, as with the telecomms, say that we would have had no right to look at Flight School records without probable cause on each Muslim pilot. And if we had intruded on Mohammed Atta's privacy and 100 other Muslim pilots without the sacred writ of a lawyer in robes, and stopped 9/11? Damn national security and American lives, they could sue the crap out of us. And a cabal of tort lawyers and Jewish ACLU activists would eagerly seek out representation of their Arab pilot victims..
then your so-called libertarians are really drinking the republican Kool-aid. Civil liberties are at the very core of libertarianism.
Don't mistake the Libertarian Party for functional libertarians.
If a "libertarian" is talking about stopping immigration, then you have a Repub. Kool-aid drinker in front of you. If you are talking to someone who wants nearly unlimited immigration (holdout for criminals and contagious health issues) then you may actually be talking to a libertarian.
Don't mistake the Libertarian Party for functional libertarians.
I guess this distinction is what I'm talking about. People like you don't have a party, as such. The people I was refering to before do have one, and it's called 'Libertarian'. I know there are true small 'l' libertarians out there, just not many. When I say to my LP friends that I'm a 'civil libertarian', they gag.
My rude comments above are about the Rothbard-type of 'libertarian'. They are indeed authoritarian and somewhat racist, too - race is definitely *not* a main issue for them, but it's lurking there.
Meh, I suspect that a majority of the people who call themselves libertarians just don't want to have to pay any taxes.
If you are a libertarian, it's perhaps not entirely inconsistent of you to support making immigration as difficult as possible. But it's sorta hard to see the libertarian case for prohibiting US citizens from associating with (i.e., selling to or buying from) anyone they damn well please. Let alone expecting said US citizens to assume the burden of enforcing immigration laws (by verifying the legality of people with whom they associate).
"I never hear very much outrage from US Libertarians about that."
Go over to Antiwar.com. Plenty of links from there to libs who are thoroughly outraged by practically everything Bush has done.
That said, of course there are (big-L) "Libertarians" who don't care about big government. Most of them are people like Ron Paul: Republicans with certain libertarian positions who ignore other libertarian positions.
Hell, even "real" libertarians - big-L and small-l vary on their positions. That's no surprise.
But the "libs" you're talking about are mostly the type Bob Black once described as: "Republicans who smoke dope."
Rothbard was technically an anarchist. However, to show you how little committed he was to that position, Wikipedia has this to say:
"During the 1970s and '80s, Rothbard was active in the Libertarian Party. He was frequently involved in the party's internal politics: from 1978 to 1983, he was associated with the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus (later reorganized as the Rothbard Caucus), allying himself with Justin Raimondo and Williamson Evers, and opposing the "low tax liberalism" espoused by 1980 presidential candidate Ed Clark and Cato Institute president Edward H Crane III. He split with the Radical Caucus at the 1983 national convention, and aligned himself with what he called the "rightwing populist" wing of the party, notably Ron Paul, who ran for President on the LP ticket in 1988. In 1989, Rothbard left the Libertarian Party and began building bridges to the post-Cold War right. He was the founding president of the conservative-libertarian John Randolph Club and supported the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992. However, prior to his death in Manhattan of a heart attack, Rothbard had become disillusioned with the Buchanan movement."
I don't see "anarchist" anywhere in that series of associations. He appears to have been more interested in expanding the influence of whatever set of positions he called "libertarian" rather than adhering to anarchist principles which would have forbade him from involving himself with most of the people he associated with, such as Paul and Buchanan.
Rothbard, I think, is more properly called a "Paleoconservative" rather than an anarchist, as is Justin Raimondo.
So, yes, you clearly could see some "authoritarianism" in his associations. But that would be irrelevant to the validity of the "anarcho-capitalist" concepts he conceived of in his earlier days. OTOH, he associated with Ayn Rand in his earlier days, too, so clearly he was susceptible to "authoritarianism" then as well.
I started out as an Objectivist as well, but eventually, after being exposed to anarcho-capitalism concepts via "The Libertarian Connection" zine, I sat down and evaluated the minarchist position. I concluded it was invalid based on Austrian Economics (i.e. that the state was by definition a coercive monopoly and that such monopolies are unworkable and incorrect and imperialist by definition). This removed any interest in the Libertarian Party.
Apparently, Rothbard went in the other direction.
In fact, I once wrote a detailed piece for "Reason" magazine explaining what was incorrect about the minarchist position. They declined the article, explaining that Rothbard had written one on the issue in question. When I read Rothbard's piece, it addressed none of the points I made. As far as I know, I am still the only one to have ever made a reasonably hard core argument against the validity of the state based on economics.
Today, it would be even easier since one could draw on the known facts of human nature to make it clear that no social organization developed by humans can be made functional - not even anarchism.
Ah, those were the "good ol' days", arguing libertarian theory.
Now I'm a Transhumanist, so all that is irrelevant.
Comments closed March 14, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
can anyone find the disconnect between MYs high-dudgeon on two different issues: 1) lawbreaking telecoms and electioneering politicos and 2) illegal immigration.
if you say "rule of law", you are clearly racist.
Posted by wandering by | February 29, 2008 9:12 AM