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David N. Mayer
 

2008: Prospects for Liberty - January 11, 2008

 

2008: Prospects for Liberty

 

                 For the past four years – since I first began MayerBlog in January 2004 – I’ve begun the New Year with an essay on “The Prospects for Liberty” in the coming year; and now I’m continuing that tradition.   Like the past recent years, 2008 offers mixed prospects for those of us who are radical individualists and thus who hold the freedom of the individual as our highest political value – those of us who support what Thomas Jefferson called “the holy cause of freedom.”  (For more on radical individualism, see my 2006 essay.)  Again, my overall assessment remains the same:  “Although there is some room for optimism about freedom’s future, for the most part there are challenges to liberty on virtually all fronts which are as great as, if not greater than, the challenges freedom-loving individuals have faced throughout human history.”   

In this year’s essay I’ll discuss the four greatest threats to liberty that Americans will face in 2008 – what I’ll call the “four fascisms” of 2008.  (I’m using the term fascism here in its broadest sense, as a political philosophy holding among its essential precepts the claims that individuals have no inherent rights, and that their interests are subordinate to, and therefore may be sacrificed for the sake of, the presumed collective good, whatever it’s called – “society,” “the race,” “the state,” the “Volk,” “the nation,” “the people,” “the proletariat,” “the common good,” or “the public interest.”  Purists may object that what I’m really calling “fascism” would be more properly termed collectivism, and that my use of the term fascism is not only historically incorrect but also deliberately provocative – and to a great extent, they’d be right.  In defending my use of the term, however, I’d note that as originally coined by Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of 1930s Italy, the term referred to the fasces, the bundle of rods wrapped around an axe carried by the lictors who guarded government officials in ancient Rome, where it symbolized the sovereign authority of the state.  In this original sense of the term, fascism thus is roughly the equivalent of “statism,” the form of collectivism in which the entity known as “the state” holds the highest political authority in society.  And because I agree with Ayn Rand’s observation (discussed below) that the fundamental political issue of our time is “the individual vs. the collective,” I have an additional justification for using the term fascism. Notwithstanding the arguments of political scientists – who would distinguish fascism from other collectivist –isms such as communism, socialism, or national socialism (Nazism) – these distinctions are really irrelevant because all these forms of collectivism are equally pernicious to, and destructive of, individual rights and freedom.  Leftists like to use the terms fascism or fascist as pejoratives because they naively believe that socialism is somehow less evil than collectivism of “the right” – that the murder of millions of people killed by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, by Mao in Red China, or by Pol Pot in communist Cambodia somehow was less evil than the murder of millions of people killed by Hitler’s regime in Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s regime in fascist Italy.  Leftists have no legitimate claim on the truth, and neither do they have any monopoly on use of the terms fascism or fascist as pejoratives.)  

The “Four Fascisms” of 2008 are: (1) Eco-Fascism, the tyranny of radical environmentalists, including the global-warming hoax and other myths propagated by “green” activists as a rationale for imposing their agenda on us by force; (2) Nanny-State Fascism, the tyranny of the health police, who seek to turn everyone into wards of the state, including the movement pushing for “universal” health care – that is, government monopolization of the health care industry (what used to be called, and still is, socialized medicine); (3) Demopublican/ Replicrat Fascism, the tyranny of the two-party political system in the United States, particularly dangerous in 2008 as an election year; and last, (4) Islamo-Fascism, the danger of militant, fundamentalist Islam to the United States and the rest of the civilized world.  After discussing each of these four fascisms, I’ll briefly discuss what we ought to do to defend individual freedom against these horrible threats. 

One additional thought, before turning to these major threats to freedom.  In this election year, it’s helpful to keep in mind this observation made by Ronald W. Reagan in 1964, when he endorsed Barry Goldwater’s candidacy for the presidency: 

"It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers.  James Madison said, `We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.'  This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.  This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them for ourselves."

  

 

 

Eco-Fascism: 

The “Global Warming” Hoax and Other “Green” Myths

Propagated by the Tyranny of Radical Environmentalism  

 

Perhaps the greatest threat to individual freedom in the world today – particularly in the Western, developed world – comes from radical environmentalism.  Radical environmentalism is a political movement led by a relatively small number of fanatics who are true believers in a quasi-religious faith.  That faith fundamentally views human beings as evil:  it draws a phony distinction between “man” and “nature” which denies the reality that human beings and their activities are as much a part of nature as any other creatures or their activities on Earth.  And that faith also involves worshipping the Earth, not as it really is (a planet not only inhabited by human beings but also dominated, and in many ways influenced, by their activities) but as it’s imagined by radical environmentalists -- a “pristine” world without the “artificial” manipulations of humans.   

Although it’s a movement led by a minority of fanatics, radical environmentalism has a dangerously powerful influence on politics and public-policy debates especially in Western democratic countries where public opinion shapes law and policy.  That’s because the quasi-religious, faith-based philosophical foundations of the environmental movement have enabled it to cash in on such negative emotions as envy, fear, and guilt.  The average naïve American is told that human beings (and especially prosperous persons) are harming not only their immediate environment but also threatening to harm, even to destroy, the Earth itself, through their activities (and especially their use of fossil fuels, as discussed below).  Schoolchildren are taught that to love the earth, they must despise what human beings have done since the Industrial Revolution in order to make life in civilized society comfortable, safe, and pleasurable.  Even major corporations are advised by their marketing consultants to embrace various “green” initiatives, to curry favor with radical environmentalist groups and the public opinion they influence.  And, most ominously, radical environmentalist activist groups like the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council, through their lobbying of state legislatures and Congress, are able to push their agenda on society through the coercive power of the law. 

The public policies urged by radical environmentalists pose direct, substantial, and far-reaching threats not only to Americans’ standard of living but also to our basic rights and freedoms.  Among these are economic freedom and property rights, as well as our freedom of choice as consumers – our freedom to purchase and use various goods we regard as beneficial to our lives and our pursuit of happiness.  (Consider, for example, the many ways that laws such as the Endangered Species Act and environmental regulations of so-called “wetlands” have prevented landowners from using their own property in various ways beneficial to human life.  Or consider how federal water-conservation policies have mandated toilets that no longer properly flush or washing machines that no longer properly clean clothes.  Or how federal energy-conservation policies have mandated lighter-weight, and therefore far more dangerous, motor vehicles and have threatened to prohibit such wonderful goods as SUVs, light trucks, and even incandescent light bulbs.) 

Of all the quasi-religious beliefs of radical environmentalists, perhaps the most dangerous today is the belief in so-called “global warming,” or as it’s sometimes more euphemistically called, the “climate change” hypothesis – the theory that human activities (namely the production of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas) are causing a dangerous increase in world temperatures.  There may be substantial scientific evidence that the Earth is warming – that is, that average global temperatures are increasing – but, notwithstanding the propaganda efforts of the Al Gores of the world, there is no solid scientific proofs of the key elements of the global warming thesis:  that it’s man-made and that it will have catastrophic harmful consequences.  Supporters of the hypothesis like to say there’s a “consensus” among world scientists, and they cite United Nations committee reports (authored by committees composed more of politicians than of genuine scientists) as their evidence.  Sound scientific theory, however, is not determined by majority vote; it’s determined by hard evidence, objectively assessed.  Although they may currently be in the minority, those scientists who are skeptical of the global-warming thesis have truth on their side.  Radical environmentalists resort to ad hominem attacks, calling the skeptics “deniers” and analogizing them to believers in a “flat Earth” or neo-Nazi racist deniers of the Holocaust.  Truthfully, however, it’s the radical environmentalists themselves, the true believers in the global warming thesis, who are the real deniers of scientific truth:  they can be likened to religious fundamentalists who believe the Bible’s creation myth and who claim that creationism is scientifically based, inventing a pseudo-scientific theory called “intelligent design” to masquerade what is essentially a matter of religious belief as an alternative scientific theory.  Like creationists, believers in the global warming hypothesis are grounding their beliefs on faith, not reason.    

Former vice president Al Gore, the most visible proponent of the global warming thesis, is a hustler – a hustler of fear.  As I observed in previous entries (see my discussion of “AlGore’s Ignoble Prize” in “Fall-deral 2007” (Oct. 25, 2007), also see “Merchants of Fear” (May 17, 2006)), Gore relies on fear to propagate as “truth” the outrageous lies he tells about global warming.  Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), has nicely summed up Gore’s alarmist work: “An Inconvenient Truth purports to be a non-partisan, non-ideological exposition of climate science and moral common sense.  In reality, it’s a colorfully illustrated lawyer’s brief for global warming alarmism and energy rationing.  It is an accusation hurled at modern industrial civilization.” (For more on the various lies in Gore’s film, see the excellent critique in Chapter 10 of the book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, by Christopher Horner, another senior fellow at CEI.)  Gore’s fans (his fellow radical environmentalists and fear-mongers) frequently attack free-market think tanks like CEI that question the global warming thesis by pointing out that they receive donations from oil companies.  What is often overlooked, however, is the bias on the other side:  global-warming theorists who receive funds from government agencies and other political entities that have an interest in propagandizing, often merely to increase their own funding; and the increasingly lucrative cottage industry that the global warming proponents themselves have created.  Al Gore is personally making a fortune from his scaremongering – and not just in royalties from his book and film.  As news wire reports noted in mid-November (a story that somehow got lost in all the media hype about Gore’s ig-Noble Prize), Gore has become an partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, a Silicon Valley  venture capital firm, focused on alternative energy investments.  Gore will profit to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – which just may be enough to help pay for his hugely expensive (and energy-consuming) mansions and private jet travel, as he hypocritically urges everyone else in the world (including people too poor to purchase “carbon offsets”) to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels. 

The global warming thesis has been aptly called “a scam,” indeed “the greatest scam in history.” In a hard-hitting op-ed published on the Internet (on the Web site of Icecap, an organization dedicated to exploding myths about climate change) this past fall, John Coleman – meteorologist and the founder of The Weather Channel – separated facts from fiction quite succinctly.  “There is no run away climate change.  The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic.  Our planet is not in peril.”  And yet, led by Al Gore, “the high priest of Global Warming,” perpetrators of this great scam have been remarkably successful.  Coleman bluntly explains how and why the scam has worked: 

“Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming.  Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the `research’ to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims.  Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going.  Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

 

“Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild `scientific’ scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda.  Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmentally conscientious citizens.  Only one reporter at ABS has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minute documentary segment.”

 

Mr. Coleman concluded his op-ed on an optimistic note, predicting that in time – in a decade or two – the outrageousness of this scam “will be obvious”:  the horrible scenarios postulated by the scammers – polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding, super storm patterns, and so on – will fail to occur.  “The sky is not falling.  And natural cycles and drifts in climate are as much if not more responsible for any climate changes underway.”  Indeed, Coleman predicts, “the next twenty years are equally as likely to see a cooling trend as they are to see a warming trend.” 

Unfortunately, by the time people realize that global warming is a scam, it may be too late:  politicians will have enacted legislation, purported to help “solve” this phony global warming “crisis,” which will in fact have devastating consequences on our economy and our lifestyles.   

The energy bill passed by Congress several weeks ago illustrates how many bad consequences (many of them unforeseen except by the minority of us who think clearly about climate-change and energy issues) will result from Congress blindly enacts into law the radical environmentalist agenda.  First, the bill requires automakers to increase the fuel economy of cars and small trucks, including SUVs, by 40% to an industry average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020.  Although less onerous than the fuel-economy standards proposed in an earlier version of the bill under consideration last summer – standards set so impossibly high that they would have, in effect, outlawed most SUVs and small trucks – the new standards will exacerbate the problem already created by government-mandated fuel-economy standards:  they will result in lighter-weight vehicles that will be less safe in crashes.  Thus, in the name of conserving fossil-fuel consumption, Congress is literally killing people by mandating unsafe vehicles. 

Another feature of the bill expands Congress’s ill-considered mandates on the use of biofuels, largely corn-based ethanol.  Although touted as an alternative to fossil fuels, the ethanol gambit is really nothing more than a massive government subsidy to corn growers and to huge agri-business concerns (like Archer Daniels Midland Corporation) that produce ethanol.  The bill calls for significant boosts in ethanol production:  from 7 billion gallons this year to 9 billion gallons next year and 11.1 billion gallons by 2009, and eventually requiring ethanol production of 36 billion gallons per year by 2022!  The existing mandates already have produced huge distortions in the market for corn, leading to several bad consequences that Congress blithely ignores.  Due to the rising demand for ethanol, the price of corn has doubled and animal feed prices are up about 25 percent.  The huge increases in ethanol production mandated by the bill no doubt will have a tremendous inflationary ripple effect on food prices in the U.S. and around the world (because U.S. corn production is such an important part of world food production).  Another unfortunate side-effect of the rising demand for ethanol – and the vast increase in corn production by Midwestern farmers, in response to that rising demand – is that the resulting increase in nitrogen-based fertilizer runoffs, from the Corn Belt states down the Mississippi River, has created a nearly 8000-square-mile (and growing) “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico (an oxygen-depleted area where fish, crabs, and shrimp suffocate).  (“Revived corn industry threatens sea: corn crop a threat to Gulf `dead zone,’” AP news wires, Dec. 18, 2007.) 

And, last but not least, the bill will outlaw the standard incandescent bulb, used for more than 120 years to light millions of homes, mandating instead energy-efficient bulbs, such as compact fluorescent bulbs, which consume fewer watts of electricity but contain toxic mercury that’s difficult to dispose of properly.  Thus has Congress grossly distorted the market for corn, made our motor vehicles less safe, and deprived us of choices in lighting our own homes – all in the name of lowering electricity usage and thus, presumably, cutting “global-warming greenhouse gases.”  The energy bill provides a clear illustration how lawmakers who fall for the global warming scam can do serious damage to our nation’s economy and our standard of living. 

Frighteningly, this horrible energy law is likely to be just the beginning of the bad public policies resulting from legislation premised on the global-warming hoax.  We can expect Congress in future years to continue to bow to the radical environmentalist agenda, by blocking oil drilling in Alaska and off U.S. shores, confiscating the profits of oil companies so that they cannot invest extra capital to help develop shale oil reserves in the West, discouraging the building of new oil refineries and power plants (particularly economical coal-burning plants), and various other misguided policies that will make power more expensive and scarce, leading to more and more brownouts and blackouts within the next few decades.  The real consequences of the radical environmentalist agenda are far more scary than any of the hypothetical scenarios postulated by Al Gore in his movie; and these consequences reveal in stark terms the environmentalists’ ultimate agenda, to destroy capitalism and all the wonderful byproducts of the Industrial Revolution. 

What can we do to counter the radical environmentalists’ dangerous agenda, those of us who are radical individualists, defenders of freedom and capitalism – and, on this issue particularly, the real defenders of science and reason?  There are several things we can, and must, do.  First and foremost, we cannot allow the perpetrators of the global warming scam and other dangerous “green” myths get away with it.  We must call their bluff, stand up in defense of sound science and not be intimidated by their ad hominem attacks likening us to “flat-Earthers” or Holocaust “deniers.”  We must call their pseudo-scientific arguments “bullshit” because that’s what they are.  We must not patronize any business that attempts to use so-called “environmentally-conscious” or “green” gimmicks as marketing ploys.  (Examples include Dell Inc., which has pledged to become the “greenest” technology company in the world and to go “carbon neutral”; Delta Air Lines Inc., which has become the first carrier to offer tickets with “carbon offsets” that give money to radical environmentalist groups; and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which has pledged to use more solar power for its stores, to use alternative fuels for its trucks, and to sell 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs.  Rather than being commended and patronized, these companies should be ridiculed for their silliness in being suckered into the great scam.  Companies that go “green” shouldn’t get our green, that is, our money.)  And we must refuse to vote for any politician who’s the environmentalists’ accomplice in this scam, any politician who supports enacting their radical agenda into law.  At the same time, we should support politicians who resist the agenda, politicians who support sensible energy policies (such as removing government barriers to the oil and gas companies’ exploitation of our fossil-fuel reserves in places like Alaska and offshore the U.S. coast).  Finally, of course, we should ridicule anyone who worries about “carbon offsets,” and we should drive our gas-guzzling vehicles, turn up our thermostats in winter and crank up the air conditioning in summer, and in other ways enjoy our consumption of carbon-dioxide-producing fossil fuels, free of any sort of guilt whatsoever.  (There’s nothing to be guilty about, for carbon dioxide is indeed “the breath of life,” the “breath of civilization,” as a series of splendid public-service announcements produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute declares.)

  

 

Nanny-Fascism: 

Socialized Medicine and the Tyranny of the Health Police 

 

Radical environmentalism threatens the ways we live our lives; but another dangerous political movement today threatens not only our lives but also something even more precious – our ownership of our own lives.   That’s the movement to extend and expand the “welfare state,” by having the government “protect” us, by providing cradle-to-grave “security,” even against our own follies – in other words, the movement to create a “nanny state.”   

Although touted by its advocates as a program to better secure our supposed “rights,” the agenda of the nanny-state activists is really designed to deprive us of our most basic and fundamental right:  our right to own ourselves, to control our own lives, by being free to live our lives as we please and (the corollary of this right) taking responsibility for our choices and actions.  Self-ownership is what defines us as human beings; alone among the creatures of the earth, humans are uniquely capable of reason (of thinking conceptually) and volition (of making choices, by the exercise of our free will).  Unlike other animals, humans have no “instinct for survival”:  we often choose to do things that may be detrimental to our well-being or even self-destructive.  But that’s the price we pay for being human; however, if we lead a good life, the harm or pain we might cause ourselves from our bad choices is more than compensated for by the benefit or pleasure we derive from our wise choices – a pleasure that’s especially gratifying because we’ve earned it ourselves.  

Advocates of the “cradle-to-grave” nanny state claim to be acting for our own good, to “protect” us from the vicissitudes of life.  But what they really seek is to deprive us of our freedom to make choices, to act on those choices, and to bear the responsibility for the consequences, whether good or bad.  By depriving us of this freedom in the name of “saving” our lives, they’re really seeking to destroy our lives by destroying those attributes that define us as human beings.  Often advocating their programs in the name of safeguarding “our children” and their future, what they really seek to do is to turn free and competent adults into nothing more than children – to treat everyone as if they were merely wards of the state. 

The “nanny state” abuses the power of government by taking it out of its legitimate realm (which concerns those actions only that directly harm others) and moving into an illegitimate realm (actions that might harm others only potentially or indirectly, or not at all, including actions that are harmful only to oneself) – and thereby deprive persons of their individual sovereignty, their freedom to live their lives as they choose.  Nanny-government, rather than safeguarding the rights of individuals (which is the sole legitimate purpose of government), in fact invades their rights – depriving persons of their essential liberty and self-ownership rights. 

In recent years nanny-government has grown by leaps and bounds, at all levels – local, state, and national.  One especially illustrative example has been the “war on tobacco.”  Anti-tobacco activists have been remarkably successful in their campaign to prohibit the smoking of cigars, cigarettes, and pipes – and indeed, to prohibit the consumption of all tobacco products.  More and more local and state governments have passed laws banning smoking in public places, in the name of protecting the health of workers and customers from the supposed dangers of “secondhand” smoke (despite the lack of scientifically sound evidence proving that secondhand smoke actually causes harm to non-smokers).  Smoking bans violate the rights of smokers and non-smokers alike; they deprive business owners of their right to control their own property – and they deprive everyone of their freedom to assess their own risks and to bargain accordingly.  (I discuss all these issues more fully in my essay “Smokers’ Rights as Everyone’s Rights,” Oct. 31, 2006.)  Unfortunately, the trend toward prohibition has been accelerating:  not only smoking in indoor public places, but smoking in outdoor public places and even in private places – in automobiles (if children are present), in apartments – have been prohibited by an increasing number of local governments.  Moreover, encouraged by the success of the anti-tobacco fascists, other “health police” activists have been pursuing an agenda to extend government’s reach into restaurants and grocery stores by banning supposedly unhealthy foods, such as New York City has done with its ban on so-called “trans fats.”  In the name of protecting public health, government is now dictating the ingredients that cooks in restaurants may use – not to prohibit substances that are toxic in themselves (which, arguably, may fall under the legitimate scope of the government’s police power), but to prohibit substances that are perfectly safe but may help increase the risks of certain health problems if consumed in excess.  (That’s the same dubious rationale that the government has used to ban smoking – as well as its rationale for continuing the failed “war on drugs,” the 80-plus-year old effort to prohibit the use of certain narcotic drugs and mood-altering substances.) 

All such prohibition laws are bad because they abuse the power of government and interfere with the rights of the individual.  On utilitarian grounds, they create far more problems than they actually solve.  The “war” on illegal narcotic drugs, for example, has exacerbated crime problems while diverting law enforcement and judicial resources from real (violent) crimes; it has created black markets, which provide incentives for more dangerous drugs (such as crack cocaine); and in general, it has stood in the way of a common-sense public drug policy focusing more on treatment than on punishment.  Similar negative side-effects from prohibition will no doubt arise as smoking bans become more prevalent, and they’ll also arise in other areas where the health police may try to prohibit people from doing what they want, such as consuming fatty foods.  We have seen from the horrible side-effects of criminalization of prostitution and gambling what may come from government efforts, in the name of suppressing “vice,” which interfere with the ability of people doing what they want to do, to pursue their own happiness (even in ways others might find immoral or self-destructive).  The lesson, again, is that no good comes from the violation of people’s rights, particularly their right to own their own bodies, to own their own lives (which includes their right to eat, smoke, drink, ingest drugs, gamble, engage in sexual activities, and so on). 

The most serious threat posed by nanny-state fascism to individual freedom in the United States in 2008 is the imminent threat – the “clear and present danger” (to borrow a phrase from early 20th-century Supreme Court free-speech decisions) – of socialized medicine.  It’s no longer politically correct to call it socialized medicine, but that’s exactly what the advocates of so-called “universal” health-care coverage are really proposing:  government monopoly over the U.S. health-care industry.  In the name of supposedly guaranteeing a so-called “right” to health care for all Americans, what the advocates of “universal” coverage are really proposing is some form of government takeover of the U.S. healthcare industry – a takeover that will have disastrous results, not only bankrupting the country by further exacerbating the problem of rising healthcare costs, but also destroying what’s best about the U.S. system and, ultimately, endangering the lives of all Americans by taking away their only legitimate “right” with regard to health care, their freedom to enter into contracts for healthcare products and services with providers of their choice.   

Measured by quality of care, the U.S. healthcare system is the best in the world; that’s because the free-market segments of it provide the necessary incentives for innovation in care, including new drugs and new technologies for treatment.  The chief problems with the American healthcare system are basically two – the rising costs of the system overall, and the wasted time and resources devoted to paperwork and bureaucracy – and both problems would be exacerbated exponentially if the U.S. were to follow the mistaken path taken by other countries in the world, particularly Canada, the U.K., and other European nations, that have some form of government-controlled national health care.  And, inevitably, the higher costs that will result from any sort of socialized medicine system will lead to efforts to control costs – which will include some sort of price controls on drug companies and other suppliers of goods/services, as well as rationing of care.  That will mean an end to innovation in drugs and procedures, not only for Americans but for everyone in the world.  Virtually all new drugs are produced in the United States because we’re the last bastion of capitalism in the health care industry today in the world; the price controls imposed by nationalized health care systems in countries like Canada and the U.K. remove all incentives for pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare companies to develop new products or procedures.  (In the medical field, research costs are enormous; companies depend on the profits they can make from the sale of new drugs, particularly during the first few years they are patented, in order to recoup those costs.  Without profits, companies would have no reason to develop new products, and so research will dry up and technologies stagnate.)  That means that some people will die, waiting for new drugs or treatments that may never come – something that happens already in the U.S. because of delays in FDA approval, and something that frequently happens in other countries with socialized healthcare systems.  And even if the appropriate drugs or procedures are available to treat people’s medical problems, there will be long delays – much like the waiting lists that currently exist for people needing organ transplants – that will jeopardize people’s health or even their lives, just as they do now in Canada, the U.K., and other countries with government-controlled healthcare systems. 

The problems already existing in the U.S. healthcare system have been caused by bad government policies since the end of World War II – bad policies that, again, would be made even worse by any form of “universal,” or socialized, medicine.  Costs are spiraling out of control in the current system because of two basic problems – over-insurance and the lack of incentives to control costs because they’re paid by third parties – and both these problems, again, would be exacerbated by socialized medicine.   Americans are over-insured when it comes to healthcare costs.  The purpose of insurance, generally, is to cover the risks of unexpected and catastrophic costs, such as hospitalization, expensive surgeries or other treatments, or unusually expensive drugs.  Insurance isn’t supposed to cover ordinary, routine costs such as visits to a doctor’s office or common prescriptions, but Americans are used to having their medical insurance cover these costs – and therefore have no incentive to control them, because a third party (the insurance company) is paying for them – thanks to perverse U.S. tax policies.  Price controls imposed on wages during World War II prevented employers from increasing employees’ salaries, so employers began providing untaxed perks, or fringe benefits, such as health insurance, in order to compete for the best employees, at a time of labor shortages.  After the War, those ill-advise price controls, like other unfortunate wartime policies (such as income-tax withholding) remained, thus giving rise to the uniquely American system that typically ties health-insurance coverage to persons’ employment.  And which typically makes that insurance coverage far more extensive, and therefore expensive, than it ought to have been. 

Both the problems of over-insurance and inefficiency have been made worse by other perverse government policies, namely the addition of some elements of socialized medicine through government-provided healthcare for certain segments of the U.S. population:  Medicare, for elderly persons; Medicaid, for poor persons; the Veterans’ Administration healthcare system, for military veterans; and most recently, the State Children’s Health Insurance (SCHIP) program.  (President Bush should be commended for exercising his veto twice to prevent Democrats in Congress from expanding this program from its original design to cover poor children without health insurance to a middle-class entitlement that would allow adults into the program and cover people in families with incomes above the median.  At the end of December, however, Bush signed into a law a compromise measure expected to provide states with enough federal money to cover the roughly 6 million people, mostly children, currently enrolled in the program.)  None of these programs, except the VA program, ought to exist, because the Constitution grants Congress no powers to provide health care or health insurance (although granting veterans’ benefits might be rationalized as “necessary and proper” powers linked to Congress’ legitimate powers to raise and support military forces).  And these programs, particularly Medicare, are hemorrhaging out of control in their costs – thanks in no small part to the former Republican-controlled Congress’s expansion of Medicare benefits to include prescription-drug coverage. 

Like Social Security – that other boondoggle of an “entitlement” program that really operates like a gigantic Ponzi scheme (see my essay “Socialist Insecurity,” Feb. 15, 2005) – Medicare is headed for a huge fiscal crisis as the Baby Boom generation retires, over the next few decades.  (80 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 could qualify for Medicare and Social Security over the next 22 years.)  Medicare’s hospital insurance fund now pays out more than it takes in; in 2019 it’s projected to run out of funds.  Medicare’s payments for doctors and prescription drugs are projected to rise faster than the nation’s overall economic growth; and beneficiaries’ premiums, deductibles, and co-payments will rise faster than their incomes.  Fixing Medicare solely with higher taxes or cuts in spending will mean a 122% increase in the payroll tax or a 51% reduction in spending, just for hospital care, according to a recent feature article in USA Today (“Social Security Hits First Wave of Boomers,” Oct. 9, 2007).  Unfunded liability under Medicare is six times larger than under Social Security.  Looking even farther into the future, over the next 75 years, scheduled benefits for the elderly will exceed dedicated tax revenues by $33 trillion (measured in current dollars).  “Looking indefinitely into the future, the present value of the additional revenues required by Social Security and Medicare total almost $74 trillion.  To put that number in perspective, obligations to the elderly are more than six times the size of the economy and 18 times the size of the outstanding federal debt.”  (Thomas R. Saving, “$74 Trillion = Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2005.) 

Given the reality of the Medicare and Social Security crisis, the idea of creating yet another massive federal entitlement program – “universal” health care – is sheer folly.   

Creation of a full-blown socialized medical system in the United States through some form of government-mandated “universal” coverage will, necessarily and inevitably, result in laws designed to control prices, which will spiral out of control far more than they have already, with our current partly-socialized medical system.  Further dire consequences will result.  Doctors, who already face the severe problem of the criminalization of medicine through current efforts to “crack down” on Medicare or Medicaid “fraud,” will be exposed to even more draconian laws that make it crimes for them to provide “unnecessary” healthcare services – “unnecessary,” that is, in the eyes of some government bureaucrat.  What the character of Dr. Hendricks said in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, about “the forgotten man of socialized medicine,” will actually come to pass, as the best doctors will join him in going on strike: 

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control. . . . Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation?  Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill?  That was not what I would place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. . . .  I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything – except the desires of the doctors.  Men considered only the `welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it.  That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only `to serve.’ . . . I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect me to depend, on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands?”

 

Under such a system, only a fool or a fraud would ever choose to be a doctor.  So, yet another horrible consequence of socialized medicine, is that it will discourage the most able and intelligent men and women from pursuing careers in medicine – meaning that the quality of service will stagnate and deteriorate.  Yes, we will “guarantee” healthcare coverage for “our children”:  but they may have to wait a long time to see a doctor, even for urgent care, and when they finally do see a doctor, he or she is likely to be incompetent. 

Finally, “universal” coverage through some sort of government-controlled healthcare system will also require – as Bill Clinton’s proposed “universal” program did in 1994, and as other countries’ nationalized healthcare systems do – that individuals are not permitted to buy, or to enter into contracts for, healthcare products or services “outside” the government-controlled system.  Such a system, in short, is truly a monopoly – and anyone who tries to circumvent the monopoly would be subject to criminal prosecution.  This is the part of “universal” coverage that even its most diehard advocates are unwilling to admit:  that it will take away all Americans’ freedom to do what they can now do, that is, to privately contract for healthcare goods or services.  That, incidentally, is the only aspect of a so-called “right to healthcare” that’s truly a “right.”  Rights, properly speaking, pertain only to an individual’s freedom to act.  The one legitimate right that all Americans have – part of their basic liberty and property rights guaranteed by the due-process clauses of our constitutions, both state and federal – is their freedom to enter into contracts for medical goods and services.  That freedom – the one truly legitimate “right,” when it comes to healthcare, that all persons have – will be destroyed, by any system of “universal” coverage. 

How imminent is the threat of socialized medicine? – How “clear and present” is the danger of destroying what’s good about the American healthcare system?  It’s quite ominously imminent:  some sort of “universal” healthcare system, some sort of federal government takeover of the U.S. healthcare industry, is being advocated this year by all the major Democrat candidates for the presidency, as well as some of the Republicans (particularly Mitt Romney, who’s promising to do to the nation as a whole what he did with his universal-coverage mandate, dubbed “RomneyCare,” in Massachusetts).  And politicians from both parties are promising to do something about healthcare in the next Congress.  In the classic words of Yogi Bera, “it’s déjà vu all over again” – a repeat of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s failed attempt to engineer a U.S. government takeover of the American healthcare system, but unlike 1993-94, this time it looks as though there will be enough votes in both houses of Congress for some sort of legislation to pass. 

What can we do to fight against this ominous trend?  Perhaps the most important thing – just as in fighting against eco-fascism – is to challenge the premises (usually unstated and even unacknowledged) of the Nanny State activists.  When politicians and policy wonks talk euphemistically about our “right to health care” and the need for “universal” coverage, we should remind them – and the American people – exactly what those schemes would mean.  We should point out that the “cure” they propose for the ills of America’s health care system is much worse than the “disease,” and that it has dreadfully bad side effects.  Politicians who propose to socialize American medicine should be met with the contempt they so richly deserve for threatening to destroy the world’s best health care system – and the world’s last hope for innovation and progress in medical science – and for threatening to deprive Americans of one of their most important and basic freedoms, their ownership of their own bodies.  On the other hand, we should support those few politicians who recognize the importance of real reform, free-market-oriented reform, of our health-care system (including such hopeful proposals as more use of medical savings accounts, coupled with catastrophic-care insurance, to replace both the existing employer-based private insurance programs and the socialized programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and so on).   What’s really needed to solve the problems with America’s health care system, as with so many other issues today, is capitalism – that is, allowing the free market, that system of “natural liberty” (as Adam Smith so aptly called it) to work its wonders in our supposedly free society.

 

  

Demopublican/Replicrat Fascism: 

The 2008 Elections and the Tyranny of the Two-Party System

  

2008 is a presidential election year.  The election of a new President of the United States (and with it, the change in the administration of the executive branch of the national government), as well as the election of a new Congress, always poses potential new threats to Americans’ freedom.  This year the stakes are especially high – and the threats are especially grave – given the sorry state of America’s two major political parties and the sorry field of candidates running for the presidency. 

In previous essays here I’ve commented on this year’s pathetically sorry field of presidential candidates – how they’re all generally mediocre, and how there are no essential differences between them (except for Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas who’s the lone libertarian in the Republican field).   The people running for the presidential nomination of the two major American parties prove the assertion of my libertarian friends, that there’s no real difference between the two parties today, that the “Demopublicans” and “Replicrats,” as I call them, are virtually interchangeable – at least when it comes to limiting the power of government and protecting the legitimate rights of individuals.  

Ayn Rand was quite correct when she wrote in The Objectivist Newsletter: 

"The issue of freedom vs. statism – or individual rights vs. government controls, or capitalism vs. socialism – is the basic issue of political philosophy.  It is the root, the start, the fundamental which is involved in every specific measure, by which all else is determined, by the side of which all other considerations are trivia.  It is the basic – and, today, the only – issue by which a candidate must be judged: freedom vs. statism."

 

Rand’s observation about politics generally is particularly true in this election year, for never has the fundamental issue of “freedom vs. statism” been as urgent as it is now, in the early years of the 21st century.  Americans today are at a crossroads:  we truly are at “a time for choosing,” to borrow Ronald Reagan’s phrase from his famous 1964 speech endorsing Barry Goldwater’s candidacy – and the stakes today are much greater than they were 44 years ago.  One path promises to take us back to the “principles of 1776,” America’s founding principles as stated in the Declaration of Independence, which put the rights of the individual first and which emphasized the need to limit governmental power, to keep it limited to its sole legitimate function of securing individual rights.  The other path threatens to take us further away from America’s founding principles – to expand and enlarge the “nanny state,” the regulatory/welfare state erected during the 20th century.  It’s this second, dangerous path that virtually all the major-party presidential candidates – and virtually all major politicians in both the Democrat and Republican parties – advocate following. 

Measured by the fundamental issue of the individual versus the collective – of freedom versus statism, of America’s founding principles versus the program of the nanny state – virtually all the presidential candidates are wanting. 

What’s really ludicrous is the notion that any of these candidates (other than Ron Paul) represent “change.”  And it’s quite ludicrous to claim that any of the Democrat candidates – either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John Edwards – is a candidate for change, when all of them advocate the same thing:  enlarging the Nanny State, the regulatory/welfare state, further expanding government control over the lives of all Americans.  The Democrats support expanding the welfare state by socializing medicine (all favor some sort of “universal” government mandate), as well as virtually all the nanny-state fascist agenda; they also all support eco-fascist programs, with more federal control over the energy industry, consumer products, even the way Americans light and heat their own homes, all in the name of the global campaign against the supposed dangers of “global warming.”  Democrats would pay for the expansion of government by taxes that “soak the rich,” imposing an even heavier burden on businesses and upper-income Americans, further exacerbating the injustice of our tax laws by further redistributing wealth from those who’ve earned it to those who haven’t, making even more people dependent on government.  Democrats also support laws strengthening the power of labor unions (such as their support for minimum-wage laws, which deprive young, unskilled workers – some of the most vulnerable members of our society – of their freedom to earn wages) and various other types of paternalistic “social legislation,” including so-called “civil-rights” laws (laws prohibiting private discrimination but mandating government discrimination in favor of particular classes of persons) – all in the name of “social justice,” which (as I’ll discuss in an upcoming blog essay) really means socialist injustice, and making everyone even more dependent on government.  

“Change”?  The policies advocated  by Democrats are nothing new; they’re the same old shit – the same old, tired, failed policies of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state, which in turn was nothing more than an imitation of the fascist welfare state created in 19th-century Germany by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, which in turn was nothing more than a revision of the centuries-old model of paternalistic government that European countries have followed since the Dark Ages.  That’s why it’s truly a misnomer to call left-liberals “progressive”; rather, they’re the opposite – reactionaries, who advocate the traditional model of a paternalistic government.  (For more on this, see my essay, “Reactionary `Progressives’,” March 16, 2006.) 

The only announced presidential candidate who truly does represent “change” – and who truly does advocate “progressive” policies, in the literal sense of the term – is Ron Paul, the sole libertarian among the Republican candidates.  All the other Republican candidates, regardless how “conservative” they claim to be, really differ from the Democrats only by degrees, not in kind:  none of them (other than Paul) takes seriously the idea that the U.S. Constitution strictly limits the powers of the national government to those powers enumerated in the document’s text, because taking that idea seriously would require one to call for the dismantling of the unconstitutional national regulatory/welfare state erected during the 1930s (as FDR’s so-called “New Deal”) and in the decades following World War II.  Neither Rudy Giuliani nor Mitt Romney nor John McCain nor Mike Huckabee nor Fred Thompson would favor dismantling the Nanny State; at best, they’d advocate expanding it less rapidly or less broadly than Democrats do.   

Republicans today are virtually indistinguishable from Democrats, when it comes to the crucial issue of protecting individual rights against nanny-state fascism, because the GOP squandered the wonderful opportunity it had, to take America along a different path, after Ronald Reagan became President in 1981.  Libertarians and limited-government conservatives (“Goldwater Republicans,” like myself) had grounds for optimism in 1981:  Reagan’s rhetoric was inspiring (for example, his 1964 “Time for Choosing” speech in support of Goldwater’s candidacy, mentioned above, or his First Inaugural Address, with its splendid line, “In our present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems – government is the problem”).  Unfortunately, Reagan’s presidency in action did not live up to its rhetoric; rather than cutting government, it only reduced the rate of its growth.  And the Republican administrations that followed – both the one term of George Bush the Elder, with his “kinder, gentler” compromises, and the two terms of George Bush the Younger, with his “compassionate conservatism” compromises – in fact expanded government.  Today, an unholy coalition of “neoconservatives,” social conservatives, and “country-club” moderates – none of them friendly to individualism – dominate the Republican party, marginalizing the Goldwater/Reagan coalition of libertarians and limited-government conservatives. 

Republican candidates are deficient not only on those issues where they’re too similar to Democrats (their failure to challenge the Democrats’ nanny-state fascist premises), but also on those issues where they differentiate themselves from Democrats.  On virtually all these so-called “conservative” issues, Republicans aren’t following Goldwater/Reagan limited-government conservatism but rather the big-government premises of the neocons and the social conservatives.  These issues include the following: 

n      the misnamed “war on terrorism” (really the war against Islamo-fascism, discussed below), where Republican “conservatives” favor abridging Americans’ freedom and civil liberties in the name of national security; 

n      immigration, where Republican “conservatives” favor closing the borders against illegal immigrants, thereby abridging freedom of labor and commerce (the freedom of foreign workers to earn a livelihood in the U.S. and of U.S. employers to hire them) as well as abridging the freedom and civil liberties of all persons in the U.S., by the draconian laws necessary to enforce border closure;   

n      “pro-life” policies, which are really anything but pro-life, for with regard to abortion, Republican “conservatives” would deprive pregnant women of their freedom to control their own bodies, thereby sacrificing a real person’s self-ownership rights to the supposed right to life of the fetus, which is nothing more than a potential human life (at least in the early stages of pregnancy); and with regard to assisted suicide and other right-to-die issues, Republican “conservatives” would expand the power of not only state governments but also the federal government (as they tried to do in the Terri Schiavo case), abridging persons’ freedom to decide how and when to end their own lives; and  

n      “pro-family” policies, such as opposing same-sex marriage by limiting the institution to the traditional (heterosexist) union of a man and a woman, or mandating abstinence-only sexual education in schools, or banning “pornography”(erotic materials) or expanding even further the FCC’s powers to censor so-called “indecent” speech; in all these policies, “conservative” Republicans would deprive individuals of their personal freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, and sexual freedom with consenting adults – and, at the same time, impose homophobic and generally anti-sexual “traditional values” on an American culture that’s slowly, but surely, maturing away from those unhealthy, emotionally-repressed attitudes of the past. 

On these issues, and many others (for example, the disastrous “war on drugs” as well as the continued criminalization of gambling and prostitution), Republican politicians are just as much the enemies of individual freedom as Democrats are. 

Nor is there any realistic hope that an independent candidate or a third party (other than the Libertarian Party) would offer any real alternative to the Demopublicans/Replicrats.  The misnamed Reform Party and the Green Party, with their populist, nanny-state platforms, offer nothing more than an extreme version of the leftist “liberalism” of the Democrats.  And New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who’s frequently touted as a possible independent candidate for the presidency, similarly offers nothing new; he’s merely the consummate Demopublican/ Replicrat politician.    

What, then, to make of Ron Paul and his almost-certainly doomed candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination?  Radical individualists have good reasons to feel mixed emotions about Paul’s candidacy.  On the one hand, Paul is a rather disappointing candidate, for several reasons.  First, in his opposition to U.S. military intervention in Iraq and the Middle East generally, Paul shares with many anarchist libertarians a naïve pacifism that ignores the justifiable need for U.S. military intervention to protect legitimate U.S. national interests overseas.  (As noted below, although there’s plenty of reason to question long-term U.S. military occupation of Iraq, a foreign policy of appeasement will not protect the U.S. against the real dangers of militant Islamo-fascism.  And Paul sounds embarrassingly ignorant, if not downright nutty, in his erroneous explanation of the causes of the September 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on the U.S.) 

Second, Paul is far from being a “pure,” or consistent, libertarian; on many issues – chiefly, in his opposition to abortion, his anti-immigration views, and his criticism of international agreements to foster free trade (like NAFTA) or to protect intellectual-property rights through the WTO – he falls short of principled libertarian positions.  Third, and finally, even on those issues where Paul takes good libertarian positions – such as reducing the costs and size of government, or cutting taxes through real tax reform (such as abolishing the federal income tax) – he’s not the most effective advocate:  he’s not very articulate, and he generally has a sour disposition, lacking both the sense of humor and the cheerful disposition that one would hope for in a pro-freedom politician. 

On the other hand, however, Paul’s candidacy has been encouraging, also for several reasons.  He has been remarkably successful in building a following on the Internet (his YouTube channel is highly subscribed and his followers are able to flood online polls and blog comments sections), as well as in raising money from large numbers of small donors all over the U.S. – and what money!  He raised five million dollars in the third quarter of 2007, even more in the fourth quarter, and has twice set one-day fundraising records of over four million dollars.  Perhaps most importantly, he has built a grassroots following that seems receptive to libertarian ideas – the “Ron Paul Revolution,” an eclectic anti-statist political movement discussed in the cover story of the February 2008 issue of Reason magazine.  As Brian Doherty theorizes in this upbeat article (so upbeat it might be regarded as a puff piece), Paul’s surprising campaign owes much to the appeal of his simple message.  And it’s not just his anti-war message.  Rather, it’s three simple points:  first, “I don’t want to run your life”; second, “I don’t want to run the economy.  People run the economy in a free society”; and third, “I don’t want to run the world.”  Doherty concludes, summing up Paul’s supporters with some rough generalizations:  “They are not an unwashed rabble of weirdos, as Paul’s right-wing critics like to say; most are either college students or adult professionals, though usually not rich.  They general support Paul all the way. . . . The war issue is important to them, but so are the larger matters of civil liberties and fiscal conservatism.  They imagine themselves continuing the fight for these ideas in some capacity after the election” – perhaps by voting for any future candidate for any office who pushes the “Paul line,” or perhaps by being those future candidates themselves.  

Brian Doherty speculates that these “Paulistas” might be “what hopeful libertarians have fantasized about for decades: a disaffected but engageable mass of Americans, many of them hidden among the 45 percent or so who tend not to vote.”  He cites a thesis advanced by David Boaz of the Cato Institute and David Kirby of the America’s Future Foundation, “who estimate, based on detailed polling data, that 9 to 14 percent of Americans hew to a roughly libertarian political ideology – and that this group has been shifting away from the GOP during the current Bush administration.”  Thus, Doherty optimistically suggests, there’s “a deep well of libertarianism waiting to be tapped” in America, “and Ron Paul has hit a gusher in a year when every other Republican stands for big government and war.” 

Although polls – and now, actual returns from early primary elections – consistently put Paul no better than fourth or fifth place among the half-dozen or so remaining Republican presidential contenders, with no better than single-digit support, Paul’s 6% to 9% among Republican primary voters is far better than the typical support Libertarian Party candidates get (invariably 1% or less) in general elections.  Paul is the first libertarian (albeit a “small-l,” rather than “capital-L,” LP candidate) to break that one percent barrier, since the last truly successful LP presidential candidate, Ed Clark, in 1980. 

When Paul finally ends his long-shot attempt to capture the GOP nomination, will he run as the LP candidate?  Would he be interested in running, and would the LP accept him?  Or will he run as an independent candidate, or as the candidate for some other third party, such as the Constitution Party?  The answers to these questions are still unclear, just as it’s unclear whether individualists ought to support him, beyond the Republican primaries.  For now, however, although I cannot be an enthusiastic Ron Paul supporter as some of my libertarian friends are, I do plan to vote for him in the upcoming Ohio Republican primary election – even if it’s just to make a protest against the otherwise pathetic field of Republican presidential candidates. 

Of course, there’s a real danger that Ron Paul’s candidacy in November, either as an independent or a third-party candidate – (which is to say, strictly speaking, the presence on the fall ballot of Ron Paul electors, as it’s the Electoral College that really selects the U.S. president) – will siphon off votes from whoever the Republican candidate might be, thus resulting in the election of the Democrat, whether it’s that power-hungry bitch, Hillary Clinton, that political fraud, Barack Obama, or that sleazy trial lawyer, John Edwards.  (Although third-party or independent candidates historically have failed to win presidential elections, they have often determined close elections between the two major parties’ candidates:  Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” candidacy as a Progressive Republican in 1912 resulted in the election of the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson; similarly, Ross Perot’s candidacy in 1992 resulted in the election of Bill Clinton.)  Unless the Republican Party broadens its tent to welcome libertarians and limited-government conservatives, however, we ought to cease voting for Republican candidates simply because they’re the lesser of two evils – or because the Democrats are “the evil of two lessers” (as I’ve explained my votes for George W. Bush, versus Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004).  A Republican Party that does not stand, on principle, for individual freedom and limited government – a Party that accepts the premises of the Nanny State, differing from the Democrats only in its more timid, reluctant embrace of socialism – is no real alternative at all.   

If we don’t vote for independent or third-party candidates more closely aligned with our libertarian principles, then we ought not to vote at all, as many libertarians (and millions of other disaffected Americans) do.  (“Don’t vote – it only encourages them” is a popular bumper sticker for many politically-inactive libertarians.)  Boycotting elections, however, does no good unless we publicize our reasons for doing so – and thus let the major parties know why they’re missing out on our support.  It’s not because we’re apathetic about politics.  On the contrary, it’s because we care too much about individual freedom in America to allow the Demopublican/Replicrat political monopoly to continue eroding it.   

 

 

Islamo-Fascism: 

Putting the Militant Islamic Threat in Perspective

 

Lastly – and intentionally last, because although a threat to individual freedom, it’s the least dangerous, compared to those previously discussed – is the threat posed by militant Islamic fundamentalism.  Note that I’m not using the euphemistic misnomer terrorism, because terrorism isn’t an enemy – it’s merely a tactic.  It’s the tactic used by our enemies in the very real war the United States and, indeed, the whole civilized world, is now engaged in – a war against militant Islamic fundamentalists who seek to impose their religion on the rest of the world by force. 

Islamo-fascism is a controversial term, as the Wikipedia article about it discusses.  But it is an apt term, for militant Islamists aim, in the short run, to place governments in Muslim countries under the rule of Sharia law and, in the long run, to destroy or convert non-Muslim countries.  By aiming to create a totalitarian religious state – to meld religion and government, using the coercive power of the later to impose the former by force – the Islamists are indeed “fascist,” as I’m broadly using the term in this essay.  Islamofascist organizations include al-Qaeda, the current regime in Iran, the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah.  These groups are indeed the enemies of the United States, as the al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001 clearly (and so dramatically) show. 

In a future essay, I plan to discuss more thoroughly the real dangers of militant Islam and to explain the causes of its war against Western civilization.  Here and now, I’ll make a few basic observations about the nature of the conflict in which we find ourselves and how we ought to objectively – and dispassionately – assess it.  (I say “dispassionately” because, unfortunately, the 9-11 attacks can easily arouse feelings of fear or anger that stand in the way of objective rational thought.) 

Militant Islamic fundamentalists do aim to destroy our civilization, and they were encouraged to attack the United States (in both the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center twin towers, those powerful symbols of Western capitalism) by a failed U.S. foreign policy of appeasement.  I believe President Bush and Congress acted properly by responding to 9-11 by authorizing the use of U.S. military force against militant Islamic conclaves in Afghanistan.  When the United States is attacked by militant Islamic groups, we should use force in retaliation – just as Israel has done, since its creation, in defense against its Muslim neighbors who aim to destroy it. 

The threat posed by our militant Islamic enemies is one that cannot be lessened by either appeasement or negotiation.  We cannot reason with these enemies because they are motivated by irrationality (specifically, their fanatical religious beliefs which teach them to destroy all whom they view as “infidels”).  The only way to remove their threat is to eradicate them:  militant Islam must be destroyed.  They are like cockroaches infesting a neighboring house or apartment:  the only way to prevent them from infesting our house or apartment is to destroy them at their source.  

Realistically, however, how great is the danger of militant Islam to the lives and liberties of Americans and other people in the Western world?  We must keep in mind that the Islamic militants come from a medieval world; and as the 9-11 attacks also so vividly illustrate, they are successful in their destructive terrorist acts only when they use our own modern technology against us.  Thousands of innocent people may fall victim to Islamic terrorist attacks in Western countries, but in an all-out war between the Islamic world and the Western world, the West will win, and win handily, not only because we are technologically superior but also (and most importantly) because we’re philosophically superior – we have something truly valuable that we’re fighting for (the most noble values of Western civilization, which are valuable because they’re ultimately based on the supreme value of our own lives and happiness), while the militant Islamists have only their perverse religious beliefs, a religion ultimately based on the glorification of death and destruction.  In wars throughout human history, it’s been the side that has something truly worth fighting for – the side that’s fighting for life – that tends to win.   

How, then, should we wage this war?  Questions about tactics are truly complex, and well-meaning, rational persons certainly have plenty of room to debate and disagree.  In my view, experience has shown that both the Bush administration and Congress overreacted to the 9-11 attacks.  Retaliatory attacks on al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan were justified, as perhaps was the use of our military to topple the dangerous regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq (which was dangerous because it was lawless and thus so apt to ally itself with militant Islamic groups).  But our continued military occupation of Iraq – our continued long-shot efforts to mold this artificial creature of early 20th-century British imperialism into a single, stable democratic nation – have taxed our military resources, making it more difficult for us to use military force against more dangerous enemies, such as the regime currently ruling Iran, or other Middle Eastern Islamo-fascist groups mentioned above.  Ron Paul and other anti-war activists seem to be right at least about this:  that it’s a misuse of U.S. military force to act as peacekeeping policemen; properly, and constitutionally, the U.S. military should be used only in our “common defense” – that is, in defense of the United States, its people and their property, including retaliatory attacks or retribution against groups or nations that attack us (or that harbor our attackers).  Quick, decisive military strikes in places like Afghanistan or Iraq (or Iran or Pakistan, etc.) are OK; long-term military occupation is not. 

Yet other ways in which both the Bush administration and Congress have overreacted, or have pursued fundamentally misguided policies, in response to the 9-11 attacks have been the domestic side of the so-called “War on Terror”:  the creation of additional government bureaucracies, the TSA and Department of Homeland Security; the erosion of Americans’ civil liberties through the provisions of the PATRIOT Act; and the effort to “secure” our borders.   All these efforts are fundamentally misguided because they miss the real reason why the 9-11 attacks worked:  the sad facts that Americans (other than those true heroes on United flight 93 over Pennsylvania) were helpless to defend themselves against a handful of young Islamic militants armed with nothing more than box cutters.  Rather than following policies designed to empower Americans to defend themselves against terrorists (for example, by allowing passengers to be armed on airplanes), we’ve made them even more helpless, even more dependent on government.  In a free society, government cannot prevent terrorist attacks from occurring:  it can only help ensure that citizens are vigilant in anticipating and responding to attacks, and then punish the attackers.  Misguided efforts to prevent further terrorist attacks in the U.S. have succeeded only in so ruining air travel that many people (like myself) choose no longer to travel by air, because of all the stupid government security measures that have made airports such unpleasant places.  And they have lessened the freedom of all Americans by allowing government agents to conduct searches without warrants and to eavesdrop on telephone calls or Internet messages.  And they have consumed billions and billions of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars on these stupid and tyrannical measures. 

Some people have defended the domestic “anti-terrorist” policies, asserting that they have helped prevent any additional militant Islamic attacks on the United States since 2001.  But the real explanation for why we’ve been so fortunate (thus far) may be that we’ve brought the war against militant Islam to the Islamo-fascists’ own homelands, in the Middle East.  (To use again the cockroach metaphor:  if a cockroaches are threatening our house or apartment because they already have infested a neighbor’s house or apartment, we may be wasting energy and resources trying to “roach-proof” our homes.  The most effective way to deal with the infestation is to destroy the roaches at their source.)  If history proves that correct, then ultimately Bush’s policy in Iraq might be vindicated 

Notwithstanding all such speculation, however, it seems clear – to me, at least – that the average Demopublican/Replicrat politician, with his or her plans to use the coercive power of government to phase out use of fossil fuels or to nationalize the American healthcare industry, poses a far greater and more imminent threat to our freedoms than some crazy young Muslim terrorist in the Middle East.  And that, in the name of protecting us against “terrorists,” our own government has been a far greater threat to our freedom than the terrorists have ever, or could ever, be.

  

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Friday,  January 11, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer