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sisyphusshruggeda few steps in along the road for Paul "Slaves Were Happy! And Well Cared-For! Really Happy! Much Happier Than People Like Me, Who Have to Fill Out Schedule C!" Craig Roberts
taxes: worse than slavery
no, really, taxes: worse than slavery, which wasn't all that bad and the slaves didn't mind, really. I myself am in far more danger from people disagreeing with me on the internet.
Equating the redistribution of subsistence funds from old people to investment managers to harm is a form of murder
african americans wield awesome unchecked power over our lives, which they use with impunity to smite those who offend them and in fact are equivalent to slave owners, really
um, wait: maybe giving unchecked power to the government and taking away our constitutional rights and our control over our own lives is a little more like giving unchecked power to the government and taking away our constitutional rights and our control over our own lives and besides, we're talking about my rights here.
Holy fuck. They're taking away our constitutional rights and our control over our own lives. Our kids are gonna be drafted. The dollar is going down. The loss of what I care about is the price our leaders are willing to pay to a small group of whackos who pretend to have conservative values and the government is caving to them in order to get elected and the media is not reporting it. How come I can't get you people to take this seriously?
"Those who believe in individual rights should not base their policies on 'disparate impact' arguments."
Paul Craig Roberts
taxes: worse than slavery
Our Founding Fathers understood this. Indeed, historically the very definition of freedom has been self-ownership. Serfs and slaves are not free, because they do not own their labor.
Any American who thinks he owns his labor can test the proposition by refusing to pay his income tax. He will quickly discover that he is not a free person.
The Heritage index is ahistorical. It is blind to the enormous loss of freedom in the 20th century, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. It takes as its starting point the re-enserfment of populations and predicates a "freedom" index on unfree labor.
This extraordinary failing reduces a valuable study to a propaganda device.
Compare an American taxpayer's situation today with that of a 19th century American slave. Not all slaves worked on cotton plantations. Some with marketable skills were leased to businesses or released to labor markets, where they worked for money wages. Just like the wages of today's taxpayer, a portion of the slave's money wages was withheld. In those days the private owner, not the government, received the withheld portion of the slave's wages.
Slaves in that situation were as free as today's American taxpayer to choose their housing from the available stock, purchase their food and clothing, and entertain themselves.
In fact, they were freer than today's American taxpayer. By hard work and thrift, they could save enough to purchase their freedom.
No American today can purchase his freedom from the IRS.
Slaves could also run away. Today, Americans who run away are pursued to the far ends of the earth. Indeed, the IRS can assert its ownership rights for years after an American gives up his citizenship and becomes a citizen of a different country. The IRS need only claim that the former American gave up his citizenship for tax reasons.
no, really, taxes: worse than slavery, which wasn't all that bad and the slaves didn't mind, really. I myself am in far more danger from people disagreeing with me on the internet.
My last column critiqued the Heritage Foundation’s freedom index. I pointed out, correctly, that the index abstracts from the historical definition of freedom: self-ownership. A person who does not own the product of his own labor is a serf or a slave. The Heritage index ranks many countries as free despite income tax systems that claim the same share of peoples’ incomes as feudal lords or 19th century slave owners.
I also pointed out, correctly, that historically, the drive toward freedom was a drive toward equality in law, and that the civil rights revolution had failed in this respect and, instead, revived status-based privileges.
I also noted, correctly, that the Blackstonian principles that made law accountable and a shield of the innocent had been eroded.
In conclusion I noted that if we had a true measure of our freedom, neoconservatives could claim far less virtue for the US and would have a weaker case for imposing our virtue on others.
Libertarians loved this column. Some even wrote that they forgave me for co-authoring that article about free trade with Senator Schumer.
Statists, however, went berserk. Brad DeLong, apparently an economics professor at UC Berkeley, whose load is so light that he has time to run a web site for people who worship government, gave me a new, very long, name: "Paul Slaves Were Happy! And Well Cared-For! Really Happy! Much Happier Than People Like Me, Who Have to Fill Out Schedule C Craig Roberts."
Of course, I said nothing in my column about the happiness or emotional state of slaves. I merely noted that they owned about as much of their own labor (necessary for subsistence and reproduction) as the modern successful American. The modern American, of course, is much more productive due to technology and accumulated capital, so his living standard is higher, but not his self-ownership.
This difference was too much for Professor DeLong to comprehend. The professor, however, was the model of intelligence compared to fans of his web site. Commentators damned me for failing to acknowledge that our government’s claims on the products of our labor are morally justified, because our government uses our incomes to do good for others, whereas the slave’s owner selfishly used what he extracted from the slave.
That I was against race and gender privileges was proof that I am a racist and a sexist. Moreover, it proved Ronald Reagan was, too, because he appointed me to the Treasury.
Many concluded that I was in favor of slaves being raped and lynched and having their families broken up. Some were so worked up against me that I might have been physically assaulted had I been present.
All in all an amazing response to a valid critique of an index of economic freedom. My conclusion from this experience is that the Rochester theory needs to be modified. The statists on DeLong’s web site were having every bit as much enjoyment, if not more, than the libertarians who appreciated the power of my argument. People do seek out contrary opinion, not to test their own, but to beat it up in demonstration of their moral superiority.
Before going to the next example, note the extreme degree of misinformation about basic economics on the web site of a Berkeley professor of economics. The professor and the commentators assume that people purchased slaves in order to mistreat them. A slave’s life consisted of whippings, having his daughters sold into prostitution, having his wife raped, being spat upon, kicked, starved, and murdered.
Only a deranged person would treat his investment in these ways. To starve or murder a slave is to destroy one’s investment. To mistreat a slave is to incur his ill will and to receive sullen, less productive performance. A regime of mistreatment creates powerful incentives to run away, thus losing one’s investment.
Some people are self-destructive and do behave irrationally. So does the government when it locks away billionaires like Michael Milken on trumped-up charges and forbids him from practicing his lucrative profession, thus denying the government a life-long stream of revenues at the maximum tax rate.
But, of course, if the government locks us all up, there will be no revenues. Indeed, people would revolt and kill the government. If slaves had been generally mistreated, Lincoln would have succeeded in stirring up a slave revolt when the South’s men were away at war and only women and children were left on the plantations to control the slaves.
Equating the redistribution of subsistence funds from old people to investment managers to harm is a form of murder
[Leftists] need to come to terms with their dysfunctional approach to human rights and the rule of law. If 'human rights' is to have real meaning, it must be more than a weapon wielded by left-wingers against politicians they dislike. The left can get away with political murders because of the presumed morality of their goals. The ends justify the means as long as the policy -- land redistribution, for example -- meets with the intelligentsia's approval. If the policy does not meet with the left-wing's approval -- such as ... privatization of Social Security and socialized industries -- the human-rights weapon is unsheathed. The two-faced nature of 'human rights' deprives the cause of credibility."
african americans wield awesome unchecked power over our lives, which they use with impunity to smite those who offend them and in fact are equivalent to slave owners, really
For three decades, the United States has been descending into a feudal legal order.
In the ancient feudal system, the differential rights in the legal system were class-based. In the new feudal order, rights are determined by race, gender and handicapped status. In the old feudalism, the people with the most rights were descendants of warriors. In the new system, it is the victim who has superior rights.
This difference aside, there are many similarities between the two feudal legal systems, despite the many centuries that separate them.
In the old feudal system, there were no First Amendment rights. The legally privileged were free to engage in hate speech and to verbally harass others, but any commoner who replied in kind could be sued or have his tongue cut out.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott still has his tongue, but just barely. He used his tongue in a way that gave offense to the new aristocrats. Black Americans have been granted the right to be offended by any words they don't like and to extract retribution. The offending speaker finds himself forced into contrition and humiliating apologies. Often the penalty is a destroyed career.
At a birthday party for Strom Thurmond, a 100-year old retiring U.S. senator, Lott said that if the country had voted for Thurmond's States' Rights Party in 1948, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over these years."
It was Lott's way of doffing his hat to the longest serving senator.
Before the new feudal age, Lott's words would have been understood as tribute to a centenarian. But we are so thoroughly conditioned to the new feudalism that race-baiters Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton scarcely needed to open their mouths before "powerful" white males, including the president of the United States and the editorial page editors of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, were doing their job for them, denouncing Lott for being a segregationist and giving offense to blacks.
um, wait: maybe giving unchecked power to the government and taking away our constitutional rights and our control over our own lives is a little more like giving unchecked power to the government and taking away our constitutional rights and our control over our own lives and besides, we're talking about my rights here.
What the neoconservatives pushing Homeland Security and war don’t understand is that our insecurity has as much to do with their policies of multiculturalism, open borders, and total commitment to Israel as it does with Muslim terrorists.
Americans are under a greater threat from their own elites, who are determined to destroy our identity with multicultural diversity and mass immigration.
Paradoxically, Americans are seeking security by placing themselves under new and dangerous government powers while permitting the Bush administration to foment war in the Middle East.
Removing Saddam Hussein achieves no security interest for the United States. Jews mistakenly believe that American aggression against Iraq will increase Israel’s security. Instead, it will stir a hornets’ nest.
Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq is a secular state. Removing him opens the way for those who want to merge Islam and government. Secular Muslim states are weak, because Muslims are loyal to religion, not to states. Overthrowing states does not overthrow Islam. To the contrary, the mullahs are strengthened by the fall of secular rulers.
Neoconservatives mistakenly believe that the U.S. postwar re-socialization of Japan and Germany, purging the former of militarism and the latter of nationalism, is a model for reconstructing the Middle East. But it took a world war to make Japan and Germany accept defeat and cooperate with the U.S.
What if in 1945 the Japanese Emperor had said: “The Americans have defeated us with weapons of mass destruction. Now they come to destroy our culture. Reply to them with terror.”
Today Muslims respond to U.S. military supremacy with terror. Our viceroys in charge of conquered secular states will be assassinated. The large Muslim populations in Europe and the U.S. provide bases for terrorists, whose grievances will mount as Americans extend hegemony in the Middle East.
The Bush administration had best cool its jets and come up with a less emotional response to 911.
Holy fuck. They're taking away our constitutional rights and our control over our own lives. Our kids are gonna be drafted. The dollar is going down. The loss of what I care about is the price our leaders are willing to pay to a small group of whackos who pretend to have conservative values and the government is caving to them in order to get elected and the media is not reporting it. How come I can't get you people to take this seriously?
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh and National Review think there is a liberal media because the prison torture scandal could not be suppressed and a cameraman filmed the execution of a wounded Iraqi prisoner by a US Marine.
Do the Village Voice and The Nation comprise the "liberal media"? The Village Voice is known for Nat Henthof and his columns on civil liberties. Every good conservative believes that civil liberties are liberal because they interfere with the police and let criminals go free. The Nation favors spending on the poor and disfavors gun rights, but I don't see the "liberal hate" in The Nation's feeble pages that Rush Limbaugh was denouncing on C-Span.
In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.
The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. "You are with us or against us."
This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits of no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate.
...
Today it is liberals, not conservatives, who endeavor to defend civil liberties from the state. Conservatives have been won around to the old liberal view that as long as government power is in their hands, there is no reason to fear it or to limit it. Thus, the Patriot Act, which permits government to suspend a person's civil liberty by calling him a terrorist with or without proof.
Thus, preemptive war, which permits the President to invade other countries based on unverified assertions.
There is nothing conservative about these positions. To label them conservative is to make the same error as labeling the 1930s German Brownshirts conservative.
American liberals called the Brownshirts "conservative," because the Brownshirts were obviously not liberal. They were ignorant, violent, delusional, and they worshipped a man of no known distinction. Brownshirts' delusions were protected by an emotional force field. Adulation of power and force prevented Brownshirts from recognizing implications for their country of their reckless doctrines.
Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy. I went overnight from being an object of conservative adulation to one of derision when I wrote that the US invasion of Iraq was a "strategic blunder."
...
There are no more troops. Our former allies are not going to send troops. The only way the Bush administration can continue with its Iraq policy is to reinstate the draft.
When the draft is reinstated, conservatives will loudly proclaim their pride that their sons, fathers, husbands and brothers are going to die for "our freedom." Not a single one of them will be able to explain why destroying Iraqi cities and occupying the ruins are necessary for "our freedom." But this inability will not lessen the enthusiasm for the project. To protect their delusions from "reality-based" critics, they will demand that the critics be arrested for treason and silenced. Many encouraged by talk radio already speak this way.
Because of the triumph of delusional "new conservatives" and the demise of the liberal media, this war is different from the Vietnam war. As more Americans are killed and maimed in the pointless carnage, more Americans have a powerful emotional stake that the war not be lost and not be in vain. Trapped in violence and unable to admit mistake, a reckless administration will escalate.
The rapidly collapsing US dollar is hard evidence that the world sees the US as bankrupt. Flight from the dollar as the reserve currency will adversely impact American living standards, which are already falling as a result of job outsourcing and offshore production. The US cannot afford a costly and interminable war.
Falling living standards and inability to impose our will on the Middle East will result in great frustrations that will diminish our country.
Paul Craig Roberts
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-29 01:08 pm (UTC)also, my head imploded about the point where he opined that slaves weren't mistreated, and you can tell because they didn't revolt during the war when all good white folk were off fighting the invading hordes of lawless federals.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-29 01:10 pm (UTC)If slaves had been generally mistreated, Lincoln would have succeeded in stirring up a slave revolt when the South’s men were away at war and only women and children were left on the plantations to control the slaves.
Yes, just like how Spartacus' rebellion brought an end to Rome's hegemony over Europe and the system of Greco-Roman slavery.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-29 05:31 pm (UTC)God help us all.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-29 06:05 pm (UTC)these are the people who worship Orestes Brownson
Date: 2004-12-01 04:10 am (UTC)Let 'em eat crow.
Re: these are the people who worship Orestes Brownson
Date: 2004-12-01 04:14 am (UTC)Be interesting to see if the Republicans can throw fiscal "conservatives" enough red meat to keep them happy while they're gutting the economy.