What Patriotic Sunday Looks Like

Dear friends and readers of Letter of Liberty:

Do you want to know what "Patriotic Sunday" looks like? Let me just say it is an overly congratulatory idolatry of the military and soldiers. It is allegedly defending our soldiers for "defending our freedoms" when really they are not.

Laurence Vance, a great Christian libertarian columnist and one of my favorite writers, says that this "is why I write, and write, and write. This is why I will never stop writing about Christianity and war and Christianity and the military. This is why I recently published War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism. This is why I sometimes sound like a broken record."

Just watch this idiotic congratulation of soldiers who fought in unjust wars such as the Iraq War, which can easily be refuted by some simple arguments. Apparently the folks who posted this video didn't want to hear any hard arguments against the anti-war view, as is shown by the disabling of comments.

To cure this militaristic sickness in the church, i would recommend that many Christians read LewRockwell.com, Mises.org, Antiwar.com, FFF.org, and many others that I have listed in my links and resources page.

And for the case for libertarianism and noninterventionism from a Christian perspective, I would recommend the writings of Laurence M. Vance, particularly his books. And see his archive at LRC and the Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF), where he serves as a policy adviser.

Eric Peters on Dealing with Cops

Eric Peters gives us some helpful advice on how to deal with cops in our modern times.

"In a word – don’t.

"Not if you can help it.

"Officer Friendly is a fiction – a vicious fable sold to schoolkids – who soon learn in one way or another that any interaction with a cop is a likely to be a bad interaction. You are dealing with perhaps the worst possible tag-team combination: Someone with legal power over you who is held to a different – and far more lenient – standard than you are. And therefore, you are dealing with a person who is much more likely to do things – not nice things – than you or I or any other person sans special costume and badge might be inclined to do. After all – why not? Especially if one is a bully – or an outright sadist – and the cop profession attracts exactly that type precisely because of the nature of the work. In its own way, giving a bully a badge is like giving a fat kid free reign at the candy store. Expecting him not to eat is almost silly."

John Whitehead on ELYSIUM and the Police State

John Whitehead, chairman and founder of The Rutherford Institute, has written a highly insightful article comparing the events in the recent blockbuster movie Elysium and the technocracy that is the American police state.

Says Whitehead:

From George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report and most recently Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, writers and filmmakers have used science fiction to both forecast the future while also holding up a mirror to the present. The best among these transcend what is largely escapist entertainment and engage their audiences in a critical dialogue about what happens when power, technology and militaristic governance converge.

With its dystopian vision of a post-apocalyptic Earth in which the majority of humanity is relegated to an overpopulated, diseased, warring planet while the elite live a life of luxury and perfect health on an orbiting space station, Elysium fits in perfectly alongside the futuristic books and films featured in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, which warn of a totalitarian future at our doorsteps.

However, while much has been said about Blomkamp’s use of Elysium to raise concerns about immigration, access to healthcare, worker’s rights, and socioeconomic stratification, what I found most striking and unnerving was its depiction of how the government will employ technologies such as drones, tasers and biometric scanners to track, target and control the populace, especially dissidents. Mind you, while these technologies are already in use today and being hailed for their potentially life-saving, cost-saving, time-saving benefits, it won’t be long before the drawbacks to having a government equipped with technology that makes it all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful far outdistance the benefits.

DHS Official Calls For White Genocide

Now, don't get me wrong folks. This post isn't going to be a defense of white supremacy, racism, or any of that nonsense. It is going to be my honest view of this DHS official by the name of Ayo Kimathi, who has recently said, "Warfare is eminent, and in order for black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites.” This is after the infamous death of Trayvon Martin, an act of self-defense on the part of George Zimmerman that is taken by many (even some libertarians) to be unjustified (from my perspective, George Zimmerman's killing of Trayvon Martin was justified; for more reasons, see here)

Anthony Gucciardi at StoryLeak reports that even the totalitarian Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) (which mixes the wheat and the chaff in their categorization of "haters") condemned Kimathi for his anti-white racism. "And this is the man who, on record according to the reports, as the man who works primarily on the purchase of guns and ammunition for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ammunition and weapons that he believes will be used for the coming race war."

So what? Who will be their first victim? Was this the government's intention, to kill white people? Or maybe this is all just opportunism and not really so much racism as it is an attempt to grow the power of the state?

What has happened to the leftists? Once they rightly condemned Bush for the Iraq War (for reasons to oppose it, see this piece by Norman Horn) and the Patriot Act. Now they are shilling for the state's crimes and murders, all in the name of social justice.

I couldn't find much from Sojourners (a leftist Christian source for news) condemning this nonsense.

Anyways, my final conclusion is that in Ezekiel 18, God reveals that the teaching of fathers eating sour grapes and children's teeth "being set on the edge" (as the NKJV puts it) is wrong and unfounded. The soul that sins will die, either through the victim practicing his natural, God-given right to self-defense, through natural causes, through some abrupt disease or some other cause.

We do not need a race war to correct injustice; rather, we must turn our eyes off the state and look to God, for as Scripture says: "My help comes from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth." God will come and deal with this in His own good time; it is not for me, or for any one, to start a race war over the death of Trayvon Martin, Chris Lane, or any one, for that matter.

Mark DeWeaver on the Chinese Situation

The Mises Institute has recently just interviewed Mark DeWeaver on the Chinese situation with regards to the economy, booms and busts, malinvestment and his new book Animal Spirits with Chinese Characteristics.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Mises Institute: There is a great deal of confusion concerning the Chinese economy and its trade and monetary policy and mystery concerning its ability to generate double-digit rates of economic growth. Let us start by giving us a description of the Chinese economy and whether it is socialism or capitalism at work.

DeWeaver: China has well-developed product markets but can hardly be called capitalist, given that most of the means of production are at least partially state owned.At the same time, the Chinese economy has also never really been centrally planned. Most economic decision making takes place at the local-government level, much as was the case during the Maoist period. The system might be best described by the seeming double oxymoron, capitalism with limited private ownership, socialism with limited planning.

Mises Institute: What is the connection of its monetary and foreign exchange rate policy to its trade policy? Is this just a modern form of mercantilism or is there something unique about the China situation that we should be aware of?

DeWeaver: Yes, Chinese monetary and trade policies are clearly a modern form of mercantilism. The central bank’s interventions in the foreign exchange market result in an undervalued exchange rate, which in turn helps to generate China’s balance-of-payments surplus with the rest of the world. In China, this policy appears to be primarily motivated by the desire to strengthen state control over the economy by reducing the country’s exposure to the vagaries of international capital flows.