A Grand Bargain for Liberty?

A Grand Bargain for Liberty?

by 

Ron Paul (September 30, 2013)

As I write this, it appears that the federal government is about to shut down because the House and Senate cannot agree on whether to add language defunding or delaying Obamacare to the “Continuing Resolution”. Despite all the hand-wringing heard in DC, a short-term government shut down (which doesn’t actually shut down the government) will not cause the country to collapse.

And the American people would benefit if Obamacare was defeated or even delayed.

Obamacare saddles the American health care system with new spending and mandates which will raise the price and lower the quality of health care. Denying funds to this program may give Congress time to replace this bill with free-market reforms that put patients and can spare the American people from falling under the worst effects of this law.

As heartened as we should be by the fight against Obamacare, we should be equally disheartened by the fact that so few in DC are talking about making real cuts in federal spending. Even fewer are talking about reductions in the most logical place to reduce spending: the military-industrial complex.  The US military budget constitutes almost 50 percent of the total worldwide military spending.  Yet to listen to some in Congress, one would think that America was one canceled multi-million dollar helicopter contract away from being left totally defenseless.

What makes this military spending impossible to justify is that is does not benefit the American people. Instead, by fomenting resentment and hatred among the world population, our costly interventionist foreign policy makes our people less safe. Thus, reducing spending on militarism would not only help balance the budget, but would enhance our security.

Yet both the House and the Senate continuing resolutions not only fail to reduce military spending, they actually authorize $20 billion more in military spending than authorized by the “sequestration” created by the 2011 Budget Control Act.  Most of the supposedly “draconian” sequestration cuts are not even cuts; instead, they are “reductions in the planed rate of spending.” This is where Congress increases spending but by less than originally planned—and yet they claim to cut spending.

Under sequestration, military spending increases by 18 percent instead of by 20 percent over the next ten years. Yet some so-called conservatives are so opposed to these phony cuts in military spending that they would support increased taxes and increased welfare “military” spending. This “grand bargain” would benefit the DC political class and the special interests, but it would be a disaster for the American people.

Instead of grand bargains of increased spending and taxes, those of us who support limited government and free markets should form a coalition with antiwar liberals to reduce spending on both the military industrial complex and domestic welfare programs. Instead of raising taxes on “the rich” we should also work to reduce all corporate subsidies. This “grand bargain” would truly be a win-win for the American people.

Sadly, even if a congressional coalition to cut both warfare and welfare spending was formed, it would be unlikely to carry the day as long as the Federal Reserve is willing to enable Congress’s debt addiction by monetizing the debt. But this cannot last forever. At some point the Fed’s policies will result in hyper-inflation and an economic crisis that will force Congress to reduce spending. Hopefully, the growing number of Americans who are awaking to the dangers of our current path can convince Congress to reduce overseas militarism and begin an orderly drawdown of the welfare state before this crisis occurs.

Randolph Bourne Tells Us Why Declared War ≠ Moral War

Randolph Bourne, the great radical thinker and libertarian, reminds us why declaring war officially doesn't automatically make a war right. The Repository, the section in which The American Conservative republishes classics of what it sees as representative of conservative thought, republishes an excerpt from Bourne's "The State."

Says Bourne:

However representative of the people Parliaments and Congresses may be in all that concerns the internal administration of a country’s political affairs, in international relations it has never been possible to maintain that the popular body acted except as a wholly mechanical ratifier of the Executive’s will.

The formality by which Parliaments and Congresses declare war is the merest technicality. Before such a declaration can take place, the country will have been brought to the very brink of war by the foreign policy of the Executive. A long series of steps on the downward path, each one more fatally committing the unsuspecting country to a warlike course of action, will have been taken without either the people or its representatives being consulted or expressing its feeling. When the declaration of war is finally demanded by the Executive, the Parliament or Congress could not refuse it without reversing the course of history, without repudiating what has been representing itself in the eyes of the other states as the symbol and interpreter of the nation’s will and animus.

To repudiate an Executive at that time would be to publish to the entire world the evidence that the country had been grossly deceived by its own Government, that the country with an almost criminal carelessness had allowed its Government to commit it to gigantic national enterprises in which it had no heart. In such a crisis, even a Parliament which in the most democratic States represents the common man, and not the significant classes who most strongly cherish the State ideal, will cheerfully sustain the foreign policy which it understands even less than it would care for if it understood, and will vote almost unanimously for an incalculable war, in which the nation may be brought well nigh to ruin.

Are Libertarians Individualists?

That's the question Steve Horwitz posed in his recent article for Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF).

Says Horwitz:

A young libertarian recently told me that, as an individualist, he thinks it strange that people identify with a religious or ethnic group as “part of their roots or culture.” For this young man, individualism apparently means rejecting all sorts of possible (voluntary) connections to others that might suggest that group identity is equal to, or even more important than, individual identity.  This sort of individualism, which is found too frequently among libertarians, misunderstands the ways in which libertarianism is and is not “individualistic.”

There are three ways that the words “individualist” or “individualism” might be used to describe libertarians.  Two of them have some accuracy, but the third, which is the one raised above, does not.

One sense in which libertarians are individualists is this: When we analyze social phenomena, we assume that only individuals choose.  Therefore, understanding even highly social institutions like the market begins, although it does not end, with individual human action.  The theory of spontaneous order explains that many social institutions are the “products of human action but not human design.”  That is, they start with individual actions, but those actions produce outcomes that no individual or group of individuals intended.  Libertarians recognize that those actions create something greater than the sum of their parts.

A second sense in which libertarians are individualists is that we believe the individual is the meaningful political unit, because only individuals have rights and all individuals should be equal before the law.  Notice that this does not mean that all individuals have equal talents or abilities; it is rather a statement about the moral standing of individuals.  Individuals are the relevant moral unit, and they are equal in terms of their moral standing.

Read the rest here.

Letter of Liberty News Edition (9-27-2013)

Here is the Friday News Edition.

Art Carden on why the naughties weren't always bad

Steve Horwitz asks the question: Are libertarians individualists?

Sheldon Richman looks to guidance from the late Lysander Spooner on the national debt crisis.

Gary North on Jim Wallis and Pope Francis

Gary North on Abraham Lincoln and central banking

Jacob Hornberger gives us reasons on why we should dismantle international checkpoints.

Edmond S. Bradley on the unintended (yet expected) consequences of Obamacare

Scott Lazarowitz on SovietCare

Paul Craig Roberts on Washington's tyranny

Justin Raimondo: It's time to defund the Syrian rebels.

Tom Engelhardt on the Stalinist roots of American exceptionalism

Scott Lazarowitz tells the truth about Keynesianism.

Is Rand Paul America's #1 liberal? Jack Rall wants to know.

David Howden makes the case for free immigrants, free capital,  and free markets.

A Brazilian advises the NSA to "have a nice day."

It seems that the US intelligence chiefs are not happy about the anti-NSA sentiment.

Is al-Shabab really a threat to America?

Wes Messamore on the inherent liberalism of gun tech

Scott Lazarowitz on the First Amendment and the American government

Dom Armentano cautions against the maximum stupidity of minimum wage laws.

Ed Stetzer on some great trends in growing churches

Eric Peters on the madness of GM

Doug French on why Wall Street is not the heart of American capitalism

Peter Boettke on the mystery of the mundane

Jeff Tucker on the abolition of the playground

Jeff Tucker on the fun and fascinating Bitcoin

Congratulations to C. Jay Engel

This post is intended to congratulate C. Jay Engel for the new daughter that has been born into his family: Elizabeth Grace Engel.

Here is his excellent piece today: "God's Life and Creation: Reflections on a Daughter Born"

Paul Rosenberg on the Real Reason Why We're Not Living Amongst the Stars

Paul Rosenberg comments today on the real reason why humanity isn't making progress as to space travel.

Says Rosenberg:

It is tragic beyond measure that human exploration has been neutered since 1972. Sure, we’ve sent out a few probes and placed a good telescope in orbit, but we have done nothing brave, nothing bold, nothing daring. Productive humans have been delegated to mute observance as their hard-earned surplus is syphoned off to capital cities, where it is sanctimoniously poured down a sewer of cultured dependencies and endless wars.

We remain locked onto this planet, not because we lack the ability to leave, but because so few of us are able to do anything about it.

What we have lost can be measured only in the billions of unactivated lives. Fifty years ago humanity was shocked to realize that they could go to the stars. After untold millennia of looking to the heavens, of wondering, dreaming and mourning the impossibility, we saw that we could go to the stars. And for ten years we took our first brave steps, successfully!

But after our first major step away from our crib, we were thrown back and surrounded with double-height rails. Since then, we have stagnated, and human culture has undergone a widespread rot. We watch science fictions about going to space, living in space and even fighting in space, but we have given up all hope of going ourselves… even though we did it just one generation ago.

Humanity – having recently discovered the ability to expand without limit – wanders aimlessly, with no challenging goal, no elevated purpose, and no path of escape. Space travel has leapfrogged us: it was done by our fathers; we imagine that it will be done by our sons; but we dare not think that it is possible to us.

Read the rest here.

The Empire In Denial

Anthony Gregory writes on Obama's recent denial that America is an empire.

Says Gregory:

President Obama tries to have it both ways when talking of American foreign policy. He sold himself to the public in 2008 as a more prudential steward of U.S. power. He would avoid “dumb wars,” as he had called the Iraq fiasco in a speech years before. He would save money by bringing the troops home from that place, and direct the resources toward the domestic fiscal mess. He would abolish torture and end the Bush-era programs of indefinite detention and Patriot Act–style surveillance.

We all know that he’s disappointed many of his supporters in the realm of national security. The letters, “N S A,” tell us all we need to know. The truth, however, is that Obama has always embraced a very active role for U.S. militarism abroad, which puts serious limits on his ability to serve as a peace president, even if he wanted to. Indeed, in his speech to the UN, he denies the existence of American empire and cautions against too much restraint:

The notion of American empire may be useful propaganda, but it isn’t borne out by America’s current policy or public opinion. Indeed, as the recent debate within the United States over Syria clearly showed, the danger for the world is not an America that is eager to immerse itself in the affairs of other countries, or take on every problem in the region as its own. The danger for the world is that the United States, after a decade of war; rightly concerned about issues back home; and aware of the hostility that our engagement in the region has engendered throughout the Muslim World, may disengage, creating a vacuum of leadership that no other nation is ready to fill.

It is true that the American public has managed to restrain the U.S. government from waging another war, this time against Assad’s Syria. This is a new development, however. I can’t recall or think of any modern U.S. war, pushed by the president, and thwarted by public opinion. This has been a beautiful thing to see.