Government creates suffering

As usual, Lew Rockwell has an almost uncanny ability -- all right, intellect backed by sound philosophy backed by wide experience -- to put his finger on problems and detect contradiction. In this piece he notes two NYT pieces today -- one noting that Obama wants to mandate that employers provide health care and another noting that California's unemployment may rise to 15 or 20 percent unless an unlikely burst of common sense breaks out in Sacramento. Related? Sure. Placing mandates on employers makes it more expensive to hire people, so unemployment will rise. California has beaucoup mandates and the legislature is always busy dreaming up more, even during a financial meltdown.

Thank you, Lew

Lew Rockwell at the Mises Institute put my piece on the financial crisis and the bailout from the Sunday Register on his LewRockwell.com Website today. I don't know how many hits it got -- they converted it to Rockwell style rather than linking to the Register site -- but Lew's site, of course, gets a lot more hits than either this blog or the Register, and I got a lot of nice e-mails from readers. Matt told me today that my article got an unusual number of hits, and at first I thought it was through Lew's site until I checked it out. It turns out most were through Google, but we don't know what people were looking for. Maybe it was the topic.

Here's Lew's piece on the House vote Monday, as well as pieces by Frank Shostak and Robert Murphy, as well as the Mises Bailout Reader, which includes a number of pieces on the Austrian business cycle theory, which sadly seems to have been validated once again.

War and Inflation

Few people can get to the point in a simple and persuasive way as well as Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute. Here's a link to a piece he did, based on a talk he delivered, on the connections, many of them that few people think about, between war and inflation. It is also a more detailed explanation of something that mystified many observers of the Ron Paul campaign: Why he kept talking about eliminating the Federal Reserve, which few people saw as related at all to his desire to get out of Iraq and have a considerably humbler, non-interventionist foreign policy, but as some sort of gold-bug crank issue.

As Lew demonstrates, however, a central bank with a monopoly over producing currency, however the keepers of the conventional wisdom may proclaim that it's role is to fight inflation, is precisely a mechanism for creating inflation. Thus governments can achieve spending power through inflation of a much greater magnitude than through taxes, because at some point people will resist taxation. That spending power has made possible the U.S.'s aggressive foreign policy -- which began, it's worth noting a few years after the Fed was created in 1913. The government couldn't finance endless wars through taxes; people would revolt. So it finances them through deficits and inflation.

Lew Rockwell hopeful but worried

Here's Lew Rockwell's latest post on the Ron Paul congressional challenge. He says he hears from people who should know that Ron is a shoo-in, but by nature he's a worrier. Here's a link to the Paul congressional campaign Web site (which gives the updated donation total at $1.037 million). You can donate or volunteer through it if you're so inclined.

Ron Paul a closet racist?

This may take several posts as there are different aspects to the question, but the short answer is surely no. Valid questions can be raised about his judgment, his due diligence, and perhaps his strategic thinking. But there's no evidence beyond some over-the-edge slurs (in my view) in some newsletters published over five years or so (out of 30 during which Dr. Paul published newsletters). I've done some blogging on this over at the Register's "Horserace '08" blog, and I have more I want to say, probably tomorrow.

To refresh, if you haven't been following. Jamie Kirchick at the New Republic posted a piece Jan. 8 quoting old Ron Paul newsletters that had some veering-on-racist comments and at least insenstive anti-gay stuff as well. I was too busy to read the piece until yesterday. I have little doubt the quotes are genuine, though some could use more context. The question is who wrote them and how much supervision Ron exercised over material that was going out over his name and was a source of revenue at a time when he was practicing medicine, trying to make sure his five kids had a good start in life, and in the last couple of years considering a political comeback. Reason has done a good piece and Jacob Sullum has written a good column.

The short version is that after Dr. Paul's poor showing as the LP candidate in 1988, Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard started developing an approach to advancing liberty they dubbed "paleolibertarianism," combining anti-statism and conservative cultural values (family, religion, respect for tradition, impatience with weirdos, hippies, disturbers of the peace). It was conceived as an outreach to the restless right. It got tied to Pat Buchanan for a while, the divorce coming as Pat moved increasingly toward "economic nationalism." It's likely though not nailed down that Lew wrote much of the stuff in question, in an effort to talk the language of the target audience. It wasn't the craziest thing libertarians have done to try to reach out to other groups with which they share some values or affinities, but it didn't pan out that well.

Several people have noted that in 35 years of public life nobody has reported hearing even faintly racist remarks drop from Ron Paul's lips. My contact with Ron Paul has been sporadic over the years, but it began when he was first elected to Congress, I was living in DC, and was assigned by Conservative Digest magazine (long defunct) to do a profile of him. He strikes me as an individualist to the core, who sincerely believes, as he told Wolf Blitzer that it's impossible to be a libertarian racist, because he judges people as individuals and understands that a free society will function best when most people do so as well. As Ayn Rand put it (paraphrasing), racism is the lowest form of collectivism. And I've never heard anything faintly racist come from his mouth.

Anyway, I don't think Dr. Paul or the campaign have dealt adequately with this issue yet. It was a hit piece that tells us something ugly about how Marty Peretz views libertarians, but there was enough "there" there to warrant enough details to put the issue to rest.

Link to Horserace'08

Here's the link I neglected to put into my previous post to the Register's Horserace '08 blog, where I'll be posting observations on New Hampshire in general and the Saturday night debate. The blog also features writers from around the Freedom chain, as well as Tibor Machan. We're also excited the Lew Rockwell has agreed to write an occasional post for us. He (and his contributors) are about as closely attuned to the Ron Paul campaign and background to the movement as almost anyone.