Skip to main content

Home/ Socialism and the End of the American Dream/ Group items tagged Jeffrey-A-Tucker

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Gary Edwards

What Is or Should Be the Law? essay on Frederik Bastiat's "The Law" - 1 views

dailyreckoning.com/what-is-or-should-be-the-law

The-Law Frederick-Bastiat executive-orders Rule Rule-of-Law

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 May 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 May 12
     
    Jeffrey Tucker at The Daily Reckoning wonders about all those Presidential Executive Orders that make Law while by-passing the Congressional process and making mockery of the USA Constitution.  He ends up referencing the great libertarian, Frederick Bastiat's seminal work, The Law - written in 1849.    
    excerpt: One party gets annoyed when the other party's president enacts laws without regard to any constitutional conventions.
    But what is the law, and what should it be? These are the bigger questions that are not part of public consciousness.
    The same was true in the time of Frédéric Bastiat (1801-50). At the very end of his life, he wrote an impassioned plea on the topic. He tried to get people to think hard about what was happening and how law had become an instrument of plunder, rather than a protector of property.
    He writes:
    ...... "It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person." .......
    This is from Bastiat's The Law, one of the great political essays to emerge from the whole Continental world of the 19th century. It vanished into obscurity in France, was resurrected in late 19th century English, and then disappeared again, only to reappear in the United States in the 1950s, thanks to the efforts of the Foundation of Economic Education.
    This essay asks fundamental questions that most people go through life never having thought about.
    The problem is that most people accept the law as a given, a fundamental fact. As a member of society, you obey or face the consequences. It is not safe to question why. This is because the enforcement arm of the law is the state, that peculiar agency with a unique power in society to
Gary Edwards

Hating the Establishment Is Not the Same as Supporting Liberty | Foundation for Economi... - 1 views

fee.org/...the-same-as-supporting-liberty

Banksters The-Establishment Jeffrey-A-Tucker

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • You might point to the American Revolution as a contrary case. We tossed out the British monarchy and invented freedom! But think again. The war itself created a new establishment consisting of politicians, military generals, bond dealers, and influential landholders.
  • Twelve years after the Declaration of Independence, these groups got together and formed a new government that, in time, became as oppressive and restrictive — and in some ways, more so — as the one the revolutionaries overthrew. And this occurred despite the existence of classical liberal political norms and intellectual culture.
  • He has said nothing about dismantling power.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Indeed, he is on record with his desire to radically expand the power of the state.
  • He wants surveillance, controls on the internet, religious tests for migration, war-like tariffs, industrial planning, and autocratic foreign-policy power. He’s praised police power and toyed with ideas such as internment and killings of political enemies. His entire governing philosophy boils down to arbitrary, free-wheeling authoritarianism.
  • As for Sanders, everything that is bad about the current establishment he promises to make worse with more programs, bureaucracy, taxes, controls, and government power in order to making life fair, just, and equitable. He speaks as if he’s never heard of the failed history of socialism and certainly hasn’t learned anything from it.
  • The ideal is liberty, not the overthrow of existing elite structures as such.
  • They resist rampant populism that would lead to a pillaging of the nation that is serving them so well.
  • To understand Machiavelli, realize that his black beast was the cleric Savonarola, Florence’s quasi-dictator who led a mass movement of crazed pietists who pillaged and burned material possessions as a pathway to heaven. The Bonfire of the Vanities of 1487 was one result. This is exactly the kind of mania that establishments exist to keep at bay.
  • The main payout is the control of the state apparatus that outlives the establishment’s overthrow. It makes sense that the results will tend to be more ruthless, vengeful, and bloody than anything that came before.
  • Establishments are as Machiavelli described: stable machines that keep competitors at bay but otherwise seek to make the system work for themselves.
  • The goal should be the tearing down of power itself and its replacement by simple human rights and a society that functions according to civilized standards.
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16
     
    "But there's a problem. The state power we oppose is not identical to the establishment we reject. You can overthrow the establishment and still be left with a gigantic machinery of legalized exploitation. All the agencies, laws, regulations, and powers are still in place. And now you have a problem: someone else is in charge of the state itself. You might call it a new establishment. It could be even more wicked than the one you swept away. Indeed, it usually is. Maybe always. Anatomy of the Establishment What is an establishment? It is a network of large and cooperating interest groups that have developed a stable relationship with state power. It includes finance, organized labor, public bureaucrats, government contractors, big businesses with quid pro quo relationships with regulators and politicians, political families with a strong stake in the election process, intellectuals at state-friendly think tanks and universities, and so on."
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page