Barak Hussein Gump

By jbcobb | March 9, 2010

Barak Obama’s ignorance regarding insurance is astounding.  Did anybody hear his remarks comparing his automobile insurance in Illinois to the state of health insurance in America?  Surely, if any of you were paying attention, you would have thrown something at your radio or television while spewing obscenities.

BHO explained how his auto insurance in Illinois wasn’t “real insurance”, and that the company laughed at him when he asked them to repair his car, following an accident.  He continued to explain that the insurance was only set up to meet minimum state guidelines.  Well, duh, Albert Einstein Obama somehow fails to understand the difference between liability insurance and full coverage, or he makes the false assumption that the average citizen fails to grasp the difference.  Given the past mistakes of this idiot, I am inclined to the former.  We thought W was the epitome of Oval Office ignorance.  Comapred to Barak Gump, Bush is a super-genius.

JB

Topics: Big Brother, Communism, Fascism, Socialism, and the Battle for American Liberty, Congress and Legislation, Domestic Policy and Social Programs, Society, Cultural Issues, and Miscellaneous, The White House | No Comments »

Happy Birthday, Mr. Libertarian by Jeff Riggenbach

By jbcobb | March 2, 2010

Today — March 2nd — is Murray Rothbard’s birthday. Had he lived, he’d be 84 years old today. And there’s sadness in that, because 84 in the world of today, though still a “ripe old age,” is not really all that old. Lots of people live to be 84. Even libertarians do it. Both Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek lived to be 92. Milton Friedman lived to be 94. Henry Hazlitt lived to be 98. In Radicals for Capitalism, his important 2007 book about the history of the modern American libertarian movement, Brian Doherty centers his story around what he describes as “[f]ive thinkers … without whom there would have been no uniquely libertarian ideas or libertarian institutions of any popularity or impact in America in the second half of the twentieth century … Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Milton Friedman.”

“Four men and one woman,” Doherty writes, “four Jews and one Catholic; four economists and one novelist; four minarchists … and one anarchist … two native-born Americans and three immigrants; two Nobel Prize winners and three who remained not only aloof from most professional and intellectual accolades but generated a heated hostility from cultural gatekeepers.” Doherty makes no mention of it, but there’s yet another facile point of comparison he might have used in discussing his five major figures — their longevity. For of his five major figures, three (Mises, Hayek, and Friedman) lived into their 90s. The other two — Rand and Rothbard — never made it to 80. Rothbard never made it to 70. It’s almost as though radicalism makes you die young. Mises, Hayek, and Friedman were minarchists — classical liberals, to be more precise.

JB:  To read the rest of the article posted byB.K. Marcus, or to listen to audio podcast by Mr. Riggenbach, go to the mises.org website, the best site in the world!

Topics: Big Brother, Communism, Fascism, Socialism, and the Battle for American Liberty, Economics, Literature, Society, Cultural Issues, and Miscellaneous | No Comments »

Classical Liberalism and International Relations by Edwin van de Haar

By jbcobb | February 28, 2010

The following is based on a wonderful book entitled Classical Liberalism and International Relations Theory: Hume, Smith, Mises, and Hayek by Edwin van  de Haar.

Classical liberal ideas apply between states as well as within states, explains Edwin van de Haar

Questions of war and peace, or foreign policy in general, are among the most dramatic issues in politics. It is no wonder that classical liberal think tanks publish papers and articles on international affairs. Often these are reactions to current issues. They hardly ever clarify how their points of view relate to classical liberalism as a political philosophy. This begs the question: Does a classical liberal approach to international relations exist?

This article will argue in the affirmative, that it is possible to judge current foreign policy standpoints from a classical liberal perspective and to develop a classical liberal foreign policy agenda. Based on a study of four important classical liberal thinkers, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek, it will show that classical liberalism is applicable in international as well as domestic politics.(1)

Academic international relations theory is dominated by American-style liberalism, which has much in common with European and Australian social democracy. One effect of this is the equation of liberalism with Immanuel Kant and Woodrow Wilson inspired calls for a world federation of the brotherhood of man, cosmopolitanism, a belief in the goodness of people and the possibility of abolishing war, optimism about the peace-enhancing outcomes of increased intergovernmental international organisation, international free trade, and so forth.(2)

Classical liberals often disagree on its precise definition, but most regard classical liberalism as the political theory characterised by a firm belief in individualism, negative freedom, non-religious natural law, spontaneous order, a limited state, and the rule of law.(3) In this article these ideas will be briefly introduced and then applied to international relations, thus sketching the contours of a classical liberal approach to world politics. In the process it will become clear that liberalism in the American sense differs substantially from classical liberalism.

JB:  You can read the rest of the article at the Policy magazine website. Policy is amagazine published in Austalia and New Zealand, and is sponsored by theThe Centre for Independent Studies, Australasia’s leading independent public policy research institute or ‘think-tank’.

Topics: Economics, Foreign Policy, International Relations, Diplomacy, and Wars, Literature | No Comments »