Ray Harvey

I thought the following was exceptionally accurate.

From ex-liberal Roger Simon:

President Obama’s been taking a lot of flak lately for not having a plan. First it was about Libya, but now — even more importantly because, as we know, all politics is local (until it’s not) — about the budget.

The latest White House porte-parole Jay Carney has consequently been taking all kinds of in-coming himself about “where’s the President’s budget plan,” “why doesn’t he have a plan,” etc.

Well, the reason for the latter is simple: because he can’t. The minute the president evinces a budget plan, the game is up. No liberal budget will stand up to scrutiny. There is no money left for deficit spending in our aging society. The welfare state is kaput. It’s gone — probably for generations to come.

Of course, there’s always that canard about taxing the rich. That will save things. But the truth is even if you tax the rich at 100%, it barely sets back our entitlement crisis a year or two, while virtually bankrupting the few job creators who remain.

So no wonder Obama doesn’t have a plan. What would it be?

Rich Miniter put a fine point on it in a recent article for Forbes, “Why the Democratic Party is Doomed.”

The Democratic Party, as we have known it for the past 70 years, is now in its last days.

Yes, the House Republicans may raise the debt ceiling for a mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers. Yes, Barack Obama may win the 2012 presidential contest. Yes, bureaucrats and judges will continue to impose new and costly regulations on the economy.

But it doesn’t matter. The long-term trends are almost all bad news for the left wing of the party.

This week’s fight over raising the federal debt limit exposes a key weakness in the warfare-welfare state that has bestowed power onto the Democratic Party: Without an ever-growing share of the economy, it dies.

Miniter’s right. As an ex-lib, it almost makes me feel sorry for liberals. But I’m not because too many of them are still playing ostrich. One lib friend just sent me an email — I’m still somehow on her list — trumpeting a 1954 (!) quote from Eisenhower: “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

I guess the implication here is that’s what Republicans are trying to do, when, especially in the case of Social Security, they are the only ones making a serious effort to save it (see Paul Ryan). But liberals must preserve their delusions — and actually not read the small print, in Ryan’s proposal or anybody else’s. After all, they are people with no plans. Why should anybody else have them?

(Link)

Whether people recognize it or not is beside the point: the welfare state is doomed by definition because in order to have the wealth to redistribute, one must first have someone producing that wealth, which (in turn) requires capital — as in capitalism — and that pool will pretty quickly dry up, especially when you vilify and punish the producers.

This, if you didn’t know it already, shows you exactly how economically illiterate and out-of-touch Barack Obama really is. It will also perhaps remind you of his whacked-out 2009 statement: “We’ve actually been operating in a way entirely consistent with free-market principles.”

From a speech Obama gave today, July 22nd, 2011:

President Obama says it is a “myth” that President FDR was not a fiscal conservative.

Question: what’s worse — if Obama actually believes that, or if he’s lying through his teeth (again)?

The following is a tiny sampling of facts about FDR, and if Barack Obama could please tell me wherein lies the fiscal conservatism here, I’d be eternally grateful.

One of FDR’s first acts as President was to close down all private banks, a maneuver he hoped would prevent scared depositors from withdrawing their savings.

What this maneuver actually did, however, was intensify the public’s panic. It didn’t improve banking at all, nor did it help in any way with the Great Depression.

Unemployment rates over the course of the Great Depression looked like this:

• 1929: 3.2 percent
• 1930: 8.7 percent
• 1931: 15.9 percent
• 1932: 23.6 percent
• 1933: 24.9 percent
• 1934: 21.7 percent
• 1935: 20.1 percent
• 1936: 16.9 percent
• 1937: 14.3 percent
• 1938: 19.0 percent
• 1939: 17.2 percent
• 1940: 14.6 percent

FDR averaged 17.7 percent unemployment, which is staggering: to be more precise, FDR’s unemployment average was more than five times the 1929 level.

Many FDR apologists like to cite the 1933 to 1940 drop in unemployment as the greatest drop, percentage-wise, in the unemployment rate ever by an American President. Of course, what this fails to take into account, among a litany of other things, is the fact that centralized banking, as opposed to privatized, through the artificial manipulation of interest rates, caused the problems to begin with, and the subsequent interventions, first by Herbert Hoover and then by FDR, exploded those problems astronomically, as testified by the unprecedented unemployment rates that decade saw: in other words, 14 percent unemployment, is, by any legitimate standard, ghastly, and only a lunatic or a fool would call it “a success.”

Quoting economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, who used statistical models to evaluate the results of FDR’s New Deal:

“The Great Depression was very significantly prolonged in both its duration and its magnitude by the impacts of New Deal programs.”

As Ludwig von Mises correctly noted, in the absence of government intervention, unemployment is always voluntary. Yet over ten million Americans were unemployed in 1938.

Compare that to the eight million in 1931.

Fact: not until FDR conscripted millions of men and sent them off to war did unemployment levels truly come down to manageable levels. Which, however, was hardly the end of the Great Depression; for unemployment, as everyone knows, is only one of several components. Thus:

In terms of aggregate production, statistics show no recovery until after World War II ended, when the size of government was at long last reduced.

The gross national product (GNP) didn’t recover to 1929 levels until 1940.

Personal consumption was 8 percent lower in 1940 than in 1929.

Net private investment, the backbone of a healthy economy, from 1930 to 1940 was negative $3.1 billion, a breathtaking figure.

Because of FDR’s mind-spinning interventionist policies, European nations came out of the Great Depression years ahead of America.

FDR believed that the Great Depression was caused by low wages. That was his fatal flaw. Because, in fact, the truth was the diametric opposite, as we now know: low wages (and prices) were caused by the depression.

And yet based upon this stupendous misunderstanding of basic economics, FDR proceeded to mandate wage and price controls, which thus kept the American people in a state of poverty for well over a decade.

Where’s the fiscal conservatism in that, Barack?

You see, when prices and wages are forced by government, the demand for labor is necessarily reduced. Why? Because in order to stay in business, businesses must turn a profit; so that when wages and prices are forced, businesses must adjust their employment and spending accordingly, or they run out of money. They must therefore cut back on workforce, and they must decrease output. In this way, forced wages create unemployment. You see, not even FDR can subvert economic law.

This is the most basic cause and effect process you can imagine: employers simply cannot pay out money that they don’t have.

Production and production alone generates wealth. That’s another crux, and FDR’s interventionist policies crippled production.

Here’s a little more of what Barack Obama calls FDR’s fiscal conservatism:

By means of the National Industrial Relations Act (NIRA), FDR’s First New Deal sought to turn United States agriculture, and other industries, into a massive government cartel.

It was at this time also that FDR began restricting production, so that unemployment began increasing.

The NIRA failed spectacularly, but in the process, it gave birth to another disaster: the National Recovery Administration (NRA).

The NRA was bureaucratic up to the gills, and, among other things, it required every businessperson to sign a pledge to observe FDR’s job-destroying minimum-wage laws, his maximum-hour laws, and his prohibitions on “child labor” (i.e. teenage labor), and so on.

Prices were therefore not permitted to rise above or fall below “costs of production,” regardless of consumer demand.

Quoting historian John T. Flynn:

[Code-enforcement police] roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books at the instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private coat-and-suit police went through the district at night, battering down doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing together a pair of pants at night (John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, 2007).

Countless people across America were arrested and sentenced to jail or prison for invented crimes like “pressing suits of clothes for thirty-five cents when the Tailors’ Code fixed the price at forty cents” (Ibid).

Pretty fiscally conservative, no?

FDR also made the private ownership of gold illegal.

Now that’s fiscally conservative, as is this:

FDR nationalized gold stocks.

He created an abortion called the Agriculture Adjustment Administration (AAA), which implemented a government cartel on agriculture markets, and which quite literally paid millions and millions of dollars to farmers for slaughtering their livestock and burning their fields, while the rest of the country starved.

Under the AAA, one sugar refining business was paid $1 million to not refine sugar.

FDR made null and void all existing contracts that promised to pay in gold, which was an act of pure and simple theft, and which in any case did not inflate prices, as was his whole intention in making gold illegal in the first place.

In 1935, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Roosevelt’s NRA and AAA were unconstitutional.

It’s worth noting also, if only for posterity sake, that the NRA and the AAA were both explicitly modeled after Mussolini’s fascist system, of which FDR was an explicit admirer.

FDR also emulated Mussolini’s propaganda campaign against freedom and free-markets. Under the Second New Deal, Roosevelt’s AAA, which the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional, was, however, resurrected under the “soil conservation program.”

It too paid taxpayer money to farmers for not producing.

Pretty fiscally conservative, Barack.

A number of other programs that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional were simply reenacted by FDR under different names as well.

Many of these unconstitutional programs, also modeled after European fascism, are still in place today.

The Second New Deal, announced on January 4, 1935, introduced a number of new programs, in addition to the renamed old, each one equally unconstitutional, though never, alas, brought before the court.

There was, for instance, the National Labor Relations Act.

There was the Fair Labor Standards Act, which amounted to more job-destroying minimum-wage laws.

There was the Works Progress Administration.

Of course too there was the egregious and now bankrupted Social Security Act, which, among other things, forgot to take into account increasing life expectancies, and so was doomed to fail from the start, a fact which, unfortunately, most Americans don’t realize even today.

Also, the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which Herbert Hoover made into law in 1932, was much more stringently enforced under FDR’s authoritarian hand, thereby making it impossible to prosecute against labor union violence, of which the whole history of labor unions is largely composed.

Extortion by unions was under FDR legally permitted, as long as that extortion concerned “the payment of wages by a bona fide employer to a bona fide employee” (Congressional Record 78th Congress, first Session, House, 1934).

There were in addition, of course, the interminable taxes imposed upon businesspeople, which taxes siphoned money out of the private sector and increased unemployment, as taxes against entrepreneurs always and inevitably will, since they take away the capital that is normally used to reinvest and thus produce.

Indeed, tax increases (much of which were used to pay FDR’s bureaucrats) were as responsible as anything else for annihilating the American economy.

Quoting FDR’s adviser Harry Hopkins:

“I’ve got four million at work [in federally created jobs], but for God’s sake, don’t ask me what they are doing.”

This same Harry Hopkins again: “We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect.”

Even prior to World War II, government spending under FDR doubled and then some.

Government spending went from $4.6 billion in 1932 to $9.1 billion in 1940.

Over $23 billion in deficits were accumulated.

Current profligacy makes these numbers look comical, and indeed in terms of sheer profligacy, Barack cannot be matched; but one must not fail to take into account the times.

Deficits annually during FDR’s reign averaged 42 percent of the federal budget, a truly incredible figure, especially considering that in 1932 FDR had the nerve to campaign against budget deficits, and he even vociferously denounced them.

The primary purpose of FDR’s preposterous New Deal spending – at least, according to many – was simply to ensure his reelection, because he, like his protégé, was another power-mad politician. Accordingly, he gave free money to hoards and hoards of poor people in exchange for the vote.
What follows is from the Official Report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Campaign Expenditures, 1938:

• In one Works Progress Administration (WPA) district in Kentucky, 349 WPA employees were put to work preparing forms listing the electoral preferences of every employee on work relief. Many of those who stated that they did not intend to vote for Roosevelt were laid off.

• In another Kentucky WPA district, government workers were required, as a condition of employment, to pledge to vote for the senior senator from Kentucky, who was an FDR supporter. If they refused, they were thrown off the relief rolls.

• Republicans in Kentucky were told that they would have to change party affiliations if they wanted to keep their WPA jobs.

• Letters were sent out to WPA employees in Kentucky instructing them to donate 2 percent of their salaries to the Roosevelt campaign if they wanted to keep their jobs.

• In Pennsylvania, businessmen who leased trucks to the WPA were solicited for $100 campaign contributions.

• As in Kentucky, Pennsylvania WPA workers were told to change their party affiliation if they wanted to keep their jobs. Many people refused and were fired.

• Government employment was increased dramatically right before the elections. In Pennsylvania, “employment cards” were distributed that entitled holders of the cards to “two to four weeks of employment around election time.”

• A Pennsylvania man who had been given a $60.50-per-month white-collar job was transferred to a pick-axe job in a limestone quarry after refusing to change his voter registration from Republican to Democrat.

• Tennessee WPA workers were also instructed to contribute 2 percent of their salaries to the Democratic Party as a condition of employment.

• In one congressional district in Cook County, Illinois, the WPA instructed 450 of its employees to canvass for (Democratic) votes around election time in 1938. The men were all laid off the day after the election.

(Cited in John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, and How Capitalism Saved America, by Thomas Dilorenzo.)

In the words of historian Stanley High:

“In states like Florida and Kentucky – where the New Deal’s big fight was in the primary elections – the rise of WPA employment has hurried along in order to synchronize with the primaries” (Stanley High, “The WPA: Politicians’ Playground,” Current History, 1939).

In 1969, when all this evidence about New Deal spending came into the light, FDR apologists (i.e. academics) immediately began making excuses and rationalizing FDR’s disgustingly biased spending – for instance, the fact that residents of western states received 60 percent more federal money than residents of southern states. All the excuses these academics have made are factually inaccurate and have been refuted, many times over, by people like Jim F. Couch and William F. Shugart, in their excellent book Political Economy of the New Deal.

Franklin Roosevelt was, to quote one David Gordon, “a vain, intellectually shallow person whose principal interest was to retain at all costs his personal power” – i.e. “total subordination of his country’s welfare to his personal ambition” (David Gordon, “Power Mad,” 1999).

The truth is, FDR had no grasp of economics, and in fact was really just another garden-variety politician. Much like his protege Barack Obama, who would have you believe that his mentor was “pretty fiscally conservative.”

This is hilarious.

Contessa Brewer, who does not have a degree in economics or common sense, beclowned herself horribly when she was grilling Alabama Representative Mo Brooks on the debt issue and tried feebly to discredit his qualifications for by asking:

“Do you have a degree in economics?”

Can you guess the answer? Watch:

Quoting Ed Morrissey

Brooks actually has three degrees: political science, economics, and law. As a lawyer, Brooks would have been experienced enough not to make Brewer’s mistake in a cross-examination, which is to ask a question without first knowing the answer. Not only that, but Brewer was being flat-out rude as well as foolish; MSNBC invited Brooks to appear to get his perspective on the issues. If their hosts respond by belittling them (whether it backfires or not), what does that say about MSNBC, its management, and the kind of invitations they make?

Since Brewer made an issue out of having an economics degree before engaging in economics debates, she must have a doctorate in the subject herself, right? Not exactly. According to her Wikipedia entry, Brewer has a baccalaureate in broadcast journalism (magna cum laude). Apparently they didn’t teach interviewing skills at Syracuse, or logic either, as a requisite for the degree.

That’s the price you pay for partisan politics, I guess.

And he unloads with good reason.

Steve Wynn, by the way, is no consistent capitalist, as he himself as much as says when he announces his support for that dingy quack Harry Reid. And yet Steve Wynn is on the money here:

I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what’s going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing’s going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress. But everybody is so political, so focused on holding their job for the next year that the discussion in Washington is nauseating.

And I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.

You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, God, don’t be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama’s deal and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth. And that’s true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I’m telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.

(Link)

Evidently, representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) wasn’t too busy answering her cell phone during Town Halls this past Friday, but instead had the time (and the nerve) to play the race card yet again, strongly suggesting that race-obsessed Barack (“My-Grandmother-Is-A-Typical-White-Person”) Obama’s skin color is what’s actually to blame in this meaningless debt-ceiling fight:

From Real Clear Politics:

Jackson Lee, a black Congresswoman, believes the disagreement over raising the debt ceiling is because of President Obama’s race.

“I am particularly sensitive to the fact that only this president, only this president, only this one has received the kind attacks and disagreements and inability to work. Only this one,” Jackson Lee said on the House floor this afternoon.

“Read between the lines.”

“What is different about this president that should put him in a position that he should not receive the same kind of respectful treatment of when it is necessary to raise the debt limit in order to pay our bills, something required by both statute and the 14th amendment?”

In related news, the following clip is a video flashback that took place not long after Barack Obama took office, a mere two and a half years ago. In this clip, Barack Obama informs us that he will be a “one-term president” if he and his economically illiterate administration haven’t turned the economy around in three years. Of course, being a neo-Marxist Keynesian himself, what he didn’t realize then, and ostensibly still does not know now, is that you can never spend your way out of a recession or depression — Say’s Law forbid it — that Keynesian economics are one of the great frauds perpetrated onto humankind; that those same economics policies he and his clownish administration have pursued will destroy America; and that real wealth can only come from production, which freedom facilitates. Watch:

No pressure, but only six months to go. Can you do it, Barack? Can you engineer an entire complex economy through massive government intervention and bureaucratic control?

Rick Santelli, who is largely credited with starting the tea part back in the old days before the tea party had lost its teeth, is something of a hero.

Here’s his unforgettable — and inarguable — salvo against Barack Obama’s explicit call to “fundamentally change America”:

Now he has this:

RICK SANTELLI: You don’t compromise on principles.

STEVE LIESMAN: So, Rick — you’re ready to see the United States –

Santelli: — Bring it on! Bring it on! Bring it on! Our fearless leader [GE CEO Jeff] Immelt, was on talking about what he perceived as an impediment to creating better jobs and he talked about regulation. Is he against Dodd-Frank?

Liesman: I’m talking about paying our bills, Rick.

Santelli: You know what, we should pay our bills. We should pay our bills. But the other amount, the 42-cents of every dollar we don’t have let Congress figure out they made the obligations.

Liesman: The trouble is, there is a time and a place for this conversation and debate.

Santelli: Now is the time!

Liesman: It’s not when the credit card bill is due.

Santelli: This is the place. We’re here. If not now, when?! If not now, when? If not now, when?!

Video here.

In hell, said Randal Jarell, Americans tell each other how to make a martini.

A martini — “the elixir of quietude” as E.B. White described it — consists of gin and vermouth. The ingredients are chilled and then strained into a cocktail glass. That, at any rate, is the original martini, though vodka is now, somewhat grudgingly, accepted in the place of gin.

Gin is a strange and fascinating spirit, with a long and diverse history. It is in essence an admixture of grain alcohol and juniper-berry oil and was invented by a 17th Century Dutch medical professor named Francois de Boe Sylvius, who created it to relieve kidney disorders and, he said, “to purify the blood.”

Sylvius called his confection “Genever,” which is the Dutch word for juniper.

Gin is relatively easy and inexpensive to produce, and, in large part for this reason, it took England by complete storm.

Vermouth today — whether sweet or dry — is an entirely different deal from the vermouth that existed back in the days of Francois de Boe Sylvius. Back then, you see, Vermouth was a sweet(ish) digestif made from a myriad of things, such as: orange peels and flowers, juniper and nutmeg, cloves, coriander, cinnamon, marjoram, brandy, white wine, tree bark, and that’s not even the half of it. Today, however, vermouth is mediocre wine, usually white, with herbal-and-spice infusions and alcohol fortification. Sugar is often added.

The true origins of the gin martini are murky, though many stories do exist. Some, for example, say that back in 1912, a legendary New York bartender by the name of Martini invented the drink. Others believe it was first concocted much earlier and in prototypical fashion, back in 1850, in San Francisco, by Professor Jerry Thomas, who purportedly made it for a miner on the way to Martinez, California. The result: the Martinez cocktail, which is a gin-vermouth-maraschino drink, slightly different from the martini, but a venerable drink nevertheless, which still exists to this day. Yet the citizens of Martinez, California say that the martini originated right there, in 1870, and the bartender who first built it was a man named Julio Richelieu.

One thing that’s known for certain: The Martinez cocktail first appeared in The Bartenders Guide in 1887.

The Oxford English Dictionary, a usually impeccable source, tells us — incorrectly — that the martini was invented in 1871, but this was a full twenty years after Jerry Thomas’s drink came into existence.

The English, on the other hand, say that because of its kick, the martini comes from a strong British rifle called a Martini & Henry.

Many New Yorker’s would have us believe that a bartender at the Knickerbocker Hotel — one Martini di Arma di Taggia — invented the drink in 1911 for John David Rockefeller, who, by the way, took his martini with London Dry Gin, dry vermouth, bitters, lemon peel and a single olive.

But, whatever.

About the shape of the glass there is little dispute.
The ritual is really the thing,
holding the stem of the chalice to the light,
somewhat to bless the dying day.
But ever you are ready to begin,
Be extra careful not to bruise the gin.

Said the poet Karl Shapiro.

“Well, you know, here’s what I would say. I think we should acknowledge that some welfare programs in the past were not well designed and in some cases did encourage dependency. As somebody who worked in low income neighborhoods, I’ve seen it, where people weren’t encouraged to work, weren’t encouraged to upgrade their skills, were just getting a check, and, over time, their motivation started to diminish. And I think even if you’re progressive you’ve got to acknowledge that some of these things have not been well designed.”

(Link)

Well, you know, you’re only a trillion dollars too late.

And dependency is just one of the many intractable problems with a welfare state.

On this day in 1776, America’s thirteen colonies broke away from Britain to forge a new nation free to govern itself. The guiding principle behind this new nation is stated very clearly in America’s foundation document — the Declaration of Independence — which says that all human beings by nature possess the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are instituted among humans to protect these rights.

I emphasize the word protect in this context because it was (and in many ways still is) a revolutionary idea: for in most lands, including America today, government is looked upon as a sovereign ruler of the people. But this was not America’s original intent.

The word unalienable means “that which cannot be transferred, revoked, or made alien” — and everything that has made America great is merely an elaboration upon this foundational principle.

The Declaration of Independence is not a treatise on political theory but a statement to the world of what the founders of America believed to be a self-evident truth: namely, that we each own ourselves and our property in full.

The language used in the Declaration of Independence owes much to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, which states that the major function of government is to protect the life, liberty, and property of each person.

The framers of the Constitution indeed believed the legitimate functions of government to be merely protective, and not paternal. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The legitimate functions of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.”

In fact, politically speaking, those two things are at root the only possible alternatives: protective government or paternal government. (Even anarchy devolves eventually into a de facto government of one or the other of these two.)

America is for this reason a nation of laws: laws which specifically protect “against the instigation of aggression,” for it is ultimately only through aggression, or its threat, that the right to life and property can be infringed or abrogated.

The right to life, which is the fundamental right, is what makes America politically free.

The right to property, which is the only manifestation of the right to life, is what makes America economically capitalistic.

Capitalism is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness applied to economics.

Capitalism is the freedom to produce and to trade property.

It is of inestimable significance that of the many grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, a number of those grievances are economic.

Money is property, and private property is the crux of freedom.
Property is subsumed under the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: obviously, you cannot possess the right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness if you do not first possess the right to produce, keep, and dispose of those things which maintain your life and make you happy.

In this sense, America is correctly known as a country of negative rights.

What that term refers to is the fact that your freedom imposes no burdens and no responsibilities upon any other person except responsibilities of a negative type: you must refrain from violating the same rights in others.

Your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

Rights are in this way compossible – which means: they can’t conflict since everyone possesses the exact same rights: specifically, the right to one’s own life and property – and only one’s own life and property.

Negative rights are the only possible way for each and every individual, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, to live freely.

Negative rights do not guarantee a set income. They do not guarantee healthcare. They do not guarantee a level playing field or a level training field. They do not even guarantee success or happiness.

They guarantee only that you are free to pursue success and happiness, and that if you achieve these things, they are yours unalienably. Which is to say, these things cannot be revoked or transferred.

That is the premise America was founded upon.

In other words, negative rights guarantee you the one thing most important to human life: the freedom to pursue your values. In America as she was originally intended, you are free to make of yourself whatever you can, provided you do not infringe upon the same rights in others.

The long war upon the principle of negative rights, which began before the ink was finished drying on the Declaration of Independence, is waged almost exclusively by those who, in one form or another, seek to replace negative rights with so-called positive rights.

Positive rights do not actually exist.

In fact, they’re a complete negation of rights and a contradiction in terms, since by definition positive rights are not compossible – which is to say that in order to be carried out, positive rights require the infringement of the rights of others. So that if, for example, whether or not you work, you possess (which in reality you do not) the positive right to a certain fixed income, it will necessarily require that someone (i.e. the government) takes money from someone else and gives that money to you, in order to provide you with your fixed income. The most obvious problem with this is that no one has the right to take money from any other person; for if someone did possess such a right, from whom would it derive?

Money and all other property may be lawfully taken only by permission.

Permissions are not rights.

Such is the nature of positive rights, whose fatal flaw is built into the very idea of positive rights.

This 4th of July, then, let us celebrate the principle that birthed the greatest civilization in world history: the principle of negative rights.

Happy 4th.

Secession is interesting thing, more complicated than one might at first think. The following — which won’t go anywhere — is semi interesting.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire:

RIVERSIDE (CBS) — Is the state of California about to go “South”?

Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone apparently thinks so, after proposing that the county lead a campaign for as many as 13 Southern California counties to secede from the state.

Stone said in a statement late Thursday that Riverside, Imperial, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa and Mono counties should form the new state of South California.

The creation of the new state would allow officials to focus on securing borders, balancing budgets, improving schools and creating a vibrant economy, he said.

“Our taxes are too high, our schools don’t educate our children well enough, unions and other special interests have more clout in the Legislature than the general public,” Stone said in his statement.

He unveiled his proposal on the day Gov. Jerry Brown signed budget legislation that will divert about $14 million in 2011-12 vehicle license fee revenue from four new Riverside County cities.

Officials fear the cut will cripple the new cities of Eastvale, Jurupa Valley, Menifee and Wildomar.

Stone said he would present his proposal to the Board of Supervisors July 12.

The new state would have no term limits, only a part-time legislature and limits on property taxes.

(Link)