One-Party System by Future of Freedom Foundation April 28, 2010 I can predict the winner of the presidential election even now: the government. In a one-party system, thats how things work. One-party system? Yes. The American political scene makes much more sense if you think of the two parties as two divisions of the same party. Admittedly that is hard to do at first. All American politics is presented as a tooth-and-claw rivalry between Republicans and Democrats. It is certainly true that elections determine who holds office among the parties candidates, and who holds office determines whose cronies get sinecures and contracts. That does give the appearance of real competition. Moreover, the major news media are willing participants in the charade that Republicans and Democrats have substantially different ideas about things. Generally, we are asked to believe that Republicans want less government and more war, while the Democrats want more government and less war. As you may have noticed, that makes no sense. War and government go hand in hand, and both ...
Iraq 3.0 by Future of Freedom Foundation March 29, 2010 One gets the feeling that even the White House realizes the mess it’s made of Iraq. The other day the newspapers reported that the Bush administration has scaled back its objectives rather substantially. We might call it Iraq 3.0. First the plan was to create a democratic paradise which, domino-like, would spread freedom throughout the Middle East. When that didn’t work, the administration shifted to simply bringing some kind of order to Iraq, reconciling the three largest groups — Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurd. That hasn’t gone too well either. The nearly two dozen political objectives that the military “surge” was intended to accomplish have largely gone unachieved. The violence level may have fallen (one never knows how temporary such things are), but there are many possible explanations for that. One horrifying explanation is that enough ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods ...
America’s Anti-Militarist Tradition by Future of Freedom Foundation April 2, 2010 The right wing went apoplectic at the skepticism that greeted Gen. David Petraeus’s recent testimony about the alleged success of the military escalation in Iraq. It was as though a member of the military was incapable of engaging in spin to support his commander in chief’s war policy. President Bush summed up this attitude revealingly when he said it was one thing to attack him, but quite another to question General Petraeus. War, Clausewitz noted, is politics by other means. That makes high-ranking generals a species of politician. Not a few have harbored presidential thoughts, and some have made it. It is said that Petraeus would like to be another. These are the people the pro-war conservatives are willing to trust implicitly? (Anti-war members of the armed forces, on the other hand, are, in Rush Limbaugh’s ...
Autocracy Comes to America by Future of Freedom Foundation March 25, 2010 We appear to live in a republic. But look closely; it’s clearer every day that we live in a de facto autocracy. President Bush has managed to amass an astounding amount of power simply by scaring the American people and Congress into thinking that our continued existence as a society depends ...
The Good and Bad News about the Bush Wars by Future of Freedom Foundation April 26, 2010 There’s good and bad news about the two American-initiated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The good news is the American people are largely disengaged from them. The bad news is the American people are largely disengaged ...
Thank Goodness We Can Ignore the Wars by Future of Freedom Foundation April 2, 2010 New York Times foreign-affairs columnist Thomas Friedman laments that most Americans are disengaged from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During a recent radio appearance, Friedman cited comedian Bill Mahers complaint that the enemy has had to fight only 140,000 Americans rather than ...
Bush and Chavez: A Marriage Made in Hell by Future of Freedom Foundation April 2, 2010 If President Bush didn’t exist, Hugo Chavez would have to invent him. Chavez, of course, is the dictator-president of Venezuela who in recent months has taken steps to centralize control of the country’s economy. His accumulation of power is based ...
Thinking about Foreign Policy by Future of Freedom Foundation April 26, 2010 The reason there is so much sloppy thinking about foreign policy among libertarians (not to mention nearly everyone else) is that most people don’t know how to approach the subject. You can see this whenever someone uses analogies such as the bully on a ...
Bush Countenances Middle East Violence by Future of Freedom Foundation March 21, 2010 The administration of George W. Bush has done some contemptible things in its five and a half years, but what it’s doing now in the Middle East could be a new low. Innocent civilians are dying in Lebanon and Israel, but the administration’s position is that the time is ...
Where Are the Isolationists? by Future of Freedom Foundation April 2, 2010 President Bush’s State of the Union address was one odd speech indeed. Besides his silly statement about our being “addicted to oil” and his messianic declarations in response to the “call of history,” he referred to isolationism four different times. Who favors isolationism?
The NRA Gets It Wrong by Future of Freedom Foundation April 26, 2010 The concept of individual rights really isn’t complicated, but even some of its defenders get it wrong. Take, for example, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA, of course, concentrates exclusively on the individual’s right to keep and bear arms, but that is no ...
The NRA Gets It Wrong by Future of Freedom Foundation March 25, 2010 The concept of individual rights really isnt complicated, but even some of its defenders get it wrong. Take, for example, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA, of course, concentrates exclusively on the individuals right to keep and bear arms, but that is no excuse for failing to relate ...
