Blogs

28% of the way through the Kindle edition of the Complete Libertarian Forum, at Location 20034, there is a segment entitled "Hospers On Crime And The FBI." It is most revealing.

It tells of how in 1972 the "Friends of the FBI" posed a questionnaire to the candidates for US President, and the segment compares answers from the first-ever LP candidate (John Hospers), Dr Benjamin Spock of the People's Party, and Linda Jenness of the Socialist Workers Party.

Editor Murray Rothbard summarizes: "on the eight separable questions above, Dr. Spock gave the best libertarian answer or tied for the best five times, Linda Jenness three times, and John Hospers three times."

One example may suffice. Question: "What is your attitude toward court-authorized electronic surveillance? Answers: Spock: Dangerous and impermissible in a democracy because it will always be easily abused for political purposes. Jenness: Any use of electronic surveillance, whether court authorized or not, is a violation of every person’s basic right to privacy. It is furthermore clearly in violation of the Constitution of the United States. Hospers: Courts should be very careful as to what surveillance they authorize, so as not to violate the individual’s right of privacy.

Yuck.

Read the others for yourself, I think you'll agree. Three out of eight!

I had no idea, but it appears the LP did not have a very principled start, any more than it has had a principled position in more recent years. I can point to several very fine candidates, such as Bergland and Browne, but this exposure of John Hospers shows the record to be patchy at best.

Grumpy Cat is not a fan of Obamacare.

If anyone still doesn't understand why NSA's spying is a bad thing, http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/nov/26/nsa-gchq-surveillance... may help.

Every Thanksgiving, the Wall Street Journal gives over its Editorial space to an essay called And the Fair Land. I expect it will be seen again this Thursday.
 
T-Day actually has a rather disreputable history. Allegedly the Plymouth Colony pilgrims celebrated their first harvest and invited their native American neighbors to share the feast, and so they may have; but the first was a thin feast and in later years native Americans were made subject to systematic government genocide.
 
Harvests dramatically improved after 1623, when the communist structure of the settlement gave way to the private ownership of land. Even Governor Bradford had to admit that “This had very good success”.
 
The designation of the annual, National holiday was fixed by Abraham Lincoln, who in the middle of his war to prevent secession declared in 1863 "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens". Hypocrisy seems to know no limit, and I wonder how far the victims of his army's savagery shared his pretended piety.
 
We shall know that the Government Era is over when the WSJ, or its successor, scraps that romantic editorial and substitutes Murray Rothbard's What really Happened at Plymouth.
 

When it comes to the TSA, justice is an anomaly.

Libertarians advocate jury nullification.

The FDA is an anti-innovation organization.

Church and State collusion, at least philosophically, continues to thrive in academia.

It's fifty years ago today since you-know-what, and although generally I'm slow to assume a conspiracy (I'm still awaiting a credible and reasonably coherent MIHOP theory for 9/11 for example) I do join the 61% who still think Oswald didn't act alone.
 
The mainstream media (MSM) have been busy this month trying to convince this 61% to change our minds, and that makes me wonder: why bother?
 
Suppose arguendo that they are right; that Lee Oswald was a low-life with big ideas and small talent, who wanted to gain immortality by doing an historic thing. Jacob Hornberger has an interesting take on that, by the way, here on FFF. If it were so, the killing would be a tragedy like all deaths, but not much more. Why the fuss? - methinks the MSM doth protest too much.
 
Cui bono? - a long list; LBJ gained the Presidency, and by re-activating the Vietnam war he gained a fortune from his holdings in military contractor firms. The whole Military Industrial Complex likewise gained huge business. The CIA was pulled back from the very brink of JFK-planned extinction. The Mafia gained vengeance on the power behind RFK, who had double crossed it by waging war on it after it had favored his brother by getting out the graveyard vote in Cook County as a favor to their old bootlegger buddy Joseph, the brothers' pa.
 
And who were best placed to choreograph the assassination? - the very same list.
 
Now, if the great American public formed a fixed opinion that a President, his intelligence staff, his friends in industry, and some of the most distinguished godfathers in American crime had all systematically conspired to commit murder, frame a patsy, and fool us all for half a century, the tatters of confidence in the established order would be swept away.
 
So, they worry :-)

The State loves to link the ownership of weapons to "insanity".