Vox Popoli

This is where I find things to start getting very interesting, because I think there are some areas where Rothbard’s assertions are, at a minimum, debatable. But keep in mind that the answers are based on the source material, not absolute truth as you understand it to be.

Chapter 4 next week. Economic contractions don’t take holidays.

Daniel Hannan points out the obvious:

We tried to warn you. We said that the bail-out would fail. We pointed out that nationalisation never worked. We predicted that the seizure of the banks would be accompanied by heavy-handed state intervention in their procedures.

Sure enough, stock exchanges have continued to plummet, several banks (notably, as Ambrose reports, in Ireland) are looking for additional bail-outs, and the banks that have already been expropriated are being told by ministers how much to lend and to whom – which is, of course, precisely what caused the crisis in the first place. The next thing, no doubt, is that they will be told to meet the government’s ethnic quotas, to redistribute a proportion of accounts of more than £50,000 to customers with credit problems, and create a number of sinecures for prominent Labour supporters. That’s what happens in socialist economies.

No idea is so bad and fails so completely that you can’t find academics and politicians attempting to repeat it on the grounds of it having been insufficiently implemented.

I’m not surprised that someone should shoot himself after reading The God Delusion. The thought of suicide has to cross any intelligent individual’s mind upon reading it and realizing that there are literally hundreds of thousands of dim-witted individuals eligible to vote who genuinely believe TGD to be a masterpiece of science, philosophy, and reason rather than the insubstantial bit of intellectually fatuous, snipe-and-dodge evangelical atheism it actually is. Such a waste. It’s tragic to think that after reaching the correct logical conclusion to Dawkinsian moral logic, the unfortunate young man didn’t see fit to shoot the pretentious Archbishop of High Church Atheism first.

A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in college, to the anti-Christian book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it.

“He was pretty much an atheist, with no belief in the existence of God (in any form) or an afterlife or even in the concept of right or wrong,” the relative wrote. “I remember him telling me that he thought that murder wasn’t wrong per se, but he would never do it because of the social consequences – that was all there was – just social consequences.

“He mentioned the book he had been reading ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins and how it along with the science classes he had take[n] had eroded his faith.

Now, obviously the young man wasn’t particularly intelligent or he wouldn’t have found Dawkins’s shoddy logic and nonexistent scholarship to be the least bit convincing. But the possibility of this sort of thing happening is one of the reasons I wrote The Irrational Atheist – readers may recall my assertion that sociopathy and suicide are among the logical consequences of rational atheism – and arranged for free electronic copies of it to be made available to anyone who might like to peruse it. In fact, Dawkins and company really should embrace TIA; its exposure of their fallacious arguments just might save their lives from one of their pathetic young converts one day.

Why yes, I am enjoying the president-elect’s appointments. I can only imagine how much fun his actual administration is going to be!

Barack Obama’s selection of Eric Holder as his attorney general is a very discouraging sign for anyone who hoped the new administration would de-escalate the war on drugs. As Dave Weigel noted earlier today, Holder pushed for stiffer marijuana penalties when he was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia

Holder is seriously hard core on drugs. He believes it’s important to eradicate “marijuana violence”. And he’s right. Because when someone’s pizza delivery is sleazed by a baked dude with the munchies, government has to act!

Attn: Gov. Palin. The 2012 youth vote is now in play.

UPDATE – The anti-war Left were the next to feel the sharp kiss of Obama’s treacherous blade:
Antiwar groups and other liberal activists are increasingly concerned at signs that Barack Obama’s national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views on other important foreign policy issues.

It’s just not looking very good for the Keynesians these days, is it:

Dow 7,997.28 -427.47 -5.07%

S&P futures vs fair value: -8.60. Nasdaq futures vs fair value: -15.00.

Nothing goes straight up or straight down. There WILL be a rally coming soon. It’s more likely to kick off in the next two weeks than this week, but there will be a rally. However, don’t be misled by the cheerleaders into thinking that this is anything but a short-term bottom.

Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests it will never be successful in reducing male demand for female prostitution:

A brothel reputed to be the largest in Europe has been overwhelmed with interest after offering free entry for life to customers who have its name tattooed on their arm. The manager of Pascha, which houses more than 120 prostitutes across its 12 stories, did not expect any takers when he put up posters advertising the tongue-in-cheek promotion. But more than 40 men have already come forward to have the name inked onto their arm in large blue letters, and the brothel’s tattoo artist is having to work extra shifts to keep up with demand.

As Spacebunny likes to say, men are always proud of the wrong things… at least, the wrong things from a female perspective. So, you can expect that an anti-prostitution policy designed around reducing men’s demand for sex isn’t very likely to be viable. Considering the way in which criminal laws and fatal infectious diseases haven’t eliminated homosexuality over the last millenium, it’s rather optimistic, shall we say, to argue that the occasional $1,500 fine is going to have any impact at all on men’s demand for sex with women. The fine is still cheaper than a weekend trip to Hawaii.

Although I am not a consumer of paid sexual services myself, I am an adamant advocate of legal prostitution. It is not only the free market’s way of undermining the feminist political fascism that is destroying the West, it also happens to nicely highlight the fundamental absurdity of most atheist concepts of morality. That undermining is why the feminist Left is utterly obsessed with attempting to stamp out “sex slavery”. As usual, the feminist position is logically incoherent; they attempt to argue that while paid sex between adults can and should be subject to government control, unpaid sex between children cannot and should not be.

Never forget that legality is not morality. The only thing that has ever prevented prostitution from becoming a part of mainstream Western culture is its Christian moral tradition, not the laws that sprang from that tradition. Secular culture, which has no broadly applicable moral tradition and rejects the application of Christian morality to sexual matters, has no rational basis for objecting to prostitution; one thing atheists who so admire European secularism seldom see fit to mention is the way in which brothels, call girls, and roadside hookers are a normal part of the Old World landscape.

Men will always pay for sex in one way or another. Many young women will always find it easier and more to their liking to earn a living through their sexual capital than by working in any of the more conventional labor markets. And the Iron Law of Supply and Demand will always trump the best legal efforts of politicians and societal reconstructionists.

Yet another data point in support of his mantra:

Flight controllers were revamping plans Wednesday for the remaining spacewalks planned during space shuttle Endeavour’s visit to the international space station, after a crucial tool bag floated out to space during a repair trip. The briefcase-sized tool bag drifted away from astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper on Tuesday as she cleaned and lubed a gummed-up joint on a wing of solar panels on the space station. She and fellow astronaut Stephen Bowen were midway through the first of four spacewalks planned for the mission. The tool bag was one of the largest items ever lost by a spacewalker….

“What it boils down to is all it takes is one small mistake for a tether not to be hooked up quite correctly or to slip off, and that’s what happened here,” said lead spacewalk officer John Ray. Stefanyshyn-Piper and Bowen finished the spacewalk in almost seven hours by sharing tools from Bowen’s bag. Ray noted that Stefanyshyn-Piper showed “real character and great discipline” by continuing on. She was the first woman to be assigned as lead spacewalker for a shuttle flight.

I can’t help but note that Miz Steffy-Pie is rather ahead of the game when compared with the usual female first. She didn’t actually manage to kill herself.

Jerry and I will be discussing it again at 4 PM Eastern. You are welcome to listen if you like.

Steve Sailer proves that George Bush’s fingers are all over the mortgage meltdown by quoting a 2004 White House press release:

As part of President Bush’s ongoing effort to help American families achieve the dream of homeownership, Federal Housing Commissioner John C. Weicher today announced that HUD is proposing to offer a “zero down payment” mortgage, the most significant initiative by the Federal Housing Administration in over a decade. This action would help remove the greatest barrier facing first-time homebuyers – the lack of funds for a down payment on a mortgage.

This doesn’t absolve Democrats like Barney Frank from their own culpability in creating the crisis, instead, it demonstrates the ongoing problem with America’s left-leaning bifactional ruling party. And the fact that there are a few reliable Republicans who still stand strongly for limited government doesn’t relieve the Republican leaders in the White House, House, and Senate of their responsibility for the party’s absolutely abysmal performance of the last eight years.

On a related note, George Will notices that the GOP hasn’t exactly been shy about “spreading the wealth”:

America can’t have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans — whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm — and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called “the private sector” has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be “spread around.”

How long will it be before the first call for a UN Navy begin?

Somali pirates struck again yesterday, seizing an Iranian cargo ship holding 30,000 tonnes of grain, as the world’s governments and navies pronounced themselves powerless against this new threat to global trade. Admiral Michael Mullen, the US military chief, pronounced himself stunned by the pirates’ reach after their capture of the supertanker Sirius Star and its $100 million (£70 million) cargo. Commanders from the US Fifth Fleet and from Nato warships in the area said that they would not intervene to retake the vessel. The Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, the owner of the ship, condemned the hijacking as an “outrageous act” that required international action.

Note that this is almost surely a false crisis. Numerous national navies have the capacity to deal quickly and easily with a single captured supertanker, however, under so-called “international law”, I don’t think they have the right to attack a vessel flying a foreign flag. The Saudis have only to offer payment to the French, the British, the Americans, or the Chinese, and the matter could be quickly resolved. One wonders, then, why they are not doing so, and are instead calling for the ever-nebulous “international action”.