January 10, 2005

Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
By Murray N. Rothbard

The Conservative has long been marked, whether he knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that the long-run trend, and therefore Time itself, is against him, and hence the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism at home and Communism abroad. It is this long-run despair that accounts for the Conservative's rather bizarre short-run optimism; for since the long run is given up as hopeless, the Conservative feels that his only hope of success rests in the current moment. In foreign affairs, this point of view leads the Conservative to call for desperate showdowns with Communism, for he feels that the longer he waits the worse things will ineluctably become; at home, it leads him to total concentration on the very next election, where he is always hoping for victory and never achieving it. The quintessence of the Practical Man, and beset by long-run despair, the Conservative refuses to think or plan beyond the election of the day.

(Editor's Note: This is one of the best, most encouraging articles I've read in a very long time! It is important reading for anyone who is becoming discouraged about the prospects for liberty in our country. Read and rejoice - then get back to work making it happen! MamaLiberty) (Read the rest here)

Tsunami Aid: Not Theirs to Give
By Sheldon Richman

The devastating earthquake-induced tidal waves in Asia are the latest reminders that Mother Nature can be a mass killer. It’s worth contemplating that the societies that interfere most with nature — the rich, market-oriented industrial societies — are the least vulnerable to her ravages. That’s not what the environmentalists would have us believe; but there it is. You could look it up.

This won’t seem the appropriate time to point this out, but the money President George W. Bush is generously promising to deliver to the tsunami victims is not his to give. I don’t know exactly what you call someone who freely gives out other people’s money, but “generous” is not the word. Presumptuous, maybe.

President Bush has no proper authority to send even a penny to the victims. On the other hand, the American people, individually, have every authority to send as much of their own money as they wish. They started doing so the moment they grasped the immensity of the disaster. Undoubtedly, they would do more if government weren’t doing it for them. They’d also have more money with which to be generous if government at all levels didn’t take so much of their incomes. (Read the rest here)

Libertarian Commentary on The News
By Nathan A. Barton © 2004

This weekend, we have a fascinating array of news, including a lot that just turns my stomach, as a Christian, a libertarian, a father, and a soldier. Like the last century, this century is turning into one in which governments (or people wanting to be governments) kill more people than ever before, and in which it is essential that individual people wake up to the fact that their only hope of survival for them and their families is to regain and exercise their God-given liberty.
Today, more than usual, the opinions and views expressed are my own, and not necessarily that of TPoL, FND, or anyone else.

South Asia tragedy
I start this section today with an odd item - trying to track down news that suddenly became “un-news.”

Indonesia, Thailand given prompt warning of undersea quake
Observer (UK)
NOTE: The original headline and story appeared on www.spacewar.com yesterday, with this url: http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050106143427.rwjc5sjk.html However, for some “unexplained” reason, that web page is “no longer available.” A search for the story elsewhere turned up several “no longer available” pages and this article from a British paper on Sunday.

As dawn came up over Thailand's west coast, Prayoon Damrongsiri was quarreling with his son. The 47-year-old fisherman had just received a phone call from his daughter, who worked in the country's meteorological department. She had told him that a seismic monitoring station had picked up series of irregular shifts in the seabed, of a type that could cause giant waves. Prayoon did not want to go out to sea. But, as his son argued that there had been no tidal waves for decades, they set off into the Indian Ocean anyway - though he headed out to deep water, just to be on the safe side. It was a wise decision. An hour earlier, thousands of miles away, Barry Hirshorn, a geologist at the Pacific Tsunami Centre in Honolulu had heard his pager go off. It told him of alerts from two far-apart seismic monitoring stations, meaning that whatever 'event' had just occurred was big. He rushed to his office. A colleague was already sitting at a terminal in the operations room, staring at the thick blue seismic lines scrolling across the screen, trying to pinpoint the location of the earthquake. At 3:14pm local time, 08.14 GMT, and 15 minutes after the earthquake struck, Hirshorn and his colleagues issued a routine bulletin - which went to 26 Pacific nations - announcing an 'event' off the northern coast of Sumatra with a magnitude of 8.0. Within the hour, a new bulletin revised it upwards - 8.5. This, the men at the Honolulu centre realized, was huge. Out in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Thailand, Prayoon and his son lowered their nets, entirely unaware of what was heading towards them.

Although I can’t find the whole story, it appears that at least TWO warnings of a massive undersea quake, of the type to cause tsunamis, were sent by various agencies to at least the two nations hardest hit by the catastrophe - however, these government types failed to act in any way to alert their citizens and visitors, although some (like the lady in the extract from the story) saw fit to warn relatives. In other words, these governments, by their incompetence and inaction, allowed thousands of people who COULD have survived the initial wave to be killed. Reduced to its most simple terms, once more, we see that “government kills. (Read the rest of the Commentary here)

FICAA.com Presents: The American Jury Hour with Iloilo Marguerite Jones and guests. Heard on The American Voice Radio Network , Thursday Afternoons, Noon Pacific, 1PM Mountain. The weekend rebroadcast of this week's program is at Sunday at 9:00 PM. .

Heard on The American Voice Radio Network American Voice Radio Network can be heard on:

C-Band Satellite at Galaxy 11 (formerly G-7), Transponder 12, Audio 8.1 Internet Streaming Audio (MP3 16kbps) C-Band and Internet Audio feeds are free with no subscription fee or sign up required whatsoever. (Read the rest here)

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