THE MILBAT WEBLOG

The Euro: A Weak Federalist Currency

2003-08-11T02:24:00.000-05:00

The euro currency is the jewel in the crown of European Union federalism. But now France looks set to smash the rules underpinning the euro with a budget deficit as high as four percent of its GDP. (The EU Stability Pact allows only three percent.)

In Sweden, a Euro Referendum is to be held in September. And it looks like the federalists will be on the losing side. If Swedes say no to the euro, Brits might follow. That would mean a major setback for the federalists.

And that’s not all. The silver strips on small euro notes are wearing away after heavy usage, causing innocent people to be accused of forgery, reports German tabloid Bild.

The Week That Was

2003-08-08T04:24:00.000-05:00

Monday Novak On the Wall

Tuesday Sullum: The Case of the Overlooked Cook

Wednesday Remembering Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Thursday Wolfowitz: Iraq Not Involved in 9-11

Friday Marcus Epstein: Heroic Merle Haggard Attacks War, Defends Dixie Chicks

The Anarcho-Capitalist Alternative

2003-08-07T04:22:00.000-05:00

Support the new Mises Institute project: A book about the alternative to the Warfare State. From Lew Rockwell's memorandum:

"We want to publish a book that is a first in the entire history of ideas. In the last 500 years, since the discovery of economics as a science, our forebears have made great strides in applying market logic to almost every area of human endeavor."

"Now we want to address the one area that has been exempt: foreign policy and national defense. Indeed, the title of the book is The Myth of National Defense. The editor is Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the economist who caused an international uproar with his last book on democracy (demonstrating that it is not all it is cracked up to be)."

"The Myth of National Defense may be the only fundamental challenge big government receives in this area in our lifetimes. Or it may spark an intellectual revolution. Won’t you help us publish it?"

"Editing, printing, binding, and distributing (especially to the students who are interested) will cost us $30,000. Please consider making a generous tax-deductible contribution to this work. And those who can give $500 or more will be listed, with their approval, in the book as among the benefactors who made it possible."

Tax Resistance

2003-08-07T02:43:00.000-05:00

The Whiskey Rebellion broke out in Pennsylvania on this very day, August 7, 1794. Read Murray Rothbard's The Whiskey Rebellion: A Model for Our Time:

"The entire American back-country was gripped by a non-violent, civil disobedient refusal to pay the hated tax on whiskey. No local juries could be found to convict tax delinquents. The Whiskey Rebellion was actually widespread and successful, for it eventually forced the federal government to repeal the excise tax."

Bollywood in Berlin

2003-08-06T06:30:00.000-05:00

Netaji: The Last Hero is expected to be a blockbuster when it opens in India early next year. The film traces the life of an Indian freedom fighter backed by Hitler.

This will prove difficult for the PC crowd. "A Third World Guru? That's good. And it's always nice to see that not all successful films are made in Hollywood. On friendly terms with Hitler, you say? Oh, dear …"

The Downing Street Smear-Fest

2003-08-05T08:03:00.000-05:00

From The Independent today:

"Downing Street engaged in a frantic damage-limitation exercise as colleagues of Dr Kelly accused the Government of sinking to a new low so close to his funeral tomorrow, and said his family was hurt and appalled at the attempt to portray him as a fantasist."

The Vatican Says Yes

2003-08-04T08:04:00.000-05:00

The Vatican has "stunned opponents of genetically modified foods" by declaring that GM-crops hold the answer to world starvation and malnutrition. An article in The Times today (only available to subscribers, unfortunately) says a forthcoming Vatican study will argue that the future of humanity is at stake and that there is no room for the argument advanced by environmentalists that "nature is good and man is bad."

This could mean a lot for the debate in EU-countries like Germany and France, where anti-GM green sentiments have prevailed so far.

Heritage Says: "America First!" (Almost)

2003-08-01T03:09:00.000-05:00

Who would have thought it? Words of wisdom from The Heritage Foundation. Well, sort of, anyway:

"The news that President Bush has ordered three warships with some 2,500 marines to the waters off the coast of Liberia in West Africa creates an uneasy sense of déjà vu."

"At a time when we are fighting the war on terrorism, U.S. troop deployments should be focused on American national security needs. Right now, that means Iraq, Afghanistan, and it may come to mean North Korea as well. This is not the time to return to experimenting with military humanitarianism."

Liberty & Power

2003-07-31T03:17:00.000-05:00

New Group Blog on HNN: Liberty & Power. Among the bloggers: David T. Beito, Ivan Eland, David M. Hart, Thomas Fleming, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.

Government Is Guns

2003-07-31T02:51:00.000-05:00

Thoreau did it. And now Priscilla Adams. She has refused to pay her federal taxes and owes the government more than $42,000.

Nationally an estimated 8,000 Americans avoid paying some or all of their federal income taxes because of their political beliefs, often because they oppose military spending, according to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

Thoreau really captured the inner contradiction of taxation in the name of security and liberty:

"When I have not paid the tax which the state demanded for that protection which I did not want, itself has robbed me; when I have asserted the liberty it presumed to declare, itself has imprisoned me."

Taxation and war go together. "Government," as Rose Wilder Lane wrote, "is guns."

Nixon Did It

2003-07-30T08:32:00.000-05:00

Former campaign aide Jeb Stuart Magruder says in a documentary for PBS that he heard Nixon's voice on a telephone as the president instructed John Mitchell to go ahead with the break-in. From The Salt Lake Tribune:

"Thirty years after the Senate Select Committee hearings on Watergate riveted the nation and doomed the Nixon presidency, a key figure in the scandal claims to have a fresh and explosive revelation: President Nixon personally ordered the burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex."

Nosing Around

2003-07-29T03:27:00.000-05:00

Happy people are three times less likely to get a cold, according to researchers who squirted cold virus up the noses of volunteers. The team also assessed how people who did catch a cold coped with the symptoms:

"This involved collecting the tissues used by volunteers to blow their noses and weighing them, to calculate the amount of mucus each person produced."

Hope Dead

2003-07-28T08:48:00.000-05:00

Bob Hope is dead. A note from CNN:

"In 1997, Congress named Hope an honorary U.S. veteran, citing his decades of entertaining troops around the world. He is the only person to receive that distinction."

Troops around the world -- that says something about the state of the union, doesn't it? A great comedian is gone. The Empire remains.

Off the Beam

2003-07-28T05:56:00.000-05:00

A realistic plan for world peace? Right …

And the Winner Is … Hong Kong! (Again)

2003-07-25T02:53:00.000-05:00

Hong Kong is the most economically free country in the world, followed by Singapore, the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Says a report from The Fraser Institute.

”Bye-bye Bismarck”

2003-07-25T02:52:00.000-05:00

The German object lesson.

Global Warming? In Your Dreams!

2003-07-24T06:19:00.000-05:00

Chilling statement from BBC science editor:

”Warm periods between ice ages typically last about 10,000 years. As it has been about 12,000 years since the end of the last glacial period, identifying the signs of a forthcoming ice age is important.”

Web Gem: Library of Economics and Liberty

2003-07-23T08:17:00.000-05:00

I suspect you have seen some of the books published by Liberty Fund. But have you visited the online library? Well, you ought to. It is really quite impressive. If you are a libertarian or a classical liberal, you will find works by some of your favorite authours, plus many great books and essays you never knew existed.

If you have not read Gustave de Molinari -- the father of anarcho-capitalism -- recently, maybe The Society of To-morrow would be a good starting point. His reflections on the state, war and peace are well worth reading these bellicose days. As Hodgson Pratt notes in the introduction, Molinari’s ”demonstration of the certain ruin impending over the most civilised states, in consequence of vast and growing military expenditure and the policy of annexation, is convincing, and deserves universal attention.”

JFK Will Cost You an Arm and a Leg

2003-07-22T08:22:00.000-05:00

Reuters reports that an online bidder for a personal JFK notebook used during the 1960 Presidential campaign thought her winning bid was for $2,250, not the actual high bid of $22,500.

Hunting Naked Women for Fun and Profit

2003-07-21T06:32:00.000-05:00

A Las Vegas company claims to offer men a chance to stalk and shoot naked women in the Nevada desert with paintball guns. Women's groups and government agencies are said to be scrambling to find a way to shut down such "Bambi" hunts.

Fascinating. I did not know there was such a strict dress code for paintball. I can understand why it is appropriate to be decently dressed for a game of golf. But a paintball fight out in the desert somewhere?

Running Out of Army

2003-07-21T04:31:00.000-05:00

The president seems to be running out of army. U.S. forces are in Germany, South Korea, Japan, Colombia, the Philippines, Eastern Europe, Bosnia, Kosovo, the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Gulf. U.S. troops are also being requested for Liberia.

"Something has to give," writes Pat Buchanan. "It is going to be the empire. We are at or close to high tide now. From here on, it begins to recede. Either President Bush starts discarding imperial responsibilities we cannot carry, and bringing the troops home, or his successor will."

The Man Who Knew Too Much?

2003-07-18T10:12:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, Dr David Kelly denied being the BBC's main source for a story claiming the Blair government had "sexed up" a dossier about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He appeared before the Commons foreign affairs committee on Tuesday.

Today he was found dead.

New Home For OIAC

2003-07-18T04:19:00.000-05:00

My occasional journal, ONE IS A CROWD, has finally found a new home and a better layout.

Something Rotten in the State of Denmark

2003-07-17T04:41:00.000-05:00

Some may not have noticed that Denmark was also a part of the US coalition in Gulf War II. The Danish government decided to send a submarine and a corvette to participate in the war against Iraq. It remains unclear whether this contributed significantly to the success of the desert campaign.

For the Danes, however, the war effort was a matter of some importance. Now the backlash has hit the small Scandinavian country. Opposition politicians demand proof for government assertions that Saddam Hussein had ties to organised terror.

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen has made repeated reference to Saddam's terror ties. On the very day that the Danish parliament passed its resolution to deploy troops and equipment, the PM stated that "Saddam Hussein has had blatant ties to terrorists, and possibly still does."

"This allegation has never been substantiated," notes the Ritzau news agency. "The UN's Counter Terrorism Committee actually discredited the allegation, concluding after the war that there was no evidence of ties between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaida terror network."

There is also the issue of WMD:s, of course. Foreign Minister Per Stig Møller seems actually to have apologized for his previous assertion that Chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix claimed Saddam Hussein had hidden his illegal weapons arsenal:

"I heard that he'd said so on the morning news, and if he did not indeed say it, then I must certainly apologize for forwarding inaccurate information. I am not able to review the tape," Møller said on Wednesday, after a meeting of the Danish parliament's Foreign Policy Committee.

LRC Today

2003-07-16T10:14:00.000-05:00

Read my article Peace Party Fellow Travellers at LRC today.

Guys & Dolls

2003-07-16T03:03:00.000-05:00

According to Simone de Beauvoir's famous dictum, "One is not born a woman but rather becomes one." But science – or at least Psychology Today – says otherwise:

"Males and females, it turns out, are different from the moment of conception, and the difference shows itself in every system of body and brain."

Not PC? Perhaps. But ignoring la différence could prove to be a costly mistake:

"Everyone gains from the new imperative to explore sex differences. When we know why depression favors women two to one, or why the symptoms of heart disease literally hit women in the gut, it will change our understanding of how our bodies and our minds work."

Corporations in a Free Society

2003-07-15T10:32:00.000-05:00

"Liberty means responsibility," George Bernard Shaw wrote. "That is why most men dread it." But why should individuals be able to evade responsibility for their actions by hiding behind a piece of legal fiction? Read Bob Murphy on limited liability corporations at Anti-state.com. Some very good points there.

War For Oil, One More Time

2003-07-15T08:06:00.000-05:00

I will have to get a copy of that new book anounced on WorldNetDaily, even if that website is not exactly my favorite fountainhead of wisdom. Crude Politics by Paul Sperry will be available for shipping the second week of August. It sounds promising (though I don’t think that the war was moral or necessary, of course):

"Crude Politics: How Bush's Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism makes the unsettling case that the Bush administration, though engaged in an unavoidable and moral war on terror, also tried simultaneously to secure future energy production in the terrorists' home turf and ended up compromising America's national security interests."

Spying for Freedom

2003-07-14T09:48:00.000-05:00

Claire Wolfe may have had a point when she wrote that it is too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. So what is one to do? Well, there is always the possibility of becoming a spy for freedom.

The Government Information Awareness (GIA) provides a "framework for US citizens to construct and analyze a comprehensive database on our government." The mission:

"To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America."

Divided From Day One

2003-07-14T03:18:00.000-05:00

A 25-member "governing council" for Iraq met for the first time Sunday, July 13. At a "rowdy press conference" the same day the council's representatives appeared "broadly divided on the subject of the coalition presence in Iraq," according to The Financial Times (July 14):

"Disagreement on this fundamental issue raged between Abdel Aziz al Hakim, representing the Iran-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress. Mr al Hakim referred to the coalition as occupiers while Mr Chalabi insisted they were liberators."

Un-American Acts

2003-07-11T03:29:00.000-05:00

From The Economist today:

"Mr Bush could have asked Congress to pass new anti-terrorism laws. Instead, he is setting up a shadow court system outside the reach of either Congress or America's judiciary, and answerable only to himself. Such a system is the antithesis of the rule of law which the United States was founded to uphold."

Lincoln & Liberia

2003-07-10T03:32:00.000-05:00

A special US-Liberia relationship? You bet. And it is not a pretty picture. Read what Thomas J. DiLorenzo has to say about it:

"As for Lincoln, Liberia was his first choice for the eventual deportation (a word he used) of all black people from the U.S."

Molinari Update

2003-07-09T10:49:00.000-05:00

The market anarchist Molinari Institute now has its own Yahoo discussion group. To join, send an email to molinari-institute-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Juan de Mariana in English

2003-07-09T04:30:00.000-05:00

I recently discovered that A Treatise on the Alteration of Money by Juan de Mariana, S.J., is now available online. Mariana's position was that the "king, having no right to tax his subjects without their consent, had no right to lower the weight or quality of the coinage without their acquiescence."

Juan de Mariana was one of the great heroes in Rothbard's treatment of the history of economics before Adam Smith. Mariana's argument that power derives from the people provided justification for tyrannicide. And this was long before the days of John Locke and Algernon Sidney. Mariana was read by the Founding Fathers --Thomas Jefferson recommended Mariana's History of Spain to James Madison.

Transatlantic Row

2003-07-08T10:12:00.000-05:00

Britain seems to have joined Old Europe. The US is facing a diplomatic dispute with its closest transatlantic ally. The UK has expressed "strong reservations" about US plans to try two of its citizens imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay before military tribunals.

And that's not all. The European Commission has indicated that the death penalty for any of the detainees at the Guantanamo Base would undermine international support for the US-led war on terrorism.

EUobserver: Fresh Transatlantic Row Looms

Liberia no threat to American security

2003-07-08T08:18:00.000-05:00

"The U.S. created Liberia," notes Jesse Walker, "and has a long, unpleasant history of sending both soldiers and aid to its shores; whatever else might be said of that involvement, it hasn't stabilized the country yet."

Reason online: Into Africa - How Iraq begat Liberia