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Ludwig von Mises on War

Ludwig von Mises on War

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The New Renaissance Hat
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
April 15, 2014
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The following are quotations on war by Ludwig von Mises (1881– 1973), who was the leading economist of the Austrian School. This list was first published as an article on the Mises Institute website and subsequently published on Le Québécois Libre.
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History has witnessed the failure of many endeavors to impose peace by war, cooperation by coercion, unanimity by slaughtering dissidents……. A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets. (Omnipotent Government, p. 7)  
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War……is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror. Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys. (Socialism, p. 59)

The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging commodities and services, fight one another. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 817 ; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 821)  
  
Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 152) 
  
The market economy means peaceful cooperation and peaceful exchange of goods and services. It cannot persist when wholesale killing is the order of the day. (Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, p. 67)  
  
[A]ggressors cannot wage total war without introducing socialism. (Interventionism: an Economic Analysis, p. 70) 
  
War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. The earthquake means good business for construction workers, and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 154)  
  
War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 154) 
  
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 77) 
  
Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace. (Liberalism, p. 44) 
  
Wars, foreign and domestic (revolutions, civil wars), are more likely to be avoided the closer the division of labor binds men. (Critique of Interventionism, p. 115) 
  
Modern war is not a war of royal armies. It is a war of the peoples, a total war. It is a war of states which do not leave to their subjects any private sphere; they consider the whole population a part of the armed forces. Whoever does not fight must work for the support and equipment of the army. Army and people are one and the same. The citizens passionately participate in the war. For it is their state, their God, who fights. (Omnipotent Government, p. 104)  
  
The existence of the armaments industries is a consequence of the warlike spirit, not its cause. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 297; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 300)  
  
What basis for war could there still be, once all peoples had been set free? (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 34) 
  
The statement that one man’s boon is the other man’s damage is valid with regard to robbery, war, and booty. The robber’s plunder is the damage of the despoiled victim. But war and commerce are two different things. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 662; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 666)  
  
It is certainly true that our age is full of conflicts which generate war. However, these conflicts do not spring from the operation of the unhampered market society. It may be permissible to call them economic conflicts because they concern that sphere of human life which is, in common speech, known as the sphere of economic activities. But it is a serious blunder to infer from this appellation that the source of these conflicts are conditions which develop within the frame of a market society. It is not capitalism that produces them, but precisely the anticapitalistic policies designed to check the functioning of capitalism. They are an outgrowth of the various governments’ interference with business, of trade and migration barriers and discrimination against foreign labor, foreign products, and foreign capital. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 680; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 684)  
  
What has transformed the limited war between royal armies into total war, the clash between peoples, is not technicalities of military art, but the substitution of the welfare state for the laissez-faire state. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 820; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 824) 

Under laissez-faire peaceful coexistence of a multitude of sovereign nations is possible. Under government control of business it is impossible. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 820; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 824)  
  
Of course, in the long run war and the preservation of the market economy are incompatible. Capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 824; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 828)  
  
What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really means is that war and high civilization are incompatible. If the efficiency of capitalism is directed by governments toward the output of instruments of destruction, the ingenuity of private business turns out weapons which are powerful enough to destroy everything. What makes war and capitalism incompatible with one another is precisely the unparalleled efficiency of the capitalist mode of production. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 824; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 828)  
  
Modern war is merciless, it does not spare pregnant women or infants; it is indiscriminate killing and destroying. It does not respect the rights of neutrals. Millions are killed, enslaved, or expelled from the dwelling places in which their ancestors lived for centuries. Nobody can foretell what will happen in the next chapter of this endless struggle. This has little to do with the atomic bomb. The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest. It is probable that scientists will discover some methods of defense against the atomic bomb. But this will not alter things, it will merely prolong for a short time the process of the complete destruction of civilization. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 828; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 832)  
  
To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 828; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 832)  
  
Social development is always a collaboration for joint action; the social relationship always means peace, never war. Death-dealing actions and war are anti-social. All those theories which regard human progress as an outcome of conflicts between human groups have overlooked this truth. (Socialism, p. 279) 
  
But what is needed for a satisfactory solution of the burning problem of international relations is neither a new office with more committees, secretaries, commissioners, reports, and regulations, nor a new body of armed executioners, but the radical overthrow of mentalities and domestic policies which must result in conflict. (Omnipotent Government, p. 6) 
  
For only in peace can the economic system achieve its ends, the fullest satisfaction of human needs and wants. (Omnipotent Government, p. 50) 
  
If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed. (Omnipotent Government, p. 122) 
  
If you want to abolish war, you must eliminate its causes. What is needed is to restrict government activities to the preservation of life, health, and private property, and thereby to safeguard the working of the market. Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone, whether citizen or foreigner. (Omnipotent Government, p. 138)  
  
Only one thing can conquer war – that liberal attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation, and which can never wish to bring about a war, because it regards war as injurious even to the victors. (Theory of Money and Credit, p. 433) 
  
The first condition for the establishment of perpetual peace is, of course, the general adoption of the principles of laissez-faire capitalism. (The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science p. 137) 
  
He who wants to prepare a lasting peace must……be a free-trader and a democrat and work with decisiveness for the removal of all political rule over colonies by a mother country and fight for the full freedom of movements of persons and goods. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 86) 
  
Liberalism rejects aggressive war not on philanthropic grounds but from the standpoint of utility. It rejects aggressive war because it regards victory as harmful, and it wants no conquests because it sees them as an unsuitable means for reaching the ultimate goals for which it strives. Not through war and victory but only through work can a nation create the preconditions for the well-being of its members. Conquering nations finally perish, either because they are annihilated by strong ones or because the ruling class is culturally overwhelmed by the subjugated. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 87)  
  
Whoever on ethical grounds wants to maintain war permanently for its own sake as a feature of relations among peoples must clearly realize that this can happen only at the cost of the general welfare, since the economic development of the world would have to be turned back at least to the state of the year 1830 to realize this martial ideal even only to some extent. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 151) 
  
The losses that the national economy suffers from war, apart from the disadvantages that exclusion from world trade entails, consist of the destruction of goods by military actions, of the consumption of war material of all kinds, and of the loss of productive labor that the persons drawn into military service would have rendered in their civilian activities. Further losses from loss of labor occur insofar as the number of workers is lastingly reduced by the number of the fallen and as the survivors become less fit in consequence of injuries suffered, hardships undergone, illnesses suffered, and worsened nutrition. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 151 – 52)  
  
There are circumstances which make the consumption of capital unavoidable. A costly war cannot be financed without such a damaging measure….There may arise situations in which it may be unavoidable to burn down the house to keep from freezing, but those who do that should realize what it costs and what they will have to do without later on. (Interventionism: an Economic Analysis, p. 52) 
  
It is not the war profits of the entrepreneurs that are objectionable. War itself is objectionable! (Interventionism: an Economic Analysis, p. 74)
War is the Worst Choice for Ukraine and the World – Article by G. Stolyarov II

War is the Worst Choice for Ukraine and the World – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
April 14, 2014
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As I write this, people have already been killed in the confrontation between pro-Putin militants of the self-proclaimed “Republic of Donetsk” in Eastern Ukraine and the “anti-terrorist” forces sent by the interim Ukrainian government to suppress the insurgents. (Calling them “rebels”, “separatists”, “militants”, even “provocateurs” may be legitimate – but the use of the label “terrorist” here only further eviscerates any meaning that term once had in referring to people who deliberately kill civilians to make a political or ideological point.) It is not precisely clear what is happening on the ground – who is prevailing, and who is responsible for the initiation of force. What is clear, however, is that a deadly tragedy may be about to occur – unless reason, common sense, and every longing for peace and civilization are marshaled against it.

I have no love for Vladimir Putin or his regime. He is clearly an authoritarian despot, with little respect for the rights of his own people or those of others. He will pursue an agenda of personal power and aggrandizement through nationalistic rhetoric and attempts to rekindle the alleged glory of Imperial and Soviet Russia. Yet, despotic as he may be, one would hope that Putin is not suicidally stupid. It was one matter to seize control of Crimea, with its majority Russian-speaking population and popular support for annexation by Russia. Occupying the rest of Ukraine – in which even many ethnic Russians have no enthusiasm for union with Russia – is another matter entirely. A protracted occupation of Ukraine, amidst an unsympathetic populace – to say the least! – would bog down the Russian military and imperil an already precarious economic situation.  It would also risk the lives of many Russian soldiers in a prolonged partisan uprising, much like the one that the Soviet regime had to deal with for decades in Ukraine during the last century.  A reasonable person would hope that Putin recognizes this and does not stray from his characteristic modus operandi – which, however ruthless, is nonetheless marked by caution and pragmatic calculation.

Until the uprisings that led to the declaration of the “Republic of Donetsk”, it seemed to me that Putin’s conduct of “military training exercises” on Ukraine’s Eastern border was a strategic bluff. While the cover of military exercises affords Putin plausible deniability, he could also sincerely agree to withdraw the troops in subsequent negotiations, in exchange for the West’s recognition of the legitimacy of the Crimea annexation and a more loosely federated Ukraine. If Putin had pursued this approach, he would have likely gotten away with annexing Crimea after nothing worse than some griping and minor sanctions levied by Western governments.

Yet it is now unclear whether the separatist uprisings in the Donetsk region were orchestrated by provocateurs employed by Putin’s regime (as many in the Ukrainian government and foreign-policy hawks in the West allege), or whether they largely arose from local Russian nationalists who were inspired by the Crimea annexation and sought to repeat it in Eastern Ukraine (as many of the separatists do appear to be ordinary civilians). Nonetheless, Putin’s regime has officially endeavored to maintain plausible deniability – which means that an escalation of military force against the separatists by the Ukrainian government would give Putin exactly the pretext he would need to invade Eastern Ukraine, if that is indeed his goal.

The “anti-terrorist” operation by the Ukrainian government of President Oleksandr Turchynov and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk is – like any attempt by Putin to even consider an invasion of Eastern Ukraine – an act of suicidal folly. Not only do Turchynov and Yatseniuk undermine their own legitimacy in the eyes of Eastern Ukrainians by treating their own citizens as “terrorists” (), they also create the actual war that they accuse Putin of fomenting! Logic suggests only two possibilities: either the separatists are Russian provocateurs, or they are not. If they are indeed Russian provocateurs, then Turchynov and Yatseniuk have effectively initiated hostilities against Russian forces. If the separatists are not Russian provocateurs, then Turchynov and Yatseniuk are deploying military and “counter-terrorist” forces against their own people, instead of dealing with any insurgent or criminal behaviors via the police and the civilian justice system. Either way, the Ukrainian government is not doing itself any favors and is itself engaged in dangerous brinksmanship, which, unless restraint wins the day, could cost the lives of at least thousands of innocent Ukrainian civilians.

If this crisis were merely an episode of competing follies between two Eastern European regimes, I might have left the matter at that. Unfortunately, prominent neoconservative war hawks such as John McCain and certain NATO generals, such as Supreme Allied Commander Philip Breedlove, remain unable to transcend the insane era of the Cold War, when the civilized world was never far from nuclear annihilation due to the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. They continue to call for “harsh” and “forceful” measures to be taken against Putin’s regime – whatever that means. Economic sanctions would, of course, be wholly counterproductive and would further impoverish Russian civilians, driving more of them, in desperation, to further embrace Putin’s nationalistic agenda. But military action of any sort by NATO or the United States would be an absolute calamity for human civilization – risking not just another cold war, but World War III between the world’s two major nuclear powers. Such a war would paralyze the progress of humankind for decades and lead to the eradication of much of the infrastructure needed to make comfortable, prosperous lives possible.

The neoconservative and NATO hawks are the Western mirror image of Putin’s nationalistic aggrandizement. They warn of the United States’ weakening image in foreign policy, of a perceived softness of the Obama administration’s response. They fear, in essence, a loss of American “national honor” and “national pride” if the United States were to withdraw from its role as global policeman and global human-rights enforcer. But they overlook the essential question: Why should the United States government be involved in the situation in Ukraine? There is no danger to American citizens, to whom the United States government’s duty of protection is owed, even in the worst-case scenario of Putin’s troops occupying all of Ukraine (which, as explained earlier, will not happen unless Putin is suicidally stupid). There is no compelling “national security” rationale of any sort for military or even extensive policy intervention in an area of the world separated from the United States by an ocean and most of the European continent!

The United States government is drowning in runaway debt, and the country is only beginning to recover from disastrous decade-long occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of American troops have been killed in the prior interventions of this millennium; tens of thousands more have come home physically and mentally scarred forever.  And the hawks want them to fight in yet another part of the world which most Americans understand nothing about, for no tangible gain, in the name of the geopolitical posturing of regimes whose leaders care not at all about them and will not bear a single physical cost of the massive killings, tortures, property destruction, and other atrocities that war inevitably brings with it? War is always fought at the behest of and for the benefit of corrupt, power-hungry leaders, and all the costs are always borne by innocent civilians and by very young armed men who know not what they fight for and who kill one another senselessly, even though they could have been good friends in other circumstances.

As the Wikileaks revelations about the conduct of some American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan showed the world, the US military is not uniquely righteous or humanitarian; torture, sadism, and perversity in the conduct of war marred the US military record, too.

The description of the horrors of war and the immense beneficence and moral imperative of peace by the great Renaissance humanist thinker Desiderius Erasmus is just as true today as it was in the early 16th century when these words were written:

Peace is at once the mother and the nurse of all that is good for man; war, on a sudden and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals. Peace shines upon human affairs like the vernal sun. The fields are cultivated, the gardens bloom, the cattle are fed upon a thousand hills, new buildings arise, riches flow, pleasures smile, humanity and charity increase, arts and manufactures feel the genial warmth of encouragement, and the gains of the poor are more plentiful.

But no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower, than what a deluge of miseries and misfortune seizes, inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action! The flocks are scattered, the harvest trampled, the husbandman butchered, villas and villages burnt, cities and states that have been ages rising to their flourishing state subverted by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war. So much easier is the task of doing harm than of doing good — of destroying than of building up!

As with the remarkable surge of grassroots opposition that prevented US intervention in Syria in 2013, it is time for the American public to vociferously denounce any military intervention in Ukraine. It is not surprising, as a recent Washington Post article highlighted, that “The less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want to intervene”! Education of Americans, not the inflammation of their zeal, should be the priority. The conflict in Ukraine today is a clash between two extremely ugly nationalisms – and ignorant neoconservative jingoists would add their own third flavor of nationalism to the mix. It is time for civilized individuals everywhere to reject all nationalism and all war. All of us humans – in Ukraine, Russia, the West, and everywhere else – face a choice for the next several decades. If we pursue the path of peace and non-intervention, we can become a spacefaring, cosmopolitan civilization. We are on the verge of major breakthroughs in life extension, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanoscale manufacturing, and ubiquitous, affordable energy. If we pursue the path of war, then humankind will instead become suffocated in the muck of jingoistic tribalism, with a promising future washed away by rivers of blood and consumed by an inferno of bombs.  The next few weeks will indicate which of these futures we face.

Norman Borlaug Saved a Billion Lives – Article by Bradley Doucet

Norman Borlaug Saved a Billion Lives – Article by Bradley Doucet

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The New Renaissance Hat
Bradley Doucet
April 13, 2014
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Wheat
A statue honouring Norman Borlaug was unveiled in DC earlier this week on what would have been the celebrated biologist’s 100th birthday. Borlaug’s work developing and promoting high-yield crop varieties is credited with averting the mass famines that were predicted in the 1960s and saving as many as a billion people in the developing world from starving to death. Yes, that’s “billion” with a “b.” In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his history-altering humanitarian efforts.
Born in Iowa in 1914, Borlaug lived through the Dust Bowl, whose effects he noticed were less severe where newer, high-yield farming methods were in use. In the 1940s, he went to work for the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico, teaching Mexican farmers the latest agricultural techniques and leading a research effort to perfect a high-yield, disease-resistant strain of wheat. In the 1960s, he moved to Pakistan and India, where he also successfully promoted the use of modern farming and high-yield wheat.

Yet this Green Revolution, as it came to be called, met with serious resistance from environmentalists, who to this day bemoan the need for inorganic fertilizers and industrial irrigation. Many greens promote the preservation of, and indeed a return to, traditional subsistence farming, even though it requires more land to grow an equivalent amount of food. Realistically, the choice humanity faces is between a) modern farming, b) razing our forests to make room for traditional farming, or c) mass starvation. And actually, without modern farming methods, razing our forests probably would not be enough to prevent mass starvation.

Thanks in part to the well-meaning but ill-conceived opposition of greens, the Green Revolution has barely begun to reach sub-Saharan Africa, the one part of the world where dire poverty is not hastily retreating. Thanks to too many people romanticizing traditional farming and demonizing modern agriculture, millions continue to suffer and die needlessly. As Borlaug himself once said, “Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Penn and Teller called Norman Borlaug “the greatest human that ever existed.” On his 100th birthday, let’s honour his unparalleled achievement by embracing agricultural technology and moving beyond simplistic and misleading fear-mongering. Let’s try to complete the glorious Green Revolution and spread prosperity across the globe—and save the world’s forests in the bargain.

Bradley Doucet is Le Québécois Libre‘s English Editor and the author of the blog Spark This: Musings on Reason, Liberty, and Joy. A writer living in Montreal, he has studied philosophy and economics, and is currently completing a novel on the pursuit of happiness. He also writes for The New Individualist, an Objectivist magazine published by The Atlas Society, and sings.
William James Sidis Biography – Video by Adam Alonzi

William James Sidis Biography – Video by Adam Alonzi

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The New Renaissance Hat
Adam Alonzi
April 4, 2014
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This video is an audio piece with a few pictures, a precursor to a larger collection of videos on history’s greatest geniuses, which Adam Alonzi has been planning for some time. The entire transcript can be found here.

Contribute to Mr. Alonzi’s Kickstarter project to fund his documentary series on history’s greatest geniuses. Just $500 of combined pledges can bring this highly promising series into being!

Note by Gennady Stolyarov II, Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator: I applaud this video – a good narrative with a thought-provoking message. What a shame that Sidis died so young and completely misunderstood by the general public – in spite of being intellectually active and immensely insightful all his life. Both in his time and now, people of exceptional brilliance are severely under-appreciated, as are attempts to push progress forward and extricate humanity out of the stagnation of mediocrity and the status quo.

I am a proud supporter of Mr. Alonzi’s Kickstarter campaign – and I encourage everyone to contribute to enable him to create his video series on genius. Any amount would help.

Adam Alonzi is the author of Praying for Death and A Plank in Reason. He is also a futurist, inventor, DIY enthusiast, biotechnologist, programmer, molecular gastronomist, consummate dilletante and columnist at The Indian Economist.

A Roman Coin from the 330s: The New Oldest Object in Mr. Stolyarov’s Possession

A Roman Coin from the 330s: The New Oldest Object in Mr. Stolyarov’s Possession

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G. Stolyarov II
March 22, 2014
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At the March 1, 2014, Transhuman Visions 2.0 conference in Piedmont, CA (where Wendy and I gave a presentation on Death is Wrong), I was pleased to meet Neal VanDeRee of The Church of Perpetual Life, an organization promoting the desirability of living without end and inspired by the philosophy of the great Russian Cosmist thinker Nikolai Fedorov (or Fyodorov – a better Anglicization of the Russian “Фёдоров”).

 Mr. VanDeRee organized a drawing of attendees’ business cards, for which the prize was an ancient Roman coin from the 4th century CE. I was thrilled to win the drawing, and I received my coin in the mail today. Here are images (scans on top, photographs on bottom) of both the front (obverse) and back (reverse) sides of the coin.

Mr. Stolyarov's Roman coin from Siscia (330s CE)

Some further research enabled Wendy and me to form a reasonably good understanding regarding the origins of this coin. The “SIS” letters on the bottom indicate that the coin was minted in Siscia (today, Sisak in Croatia), which housed a mint for roman coins between 262 and 383 CE. (Wendy and I are not yet in agreement as to whether the first letter is “A” or “B”. Wendy thinks it is an “A”, while I see a “B” because of the elevated ridge on the bottom of the letter. What do you think?)

This particular coin is a commemorative coin for the city of Constantinople, with a left-facing image of a helmeted emperor (likely Constantine I – Roman emperor from 306 to 337) on the obverse side and a winged Victory goddess with a spear and shield on the reverse side. Here and here are images of two highly similar coins, which are identified on the Dirty Old Coins website as dating from 330-333 CE and 334-335 CE, respectively. Another highly similar coin is listed here on the Portable Antiquities Scheme site from the United Kingdom. That coin is dated to 334-335 CE. Based on our research, Wendy and I are reasonably confident that our coin, too, dates to the 330s CE, prior to Constantine’s death.

In Death is Wrong, I wrote about an 1893 Indian head penny which I found in the hallways of my high school in 2004, when I was gathering spare change found in the “state of nature” in order to donate to the Methuselah Mouse Prize. I am happy to still have this object – older than any living human being today – in my coin collection. This Roman coin from the 330s, though, is older by an order of magnitude. It has existed for approximately 1680 years already, and it is certainly the oldest object I own. May it continue to exist indefinitely, and may all of us humans continue to live indefinitely also!

David Brooks, The Whigs, and Corporate Welfare – Article by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

David Brooks, The Whigs, and Corporate Welfare – Article by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

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The New Renaissance Hat
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
February 8, 2014

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In a January 30 column David Brooks, the house neoconservative of the New York Times, urged Obama to ignore both his socialist/egalitarian base and the “conservative tradition that believes in limiting government to enhance freedom.” Obama already has nothing but hateful contempt for the latter tradition and needs no convincing by a right-wing statist like David Brooks.

The president should also abandon his life-long infatuation with and devotion to socialism as well, advises David Brooks. In its place he should pursue an agenda of crony capitalism disguised as a “social mobility agenda” with the help of professional propagandists and perverters of American history such as Brooks and his fellow neoconservatives. Of course, Brooks doesn’t use these less-than-flattering words to describe his Machiavellian agenda. He talks of “a third ancient tradition” in American history, namely, “the Whig tradition, which begins with people like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln.”

Either Brooks knows nothing at all, whatsoever, about the Whig Party tradition in American history, or he is lying through his teeth about it. For he describes it as having been devoted to “using the power of government to give marginalized Americans the tools to compete in a capitalist economy.” The Whigs, says Brooks, “fought against the divisive populist Jacksonians” who supposedly sought to “pit classes against each other.” Every bit of this is exactly the opposite of the truth. The Whigs were the party of crony capitalism, of government of plutocracy, by the plutocracy, for the plutocracy. That is why so many historians have marveled over how a man like Abe Lincoln, who grew up so poor, would become the political water carrier for the Northeastern moneyed elite in American politics.

The most divisive economic issue in American politics during the heyday of the Whig Party (1832–1852) was the battle over free trade versus protectionism. If the Whigs stood for anything, they stood for corporate welfare in the form of high protectionist tariffs that would plunder the masses for the benefit of the few. This meant, for the most part, plundering Southern farmers more than anyone for the benefit of Northern manufacturers who would be protected from international competition by the high tariffs. As John C. Calhoun once said, what “protectionism” protects the public from is low prices. Next to slavery, protectionism was the biggest assault on property rights in America during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Whigs did not believe in “sacred” property rights, as Brooks foolishly writes. Their entire political agenda was based on the government-enforced attenuation of property rights for the benefit of the wealthy and politically-connected.

Next to political plunder through protectionism, the Whigs stood for the worst sort of crony capitalism in the form of needless corporate welfare for road-, canal-, and railroad-building corporations. This was euphemistically called “internal improvement subsidies” at the time. Private capital markets financed thousands of miles of private roads during the first decades of the nineteenth century. As of 1800 there were 69 privately-financed road-building companies in America that would build more than 400 private roads over the next 40 years, as economist Daniel Klein has documented. The great railroad entrepreneur James J. Hill also proved that government subsidies were not needed to build a transcontinental railroad as he and his investors and business partners built and managed the Great Northern Railroad without a dime of government subsidy, not even “land grants.”

When the Whigs did get their way and conned state government into funding “internal improvement subsidies”, it was an unmitigated financial disaster. Very few, if any, projects were ever finished; taxpayers were stuck with enormous government debts to pay off; much of the money was simply stolen; and by 1860 every state except for Massachusetts had amended its constitution to prohibit the use of tax dollars for corporations with which to do anything, according to economic historian Carter Goodrich.

Edgar Lee Masters, the famous 1930s-era poet, playwright (author of The Spoon River Anthology), and law partner of Clarence Darrow, perfectly described the Whig Party on page 27 of his book, Lincoln the Man. Describing the leader of the Whigs, Henry Clay, Masters wrote:

Clay was the champion of that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises. … He was the beloved son [figuratively speaking] of Alexander Hamilton with his corrupt funding schemes, his superstitions concerning the advantage of a public debt, and a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone. His example and doctrines led to the creation of a party that had no platform to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.

This is exactly correct, and exactly the opposite of what David Brooks wants his New York Times audience to believe. Clay’s agenda, which Alexander Hamilton originally labeled “The American System,” was really an Americanized version of the corrupt mercantilist system the American founders had fought a revolution against. The Hamilton/Clay/Lincoln “American System” included protectionism, corporate welfare, and a central bank to dispense even more corporate welfare subsidies to politically-connected businesses. It was a recipe for political power based on using taxpayer dollars to line the pockets of the (mostly Northern state) business plutocracy at the expense of the general public. Some things never change in a democracy.

It is equally outrageous for Brooks to claim that the Jacksonians were “divisive” and wanted to “pit classes against each other.” This was the function of David Brooks’s beloved Whigs, who were simply an early version of the neoconservatives; it was the libertarian Jacksonians who opposed politicized divisiveness and the pitting of classes against each other. This is exemplified in President Andrew Jackson’s famous veto of the re-chartering of the Second Bank of the United States, a precursor of the Fed.

The Whigs championed a central bank. The Bank of the United States (BUS) even paid both of Brooks’s heroes, Clay and Webster, many thousands of dollars as bribery money to promote the continuation of the bank despite the fact that it was well known that the BUS had corrupted politics and generated boom-and-bust cycles. In vetoing the re-chartering of the BUS (which was not overturned), Jackson wrote:

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. … In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by the law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. … In the act before me [the bill to re-charter the BUS] there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.

Neither Jackson nor the Jacksonians were “perfect” libertarians, but by their motto of “equal rights” they meant equality under the law and opposition to the use of the state to dispense “exclusive privileges” and special favors to special interests. They stood for exactly the opposite of what David Brooks claims they stood for, in other words.

Brooks’s commentary turns to slapstick humor at one point when he claims that the Whigs, who were, after all, politicians, were somehow “family-oriented in their moral and social attitudes.” (I assume that he threw this into his article to further dupe the “evangelical Christian” base of the Republican Party into accepting his thesis). The leader of the Whigs, the slave-owning Kentucky hemp plantation patriarch Henry Clay, was indeed “family oriented” in that he had 11 children. But he was also a notorious gambler who rang up $40,000 in personal debt in the 1820s and was famous for staying out late carousing and dancing with women other than his wife while he was in Washington and the wife was back home in Kentucky, according to several biographies.

Armed with this absurdly false history of American politics, Brooks argues for an explosion of governmental central planning by Obama during the rest of his term. He wants Obama to employ “social entrepreneurs” to fundamentally transform American society by “improving family patterns,” expanding early childhood education, “structuring neighborhoods,” paying “young men wage subsidies so they are worth marrying,” training “middle-aged workers” for jobs, and generally micromanaging everyone’s life from cradle to grave. In his words, government should promote “[social] mobility issues from the beginning to the end of the lifespan.”

Something very much like this has been tried before. It was called totalitarian socialism, and it failed miserably.

Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute.

He is the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked; How Capitalism Saved America; and Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for Americans Today. Send him mail.

This article was published on Mises.org and is reprinted pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Technological Singularities: An Overview – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Technological Singularities: An Overview – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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Mr. Stolyarov explains the basic concept of a technological Singularity and his understanding that humankind has already experienced three such Singularities in the form of the Agricultural, Industrial, and Information Revolutions. The next Singularity will come about due to a convergence of technologies such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology (including indefinite life extension).

Iraq: The “Liberation” Neocons Would Rather Forget – Article by Ron Paul

Iraq: The “Liberation” Neocons Would Rather Forget – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
January 5, 2014
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Remember Fallujah? Shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military fired on unarmed protestors, killing as many as 20 and wounding dozens. In retaliation, local Iraqis attacked a convoy of US military contractors, killing four. The US then launched a full attack on Fallujah to regain control, which left perhaps 700 Iraqis dead and the city virtually destroyed.

According to press reports last weekend, Fallujah is now under the control of al-Qaeda affiliates. The Anbar province, where Fallujah is located, is under siege by al-Qaeda. During the 2007 “surge,” more than 1,000 US troops were killed “pacifying” the Anbar province. Although al-Qaeda was not in Iraq before the US invasion, it is now conducting its own surge in Anbar.

For Iraq, the US “liberation” is proving far worse than the authoritarianism of Saddam Hussein, and it keeps getting worse. Last year was Iraq’s deadliest in five years. In 2013, fighting and bomb blasts claimed the lives of 7,818 civilians and 1,050 members of the security forces. In December alone nearly a thousand people were killed.

I remember sitting through many hearings in the House International Relations Committee praising the “surge,” which we were told secured a US victory in Iraq. They also praised the so-called “Awakening,” which was really an agreement by insurgents to stop fighting in exchange for US dollars. I always wondered what would happen when those dollars stopped coming.

Where are the surge and awakening cheerleaders now?

One of them, Richard Perle, was interviewed last year on NPR and asked whether the Iraq invasion that he pushed was worth it. He replied:

I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say, well, we shouldn’t have done that.

Many of us were saying all along that we shouldn’t have done that – before we did it. Unfortunately the Bush Administration took the advice of the neocons pushing for war and promising it would be a “cakewalk.” We continue to see the results of that terrible mistake, and it is only getting worse.

Last month the US shipped nearly a hundred air-to-ground missiles to the Iraqi air force to help combat the surging al-Qaeda. Ironically, the same al-Qaeda groups the US is helping the Iraqis combat are benefiting from the US covert and overt war to overthrow Assad next door in Syria. Why can’t the US government learn from its mistakes?

The neocons may be on the run from their earlier positions on Iraq, but that does not mean they have given up. They were the ones pushing for an attack on Syria this summer. Thankfully they were not successful. They are now making every effort to derail President Obama’s efforts to negotiate with the Iranians. Just last week William Kristol urged Israel to attack Iran with the hope we would then get involved. Neoconservative Senators from both parties recently introduced the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013, which would also bring us back on war-footing with Iran.

Next time the neocons tell us we must attack, just think “Iraq.”

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Why I Wrote a Children’s Book on Indefinite Life Extension – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Why I Wrote a Children’s Book on Indefinite Life Extension – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
December 21, 2013
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My greatest fear about the future is not of technology running out of control or posing existential risks to humankind. Rather, my greatest fear is that, in the year 2045, I will be 58 years old and already marked by notable signs of senescence, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking my morning coffee, and wondering, “What happened to that Singularity we were promised by now? Why did it not come to pass? Why does the world of 2045 look pretty much like the world of 2013, with only a few cosmetic differences?” My greatest fear is that, as I stare into that mug of coffee, I would recognize that it will all be downhill from there, especially as “kids these days” would pay no more attention to technological progress and life-extension possibilities than their predecessors did. My greatest fear is that they would consider me a quixotic old man, fantasizing about a future that never was, while they struggle to make ends meet in an ever-more hostile economy (which would look much like our own, except farther along in the sequence of gradual decay, because nobody cares), strangled by labyrinthine restrictions arising out of Luddism and change-aversion within the widespread society. In short, my greatest fear is that our present will be our future, except that I and the present generation of longevity activists will lose our youthful vitality and will ourselves be rapidly approaching the abyss of oblivion.

So I needed to do something. I am not a doctor or biologist, but I did vow at the age of five that I would devote my life to the struggle against senescence and death – so I needed to make good on that promise. My articles, videos, and occasional donations to life-extension endeavors are all well and good, but I also wanted to make a unique contribution that could turn the tide of cultural attitudes toward life extension and toward death itself. After years of brainstorming and months of concerted activity on the part of both me and my wife and illustrator Wendy Stolyarov, the result is Death is Wrong – an illustrated children’s book on life extension that is the first of its kind.

Death is Wrong - by Gennady Stolyarov II, Illustrated by Wendy Stolyarov

Death is Wrong – available in both paperback and Kindle editions – fills an important void. Virtually everyone learns about death as a child, and the initial reaction is the correct one: bewilderment, horror, and outrage. Yet there has been no resource to validate these completely correct first impressions. Almost immediately, the young ones are met with excuses and rationalizations, so that they might be consoled and return to a semblance of normalcy. Over millennia of facing indeed inevitable demises, humans have constructed elaborate edifices of rationalization, designed to keep thoughts of death from intruding upon their day-to-day lives. While understandable in eras when technological progress could not have been expected to attain radical life extension (see Benjamin Franklin’s famous lament that he was born too soon), today such evasions of the grave wrong of death are among the most counterproductive attitudes imaginable. Now that technological progress could bring us into the bright age of indefinite longevity within our lifetimes, every atavistic remnant of the old death acceptance poses a barrier that must be surmounted. The fewer barriers life-extension progress encounters, the faster indefinite lifespans will arrive for us; the more of us will be preserved from oblivion.

While transhumanists and life-extension advocates have made headway with conveying their aspirations for the future to some of the most technically educated and philosophically inclined adults, the mainstream of society remains pervaded by the old death-acceptance arguments – religious and secular: from the fear of “playing God” to the specter of overpopulation. Every mind held captive by these traditional and Malthusian pro-death prejudices is a mind that will at best not help life-extension progress and at worst hinder it greatly – a higher likelihood for the most intelligent purveyors of the death-acceptance mindset. People who embrace these notions and find them credible (despite the relative ease of debunking them using logic and evidence) largely do so because the fallacies were ingrained into them since childhood, with no counterarguments being presented or even posited as conceivable. So, if the antidote to these fallacies is to be most effective, it must be administered in childhood.

Death is Wrong will be easily understood by most eight-year-olds, though my aim is to encompass as young an audience as possible. The beautiful and detailed illustrations will help keep young minds engaged as they read about long-lived organisms found in nature, as well as the great advocates of life extension from the past and the present (featured in the book are Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Marquis de Condorcet, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alan Harrington, and Aubrey de Grey). The book discusses successes in animal life extension, along with providing a concise introduction to Dr. de Grey’s SENS program and the seven principal types of damage that must be addressed in order to reverse senescence. Parts of the book are autobiographical: they describe my own experiences as a child finding out about death and vowing to combat it. The book also focuses of refuting the common pro-death rationalizations and presenting young readers with all of the amazing opportunities and possibilities that can only exist if humans live much, much longer than is presently the case. At the end is a call to action and a list of further resources for young readers to find out more and to become involved with the life-extension movement.

Some may question my tactic of assailing death itself directly – an approach that strikes at the very attitudes enabling acceptance of the Dragon-Tyrant in the room (not the elephant, because elephants are largely innocuous). Yet this is not the time for prevarication or for dampening the rhetoric to the point where one only advocates greater “healthspans” or “compression of morbidity” or any incremental stopping place for progress. While the achievement of indefinite lifespans (and functional immortality, through improvements to the safety of humans’ environment and to the institutional incentives to avoid violence) will not come all at once, and incremental discoveries and lifespan extensions will certainly be the process leading to the goal, the goal itself – defeating death – should not be forgotten or dismissed. The grave wrong of death is worse than that of slavery – once a ubiquitous institution that every society took for granted. William Lloyd Garrison, the 19th-century abolitionist, recognized that the way to get slavery to disappear was to emphasize the feasibility and desirability of its complete eradication: “Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend.” [1] Truer words were never spoken when it comes to the abolition of innocent human death. For those of us life-extension advocates who cannot participate in the research directly (other than donating money and other services to aid the researchers), the most promising path to follow is the example of William Lloyd Garrison. We should emphasize the urgency, the moral necessity, the undeniable justice of abolishing the death of innocent humans as soon as possible. We need to transform the culture so that it comes to reject death much as it was transformed to reject slavery after millennia of blithe acceptance. Then the research funding will flow, the votes and political rhetoric will follow, and even theologies and philosophies will be reinterpreted to view the fight against death on Earth to be the natural conclusion of every religious faith and secular ideology.

The spread of Death is Wrong to children is just one piece of the strategy of advocating for the abolition of the death of innocents. I would admire and embrace every activist project – including other children’s books – aimed toward this same cultural transformation. For those who have been wondering how they personally could contribute to the prospects of achieving indefinite longevity within our lifetimes, I hope that this book offers inspiration as well as some concrete possibilities for action. Even a single pro-longevity activist in a community could make a tremendous difference by donating copies of Death is Wrong to libraries, schools, bookstores, and children’s activity groups – or directly to children with whom the activist is acquainted.

Perhaps, if enough of today’s children read Death is Wrong, they would not view us life-extension advocates as hopeless oldsters lost in unattainable fantasy, thirty-two years into the future. Rather, they would be young alongside us, working to build a human civilization truly worthy of the name – one that is permeated by peace, prosperity, virtue, and a striving to ceaselessly progress as humankind comes to inhabit, develop, beautify, and ennoble the universe at large.

[1] Quoted in William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, eds., The Antislavery Argument (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965), p. xxxv.

After 100 Years of Failure, It’s Time to End the Fed! – Article by Ron Paul

After 100 Years of Failure, It’s Time to End the Fed! – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
December 15, 2013
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A week from now, the Federal Reserve System will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding. Resulting from secret negotiations between bankers and politicians at Jekyll Island, the Fed’s creation established a banking cartel and a board of federal-government overseers that has grown ever stronger through the years. One would think this anniversary would elicit some sort of public recognition of the Fed’s growth from a quasi-agent of the Treasury Department intended to provide an elastic currency, to a de facto independent institution that has taken complete control of the economy through its central monetary planning. But just like the Fed’s creation, its 100th anniversary may come and go with only a few passing mentions.

Like many other horrible and unconstitutional pieces of legislation, the bill which created the Fed, the Federal Reserve Act, was passed under great pressure on December 23, 1913, in the waning moments before Congress recessed for Christmas with many Members already absent from those final votes. This underhanded method of pressuring Congress with such a deadline to pass the Federal Reserve Act would provide a foreshadowing of the Fed’s insidious effects on the US economy—with actions performed without transparency.

Ostensibly formed with the goal of preventing financial crises such as the Panic of 1907, the Fed has become increasingly powerful over the years. Rather than preventing financial crises, however, the Fed has constantly caused new ones. Barely a few years after its inception, the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy to help fund World War I led to the Depression of 1920. After the economy bounced back from that episode, a further injection of easy money and credit by the Fed led to the Roaring Twenties and to the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in American history.

But even though the Fed continued to make the same mistakes over and over again, no one in Washington ever questioned the wisdom of having a central bank. Instead, after each episode the Fed was given more and more power over the economy. Even though the Fed had brought about the stagflation of the 1970s, Congress decided to formally task the Federal Reserve in 1978 with maintaining full employment and stable prices, combined with constantly adding horrendously harmful regulations. Talk about putting the inmates in charge of the asylum!

Now we are reaping the noxious effects of a century of loose monetary policy, as our economy remains mired in mediocrity and utterly dependent on a stream of easy money from the central bank. A century ago, politicians failed to understand that the financial panics of the 19th century were caused by collusion between government and the banking sector. The federal government’s growing monopoly on money creation, high barriers to entry into banking to protect politically favored incumbents, and favored treatment for government debt combined to create a rickety, panic-prone banking system. Had legislators known then what we know now, we could hope that they never would have established the Federal Reserve System.

Today, however, we do know better. We know that the Federal Reserve continues to strengthen the collusion between banks and politicians. We know that the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy continues to reap profits for Wall Street while impoverishing Main Street. And we know that the current monetary regime is teetering on a precipice. One hundred years is long enough. End the Fed.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.