Re: [A-List] UK state: capital management

["Anne Williamson" <annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

Keaney Michael wrote:

Here's a nice quote for Anne Williamson: "Price regulation is not consistent
with a market economy and may serve to restrict choice and innovation for UK
business." I guess this banker must be irked every time the Bank of England
sets the minimum lending rate. Then there's the Galbraithian point about who
does the regulating anyway, etc., etc.

Thanks, Michael, that is a great quote!  Here's an elaboration vis a vis
political divisions.  And a wonderful new
phrase, "Neo-consters."  Wish I'd thought of that.......-A.


Podhoretzes vs. Rothbard
by Tom White

I am less than 2 months from my 79th birthday (yikes!), and I am day by day
still finding out stuff I ought to have known, say, 63 years ago. Can't be
helped, though; that appears to be the way the cookie crumbles. (How do you
like that for a fresh cliché?)

I say that because I have just read a 1965 article by Murray N. Rothbard
posted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. From this piece by Rothbard, an
incredibly learned and cheerful scholar, I have learned the need to reassess
my place on the political spectrum. The article, "Left and Right: The
Prospects for Liberty," was for me a corrective, a clarification, and a
freeing, all at the same time.

I wrote on this site just a few days ago in "Concerning World War Four,"
that I was convinced Norman Podhoretz, and the so-called neo-conservatives
generally, are really of the Left, and I implied that all us good
Libertarian folk are of the Right. Well, slow up a bit. Rothbard makes it
plain that there is much confusion in this left-right business.

As they relate to monopolists, cartelists, warmongering munitions
manufacturers, etc., libertarians have a natural affinity for the left that,
in the name of the "worker," should and often does oppose "combinations in
restraint of trade," the conspiracies against the general welfare that old
Adam Smith said always grow up where business men meet to find ways to work
with government and suppress competition.

On the other hand, libertarians have no business making common cause with
those conservatives, people of the right, who would maintain or even
reconstitute oppressive, illiberal social structures, and who think it just
dandy that income and other taxes are gathered in so ineluctably by
government that it may spread largesse among corporate fat cats,
agricultural magnates, and the like.

Rothbard would have it, as of 1965 anyway, that conservatives, properly
so-called, are doomed, because "conservatism is a dying remnant of the
ancien regime of the preindustrial era and, as such, it has no future."
Conservatives who would conserve anything but the forward thrust of liberty,
innovation, and free trade as the principal means to peace are no friends of
libertarians.

Conservatives who wish to conserve the governmental arrangements of the Cold
War (World War Three) and use them, enlarged and "improved," to implement
World War Four, as Norman Podhoretz says he wishes to do, are people it's
good to get far, far away from.

Looking at Rothbard's interesting assessment of the "political spectrum" in
1965, I make adjustments as follows:

Let me replace Left vs. Right with Bad vs. Good.

Then under "Bad" I'd have, inter alia, this short list: collectivism, big
central government, imperialism, perpetual war, international buttinskyism
and bullying, and pseudo-free trade, that is, trade managed in all
particulars by government.

And under "Good" I'd have, inter alia, this short list: individualism, no
(or drastically limited) government, anti-imperialism, peace, minding one's
own business (which Plato said, I seem to recall, is simple justice), and
free trade with no "management" by government.

This is only the rough beginning of a sort-out, but if you are hanging on to
such ideas as I advance here, then the "Podhoretz Program" of fostering
invigorating war to build our national character and improve our usefulness
to our betters, that is, to those who are determining just what wars we
should wage, will not look attractive to you.

Another Podhoretz, John, son of Norman - Poddy fils, or Poddy Jr. - weighed
in with a resounding second of his father's program but with even sharper
notes of resentment about our tacky national character which stands so in
need of firming up.

I give you some quotes from his March 12NY Post op ed with some asides of
mine in brackets:

"The problem Bush faces is that the sustained and relentless work necessary
to conduct this kind of war is not characteristic of the American way." [But
I expect Poddy Jr. is up to it, keyboard at the ready, and will show us how
it's done.]

"We have tended throughout our history to become involved in international
confrontations almost against our will and to seek all the while to pull
back within ourselves as soon as possible." [Why the Hell not? What in the
name of God were we doing in Vietnam or Somalia, to name just two of these
"international confrontations," in the first place?]

"And none of these presidents was consistent. John Kennedy began our proxy
war in Vietnam to counter the Soviets, but also negotiated the Nuclear
Test-Ban Treaty. Carter talked about how we needed to get over our
"inordinate fear of Communism," but then confronted the Soviets over Cuba
and Afghanistan. Reagan was the cold warrior par excellence, but he ended
the grain embargo against the Soviet Union for crass political reasons."
[Now, I wonder if Poddy Jr. knows anything of crass political reasons, or
would such low-life considerations be altogether beyond him. He wouldn't
have a crass political agenda behind anything he says, would he?]

"The idea that you can force a change in regimes in crisis-riddled nations
and then just pull up stakes and go home is a particularly American
fantasy." [Well, I'm glad that Poddy Jr. is not afflicted with that awful
fantasy. He would no doubt have us never pull up stakes, never come home.
Sounds a bit stern, but then we need a stern taskmaster, don't we? Someone
who won't let himself encourage any unmanly yearnings for home.]

"The war on terror is more than a confrontation to the death against a
particularly complicated peril. It is a confrontation against a deeply
ingrained American attitude toward our role in the world - a role defined
for centuries by the oceans separating us from Europe and Asia." [Ah? And
just what is that attitude that is so stubbornly un-Poddylike? Why it's our
old friend, "Live and Let Live, which does so well in our villages that we
have stupidly assumed it might work in foreign affairs. But Poddy says that
it is OUT, that we must forget our ridiculous old-timey notion that other
nations should be permitted to conduct their affairs as they wish, without
our nagging them to death.]

"We can never occupy that role again. We do not have and will not have the
luxury, not with rogue nations capable of developing weaponry that can do
damage on a scale that would dwarf Sept. 11." [It does rather make you
wonder why so many people are angry with us that they are apparently being
very roguish and developing weapons of mass destruction and all, and plowing
airplanes into our buildings, and yelling at us in their streets, and
generally behaving badly, especially when you think how, on the other hand,
so many millions have struggled so hard over the centuries to get here
(including Poddy Jr.'s forbears and mine). What have we done to turn a large
segment of the world against us? Poddy doesn't bring that up, but I think he
should, don't you?]

And I think it might calm Poddy Jr.'s nerves a little as he thinks of
nuclear and biological weapons in the hands not only of such nations as
ourselves and Israel and Pakistan and India and China, but also very soon
all those "rogue" nations he talks about, if he were to realize that should
this whole thing get down to a sort of foot-soldier slog across the
landscape, we Americans are in pretty good shape to survive the worst of
those rogue fellows: we have 83 million armed men, or thereabouts, in the
world's largest private militia, all willing to set aside that tacky and
lazy character that Poddy Jr. so dislikes and rise to defend our homes and
families, which was the idea we had in the first place, the devil take
Europe, the Middle East, and all the rest, just as Thomas Jefferson, among
others of our Founders, said.

To quote him so as to clear the air of cant: "There is not a crowned head in
all Europe fit to be a vestryman in an American parish." Well, there aren't
many kings anymore; so substitute prime ministers and pundits.


March 15, 2002