Blog 27 | The Libertarian Institute

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Good Plan Means My Plan

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 23, 2024 | Blog, Economics

“All this passionate praise of the supereminence of government action is but a poor disguise for the individual interventionist’s self-deification. The great god State is a great god only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of interventionism wants to see achieved. Only that plan is genuine which the individual planner fully approves. All other plans are simply counterfeit. In saying ‘plan’ what the author of a book on the benefits of planning has in mind is, of course, his own plan alone. He does not take into account the possibility that the plan which the government puts into practice may differ from his own plan. The various planners agree only with regard to their rejection of laissez faire, i.e., the individuals’ discretion to choose and to act. They entirely disagree with regard to the choice of the unique plan to be adopted. To every exposure of the manifest and incontestable defects of interventionist policies the champions of interventionism react in the same way. These faults, they say, were the results of spurious interventionism; what we are advocating is good interventionism, not bad interventionism. And, of course, good interventionism is the professor’s own brand.

“Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force him to yield to a dictator.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Who Needs What?

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 22, 2024 | Blog, Economics

“[I]t is evident … that the man, who first made himself clothes and built himself a cabin, supplied himself with things which he did not much want, since he had lived without them till then; and why should he not have been able to support in his riper years, the same kind of life, which he had supported from his infancy?”

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Equality

“Under laissez faire, says the planner, it is not those goods which people ‘really’ need that are produced, but those goods from the sale of which the highest returns are expected. It is the objective of planning to direct production toward the satisfaction of the ‘true’ needs. But who is to decide what the ‘true’ needs are?”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Whose Plan?

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 21, 2024 | Blog, Economics

“The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence.

“Laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: Let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

What Full Liberalism Is Not About

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 20, 2024 | Blog, Economics

“Liberalism is a doctrine directed entirely towards the conduct of men in this world. In the last analysis, it has nothing else in view than the advancement of their outward, material welfare and does not concern itself directly with their inner, spiritual and metaphysical needs. It does not promise men happiness and contentment, but only the most abundant possible satisfaction of all those desires that can be satisfied by the things of the outer world.

“Liberalism has often been reproached for this purely external and materialistic attitude toward what is earthly and transitory. The life of man, it is said, does not consist in eating and drinking. There are higher and more important needs than food and drink, shelter and clothing. Even the greatest earthly riches cannot give man happiness; they leave
his inner self, his soul, unsatisfied and empty. The most serious error of liberalism has been that it has had nothing to offer man’s deeper and nobler aspirations.

“But the critics who speak in this vein show only that they have a very imperfect and materialistic conception of these higher and nobler needs. Social policy, with the means that are at its disposal, can make men rich or poor, but it can never succeed in making them happy or in satisfying their inmost yearnings. Here all external expedients fail. All
that social policy can do is to remove the outer causes of pain and suffering; it can further a system that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and houses the homeless. Happiness and contentment do not depend on food, clothing, and shelter, but, above all, on what a man cherishes within himself. It is not from a disdain of spiritual goods that liberalism
concerns itself exclusively with man’s material well-being, but from a conviction that what is highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by any outward regulation. It seeks to produce only outer well-being because it knows that inner, spiritual riches cannot come to man from without, but only from within his own heart.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, 1927

Greeks Refuse to Purchase Fifty Million Dollar Floating Dumpsters From the US Navy

by Bill Buppert | Dec 20, 2024 | Blog

These floating dumpsters cost the American taxpayer 500-600 million per ship.

The US Navy is trying to garage sell these malfunctioning ships to Greece and they are onto the scam. The Greek Defense Minister is smarter than the average bear.

Glad to see that even foreign navies with very tight budgets have the discipline not to take on ineffective and ultimately, fatally flawed surface ships.

“As far as the agreement with the United States is concerned, I am proud of the two military agreements with the United States that bear my signature, as well as the agreements with France and the UAE. The agreements with the United States, ladies and gentlemen, put Alexandroupolis on the map. And this is absolutely essential for national reasons, as you all know, and there is no disputing that.

The United States has honored what was outlined in these agreements, colleagues. Do you know what they did not honor? What is outlined in the Blinken letter. What Secretary of State Blinken wrote to the Prime Minister was not honored by the United States, and I said so plainly. And for this, neither the Greek Government, nor the Greek Prime Minister, nor our country bears any responsibility.

They mentioned LCS and proposed LCS vessels to us without fixing the propulsion system. It would have been absurd to accept them! And, on top of that, with a requirement to pay 50 million for each of them? No. A thousand times no. And you would have made the same decision I did.”

– Nikos Dendias, Defense Minister of Greece during his speech at the Parliament on December 14, 2024

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/12/no-a-thousand-times-no-greek-defense-minister-on-lcs-deal/

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Aesthetics and Frequencies w/Mano Elia

by Tommy Salmons | Dec 19, 2024 | Blog, Year Zero

Mano is back to discuss the image of God in the world.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Welfare-State Paradox

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 19, 2024 | Blog, Economics, Politics

“Whether … a system of social security is a good or a bad policy is essentially a political problem. One may try to justify it by declaring that the wage earners lack the insight and the moral strength to provide spontaneously for their own future. But then it is not easy to silence the voices of those who ask whether it is not paradoxical to entrust the nation’s welfare to the decisions of voters whom the law itself considers incapable of managing their own affairs; whether it is not absurd to make those people supreme in the conduct of government who are manifestly in need of a guardian to prevent them from spending their own income foolishly. Is it reasonable to assign to wards the right to elect their guardians? It is no accident that Germany, the country that inaugurated the social security system, was the cradle of both varieties of modern disparagement of democracy, the Marxian as well as the non-Marxian.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

The Ford Follies: Yes, It Can Get Worse

by Bill Buppert | Dec 19, 2024 | Blog

Brent Eastwood does a splendid job elucidating so many of the problems of the fatally flawed Ford super-carrier. I suspect he had to say “promising” but there is nothing here for the 21st century; this is the chariot and crossbow of the next generation. This is the sunken cost fallacy afloat. The prudent policy is to retire these behemoths immediately and completely rethink US and Western surface naval combat. The era of manned combat aircraft is over, whatever is aloft is a zombie force on borrowed time. The US Navy is quite literally playing chicken with thousands of lives in a gamble that the opponents will blink.

They won’t.

They can’t.

As we have discussed before, the strike package projection from a single super-carrier is less than ten birds with a combat radius of less than 750 nautical miles. China, Russia and Iran (not to mention the Houthis in Yemen) have the capacity right now to disable or sink a carrier near their homelands. They have been perfecting this amelioration effort for years if not decades, they are ready.

Key Points: The U.S. Navy’s Ford-class aircraft carriers represent technological advancement but face five significant challenges.

–First, the cost is staggering, with the Gerald R. Ford exceeding $13 billion and maintenance costs nearing $27 billion over its lifetime.

–Second, construction delays have plagued the program, with delivery timelines stretching years.

–Third, evolving threats like anti-ship missiles, hypersonics, and drones put carriers at significant risk.

–Fourth, resupplying the massive vessel for long deployments remains logistically challenging.

–Lastly, advanced technologies like EMALS and Advanced Arresting Gear have faced reliability issues.

-While promising, the Ford-class program has sparked debates about cost, delays, and future survivability.

The U.S. Navy’s Ford-Class Aircraft Carriers: 5 Biggest Problems

Not only is the super-carrier crippled by existential problems in capability, its very existence is reminiscent of the Battleship Hypnotism that enthralled admirals of the West prior to 8 December 1941.

A live-fire battle with China would answer many of the following questions. Can a carrier survive a direct hit from an anti-ship missile? Do carriers need to patrol outside the range of the Anti-Access/ Area Denial defensive bubble that the Chinese have so deftly created around their First Island Chain? Will manned or unmanned submarines be the death of a U.S. aircraft carrier?

These questions will have to be pondered by some of the best thinkers in the U.S. Navy. Otherwise, the Gerald R. Ford will not be worth the exorbitant cost, and future aircraft carriers of the Ford-class may be reconsidered.

The next war may include anti-ship missiles, drones, and submarines. Carrier-based combat could be made obsolete by asymmetric weapons and a determined enemy who is likely to try anything to slow down or destroy the Gerald R. Ford.