Blog 45 | The Libertarian Institute

Laci Green is Wrong: Democratic Competition vs. Free Market Competition

by Keith Knight | Mar 17, 2023 | Blog

In environments where there’s a lot of competition, people tend to lie out their ass and you can apply this to any competitive situation.

Take capitalism. As industrialization took full effect, the Federal Government had to interfere because there was so much false advertising.

– Laci Green

The concept of “unregulated dog-eat-dog competition” is frequently attributed to capitalism even though it applies more so to democracy.

Democracy, also known as Mob Rule by the Ignorant, involves people competing for who gets to coercively rule over everyone else, while the free market competes to better serve customers. Huge companies like Myspace, Sears, and Blockbuster, have gone out of business because consumers voluntarily chose to spend their money elsewhere. Politicians on the other hand can get replaced, but citizens have no legally recognized right to opt out of funding a government which they don’t find value in.

Imagine such a scam in any other scenario: “Amazon get’s to take 35% of your income every year and they can jail you for not obeying their arbitrary rules and regulations. However there is nothing to fear because every four years you get a 1 in 150,000,000 vote in who gets to be the CEO of Amazon!”

In a democracy, voters and politicians are constantly in competition for who gets to sit on the throne. Not only is there competition between Democrats and Republicans, but there is competition within each party for status. Every Congressional and Presidential debate is simply a competition for who can be the best demagogue.

Ms. Green apparently believes people should have the right to vote in elections but should NOT have the right to buy whatever they want because the Federal Government has to first make sure there isn’t “false advertising”. Notice Green says they “had to interfere” as if their hands were tied and they didn’t jump at the chance to control the behavior of others. This is no different than saying “High IQ people have to coercively interfere in the lives of low IQ people to protect them.” Progressivism continues to be nothing more than domestic imperialism.

Politicians, the biggest false advertisers in society, protect us from false advertising. Yes, and OJ Simpson protects us from bad marriages.

Both democracy and the free market involve competition. Market competition is preferable to democratic competition since it allows people to voluntarily opt out of funding things they do not value.

Empower the Workers: Decriminalize Economic Activity Between Consenting Adults

by Keith Knight | Mar 15, 2023 | Blog

The most reliable and effective protection for most workers is provided by the existence of many employers. As we have seen, a person who has only one possible employer has little or no protection. The employers who protect a worker are those who would like to hire him. Their demand for his services makes it in the self-interest of his own employer to pay him the full value of his work. If his own employer doesn’t, someone else may be ready to do so. Competition for his services—that is the worker’s real protection.

– Milton Friedman, Free to Choose

Chris Rock’s New Special Exposes His Political Ignorance

by Keith Knight | Mar 8, 2023 | Blog

A common claim among Democrats is that, “It’s not that people don’t want to be educated, they just haven’t been given the opportunity, thus government spending on education needs to increase.”

If there were ever a group of people capable of “educating” themselves it would be American celebrities.

Yet it seems as though there is a secret contest among them to see who could be the most historically, economically, and philosophically illiterate.

The most recent example comes from Chris Rock’s “Selective Outrage” Netflix special where he says, “It’s the Royal Family…they invented colonialism.”

Here is a brief list of empires who engaged in Colonialism before the Royal Family did:

Marhasi Empire
Islamic Empires
Akkadian Empire
Hittite empire
Assyrian Empire
Roman Empire
Babylonian Empire
Persian Empire
Shang Dynasty
Egyptian Empire
Zhou Dynasty
Macedonian Empire
Qin Dynasty
Han Dynasty
Armenian Empire
Xin Dynasty
Gallic Empire
Hunnic Empire
Latin Empire
Mongol Empire

Other examples from Rock’s “Selective Outrage”:

January 6th

“You see the Capitol riots? White men trying to overthrow the government, that they run!” – Chris Rock

It does not occur to the Social Justice Race Essentialist mind that people who are the same race (and gender) have differing ideas on what is just or unjust. Just because two people are of the same race and gender, it in no way means the person (or group) with power is acting on behalf of those who share their gender or race. It’s akin to saying: “How did a war occur in China between Mao’s Communists and Chiang’s Nationalists? They were all Chinese! How was there a Russian Civil War between Reds and Whites? They were all Russian!”

Ukraine

“America’s in horrible shape. We got it worse, than Ukraine. Yeah I said it…Ukraine is united, and America is clearly divided.” – Chris Rock

I guess after Rock researched the stark contrast between Ukrainian separatists in the Donbas supporting Viktor Yanukovych and those in 2014 supporting Petro Poroshenko leading to an eight-year civil war killing 14,000 people, Rock came to the conclusion that like White men, all Ukrainians are on the same page.

I was not aware that Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on the same page with the people who he enslaved via conscription to fight in his military, the political parties he banned, and the media he nationalized.

Jim Crow

Rock makes a great point at the end about the evils of Jim Crow Laws which forbid Blacks from seeing White dentists. It’s pure evil for a third party to forcibly restrict two consenting parties from engaging in a mutually beneficial voluntary economic exchange. This is the central goal of the Libertarian Institute, and on this issue we stand firmly with Chris Rock!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

War and Delusion: A Critical Examination

by Laurie Calhoun | Mar 7, 2023 | Blog, Foreign Policy

In this episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, Alex Bernardo sits down once again with Laurie Calhoun. Laurie is a philosopher, a cultural critic and an author. She is a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute, where she regularly writes articles analyzing war and the military industrial complex. We discuss her 2013 book War and Delusion, a devastating philosophical and empirical critique of the ‘just war’ theory, which posits that there are conditions under which a war can be justly waged. We explore the inconsistencies of the just war theory, the medieval Christian assumptions that undergird it, the ways in which it has been consistently applied to legitimate American foreign policy, and how it has ultimately led us to war in Ukraine.

Media Referenced:
War and Delusion, Laurie Calhoun

Crime and Poverty

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 2, 2023 | Blog, Criminal Justice

“The theory that crime is caused by poverty is not supported by the known facts. The very poor, in fact, tend to be just as law-abiding as the rich, and perhaps more so. To argue otherwise is to libel multitudes of people who keep to decency under severe difficulties, and in the face of constant temptation.”

—H. L. Mencken, Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, 1956

Don’t Be Silent

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 28, 2023 | Blog, Politics

We should reject the fashionable idea that one should never write or post anything that possibly could be used by bad people for bad purposes. That admonition brings two things to mind.

First, it fails its own test. If good people avoid a topic because even constructive analysis might be put to bad use, the very avoidance will likely fuel conspiracy theories about how this or that interest group controls the public debate. Thus the fashionable idea is self-subverting — much as the precautionary principle is.

Second, it reminds me of what Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a very different context, wrote in concluding his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” There are no chilling implications in Wittgenstein’s maxim because he literally meant can not, as opposed to may not. The same can’t be said for the fashionable maxim.

Can There Be Only One Race?

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 27, 2023 | Blog, Politics

I’m old enough to remember this 1960s Lay’s Potato Chips commercial. (Hell, I’m almost old enough to remember when plays were in black and white!) In the commercial a man (Bert Lahr, the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz) faces a challenge from the devil, who has a bag of Lay’s: “Bet you can’t eat one.” “That’s absolutely absurd,” Lahr says; of course he can eat one. After enjoying the chip he says, “I’ll have another,” to which the devil says, “Oh no. I said just one. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha….”

Admittedly, this is a long and winding road to my point: there can’t be only one race. Most people believe that human beings come in different genetic models: black, white, Asian, and a couple more. (Of course one can believe this without hating anyone.) But biologists and geneticists know better. There are no significantly distinct genetic groups of human beings that correspond to skin tone, hair texture, or other such visible features. Individuals within one grouping of superficially similar persons can have more genetic variation among themselves than they do with individuals in other superficial groupings. (We all are of African ancestry, though for some it’s more recent than for others.) As Barbara and Karen Fields discuss in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, the idea of race grows out of the discriminatory practice of racism, not the other way around. In other words, the double standard people used in the treatment of others itself generated the justificatory concept of race. It’s like witchcraft.

Does it follow from this that, as humane people like to say, there’s only one race, the human race? I don’t think so. In this case 1 = 0. Leaving aside the biologists’ technical genetic concept of race (which has nothing to do with appearance), a concept of race would be useful only for making distinctions. But if there is only one race, then by definition, there are no distinctions to make. Therefore, one equals none.

We already have a perfectly good biological category for distinguishing human beings from other animals: species. So we have no need for the category of the human race. “Race” is worse than superfluous. It’s dangerously divisive.