To Be A Marijuana Farmer; 100 Years of Medical Robbery1,000s of days before D-Day; Muddle of Liberty; these articles have their titles and text in this color and are featured this week in -
 
Ender's Review of the Web
 

Web articles of likely interest to individualists found during the week of June 6 - 12, 2004.

 
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Political Liberty
Articles showing a positive influence of political action on the cause of Liberty.
 
Dear Mike Badnarik Supporters, Friends, and Future Friends
        by Alan R. Weiss from The Libertarian Enterprise
"Tell your friends that the Libertarian Party, the Party of Principle, has finally lived up to its slogan and has elected a man of extraordinary principle - a man uncomprom[is]ing in his dedication to Liberty."
 
Ronald Reagan has passed into history
        by Thomas L. Knapp from RationalReview.com
"In the coming months, we'll be subjected to a deluge of 'he made America great again' and 'he won the Cold War,' not least from those who want very badly to steal some of Reagan's glory on behalf of his pale, sickly shadow now occupying the White House. Those things may or may not be true, but it's enough that he was the kind of man about whom they can be said with a straight face. People believed in Ronald Reagan because he made them believe in themselves."
 
Superpower or Superdebtor?
        by Rep. Ron Paul from Antiwar.com
"It is clear that interventionism leads to the perceived need for more interventionism, which leads to more conflict and to increased resentment and anti-Americanism. It is an endless cycle and the American taxpayer is always left holding the bill. ... War cannot raise the standard of living for the average American."
 
Life in Amerika
Articles depicting the negative impact of politics on Liberty.
 
100 Years of Medical Robbery
        by Dale Steinreich from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"In the days of its founding AMA was much more open--at its conferences and in its publications--about its real goal: building a government-enforced monopoly for the purpose of dramatically increasing physician incomes. It eventually succeeded, becoming the most formidable labor union on the face of the earth."
 

The Anti-Wal-Mart Jihad

        by Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com
"There is a common ignorance in the world with which those of us who favor free market economic systems must continually contend. It is a point of view that cannot distinguish between legally unrestrained economic behavior in which people voluntarily choose to trade (or not) with one another, and a system in which economic life is regulated, licensed, taxed, or prohibited by the state."
 
All the fear that's fit to print
        by Robyn E. Blumner from St. Petersburg Times
"I bet the men and women of the armed services have little idea that years after they have completed their service, their fingerprints are scanned for any potential criminals and terrorists among them."
 
Ordered Liberty without the State
Some people say it's Anarchy, some say it's not possible. It is an interesting topic.
 
So You Want To Be A Marijuana Farmer?
        by Matthew Bryan from Endervidualism
"Our purpose is to examine the ramifications of legalizing a substance that, in the past century, has infected our federal masters with an arguably unprecedented messianic zeal and unslakeable thirst for moralistic discipline. ... Assume all is the same, except we are now free to cultivate and smoke pot with impunity. Let's see how this might play out."
 
The Importance of Free Expression
        by Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com
"The state -- as enforcer of institutional rigidity -- loves the cloned mentality. The government school system and military training camps are the state's mechanisms for fostering the uniformity and obedience that benefit its interests while helping to destroy the vibrancy of a free and productive society."
 
Introduction to Dissenting Electorate
        by Carl Watner from voluntaryist.com
"As Albert Jay Nock put it, '[A]ges of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method ...; that is the method of each "one" doing his very best' to cultivate his own garden. This is the quiet or patient way of changing society because it concentrates upon bettering the character of men and women as individuals."
 
Spreading Decentralism
Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.
 
Be Ashamed ... Be Very Ashamed
        by L. Neil Smith from The Libertarian Enterprise
"I don't believe this government would ever have released them, after holding and abusing them in clear violation of the Constitution and international rules of civilized behavior, if it hadn't somehow been compelled to. Nor are we offered a clue about who it was who put the pressure on."
 
The Four Generations of Modern War
        by William S. Lind from LewRockwell.com
"Fourth Generation war is the greatest change since the Peace of Westphalia, because it marks the end of the state's monopoly on war. Once again, as before 1648, many different entities, not states, are fighting war. They use many different means, including "terrorism" and immigration, not just formal armies. ... All over the world, state militaries are fighting non-state opponents, and almost always, the state is losing."
 
Being practical isn't always good
        by Tibor Machan from The Daily News
"It is the task of visionaries, including political thinkers and editorialists who have come to find their ideas sound, to bring the rest of the citizenry around to seeing a strange but good idea as also a feasible and practical one."
 
The New World Hegemon
Depictions of the coming Imperial power
 
Hail the Great Leader!
        by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from LewRockwell.com
"The idea of a president worried those who believed in the ideals of the revolution. They were assured that he could not be a despot. He would be under the impeachment threat. He couldn't do a thing without the Senate's advice and consent. The Senate in turn was to be appointed by the state legislatures, which were the fundamental governing units in America."
 
"Puto deus fio"
        by Nicholas Strakon from The Last Ditch
"Any propaganda about a leviathan-politician's having been 'great' at anything, apart from wickedness, puts me in mind of what Samuel Johnson said about women's preaching: it was like 'a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.' Substitute 'politician' for the lady preacher, and Bob's your uncle."
 
How Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing Information About You
        by Teresa Hampton & Doug Thompson from Capitol Hill Blue
"Going on a trip? TIA knows where you are going because your train, plane or hotel reservations are forwarded automatically to the DARPA computers. Driving? Every time you use a credit card to purchase gas, a record of that transaction is sent to TIA which can track your movements across town or across the country....If they order an adult film from any of DirecTV’s three SpiceTV channels, that information goes to TIA and is, as a matter of policy, forwarded to the Department of Justice’s special task force on pornography."
 
Politics by Other Means
War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.
 
The Dog Days of the War Party
        by Patrick J. Buchanan from Antiwar.com
"The Night of the Long Knives has begun. The military and CIA are stabbing the neocons front, back and center, laying responsibility on them for the mess in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Balkan wars of the American Right have reignited, with even the normally quiescent Beltway conservatives scrambling to get clear of the neocon encampment before the tomahawking begins."
 
Tenet Now, Rummy and Wolfie Soon
        by Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute
"Because Tenet is a holdover from a Democratic administration, his sacking will relieve pressure on the administration to hold someone accountable for the debacle without angering an already disgruntled conservative base. He'll need to keep that group mollified in what promises to be a close election in the fall."
 
Kerry: An Echo, Not a Choice
        by Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"What Kerry really cares about is military might, diplomacy, and the intelligence system -- in other words, the hardware of government intervention and imperialism. He is fully a believer i[n] projecting American power abroad. He seeks only to make it more palatable to the American people by making sure that some of the casualties have foreign-sounding names."
 
Spontaneous Order
Articles showing decentralized successes.
 
The Human Impact of Factor Mobility
        by Clifford F. Thies from Ludwig von Mises Institute 
"Our increasing wages and standard of living result not from working longer hours or working harder. Rather, they result from a combination of increasing labor productivity and increasing total factor productivity which, in turn, depend on increasing saving and investment, from innovations and inventions, and from increasing specialization."
 
Government Has No Business Interfering With What You Eat
        by Radley Balko from Cato Institute
"Give Americans moral, financial and personal responsibility for their own health, and obesity is no longer a public matter but a private one--with all the costs, concerns and worries of being overweight borne only by those people who are actually overweight."
 
Mises on Copyrights
        by Bettina Bien Greaves from The Freeman
"A patent or copyright is defined as an agreement on the part of the government to protect the property rights of an inventor or author to his creation for a certain period of time. The inventor or author pays a price for this protection: he agrees to turn his creation over to the public, at no cost, when the protection expires. Now if the government is to protect property, it must define that property."
 
Nonspontaneous Disorder
Articles showing centrally planned disasters.
 
The Silent Partner in Family Decline
        by Per Henrik Hansen from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"The traditional family has for many centuries and in most countries been the core unit of society. It has been the foundation and even the ultimate purpose in many people's lives. It has provided a stable framework to bring children into the world, to raise them, to teach them manners and how to become productive and happy human beings. ... All this is changing now."
 
The Socialism of Social Security
        by Jacob G. Hornberger from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"Social Security and every other socialist program takes the exact opposite tact: You cannot be left free to care for yourselves, your parents, or others because you are too incompetent, selfish, and self-centered to make these choices. You are not free to say 'No.' If you were free, you would make the wrong choice. Therefore, we must force you to make the right choice."
 
Ladies Night of the Living Dead
        by Jonathan David Morris  from Strike The Root
"Ladies Night. It's the queen of bar and nightclub promotions, and it's popular nationwide. ... Now, it's hard to deny that Ladies Night is a discriminatory practice. That is, after all, the idea. But is it really a bane upon the progress of... well, mankind? Probably not."
 
War Is The Health Of The State
War is the ultimate State intervention in society.
 
Thousands of days before D-Day
        by Nicholas Strakon from The Last Ditch
"War fans insisting that antiwar people answer their simple-minded question about What 'We' Should Have Done in World War II deserve a simple answer -- Stay out! -- but they really ought to look at more of history than just the chapters covering June 6, 1944, and December 7, 1941. In history one thing leads to another. And it's impossible to understand anything about the second great war without confronting the first great war. World War I brimmed with catastrophes ... but despite the unprecedented scale of those state-massacres the worst catastrophe, in terms of long-term effect, was the entry of the United State into the evil madness. That intervention led straight to Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin, and also greased the skids leading to the Great Depression of the 1930s. At home Wilson's foreign intervention created an upsurge of totalitarianism, great and petty, that, to put it mildly, we've never gotten over."
 
The Great Compromiser
        by Christopher Westley from LewRockwell.com
"Hopkins urged a fight with Nazi Germany at a time when many on both sides of the Atlantic believed that that country's national socialist experiment had, like the New Deal, run its course. But Hopkins provided a curious strategy for victory over fascism abroad: America must adopt fascism at home. So he argued that democracy 'must wage total war against totalitarian war. It must exceed the Nazi in fury, ruthlessness and efficiency'."
 
War, War, War!
        by Charley Reese from Antiwar.com
"While few wars are just wars, all are profitable -- though, of course, not to the lads and lassies who fight and die in them. They are profitable to the military-industrial complex. The Iraq War is a multibillion-dollar bonanza for Halliburton Inc., and a lesser bonanza for all the other corporations scooping up the dollars, whether to supply mercenaries or to do jobs unemployed Iraqis ought to be doing."
 
Bits of History
The Past seen with a fresh look.
 
The Search for the Historical Reagan
        by Jesse Walker from Reason
"The best you can say about his economic policies is that, while he didn't roll back many rules ... Reagan generally refrained from imposing new regulations.... And if Reagan didn't live up to the expectations of his libertarian supporters, the flipside is that he did the same thing to his backers on the Christian right...."
 
Nazism and the Burden of Collective Guilt
        by Richard M. Ebeling from Foundation for Economic Education
"Just as there cannot be collective, or group, 'rights' different and distinct from the rights belonging to individuals, so there cannot be collective, or group, guilt or responsibility different and distinct from the responsibilities of separate individuals."
 
I'll Buy That Dream
        by Gail Jarvis from LewRockwell.com
"The end of World War Two in 1945 ushered in a mood of exuberance throughout America. Our soldiers returned home with visions of peace and prosperity. The bright hopes of these young men were expressed in a catchy hit song that came out that same year: I'll Buy that Dream."
 
War and Peace
Articles showing the nature of War.
 
Nothing Learned in 60 Years
        by Jim Davies from Strike The Root
"Governments are 100% useless appendages to any society, and have to work to justify their existence in the eyes of those they rule; one way to do so, proven effective by 5,000 bloody years of history, is to excite small boys--and adults with a juvenile perspective--with the idea of the glory of patriotism, warfare and conquest."
 
It Takes Planning?
        by Paul Hein from LewRockwell.com
"Our military surely have access to press, radio, and TV in that country. How about an announcement that, having removed Saddam (whom we leave to your legal system, dear Iraqis) and proven the non-existence of WMDs, we've done what we set out to do, and will be departing? Good by, and good luck."
 
Pride, Patriotism, and Propaganda
        by Thomas Gale Moore from Antiwar.com
"The belief that military power can bring the world peace, prosperity, and democracy should have been dealt a fatal blow. Are we better off for having taken on two wars? We are now bogged down in those two conflicts. Rather than concentrate on bringing to justice the people who attacked us in September of 2001, the Bush Administration is still lumping together real with phony wars."
 
Great Individuals In History
Some people stand out from the crowd.
 
Painter - John Trumbull : June 6, 1756
        by Virtualology from rebelswithavision.com
"When the [American] Revolutionary war opened, he joined the army as adjutant. His skill as a draughtsman enabled him to make drawings of the enemy's works at Boston, and Washington appointed him one of his aides-de-camp."
 
Diarist - Anne Frank : June 12, 1929
        from annefrank.org
"On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank celebrates her 13th birthday. She receives a diary as a present. It is her favorite gift. She begins writing in it immediately: 'I hope I will be able to confide everything to you…and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support'."
 
Playwright - Terence Rattigan : June 10, 1911
        from The Filmmakers at sonypictures.com
"Rattigan enjoyed uninterrupted success from 1936 until 1956. With a string of hits including 'French Without Tears,' 'While the Sun Shines,' 'Love in Idleness,' 'The Browning Version,' 'Separate Tables,' 'The Winslow Boy' and others, it seemed as though Rattigan could not miss."
 
Culcha'
Books, Movies, TV, Media, Music, poetry, etc.
 
'Day After Tomorrow' Assaults Science and Reason
        by Jeff Wright from The Colorado Freedom Report
"By the end of the movie it is very self-evident that the folks who made this movie actually believe the crap they portray. The public pronouncements by the lead actors about the flick also have been instructive as to the level of ignorance that dominates Hollywood."
 
Nock Revisited
        by Sheldon Richman from The Freeman
"Some books and essays require regular re-reading. ... For me, Albert Jay Nock’s masterly essay 'On Doing the Right Thing' is one of those works. (Written in 1924, it is reprinted in the Nock collection The State of the Union: Essays in Social Criticism, edited by Charles H. Hamilton and published by Liberty Fund.)"
 
Beyond Tomorrow: Some Not So Special Effects
        by Lady Liberty from The Price of Liberty
"Hollywood has long tried to influence politics, sometimes successfully.... But in the case of The Day After Tomorrow, Hollywood goes beyond politics and into the realm of science. I don't imagine it was trying all that hard to do so, but the credibility given the movie by its famous endorsers (and detractors) lends impact to its onscreen claims. And given our woefully undereducated public school students where the sciences are concerned, the accompanying spread of misinformation offers a much more likely - and at least as scary in its own way - scenario than the one actually depicted in the movie."
 
The lighter side
Humor, satire, cartoons, parodies, food, popular music and other things to amuse.
 
What Do You Think? -- Tenet's Resignation
        from The Onion
"CIA Director George Tenet resigned last week, claiming that the decision was 'personal' and unconnected to recent controversies. What do you think?"
 
Canada Refuses To Change Its Name To Ronald Reagan - Republicans Blast Canadians as 'Ingrates'
        by Andy Borowitz from BorowitzReport
"'After all Ronald Reagan did for them, these Canadians are acting like a bunch of ingrates,' said Senator James M. Inhofe (R-OK). 'It's no wonder some of them speak French, if you catch my meaning'."
 
President Reaganesque
        by Mark Fiore from The Village Voice
We still have….
 
Deep Thought
Scientific and scholarly studies, philosophical essays, in-depth and longer articles.
 
The Muddle of Liberty
        by Richard Rieben from Endervidualism
"From the vantage of someone wanting liberty - plain and simple - this exploration appears overdone and muddled. People who want liberty do not care to consider 'what they are' qua human being. They do not want to ponder what is 'appropriate to their condition.' They do not want to waste time examining their cultural proclivities and contradictions. They just want a practical plan. Now."
 
The new Puritans
        by Doug Casey from WorldNetDaily.com
"The seeds sown by those Puritans have persisted through American history, albeit with the normal ebb and flow of society. The roaring '20s and psychedelic '60s are, to my way of thinking, more representative of why America is great than the societies of the Pilgrims and the Puritans."
 
Austrian Economics and the Political Economy of Freedom
        by Richard M. Ebeling from The Freeman
"The Austrian view of man refutes the positivist, historicist, and neoclassical conceptions of man as a mere physical, quantitative object, or as a passive subject controlled by the dark forces of history, or as a 'dependent variable' in a system of mathematical equations."
 
Miscellany
Articles not easily classified.
 
A War in America
        by Anthony Gregory from Strike The Root
"If Americans think it's right to lock harmless hippies in cages with rapists, only to let the rapists out first, how are they going to understand the complexities of antitrust? If they don't find it unnerving that innocent people are strip-searched in airports because they might be carrying 6,000 year-old Chinese medicine, how can we expect them to grasp the subtleties of central banking?"
 
Three cheers for the Cos, Part II
        by Walter E. Williams from Townhall.com
"Black people will accomplish much more by focusing on the issues of crime, illegitimacy, poor parenting and slovenly behavior than worrying about whom the Republican Party is appealing to and racial discrimination."
 
Ray Charles 1930-2004
        from The Olympian
"Charles stature grew as he came to represent the best of American creativity and individualism. His 'America the Beautiful' has become a standard and his version of 'Georgia on My Mind' is now Georgia's official state song."
 
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