Q: What is socialism?

A: The longest road from capitalism to capitalism.

Like all of the best jokes, this one kind of makes you want to laugh and cry and the same time, doesn't it?

As with so many policies produced by left-right Washington, the compromise immigration bill that the Senate effectively scuttled today was a lose-lose proposition from the beginning. It contained a one-time benefit for a chunk of our current illegals, but it didn't address the ongoing issues that compel Mexican laborers to stream over the border in the first place. It also contained billions of dollars worth of the same dubious enforcement measures that are currently failing, not the least of which was hundreds of miles of mostly symbolic fencing and a truly disturbing national employee verification system that would have increased the cost of every job in America and made the Federal government the final arbiter of every employment decision made in this country.

Although entrepreneurship is at an all-time high in the US, most of us still work for someone else, and so when the government comes along with a new scheme that demands businesses hand over yet another right to the government, too many Americans think little of it. And then a few years later, when the depressing effects of the new regulations come home to roost, the same Americans get angry and demand yet another government scheme to address it. It's pretty obvious that freedom loses in every revolution of this cycle, and when freedom loses, we all eventually lose.

It would be great if conservatives would realize that the market doesn't care one bit whether the expensive regulation imposed upon it is intended to protect us from Mexican labor or to protect some sub-sub-species of nematode, and thus there is no practical or moral difference between the two, but I just don't see this happening, with immigration nor anything else. Unfortunately for America, as this immigration bill demonstrated, when both of their policies are wrong-headed, any compromise between the two sides of the aisle simply compounds their error instead of counterbalancing each other, and thus the best we can hope for under the current state of affairs is that they both fail. In other words, under the Democrats and Republicans, progress = the status quo. Not very inspiring for the future, is it?

First Whittle, then Rachel Lucas, then the Frogman, and now the best pure blogger ever, Michele Catalano, is back. What a glorious month it's been!

Hat-tip: Cranky-d 

During the Republican presidential debate hosted by CNN a couple of weeks ago, Congressman Ron Paul made a remarkable statement:

“We in the past have always declared war in the defense of our liberties or go to aid of somebody,” he said. “But now we have accepted the principle of preemptive war — we have rejected the Just War theory of Christianity.

“We have to come to our senses about this issue of war and preemption and go back to traditions and our constitution and defend our liberties and defend our rights,” he added.

This is a lovely thought, as evidenced by the 250 supportive comments to the CNN post. It's also factually incorrect:

Are we really to believe that this country never before waged war even though our national security was not being directly threatened? What then was the first of this republic's wars, its war for independence? That colonial rebellion, which would last eight long years, began as a disagreement over tax policy, not because our security was threatened—directly or indirectly.

Skipping lightly over the undeclared naval war with France (1798-1800), the same could be said of the War of 1812, which was a war of our choice. Indeed, at the time it wasn't easy for Americans to decide whether to go to war against France, Great Britain, neither or both.

The Mexican-American War needn't have been fought if this country had been willing to recognize Mexican claims. It, too, was a war of choice, not necessity.

And what about the Spanish-American War? Our national security was scarcely threatened by the decaying Spanish empire, much of which we soon made our own. Nor did we have to put down the Philippine Insurrection that followed — for years.

There was considerable hesitation before the United States chose to enter the First World War, too, under a president who had just campaigned for re-election under the popular slogan, He Kept Us Out of War.

Nor did American involvement in the Second World War begin, as it does in the movies, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the United States was being drawn into that conflict long before war was formally declared.

Back during the run-up to the Iraq war, there were a handful of blogs I frequently read which helped me anchor my confidence in my own world-view. But the war turned out to be a go, and a year or so later after everyone realized that Iraq wasn't going to be a drive-by, an almost suspicious number these bloggers either experienced life issues, or became simply burned-out from fighting the good fight on the front lines against the left-wing anti-American narrative. Some of these bloggers let their blogs go dormant, some quit them altogether, and some quit blogging about the war and politics and started blogging about some other, less controversial topic.

Dissident Frogman was one of those blogs that just sort of stopped. Thankfully, it now appears the Frogman's hiatus was only temporary, because he's back up and running. Written by an anonymous pro-American Frenchman(!), this blog is big-time funny, occasionally poignant, and very original, including original graphic artwork and animated gifs. He belongs on every liberal capitalist's blogroll and bookmarks collection. Seriously, it's that good, and the new layout is beautiful. Welcome back Frogman! I'll get you on my blogroll as soon as I can remember the password...

It seems House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have written President Bush a stern letter claiming that the US troop "surge" in Iraq is a failure—you know, the troop surge that was scheduled to actually start in full-force right about now.

The borders of the United States are completely controllable. They're just not controllable in the way we've been trying to control them for the last eighty years. But the first thing we have to do in order to start thinking clearly about the problem is to make an honest, open-eyed appraisal of what is actually going on here. Number one, the term "illegal immigrant" is an oxymoron. An "immigrant" to the US wants to live here permanently. That in itself implies a desired legal status in the definition of the term. Who in heaven's name would want to permanently move to another country and spend the rest of their lives living underground, unable to ever fully participate in their community lest they be detected and deported at a moment's notice? What would be the point? Even if your homeland is an impoverished, oppressive mess, what would be the point of exchanging that for a life on the lam? You could never own a house, take a steady job, indeed, you could never stay in the same community for very long without risking being detected and deported or jailed. And as far as I know, here in the US, if you're ever caught here illegally you can never obtain legal residency in the future. So essentially, if you want to spend the rest of your life in the United States, sneaking across the border and living and working here clandestinely is about the worst imaginable way to go about it.

But that millions of Mexicans are here illegally is indisputable so how can this be? Because they're not here seeking to immigrate, they're mostly here for something else. We are not witnessing a massive wave of immigration as many reactionary social conservatives assert, what we are actually seeing is capital—in this case labor capital—seeking its highest rate of return. Most of the Mexicans illegally in the US today have no intention of remaining here. Most are here to make a quick buck to invest back home in Mexico. About half of all illegal Mexicans are very young single men, many of them looking to put together sufficient savings to establish themselves enough back home to take a wife and start their families. But regardless of what they want money for, they're illegal workers, not illegal immigrants, and this distinction is important to our understanding.

So everyone needs to calm down, please. America is not being "invaded" by Mexicans or anyone else. This is not to say that our border isn't currently broken, but by understanding what we're really facing, we can alter our law to radically change the situation. By creating a legal vehicle by which Mexicans can legally enter the US and work in the numbers demanded by the US labor market, an irresistible pressure—the pressure of supply and demand—will be neutralized at the border, permitting normal border measures to be sufficient to control them. Gone will be the mobs of border jumpers that have overwhelmed our border defenses for years. Instead they will all be waiting patiently in a quick line to pay their admission, be fingerprinted and photographed and issued an identity card that enables their movements to be tracked. The few people left with reason to try a border jump will be easily interdict-able by our current enforcement regime. We won't need Federal employment verification systems, national ID cards or pernicious hiring regulations. We won't need hundreds of thousands of border patrol agents...and we won't even need a 2000 mile-long wall.

There is no law saying that by permitting foreign nationals to live amongst us and work, we have to put them on the track to permanent residency and citizenship. And if I'm wrong and there is such a law, well, we can change it. One of the reasons that so many Mexicans are willing to come here illegally is because they have no intention of ever becoming American citizens; the ones that want to become citizens are the ones waiting in the decades-long lines to get here legally.

So the first step the US has to take is to separate, both conceptually and legally, work visas from the process of becoming a US citizen. It is in our best interest to allow the former unfettered and slow-walk the latter. Congress should create a work visa that lasts, say, two years—a "W" visa, with "W" being for "work." There should be no restrictive quotas or conditions on a W visa; instead they should be restricted only by charging a price for them. This price should fluctuate based on the "market." We should charge as high a price as possible, but not so high that most Mexican workers decide that it's more cost-affective to enter and work in the US illegally. A good starting point would be to find out how much the coyotes charge and charge half of that figure (remember, the idea isn't to compete with them but to put them out of business). The last I saw, they were charging $1000-1500 per head.

But even though W visas should be easily renewable for an additional price every two years into perpetuity, purchasing them and living and working in the US under their auspices shouldn't entitle the foreign worker to citizen track status—or any other status for that matter, other than "W."

That's it. I'm sick of the sniveling. And the whining. And the absurd histrionics. So let's just do it. Let's build our wall. Let's deport every illegal that can be found. Let's sanction any and all employers we find hiring illegals. I'm ready, but I'm betting the anti-Mexicans aren't.

Let's see how well the right-wing lustre on the immigration restrictionists arguments holds up when the government starts sanctioning farmers out of business by the hundreds and thousands. After all, a majority of Americans oppose "amnesty," right? Let's see how well the thousands of middle-aged construction sector small businessmen like picking up a hammer again after all of their help is deported. Sure, it might pay a little more than it did when they were younger, but will they be more likely to vote Republican? And will the market be affected when housing starts don't merely slow but disappear? Let's watch how the poor and working classes deal with doubling grocery prices to go along with the fuel inflation they've already been struggling against. The inflation won't come because unemployed Americans will demand more than illegal Mexican workers for picking produce and manning feedlots. Prices will go up due to shortages of these goods, at least until foreign agricultural imports can grow enough to take up the slack. From countries like China and...Mexico.

And I'm all for a 2000 mile wall. Let's build it. That is, let us build it, not Mexicans. Let's pass a law banning any Mexican labor or materials from being used to build our all-American wall. And then let's see if it gets built. Let's see how much money it takes to get enough middle-class, legal Americans from behind their PCs in their air-conditioned cubicles and home offices to man a shovel in the Chihuahuan Desert.

I understand that most people are unaccustomed to the idea of actual labor scarcity and the implications of true full employment. The history of the human condition has until now been one of surplus labor punctuated by periods of intense job scarcity known as recessions. Thus many can't get their heads around today's employment reality: We. Are. Out. Of. Workers. Those that used to be on the low end of the totem pole have moved up, and now there is a shortage at the bottom. The problem we have is that the laws of supply and demand don't care if we can figure it out or not. They are going to do what they always do, regardless. Like all natural laws, they have no conscience.

Now some may be thinking to yourselves, "but I thought all you free-market types said that keeping illegals out is impossible? How are farms going to go out of business unless these barriers to immigration actually work?" Well ultimately they won't be kept out, or at least not most of them after they discover the holes in the new system and fake documents become more ubiquitous. What will cause the economic damage is the disruption caused by enforcement. When the INS comes and rounds up all the illegals picking your lettuce, what is the lettuce going to do? Patiently wait until you can scrounge up other workers to resume the harvest? No, it's going to quickly become unsalable, which means you aren't going to make this season's payments. To many farmers, it won't matter that enough illegals will figure out how to get here in time to pick next year's crop. For these farmers (and meatpackers, and landscapers, and contractors, and small restaurant owners, etc.), there won't be a next year.

Mitch Townsend over at ChicagoBoyz delivers multiple right hooks to John Edwards' pampered puss.

Can someone remind me again how this fatuous slickster has achieved the status of contender for the Presidency?

Go to Google, type in "immigration betrayal" and hit the search button. Gaze upon the 971,000 hits. Check out a few of the links. Are you as creeped out as I am? I'm afraid the anti-immigration zeitgeist is no longer about the economic illiteracy behind protectionism or even fear. It's about vilification, the demonizing of those who disagree with the anti-immigration movement and its demands for fences and mass deportations.

Of course to legitimately characterize an action as a betrayal presupposes that a non-treacherous option is available and willfully not chosen. If no such option exists, then charges of venality have no basis.

But that's not the creepy part. The creepy part is the extent to which greedy big business is now being invoked as the villian in all this when anyone with eyes in their head can see that the bulk of illegals work for the smallest American businesses or work for themselves performing day labor. Historically, whenever popular political movements target "big business," the outcomes are never good.

A Google search for "immigration greed" produces 1.6 million hits.

When searching for "immigration big business" Google automatically parses "big business" as a single term, yet the search still produces 18.6 million hits. 

Yikes.

The list of changes I've wanted to make to LiberalCapitalist.com had grown over the last year to the point that it was making me nuts, so I finally rolled up my sleeves and implemented most of them. I simplified the document structure and eliminated several sections that were essentially orphaned.

The biggest change was the elimination of the creaky old Xaraya forum in favor of the shiny fancy Simple Machines forum (SMF). You can get there by clicking on "The Conversation" in the menu above. As soon as I figure out how to move it, I'll shift it to the liberalcapitalist.org domain which I also have registered. There is a small inconvenience introduced with the change I must apologize for in advance, and that is if you've registered here on the blog your registration doesn't carry over to The Conversation, so you will have to re-register there in order to post in the forums. I'm afraid I couldn't migrate existing accounts either because the passwords of users are actually (gasp) secure. The only reason I've used registration here on the blog is because if I don't the site becomes quickly inundated with comment spam. As soon as I can figure out a way to do it without exposing myself to the tender mercies of the spambots, I'll enable guest commenting on the blog and do away with its registration altogether. If anyone has any comments, criticisms or suggestions, leave them below or email me at the address listed in the contact block at the bottom-right. Anyhoo, this site is now officially considered out of beta.

Bill Whittle is back with a new site design, he's figured something out, and he's decided to do something about it.

Two years ago when I first thought of putting together a framework for a new American political narrative, Bill's essays (all of them) went a long way toward fleshing out a concept of liberal capitalist confidence for me. If a Liberal Capitalist Party has any possible role to play in Whittle's Ejectia project, then we will fulfill that role.

Having spent my entire adult life involved in third party politics, I've always thought that I had an appreciable understanding of how the two major parties protected their political duopoly by manipulating the rules of American democracy to block competition from smaller parties and independents. When it comes to refoming the state-by-state rules and laws governing ballot access, we can’t really look to the two majors for any type of support for reform because they are the direct beneficiaries of the status quo and the current arrangements produce no real downside for them. We can thus expect that they will always stand together to fight any reform that would enable others to take votes from them.

This is the reasoning that more or less forms the conventional wisdom that is most commonly used to explain the protracted dominance of the two major American parties and the obstacles to success that third parties must overcome to compete electorally. But as I've recently come to learn, this isn't the whole story. In fact, all of the rule-rigging is only a peripheral factor driving the two-party system. The primary cause was posited by French political scientist Maurice Duverger decades ago. He observed that when elections are based on choosing a single winner for office from within a geographical district, a two-party political system is the system most likely to emerge over time. Eventually this has become known as Duverger's law, and if it is correct, then America’s two party system is pretty much here to stay. And even if one believes, as I do, that the two-party system is on whole a more effective democratic system than multiparty systems, that doesn't mean it couldn't be better still for all of us if the Democrats and Republicans didn’t have a permanent lock on their memberships in this exclusive club, but rather rose and fell in prominence relative to other parties as well as each other according to their responsiveness to the desires of American voters.

As the Libertarian Party's repeated ballot access successes and subsequent dismal election results over the years have demonstrated, getting on the ballot and getting votes are two entirely different things. As it turns out, there's another hurdle, long lamented by third parties, that dwarfs the issue of ballot access: the "wasted vote" dilemma. Most voters intuitively sense the game theoretics behind our current single-vote/single winner election model: any vote not for the contender (the second place candidate) is for all intents and purposes a vote for the favorite (the front-runner) since any vote for any other candidate—because he or she has virtually no chance of winning—is "wasted" by not contributing to the ultimate outcome of the election. The wasted vote dilemma is thus an unintended Hobson's choice produced by the fact that voters have but a single vote to cast in any election, where most supporters of alternative candidates find themselves compelled to vote for one of the two front-runners instead of their actual preference. Net result? The vast majority of votes wind up going to the top two candidates and the two parties that support them. Third parties are cheated out of electoral support and thus the opportunity for long-term development because a mojority of their would-be voters choose the short-term gratification of participating in the contest between the top two contenders on the slate. Now there exists sound rebuttals to the wasted vote argument, but all of them require independent voters to trade their short-term electoral interests for potential preferred electoral opportunities in the future. Like most gratification deferral arguments, these arguments are not popular, and will most likely never be popular enough to drive any meaningful change.

Currently all fifty states use a voting system whereby each voter gets a single vote to exercise for any one candidate in any race. This single-vote/single winner system is most commonly referred to as a plurality vote system. Plurality voting has the benefit of being very simple, perhaps even the simplest form of voting, far easier to understand than some of the ranked ballot proportional voting schemes practiced in some countries in Europe as well as in Israel and Australia. Single-choice plurality ballots are simple to cast, and votes are simple to count, with each vote having the same value. And finally, the outcome of plurality elections are generally perceived by the electorate as fair and deliberate. In spite of these advantages however, there are still drawbacks to plurality voting. For one, there's tactical voting, where voters may decide to cast their one vote for a candidate they don't desire in an attempt to defeat a candidate they desire even less. For the major parties, the biggest flaw in the current system is it's tendency to regularly produce outcomes where a "spoiler" candidate splits off a margin of the vote to cause the otherwise most popular candidate to lose (think Perot in 1992, or Nader in 2000). And as we often see in our elections, candidates are too easily tempted to "go negative" with their campaigns, because the single-vote system makes the loss of a vote for the attacked opponent worth the same as a positive vote for the mud-slinger even though opinion polls show negative campaigns to be harmful to both the slinger as well as his or her target.

Does this make the electoral aspirations of American third parties a hopeless pipe dream? Maybe not. There is an election reform for which all of America—including the Democratic and Republican parties—just might be ready. The election reform that would put a stop to all of the negative externalities of our plurality system is called approval voting. In an approval voting system, the only difference from our current system is that voters can each vote one time for any candidate in any race. After the polls close, votes are tallied for each of the candidates the same way they are today (using the exact same methods and equipment) and the candidate with the most votes wins. There are advocacy groups currently agitating for this reform which can explain the simple mechanics more thoroughly than I can, but in short, approval voting would mean that every voter could vote for either one or both of the two front-runners and their preferred down-ballot candidate if they choose, making the wasted vote dilemma a thing of the past. The wasted vote dilemma can only occur when voters have only a single vote to cast. Third parties would finally be free to thrive or die based on their own merits instead of an unintended consequence of our electoral system. Although approval voting or similar electoral reform may not be sufficient to end the duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans, it may very well be a necessary step. Otherwise third parties will be stuck having to wait for one of the two major parties to completely collapse like the Whigs of yore, or pray for a political superstar like a Teddy Roosevelt to materialize and lead them to victory. And at the end of the day, an approval voting system also would result in more power in the hands of voters. In a democracy, more actual votes equals more political power for the People.

Here, Jane Galt, a.k.a. Asymmetrical Information's Megan McArdle, goes digging for comedy gold in Matthew Yglesias' comments section from a post of last week regarding the Parker v. District of Columbia. She finds a couple of doozies to hoist, including one from a commenter claiming that the Second Amendment was written to protect "the right of the People" to join the military. Although some years ago I would have appreciated the unintended humor, these days, well...not so much.

I don't know if it's because of 9/11, or the impatience with foolishness that results from growing older, or some other reason that has yet to occur to me, but I'm completely over the gun control debate. Everybody should be over it because the debate is finished, and we have an obvious winner.

I recall reading a Molly Ivins (RIP) column years ago in which she sneered at gun rights arguments for citing "canned quotes of the founders" to buttress the position that the Second Amendment protects individuals' rights—you know, just like the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights do. Molly lived in my town, and I was always hoping I'd bump into her one day so I could ask her for the canned quotes of the Founders that supported her argument. It would have been a rhetorical question of course, because the fact is there are none. That's none, as in zero. The simple fact is there is no evidence whatsoever that would indicate any of the Founders would have tolerated (much less supported) any government prohibition of firearms. The bizarre "militia rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment that the prohibitionists have been trying to make play all these years folds at the slightest touch on historical, legal, and even grammatical grounds.

And then there's our experience with right to carry laws. The anti-gun establishment argued forcefully that such laws would bring the violence of the OK Corral to our streets. But most of the states legalized concealed carry anyway, and the exact opposite of the prohibitionist predictions occurred: states with legal concealed carry experienced significant reductions in crime, including gun crime, in both absolute terms and relative to the handful of states where concealed carry remains illegal. Unfortunately for the gun control movement, their entire rationale for gun control was predicated on appeals to crime control and public safety, and thus their arguments have lost all possible credibility.

When we then add to the list the fact that gun prohibitionist have imagined no enforcement regime other than the same failed method the government employs to ban cocaine, the circle of refutation is complete. Arguments for gun control fail in every respect: the link-between-guns-and-crime argument, the Constitutional argument, and the enforcement argument. What arguments they have left, even if granted, are only barely capable of temporarily muddying the waters.

It's time to stick a fork in gun control, folks, it's done. It's so done it's not even funny anymore, or at least not to me. Now that O'Connor is gone, I predict that within the next few years the United States Supreme Court will "incorporate" the Second Amendment (by interpreting it based on the due process and equality clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment) as being an individual right inviolable by any level of government.

Anyway, I think we've had our fun, and now it's time for gun rights supporters to declare victory and advance the debate. We should quit humoring those gun opponents whom are too stuborn to admit defeat by arguing with them, but should instead dismiss them with a brief, perfunctory referral to Article V of the US Constitution. If they don't like the right to bear arms, then they can try to amend the Constitution themselves like good little Americans.

This is a powerful, powerful demonstration of how capitalism has improved the lives of billions over just the last 30 or so years. Here is Hans Rosling, professor of international health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, animating data to spectacularly demonstrate how world health has evolved in the wake of economic liberalization.

Hat Tip: Cafe Hayek 

Some facts that aren’t generally disputed by anyone:

1. Out of the 33°C of total warming attributed to the greenhouse effect, most if not all of it is desirable; without it we’d be an ice planet.
2. Out of the 33°C of total warming attributed to the greenhouse effect, 60-90+% is caused by water vapor, the third most common gas in our atmosphere.
3. Although cloud cover plays a major role in determining temperatures, we don’t yet understand how. The climate models currently predicting warming don’t model clouds at all yet.

The part that disturbs me about the current state of the science vis-a-vis the politics of climate change is that in spite of the fact that we are obviously before all else a water planet and it is agreed that water plays the largest role in greenhouse theory, hydrology studies are getting the short end of the stick and thus the science lags years behind the CO2 science.

So does the role of land use. For instance, think about the jillion square miles of asphalt we’ve laid down over the last hundred years worldwide. We can see the evidence of this warming every night on TV weather maps with cities always warmer than the surrounding countryside. Yet the phenomenon is largely ignored by a scientific community paid to focus almost exclusively on carbon dioxide.

Why is this? I posit that it is because government paymasters would have a far harder time arguing that they should take over every aspect of world economic output in an effort to control the Earth’s humidity. And land use? Sorry, but a scientific mandate to paint our roadways and rooftops with a radiative barrier is hardly the same as the worldwide control of the power of fire. And hey, we all know that the customer is always right.

I think we need to get government out of the science business.

No other domestic political issue has been more divisive during the last thirty years than the issue of abortion. And over the years the two opposing sides have allowed their stridence to coalesce into absolutist positions with the radical core of abortion rights proponents fighting any imaginable restriction and tacitly supporting a position of abortion until birth, and the radical pro-life core of the pro-life movement rending their garments over harvesting stem cells from abandoned polyzygotes "living" in fertility clinic freezers. And still, poll after poll demonstrates that roughly 70% of Americans favor abortion rights with restrictions.

The Liberal Capitalist Party believes that the time has come for a political party to take up the banner beneath which most Americans already march, and articulate a morally rational, politically workable compromise position.

 In order to do so, the first thing that needs to be addressed is the current law of the land, the US Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade. Current pro-life orthodoxy considers this ruling at best to be modern day Dred Scott decision, ripping the right to be alive from the unborn. On the other side of the fence we have pro-choice advocates treating Roe as if it were the Ark of the Covenant, the loss of which can only result in the destruction of the promised land. The whole truth of course isn't to be found in either extreme.

 The pro-life side needs to recognize that even though the ruling is generally correctly viewed as an example of unjustified judicial activism, it's beside the point. Women essentially have and have always had the power to have an abortion, regardless of this or any other ruling, and overturning it will move this nation absolutely no closer to stopping even a single abortion, especially as we pass into the age of safe and effective (for the mother) abortion drugs. For any politcal movement that holds less actual abortion as its goal, Roe is simply yesterday's battle.

The pro-choice side, on the other hand, needs to understand that Roe's findings aren't what they think they are in regards to women's rights. The ruling in fact contains the seeds of its own destruction by basing the permissability of abortion solely on the viability of the fetus. Notice how there is no mention of pregnant women at all in this premise? 

Although the medical technology is currently beyond our grasp, I don't think any of us would have any difficulty imagining a near-future where real test-tube babies can be conceived and brought to "term" without ever seeing the inside of a uterus. And from the second that becomes possible, abortion will be completely illegal as per Roe v. Wade, since all fetuses at every stage of development will then be theoretically "viable." 

 America, we have a problem. If we think the current debate over abortion has been socially corrosive, just wait until Roe hits the fan.

Looking back, it seems in every age Providence sees fit to send one amongst us who stumbles upon an overlooked truth which changes everything, literally altering the arc of human history by fundementally correcting our trajectory into the future. In our time, Milton Friedman was that man—until last November.

Delightfully, the new truth is nearly always a very unassuming detail that, nevertheless, once revealed, sweeps away ancient ignorance and frames an utterly new understanding of the worldly phenomena we witness every day: thanks to Copernicus' thinking about spinning balls, we know what days, and years, and seasons really are. And thanks to Gallileo's observation of the phases of Venus, we know Copernicus was right—and, as a mere side benefit, what science is. Thanks to Einstein's E=mc² we know what time is, and what space is. Thanks to Jefferson noticing that all men are created equal, we know what dignity and prosperity are.

And thanks to Milton Friedman, we now know what money is. Friedman's insight? Well it starts with an obvious fact that was mostly overlooked by economists until Friedman came along: the laws of supply and demand apply to money, just as they apply to most goods and services. When the laws of supply and demand are determining the exchange value of a good or service in terms of a money price, they are simultaneously determining the "price" (exchange value) of money in terms of that good or service. In other words, the laws of supply and demand are commutative; when a loaf of bread is sold for a dollar, that same dollar is sold for a loaf of bread.

Although this idea doesn't seem subversive on its surface, in its basic implications lay the power to explain both inflation and economic depression as simple expressions of the already well-understood laws of supply and demand. Up until Friedman came along, depressions were considered by most as some type of shadowy and inevitable natural failure of the free marketplace, a bug in the capitalist system. What Friedman demonstrated was that depressions were caused by monetary events where something causes the supply of money to suddenly and substantially contract. When this happens, buyers in the economy suddenly find theselves with less money to buy things. Thus sellers have difficulty selling what they make or do, so they start cutting prices. Some sellers find themselves unable to pay their bills, and firms start to fail. Bank loans go unpaid, and in desperation banks begin to call other loans which often also go into default. Unemployment lines start to grow. Government finds itself with falling revenues while demand for government services simultaneously rises. Unemployment grows even more. Voilá: depression.

But Milton Friedman wasn't content to rely on the strength of theory alone, as sound as it was. In his 1963 book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, he and Anna Schwartz demonstrated with data that every economic depression that occurred in those 93 years in the US was accompanied by a precipitous drop in the money supply, and every precipitous drop in the money supply that occurred was accompanied by a depression. Most of these monetary events, especially the really bad ones like the Great Depression, are caused by rapid, multiple bank failures.

With this book, Milton Friedman became to Adam Smith what Gallileo was to Copernicus: the empirical validator. And in doing so, they've both shown us what economics is. It's capitalism.

If this were the only thing that Friedman gave to us, it would have been enough. But over the long course of his life it proved to be merely the tip of the iceburg, both academically and publicly. Fortunately for us, Friedman's light was allowed to shine for a long time. Whether it was long enough for us to get it, time will tell.

I apologize for sitting out this election season. Unfortunately I just couldn't bring myself to write about it. The entire thing can be summed  up as the two major parties pointing fingers at each other and screaming "Fag!" I don't know about you, but I couldn't work with that.

But now all the chips have fallen. The Democratic Party has gained enough seats to take over both houses of Congress. Although all of the attention right now is currently being paid to the fact that the Democrats have bested the Republicans, soon everyone is going to notice that the Democrats' margin is even smaller than the Republicans' was, and recognize that regardless of the dynamics of the various races in which everyone has been so caught up, at the end of the day we're left with an even more narrowly divided Congress. That's right folks, we're as evenly split as we ever were. We still have no general political consensus, and thus as a nation we are prevented from making any progress. And that's the part that I found so hard to watch and write about. We are still represented by two parties which a majority of Americans can only reluctantly support.

The Liberal Capitalist Party fully supports Pope Benedict XVI in his statements of September 12, 2006. The free nations of the world have no problem with Allah being Allah, Mohammed being Mohammed, or the Koran being the Koran. We do however have a problem with those who would use religion to keep entire nations enslaved in a primitive tribal backwardness predisposed toward psychopathic violence. Ultimately it is not religion but this backwardness and ignorance of reason which keep these nations from assuming their rightful place shoulder-to-shoulder with the Great Nations—the Free Nations—of the world.

Over at A Second Hand Conjecture, Lance posts a tragic reminder of the situation in Darfur, where the humanitarian catastrophe only appears likely to worsen. But in spite of my own emotional distress over the situation, I can't bring myself to turn a blind eye to the implications of the calls for the outside world to somehow "stop" the ethnic cleansing taking place there. I believe it behooves all parties concerned to face up to some hard truths about the constraints we would face in any attempt to change the course of events in western Sudan.

The first fact we have to live up to is that deploying UN forces is very unlikely to help, if history is any indication. But it wouldn't be just because the UN is the UN; the current atrocities are occurring under the noses of the 7000 African Union troops already deployed there. Other diplomatic sticks aren't going to find a lot of success their either. The government of Sudan accurately sees itself as engaged in an existential struggle, and the nation is so impoverished already that it's likely no one there could even notice the effect of any type of economic sanctions. The truth is, the only way anyone is going to stop this horror from the outside is to overthrow the government of Sudan. Who is prepared to do that? Who is capable of doing that? The last time the US followed the UN into Africa was in Somalia. Who's ready for a sequel in Sudan?

As awful as the situation in Darfur appears, it should not be forgotten that it is taking place in what is arguably the most awful place in the world. There are no good guys and bad guys in any clear-cut moral sense, but rather a host of clashing tribal aggressors in an area that has known little more than grotesque privation and civil war for decades. The current conflict is the result of the Sudanese government's response to what were initially successful attacks on the government by rebels based in the Darfur region. The government found itself forced to pay and arm the Janjaweed militias to protect them from the rebels. And thus, the ethnic cleansing genie was let out of the bottle.

So let's cut to the chase: what are our real choices here? First, we could invade Sudan, geographically the largest nation in Africa, more than twice the size of Afghanistan and Iraq put together, and attempt to neutralize the military dictatorship that rules the country and suppress the ethnically Arab tribes in the west. Now honestly, is this even a realistic option? Even if the UN sends 20,000 disinterested Blue Helmets, will it help? There are some thirty-five or forty million people in the Sudan, which is ten to fifteen million more people than live in Iraq where we have eight times as many troops engaged.

Then there's option two: evacuate the black African population of Darfur, presuming that they are willing to leave their ancestral lands. But this option is also a no-go if for no other reason than because slightly more than half of the population of Sudan is made up of black Africans. It's simply not reasonable to believe that we could evacuate potentially millions and millions of black Sudanese without creating a humanitarian crisis worse than the current one. 

There is a third option, the option which I support, although with a certain reluctance. That is to provide the ethnic cleansees in Darfur with as many M-16s and as much ammunition (and perhaps even a little training) as would be necessary to allow them to defend themselves. Innocent human beings have the natural right of self-defense, and unlike the other two options, arming the victims (especially the women) in Darfur actually stands a chance of relative success. My reluctance comes from not knowing what to do if the cleansees use those weapons to overcome the cleansers and start their own round of genocidal payback.

I found this video linked over at Jeff Goldstein's site. He linked it without comment, so I wasn't prepared for what I saw and heard: Ayn Rand crossed with Martin Luther King in the form of a middle-aged Syrian-American woman. This video is of Wafa Sultan, on Al Jazeera in February of this year... truthspeaking. I'm sorry, but that's the only way I can describe it. As I said, this was in February, so I apologize to those who have already seen it.

I've not even a passing knowledge of the Arabic language, and thus I've never been moved by an Arabic speech—until now.  I had to post it.

One of the primary goals of the Liberal Capitalist Party Project is to "embrace and extend" the very concept of what a political party is in America. Today, both of the major parties have evolved into purely political entities which concern themselves almost exclusively with developing party doctrine, electoral strategizing, and supporting individual candidates for elected offices. But it was not always thus.

For example, many newspapers still printing today were originally founded by one of the major parties, including my local paper the Austin American-Statesman, which first began publishing in the 19th century as the Democrat-Statesman. Historically the major parties also fostered other derivative activities and associations such as the Union Leagues, mutual aid societies, and the organization of labor unions.

Then this morning I read that in Lebannon, Hizb'allah, or "party of God," started and continues to energize itself with a well-organized relief organization. In Gaza, Hamas formed itself in much the same way. 

Reading this I was reminded of how a few years ago, when I originally began to think about what a new, post-collectivist political party would look like, I envisioned an effort to combat the widespread economic illiteracy that inadvertenly supports so much of the political status quo in the United States. After all, most kids coming out of high school do so not knowing so much as how to write a check. Therefore, to promote party growth and its vision of liberty, prosperity and confidence, I believe the Liberal Capitalist Party should early on establish a widespread volunteer effort to offer free local workshops in personal financial planning, education attainment, entrepreneurism, and family debt management at the community level—sort of like an immersion course of Practical Capitalism for the Masses.

Such an effort should be based on a solid curriculum high on practical content and low on party boosterism, and unquestionably upright ethical practices, involving absolutely no financial solicitation for donations or other sales of products or services. Through such an effort we can leverage support for the LCP by helping to bring about the realization of the American dream throughout our citizenry, one American household at a time.