Libertarians in Media are clueless about the military

Gun Toting Socialist, David Weigel

There's no warfare like class warfare.

One of the sad things about the true Right, which includes libertarians, is the utter absence of military knowledge in the ranks of their scribes.  It is not an issue that many of us with decades of military experience are not libertarian, no it is just odd that magazines like Reason cannot manage to assign a single story that relates to the military to anybody with a day's worth of experience in uniform.  Worse than that, a basic item of being libertarian in America is actually knowing what is in the US Constitution.  This works out great when libertarians publish articles about marijuana legalization or abuses of police power, but they seem to have skipped Article 1, Section 8 when topics like Marines badmouthing the Commander-In-Chief pop up.

In his latest David Weigel impression, Mike Riggs tosses this bit of class warfare into the cloud:

Mike Riggs, David Weigel Impersonator

Dissenting While Enlisted Will Get You Fired, Dissenting While Commanding Gets You Retired

Riggs tosses out the false comparison between the treatment of a General who illegally badmouthed Vice President Biden and was summarily retired, with the treatment of a Marine Sergeant who was discharged, with nine years of service, for badmouthing the President.


Article 1, Section 8, states in part:

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

The Congress is empowered, actually commanded by the States to regulate the affairs of military people in a manner that they cannot do to civilians through the "organizing, arming, and disciplining" portion of the document that most libertarians hold dear.

In this case, it is a simple principle that crosses both government service and private employment grounds: badmouthing the boss can have severe consequences.  On a related point, Riggs' lack of knowledge is telling:

Could those remarks be interpreted as "prejudicial to good order and discipline"? I guess that depends on your rank. They were bad enough that Obama told McChrystal to resign or be fired, but they weren't bad enough for McChrystal to be discharged. 


Riggs' concept of what "be fired" means for a soldier amounts to getting a transfer to a new department, or being moved to a smaller office, like some screwup at the EPA.  Not the case.  Be fired means getting booted from the service, but it usually does not mean losing one's pension.

I know a retired Command Sergeant Major who was famous for this with the senior NCOs within his domain for infractions arguably much more severe than this, usually dereliction of duty related violations.  He would show up where the NCO was supposed to be working, knowing full well that they would not be there, track the NCO down and shove a resignation letter and a list of charges before the NCO, giving the NCO his choice of retiring or fighting the charges.  They always chose retirement.


Additionally, Riggs appears to be under the impression that a Sergeant got screwed out of a retirement check.  As most all Service Members know (as well as many other people), you are not eligible for retirement after only nine years of service.  If this Marine had 20 good years of service, odds are overwhelming that he would have been forced out as a retiree, just like the General.  Fact is, he was not even half-way to retirement so the point is moot.

Another factor here is the liberaltarian leanings of Reason magazine.  Their writers and readers tend to have the same attitude toward the US Military as college Liberal Arts professors and their fellow travelers at The Daily Worker, The Nation, Slate and MSNBC.
Update: Looks like Nick Gillespie, aka The Jacket of Reason, get it but he does not get to expand on how he came to his correct conclusion. Redeye from 5 APR 2012.

The Decline of Reason: Riggs Is The New Weigel

Gun toting Socialist, David Weigel

As a frequent reader and infrequent commentator at reason magazine's blog for several years, I am somewhat shocked at the latest incarnation of David Weigel, who goes by the name Mike Riggs, gracing their blog.

Like Weigel, Riggs expresses not one hint of knowing that government police power is perfectly acceptable to protect private property:
New York Judge Upholds Eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park by Mike Riggs

The new Dave Weigel Socialist at reason: Mike Riggs

Everything Bloomberg does to you is for your own good, even jail! was his tone when the city of New York finally got around to clearing out the #Occupy squatters defiling privately owned Zuccotti Park in Manhattan.  I defy you to distinguish the reason post from the worst one can find daily in the Nation or Slate for refusing to even acknowledge that private property owners have any rights whatsoever.

Bradley Gardner: Reason's Thomas Friedman

Reason no longer confines itself to being a champion of stripping real property owners of any control of their land, while bashing the police for actually doing something that they are supposed to do.  No, as if Leon Panetta, Joe Biden, Norman Fleishman, Tom Friedman (and the rest of the New York Times staff) were not falsely touting Communist China's crony capitalism (conveniently leaving out the word "crony") in the mainstream media, reason recently entertained us with this bit of Bradley Gardner pap:
New at Reason: Bradley Gardner on China’s Black Market City

Chen Mingyuan has lived here all his life, but he still gets lost every time he drives into Wenzhou. “All the roads in this town were built by businessmen, so none of them make any sense,” Chen says as we back out of what we just discovered is a one-way street. For the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure. 

The article fawns over the people of Wenzhou for building the infrastructure that the government did not build, and the Communist Chinese government for "looking the other way" so that these brave entrepreneurs can engage in commerce.  Perhaps a video of what the Chinese government does build around Wenzhou should dampen any praise for Communist engineering, or any respect for private property to build disasters waiting to happen:

Not a matter of if, but when.

Oddly, the reason take on the situation is that if the Communist government took a peek and went away, then they will continue to do so.

The government’s indifference didn’t last forever. But when the authorities got around to paying attention, they decided not to mess with a good thing. In 1985 Liberation Daily, a paper sponsored by the Shanghai Communist Party, referred to Wenzhou as a “model” for other parts of China to study. In the next year 15,000 government officials visited the city to learn, not crack down. Although bureaucrats still occasionally try to impose state controls on the city, the futility of the effort quickly becomes apparent. By now the local Chamber of Commerce has taken to negotiating trade deals both domestically and internationally because, as in most other things, the private sector is more effective here.

There was no pondering of how long it would be before the autocrats in Beijing show up to claim the "people's property" without so much as a thankyouverymuch and seizing the privately built roads and utilities.  No, the article waxed on about how this is the way Chinese capitalism works.  Something else missing was any government enforcement of contracts, but there was a slight nod to the iron-fisted loan shark enforcement that may or may not exist.

Gray-market lenders are often established, though technically illegal, financial institutions that lend primarily working-capital loans at rates as high as 10 percent a month. Contacts often modify interest rates based on how well you know them. Forms of repayment enforcement differ. Weng points out that in a community so dependent on guanxi—relationships—defaulting on a contact’s loan could blackball you from future business opportunities. Weng doesn’t clarify how defaulters are treated by underground debt collectors, but he does say they “aren’t the type of people I’d want to get involved with.”

This is an incredibly naive view of how authoritarian governments operate.  Even here in the United States, where nobody could argue with a straight face is anything approaching the authoritarianism demonstrated in China, when people make property valuable the government swoops in to take it over or get their unconscionable cut.

Reason, it has been nice knowing you as a sometime voice of reason (drink!) in a world teaming with Socialists.  Now you have joined their ranks as a sideshow act, destined to be a punchline in the monologues of David Corn and Katrina Vanden Heuvel on cable news appearances.