The Secret Libertarian Message In Food Inc.

I know, I know, you think the title must be a perverse joke.  However, I am serious.  Now, I have no idea if the passel of Leftoids who made Food Inc. are secret libertarians or unaware/inadvertent libertarians, but a libertarian message there is, buried near the end of the 'film.'

Consumers Drive The Train!
One must wade through ever deepening piles of manure to get to the end of the film to discover that, yes, the customer drives the train in a truly Free Market.  They give The Walmart a fine hearing, buried at the end, because they are out buying "organic" products for their stores.  Why are they buying 'organic?'  Because their customers want them.

Organic is a funny word anyway.  All food is organic.

Subsidies Bad!
Also, this pack of Marxists discovered that subsidies are bad.  Sort of.  They go to great lengths to complain that there is some sort of a lack of regulation, that somehow there is not enough government involvement, yet they complain that the government is regulating in favor of the biggest players in the food industry.  Isn't it obvious that this is the outcome every time you give government the power to pick favorites?

Anyway, they have a complaint that corn is subsidized.   The subsidized corn is messing up our food when it is fed to cows, or when corn sugars are fed to us.  Oh, and "the corporations" are doing this just to poison us because they don't care if they kill their customers.

The hidden libertarian thing here is that subsidies are bad.

Only The Large Rule?
Another of their complaints is that the food industry is consolidated into about four "giant" companies.  They show numerous examples of small farms, that seem to be doing pretty well, so I am not sure if the writer of the narration actually saw what he was narrating.  Within this complaint, they complain that food production has been consolidated into a handful of large factories.  That is pretty much the way things go with advancements in production technology.  However, they also complain that the armada of inspectors have declined.  Seriously?  If the production is, as they claim, concentrated in a few factories, then the inspectors do not need to cover as much ground.

Of course they use the fiction of Upton Sinclair as some sort of evidence that meat packing is dirty business.  Oddly, their video clips of where meat is actually butchered shows pretty darn clean conditions, while the narrator talks about all the filth that was on the outside of the cows before they were washed off and skinned.

The secret libertarian message here is that without government possessing the legal authority to pick favorites, the consumers would be picking their favorites in the marketplace as manufacturers competed for their business.

Walmart Monolith?
They make a big deal about Walmart, yet the opening credits and many other scenes appear to be shot at Kroger.  This seems to be a big thing with the neo-Marxists, pretending that Walmart is the only store left and that they have some magical power to destroy other stores.  In my neck of the woods, they don't seem to be doing such a good job, since I have to drive past Food City and Kroger to get to a Walmart produce department.  One had to drive past all three to get bags of fried gluten, or even a fresh-frozen pig's head.

Intellectual Property Gone Wild
They also make a point about Monsanto's aggressive patent enforcement and the ridiculous government handling of that sort of thing.  If, and only if, they managed to frame this bit factually (accidents can happen), then the Intellectual Property system is really out of whack.  Some farmers, who claim to never use Monsanto seed, say that other fields cross-pollinate their seed, resulting in patented Monsanto genes ending up in their next generation of soybeans.  Somehow, our glorious courts deem this as a patent infringement.

I don't know about you, but to me if you have a patent for something that can replicate itself, you should not have a claim on other people's property that your creation invades.  Too bad these farmers can't retaliate with trespassing charges.

If only we had decent judges who would throw out cases like this.  However, the film's answer to these issues is more government.  Sounds like another argument for the abolishment of intellectual property.

Pete Townshend: Uber Libertarian

This 2006 video of the great Pete Townshend is the ultimate in libertarian expression.
He says that he is now a conservative, but once was a socialist, which fits a common libertarian pattern: "A libertarian is a leftist whose been mugged." A transcript will be in the introduction to Super Duper Socialism.

Goldberg vs. Welch

A debate about Libertarian vs. Conservative at the American Enterprise Institute between Matt Welch, of Reason magazine, and Jonah Goldberg of National Review.

What Do Mussolini, Hitler, Obama and Newt Gingrich Have In Common?

What Do Mussolini, Hitler, Obama and Newt Gingrich Have In Common?

They loved FDR, in the beginning.

They all praised Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a great President with great policies.  Yes, it is true, Mussolini and Hitler praised FDR  in the same way that Progressive Newt Gingrich does today.  As George F. Will wrote on December 2, 2011 of Gingrich:

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”

As any thinking person knows, there is precious little difference between Marxism and the other Socialisms, beyond marketing.  "Progressive" is just the latest relabeling of National Socialism, an authoritarian system of government that began as Yellow Socialism in France, but did not catch on in Europe after it was made popular in the USA by Theodore Roosevelt, his cousin FDR, and Woodrow Wilson.

If that is not enough, just read this: Newt Gingrich Praised SEIU Head Andy Stern's Forward-Looking Vision. If you have been following this blog, you will know that Andy Stern is a Socialist who endorses the latest crony capitalism/central planning developments in Red China.  The Huffington Post quotes Gingrich as saying this in his book Real Chance: From the World That Fails to the World That Works:

Andy Stern, the head of the Service Employees International Union, is the union leader who probably best understands the challenge of the world market and the need to make American union members productive in the face of world competition. Sadly, he is a distinct minority among union leaders.

The thing that divides Progressives like Newt Gingrich from libertarians like Ron Paul is freedom, especially the freedom for the consumer to chose in a free market. The sad thing is, Gingrich can play the nomination game better than the Ron Pauls of the world.

Atheist Leftists Are Leftists First And Atheists Second, Or Less

Update: Christopher Hitchens died on 15 December, 2011.  National Review and Vanity Fair have the details.

Here we have Christopher Hitchens speaking to a group of atheists at a Freedom From Religion Foundation gathering.  He sounds like damn near the only atheist in the building:

One of the great things about Christopher Hitchens is that he is principled.  He dresses down a Leftist surrender monkey (around the 3:40 mark) and asks what he is doing in a conference like this.  He uses as an example the Greek Myth of Antaeus to respond to the ridiculous notion that if bin Laden is killed many will spring up in his place.

The point he makes is, there are religious zealots who are fighting us, killing human rights volunteers, etc. and they need to be stopped in the name of liberty for all.  The next questioner, a Marxist/Communist is "troubled" by Hitchens' earlier answer.  "You see how far the termites have spread" is the Hitchens money quote in response to the ridiculous question and the man's accusation that the West is the big "war crimes" instigator.

Hitchens continues in this clip about Islamic slaughter in East Timor and its appearance in the Al Qaeda/bin Laden manifesto:

Now, the point of all of this goes directly to the bigger issue of Atheism in the Socialist vs. Libertarian dialogue.

A hallmark of Socialists/Leftists is their professed atheism.  Not all of them to be sure, but one must mount a tremendous search to find a non-atheist among them.  In the libertarian ranks, the search is ever so slightly shorter.  That said about both, many a libertarian and many a Socialist will side with any non-Christian/Jew who wishes to attack Western Civilization.  Much like Murray Rothbard, on a different principle, clapping for Khrushchev  because "Khrushchev had killed fewer people than General Eisenhower, his host."

In the video clips above, Hitchens (now a libertarian Atheist) dresses down two pseudo-atheists for being against the Western response to being attacked by Islamic fundamentalists.  The basis of these pseudo-atheists' objection to the war against a religious theocracy is a recurring theme: Western free-market leaning governments caused the problem, so we should leave the jihadists alone and they will settle down.  Hitchens does not accept their arguments and dices them as any thinking human being should.

Now, for my own personal "bias", I am a Christian and libertarian who can agree with Hitchens in virtually all that he said in response to these people.  I do not want to impose my beliefs on others by force, terror, government coercion, or any other tactic that the jihadists are using.  Additionally, if some person or group want to force anybody else into a religion of any kind I feel that should be opposed, even with force of arms.

Sadly, many libertarians combine atheism and pacifism into a bizarre mix that results in a defacto support for any non-Christian group that is willing to attack the West.  Their atheism is more like an endless attack on Christianity from a non-denominational agnostic view than true atheism.  Perhaps there is a dose of false libertarianism in there too.

Natural rights do not enforce themselves.  Words to live by from quite a few libertarian and conservative thinkers.  If someone is trying to take your rights by any means, you have every right, indeed you have an obligation, to prevent them from doing so, even if force is required and the police power of the state is perfectly appropriate.  One can understand leaving our powder dry when some group of people outside of our control wishes to abuse each other, issuing official embargoes, strongly worded telegrams, and the like.  However, when they move to attack us and impose their version of il-liberty on us, including our allies, the gloves need to come off.

Who Thinks #OccupySomeplace Is Like The Tea Party or like Fight Club?

One thing that can possibly sillier than the #Occupy "movement" is the people who write about it.  Especially the ones looking for similarities to the Tea Party.

Other than being diametrically opposites, exactly like Socialism vs. Libertarianism, there are no similarities at all.  Yes, I said it that way on purpose.

If you want to find a similarity between #Occupy and anything modern, you must turn to fiction entertainment.  One film that comes to mind is Fight Club, a film from 1999 with the social message that we can all be equal if only the evil, bad, unfair credit bureau databases were erased.  In the movie, the domestic terrorism plot was financed through fraud against a corporation, resulting in billions of dollars worth of information and real property blown up in Manhattan.

The #Occupy crowd has a similar solution, although they have not yet used explosives.  They are calling for loan forgiveness on pretty much any loan that their members willingly received, typically for college degrees that employers find less valuable than a Commercial Driver's License.  Other loans are in there too, but this crowd expects the government to steal from "the rich" and "the banks" to pay for their collective bad consumer choice.

Somehow, they feel that the way to do this is by empowering the same government organs that now over regulate lenders even more power.  The sad thing is, these people would not have the debt they have if it were not for government programs proscribing this sort of haphazard lending to begin with.  The #Occupy crowd wishes to give even more power to the government people who bailed out the lenders several times in a row, with little or no relief to the people who ignorantly bumbled, or rushed, into these questionable loans to begin with.

If only the government were more Libertarian rather than Socialist, the government would be concerned with the properness of contracts and the people lending the money would be worried about getting their $100,000 back from an art student, or not.

Would You Like Borders With That Socialism? Progress and Background

I think that I have most of this book in my head now.  The only hurdle is writing it down in a manner that others can follow, or at least stand to read.  The experience is a little strange, because I used to write papers, studies and long reports when I made my living as a defense analyst.  However, those writings were not for that broad of an audience.  There was always someone around to proof read too, and I am doing this solo.  My other books are fiction, set in the future, which is easier and harder than doing this.  It is easier because, in fiction, I invent the world that the characters populate.  Fiction is harder because In have to remember what I made up throughout a series.  I have no problem with consistency in non-fiction, but Socialists and Leftists have none of these problems, because they do not let that pesky consistency bother them.

Actually, the vetting of anything I touched in defense was reviewed, proof read, shot at, blown up, rewritten, and required approval of so many other analysts that it was nearly impossible for it to escape into the wild as bad work.

I am still reading Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism.  I cannot stress enough what a must read book this is for any Libertarian, libertarian, conservative or Conservative.  Small confession here, when I began this writing project I sought out a copy of Liberal Fascism only as a reference source for my new book.  There was one, and only one, copy at Barnes & Noble and my only intention was to find a few important references that Jonah mentioned when he was speaking to the Heritage Foundation.  Being generous here, I will estimate that it took all of ten minutes for me to decide this paperback needed to be on my bookshelf.  It has been my constant companion, second only to my fiancee, for the past week.  See my YouTube channel under Favorites for video of Jonah Goldberg speaking before Heritage and at the Rio Grande Foundation.

One "problem" with this project is, like many other things, I thought of or observed many things that others have written about already.  Liberal Fascism covers more of things I thought of, within the scope of modern political divisions and their roots, than any other book I have found.

If that were all there were to it, I could just pass around writers and essays that match what I like and believe, help others to see the fallacy of Socialism, and be done with it.  Well, there is something else that I hope to bring to the table.  I see other connections that others seem to miss, or at least they do not connect them together.  Sticking with Liberal Fascism, Jonah writes at length about the Leftist/Socialist connection to Moscow.  There is a lot more to that than most political writers seem to acknowledge.

For this post, I leave you with yet another misuse of Fascist/Nazi combined with disinformation all rolled into one.  A video clip I shot 10 OCT 2010 that includes a Lyndon LaRouche supporter 30 seconds into the video.  If you do not know, the Lyndon LaRouche camp are the Democrats who show up at rallies with photoshopped posters of Obama wearing a Hitler mustache.  I allowed the LaRouche supporter to give his spiel about what they stand for.  Basically, they are for everything the Nazis were for, minus the genocide, but they paint Obama as Hitler.  I think the better image for Obama would be a black shirt with that cute little Il Duce cap and fasces.