Year: 2016

The possibility of nominees for President that majorities do not seem to want is due to the plurality winner takes all elections and the existence of super-delegates in the Democratic Party.

If Trump wins the nomination, Republicans have another tool to block both his election and the Democratic nominee – the Electoral College.

Most states use plurality voting for electing members of the Electoral College. The Electoral College requires the person they designate as President to get a majority of electoral votes. If no one gets a majority, the House of Representatives gets to pick the President.

If the Libertarian Party nominee wins enough states to insure that no one gets a majority of the electoral votes, then if the Republicans can continue to hold the House of Representatives, the Establishment could end up selecting the President.

Could the Republican Establishment (whoever they are) give Gary Johnson or whoever wins the Libertarian nomination, enough votes to win a plurality in a sufficient number of states to deadlock the Electoral College?

While he might be better than all the other major presidential candidates still active, John Kasich is wrong for America.

From his website:
https://www.johnkasich.com/nationalsecurity/

“RENEW OUR MILITARY: As America’s commitment to security leadership has withered, our military has been neglected. John Kasich has called for $102 billion in increased defense spending over the next eight years to improve our conventional capabilities and create new cyber defense resources to better safeguard our security.”

There is no data that shows that the military has been neglected.
https://mises.org/library/no-military-has-not-withered-away-under-obama

It is the foreign adventurism started years ago, and continuing to this day that is out of control.
“…during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency (2001 through 2008), the federal government spent $4.7 trillion on defense. During the seven years of the Obama years, from 2009 through 2015, the federal government spent $5.3 trillion. Obama still has another year to go.”

The appalling suicide rate of those who have been sent on deployment after deployment by the Bush and Obama Administrations shows there is something terribly wrong. The reports on the suffering of so many veterans, never question the fundamentals of an interventionist foreign policy that has led us to this situation. Better treatments for PTSD is not the solution. Stopping the madness of our foreign policy is.

As the last good Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul (not Rand) says: the best way to rebuild the military is to change our foreign policy. We must stop using the military of the United States as the world policeman. Stop treating soldiers, sailors, and airmen as pawns in the neocon and “humanitarian interventionist” game of militarized American exceptionalism. Stop using the US military to protect wealthy countries across the globe. Putting troops on Russia’s border and sending warships to the South China Sea are not protecting the United States. Our bipartisan aggressive foreign policy continues to place us in danger.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2016/march/06/do-we-need-to-rebuild-the-military/

At least in his public pronouncements John Kasich shows no willingness to change the direction of our foreign policy, but rather wants to double down on the failed policies that have continued to make the world so dangerous.

Jerry Taylor gives his prescription for moving toward a more libertarian future.

http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2016/02/23/is_there_a_future_for_libertarianism_1563.html

My take:
While it would be nice if we could have more liberty by promising a “robust” safety net, those who seem to be more interested in equality than adequacy will probably not be willing to make a bargain with the pro-liberty crowd.

It reminds me of Reagan agreeing to raise taxes and expecting Congress to cut spending.

As Taylor says, we haven’t gotten far with the strategy we have been selling, so what is there to lose by following Taylor’s suggestions.

So for now, I will only encourage increasing/maintaining non-economic civil liberties, and reducing foreign intervention (adventurism), and moving the military, CIA, and State Department savings into making a more robust safety net.

Steven Horowitz argues that both Trump and Sanders show conservative tendencies in an essay published by FEE.
click for full article

excerpt:
“… despite being seen as political opposites, their distinct views converge in the idea that resources are “ours” as a nation and that it is the president’s job (and the state’s more generally) to direct them in the national interest. For Trump, that interest is “making America great again” and making sure we “beat” the Chinese. For Sanders, that interest is the attempt to protect “the working class” against the predation of two different enemies: the 1 percent and foreign firms and workers, all of whom are destroying our industries and human resources. “

At a recent FEE Conference, http://fee.org/events/annual-retreat-2016/,
one of the break out sessions had a showing of the documentary Poverty Inc.

There were two major contentions in the movie about how foreign intervention prolongs poverty and dependency.

1. Perpetual aid kills the local economy, by reducing economic activity.
2. The strings attached to economic aid and other restrictions on trade, reduce the ability of “third world counties” to participate in global trade.

I agree with #2  but I am not sure that perpetual aid on its own reduces economic activity.

The video shows that prior to massive foreign aid many third world countries were self-sufficient in food production, clothing and textiles, but these industries died out when food and clothing aid arrived.

While I agree that certain industries could be destroyed by foreign aid, I do not understand how that activity alone would keep a local economy from growing. It would seem to me that the benefits of division of labor would more than offset some businesses being unable to compete.

If local people cannot compete growing food, that does not mean that the local people must remain idle. When people no longer have to buy food, and spend their time growing food,  would not  that free them to do other things, and thus economic activity could be sustained, If there were no restrictions on markets they could enter, or skills and capital that outside entrepreneurs could provide them philanthropy should not be a negative.  If, however, people are content to a marginal life, and not use the advantages that charity give them, then their idleness hurts everyone.

How welfare affects the recipients behavior is more important, than its effect on local businesses.

 

Bruce Fein writes
full article in Washington Times

Excerpts:
The president, i.e., the Commander in Chief under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, should prohibit offensive use of the military not in self-defense unless two conditions are satisfied.

First, victory must be defined with mathematical exactness including the month and year of accomplishment. The prevailing practice, appropriately borrowed from Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio, is to define victory as “We’ll know it when we see it.” Thus, neither President Obama nor his national security team can describe what victory will look like or when it will be achieved in the many Middle East, Asian and North Africa nations in which we are militarily engaged.

Presidential candidates for 2016 are equally criminally clueless. One defines victory over ISIS as making the “sand glow in the dark.” Another boasts of a “secret plan” to defeat ISIS like Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” for victory in Vietnam during his 1968 campaign. He did not dispute Sarah Palin’s characterization of his secret plan as “kick ISIS’ ass.” A third candidate amateurishly described victory over ISIS as doing “whatever it takes,” including terrifying the organization by prohibiting Syrian refugees from entering the United States and expanding the intelligence capabilities of the agency that detected mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Often people ask their politicians to ban peaceful but potentially dangerous activity.

Recent political controversies include: fracking, owning a bit bull, carrying a gun, not being vaccinated, selling vaccines, etc.

I recommend that legislatures (state or local) be able to require liability insurance when people want to engage in what the political process deems potentially dangerous activities? (States already do this for driving an automobile).

The liability insurance would cover all damages without a monetary limit. If the activity is truly dangerous, the cost of such liability insurance will be very expensive. If the the activity is not dangerous, than the cost of insurance will be low.

There would be no need to ban these activities. The penalty for not having insurance for designated activities and the cost of insurance would effectively ban dangerous activities from concerned communities. We would still have the political process to decide what is considered dangerous, but the market would decide how dangerous is it.

Many of us agree that sharing and caring are essential to human survival. The major difference in our opinions seems to boil down to: should we force sharing or encourage sharing? Libertarians believe that we can encourage it via empathy and freedom; socialists believe that it needs to be forced via government and restriction. The good news is, more people are looking at libertarians and socialists because we’re talking about a wider range of problems than the democrats and republicans are. We’re not beating the same dead horses. That is the beginning of a paradigm shift.

My favorite David Bowie songs were sort of soft rock;

Here is a report from the Washington Post that explains why there were US personnel in Benghazi based on a confidential (ie hidden from the American public) report.
Washington Post Article
Excerpts: “A highly classified annex to the [Senate] report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.)

The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation.” …. “also noted that this is not a partisan issue … both parties greenlighted regime change in Syria years ago, and both parties have tried to cover up what was really going on in Benghazi.”

My comment:
What Gowdy and others should tell the American public is that, since you are willing to accept an American empire that intervenes anywhere and everywhere in the world, you need to expect that operatives will get killed and hurt. The US personnel in Benghazi were not doing innocent public service, they were gun running. Shades of the Iran-Contra affair.