RAH wrote...

...

I'd like to hear how children who werent old enough to pronounce the colour were 'reds' who were rightly tortured (apparently) in your view, as well as the many women raped and tortured at the hands of SOA graduates.

Funny how "liberals" always do the debits and not the credits in these grotesque calculations. Shall we count the several-orders-of-magnitude number of starved (*and* butchered) children in various Marxist "paradises" around the world, too? I thought not. It wouldn't be "fair".

Holy shit, Hettinga. Most of the time you make some sense. This ain't one of 'em. So, in other words, if Salvador Allende is democractically elected in a foreign country, then it's OK for the US to send agents and train torturers and then assasinate their leader? This is a complete nonsequitur logically. The fact that "The Marxists would have killed even more" is irrelevant. As someone who seems to espouse a more or less deterministic viewpoint vis economics and crypto-anarchy, you yourself should support a notion of letting them figure things out on their own. More than this, this is the exact thinking that has caused us all sorts of problem. The best (and most obvious) examples are Vietnam and China. Both of these countries repeatedly kicked our ass in several theaters and then went through a brief socliaist period. In both cases, socialism is practically gone. Had we instead been smart with Mao and China (who we sent the moron Ambassador Hurley to meet) and Ho Chi Min (who was actually our ally against the Japanese), might the excesses of, say, the cutlural revolution been nearly as bad? Would Mao have felt it necessary to try to move the industrial base to the countryside where things would be much less easily A-Bombed (As MacArthur recommended)? Obviously not. There probably would have been a cultural revolution/cleansing of some sort anyway, but this has always happened periodically in China, and Fa Lun Gong is merely another example. In the end, China ended up being a major capitalist country, and our involvement against the Chicoms only slowed this process down. We're making a similar mistake in Iraq, and we New Yorkers will probably pay for it again (if Tyler Durden stops posting after WTC#2 comes tumbling down, you'll know what happened. I'll try to post one more time from under the rubble if I can sniff a WiFi hotspot.) -TD

From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> To: irtheory@yahoogroups.com, cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: RE: [irtheory] War ain't beanbag. Irony is conserved. Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:45:37 -0400

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Ah. Here we go. A "liberal" hides behind the straw man, this time in the shape of a child. How original.

At 3:37 PM +0100 6/13/04, Lee James wrote:

...

I'd like to hear how children who werent old enough to pronounce the colour were 'reds' who were rightly tortured (apparently) in your view, as well as the many women raped and tortured at the hands of SOA graduates.

Funny how "liberals" always do the debits and not the credits in these grotesque calculations. Shall we count the several-orders-of-magnitude number of starved (*and* butchered) children in various Marxist "paradises" around the world, too? I thought not. It wouldn't be "fair".

...

I'd also be keen to see evidence of this free-market success of which you talk, because it isn't in central america for the countless millions in poverty.

Freedom, market or otherwise, isn't about the fool's errand of forced income redistribution, which is, invariably, what actually causes famine and tragedy. See "children", above. (Not that "for the children", above, isn't the "liberal" canard it has always been.) Freedom, market, and otherwise, is about *choice*. The choice to work hard and make money and do better than you started. Progress, more stuff cheaper now than it used to be, more stuff cheaper tomorrow than it is now, is the result. What you do with that stuff, is your problem. More to the point, it is the very "maldistribution" of that stuff that makes *progress* happen.

Marxists have this problem with counting stuff. They deal in lumps of labor, or "missing" jobs, or labor theories of "value", and it all speaks to a basic innumeracy that does them ill in a world where actual math and science are required to achieve things.

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Before, a person encourages free-markets elsewhere, how about encouraging them in the United States in order to really test the theory and give these nations a chance of economic development. The three most successful industries in the united states (steel, agriculture and techonology/military)

Straw man. You're comparing markets and economies that are, for the most part, free, and pulling out subsidies which are, by definition, exceptional, and then comparing them to economies in which private property is, for the most part, criminalized, and saying that the former is worse.

Give me a break.

Sure. I wish that government didn't control huge tracts of the economy in the US, making them, for the most part, like the very lands that they own -- sometimes to enhance it's take in graft, sometimes to mystify nature for various useful idiots out there -- productivity wastelands.

Manufacturing in the US is done in *spite* of, not *because* of, subsidy, not to mention over-regulation and the government-assisted extortionate demands of labor "unions". So too with the political feather-bedding and log-rolling in agriculture, mining, and, even, I would claim, defense -- if it were possible to imagine a world with force-monopoly to begin with, making the whole point moot.

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are all state funded and protected in a exceedinly 'socialist' manner. There is no evidence in Europe of development occuring in industry any other way either.

Say no more. :-). In Europe industry is forbidden unless permitted. In the US, where new industries are created (what medium are we talking on, here, for instance) faster than governments can regulate, much less subsidize them, industry is permitted unless forbidden.

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The defence of America and by proxy Reagan's crime in Central America is alarmingly close to Hitler's defence of his Genocide and also Stalin's killing of counter-revolutionarys (if we hadnt done it they wou;d have killed more, theyre the threat not us etc).

That's it. Go for it. You know you want to: Reagan = Hitler.

Somewhere, even Mike Godwin, who probably didn't vote for Reagan, though for different, more valid, reasons than yours, is laughing. Godwin, a casual friend of mine, has another "law", by the way. See my .sig, below, which points to an axiom of mine, which is, "progress, like reality, is not optional". It's entirely appropriate to this discussion of industry being created by government, and not the other way around.

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Exactly at which point does a war (any war) stop being defensive because according to the history books the US has never fought an aggressive war.

I prefer to think about the McDonald's paradox: No country that has a McDonald's has attacked another. :-). We'll see how long *that* stands up. As for "democracy" somehow being magical, remember that Athens brought on the Peloponnesian war, not Sparta. That Andrew Jackson, the founder of the political spoils system that is one and the same as the "Democratic" party in the US, was one of the great war-mongers of all time. There is a hoary old joke among Republicans in the US that Democrats start wars, and Republicans finish them. Humor that is, in this case, rooted more often than not in reality.

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I'm not sure that it is defensive to defend a country against its own people, when europe did so it was called colonisation.

Yawn. When Europe did it it was called "economics". A word you seem to be unfamiliar with. When their economic interests were attacked (First the Portuguese, then the Spanish, then The Dutch, then the English), surprise, they won. See Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", for details. Eventually, having won all these mostly defensive wars, they owned all this territory, and like other great rent-seekers throughout history, they handed it all over to the government because it was cheaper than hiring their own armies.

Life is hard. Sometimes, people with guns come and kick your ass. If you don't have guns, you can't kick their ass. More often in history, though, people with swords and spears came to kick the ass of *traders* with guns, who are there just to make a little dosh buying cheap and selling dear, and, strangely enough, the guys with the swords and spears lost, yielding their territory and, surprise, sovereignty. Force is a geographically monopolistic market. Whadda concept. It would be nice to change, but, like I said before, there it is.

Cheers, RAH

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