[irtheory] War ain't beanbag. Irony is conserved.

[R. A. Hettinga]

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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.

>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.

>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.

>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.

>
>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.

>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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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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