wkmac
Well-Known Member
The Conservative Nut That’s Hard To Crack
by Scott Lazarowitz
During this holiday season and with all the performances of The Nutcracker now, I must express my frustration with hard nuts to crack: influential conservatives who simultaneously criticize domestic Big Government yet support Big Government foreign policies.Those kinds of destructive expansionist policies, from the anti-communist Big Government military socialism to the US government’s last 20 years of invasions and occupations in the Middle-East, could not have been possible without Americans’ dependence on the US government’s compulsory national defense monopoly. Prof. Hoppe has discussed how such a state-run defense monopoly, naïvely approved by the Founders in their Constitution, is inherently invasive of the very people the state is in charge of protecting, because it compels citizens to participate in such a contract, and it is funded through coerced taxation. As Hoppe notes,
Since President Obama's election, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have been consistently lecturing from the rooftops in favor of free market capitalism and getting the government out of our lives. These conservatives advocate the Founders’ views of "limited government" and private property rights when it comes to government’s invasions of our personal and economic lives. Then, they contradict themselves by enthusiastically supporting the US government’s expansion and invasions into the lives and property of people on foreign lands.
As Lew Rockwell noted, "conservatives have two brains. One sees the government as a menace, something stupid, inefficient, brutal, isolated from real life, and the enemy of liberty. The other sees government as smart, wise, and all-knowing, a friend to all, in touch with life around the planet, and the friend to liberty everywhere."
In his article, The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism, economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe analyzes post-World War II anti-communism, particularly of National Review founder William friend. Buckley, Jr. Hoppe notes Buckley’s "new conservative credo," and Buckley having written that "we have to accept Big Government for the duration―for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged…except through the instrument of totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores."
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the US Military Industrial Complex had become a firmly accepted fact of life, along with its funding through taxes and debts, and had conservatives supporting it. In 1990, the elder President Bush decided that Saddam Hussein was the new enemy, and took the US military into Iraq. That was followed by more Islamic-based terrorism in the 1990s and the September 11th, 2001 attacks. The Islamic terrorists had replaced the communists as the bad guys.
Ten years after the elder President Bush invaded Iraq, the younger President Bush’s Doctrine of "end justifies the means" moral relativism was in place. Because the terrorists use unconventional means of attack and are not of any organized nation or state, say the conservatives, therefore it is necessary to compromise our principle of non-aggression by initiating foreign invasions to prevent future attacks.
...no one in his right mind would agree to a contract that allowed one's alleged protector to determine unilaterally, without one's consent, and irrevocably, without the possibility of exit, how much to charge for protection; and no one in his right mind would agree to an irrevocable contract which granted one's alleged protector the right to ultimate decision making regarding one's own person and property...
Hoppe contends that, when the state has a compulsory monopoly in protection, "...instead of preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage."
read the rest at the buried link in the title above
