Egoism
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(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
Why libertarians must vote--for Bush

by Greg Swann

My mail ballot is here. It's sitting in front of me at my desk. It arrived a few days ago, but I'm waiting for my son Cameron to have time to help fill it out. This is the first election he's paid much attention to, and I want to go through the ballot questions--a/k/a initiatives, referenda, direct legislation--with him.

I almost always vote by mail. I almost never do anything where I am obliged to wait, so I almost never vote except by mail. But in fact I do almost always vote. I'm aware of all the virulent libertarian arguments against voting, and they all seem pretty vain to me. Whatever minimal impact a single drop of rain might have, it does have impact. However little politicians may listen to me, they never listen to me more attentively than when I vote. To the small extent that I can make them aware that there are people who deeply love true human liberty, to that extent do I benefit myself--and my son.

The one time that I was completely unable to vote--I was laid up in the hospital for almost a month--was the election in 1994, when Newt Gingrich handed a slice of reality to Hillary Clinton. Libertarians might wish to chortle that this came to nothing--which is false; it led to welfare reform and otherwise stymied the Clintons' socialist impulses--but my actual regret was that I didn't get to vote for Arizona Governor Fife Symington, an amazingly libertarian country-club Republican.

Even so, I can accept the counter-claims that I am voting for reasons that amount to fandom or to sympathetic magic or simply as a Hail Mary rejoinder to nihilist despair. I don't have a problem with any of those claims. The damned cars in front of me never go faster when I growl at them, but I haven't stopped growling. The fact is, this year I almost tripped over to the level of campaigning against a particularly pernicious ballot question--the amazingly insane Phoenix Trolley--but fortunately I was too busy to weigh my enthusiasm. In the end, I regard myself as being not just in but of this messy republic, so it's only right that I should join my brothermen in this dance of franchise.

But: I think this particular election is a good deal more important than the usual affair. And I think it is important for libertarians, whatever their objections, to hold their noses and vote. To vote for George W. Bush, of course, but that's too much like a campaign commercial. It's just as important to vote against John F. Kerry, after all.

The West is at a crossroads, and not joyously so. We are less proud of our humanity, and less deserving of the name, with each new iteration of homo sapiens. We are not so much bored with our past greatness as we are ignorant of it, sneering at works of genius we've never bothered to understand, razing the standards of excellence we had never yet finished raising. The incendiary Islamists demand our attention, but we hardly have time to notice them, so busy are we in our decadent disdain of the giants of our civilization, spitting at the West from the heights of their shoulders.

President Bush is nobody's Atlas, but he's enough of a giant that only about half of us can apprehend his stature. I could wish that the West had a better defender in this emergency, but it remains that Bush is the best we have. This alone is sufficient reason for everyone who is enfranchised to vote for his re-election.

I believe in speaking always from principle, and I believe that there is nothing so practical as speaking from "impractical" principle. WalMart is trying right now to beat back its critics with claims about feminist empowerment and cornucopian employee benefits. Instead it should look the American people in the eye and say, "We're better, faster and cheaper because we want your business. Our critics want to force you to pay more for less value. How is that right?" We've just been treated to another video of a another weeping hostage in Iraq begging the West to commit suicide in her behalf. This is not what she said, but this is what is meant by these entreaties--"Death to anyone or even to everyone except me!" Obviously the terrorists will continue to abduct, videotape and behead hostages so long as the hostages are willing to put on these pitiable performances, so the only principled stand is to say, "Kill me now. I will not betray my humanity in your behalf." The point is this: I wish George Bush were a large enough man to stand up to Kerry and his lap dogs in the media and say, "The war in Iraq has been a huge success. Not because there are no insurgents, but because we have the bases we need to launch and supply air- and land-based forces throughout the region. Iraq will be as free as it dares to be, but in due course all of Persia and Arabia will be free, all because we won this war." Bush won't speak from principle on this issue, and it costs him with people who never speak from anything but calculation.

But if Bush is not as large as he might be, he is still larger than many Americans can abide. The frenzy of hatred that has been whipped up against him would be amazing, had we not seen these same sorts of frenzies again and again in the past. It's a campaign, of course, the strategy of a few endlessly echoed by a thoughtless many. George Bush is an amazingly affable man. There is no one who would not be charmed by him in seconds, just as there is no one anywhere who can claim actually to like John Kerry. But more importantly, Bush is a man of firm and fixed purpose, and this is reflected in everything he says and does, in every line of his face, in his every movement and gesture. He may not be everything he could be, but he is everything he is, all the time. We've suffered through Bill Clinton, Al Gore and now John Kerry, the three stooges of Eddie Haskell's planet of oily lies and puerile, petulant posturing. If those three little boys are too much children of the sixties, then George Bush might well be the last man left from the fifties.

But instead George Bush is the first great man of the twenty-first century. Surely he had greatness thrust upon him, but he has borne up to it more than ably, more than admirably. He clearly understands the difference that the September 11 attacks made in global politics--just as clearly as John Kerry does not. The War on Terror devised by the president and his advisors is not a Kerryesque, Clintonesque police investigation. It is not a war of vengeance, as some on the right might have hoped, nor a war of conquest, as the calculating leftists and their volunteer dupes, the libertarian activists, insist. No, President Bush is actually exporting the West, as much of it as he can. I have argued in the past that the US would implant Rotarian Kleptocracies in its wake. In fact, the near-term results are more like Sharia Kleptocracies, but the governments the US is installing are republics, governments--even if messy governments--of the people. This by itself is a radical transformation in much of the Islamic world, and we can but hope that in the long run--and it may be a very long run--the seeds of Western pluralism will bear sweet fruit.

But this is George Bush's war, and it can never be John Kerry's war. The Democratic party may yet bring forth a viable national candidate who comprehends the post-9/11 world, but it has not done so yet. It has produced a vast host of inane demagogues--among whom Kerry is far from the worst--who would deliver the West, inch by inch, to the worst enemies it has ever known. George Bush is nobody's Atlas, alas, but he is our Cincinnatus--the freeholder who set down his plow long enough to save the republic from conquest--and that's enough for now.

There are other issues in this election, but there are only two that matter. Surely no libertarian can prefer Kerry to Bush on domestic policy--taxation or regulation or health care. Libertarians have attempted to claim that the post-9/11 legislation would be used to oppress innocent Americans. This may yet turn out to be true, under a John Kerry or Hillary Clinton administration. But it has not happened under Bush. Janet Reno, Bill Clinton's Attorney General, didn't need a Patriot Act to commit her crimes at Ruby Ridge and Waco, but the much-reviled John Ashcroft, despite his affectations, has been a model of restraint. Bush has been a pushover on domestic spending and crybaby social issues, but it is not reasonable to argue that Kerry would be better on these points. All of which is to say, even ignoring the only two issues that matter, Bush is still the better choice.

But it is only in the light of those two issues that it becomes obvious why libertarians must vote in this election--and vote for Bush.

The first is the war, of course, and the war is such an immensely important issue that libertarians should rush out to vote for George W. Bush on that impetus alone.

But there is another issue, at least equally compelling: The destruction of the republic by the left. The incidents are innumerable and astounding: Bush signs torn down, cars with Bush stickers defaced, Bush posters torn out of peoples hands, Bush campaign offices broken into, trashed, shot up, swarmed by mobs. The media have dropped all pretense of balance and are openly campaigning for Kerry, with the CBS and ABC revelations being only the worst of a vast number of dirty tricks. Reports of falsified voter registration abound, and evidence mounts that campaign polls are being manipulated. Kerry's opponents are brutally shouted down in television interviews. The left is declaring by its behavior that, if it cannot obtain power democratically, by the government of the people, it will obtain power by naked force, government of the brutes.

This is a fate a thoughtful people could make an effort to avoid.

It is a common canard among libertarians that one government is just as bad as the next--an intellectual offense of which I, too, have been guilty. This is false. Whatever its faults, life in the present day United States is by every measure preferable to life in an Islamist theocratic dictatorship, for example. And life in this republic, under George W. Bush, is preferable to a life in a future America where any dissenting opinion invites, at a minimum, a censorious freelance terrorism licensed by the sly wink of a President John Kerry or a President Hillary Clinton.

George Bush is nobody's Atlas and and I am nobody's Cato, but the West is at a crossroads and the American republic is at a crossroads, and re-electing George W. Bush is the best turn for both, for now.

I haven't wanted to do this. I haven't wanted to take the positions I've come to over the last three years. It would have been much easier, and much more congenial, simply to sleep in my bed, to drive my car, to make and spend my money, all the while clucking about the mistakes of the American government, all the while painting detailed pictures of imaginary alternatives. But we live in the midst of an emergency, and the typical libertarian response is comically irrelevant where it is not openly and actively anti-civilization. It is by now obvious to everyone who dares to think that the War on Terror, however imperfect it might be, is the only way to secure freedom--the freedom of Americans, of the Western world and of the innocents brutalized every day by Islamist terror.

Voting for George W. Bush is not only the best way to assure victory in the War on Terror, it is the best way to communicate to the left, which never listens to you so attentively as when you vote, that you are of and not just in this republic, that as much as you might wish for something better, you will not by your indifference replace it with something far worse.

The freelance leftist electoral terrorists and the dedicated incendiary Islamist terrorists are allied in this election, in this war, allied against your liberty, your autonomy, your freedom of action and thought. Each of these would-be tyrannies think they can conquer the other, once they have conquered you. But first they must conquer you. Your leader in this war for your freedom, your Cincinnatus if not your Atlas, is President Bush. As you value your life and mind--as you value your children's lives and minds--as you value human liberty, here and now, elsewhere and everywhen--as you value the glorious past and the illimitable future of Western Civilization, you will stand alone in a voting booth on November 2--holding your nose if you must--and pull the lever for George W. Bush.

---

Permission is explicitly granted to repost/reprint unmodified.
posted by Greg Swann at 5:12 PM

 
Catching Hillary's influenza

Diana Hsieh cites this article by William Tucker in the Weekly Standard on this year's government-caused shortage of flu vaccine:

John Kerry wasted no time jumping on President George Bush about the unexpected shortage in flu vaccines this year. Why wasn't Bush paying attention? He should have done things differently. And of course Kerry had a 'plan' to solve the whole mess.

If Kerry thinks he can solve the flu vaccine problem, he need look no further than his own running mate, trial lawyer John Edwards. Vaccines are the one area of medicine where trial lawyers are almost completely responsible for the problem. No one can plausibly point a finger at insurance companies, drug companies, or doctors. Lawyers have won the vaccine game so completely that nobody wants to play.

Two weeks ago, British regulators suspended the license of Chiron Corp., the world's second-leading flu vaccine supplier, for three months. Officials cited manufacturing problems at the factory in Liverpool, England, where Chiron makes its leading product, Fluvirin. Chiron was scheduled to supply 46 million of the 100 million doses to be administered in the United States this year. The other 54 million will come from Aventis Pasteur, a French company with headquarters in Strasbourg.

So why is it that 100 percent of our flu vaccines are now made by two companies in Europe? The answer is simple. Trial lawyers drove the American manufacturers out of the business.

That's not the worst news, of course. Under Bill Clinton's wretched wife, the US government reorganized the vaccine business under the National Socialist plan, with predictable consequences:

In theory, prices might have been jacked up enough to make vaccine production profitable even with the lawsuit risk, but federal intervention made vaccines a low-margin business. Before 1993, manufacturers sold vaccines to doctors, doctors prescribed them to patients, and there was some markup. Then Congress adopted the Vaccine for Children Act, which made the government a monopsony buyer. The feds now purchase over half of all vaccines at a low fixed price and distribute them to doctors. This has essentially finished off the private market.

As recently as 1980, 18 American companies made eight different vaccines for various childhood diseases. Today, four companies--GlaxoSmithKline, Aventis, Merck, and Wyeth--make 12 vaccines. Of the 12, seven are made by only one company and only one is made by more than two. "There are constant shortages," says Dr. Paul Offit, head of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "With only one supplier for so many vaccines, the whole system is fragile. When even the smallest thing goes wrong, children miss their vaccinations."

Now this is bad. Because of the predictably bad effects of central planning, 93 children died last year from influenza, even though there was enough vaccine to go around. It's conceiveable that thousands of people could die this year. And that's bad, too. But what's worse is that the American people seem to be fully immunized from learning anything from their bad experiences with ever-more-Nazified government health-care schemes. Ham-stringing the vaccines makers has worked out so poorly that John Kerry wants to ham-string the entire medical profession.

This of course is a time-tested way to rid the world of Socialists--as an unintended secondary consequence--but it's hardly the ideal way. If the meme gnomes had a case, we might hope for an Austrian Incluenza, but in fact minds are only changed from the inside. Even so, it's still possible for Americans to catch a clue.
posted by Greg Swann at 7:03 AM

 
How the West is lost...

Citing a dumb MSNBC article (Drudge had it, too), David Deutsch of Setting the World to Rights offers this:

This year's Academy Award for Best Motion Picture is thought to be likely to be awarded either to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ or to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. It will be an agonising choice for the Academy, involving a rare conflict between the two great principles -- antisemitism and idiotarianismÊ-- that currently trump every other consideration in the minds of the fashionable.

The two movies are somewhat similar symptoms of the same serious malaise in Western society: the widespread loss of confidence in its secular moral values. Both are personal statements made by charming rogues who have a sense of humour, are very good at their jobs, and are driven by a core of gibbering hatred. Both peddle incendiary falsehoods that have caused murder and destruction beyond measure, been a blight on every kind of progress and will undoubtedly do a great deal more harm before they are extirpated.

Privately, by email to Sarah Fitz-Claridge, whom I had thought had written the piece, I wrote:

> Both [....] are driven by a core of gibbering hatred.

This is beneath you. You have no evidence of gibbering hatred in Gibson and no shortage from Moore. This is moral relativism at its worst. Whatever Gibson's faults may be, he is motivated by nothing but benevolent ends. And whatever Moore's virtues, if any, his objectives are openly malevolent. Even taking account that neither film will attract any Oscar votes--why would that matter? are you misled or just counting coup?--this is a completely invalid comparison.

[snipped]

It is not necessary to insist that Gibson is right about anything to understand that, by grouping him with Moore, you are crediting an unearned merit to Moore.

It was Sarah who told me that the author was David Deutsch. In the mean time, I had these further thoughts:

The best-light form of the equation is:

life-loving small-l libertarian film-maker carried away by his religious faith, who may have been influenced by an antique anti-semite, produces a film that consists of a particularly gory Stations of the Cross with a particularly saccharine Pieta as coda, which film, contrary to hysterical predictions, has had zero negative consequences and may have had some salutary positive consequences, and has no movement-oriented or anti-civilization objectives whatever

equals

life-loathing Socialist propagandist desperate to deprive honest but ignorant voters of their right to an informed consent by deliberately promoting vicious mis- and disinformation, thereby intentionally undermining American and allied troops in war and openly making common cause with the worst enemies Western civilization has ever known

This is an obviously invalid equation. When we despoil thought we despoil the very thing we have that our enemies lack. We surrender that which cannot ever be conquered.

I don't like the non-concepts "idiotarian" and "anti-idiotarian", a pair of junk drawers of the mind, but whatever the poster thinks--or doesn't think--about The Passion, Mel Gibson is beyond all doubt an important voice in the ancient and continuing war against tyranny. Not only does the poster elevate his undoubted enemies, he denigrates a true friend of liberty far more important than any of us. This would be nothing more than detestable snobbery if it did not effect by erosion the enemy's objectives.

The West will fall, if it does, not because it was knocked down from the outside, but because it was not held up from the inside. That little post, of less, even, than passing moment, is how that will be done.

I have defended The Passion of the Christ at length, not just because it is a great movie, but also because it is not an evil movie. It is a good deal less important to the cause of human liberty than Braveheart or The Patriot, but it is a good and valuable and important film. Moreover, Gibson's entire corpus is entirely benevolent, where Moore's is entirely malevolent. To compare these two men in any way at all is the kind of obscenity, that, if indulged, will contribute to the fall of the West.
posted by Greg Swann at 1:14 PM

 
Team America

Raucously funny. Outrageously rude. Impeccably vulgar. Truly a comic masterpiece.

Stay to the end of the credits--there's an Easter Egg.
posted by Greg Swann at 7:33 AM

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