Liberais Franceses

Para reforçar o que aqui disse, "JCE diz que "Gertrude Himmerfarb sugeriu recentemente que esta ideia de um poder central unitário, intérprete infalível da razão contra os interessses particulares dos indivíduos e das instituições particulares, permeia todo o pensamento francês do século xviii"...e acaba mais À frente com "...porque são os povos de lingua inglesa os primeiros a levantar-se em defesa...".

Eu observo apenas que da cultura francesa saiu muito do pensamento liberal clássico e também da produção de teoria económica, muita dela, antecedente da Escola Austriaca (que corrigiu alguns rumos da teoria económica clássica com origem inglesa)."

Fica a chamada de atenção para Remembering Gustave de Molinari, no Mises Institute:

"March 3 marks the 185th anniversary of economist and philosopher Gustave de Molinari's birth in Belgium. It is a date worth commemorating, because according to David Hart, "He was the leading representative of the laissez-faire school of classical liberalism in France in the second half of the 19th century."

Onde estão expostas algumas citações:

"Government must confine itself to the naturally collective functions of providing external and internal security."

"Society is heavily taxed in the increased costs which follow government appropriation of products and services naturally belonging to the sphere of private enterprise."

"Citizens of constitutional States have obtained a right of consent to public expenditure, and to the taxes which furnish it, but the right has proved sterile. Their representatives have never checked the progressive rise in taxation and expenditure which has occurred in every State…And this process must continue indefinitely for just so long as governments, charged with guaranteeing national security, maintain their right of unlimited requisition upon the life, liberty, and property of the individual."

"[Individual sovereignty] is the right of each man to dispose freely of his person and his property and to govern himself."

"A natural instinct reveals to these men that their persons, the land they occupy and cultivate, the fruits of their labor, are their property, and that no one, except themselves, has the right to dispose of or touch this property."

"…when the sphere of collective government has been reduced to its natural limits, and individual action has obtained perfect freedom, the influence of individuals upon the destinies of society and the race will rapidly increase."

Libano V

CNN - Massive protest marks former PM's death: "Last week, Syria began pulling its 14,000 troops to the Bekaa Valley near the border, and vowed to bring all the troops and intelligence officials across the border into Syria later on.To counteract the opposition, Hezbollah -- an official party in Lebanon, considered a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel -- organized an enormous pro-Syria rally. Monday's opposition rally in Beirut was designed to pull even greater numbers. It was not immediately clear which rally was larger. "

Esperemos que as guerras fiquem pelos números. É em situações destas que a ingerência externa se torna visivelmente perigosa, podendo mesmo ser contraproducente. Pode resultar bem como mal, mas mesmo que resulte bem, qual será o resultado de se tornar norma que todos os países e blocos políticos começem a disputar activamente (e não só a tomar posições de princípio) influências em todos os momentos críticos de outros países? Foi assim que um atentado terrorista na Bósnia levou a um conflito mundial.

Time preference and Elton john

"...the article tells of how Elton once went on an $80 million shopping spree in a 20 month period, even spending $200,000 on flowers "because I like them." In one year he spent $18 million on house purchases around the world, and owns more than 2500 paintings, some of which are worth a million dollars or more.

When asked why he spends the way he does, Elton replied: "I have no one to leave the money to. I'm a single man. I like spending money" (p. 74). He's gay and childless, and so he naturally has a high rate of time preference" via LRCBlog.

Nota: Parece que a afirmação de Hans-Herman Hoppe, de que em geral, os homosexuais (como outros grupos - pessoas idosas, etc) , tendem a poupar (relativamente a outros) menos (ou seja, têm uma alta preferência temporal) se encontra demonstrada.

The Unpredictability of Revolutions

"(...) When we Americans think of revolution, we think of the Spirit of '76 and the republic that came out of our War of Independence. But when Louis XVI was dethroned in 1789, that revolution gave us the guillotine, the Terror, and the Napoleonic wars. When kings depart, democracy is not always at hand.

What is critical in a revolution is the character of the men who make it. When the czar abdicated, a democratic socialist took power, but a weak Alexander Kerensky was soon run out of the Winter Palace by Bolsheviks. After World War II, there came the Chinese and Cuban revolutions that looked to the Russian as the model. As did Pol Pot's revolution in Cambodia, which came out of an earlier American intervention.

In the Middle East, rebellions and revolutions do not have Hollywood endings. In 1952, King Farouk of Egypt was ousted in a colonels' coup from which the dictator Nasser emerged. In 1958, King Feisal of Iraq was overthrown, his body dragged through the streets of Baghdad. Saddam came out of the pile. In 1968, King Idris was overthrown. Enter Ghadafi. In 1974, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was ousted by Col. Mengistu. A million perished. In 1979, the shah fell to a revolution that butchered all remnants of his pro-American government.
It is this history that causes one to smile at the giddiness of neocons who see events in Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon as vindication and harbingers of two, three, many "Prague springs" sweeping the Islamic world. (...)

Though from the look of that Beirut crowd of 500,000, roaring for Sheik Nasrallah of Hezbollah, it may be premature to call this democracy. A day after that monster rally in a land of 4 million, the pro-Syrian prime minister, ousted after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, was voted back into office by parliament, an in-your-face defiance of America and "the international community."

Rather than democracy, revolution may be on the march. If the May elections in Lebanon are free, Hezbollah could move closer to power. While that might constitute pure democracy, is it something we Americans should applaud, subsidize, or fight for?

In elections thus far in the Middle East, the returns have been mixed. In Iraq, Kurds voted for autonomy now, independence later. Shias voted as Ayatollah Sistani told them. Whether the new regime will be pro-Iranian, we know not. It will surely be less pro-American than the ousted Alawi regime. But the cost of a Shi'ite government in Iraq is already known: 1,500 U.S. dead, 10,000 U.S. wounded, 200 billion U.S. dollars gone." Patrick J. Buchanan

Destaques

1) Jaime Nogueira Pinto em "A (re)fundação da direita (1) " no Expresso, cita Russel Kirk "...dizia que «as ideias têm consequências» ...Olhando os resultados do «centro-direita», eu diria que a sua falta (das ideias) também!"

[Nota: e como era bom que existisse uma direita portuguesa atlantista mas alternativa e mais imune ao neoconservadorismo - onde certas ideias se arriscam a terem consequências que as tornam próximas de Napoleão e Trotsky - e que pudesse rever-se no conservadorismo tradicional americano (e que ao contrário do europeu tradicional contém muitos princípios liberais clássicos, por um lado, mantendo o pessimismo em eleger a vox populli a qualquer fim em si mesmo, por outro) de Russel Kirk e Robert Nisbet]

No fim, JNP estabelece alguns princípios gerais:

"Não sei se estes valores são património exclusivo da direita. Por mim, penso que a defesa dos princípios cristãos, do valor da nação como comunidade solidária dos cidadãos e da família e da propriedade ...

[esta sentença tem muito de Robert Nisbet, que dizia ser a reverência à propriedade , como um elemento de continuidade e ordem, uma das características obrigatórias da sensibilidade conservadora e que torna possivel a soberania da familia e comunidade - o que por sua vez faz com que essa sensibilidade olhe com desconfiança para qualquer intromissão nesses domínios por parte de qualquer poder político - visivel na Idade Média e no Feudalismo até ao advento do absolutismo antigo e do novo - o do Estado Moderno. Eu diria que o problema da direita actual é ter capitulado perante o centralismo e por culpa própria, porque caiu na falácia de ver nesse centralismo um meio de proteger a sua "familia, comunidade e propriedade" - o problema é que depois de criada essa fonte de poder, foi depois tomado de assalto adoptadas outras prioridades - o igualitarismo, relativismo, etc]

da sua liberdade. Esta é a direita com que me identifico - patriótica, realista, solidária, livre, mas consciente de que o bem comum existe e é superior à soma e à subtracção dos bens e interesses individuais"

2) João Carlos Espada, num artigo intitulado de "Burke e a tradição anglo-americana da liberdade" fala de Edmund Burke que "condenou todas as tentativas políticas ou governamentais de redesenhar a ordem social com vista a fazê-la conformar com um visão abstracta. Fê-lo em defesa dos direitos dos católicos irlandeses, em defesa dos colonos americanos, em defesa dos súbditos nativos da Índia sob administração inglesa; e finalmente, em defesa da liberdade dos franceses contra o despotismo iluminado dos jacobinos"

Burke era também prudente quanto ao crescimento do Império Britânico (já agora Burke nasceu em Dublin o que provávelmente contribuiu para o capacitar de apreciar e criticar...). Nos dias de hoje talvez se afirmasse que alguém como Burke apoiava causa separatistas (e quem sabe até "terroristas" - afinal a revolução americana, como as lutas irlandesas...), mas o essencial não está nas classificações (ou seja, de "separatismos" em si) mas num correcto julgamento:

"...The surge in royal executive power during the 1760’s and 1770’s alarmed the colonists and they feared that their way of life might be destroyed. In order to preserve their "English liberties" as they called them, the colonists decided to withdraw from a governmental entity they saw as a threat to their value system. They did not wish to engage in regicide or to indulge in vengeful slaughter. They only sought to conserve a system they feared would be taken from them. Edmund Burke saw this clearly from the Parliament in London. Burke could appreciate that American politics, American values, and even American religion was not like that which existed in England. As the conflict drew on, Burke predicted that if the British were to win the war, the American colonies would have to be remade in a new image in order to remain a part of the British Empire. That which made America what is was would have to be expunged from the earth. Burke did not wish to revolutionize America or anywhere else. The fact that Burke supported the American Revolution while condemning the French Revolution is a compelling fact. While the French Revolution sought to overturn and destroy an established order, the American Revolution sought only to conserve an established order which was being destroyed by British intrusion. " (1)

Eu acho que tudo o JCE diz é correcto, só não tenho a certeza que Burke embarcaria no actual cruzeiro neoconservador (nem cruzada) e porventura seria mais prudente em reclamar mudanças aceleradas induzidas exógenamente (e na ponta da baioneta) a bem de uma nova ordem mundial (até porque quem pediu uma Nova Ordem Europeia, utilizando a força, a mudanças de regime, a influência na escolha de governantes de terceiros, etc, foi Napoleão). Creio mesmo que nem no conflito israelo-palestiniano podemos ter a certeza que os seus olhos veriam com a mesma simplicidade de quem costuma caracterizar um conflito por domínio territorial como de sendo de "democracia versus terrorismo" ou coisa do género.

Edmund Burke apreciava a imagem dum "...English garden, a parable for a decentralized, diverse and lovely place where individuals and families and communities produce, create, and find joy – as they work to gently govern themselves in ways that satisfy their higher values, culture and tradition – is never found in statist "order." (2) o que elege como qualquer liberal clássico sem antagonismo com a tradição ainda que preparado para advogar a mudança com realismo, tendo dito “change is the means of our preservation".

E por isso mesmo, JCE fala de Burke como o "primeiro teorizador dos partidos políticos parlamentares modernos" (se bem que não sei se é mais adequado falar do parlamento em si mais do que em partidos).

JCE diz que "Gertrude Himmerfarb sugeriu recentemente que esta ideia de um poder central unitário, intérprete infalível da razão contra os interessses particulares dos indivíduos e das instituições particulares, permeia todo o pensamento francês do século xviii"...e acaba mais À frente com "...porque são os povos de lingua inglesa os primeiros a levantar-se em defesa...".

Eu observo apenas que da cultura francesa saiu muito do pensamento liberal clássico e também da produção de teoria económica, muita dela, antecedente da Escola Austriaca (que corrigiu alguns rumos da teoria económica clássica com origem inglesa).

Diz em "Richard Cantillon and the French Economists: Distinctive French Contributions to J. B. Say*" by Leonard P.Liggio, Institute for Humane Studies George Mason Universiry:

"...Stanley Jevons made reference to this supriority of the French over the English schocls in the Preface to the Theory of Political Economy:
The true doctrine may be more or less clearly traced to the writings of a sucession of great French economists, from Condillac, Baudeau, and Le Trosne, through J. B. Say, Deshin de Tracy, Stroch, and others, down to Bastiat and Concerlle Semeille.

(...) The Physiocrats were concerned to treat the economy as a natural phenomenon, a natural order, a process, in comparison to the mercantilists who emphasized the need for artificial and extraordinary government measures to achieve their objectives.

In this the Physiocrats were following the lead given by Cantillon. Starting with their foundation in a theory of property, the Physiocrats constructed a science around the natural harmony of interests. Property owners should be those or their heirs who cleared and drained land for its cultivation. From Cantillon's analysis, including his contribution on entrepreneurship, the Physiocrats derived their sense of harmony of interests. Le Mercier de la Riviere, L'Ordre naturel et essenciel des societes politique (1767), described how competition is the means by which diverse economic interests are reconciled.' According to Le Trosne, Del ínteret social (1777): It is competition which conciliates all interests: it is perfect only under the absolute reign of freedom of trade, which is the premier consequence of the right of pmperty, and in consequence one of the most essential laws of the social order.'

The Physiocrats shared with Cantillon a system of thought based on methodological individualism. Cantillon's assumption that autonomy of the individual leads to harmony of interests was suggested by Mandeville's Fable of the Bees."

Outro aspecto a propósito tem que ver com o papel da França na história das guerras: combateu a tentativa de hegemonia continental por Carlos V, foi a primeira a derrotar a Prússia (Napoleão), combateu a Alemanha de Bismarck em 1870, depois na Grande Guerra começou a mobilização mal a Rússia declarou guerra, e na Segunda declarando Guerra a Hitler por causa da Polónia sem ter um canal para a proteger...e não ficaria mal lembrar que a França foi o primeiro aliado da Revolução Americana (mais tarde, em 1812, James Madison declarou guerra à Inglaterra e quando esta se empenhava na luta contra Napoleão... tendo os ingleses conseguido incendiar Wasghinton").
O preço pago pela França foi, ao longo da sua história, sempre muito elevado, o que por vezes não custava nada ser reconhecido - em West Point o francês ainda é lembrado como a lingua das manobras militares (tal como os Prussos também a usavam) e hoje os neocons falam na criação de uma "legião estrangeira" que como não podia deixar de ser, só podiam (propor) baptizar de "legião da liberdade".

Talvez a América seja hoje, apenas uma nova França. Não que isso sejam boas notícias.

The Welfare State We’re In

As Agruras do Estado Social, por Miguel Noronha, no site da Causa Liberal.

Recensão da obra The Welfare State We’re In (Politico’s, 2004), de James Batholomew.

A causa maior do declínio está na progressiva intromissão do Estado na sociedade substituindo funções anteriormente desempenhadas pela sociedade civil. Por outras palavras, a construção do Welfare State. Esta “infiltração” teve como consequência a desresponsabilização do indivíduo perante o seu próximo e mesmo perante o seu próprio destino. Os sucessivos programas de “engenharia social” levados a cabo pelos responsáveis políticos destruiram as intituições, formais e informais, anteriormente vigentes (e que, reconhecidamente, no caso britânico, tinham dado provas da sua eficácia) causando autênticos pesadelos dignos de países do Terceiro-Mundo.

The Meaning of Security

"(...) In the world of ideas, a vigorous debate is taking place about the extent to which private enterprise is capable of providing security, not only as a supplement but as a full replacement for state-provided security.

Advocates of fully privatized security point out that in the real world, most of the security we enjoy is purchased in the private sector. Vast networks of food distribution protect against starvation, private agents guard our homes, insurance companies provide compensation in the event of unexpected misfortune, and the locks and guns and gated communities provided by private enterprise do the bulk of work for our security in the real world.(...)

The message of this school of thought is that liberty and security (real security) are not opposites such that one must choose between them. They go together. Liberty is the essence of the free enterprise system that provides for all our material needs, that helps us overcome the uncertainties and contingencies of life.(...)" Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Aumento de Impostos?

Taxation Is Robbery, by Frank Chodorov
[From Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist, by Frank Chodorov; The Devin-Adair Company, New York, 1962, pp. 216–239.]

THE Encyclopaedia Britannica defines taxation as "that part of the revenues of a state which is obtained by the compulsory dues and charges upon its subjects." That is about as concise and accurate as a definition can be; it leaves no room for argument as to what taxation is. (...)What sanc­tion, in morals, does the State adduce for the taking of property? Is its exercise of sovereignty sufficient unto itself?

On this question of morality there are two positions, and never the twain will meet. Those who hold that political institutions stem from "the nature of man," thus enjoying vicarious divinity, or those who pronounce the State the key­stone of social integrations, can find no quarrel with taxa­tion per se; the State's taking of property is justified by its being or its beneficial office.

On the other hand, those who hold to the primacy of the individual, whose very existence is his claim to inalienable rights, lean to the position that in the compulsory collection of dues and charges the State is merely exercising power, without regard to morals.(...)

If the State has a prior right to the products of one's labor, his right to existence is qualified. Aside from the fact that no such prior right can be established, except by declaring the State the author of all rights, our inclination (as shown in the effort to avoid paying taxes) is to reject this concept of priority. (...)

In principle, as the framers of the Constitution realized, the direct tax is most vicious, for it directly denies the sanc­tity of private property. By its very surreptition the indirect tax is a back-handed recognition of the right of the indi­vidual to his earnings; the State sneaks up on the owner, so to speak, and takes what it needs on the grounds of neces­sity, but it does not have the temerity to question the right of the owner to his goods. The direct tax, however, boldly and unashamedly proclaims the prior right of the State to all property. Private ownership becomes a temporary and revocable stewardship. The Jeffersonian ideal of inalienable rights is thus liquidated, and substituted for it is the Marx­ist concept of state supremacy.(...)

Taxes cannot be compared to dues paid to a voluntary organization for such services as one expects from membership, because the choice of withdrawal does not exist.(...)

If the State supplies him with all his needs and keeps him in health and a degree of comfort, it must account him a valuable asset, a piece of capital. Any claim to individual rights is liquidated by society's cash invest­ment. The State undertakes to protect society's investment, as to reimbursement and profit, by way of taxation.(...)

(...) They insist that the State is a contributing factor in production, and that its services ought properly to be paid for; the measure of the value of these services is the income of its citizens, and a graduated tax on these incomes is only due compensation. If earnings reflect the services of the State, it follows that larger earnings result from more services, and the logical conclusion is that the State is a better servant of the rich than of the poor.(...)

The State does not give; it merely takes. All this argument, however, is a concession to the obfus­cation with which custom, law and sophistry have covered up the true character of taxation. There cannot be a good tax nor a just one; every tax rests its case on compulsion."

Libano IV

"(...) He was talking about the great betrayal at the end of World War I.The Arabs had been promised an independent country if they fought the Turks. It was a lie. The British and French negotiated a secret agreement that divided up the Middle East between them. France got Syria and, by chopping off the mountainous, coastal region, created Lebanon, just as the British created Jordan by severing Palestine east of the Jordan River.

Saladin was a Kurd, born in Tikrit, where Saddam Hussein was born. Saladin whipped the Crusaders and drove them out of Jerusalem.

The point of this story is that nothing is as simple in the Middle East as it appears to be to the president and his neoconservative ideologues. Lebanon remains part of Syria in the minds of many Syrians and, indeed, in the minds of some Lebanese. It's no big deal for France to join the United States in calling for a Syrian withdrawal. France is not popular in either Syria or Lebanon. The president of Syria has taken no public notice of the president's demands. He is not, as it has been erroneously reported in some outlets at this writing, withdrawing the troops from Lebanon. He is redeploying them along the border – on the Lebanese side.(...)

But even if Syria decides to withdraw, that won't end Syrian influence. Lebanon has many factions. There are the Druze, the Maronite Christians, the Eastern Orthodox Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and Palestinian refugees. They were embroiled in a terrible civil war in the 1970s, and it was the Syrians, invited in, who finally brought it to a halt.

(...) The latest administration talking point that is worming its way into what is fondly called the news media is that democracy is breaking out all over the Middle East. The people in the Middle East have been having elections for decades. The president conveniently forgot that Yasser Arafat was elected in a free and fair election. The trouble is, the results of elections don't last very long. There is no reason to believe the Iraqi elections will be any different. The Middle East is full of ruins left by past superpowers. As a Palestinian friend of mine likes to say, pointing to those ruins: "They are all gone. We are still here." Charley Reese

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." – James Madison

Libano III: Spectator - "A revolution made for TV"

Mary Wakefield

"'Out Syria! Out Syria! Out Syria!' cried the crowd. 'We're revolutionaries!' said my friend happily. But I felt a bit gypped. Everybody around me was young, good-looking, having fun, but that wasn't really what I had had in mind. Only 1,000 or so people? I thought it was the whole of Beirut. Why was everybody under 30? Even in the middle of the crowd, right at the front, it felt less like a national protest than a pop concert. Bouncers in black bomber jackets wore laminated Independence '05 cards round their necks, screens to the left and right of the platform reflected the crowd back at itself, and up against the Virgin Megastore wall were five plastic Portaloos. To the left of the main speaker, a man in a black flying suit with blond highlights, mirrored Oakley sunglasses, and an earpiece seemed to be conducting the crowd. Sometimes he'd wave his arms to increase the shouting, sometimes, with a gesture, he'd silence them. The upturned faces of the revolutionaries were bathed in white light from the TV arc lamps. "

Libano II

Harry Brown (libertarian) enfrenta as criticas ao seu artigo (e como é dificil temperar os excessos de entusiasmo pela "liberation" e a "revolution" dos outros...aqui como na Ucrania (onde os "oprimidos" votaram em 44% pelo outro candidato)...:

"My article "The Syrian Hoax" – on the Syrian-Lebanese situation – has provoked more criticism than any article I've published in a long time.

Some of the responses have been of the scholarly variety . . . "You are an absolute idiot. With reporters like you we don’t need any other enemies." , "Keep pushing the liberal propaganda on us Harry. You are good at it. We know at least 50 percent of the American public are clueless. Just like you. Now if we can convert the rest of us to sniveling cowards like you, we'll be in real good shape for the future."

It's obvious from what they say that these people know much more about the Syrian situation than I do. It's quite cruel that they don't pass on to me any of their superior knowledge. They hinted that they know things I don’t know, but they refuse to tell me what those things are.

Syrian Occupiers & American Occupiers

I pointed out in my article that the 13,000 Syrians "occupying" Lebanon are nothing compared to the 150,000 American troops in Iraq – and yet George Bush is demanding an immediate withdrawal of all 13,000 Syrians. (Yes, I know that Bush isn't the only "world leader" calling for Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, but he's the only one making a lot of noise about it.) Someone wrote to tell me that there is no comparison between the Syrian and American occupiers: The difference is that Syria has no interest whatsoever in promoting freedom for the Lebanese, whereas the US has allowed open protests, free speech, and a landmark vote involving dozens of political parties. The Syrians have turned Lebanon into a complete client state.

But Zvi Bar'el has pointed out in the Israeli publication Haaretz: Just to calm those who note the "historic moments" in the Middle East, Lebanon is the freest country in the region. Its parliament has real power and its newspapers and electronic media demarcated the boundaries of freedom of expression before Al Jazeera did so. Anti-establishment satire has existed there for a long time and its citizens, even more than the citizens of Turkey, regard themselves as more Western than Arab.

In fact, if the Syrians won't let the Lebanese express themselves, why are the American media making such a big thing out of a few thousand people holding rallies in Martyrs Square, rooting for the Syrians to leave Lebanon.

We've all read about such demonstrations and seen them on television. From the media, we could easily draw the impression that there isn't a single Lebanese who doesn't want the Syrians out of Lebanon by High Noon. But it might help to add some perspective if the media just as ardently covered the pro-Syrian demonstrations – which, in fact, are considerably larger than the anti-Syrian rallies. As with the anti-Syrian demonstrations, some of the participants have been urged to join the demonstrations by various organizations and some are everyday people who want to express their opinions.

And as to the idea that the Iraqi people under American occupation are much freer than the Lebanese, please take a closer look at the police state the American military has established in Iraq.

Not Much Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing

Syria is not my idea of a nice country. But it's also not a threat to anyone – not even to the Lebanese. Few Americans understand the long relationship between Syria and Lebanon – a relationship that began way before George W. Bush was born.

But neither reality nor history mean anything to George Bush or to the sycophants who are willing to follow him down the barrel of a cannon. As the Israeli writer Uri Avnery has pointed out, "George Bush, the (not-so-)Quiet American, runs around the world hawking his patent medicines, 'freedom' and 'democracy,' in total ignorance of hundreds of years of history." Avnery's article "The Next Crusades" is an excellent summary of U.S. and Israeli meddling in the Middle East.(...)

P.S. One correction: In my previous article I said "Syrian troops first invaded Lebanon at the time of the Gulf War." This was wrong on two counts. The Syrian troops were invited in by the Lebanese government, and that was in the mid-1970s. Several readers noticed my carelessness, and I'm grateful for the correction. March 11, 2005"

Greenspan: Budget deficits pose big threat

Ou as consequências da política do "Guns and butter".

Destaque

LEGISLATION AND THE DISCOVERY OF LAW IN A FREE SOCIETY
N. Stephan Kinsella*

I. Introduction ....................................................... 134
II. Centralized and Decentralized Legal Systems ................ 135
A. Civil Law and Common Law .......................... 135
B. Civil Law, Rationalism, and Libertarianism ......... 137
III. Law, Legislation, and Liberty ................................. 140
A. Anarcho-Capitalism ..................................... 140
B. Certainty .................................................. 141
1. Certainty, the Rule of Law, and Legislation 141
2. Decentralized Law-Finding Systems ......... 144
a. Limits of Courts’ Decisions:Jurisdiction, Scope of Decision,and Precedent ...................... 144
b. Government Courts:Extra-Market Powers andDisguised Legislation ............ 146
3. Civil Codes ...................................... 148
a. The "Special" Status of a Civil Code 148
b. Diluting Effect of SpecialStatutes ............................. 149
4. Negative Effects of Uncertainty ............... 150
a. Sanctity of Contract .................... 150
b. Time Preference and theStructure of Production ........... 151
c. Time Preference and Crime ............ 153

C. Central Planning and Economic Calculation .......... 154
1. Central Planning and the Impossibilityof Socialism ................................. 154
2. Legislation as Central Planning ................ 157
3. Special Interests and the UnrepresentativeCharacter of Legislation ................... 160
4. Decentralized Law-Finding Systems ......... 162
D. The Proliferation of Laws .............................. 163
IV. Naive Rationalism and The Primacy of Legislation ......... 166
V. The Role of Legislation and Codification ..................... 169

A. The Role of Legislation ................................ 169
1. The Secondary Role of Legislation .......... 169
2. Alleged Deficiencies of DecentralizedLaw-Finding Systems .................... 170
3. Structural Safeguards to Limit Legislation .. 174
B. The Role of Commentators and Codes ............... 176
VI. Conclusion ...................................................... 180

Algumas passagens que destaco:

1) "Because the classical common law and Roman law developed the large bulk of their legal principles through the decision and discussion of cases, they serve as rough examples of decentralized systems of "judge-found" law, as do largely private customary law systems like the Law Merchant.4

Unlike Roman law and the common law, however, modern civil law principles are embodied in a statute called a Civil Code, and the civil law enshrines legislation as the primary source of law.5 The modern civil law is thus a good example of an explicitly centralized legal system, even though much of the substantive provisions of civil codes are based on legal principles discovered in decentralized fashion in Rome many centuries ago. Roman law thus has more in common with the common law and customary law than with the Roman law’s offspring, modern civil law, since the former were decentralized law-finding systems, while the latter are centralized, legislation-based law-making systems.6 Today’s common law, while based on the classical and mostly decentralized Anglo-American common law, is also coming to be more and more dominated by legislation, and, to that extent, is gradually being centralized as well. "

2) Under the libertarian conception of individual rights, the virtues typically cited in favor of the civil law are certainly necessary requirements of a just legal system. The virtues of economic liberalism, private property, freedom of contract, individualism, natural law, and justice, are really only secondary derivations of the basic individual rights to person and property. Natural law is nothing more than the objective truth that each individual has certain rights — i.e., to own himself and to homestead unowned property. Justice is nothing more than giving a person his due, but what a person’s “due” is depends upon what his rights are. Individualism has meaning and validity, because it is individuals that have rights. Economic liberalism, private property, and freedom of contract are only the playing out of the fact that individuals have a right to own, and thus trade, private property, and indeed have a right to do anything that is not coercive."

3) Certainty, which includes clarity and stability in the law, is a necessary feature of any just legal order, as it is a crucial component of the rule of law itself. “The rule of law” is a phrase that is used with varying meanings: “(1) the absence of arbitrary power on the part of the government to punish citizens or to commit acts against life or property; (2) the subjection of every man, whatever his rank or condition, to the ordinary law of the realm and to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals; and (3) a predominance of the legal spirit in English institutions . . . .”25 The rule of law is necessary because a government with arbitrary power to inflict violence on its subjects is a standing threat to individual liberty.(...)Yet, as Leoni points out, there is much more certainty in a decentralized legal system, than in a centralized legislative system. When the legislature has the ability to change the law from day to day, we can never be sure what rules will apply tomorrow.

4) By contrast, judicial decisions — whether by private arbitrators in an anarcho-capitalist society or by judges in a governmentestablished common-law system — are much less able to reduce legal certainty than is legislation. This is because, as Leoni explains, the position of common-law or decentralized judges "is fundamentally different from that of legislators, at least in three very important respects.":

First, judges can only make decisions when asked to do so by the parties concerned.
Second, the judge’s decision is less far-reaching than legislation because it primarily affects the parties to the dispute, and only occasionally affects, third parties or others with no connection to the parties involved.(...)
Third, a judge’s discretion is further limited by the necessity of referring to similar precedents. This does not necessarily mean that a judge is automatically bound by a prior judicial decision on similar facts, but that at least such precedents are influential. When law is viewed as being found rather than made, it makes sense that one court would refer to principles already discovered and developed over the centuries by other judges.

5) Yet increased uncertainty causes an increase in time preference rates. With the very possibility of legislation, the future is made more unpredictable than it would be without the possibility of legislation. Future goods are always less desirable to individuals than present goods. But if the future becomes more unpredictable, future actions and goods become less certain to occur, and thus future goods become relatively even less desirable, and present goods therefore become relatively more desirable.

As explained by Hoppe, [T]he mere fact of legislation — of democratic law-making — increases the degree of uncertainty. Rather than being immutable and hence predictable, law becomes increasingly flexible and unpredictable. What is right and wrong today may not be so tomorrow. The future is thus rendered more haphazard. Consequently, all around time preferences degrees will rise, consumption and short-term orientation will be stimulated, and at the same time the respect for all laws will be systematically undermined and crime promoted (for if there is no immutable standard of ‘right’, then there is also no firm definition of ‘crime’).57

6) In a free market, in which there is by definition private ownership of property, the free exchange of goods by individual human actors in accordance with their subjective utilities establishes relative prices, in terms of money (which historically was gold and other precious metals). These money prices are the indispensable tool of calculation for rational coordination of scarce resources, since “monetary economic calculation is the intellectual basis of the market economy.”65 Without market prices, how can a central planning board know what or how many products to produce, with which techniques and raw materials, and in which location?(...)
In the words of Mises, “Where there is no market there is no price system, and where there is no price system there can be no economic calculation.”68 “The paradox of ‘planning’ is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all.”

7) The legislator, like a communist central planner, can only grope in the dark. (...) Further, not only can legislators not know the actual situation of the individuals they intend to cast their legislative net over, but they cannot predict the often far-reaching effects of legislation. Legislation routinely has unintended consequences, a fact that cannot be gotten around since it is necessitated by the systematic ignorance that legislators face.72

The ultimate reason that the legislator and central planner are both ultimately doomed to failure is that "there is more than an analogy between the market economy and a judiciary or lawyers’ law, just as there is much more than an analogy between a planned economy and legislation."73 There is "more" than an analogy because legislation and central planning are really the same thing: coercively-backed commands emanating from the government that order individuals to act in certain ways that the government prefers.

8) A crucial reason for the systematic ignorance of central planners and legislators alike is “the decentralized, fragmentary character of knowledge.”76 This makes central planners and central law-makers systematically unable to ever have enough knowledge to make informed decisions that affect entire economic or legal systems. Moreover, not only is a central planner “unable” to gather information only present in a dynamic price structure, but the attempt to plan actually destroys the price structure because the private property system at the base of a price structure is outlawed. Similarly, not only does a legislator face a severe ignorance problem — he could never hope to have a comprehensive and continuallyupdated view of all the interactions, rules, relationships, and customs that exist among the people — he also subverts the very spontaneous legal order that would form in the absence of legislative interference.

9) As Professor Aranson puts it, "Legislation saps the social order of spontaneity."78
Just as a decentralized, free market economy is essential to the coordination of resources and the production of wealth, so a decentralized law-finding system is a prerequisite to allowing true Law to develop. This does not guarantee that the law will be just — there are no guarantees — but at least it is possible in a decentralized law-finding system, while in a legislated system it is not.

10) Conclusions: (...) Both the Roman law and common law have been corrupted into today’s inferior legislation-dominated systems. The primacy of legislation should be abandoned, and we should return to a system of judge-made law — a private system, ideally, but in the direction of systems like the old common law and Roman law, at least. Scholars who codify naturally-evolved law have a vital function to serve, but they should not ask for the governmental imprimatur on their scholarly efforts. Ultimately, the form of a legal system does not guarantee that just laws will be adopted. We must always be vigilant and urge that individual freedom be respected, whether by legislator or judge.

Mises Institute influencia jornalismo económico português

1) "Porque cai o dólar?" Sérgio Figueiredo - Jornal de Negócios. Artigo publicado a 9/03/2005.

"Confrontados com os lamentos sobre a queda do dólar, os americanos reagiam: «o dólar é a nossa moeda, mas o problema é vosso». A resposta não é de agora, mas de 1971. E é atribuída a um político, John Connally, na época o secretário do Tesouro de Nixon. O dólar continua a ser a moeda dos EUA, mas a queda persistente da sua taxa de câmbio não constitui uma dor de cabeça apenas para os outros.

É também um problema dos Estados Unidos.

Na época de Nixon, eles exerciam um poder monopolista de emissão de moeda, porque fixavam unilateralmente a paridade do dólar face ao ouro e, por arrasto, face às restantes divisas.
Mesmo com o colapso do padrão-ouro, a hegemonia era garantida pelos elevados graus de liquidez e de integração dos seus mercados financeiros. Franco suíço, iene ou marco alemão, moedas ligadas a mercados sem profundidade, não conseguiam rivalizar sequer com a sombra do dólar.

Sucede que, a partir de 1999, o euro mudou esta constelação. Além da dimensão geográfica, a moeda europeia começou a ganhar relevância económica.

Países não-alinhados, com a China à cabeça, adoptaram, ou anunciam a intenção de adoptar, o euro como taxa de câmbio de referência para as suas moedas. Outras nações, sobretudo produtoras de petróleo, anunciam a intenção de cotar as suas exportações na moeda europeia.
Dito de outra forma, está em causa o papel do dólar como única reserva cambial e como principal divisa para o comércio internacional.

Existe hoje um consenso no sistema financeiro internacional de que a queda abrupta do dólar deve ser evitada. Já se conhecem as razões dos europeus: quanto mais fraco estiver o dólar, menos capacidade exportadora têm a Alemanha e outras economias que precisam do estímulo externo.

Japão e China não desejam igualmente o crash do dólar. Os japoneses, como principais credores dos EUA, por serem os que mais investiram em activos americanos. A China também não, pelo menos enquanto não trocar por petróleo, matérias-primas ou outras divisas, parte significativa dos dólares que acumula em reservas.

O contraste entre a realidade e os desejos de ministros e de banqueiros centrais é, contudo, abissal. E as explicações que se procuram para o facto de o dólar cair, quando todos querem que ele suba, são ainda mais extraordinárias.

(...)

2 ) Why the Dollar is Falling, By Antony P. Mueller - Mises Institute 8/03/2005

When confronted with complaints about the falling value of the dollar, the U.S. official is said to have responded to his European visitors: "The dollar is our currency, but it's your problem." That was in 1971. The politician to whom this statement is attributed was John Connally, who at that time served as the secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His boss was Richard Nixon, the same President who used a word for the Italian lira which politeness prohibits repeating. Nevertheless, Connally and Nixon made clear how matters were.

(...) After some initial weakness—probably due to fears that the new arrangement might fail—the euro has gained markedly in value against the U.S. dollar over the past three years. The American currency is facing a rival. An increasing number of central banks announced plans to shift part of their international reserves into the European currency. The dollar is still the currency of the U.S., but a sinking dollar is no longer just a problem for foreigners, it is also a problem for the United States.

In the past, the United States could count on having the monopoly of issuing the currency with the highest degree of liquidity and financial market integration. Although there were stronger currencies than the U.S. dollar, such as the Swiss currency or the Japanese yen and the German mark, these currencies could not rival the U.S. dollar because of their limited market share.

The existence of the euro has changed this constellation. As to its market size, the euro area is up to the U.S. dollar with the tendency of further augmenting this position when new members of the European Union will adopt the single currency, some non-EU countries will peg their exchange rates to that of the European monetary union or when oil producers will change to euros when pricing their exports.

(...) There is a consensus currently among the major players in international finance, particularly among the relevant governments and central banks, that an abrupt fall of the dollar should be avoided. Japan, the largest foreign holder of U.S. assets, depends on U.S. protection in the face of the growing muscle of China in its region. China itself most likely would also like to avoid a dollar crash at least as long as it has not yet spent a considerable part of its dollar reserves in the effort to secure future supplies of food and oil around the world. The Europeans do not want a much weaker dollar because as of now it is mainly exports that are booming in the major economies of this region.(...)"

Liberalismo e politica externa e de defesa

Do meu ponto de vista, um liberal, deve apontar tantos defeitos a uma politica de intervencionismo externo como em qualquer outro assunto económico ou social. E quando vêm com a conversas morais e idealistas, ainda especialmente mais. E quando nos apontam timidos e ainda incertos resultado depois de, por exemplo, se gastarem 300 bilióes de dólares, milhares de mortos e significativa destruição material e moral, ainda mais ainda.

Não é preciso ir mais longe na história do que a Grande Guerra para observar como as decisões aparentemente legitimas e racionais de todas as partes produziu o maior desastre da civilização, provocando quer o aparecimento do comunismo, do fascismo como no final da social-democracia centralizada em geral (e uma guerra adicional) - foi o que se chama a revolução total. E os conservadores olhando para os resultados das guerras do século 20 deviam ter já cultivado a maior dos pessimismos quanto aos efeitos inesperados e "unintended consequences" que só se vislumbram no longo prazo (como em qualquer programa de planeamento económico e social).

Na actual senda neo-conservadora pela revolução mundial (que muito se deve às origens revolucionárias dos seus mentores), está-se a percorrer os mesmos caminhos que outros impérios de outros tempos,que descobriram tarde demais, que de repente, se tornam reféns dos acontecimentos. Por exemplo, Churchill que desde o inicio do século procurou impedir as ambições de uma Alemanha ainda civilizada (isto é monárquica e efectivo federalismo), viu-se envolvido no fim de todas as monarquias europeias relevantes (e em especial, o Austro-Hungaro - um factor de equilibrio), para depois vir a combater uma república nazi (tendo como aliado uma república estalinista), a cujo combate, provocou o fim do seu querido (e nosso) Imprério Britânico.

A razão para a situação no Iraque ser ainda, apensar de tudo, gerivel, é porque os interesses xiitas e kurdos vão no sentido de esmagar a influência sunita. Sunitas que são a influência mais secular e menos radical do mundo islâmico, incluindo na Siria (quem não perceber isto não vai conseguir perceber nada).

Entre democratização e caos o caminho é curto, e mesmo que a curto prazo se percepcionem sinais positivos, temos que nos lembrar que a Segunda Guerra que fez do mass-murder Estaline um aliado do Ocidente e entregou de bandeja o comunismo ao mundo por 50 anos, resultou do que parecia ser a Guerra para acabar com as Guerras e fazer o mundo mais seguro para a democracia, e tudo isso, em grande parte resultado das decisões de um Presidente idealista referência incontornável dos Neo-Cons.

MSNBC: Nearly half a million pro-Syrian protesters rally in Beirut

"Nearly 500,000 pro-Syrian protesters waved flags and chanted anti-American slogans in a central Beirut square Tuesday, answering a nationwide call by the militant Shiite Muslim Hezbollah group for a demonstration to counter weeks of massive rallies demanding Syrian forces leave Lebanon.

(...) Rally eclipses opposition protests

Tuesday’s rally was far bigger than the more than 70,000 anti-Syrian protesters who filled the nearby Martyrs’ Square on Monday. That was the biggest rally yet of anti-Syrian furor, as demonstrators waved Lebanon’s cedar-tree flag and thundered, “Syria out!”

Entretanto:

1) Bush vows 'freedom will prevail in Lebanon'
2) Também parece que "...he demanded fast and complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, noting that no country can have free elections under foreign military occupation."

Feminism

" (...) does feminism preach, as it has for decades, that there is no difference whatever (except the famed le petit difference) between the two sexes, that their capacities, traits, etc. are all equal, "(...) the same, or are they saying, as feminists have recently taken to arguing, that women are very different, that they are nurturing, caring, etc., and therefore superior to men? And how can they say both at the same time, or have it both ways?

These are cogent questions, but they have not penetrated to the heart of the feminist agenda. Here is how these seemingly embarrassing contradictions and double standards can be resolved: men are the evil, victimizer sex; women are the good, victimized sex. The two genders are ineluctable enemies. Therefore, all tactics and strategies are permissible and valuable if they result in the victory of women over the Male Enemy. Hence, attack one-sex colleges if they are male, proclaim their greatness if they are female. If you are talking about qualities such as career advancement, intelligence, success, proclaim women as exactly man's equal and denounce as "sexist" any intimation to the contrary; but if you are talking about such good things as nurturing, peace, etc., proclaim women's innate superiority. Don't worry about such "objective" qualities as fairness, logic, truth, or non-contradiction; remember, all's fair in hate and war" The Irrepressible Rothbard

A Grande Guerra e o Socialismo

"(...) Last year, Cambridge published a collection of 500-plus pages on one of the most exhaustively examined subjects in the whole history of historical writing, the origins of the First World War. As for general works, in the past few years at least six have appeared in English, by both academic and popular historians. The Western Front: Battle Ground and Home Front in the First World War (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003) by Hunt Tooley, who teaches at Austin College, in Texas, falls into the academic category, and for such a short volume (305 pages) it offers a very great deal indeed.

Tooley traces the roots of the world-historical catastrophe of 1914–1918 to the Franco-Prussian war, which, while achieving German unification in 1871, understandably fostered an enduring resentment in France, "a country that was accustomed to humiliating others during 400 years of warmaking and aggression" (p. 5). Bismarck sought to ensure the Second Reich’s security through defensive treaties with the remaining continental powers (the ones with Austria-Hungary and Italy constituted the Triple Alliance). But under the new (and last) Kaiser, Wilhelm II, the treaty with Russia was permitted to lapse, freeing Russia to ally with France. The over-ambitious Wilhelm’s extensive naval program was perceived by the British as a mortal threat; starting in 1904 they developed an Entente cordiale (cordial understanding) with France, enlarged in 1907 to include Russia. Now the Germans had good reason to fear a massive Einkreisung (encirclement).

A series of diplomatic crises increased tensions, aggravated by the two Balkan wars of 1912–1913, from which a strong Serbia emerged, evidently aiming at the disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy. With Russia acting as Serbia’s mentor and growing in power every year, military men in Vienna and Berlin reflected that if the great conflict was destined to come, then better sooner than later.

(...) Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb set "the stone rolling down the hill," as the German chancellor bleakly put it. Mobilizations and ultimatums followed, and a few days later the giant conscript armies of the continental powers were in motion. In democratic Britain, the commitment to France had been hidden from the public, from Parliament, and even from most of the cabinet.

The German declaration of war on Russia and France placed the Asquith government in a grave quandary, but, as Tooley writes, "the first German footfall in Belgium salvaged the situation" (p. 39). Now Foreign Secretary Edward Grey could deceitfully claim that England was joining its entente partners simply to defend Belgian neutrality.

(...)The war was greeted as a cleansing, purifying moment, at least by the urban masses, whose enthusiasm easily outweighed the rural population’s relative passivity. (...)Especially ecstatic were the intellectuals, who viewed the war as a triumph of "idealism" over the selfish individualism and crass materialism of "the trading and shopkeeping spirit" (...)Socialist parties, except in Russia and later Italy, added their eager support, as did even celebrated anarchists like Benjamin Tucker and Peter Kropotkin.

(...)The German strategy in the event of war on two fronts, the famous Schlieffen plan, foolishly assumed the infallibility of its execution and ignored the factors that doomed it: active Belgian resistance, the rapid Russian mobilization, and the landing of a British Expeditionary Force (those mercenaries who, as another poet, A. E. Housman, wrote, "saved the sum of things for pay").(...) In 1916 "the butcher’s bill," as Robert Graves called it, came due, at Verdun and at the Somme. Ill-educated neoconservatives who in 2002–2003 derided France as a nation of cowards seem never to have heard of Verdun, where a half million French casualties were the price of keeping the Germans at bay. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, the brainchild of Field Marshal Haig, the British lost more men than on any other single day in the history of the Empire, more than in acquiring Canada and India combined.

(...) In Britain, France, and later the United States, proponents of centralization and planning gleefully exploited the occasion to extend state activism into every corner of the economy. (...). The deluded patriots who purchased government war bonds were crippled by inflation, now "introduced [to] the twentieth century…as a way of life" (p. 113). Tooley cites Murray Rothbard on one of the hidden detriments of the war: it initiated the inflationary business cycle that ended in the Great Depression.

(...) The aggrandizement of state power in the combatant nations reached, Tooley notes, a kind of reductio ad absurdum in what was probably the war’s worst result: the establishment of a terrorist totalitarian regime by the Bolsheviks in Russia.

American entry had been virtually determined in the wake of the sinking of the Lusitania, when the terminally Anglophiliac Wilson administration declared that the Germans would be held "strictly accountable" for the loss of any Americans’ lives through U-boat action, even when those Americans were traveling on armed British merchant ships that carried munitions of war.

(...) British propaganda was, as always, topnotch. Its high point was the mendacious Bryce report on the "Belgian atrocities."

(...) The Bolshevik coup d’état of November, 1917 led to an armistice in the East, and the Germans launched their final, va-banque push on the western front.(...) By the summer, the American expeditionary force under John G. Pershing amounted to 2 million men, many of them keen to make the whole world safe for democracy.

(...) century earlier, after the Napoleonic wars, the aristocrats at the Congress of Vienna fashioned a viable system that avoided general war for another hundred years. At Paris in 1919, the diplomats, now answerable to their democratic constituencies, set the stage for a virtually inevitable future conflict. Tooley very correctly places the word "peace," as in the Versailles "peace" treaty, in ironic quotes.

(...) In U. S. history it has been crises, most often wars, that result in a great expansion of state power. Once the crisis is over, the state and its budgets, deficits, functionaries, and regulations are cut back to more normal levels, but never to what they were before, and they go on from there. Ideology, the underlying political mentality of the people, is also permanently skewed in a state-receptive direction. As Tooley sums up: "If the twentieth century became the century of managerial control, of the prioritizing of group goals and group efficiency over the autonomies of individuals, families, and regions, then we will find in World War I the accelerator of processes which were emerging before then" (p. 267)." The Great War Retold by Ralph Raico

Guilt Sanctified II

Rothbard neste artigo fala da boa nova que nos foi anunciada pelo que chama de left-liberalism - a libertação de qualquer sentimento de culpa ....pelos nossos desejos reprimidos, ou seja estamos

"...repressed, inhibited, guilt-ridden for giving in to their natural desires and impulses. We come to preach you a joyous removal of guilt, hammered into you by repressed ministers and priests. We preach hedonism, the end of guilt, following your desires, and to put it in a common rebarbative phrase of the 1960s Sexual Revolution: "if it moves, fondle it." Sex, furthermore, is "only a drink of water," natural and harmless."

Mas como diz, "apenas durou 6 meses", porque logo a seguir os mesmos afundaram-nosem todo o género de culpas.

"...guilt for centuries of slavery, guilt for the oppression and rape of women, guilt for the Holocaust, guilt for the existence of the handicapped, guilt for eating and killing animals, guilt for being fat, guilt for not recycling your garbage, guilt for "desecrating the Earth." Note that this guilt is never confined to the specific individuals, say, who enslaved or murdered or raped people. (...) Some groups are accorded the status of Official Victims; everyone not in the Victim groups are, therefore, criminals and Official Victimizers."

No fim nem o o próprio sexo (a motivação original para a libertação de todas as culpas) se salvou: "even sex, the last bastion of hedonism, is no longer guilt-free; with the onslaught of "sex exploits women," and ravening condomania in the interest of "safe sex."

Dei-me ao trabalho de falar novamente neste artigo porque no Diário de Notícias leio que num estudo dum tal "Observatório da Imigração" se chega à estatística que a taxa criminal entre estrangeiros é quase o dobro dos nacionais. A conclusão óbvia do estudo é que a explicação reside toda na....DISCRIMINAÇÂO.

Portanto, somos todos culpados. Sempre. Colectivamente. De tudo o que de mau acontece debaixo do sol (e da lua). Basicamente, a solução provavelmente passa por começar a pagar ainda mais impostos, talvez uns 99%, para expiar a nossa culpa com programas que atraiam de forma ilimitada todo e qualquer despojado do mundo para o qual a simples possibilidade de passear e vaguear pleas ruas (enquanto espera por uma habitação social num bairro feito à medida) representa provavelmente uma enorme subida da sua qualidade de vida. Principalmente se ainda puderem cometer um ou outro crime apontando os culpados: Nós mesmos. Os assaltados.

Em resposta, diz, Rothbard: "..the only way to save the day is to raise the banner high and engage in a frontal and all-out onslaught against the left guilt-inducers. In such an onslaught lies the only hope of taking back our lives and our culture from these malignant pests and tyrants"

Pensamento do dia

Os Conservadores morais (eutanásia, suicidio, homosexualidade, aborto, multiculturalismo imposto, droga, prostituição, religião, castidade, fidelidade, casamento, familia, comunidade, tradição, lei intemporal, abstenção do consumo e acumulação de capital, etc) precisam de recuperar o seu sentido de anti-estado-poder-central porque não lhes vai restar mais nada senão exigir a mais completa descentralização politica e a protecção da propriedade e contrato, de forma a permitir o crescimento de comunidades privadas em livre associação e segundo os seus próprios valores. Será a única defesa que restará contra o inevitável relativismo imposto a todos particularismos por parte de qualquer poder politico central legitimado pela vox populli, principalmente quando perde a escala humana (e a tendência do momento, são a criação de espaços uniformizantes de decisões democráticas-maioritárias-politicos cada vez maiores).

Libano

1) Haaretz: End the occupation - but only in Lebanon

"(...)Just to calm those who note the "historic moments" in the Middle East, Lebanon is the freest country in the region. Its parliament has real power and its newspapers and electronic media demarcated the boundaries of freedom of expression before Al Jazeera did so. Anti-establishment satire has existed there for a long time and its citizens, even more than the citizens of Turkey, regard themselves as more Western than Arab.

But this is not the main point. Three occupying countries remain in the Middle East: Syria, Israel and the United States. The two Western occupiers are now demanding that the Arab occupying state desist from occupying. In its honor, they pushed for the Syria Accountability Act - legislation enabling sanctions to be applied, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559.

The status of this resolution is no different than that of resolutions 242 and 338, which call for Israel to withdraw from the territories it conquered. Israel countered these resolutions with a legalistic argument, claiming it was not a case of occupation, but rather of liberation - or at most, a case of administered territories. That is, a deposit. Syria has a literary argument similar to that of Israel: the government of Lebanon invited it into the country. And the United States, of course, came to Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction. But without any such weaponry, it will make due with establishing democracy.(...)

It may suddenly dawn on Israel that the weakening of Syria's control in Lebanon enhances the power of the more dangerous enemy, Hezbollah.(...)"

2) So What’s Doing in Syria & the Rest of the Middle East?, Harry Browne

1. There are 13,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon. (...)

Sirios (embaixador) : Actually, if anyone with a sense of fairness would look at the history of our presence in Lebanon, you could easily tell that we had 42,000 troops in Lebanon 10 years ago, and we started a series of withdrawals and redeployments. Today, we have only 13,000 troops, and they — all of them are outside major Lebanese cities. So we have done this in the past, and we have explicitly said that we will continue doing this. . . . And we have repeatedly said on the record in the past three years, not because of this pressure now, the moment the Lebanese government will ask us to leave, we will leave. And we are leaving, absolutely.

2. The Syrian troops in Lebanon are all in the countryside — ready to help restore order if needed, but generally out of sight of the Lebanese people. The American troops in Iraq are all over the place — killing insurgents and civilians alike while devastating cities like Fallujah.

3. There are no reports of Lebanese insurgents fighting the Syrian troops, while there are daily clashes between Iraqi insurgents and American troops.

4. As Pat Buchanan has pointed out, it would make no sense for the Syrians to have assassinated the Lebanese ex-Prime Minister — since they had to know that they would automatically become the #1 suspect and bring the wrath of Bush down upon their heads.

5. Syrian troops first invaded Lebanon at the time of the Gulf War. And while Syria was overrunning Lebanon, President George H.W. Bush was proudly listing Syria as a member of the coalition of nations fighting Saddam Hussein.

6. The Bush administration, as usual, won’t negotiate anything with anyone. The Bushies prefer to make accusations in the media, assert that they have evidence that no one ever gets to see, and incite Americans to hate another nation of human beings.

(...)8. The TV pictures of a Lebanese crowd celebrating the fall of the pro-Syrian Lebanese government no more demonstrate the attitudes of all Lebanese than do the TV pictures of U.S. pro-abortion rallies demonstrate that all Americans (or even a majority) are in favor of abortions.

9. Despite the State Department’s human rights report of torture and other ghastly conditions inside Syria, the U.S. government has sent some of its "War on Terror" prisoners to Syria for interrogation — and, presumably, torture. And not one American politician is embarrassed by the contradiction."

Libertarianism

"(...) Libertarian societies in all their variety would not be utopias, of course. Libertarianism does not propose an end to evil or even to coercion, but only the flourishing of civilization in the absence of institutionalized coercion. Crime would not disappear, poor taste would still exist, and even conservative communities would remain beset with imperfection. Removing the privileges of the state would make these evils smaller, less centralized, and more manageable, however. This picture is no abstraction or economic construct; it arises from the practice of actual institutions.

The record of civil society and the free market is as old as the human race. The libertarian idea of society would hold true even if a degree of coercion were absolutely necessary and ineradicable: the more authority residing in civil society rather than the state, the better. But there are at least a few prima facie considerations that lend weight to so-called radical libertarianism.

The most widely agreed upon of all so-called public goods, national defense, is not what it seems. The mightiest military on earth failed to prevent the atrocity on 9/11. On the contrary, U.S. interference in the Middle East and support for thuggish regimes has endangered Americans. Is a country ripe for invasion without a standing army? The last 200-odd years have shown many instances, including our own Revolutionary War, where guerrilla forces have been more effective than regular armies. Nor is there any need for conscription when people want to defend their homes; conscription is what states need to make people fight for causes in which they don’t believe.

A libertarian order is not coming any time soon, but it should be plain to anyone who undertakes the investigation that the solution to war, bureaucracy, taxation, personal irresponsibility, and the rot of culture is not more government, it’s less."

Guilt Sanctified

Earlier in this century, left-liberalism came to Americans preaching the alluring gospel of Liberation from Guilt. Americans, they boldly proclaimed, are repressed, inhibited, guilt-ridden for giving in to their natural desires and impulses. We come to preach you a joyous removal of guilt, hammered into you by repressed ministers and priests. We preach hedonism, the end of guilt, following your desires, and to put it in a common rebarbative phrase of the 1960s Sexual Revolution: "if it moves, fondle it." Sex, furthermore, is "only a drink of water," natural and harmless.

The era of guiltlessness under our left-liberal culture lasted, as I remember, about six months. Now, the entire culture is characterized by massive collective guilt, and if anyone fails to give due public lip-service to a long list of solemnly avowed guilts, he is literally driven from public life. Guilt is everywhere, all-pervasive, and brought to us by the same scoundrels who once promised us easy liberation. A brief rundown: guilt for centuries of slavery, guilt for the oppression and rape of women, guilt for the Holocaust, guilt for the existence of the handicapped, guilt for eating and killing animals, guilt for being fat, guilt for not recycling your garbage, guilt for "desecrating the Earth."

Note that this guilt is never confined to the specific individuals, say, who enslaved or murdered or raped people. (...) Some groups are accorded the status of Official Victims; everyone not in the Victim groups are, therefore, criminals and Official Victimizers. The Victimizers are expected to feel guilty about the victims, and therefore – because there is no point to guilt without a payoff – to pay through the nose in money, privileges, and "empowerment" forever and ever without end. Amen.

There is never a way of getting out from under. And this is what our liberators have brought us. In return for old-fashioned Christianity and guilt about sex, they have brought us a new religion of Victimology and of the Goddess Nature. And even sex, the last bastion of hedonism, is no longer guilt-free; with the onslaught of "sex exploits women," and ravening condomania in the interest of "safe sex," it might be better to scrap the whole thing and go back to Christian guilt. Certainly it would be simpler and more peaceful.

As in all other aspects of our rotten culture, the only way to save the day is to raise the banner high and engage in a frontal and all-out onslaught against the left guilt-inducers. In such an onslaught lies the only hope of taking back our lives and our culture from these malignant pests and tyrants." Murray N. Rothbard

Afghanistan now nearly 'a narcotics state'

"WASHINGTON - More than three years after a pro-U.S. government was installed, Afghanistan has been unable to contain opium poppy production and is “on the verge of becoming a narcotics state,” according to a presidential report."

Michael Meacher no The Spectator: One for oil and oil for one

"Yes, our man (Yushchenko) and our system (democracy) won in Ukraine, and once again good triumphed over bad. Yet this presentation, so characteristic of the Western media, misses the point about what the struggle is really about.

If the issue was fair elections, there would have been an equal furore about the grossly rigged elections by which Ilham Aliyev assumed the presidency of Azerbaijan in 2003 from his father, a ruthless KGB hardman in the former Soviet state. In fact the West turned a blind eye, in order to maintain access to Azerbaijan’s oil supplies after a $13 billion contract had been signed with BP in 1998. Equally, there would have been uproar when the pro-Russian Shevardnadze was ousted as President of Georgia in 2003 and the West’s favoured candidate won 96 per cent of the vote to replace him. But nobody raised any complaint.

If the issue was legitimate government, much more attention would have been focused on Yushchenko’s aides and the tenor of his administration. His closest aide, Julia Timoshenko, known as Ukraine’s ‘gas princess’, and now appointed Prime Minister, has been widely accused by both the Russian and Ukrainian authorities of bribery and embezzlement.(...)

What has been at stake in Ukraine is less a fight over democracy than a struggle over the geopolitics of oil and military reach. If Ukraine is absorbed into the Nato orbit, Russia will be deprived of access to its naval bases in the Crimea, and Russian oil and gas exports will be squeezed by a new US straitjacket.

But the significance of the Ukrainian confrontation goes even wider. China remains the sole long-term challenger to US hegemony, and while the Chinese economy has been expanding at a phenomenal rate, its weakness continues to be its energy supply. (...)"

The compulsory old age insurance system

By subsidizing with tax funds (with funds taken from others) people who are poor, more poverty (bad) will be created. By subsidizing people because they are unemployed, more unemployment (bad) will be created. By subsidizing unwed mothers, there will be more unwed mothers and more illegitimate births (bad), etc.

Obviously, this basic insight applies to the entire system of so-called social security that has been implemented in Western Europe (from the 1880s onward) and the U.S. (since the 1930s): of compulsory government "insurance" against old age, illness, occupational injury, unemployment, indigence, etc. In conjunction with the even older compulsory system of public education, these institutions and practices amount to a massive attack on the institution of the family and personal responsibility.

By relieving individuals of the obligation to provide for their own income, health, safety, old age, and children's education, the range and temporal horizon of private provision is reduced, and the value of marriage, family, children, and kinship relations is lowered.

Irresponsibility, shortsightedness, negligence, illness and even destructionism (bads) are promoted, and responsibility, farsightedness, diligence, health and conservatism (goods) are punished.

The compulsory old age insurance system in particular, by which retirees (the old) are subsidized from taxes imposed on current income earners (the young), has systematically weakened the natural intergenerational bond between parents, grandparents, and children.

The old need no longer rely on the assistance of their children if they have made no provision for their own old age; and the young (with typically less accumulated wealth) must support the old (with typically more accumulated wealth) rather than the other way around, as is typical within families.

Consequently, not only do people want to have fewer children—and indeed, birthrates have fallen in half since the onset of modern social security (welfare) policies—but also the respect which the young traditionally accorded to their elders is diminished, and all indicators of family disintegration and malfunctioning, such as rates of divorce, illegitimacy, child abuse, parent abuse, spouse abuse, single parenting, singledom, alternative lifestyles, and abortion, have increased.

(...) Subsidies for the ill, unhealthy and disabled breed illness, disease, and disability and weaken the desire to work for a living and to lead healthy lives. One can do no better than quote the "dead Austrian economist" Ludwig von Mises once more:

being ill is not a phenomenon independent of conscious will. . . . A man's efficiency is not merely a result of his physical condition; it depends largely on his mind and will. . . . The destructionist aspect of accident and health insurance lies above all in the fact that such institutions promote accident and illness, hinder recovery, and very often create, or at any rate intensify and lengthen, the functional disorders which follow illness or accident. . . . To feel healthy is quite different from being healthy in the medical sense. . . . By weakening or completely destroying the will to be well and able to work, social insurance creates illness and inability to work; it produces the habit of complaining—which is in itself a neurosis—and neuroses of other kinds. . . . As a social institution it makes a people sick bodily and mentally or at least helps to multiply, lengthen, and intensify disease. . . . Social insurance has thus made the neurosis of the insured a dangerous public disease. Should the institution be extended and developed the disease will spread. No reform can be of any assistance. We cannot weaken or destroy the will to health without producing illness.4" Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The Spectator: A despotic act

"It is unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable, that people who have lived only in conditions of liberty and democracy should have limited interest in the legal provisions that keep societies free. That much is clear from the public’s response to the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. The past week saw one of the gravest parliamentary debates of modern times, on a measure which would undermine an 800-year-old principle of English law: that no man should face imprisonment without trial. And yet to judge by the opinion polls, most citizens seem to care little about the issues involved. Inasmuch as they have followed the debate at all, it is simply to absorb the glib suggestions of the Prime Minister that the only ‘civil liberty’ which matters is personal protection from a terrorist bomb.(...)

Mercifully, it is unlikely that the average law-abiding citizen will fall foul of the provisions in the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. But that should not blind us to their potential. They are levers of despotism, no matter how worthy the intentions of those ministers who have conceived them. Coming from any government this Bill would be a disgrace. Coming from a government which has so often trumpeted its commitment to human rights, it is also, of course, the height of hypocrisy."

Intolerâncias

No Público: No reino (não santo) da intolerância Nuno Pacheco diz que

"(...) Infelizmente, a história costuma ser manchada de sangue precisamente por aqueles que vivem até ao limite o que acreditam. Sem qualquer comparação com o caso actual, que apenas revela uma cega (e inaplicável, diga-se) intolerância, ditadores e terroristas vivem, sempre, até ao limite aquilo em que acreditam. Mentem por isso, matam por isso. E não consta que se arrependam"

Mas quando essa grande conquista da humanidade que é a liberdade de abortar for estabelecida universalmente porque o "corpo é da mulher" (ver socialistas e sociais-democratas de todas as cores a defender de forma tão absoluta um direito de propriedade é quase enternecedor para um anarco-capitalista como eu), não irá essa imensa tolerância democrática obrigar todos os que acreditam que tal acto é profundamente imoral, a financiar compulsóriamente a gratuidade de tal acto?

Não minta a si mesmo sobre a sua imensa tolerância nem me venha com essas tretas que o aborto não é uma morte (porque arrisca-se a precisamente a estar de alguma forma a mentir e a matar). O pobre padre (com quem você se mostra tão intolerante) não apelou a o "Estado de direto" para impor a sua moral. Os tolerantes (sociais) democratas fazem-no (para financiar a sua própria moralidade) com a ameaça de prisão e hipócritamente acham-se puros e iluminados e citando-o a si, todos os puros e iluminados "vivem, sempre, até ao limite aquilo em que acreditam. Mentem por isso, matam por isso. E não consta que se arrependam".

Todas as entidades privadas (igrejas, associações, empresas, etc) devem poder descriminar àcerca do aborto ou qualquer outro valor moral se assim o entenderem. Indo mais longe, até localmente isso deve ser possivel (quando os inevitáveis N referendos necessários para legalização forem efectuados), ou seja, os municípios devem passar a poder regular individualmente (no limite se assim o entenderem, proibindo) a prática de aborto. Na prática, dirá, é ineficaz porque o do lado pode permiti-lo, mas com sabemos, em questões morais, o exemplo é a melhor forma de propaganda.

Ruanda, desarmamento das populações e o BI

"Over 800,000 Christian Tutsis in Rwanda were hacked to death with machetes between April and July of 1994 by the Hutu-led military force after the Tutsis had been disarmed by governmental decree in the early 1990s, of which disarmament decree the United Nations helped to enforce. On several occasions, United Nations soldiers stationed in Rwanda actually handed over helpless Tutsi Christians under their protection to members of the Hutu military. They then stood by as their screaming charges were unceremoniously hacked to pieces. This massacre happened one year after the United Nations helped to put in a national ID card in Rwanda, and it was that very national ID card system which the Hutus used to track-down and identify the Christian Tutsis. Needless to say, all of the subject populations of the above mass murders had been disarmed beforehand."

Alexis de Tocqueville

...observou em Democracy in America, "The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so..."

Lincoln entendeu que não. Os Chineses parece que também não.

Isto, provavelmente, explica algumas coisas

"O consumo de medicamentos antidepressivos aumentou 45 por cento nos últimos cinco anos: em 2000 foram compradas em Portugal cerca de quatro milhões de embalagens, no ano passado foram quase seis milhões.

(...)Carlos Lopes Pires, professor de Psicologia da Saúde na Universidade de Coimbra, considera o consumo de antidepressivos como "um problema de saúde pública".

Re: Corrupção e impostos municipais

Como, e que hipóteses se podem colocar, quanto ao auto-financiamento das autarquias, num cenário de uma revolução administrativa?

1. O auto-financiamento das autarquias pressupõe uma forte descida dos impostos nacionais.

2. As Juntas de Freguesia devem constituir-se como as entidades de gestão do património comum, financiadas por algo semelhante a um I.M.I (ex contribuição autárquica), e com regras estatutárias semelhantes aos dos condomínios. Seria natural serem aqui regulados diversos assuntos que dizem respeito aos residentes e que afectam a sua tranquilidade e a boa gestão comum.

3. Os Municípios agregam os interesses das Juntas de Frequesia (na verdade, a Assembleia Muncipal devia ser constituída por representantes legais de cada uma das Juntas de Freguesia) e são financiados parcialmente pelas Juntas de Freguesia e por taxas sobre as vendas (prática comum nos grandes centros comerciais).

Nota: Esta visão de uma revolução administrativa não tem de passar própriamente por um "big bang" nacional. Deve é ser dada a possibilidade de cada uma das autarquias e respectivas Juntas de Freguesia poder livremente decidir constituir-se desta forma quando o bem entenderem.

Re: A Islândia e a UE

No Insurgente.

São os países pequenos que dão o exemplo. Tudo o que aqui está dito (como "It's a customs union. It protects itself from outsiders with walls of tariffs.") é aplicável em maior ou menor grau a qualquer zona económica, que mais tarde ou mais cedo, trás consigo o germe da união política e a inevitável tendência para fazer um mercado interno "livre" à custo de regulamentação e de protecções que seriam impossíveis de implementar sem a criação em primeiro lugar da tal "zona de comércio livre".

E em geral, é nos países muito pequenos que algumas das liberdades antigas (e que desapareceram com o advento da Grande Guerra) ainda sobrevivem (impostos muito baixos, comércio livre, banca desregulada, livre imigração profissional, etc) e a Ordem subsiste, até no Médio Oriente (Dubai, Koweit, Qatar, Monaco, Lichestein, Andorra, Gibraltar, etc).

Os espinhos das revoluções

"(...) it seems that the growing opposition to the Syrian presence in Lebanon may pose another threat to the stability of the Lebanese economy. According to the Kuwaiti Al Siyasa newspaper, Syrians, including senior officials, have withdrawn recently some US$3.5 billion deposited in Lebanese banks. One bank owner told the newspaper that out of US$10 billion held in Lebanese banks by Syrian officials, senior officers and businessmen, some $3.5 was withdrawn in recent days. According to him, the CBL has ordered not to publish this information in fear that the local economy will collapse."

Re: Ideias II

Parece causar estranheza propor a distribuição das acções das empresas públicas pelos contribuintes, mas não vislumbro porquê.

Partindo do princípio que não falamos de empresas públicas com origem em "nacionalizações" (caso em que a solução legal deve passar em primeira análise, não por re-privatização, mas pela devolução aos donos legítimos) e que não têm um carácter municipal (caso em que a possibilidade de municipalização deve ser considerada), a distribuição de tal propriedade colectiva pelos contribuintes que a financiaram deve ser considerada.

Um método perfeitamente aceitável seria usar a colecta de IRS registada de cada contribuinte como critério de distribuição dessa propriedade. As acções podem ser cotdas em bolsa e depois cada um saberá o que fazer com elas. Potenciais investidores interessados na aquisição de tais empresas poderão considerar lançar Ofertas Públicas de Compra, sendo os novos accionistas livres de decidir da bondade (ou não) de tal oferta. Ou então a nova equipe de gestão consegue manter a independência do negócio.

Vantagens:

1. Devolução de propriedade aos seus financiadores.
2. Poupa-se mais um processo de venda intermediado pela classe política.