Dissent, a shared idea

“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air — that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.”
— H.L. Mencken

Ukrainians and Freedom Convoy truckers share this principle. You may disagree with their interpretation. If so: Use your words. And don’t try changing the definition of freedom.

The immediate risk of asserting that they are freemen is higher for Ukrainians than for truckers. The long term consequences of failure to resist tyranny are the same.

Trudeaupia’s false choice is that 1984 is not different from Brave New World. Though Justin did resort to the former when his estimation of the completeness of the latter turned out to be overly optimistic.

Keep on Truckin’

It was not enough that GoFundMe, at the direction of Canadian apparatchiks, attempted to redistribute 9 million dollars given to Canada’s Freedom Convoy.

No, somebody had to perpetrate a DDOS attack against GiveSendGo‘s replacement campaign. The new Freedom Convoy donation site GiveSendGo is working this morning. I was able to donate an hour ago.

This degree of cooperation between the state and corporations is a matter of some concern. In this case, it appears GoFundMe volunteered to act as an arm of the State, as evidenced by extra punishment GoFundMe planned to visit on the truckers and anyone supporting them:
1) Requiring application for a refund, counter to GoFundMe’s SOP.
2) Setting a short window in which to apply for the refund.
3) Their differential treatment of the 2020’s Seattle insurrectionists. More below.

Dr. Julie Ponesse* has a worthwhile interview with Jordan Peterson about the political and social aspects of the protest. I’ve queued it up to JBP’s contention that the Canadian State coercion of GoFundMe as an inflection point more dangerous “to our collective health than the pandemic”. I would frame that as “the health of our polity”, but you get the point.

GoFundMe started out with a hypocrisy problem since they had promoted participants in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone occupation of Seattle, as Elon Musk pointed out.

The Seattle “summer of love,” to quote Seattle’s mayor, was, in fact, an insurrection. Police were besieged, government buildings were torched, looting was rampant, and murder was committed while GoFundMe promoted the occupation – in line with mayor Durkan’s gauzy ‘flowers in their hair’ puffery. The Antifa/BLM occupiers claimed sovereign control of part of Durkan’s city. It was an insurrection by any reasonable definition.

The Freedom Convoy has done none of that, but the Ottawa police and some faceless Morlocks in the Liberal government were able to convince GoFundMe to not only spike the Freedom Convoy donations, but also to force those who contributed to file forms to get their money back.

“We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity,” GoFundMe wrote in a statement.

Donors have until Feb. 19 to ask for a refund, and the rest of the money the group raised would be allocated to “credible and established charities” chosen by Freedom Convoy organizers, the site said.

Well, you certainly had the evidence of your own eyes in Seattle.

And, right. Define credible and established for me. Ottawa Police Benevolent Association?

GoFundMe would have ‘allowed’ (?!) the convoy organizers to send the money to support the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (Brian Peckford’s** lawsuit), the Fraser Institute, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, Canada Strong and Free Network? They are established. Will Justin Trudeau find them credible, or do they promote unacceptable ideas?

GoFundMe got shellacked for this attempted larceny, and are now following their standard practice: automatic refunds. But it’s far from over. You have to wonder how soon the name and address data GoFundMe collected will be forwarded to the Ottawa constabulary:

Ottawa Police have also warned that they will be collecting as much digital and financial information as they can from both the truckers and anybody who donates to support them. In a threatening statement, the police implied that supporters of the Freedom Convoy could face prosecution just for donating.

Enhanced intelligence operations and investigations: National, provincial and local intelligence agencies have increased efforts to identify and target protestors who are funding/supporting/enabling unlawful and harmful activity by protestors. /11
— Ottawa Police (@OttawaPolice) February 4, 2022

Investigative evidence-gathering teams are collecting financial, digital, vehicle registration, driver identification, insurance status, and other related evidence that will be used in criminal prosecutions. /12
— Ottawa Police (@OttawaPolice) February 4, 2022

Peterson has a point.

Footnote:
There’s a lot of raw video out there from Ottawa, but a good place to go for news on the Freedom Convoy is Rebel News’: Convoy Reports. The legacy media is doing all it can to vilify the protesters.

*Dr. Julie Ponesse is a professor of ethics who has taught at Ontario’s Huron University College for 20 years. She was placed on leave and banned from accessing her campus due to the vaccine mandate…

**The only surviving drafter and signatory 40 years after the 1982 Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted.

Looting and Freedom

Whether political freedom or economic freedom is more important is a moot question.

The most basic property right is self-ownership. To the degree that right is compromised, so is freedom. A commenter at the linked article above noted this:

“I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor, and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the ‘economic means’ for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the ‘political means’.”

   – Franz Oppenheimer, The State. New York: Free Life
      Editions, 1908 (1975), pp. 24-25

Beyond the unabashed wealth redistributionism of a Bernie Sanders, ‘unrequited appropriation of the labor of others’ includes all forms of rent-seeking: Regulation favoring entrenched business (from tariffs to requiring hair braiders to take hundreds of hours of training, to subsidies for solar panels, movies, art, mortgages, etc., etc., etc.); union shops; civil asset forfeiture and eminent domain; and zoning laws.

We may agree politically to give some portion of some of those freedoms to the State, but we will, by definition, be less free; and bureaucracies will always take more than is granted.

Principled resistance to the looting is a requirement of freedom.

Liberal Ayn Rand?

At Slate, Beverly Gage asks “Why Is There No Liberal Ayn Rand?

Ask Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan how he became a conservative and he’ll probably answer by citing a book. It might be Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Or perhaps he’ll come up with Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, or even Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. All of these books are staples of the modern conservative canon, works with the reputed power to radicalize even the most tepid Republican. Over the last half-century, they have been vital to the conservative movement’s success—and to liberalism’s demise.

We tend to think of the conservative influence in purely political terms: electing Ronald Reagan in 1980, picking away at Social Security, reducing taxes for the wealthy.

The answer to “Why Is There No Liberal Ayn Rand?” is right there, in the first sentence of the second paragraph. It’s blindingly obvious (it’s even Ms Gage’s point) that “Liberals” don’t think in terms of ideas. Ideas are hard work, intentions are easier. Liberals like to think in terms of intentions, and mostly they think in terms of how they interpret the intentions of others based on their own intentions to improve humanity. Liberals don’t think like free people, they think in terms of how to apply power to the purpose of perfecting their fellows. To a Liberal, making everybody else perfect is what Liberty means.

The reason there’s no Liberal Ayn Rand is the same reason there’s no Liberal Rush Limbaugh. It’s been tried and it has utterly failed. It’s the very definition of oxymoron.

You might as well ask why there’s no “Liberal” John Galt. A question you couldn’t ask if you’d bothered to pay attention to certain compelling arguments from your opposition. Even if the ideas weren’t compelling to you, would the demands of diversity not require you to attempt to understand? Would not a reasoned defense of your own ideas demand it?

And here the answer is again – in the first sentence of the third paragraph:

Liberals, by contrast, have been moving in the other direction over the last half-century, abandoning the idea that ideas can be powerful political tools. This may seem like a strange statement at a moment when American universities are widely understood to be bastions of liberalism, and when liberals themselves are often derided as eggheaded elites. But there is a difference between policy smarts honed in college classrooms and the kind of intellectual conversation that keeps a movement together. What conservatives have developed is what the left used to describe as a “movement culture”: a shared set of ideas and texts that bind activists together in common cause. Liberals, take note.

But it’s yet more subtle than that. First, the tea party people needed no institutional bastion of conservatism, controlled by an insular elite, to “re-educate” them. They’d have a hard time finding one if they did. They didn’t need the ivory tower re-education camps in the first place. They get it innately. They fundamentally understand it. When they read Ayn Rand, they can see today’s headlines. Our president’s success as a community organizer doesn’t make them swell with pride. Rather, it reminds them of Wesley Mouch.

“Liberals” have not abandoned the idea that ideas can be powerful political tools, they have abandoned the idea that anyone but them is allowed ideas. They are shocked, shocked when anyone deigns to challenge their intentions.

Liberals have channeled their energies even more narrowly over the past half-century, tending to prefer policy tweaks and electoral mapping to big-picture thinking. When was the last time you saw a prominent liberal politician ascribe his or her passion and interest in politics to, of all things, a book? The most dogged insistence on the influence of Obama’s early reading has come from his TeaParty critics, who fume constantly that he is about to carry out a secret plan laid out a half century ago by far-left writers ranging from Alinsky, the granddaddy of “community organizing,” to social reformer Frances Fox Piven.

In fact, no. Tea party criticism is not about the books Obama may have read, it’s about the books he “wrote.”

Liberals may argue that they are better off knocking on doors and brainstorming policy than muddling through the great works of midcentury America.

Policy without theory is untestable, and I can see why “Liberals” would consider that a strength. It allows them the excuse that without Obama’s stimulus the unemployment rate he promised wouldn’t go over 8%, but hit 10% (and more), deserves a Mulligan. He meant well.

And that Obama predicted the unemployment rate, with stimulus, would now be 5.6% is irrelevant. Get that? Not below 6%, but 5point6%. This is the same administration that quibbled over whether an unemployment rate of 8.254% should be reported as 8.3%.

So much for the precision wisdom of the centralized planners. You know, those very same people who turn out to be even more wrong than our president… in some book written by Ayn Rand.

Nothing to see here about testing ideas, let’s just MoveOn:

Ms Gage continues:

Some of this imbalance is due to the relative weakness of the current American left. Liberals are not the logical counterweight to conservatives; leftists are, but they are few in number.

Some of this perceived imbalance is due to self delusion. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama (who, as a teen, was mentored by an avowed Communist, wrote about hanging out with Marxists in college and who, in 1996, received the endorsement of the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America), Bernie Sanders, Maxine Waters, Barbara Boxer and Debbie Wossname-Schultz are not left? The self-declared Communist (Van Jones) and admirer of Mao (Anita Dunn) whom Obama appointed to positions of power were not left? Please.

And, finally, a note is required on the lead sentence of the closing paragraph:

In the current election this means that liberals also run the unnecessary risk of ceding intellectual authority to the right.

Excuse me, but this is the risk Liberals continually choose. They do it gleefully, confident in the ascendance of their intentions, and with no thought about ideas. There is no necessary or unnecessary when peering down from the summit of moral superiority.

This election may represent increased risk for those who don’t have, or care about, ideas; but they don’t care enough to read Atlas Shrugged or Capitalism and Freedom to find out about the ideas that oppose them. Many of us who’ve read Atlas, have also read Das Kapital and Rules for Radicals and The Black Book of Communism. We have some idea what we’re up against, and, unlike Ms Gage, we can even name Liberals we used to consider serious thinkers. We were wrong, but we could say why.

Good news from the regime

Well, not for you, of course.  For you, it’s just less and less freedom, higher costs and more difficult to arrange loans.

White House Backs Bill to Collect Employee Pay Information from Businesses

Currency tax: A way to invest in our future (Rep. Pete Stark)

Gold Coin Sellers Angered by New Tax Law

Did The Credit Agencies Just Go Extinct?

Obesity Rating for Every American Must Be Included in Stimulus-Mandated Electronic Health Records, Says HHS

‘A Commandeering of the People’

Angelo M. Codevilla provides a framework for understanding why the regime class passes such laws and imposes such regulations, and how they get away with it: America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

Quite long, but worth it.

…our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

This is the conclusion of the Declaration of Independence, signed by men who fully expected they might lose their lives and their fortunes, but who would never lose their honor.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Sometime today, while you are enjoying your freedom, find time to read the whole thing. If you have guests, read it to them out loud. If you have children, read it to them. The 56 men who signed our founding document deserve your remembrance.