Libertarian Standard
"Liberty Leading the People" by Eugene Delacroix
29
Apr
09
Libertarian Quotes
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
– John Adams (1814)
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. “
– Benjamin Franklin
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. “
– George Washington
“Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.”
– Mark Twain
“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. “
– Honore de Balzac
“The Constitution is a written instrument. As such, its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when it was adopted, it means now.”
– South Carolina v. United States, 199 U.S. 437, 448 (1905)
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens.”
– Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”
“Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.”
– Ludwig von Mises
Q. What does Cape Fear Literacy Council’s do?
A. We provide opportunities to educate adults in literacy who made had the opportunity to finish school or learned at to read. We also provide public support to break illiteracy and get involved with families and the community.
Q. Is CFLC affiliated with a larger national advocacy group?
A. ProLiteracy America, National Institute for Literacy, North Carolina Literacy Association…and others. The Council also works with UNCW to get students in the Creative Writing and English Departments.
Q. What do you do for CFLC?
A. I help with literacy skills for middle aged adults, those who cant read proficiently. This generally consists of once a week I will go to the 17th Street office and tutor people for a hour and a half or so.
Q. How did you first get involved in CFLC?
A. I found out about it through school and did an internship with them. After that I just kept it up because I feel like I’m giving back to the community.
Q. What about CFLC’s advocacy attracts you?
A. I think it is so important that everyone has an equivalent reading level. So what attracted me was to have the opportunity to help with this cause. Some of the adults I’ve helped only have the ability to read and write their name. These people are also poor minorities that never had a chance.
Q.What is your greatest accomplishment volunteering or CFLC?
A. As a Creative Writing major who is also getting my teaching lisencure I feeling that this will prepare me for working with children that are behind in their reading and writing skills. This will give me the tools I need to better change something that is so important to me.
Q. What frustrating or discouraging situations have you encountered volunteering for CFLC?
A. Just seeing the many families who have illiterate parents that havent been able to help their children read, grow and learn. Sometimes you can tell a child really wants to learn but they were never nurtured in the right home environment.
29
Apr
09
Paul Watson
For my presentation I chose to write of the environmental activist Paul Watson. He played pivotal roles in the formation of the Greenpeace Foundation and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Paul Watson’s involvement in environmental activism began in 1969 with the protest of nuclear testing at Amchitka Island on the U.S. and Canadian border. Mr. Watson’s protests at sea began in 1971 with the launching of the Greenpeace I.
Mr. Watson left Greenpeace in 1977 because he saw the groups tactics as too limited. He saw the need for direct action in the global conservation movement. It was out of this reality that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was formed. The organization was founded in December 1978 the group launched their ship the Sea Shepherd. Over the years direct action by Mr. Watson has included ramming seven whaling vessels, scuttling of eight whaling ships, seven naval confrontations, four times under fire form small arms, four destroyed or confiscated long drift nets, one hundred and eighty two miles of long line destroyed and two hundred and thirty eight voyages.
Mr. Watson’s direct actions has earned his the derision from many governments including Iceland, Norway, Canada and Japan. Even his former group Greenpeace now distances itself from Mr. Watson. Mr. Watson’s activism has been published in numerous books and articles. He often refers to the hunting of whales as a “biological holocaust” resorting to highly charged rhetoric. Throughout his actions, words and writing Mr. Watson is steadfastly totalistic. He has a complete inability to compromise with the opposition. He sees the world in black and white and those not entirely in his camp are against him.
In the last forty years, Watson has managed to alienate those sitting on the fence and sever ties with adversaries. Despite a possible reduction in Watson’s effectiveness in environmental conservation, he still serves an important role. He, and his organization, serves as a balance against powerful geopolitical forces. In a world with plenty of people to stand up for the whaling and seal hunting industry, at least as long as Paul Watson is around, someone will stand up for the wildlife. It is in this capacity that his achievements are most important. He might not be able to keep the industry, and the world’s governments, honest but at least he can make them look over their shoulder and second guess their actions. At the bottom and top of the world, he serves as a sort of quasi-old-west-sheriff-mercenary-pirate, keeping the outlaws, in this case the law of nations, from wreaking havoc on a dwindling resource and ecological treasure.
29
Apr
09
Activism: My View.
The activist in me has sprouted during my college career. I have always had strong feelings about many activist ventures but never acted on the before college or lack the outlet through which to do so. In college two forms of activism have become particular interests of mine. The realms of activism that are particularly dear to me are political activism and environmental activism.
Through my college career I have been active in both the Cape Fear Surfrider Foundation and the Cape Fear Riverwatch. I chose these two organizations because they were outlets through which I could make an impact on my local environment and the North Carolina coastal ecosystem that is so dear to me. I’ve was born, grew up and went to college on the coast of North Carolina. From Okracoke Island to Corrova Beach I believe that in all my travels that this string of barrier island and sounds, rivers, waterways, swamps and forests that I have seen no prettier sight. Growing up on the coast things such as water conservation, wetlands management and global warming are personal to me. If the global sea level rise that is predicted to happen within the next century happens. Everything I have ever known will be under water.
As far as political activism goes I am very much a Constitutionalist. As a student of history in the last four years this has only made me more so. I have had the chance to read, first hand, what the founding fathers and the legal minds behind the formation of our country thought and it scares me how far we have deviated from where our nation began. 230 years ago we were a Federal Republic with the federal definitely being lowercase. The intent was to divest the majority of powers in the various state in order to reduce the likely that an tyrannous, all powerful, central state would emerge. The federal government simply existed to act in a capacity to provide for a common defense and establish a fluid and viable economy between the constituent parts. What has emerged in the years since the Civil War has been ever increasing power vested in the federal government. This is as scary as it is destructive to the ends of the Constitution. Without an elaborate system of balances and counterbalance the federal government will and is becoming as massive bureaucracy through which the personal liberties of the people will slowly be taken from them.
I have been very politically active in the Libertarian Party locally and even attempted to start of campus chapter by Sophomore year. I will dedicate my life to attempting to counter the destruction of the Republic that has been undertaken in the last 150 years.
In March 2009 I attended the UNCW Presents Leadership Lecture Series with Sherman Alexie. Mr. Alexie is an award winning author and poet and an excellent public speaker. He is a Spokane Indian and much of his writing is shaped by this. Most of his book and poem are focused on the lives of contemporary Native Americans. Mr. Alexie is also an accomplished screenwriter with his book “Smoke Signals” being translated into the successful 1998 film of the same name.
Overall through his writing Mr. Alexie is an activist for a modern idea of a modern Native American. Through his writings he portrays Native Americans living today as average people. His writing is devoid of the stereotypes about Native Americans. He instead shows Native Americans for what they are, average Americans.
This generally focuses on such topics ranging from homophobia to war to morality. Mr. Alexie firmly rejects many of the stereotypes that have become synonymous with the modern view of what a Native American is past, present and future. Mr. Alexie rejects Hollywood’s portrayal of the “noble savage.” In history Native Americans were just as destructive of their environment as whites. The Great Plains ecosystem and bison herds were recked largely by the Plains Indians switch to a horse society, not white incursion.
Mr. Alexie’s most scathing attack is against the idea that Native Americans possessed some mystic abilities that gave them skill in combat. Myths, propagated by Hollywood, that Indians possessed superior eye sight, stealth, etc. were all unfounded. In the end what generally happened was, such as during World War II, Native Americans were put in crack units with the purpose to go into harms way because it was assumed that they possessed the greatest chance of success in combat. However, as Mr. Alexie points out Native Americans had substantially higher mortality rates than did other ethnic groups fighting in American wars.
In the end Mr. Alexie is an activist pushing for Native Americans to be fully accepted into the fold of the American identity. He is for enacting a cultural change that will result in an end to the “cult of the victim” and guilt towards the destruction and “noble” people. He simply want Native Americans, in history and modern society, to be regarded the same as all Americans.
Friedrich von Hayek was an economist central to the Austrian school of economics and the formation of Libertarian economic ideals. In his book The Constitution of Liberty published in 1960 von Hayek offered his ideas on what the relationship between personal liberty and civilization. Von Hayek was inspired write the book after editing John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, another work of supreme importance to Libertarian thought.
Von Hayek’s book, just as his life, is very much centered around activism, the principles surrounding it and the rhetoric necessary to compel others. Through Mssr. Von Hayek’s long life, ninety-three years, he underwent all the stages of an activist movement.
In the first stage of a movement the activist(s) become dissatisfied with the world around them. What bothered Von Hayek the most was the rise of socialism and fascism in Western Europe early in his life. Von Hayek, as an economist and a person, was profoundly disturbed by the manner in which these two political ideologies led to “collective” mentalities. Von Hayek saw such occurances as not only destroying the free market but destroying personal liberty by eliminating choice. In Von Hayek’s Constitution he especially is concerned with the “rule of law” and its debasement in socialist and fascist societies in the name of the collective good.
Out of this unrest comes the next phase of a movement, this desire for change. Von Hayek, as a leading economic mind and professor a the University of Freiburg sought to use his influence as an academic to both provide the public at large “manifesto’s” rejecting the “collectivist” economic and political ideologies and prove his students with the education necessary to stem the tide of the ideologies. Out of this desire came the now famous Austrian School of Economics who Von Hayek, along with Ludwig von Mises, to nurture a new generation of economists to promote the free market and a laissez faire economics.
In the final stage of a movement comes the product, successful or not. All in all Von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty sparks much international acclaim. The book became the “bible” of the Conservative Party, against its authers best wishes, under Margaret Thatcher in England. In 1974 Von Hayek won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work. Now in 2009, Von Hayek’s name lives on through political discourse from the likes of Ron Paul and Tom Woods. The success of Von Hayek is present in the fact the free market capitalism, although damaged of late, remains thoroughly intact as the economic system of choice amoung the world’s most powerful countries.
The now famous poem “The New Colossus” has become synonymous with the Statue of Liberty. It was in fact read at the 1886 opening of the Statue but then quickly forgotten. The poem was not en-grained into the American psyche until 1903 when the poem was engraved on a plaque and placed at the entrance of the State of Liberty. The reasoning for the forgotten poem was its controversial nature at the time of the Statue’s opening in 1886. The poem is as follows…
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”—Emma Lazarus, 1883
The Statue of Liberty in the beginning was not intended as a symbol of immigration. In the now well known story the Statue was a gift from France to the United States in commemoration of one hundred years of democracy. However, the Statue of Liberty had not yet gained its status as a symbol of immigration. It must be understood that until well into the 20th century America’s status of the haven of the “huddled masses” was not part of the national consciousness. In fact throughout much of the nineteenth century the never ending tide of immigration led to increased tensions and hostilities, especially in the epicenter of New York.
I’m sure that Lazarus’s own experiences, herself to daughter of Sephardic Jewish immigrants, influenced her rhetorical writtings. Her father had settled in New York as an exile from Portugal and through the gifts of her new nation had enjoyed the benefits of education in literature that would have been barred in the old world. For Lazarus, her activism was centered around the open acceptance of America as the “Mother of Exiles.”
When Lazarus was offered the podium she wished to use the opportunity to voice her opinions. In the poem Lazarus goes about a “delineation of good.” The “Colossus” is the symbol of the United States and what it represents, or should represent. For Lazarus, America is a land devoid of the ills of Europe, “ancient lands” and “storied pomp.” It is instead the open arms of salvation for those that have been victims of the old world. Her rhetoric unburdens the reader by asserting views about a shared past and future that although not entirely accurate is the ideal.
Jefferson’s 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists is often misunderstood. It is often seen as a letter in which Jefferson is reaffirming his believe in the “wall of separation” between the government and the Church. However, it is instead a letter of activism for his beliefs and will with the eloquence and rhetorical usages that were distrinctly his own.
In the letter Jefferson is definitely a defendant rhetorician. Throughout Jefferson’s political career, in which he was half way through his first term as president, Jefferson was villified by his political rivals for his view on religion and politics. Jefferson, as a man of the Enlightenment, was thoroughly a product of the so called “age of reason.” The Enlightenment held that as reason was the ultimate source of human understanding the human being itself became the inviolable source from which power derived. As such, even topics such as religion that had been thoroughly engrained into the public sphere for centuries in Europe were now personal matters. This was a ground shaking idea that cast aside everything from the absolute, religiously derived, power of the king to the power of the clergy of the common man.
In the letter Jefferson is defending the radical views on the personal nature of the practice of religion. For Jefferson religion was a matter for “Man and his God.” This was important because it bypassed the Pope, clergy and king in the religious structure by requiring “account to none other for his faith or his worship.” The people of the Danbury Baptist church were writing Mr. Jefferson to request his help, as executive of the United States, in a matter in which they felt their religious interests were hindered by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Amendment held that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Mr. Jefferson took the moral high road and reaffirmed his beliefs in the “wall of separation” between religion and state. He held that though the Constitution did not specifically bar him, as chief executive, from interceding such an action would be opposed to the principle of the Amendment.
In rejecting the wishes of the Church he also uses rhetoric that resonates with the Church. In his closing lines he reassure the congregation of his belief that through rigid adherence to the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment “natural right” will prevail. In closing Jefferson offered a religious blessing that both reassures his audiences own religious sentiments and reaffirmed the personal nature of religion with the “blessing of the common father and creator of man.”
The Mecklenburg Resolves were issued by the “Committee of Public Safety”, of then Charlottetown, on May 31, 1775. This date is important to me as a native North Carolinian not only because of the location of this pivotal incident in American history but because the date is commemorated on a state flag. In order to properly understand the Mecklenburg Resolves, and its importance to American history, it is necessary to understand the influences and factors that drove the rhetoric of this document.
This document was a product of eighteenth century liberal thought. The rhetoric and aims of this document, and its authors, reads like a summary of the principles of the age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment holds that reason is the ultimate tool for human progress and understanding. It rejects the idea that power, political or otherwise, can be derived from God or hereditary right. Liberty, freedom, etc. are instead based in the “laws of nature” and are therefore not privileges derived from a government.
In the document the people declare that the king of England and his laws are “null and void” in the colonies. That the only legitimate political entity in the colonies are the “provincial” legislatures and the “Great Continental Congress.” In the end the Mecklenburg Resolves declare that the colonies, not just Mecklenburg itself, are sovereign entities independent of the king and Parliament. This document is therefore very much reflective of an Anti-movement. Although it has its own institutions and ideas it wishes to put in place ultimately it is overwhelmingly a document in which its rhetoric rejects the legitimacy of the king and Parliament as sources of political authority in the colonies.
This social movement is very much in its inception phase. At the time this document was produced as declared in the opening paragraph of the document the American colonies were in “open rebellion.” With the powder keg of revolutionary zeal and unrest Enlightenment ideals that had existed just below the surface of eighteenth century English society surfaced. Even at the court of King George III, himself a follower of science and patron of some of the best minds of the Enlightenment, such discussions of reason and the liberty of “free-born Englishmen” was openly discussed and even thought of as a mark of pride differentiating the Englishmen from the authoritarian society of his French enemy. The events in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York in the years leading up to 1775 only nourished the rhetoricians and initiated the inception of said principles.
This document was a work of activism because it had no real legal authority. It was more a summation of what a good government, with its “powers derived from the people,” might look like. The document provided for the formation of a new constitution, judicial structure and formation of a militia for the common defense. A little over one year later this document surely played a pivotal role in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.
