I don't know much about the rest of his political beliefs (he is purportedly the first person to call himself an anarchist and is also termed a socialist), but man did Pierre-Joseph Proudhon have it right in describing what it really means to be "governed", particularly if to the open-ended extent that totalitarians and collectivists, whether claiming to be left or right, would carry their endless scheming for control over humanity : To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and ...

As I have written here and elsewhere before, social(ist) conservatives are an aberrant sect of what are, in essence, statists who have hijacked the moniker of conservatism. They have done so, I believe, in an attempt to mask their fundamentally-statist authoritarianism in matters of personal or private life behind the nominal and false claim that they are not, in fact, quite in philosophical league with the socially-permissive leftists they so abhor. Irrespective of "social conservative" claims of distinction from their leftist brethren and sistern, their agenda is nonetheless fundamentally the same. Social "conservatives" are merely big government statists with a different agenda for control and social uniformity...but just as frightening an agenda if taken even close to its natural conclusion. So-called "social conservatives" are the other side of the same hollow coin of collectivist control over the individual. And "social conservatives" posit...

This is an interesting development, by which the Democrats' disgusting secretive self-dealing process of health care lawmaking-by-payoff is not being accepted merely as the ugly side of politics-as-usual deal cutting and vote buying. Now actual prosecutors from various states are taking notice of the putrid stench of corruption permeating the Harry Reid health care monstrosity. But of course, these are just partisan Republicans driven purely by political considerations, unlike those exemplars of moral and political virtue intent on ramming this shit sausage straight down the public's throats. Several prosecutors probing health care deal They question the constitutionality of ‘Nebraska compromise’ COLUMBIA, S.C. - The top prosecutors in seven states are probing the constitutionality of a political deal that cut a funding break for Nebraska in order to pass a federal health care reform bill, South Carolina's attorney general said Tuesday. Attorney General Henry McMaster said ...

Dr. Rand Paul looks poised to become the next junior Senator from Kentucky, if polling trends continue as they have. As I have said before, Paul if elected would be the single most libertarian U.S. Senator in the last 50 years, if not more. Paul has rocketed to the top of the polls from just months ago when he was pooh-poohed by establishment-type Republicans , much like the treatment his father Ron Paul received during his bid for the presidency. Rand Paul entered the fray trailing behind establishment Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson. However, Paul has since taken a " commanding lead ". His support is grassroots and based purely on the power of his ideas and the conviction with which he offers them up. Rand Paul's election as a Republican U.S. Senator would be a serious harbinger that the libertarian conservative uprising in the G.O.P. is not only real but quite consequential and arguably the future of the party, no matter the exhortations, ca...

Jonah Goldberg gets it right in this analysis . The notion that big business is "right wing" has always been more sloppy agitprop than serious analysis. It's true that historically, big business is against socialism and communism -- and understandably so. Socialism and communism were once close to synonymous with expropriation of wealth and the nationalization of industry. What businessman or industrialist wouldn't be against that? But many of those same industrialists saw nothing wrong with cutting deals with statist regimes. For example, the Swope Plan, put forward by Gerard Swope, president of General Electric, laid out the infrastructure for much of the early New Deal. Yet the debate is always framed as if the choice is between "government intervention" on the one hand and free-market capitalism on the other. From 30,000 feet, that division is fine with me. My objection is the glib and easy association of big business with the free-market guys (Milton Fr...

Obama is now convincingly a minority president. No, I don't mean racially. I mean Obama now joins George W. Bush not only in the continuation of neocon foreign policies and big government profligacy, but (inevitably) that this is leading him to now consistently poll below 50% approval...and falling. At 46%, President Obama's latest job approval rating is the lowest ever in Q uinnipiac polls, and he has an upside down rating for his handling of health care. The new survey (Dec. 1-6, 2313 RV, MoE +/- 2%), released this morning, finds 44% disapproving of the job Obama's doing. More than half (51%) of independents now disapprove of Obama's job performance, while 37% approve. Similarly : Obama's 47 Percent Approval Lowest of Any President at This Point The public's fast-growing disapproval of Obama's arrogant power-mongering should come as no surprise, except perhaps to the most reality-oblivious and purely-partisan hopechangelings now hunkering down in the bunk...

I hope the president is pleased with himself now that he has earned himself the neocon mantle , praised by those bloodthirsty chicken-hawk war cheerleaders who are content with any bit of a loaf of aggressive middle east adventurism and interventionism. Only the most militarist will remain unsatisfied with Obama's splitting the loaf, in a truly half-assed attempt to politically hedge his decision to continue the waging of remote overseas wars by the United States. No thinking citizen who listened to Obama's speech last night, complete with "19 hijackers", "9/11", "terrorist safe havens", and all manner of stock-in-trade Bush war-justifying catch phrases, could not help but feel Obama may as well have been reading from the Bush/neocon script, word-for-word. As if the Obama national domestic profligacy and power-mongering isn't bad enough, now he has bear-hugged the worst elements of American foreign policy decision-making since Woodrow Wilson. ...