The Debate Is Only About Control--Not Guns

Gun control isn't about guns, it's about control. The intention of the Second Amendment is to prevent control. Last Wednesday's post about gun rights being inalienable whether or not they are written, was about what we are born with rather than what we are given. What we are given is called 'positive rights'. What we are born with are called natural rights. What laws are supposed to prevent being taken from us are called 'negative rights', and natural rights are 'negative rights'.

President Obama and others said we must "protect the children", sometimes adding "at all costs" or "at whatever cost". But others in the past have said that we cannot protect one person's rights at the expense of another.

On Saturday at one of the many pro gun-right rallies held across the nation, former Marine Damon Locke said to applause at a Florida rally he had helped organize, "We are law-abiding citizens, business owners, military, and we are not going to be responsible for other people's criminal actions."

What lesson does it send to children and to young adults to learn their political leaders have a desire to protect them by diminishing the right of law-abiding citizens? What lesson does it send to demonstrate that when a problem arises, the only means their leaders can think of is to destroy the Constitution?

What lesson, when they are old enough to stop to think that the utilitarian and pragmatic ideas coming out of Washington have gone from the fallacy of the greatest good for the greatest number, to using children as pawns in the fight to control the weapons without which we could not protect our First Amendment?

The right to bear arms does not say which kind of arms. Certainly we do not want live cannons and mortars in our neighbors' back yards, so we ban those things. That isn't about control, it is about immediate safety; in other words, if a cannon shot a round from suburbs of Detroit, where would the round hit, and does anyone have a right to fire a cannon anywhere except on a training field? What if it was not properly maintained and it blew up? We wouldn't let people have tiny nuclear reactors, if they existed, in their homes for their electrical needs, because when those devices have accidents, they are often irreparable.

"The Second Amendment was not written to protect your right to shoot deer. It was written to protect your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government," said Judge Andrew Napolitano. 

© Curtis Edward Clark 2012

Proof Nobody 'Gets It' About Economy

Mitt Romney, replying to a question by Gayle King on CBS This Morning said, "Well, of course, we have to have regulation on Wall Street and on every street to make sure that our economy works well..."

Do we, Mr. Romney? We cannot call our system 'free enterprise' when that phrase, meaning an economy run by the forces of the market place, is instead run by political ideology. It doesn't matter if we mean your ideology or Obama's or Marx's. If an economy isn't free of politics, then you can't use the phrase.

On the self-declared Marxist website Political Affairs, author John Case discussing science-based economics wrote, "You cannot ever make economics non-political." However, he then goes on to explain how libertarian, Austrian-school economics is not political. He even states unequivocally that "The 'Austrian School' is the opposite of a data or evidence driven framework." Case cites Paul Samuelson's Keynesian economics as "a more scientific framework for economics." Case doesn't like libertarian economics.

Austrian economics is exactly the opposite of government's Keynesian-driven 'evidence', dealing exclusively instead with business evidence, the kind business people deal with on a sometimes hour-by-hour basis. Business professionals make decisions based on whatever they need to know when they need to know it, such as the rising prices of their materials or the falling price of their goods, or of their competitor's goods; the cost of transportation; the cost of labor, etc. These are not the things about which a government should worry; in fact, a government which protects men's rights ought to stay completely away from the things business professionals need to worry about.

A free nation needs to worry about protecting society from men who set out to bilk victims and receive ill-gotten gains, not about men working within legitimate market forces. Artificially affecting market forces makes the economy less able--in some cases impossible--to operate. When a government manipulates market forces using the evidence it chooses to see, it has no objective basis on which to set those manipulations. What objective standards could it possibly use since it is not operating a business?

As one example, should government help the trucking industry maintain status quo rates to prevent drivers from being laid off, or leave it alone so that producers can ship more cheaply, thereby creating more jobs or paying workers more (or both)? How can competition properly lower production and consumer prices, when government helps trucking companies maintain their current rates instead of letting market forces determine those?

But not even the conservatives like Romney seem to get this fact. Paul Ryan is nothing more than a conservative who attracts Tea Party labeling by being less progressive. Romney's desire to 'regulate every street' makes him sound very threatening. Does he mean such things as retaining the corn ethanol requirements, part of the Renewable Fuels Standard, that caused farmers to sell or slaughter livestock this summer because corn became so expensive when the drought prevented corn and wheat from growing? Using corn for ethenol is predicted to cause the price of our food to rise by as much as 14% in 2013.

(Read how farmers switched from growing white corn to yellow corn, "making the base of most Mexican foods unaffordable." What happens in one place, affects other places. Should things be affected by honest markets, or political ideologies?)

Economist Richard M. Salsman wrote in The Objective Standard, "There is a lagged influence between academic economics and public policy, but increasingly since the 1970s academic economists have recognized that free markets work, that 'market failure' reflects poorly defined and ill-protected property rights, and that boom-bust cycles and sapped prosperity are consequences of bad public policies."

He uses as examples of 'academic economists' the Nobel Prize winners F. A. Hayek of the 'Austrian-school' of economics (1974), the idea of 'monetarism' from Milton Friedman (1976), 'rational expectations' from Robert Lucas (1995) and Thomas Sargent (2011), the 'public choice' of James Buchanan (1986), and of supply-side economics by Robert Mundell (1999).

These are the economics that John Case and other Marxists, and progressives like President Obama and Hillary Clinton, abhor. Let's see whether Romney and Ryan come anywhere near such "academic" standards as those which advocate a really free economy.

'Like' Curtisedwardclark.com on Facebook
© Curtis Edward Clark 2012