Abu Hatem أبو حاتم

Via RonPaulForPresident2008

Share This

(Cross-posted at the Western Standard)

Kalim Kassam of the Western Standard makes an excellent point on how popular democracy often subverts the cause of individual liberty and individual rights. It was Karl Marx himself who wrote that “democracy is the road to socialism.” Moreover, Lord Acton reminds us that the doctrine of unlimited popular rule is not an idea of classical liberalism but of pure democracy theory with its sources in Rousseau.

While Hoppe argues that individual human rights are better preserved through monarchy, there are two other answers to the very challenging inquiry worth exploring; that of Catholic political theorist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn who claims that there is a fundamental tension in the Anglo-American concept of “liberal democracy” and that true liberalism and support fo individual rights can be beser preserved by aristocracy, specifically aristocratic monarchy.  Von Kuehnelt-Leddihin’s work Liberty or Equality? is a classic warning of the dangers of majority tyranny.

Then of course, there is the advice of the founders of the American constitutional polity, who advocated a weak federal government, federalism, and republican government to be the solution to this problem.

For a contemporary analysis of popular democratic chokeholds do to liberal democratic countries, see conservative public policy scholar Morris Fiorina’s great work Congress: The Keystone of the Washington Establishment wherein he argues that popular demand and Congressional self interest lead to an Iron Triangle of bureaucratic statism based in a big government Washington Establishment.

Share This

From the Western Standard via The Mises Institute - perhaps the best economist of modern times, Nobel Laureate and political philosopher Friedrich von Hayek, a self-described “Burkean Whig” traditionalist classical liberal and champion of free markets, on Meet the Press, taking questions from such reporters as George Will, then of the National Review:

mises.org/multimedia/mp3/interviews/Hayek_MeetThePress_06-22-1975.mp3

Jeffery Tucker from the Mises Institute adds:

In light of the present crises, and the appalling ignorance of the present generation of policy makers of any historical understanding, it is so helpful to remember that we’ve been down this road before, and done all the wrong things before. Forget learning from history. The present generation does even know enough history to learn anything from it. So this interview really makes it clear what has come before.

If you haven’t read von Hayek, then some of his works you should definetly take a look at:

1. The Road to Serfdom
2. Law, Legislation, and Liberty
3. Prices and Production
4. Individualism and the Economic Order
5. The Constitution of Liberty
6. The Denationalisation of Money

Also, for the relationship between Hayek and Burke’s thought on the importance of tradition and the role of tradition in relationship to politics, freedom, and the market - please see this wonderful journal article: Hayek on Tradition.

Share This

Happy Thanksgiving, and all thanks and praises be to the Lord God, and may God continue to reign blessings upon us through experiencing the beauty of existence, and may he send his peace and blessings upon his messengers and all of the righteous.

As a Muslim blog with an overwhelmingly Christian audience - or so it seems - I decided to leave a peice of Thanksgiving wisdom from the Messiah Christ Jesus himself, may God’s peace be upon him, a source of scriptural wisdom we can all find dear.  In fact, three of the following sayings of Jesus, although being from Muslim sources such as Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s Kitab al-Zuhd, have similiar narrations - almost verbatim - from the Gospels, and are hence revelatory precepts we can agree upon.  For more of these sayings please see Dr. Tarir Khalidi, a wonderful Arabic and Islamic studies professor at the American University of Beirut, and his essential work The Muslim Jesus.

1. Jesus used to say, “Charity does not mean doing good to him who does good to you, for this is to return good for good.  Charity means that you should do good to him who does you harm.” (Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Zuhd no. 317 and no. 469, Ibn ‘Askir no. 166)
2. A man came to Jesus and said, “Teacher of goodness, teach me something that you know and I do not, that benefits me and does you no harm.”  Jesus asked, “What would that be?”  The man said, “How can a servant be truly pious before God?”  Jesus replied, “The matter is easy.  You must truly love God in your heart and work in His service, exerting all your effort and strength, and be merciful towards the people of your race as you show mercy to yourself.”  He said, “Teacher of goodness, who are the people of my race?  Jesus replied, “All the children of Adam.  And that which you do not wish done to you, do not do to others.  In this way you will be truly pious before God.” (Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Zuhd no. 332)
3. Jesus said to his disciples, “The sign that you shall use to recognize each other as my followers is your affection for one another.”  And Jesus said to his discipline Yashu’, “As for the Lord, you must love Him with all your heart.  Then you must love your neighbor as yourself.”  Jesus was asked, “Show us, Spirit of God, what difference there is between these two loves, so that we may prepare ourselves for them with clarity of vision.”  Jesus replied, “You love a friend for your own sake and you love your soul for the sake of your Lord.  If you take good care of your friend, you are doing so for your own sake, but if you give your soul away, you do so for the sake of the Lord.” (Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, Risala fi al-Sadaqa wa al-Sadiq)
4. Jesus said, “The merciful in this world is the one who will be shown mercy in the next world.” (Abu al-Hasan al-’Amiri, al-Sa’ada wa al-Is’ad)

Interestingly enough also, sayings 1 and 4 are almost verbatim equivalents to scriptural sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and give him peace.

Share This

Rep. Ron Paul on antiwar radio discussing American empire, the erosion of civil liberties in war, why war is anti-conservative and anti-market, and how war is the biggest of all Big Government programs.

dissentradio.com/radio/08_11_21_paul.mp3

Share This

For those who thought Obama’s foreign policy would be marked by restraint, noninterventionism, and the heeding of international law and shunning of aggression - think again.  Susan Rice - Obama’s UN ambassador - sure seems to care for international law and nonaggression!  To quote Dr. Rice, courtesy The Volokh Conspiracy:

The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African
political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other
military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan’s
oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy — by force, if
necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing.

If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it.
Impossible? No, the United States acted without U.N. blessing in 1999
in Kosovo to confront a lesser humanitarian crisis (perhaps 10,000
killed) and a more formidable adversary….

Others will insist that, without the consent of the United
Nations or a relevant regional body, we would be breaking international
law. Perhaps, but the Security Council recently codified a new
international norm prescribing “the responsibility to protect.” It
commits U.N. members to decisive action, including enforcement, when
peaceful measures fail to halt genocide or crimes against humanity.

Eric Posner of the Volokh blog adds:

Not “perhaps.” And not with NATO involvement or African political support. Sound familiar? Let the next adventure begin.

So much for change we can believe in…

Share This

From RealClearMarkets via ClubForGrowth:

Share This

Daniel Larson, a paleoconservative blogger with The American Conservative and a Ph.D. candidate in Byzantine history, writes on his blog Eunomia that Obama won’t be dumb enough to try to pass the pro-abortion anti-federalist FOCA, as firstly it probably doesn’t even have enough votes in the Senate (remember Partial Birth Abortion passed with a 64-34 margin) and it will re-ignite a cultural war and get the GOP ready for a 2010 comeback.  Larson writes:

signing such a bill would feed into every hostile portrayal of him as a pro-abortion extremist (a portrayal, by the way, that is not an exaggeration of his record), and it would be exactly the sort of distraction from larger priorities that Emanuel has hinted the new administration will avoid… Bringing up such legislation for a vote would give Republican leaders an easy target and an occasion to pull away Blue Dog Democrats from the majority to deliver an early defeat to the other party. You would start seeing a media narrative of liberal overreach and establishment punditry would begin kvetching, “Where did the pragmatic, reasonable Obama agenda we saw during the transition go?”

I agree.  To impose such radically pro-abortion legislation, especially the part about doctors being prohibited from refusing abortions, the democratic party will self-destruct itself.  Planned Parenthood will never be able to get this law passed because it will ruin Obama and the democrats.  Joe Biden himself, Obama’s VP, voted for the Partial Birth Abortion bill, as did the new Secretary of Health and Human Services - Tom Daschle, and current Senate majority leader Harry Reid.  It will never happen.

Share This

Neoconservative foreign policy scholar Max Boot discusses why he is so happy to see Barack Obama’s cabinet, and how he believes that in terms of foreign policy it could have easily come from a president McCain.  Just another proof that Obama is just another side of the same coin:

As someone who was skeptical of Obama’s moderate posturing during the campaign, I have to admit that I am gobsmacked by these appointments , most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain. (Jim Jones is an old friend of McCain’s, and McCain almost certainly would have asked Gates to stay on as well.) This all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators, and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign. His appointments suggest that, if anything, his administration will have a Reapolitiker, rather than a liberal, bent, although Clinton and Steinberg at State should be powerful voices for “neo-liberalism” which is not so different in many respects from “neo-conservativism”. Both, for instance, support humanitarian interventions in places like Darfur and Bosnia.

Yep.  Thats why I wasn’t stupid enough to go with either Obama or McCain.  Ron Paul and Ralph Nader ‘12.

Share This

(Crossposted at the Western Standard)

As Russia attempts to soft balance against the United States (as realist scholar and Ron Paul foreign policy adviser Robert Pape calls it) by palling up with Chavez, and Cuba in response to America wanting a missile shield in Poland and Georgia and Ukraine in NATO, it might help us all out to read this column by Pat Buchanan yesterday calling for a reassessment of national interests.  Buchanan vividly writes in “Meeting Medvedev Half-Way”:

Opportunity also presents itself with the official report of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on the August war. According to The New York Times, the OSCE found, consistent with Moscow’s claims, that Georgia “attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.”

Russia’s response — running the Georgian Army out of South Ossetia, occupying Abkhazia and recognizing both as independent nations — may seem disproportionate and excessive. But, contrary to John (”We are all Georgians now!”) McCain, Moscow has a compelling case that Georgia’s Mikhail Saakashvili started the fire…

Medvedev is now on a four-nation Latin tour with stops in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. But this seems more like diplomatic tit-for-tat for high-profile U.S. visits to Tbilisi and other ex-Soviet republics than laying the groundwork for some anti-American alliance.

For, just as for Washington the relationship with Moscow is far more crucial than any tie to Tbilisi, so Moscow’s tie to Washington is surely far more crucial to Russia than any tie to Caracas or Havana.

America has no purpose poking the Russian bear - idealistic or realistic.  From a moral point of view, Georgia committed immense war crimes - as documented by Amnesty International - in the war against Russia this summer.  Georgia is also not exactly an American style liberal democracy, just last month Shaakasvili fired on protesters, and the two seceeding republics did not want any part of Georgian rule anyway.  From a power politics point of view, Russia can’t exactly destroy the United States nor will it probably go to war with us, but it does have enough chips on the world stage to sufficiently cause us major problems.  Now is not the time to restart a Cold War, we need all of the friends we can get, and America’s national interests lie in having a friendly relationship with Russia.

As a final point, how do we truly expect Russia to respond?  If China had invaded Mexico, it would be an American national security threat.  This would cause immense pain to the United States who would then try to use its bargaining chips to convince China not to come in to its sphere of influence.  This is the same exact thing.  While American ambitions to stand with “democracy” and against “aggression” have meritable, let us remember that the world is not clear-cut and black and white as we think.  All sides have guilty, bloody hands, and we don’t have a dog in this fight.  Utopian social engineering by government doesn’t work - especially in foreign policy.  We can never make the world perfect, and sometimes attempts to make the world perfect end up making it worse and less peaceful.  That’s the dose of conservative Niebuhrian realism we need.

Share This