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Sinners of the World, Repent! November 13, 2005

Posted by Resident Egoist in : Uncategorized , comments closed

I know this is going to sound shocking to some of you, but alas, the truth often is. GOD EXISTS, people — and I have proof … finally! You can chat with His Tri-Oneness right here. Let me see you atheists try to deny this one now. Ha!

No Compulsion in Religion? November 11, 2005

Posted by Resident Egoist in : Uncategorized , comments closed

Via Mid-Day.com:

An alarming trend ? that of Muslims kidnapping Pakistani Hindu girls and forcing them to convert to Islam ? in Pakistan?s Sindh province is forcing the worried resident Hindu community to marry off their daughters as soon as they are of marriageable age or to migrate to India, Canada or other nations.

Recently, at least 19 such abduction cases have occurred in Karachi alone, while several others have been reported in the media.

Well, there’s “the religion of peace” for ya.

What do some people think(?) ideas are anyway? Something to be rammed down the throats of others? Are they so gullible to the point of truly believing that one can’t fake allegiance to an idea? No. The human ability to practice evasion is not infinite.

What the above type of action reveals is merely an interesting fact about ideas that can be transmitted to others only through recourse to the initiation of physical force: that said ideas are glaringly false and those who resort to coercion to spread them know it.

Dialectical Calculus November 11, 2005

Posted by Resident Egoist in : Culture, Philosophy , comments closed

Robert Tracinsky has a great article at Capitalism Magazine on the current riots in France and their root cause: the ideology of multiculturalism, i.e., racism. In it he provides an interesting quote by Nazi chief Adolf Hitler, which goes as follows:

“Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles”?”you are nothing, your race is everything.”

Many would be be surprised to learn that they essentially agree with Hitler. Yet all they have to do to see that they do is to replace the word “race” with such words as “society”, or “class”, or “proletariat”, or “ethnic group”. The underlying fact is that in all these cases, the individual is wholly unimportant, while the collective is considered to be everything. Hell, everywhere you turn today you are told to turn away from the illusion of the self, and embrace the undeniable reality of the omni-maximus collective.

But now I come to my question for all the collectivists out there, including the Hitlerites: The collective, whether it be race, or gender, or “proletarians of the world”, or society, or whatnot, is necessarily a collection of individuals. There can be no collective without the individuals that constitute it. To put it another way again: a collective is merely an aggregate finite number of individuals. But now, if the individual is nothing, how can a certain sum of individuals amount to something or anything?! Since when did 0 + 0 + 0 + … start yielding anything other than 0?

So much for the validity of “scientific” socialism.

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Socialism of the German Pattern November 9, 2005

Posted by Resident Egoist in : Politics , comments closed

Socialism of the German [or Nazi] pattern is Ludwig von Mises’ term for

[a]n economic system completely planned and controlled by the government while retaining many of the labels and nominal forms of capitalism. A form of socialism which retains the appearance and terminology of the market economy while in fact private ownership of the means of production, real buying and selling, and real market prices, wages and interest rates no longer exist because all production activities and product allocations are directed and controlled by government orders which all participants are bound to obey unconditionally.

This form of anti-economic system, a variation of socialism, is also known as Fascism. The United States is not yet a full-scale Fascist dictatorship, but it certainly is headed way — the statists disdain for the word “fascism” notwithstanding.

We still “retain the appearance and terminology of the [free] market economy” in this country today. This helps blame all economic ills on capitalism, yet we have no real private ownership of the means of production: ownership means the ability to control and dispose of what one owns. We no longer have market wages, as the State has managed to impose universal minimum wages that everyone, both employer and employee must obey. And certainly we have no market-dependent interest rates — this is fully set and controlled by the Federal Reserve, which is in total control of the country’s banking system.

The only vestige of capitalism that this country retains today is a highly hampered and regulated stock market — where the government can appropriate to itself any percentage of profits that it wishes. A market where such wholly undefinable practices as “price gouging” [read: high prices], “predatory pricing” [read: low prices], and “price fixing”, are forbidden at the risk of hefty fines and jail sentences.

Shamelessly demonstrating the truth of the above, Senators of the Energy and Commerce Committees decided yesterday to summon the executives of oil companies in order for these latter to justify their latest profits, i.e., to tell the congressmen why they shouldn’t have their earnings wrestled from their hands — important to note is that these hearings were called for for by soi-disant Grand Oil Party members:

“[T]here are those who abuse the free enterprise system to advantage themselves and their businesses at the expense of all Americans, they ought to be exposed, and they ought to be ashamed …

“I have asked [the members if the Senate Energy and Commerce Committees] to call as witnesses executives from the major oil companies and representatives of the state attorneys general, who have the initial responsibility of keeping the behavior of local energy providers on the straight and narrow.”

Those were the words of Senate Majority Leader, William Frist. Evidently, Senator Frist has no clear idea what a FREE market is, let alone how it works. In hist conception of a free (?!) market, businessmen are supposed to be kept “on the straight and narrow,” i.e., fully regimented, by the local attorney general and his gang of enforcers. And in this free (?!) market the free exchanges among individuals are not made according to mutual interest and benefit, but rather, lead to the unforgivable exploitation of man by man.

Yep. In Mr. Frist’s free (?!) market, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is completely absent — here, Herr Doktor Karl Marx is the uncontested ruler … with Senator Frist as his self-appointed lieutenant, of course. Yes again: when it comes to the direction toward which this so-called “free” market should head, Senator Frist thinks he — not the entrepreuneurs or the consumers — knows best:

“We need to increase refinement capacity, provide more energy resources, encourage conservation, invest in science and technology, and, most importantly, transition towards energy independence, including the use of more alternative fuels.”

As to the morality that makes this idiocy permissible, it couldn’t have been more explicit than this:

People are concerned about fairness and justice at a time of sacrifice. Your sacrifice appears to be nothing.

Seems like those who label socialism as a system of equal misery for all are not so far off the mark, after all. The above was senator Boxer’s address to the executives during yesterday’s Inquisition — which so far has accomplished nothing except making economically ignorant and reckless masses believe that something — anything — is being done about the high costs of energy.

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Grannies Against Liberty November 8, 2005

Posted by Resident Egoist in : Culture, Politics , comments closed

Via FEE, I just learned of this story from the Washington Times — which so far I can only dub as “interesting.” It is about a group of grandmothers from Arizona who voluntarily patrol the U.S-Mexico border in order to keep out illegal immigrants:

NACO, Ariz. — The “Granny Brigade,” Carmen Mercer and Connie Foust, sits silently in the pitch-black desert night at their Minuteman observation post just a few yards from the dirt road and four-strand barbed-wire fence that separates the United States and Mexico.

With the temperature dropping into the low 40s and the wind whipping across the high desert, they wrap their legs in warm blankets. As sector bosses for more than two dozen Minuteman Civil Defense Corps volunteers on the night shift along what is known as the Naco line, the women, who have a combined eight grandchildren, scan the area with a night-vision scope.

I have heard quite a few arguments in favor of restricted immigration [all of them faulty] but I don’t believe to have had heard the one advanced by one of these grannies — who happens to be herself an immigrant:

Mrs. Mercer who is divorced, met and married a U.S. serviceman stationed in her native Germany in 1979, later coming with him to the United States and becoming a U.S. citizen. She said the U.S. government’s inability to keep massive numbers of illegal aliens out of the country is unfair to those legal immigrants who spend years trying to become U.S. citizens.

“I love America and all that it stands for,” she said. “For those of us who stood in line and waited to become a part of this great country, it is unfair that others can ignore the process and the government doesn’t seem to care.”

What an incredible sense of justice, she has!! That she had to go through a maze of bureaucratic regulation in order to get naturalized does not lead her to the conclusion that such a bureaucracy should be abolished, but rather, that it should expanded and rendered more effective so that others have to suffer through her ordeal — i.e., that injustice [the violation of the freedom of association] should be perpetrated in the name of “fairness”!!

So much for the monstrous slogan: “Justice as Fairness“. And what on earth does she think “America … stands for”? Bigotry?

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