Blogger Profile: Liberty Belle

I was listening to NPR while driving to campus early this morning and, while many of the hosts featured on their station come with more of a left-liberal lean, their story highlighted a young, conservative girl who has become a booming voice for the tea party movement. Keli Carender, known as the famous blogger, Liberty Belle, was a tea party patriot even before this recent revival of the tea party movement. Her claim to fame came after she held up a $20 bill and challenged her Democratic Congressman at a health care town hall protest to come and take it from her. With these words, she’s inspired thousands of others:

The other side [of the constituency] is demanding that your vote culminate in legislation that actively seeks to plunder from some in order to satisfy arbitrary needs as determined by you and other bureuacrtas. So here is my question: if you are so keen to forcibly take from one person to give to another who you deem as needier than me, if you believe that it is absolutely moral to take my money and give it to someone else based on their supposed needs, then you come and take this twenty dollars from me and use it as a downpayment on this health care plan. (video provided below)

Reading her blog and having watched her videos on YouTube, I am blown away by the immense sincerity and thoughtfulness of this girl. Not only can she speak clearly and effectively, but she can relate the philosophical foundations of our republic to the current policy debates making headlines and directly affecting the lives of millions of Americans. Like the tea party movement, there are no politics of party preferences involved here, rather just debating the heart of the matter. Therefore, while politics makes an art out of evading the principle in question, little miss Liberty Belle eloquently throws it in their face and demands it be addressed.

I wrote an earlier post about how difficult it was trying to find ways to convince my younger sister that conservative can be cool; communicating monumental ideas of liberty, property, and economics in a way that she can understand and appreciate is no easy feat! It’s people like Keli Carender who make movements like this so much more than just a trend. What’s been holding our country together has been doing so since our independence: freedom isn’t a fad. To a rebellious 11-year-old like my sister, freedom has a profound meaning all on its own. The dissent Keli Carender is voicing and encouraging others to participate in is just the type of inspiration I want my sister to have.

Here is a quote from the NPR story I really liked. Carender speaking about the decentralized structure of the tea party movement:

If you have a machine, you know exactly how to attack it, exactly how to shut it down,” she says. “If you have 3 million machines coming at you, you don’t know where to turn.

I’m always blown away by the beauty of the coordination of the masses of anonymous millions.

- Elizabeth

Kagame Among World’s 50 Most Influential People

The Financial Times named Rwandan President Paul Kagame as one of the world’s 50 most influential people. He’s credited for successfully lifting his country “from the ravages of the 1994 genocide in which nearly a million people were massacred.” After the genocide, thousands accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity were crammed into prisons, completely backlogging prosecution. Much of the current success in Rwanda comes from social innovations created to address the incapacitated justice system. The Financial Times thus names Kigali “Africa’s fastest growing ’social innovation’ capital.”

The Gacaca court system is one innovation adapted from traditional communal law that now helps to promote the healing and progress of Rwanda by serving as a transitional justice system. The Gacaca court is a more expeditious way to serve justice to a country badly in need of healing, and has already heard over 1.5 million cases. The Imihigo is a governance innovation “that appraises officials based on their performance contracts” and has “wiped out corruption”. Lastly, “Umuganda is a social innovation that encourages nationwide communal based cleaning, is responsible for Kigali’s well manicured lawns.” Below is a picture of a defendant in the Gacaca court.

Kagame hopes to inspire other African countries to produce “a competitive, productive African continent.” Last year, Kagame wrote in the Financial Times about how Africa would have to find its own way to prosperity. He pushes for entrepreneurship and competition as opposed to the tired and tried methods of aid deployment, using development prescriptions from Dambisa Moyo’s book, Dead Aid, which I wrote about here.

It’s amazing what the people have accomplished there and it’s so great to hear positive news being published about Africa. This is a great achievement for Kagame, and I hope he successfully follows through with his vision for Rwanda.

- Elizabeth

Children of Gaza donate to Haiti

Following the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti last week… in which hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives, the expected donations of humanitarian aid and emergency relief supplies have poured in from all corners of the globe.

However, one of the most touching outpourings of sympathy and aid has come from the most unexpected source. Gaza. In a region so desperately troubled itself, the people of Gaza have gathered assistance such as blankets, food, milk and what little money they have to send to the victims of the Haiti earthquake disaster. Seeing children in Gaza, who already have so little, join together to help people who they have never even seen, in a country they have probably never even heard of is moving indeed. – MEMO Middle East Monitor

It might be one of the world’s poorest areas, besieged by its neighbor Israel, but Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have been donating what little they have to help those struck by the earthquake in Haiti – small luxuries that Gazans know only too well can brighten spirits in the face of devastation.

There are ruins in the Gaza Strip reminiscent of the scenes in Haiti. These were not caused by a natural disaster, but by bombs and shells in Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza, a three-week military conflict between Israel and Hamas that took place in the Gaza strip and southern Israel during the winter of 2008–2009.

The reason for the destruction might be different, but Palestinians say they understand Haiti’s pain

Me in the streets of the city of Ramallah (Palestine), with two brave boys, 2008.

-Rizqi

The Character of Battle: The Industrial Revolution and Warfare

Comments on Napoleon’s military strategy and leadership

(Bonaparte Crowns Himself Emperor, 1804)

The French Revolution expanded the scope of  innovations (politically, militarily, socially). With this, also came a new importance for the army in French life. The revolution consisted not in sudden innovation but in the more general and forceful employment of institutions and methods that had existed for decades in the Old Regime. Through this shift in the technological climate of the Industrial Revolution, the character of battle shifted as well.

The known infantry tactics since the Seventy Year’s War were the “mixed” system of skirmishers, march and attack columns, and linear formations. Napoleon Bonaparte masterfully capitalizes on these existing trends through focusing on institutional and tactical modernization (i.e. mass conscription). He faced the difficulties for quickly expanding the royal army (for political ends), and transforming the populace into a force that was both efficient and loyal to the new government. He managed to sync the current state of affairs in politics with that of which catered to the human psyche – of the soldier, commander, and families – hence coupling technological development with a motivating ideological force

Napoleon recognized the military potential of the changes taking place, and brought them together into a system of destructive power that recognized the full potential of the progressive developments in war, and industry. In economic lingo, arbitrage at its best. Napoleon’s military genius that marked him the “Emperor of the Revolution” by Clausewitz (Military theorist  who wrote On War) stemmed from his unique fusion of social, political, and military elements brought about by the overthrow of the Old Regime in France.

“To know… how to draw supplies of all kinds from the country you occupy, makes up a large part of the art of war.” – N. Bonaparte

This system of ‘living off the country’ was facilitated by the institutionalization of military development: the breaking up of the formerly unitary army into permanent divisions and corps, combining infantry, cavalry, artillery, and support services.  The separation of the army into largely self-sufficient commands meant the fragmentation of effort through the division of labor. With each individual assigned a specific task, the forces were acclimated to specializing in their own craft or responsibility, hence profiting from the actualization of war time comparative advantage. He understood that his capital resources included both economic and human. The unity of political and military authority was at the forefront of his command-control system. However, this system also led to it’s own downfall – As the very nature of a centrally organized and top-down system of governance often leads to increased transactions costs and the retardation of flows of information, thus hindering educated decision-making.

Napoleon preferred attack, valued the initiative, and had a keen understanding of the human condition of the players in war. He believed in always having a clear political purpose and fought with tactics of severe defeat (aka “the decisive point”) as a gateway to further losses, withdrawals, and capitulations – increasing the levels of uncertainty for the opponent.  The Napoleonic strategies were the products of their own times, Napoleon certainly payed close attention to history, and attempted with varying degrees of success to adapt to the economic , social, technological, and political conditions of the day (1803-1815). To say the least, Napoleon laid the foundations for modern warfare and military theory of the 19th century.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The economist in me understands that all of this comes at a price, the unintended consequences of war on an economy are tragically devastating. (Thomas Sowell’s book Applied Economics, and my econ professors at GMU continually motivate me to think beyond stage one). Therefore as a follow up post, I will write about this very fact…

The effects of war on an economy; the Napoleonic Wars

(…hey, incentives matter right? )

- Rizqi

Individualism: True and False

I know The Road to Serfdom is Hayek’s most well-known book, and maybe his most important, but his collection of essays in Individualism and Economic Order is what really captures me. Peter Boettke gave me a copy when I first became an eager student of economics and it was from reading this book that I could begin to integrate everything I had been learning in my economics classes and texts. Not that I didn’t understand any of the ideas or principles beforehand, but Hayek made them all came together to create a foundation for a philosophy of free market ideology that I could understand and build off of. Suddenly the meaning of economics as a science, the benefits of competition, the beauty of the price system, why there was a socialist calculation debate, and the grave importance of individualism and freedom became so clear and their relations to each other identifiable and logical. Here’s an expert where I italicized my favorite quote:

The fundamental attitude of true individualism is one of humility toward the processes by which mankind has a chieved things which have not been designed or understood by any individual and are indeed greater than individual minds. The great question at the moment is whether man’s mind will be allowed to continue to grow as part of this process or whether human reason is to place itself in chains of its own making.

What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us, “be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.”

-Individualism: True and False

Me in front of Peter Leeson’s presentation on Anarchy during the FEE Austrian Summer Seminar 2008

- Elizabeth

The iPad: Apple’s new e-book

Apple just introduced it’s version of the e-book. Costing $500 and weighing 1.5 pounds, it’s supposed to meet the reading, writing, and web surfing needs of the average Joe that the Kindle and Nook haven’t met. It’s not just like a large iTouch, nor is like a small Macbook. This was created for the serious reader and is meant to be used more than just a cool, expensive toy. Here’s a good overall review of what’s new and exciting about the iPad:

Two elements of Apple’s iPad announcement made clear the company’s ambitions to have the device function as more than a plaything. One was its reworking of three Office-like Macintosh applications — Numbers (for spreadsheet), Pages (for word-processing) and Keynote (for presentations) — for the iPad. The other was the iPad’s ability to connect to Apple’s wireless keyboard, or to purchase a docking station with its own keyboard. Taken together, these mean the iPad will be more than capable when it comes to preparing documents, designing PowerPoint-like presentations and crunching numbers.

The author also notes that the iPad offers a special opportunity for struggling media companies suffering from the digital switch to revive their business. If these companies can keep up with the reading and computing demands of consumers, something at which they have thus far proven unsuccessful, consumers will start reading papers again and actually pay for the e-content. For Allan Hoffman, what sets Apple’s iPad apart is it’s functionality.

But it’s the “touch” that really sets the iPad apart. A computer, even a lightweight notebook computer, always feels somewhat cumbersome. But a touch-screen interface feels natural, like it’s an extension of you; it’s more akin to holding a book, or a pen and notepad, than operating a computer. And that’s a meaningful, even revolutionary, change.

Here’s Kottke’s questions, concerns, and interests in the iPad and some technical stats from the Apple site:

You can browse the web with Safari, check e-mail, listen to music, edit photos, buy music, movies, and TV shows through the iTunes store, you can download iPhone apps like maps, notes, and youtube, and a new iBookstore has been launched. The iPad prices range from $499 for a 16 Gigabyte version to $829 for the top 3G wireless-enabled model.

Caveat: the iPad comes with a limited data plan from AT&T for $29.99 a month, can’t play widely used Adobe Flash animations, there’s no video camera, no non-internet phone function, no removable battery or storage.

And it looks beautiful. Nothing compares to its sleek, slim exterior. While I’ve been so hesitant in picking an e-book as other brands always had features missing that I value, the iPad has it all and would be my top choice- only I could never afford it after buying my Macbook.

- Elizabeth

Bomama’s Report Card

Not only is he a great professor, he’s also a terrific blogger. In his post, A Reversal of Fortune, Charles Rowley assesses Obama’s first year in the presidency. He comments that after Obama was thrust into office with high expectations, and fortunately, Democrat majorities in both houses, he pursued,

during the first year of a first-term, a policy agenda designed to impact every aspect of the United States economy.

And that he did. Here’s part of Rowley’s assessment of Obama’s goals and the current state of the union:

The goals were indeed all-encompassing:  a restructuring of one-sixth of the entire economy in health care reform, an empowerment of the unions, in ‘card check’ legislation, the defeat of global warming, in ‘cap and trade’ legislation, the revamping of  income distribution through the imposition of increased taxes on the well-to-do, the partial nationalization of the financial sector and the automobile industry, a shift away from free trade towards  trade protection, and the reversal of economic deregulation policies promoted by his four immediate predecessors in the White House.  Oh yes, and by the way, the administration would remove in 2009 the financial panic, and associated  economic contraction,  that was throttling jobs and wealth throughout the nation, decimating home ownership and wiping out stock market wealth.

The outcome inevitably fell far short of the goal, as the United  States Congress lost traction with the median voter in its frenzied efforts to meet impossible targets, and as an idealistic President expended all his personal political capital, and more, in promoting, in a hands-off manner, an agenda that, if successful, would change the nature of the US economy forever, via a shift from laissez-faire to state capitalism. Few individuals can relish the price that President Obama will pay tonight as he makes a State of the Union Address that will be viewed world-wide as a recognition of the failure of his economic policies and that will outline a new, and yet I fear, an equally over-ambitious course for the second year of his young presidency.

- Elizabeth

DEFEATED PROSE CONNING ITS WAY INTO ROMPANEOUS ORDER

A Poem

Roses are red, violence is too
Who’s to tell me, All violets are blue?

Violets in shade are short of true blue
And roses are read by perceptions of hue

So how do you account for parallax visions?
And differences in opinion on governing propositions?

True reason comes from doubt and observation
Descartes and Bacon shared insights, null of prophetic revelation

But the Holy Roman Church and State, stated all “truths”
That resulted in the land of conclusions, as in the Phantom Tollbooth

Where are the wild things? AoooooHHH!

Philosopher kings and tyrannosaurus
You fool no one, your assumptions erroneous

Your coercion and power, empowers the weak
For weeks on out your message is bleak

Welfare and high wages for the people!
Social security and public education will be a staple!

Dead weight loss and zero sum games
Harburger’s triangles, it’s more of the same

I thought there was no such thing as a “free lunch”
But for cronies and bureaucrats everyday it’s time to munch

Scare tactics and propaganda is your mode of operation
Little effect has it on a nation built on free exchange calculation

When property and economic rights are devolved to the people
They possess a strong base of opposition, thus senses heedful

On the road to tyranny no society lays down
and willingly submits to triumph and breakdown

Truth speaks for itself, there’s no substitute to reason
The tutelage of central planning creates pathways to treason

Socialism leads to de-development and destitution
A daily menu of bread, potatoes, and pollution…

of the mind, body, and character of the soul
Let no one man dictate and posses absolute control

Dictators and bandits, go ahead, battle with me
For I’m on the side of Hayek, Mises, and Pete Boettke

The role of ideas will humiliate your gun
Not long, till you will be exposed as public enemy number one

Prices left unhampered give me the information I need
To generate the incentives and coordination you cannot foresee

So ask not what you can do for your country,
But as Milton said, ask what you can do for yourself
If roses are red and violets are blue
I need no one but me, to reason that this is true.

__________________________________________________

Untitled sketch. no. 16

It has no due date, no deadline. Just a meaning on its own.

I continually ask myself what liberty and freedom of expression mean to me. And when words often fail to fully represent my personal thoughts – something finds its way to do so.

On a day of defeat. random mental processes ensued. and amalgamated itself into broke-beat English. accompanied by slug-like ink stains on paper napkins and jean pockets. The closer you look, the more you will see. Only one might ask, Where is the coordination? Where is the romping?… You tell me.

“Tis excellent to be spontaneous, though better to be brilliant.” -Jonze

Untitled sketch no.16

- Rizqi

Bomama and Growing up as an American

I sneered at Obama when his face popped up on CNN as Mia and I were watching TV this weekend. “I thought you liked Obama…,” she said, with a puzzling face. Her mom was on the Hillary sidelines throughout the election and our dad was the perfect uninvolved political cynic. While Mia is a very inquisitive girl, keen to recognize dishonesty, and always ready to state what she thinks is correct, she has not yet grasped the realm of politics. While she donned a Hillary shirt for a week, she has not yet decided which is the better side of politics. My cool points may be waning because I don’t wear colorful high-top Nike’s, prefer bookstores to booze, and use words like “puzzling,” but she still respects my guidance in those areas where she believes I know more than her. That means, for right now, I still have an influence in her prospective political inclinations.

Mia’s in middle school now where her social life and being cool are the only things worth thinking about. There’s definitely a cool factor about being a democrat and supporting Obama that conservatives and libertarians are lacking. It’s a kind of new fad where it’s cool to be politically involved where, before, politics was the last thing young folks wanted to try and comprehend (not saying that they do now). A big part of the tsunami of support for Hillary and Obama, the green, eco-friendly movement, and universal health care comes from young people. The social component of being a democrat means you get to be accepted among other young democrats sporting Obama gear where having a(n agreeable) political opinion gets you major cool points. It signals you have an intellectual side and you care about what’s going on in America. Now, it’s definitely not cool to be conservative. It’s not a marketable trait to peers partly because it’s connoted with Bush and his unpopular War on Terror and democrat passions are appealing where calm reasoned argument by libertarians is a bore and can come off as pretentious or pedantic. I was once a wily social democrat, but that was because I didn’t understand the concepts of Rights, of Liberty, nor the work of our Founding Fathers. And frankly, I didn’t want to have to study to be able to have an opinion on something so prevalent in everyday life.

But that’s what it took. I didn’t grow up with parents who guided my political position; my little Korean mamasan had other priorities for my brother and I, and my dad, like I said, is a cynic who believes all politicians are liars and scumbags. I’ve only recently come to understand what men in liberty can achieve and only recently can appreciate the brilliant wisdom of our Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and the beauty of the Constitution. It took lots of reading other opinions, sitting in many lectures, getting into discussions with more knowledgeable people, and it took a lot of confusion and patience. This, I don’t think many young democrats have engaged in.

So when Mia asks me what do I think about Obama? or do I think universal health care is a good thing? I want her to have an early advantage and understanding that I didn’t have. Yet, at the same time, I want her to really understand how unlimited our possibilities are under freedom, what private property means in society, why a laissez-faire economy makes us our best, and how precious is our liberty. I don’t want her to simply know where I stand and make a judgment from there- I want her to know why. I just don’t know if she’d be willing to listen. I’m slowly learning the art of teaching monumental fundamental principles to an 11-year-old. Her teachers already have her talking to me about how bad driving a Hummer is for the environment and that poor polar bears in the arctic are dying from global warming, so I have a big battle ahead of me. But the influence I have as an older sister better trump that of an elementary school teacher eager to spread her political seed- I just have to make it interesting and relevant to her life and image, now, as a popular, soon-to-be-teenie-bopper, middle-schooler.

- Elizabeth

collusion and crunching numbers

Japanese publishers plan to create a Japanese electronic book publishers’ association to fight Amazon’s intent to market a Japanese version of the Kindle. Read about it here. Publishers fear that e-versions of books “promise higher royalties than in the case of print books” and they’re fighting to keep their share of the profits. It is argued that books are the work of both authors and editors and Amazon’s intrusion in the market disrupts this cooperative venture. However, Japan’s copyright law gives author’s the right to decide who and if electronic versions of their books can be published. Now publishing houses are going to government to claim “rights for the second use of books, including their digitization”. After all, they do have a lot to lose; together, 21 of these publishing houses have a 90% share of the Japanese market for e-books. In 2008, this market was worth $508.5 million.

I’m studying at the Fairfax Library where there are rednecks smoking in the bathroom and causing a raucous. But between the stacks, all is still pleasantly quiet.

- Elizabeth