Response: In my life, I have only ever spent 2 weeks INSIDE the US. I live in Cape Town, South Africa* and have travelled a little , mostly the UK and Australia , and briefly Hong Kong and the US. And everywhere Ive seen, and read about, it seems to be more or less the same: what you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts. My point was not to declare that the US is more free than everywhere else (I agree that it isn’t, by a long chalk, albeit there are some considerably worse), but that there is no country that I know of that is fundamentally free by any standard.

At the detailed level, any one country relative to another will have some freedoms that are more circumscribed than in other places, and other freedoms, less so. Moving from (any) one constituency to another will inevitably yield a mixed bag of better and worse – more of some freedoms than where you came from, mixed in with less of some other freedoms you might formerly have taken for granted. The hard part is quantifying the ‘on balance’ net degree of freedom of any one country – how do you even begin to put a number on something like that?

btw, I must aplogise, both for the inadvertant typos and the conversational license used less inadvertantly, (eg. ‘freeer’), which no doubt has my long-dead grammar teachers spinning in their graves.

Suppose A rents to B and rent control comes in. A then sells the property to C. If you just come along with the idea “rent control steals from landlords”, you will get the idea that C is a victim. He isn’t – A was. C faced no loss because A had to sell at a price with his own loss embedded in it. Abolishing rent control wouldn’t be getting B to make restitution, it would be providing a gain for C at A’s expense. If C then sold to D, he would realise the whole gain because the new price would be higher to reflect it.

The logical mental work involved is beyond the ability of many who among us are Neanderthal remnants. So many of us are deceived into thinking that they are extinct but aren’t. Trying to educate them is a lost cause especially so when they are mentally frozen below the age of reason, say 12-15 years of age.

It will be a little harder to convince the uncommon man –the theorists behind new trade theory and path dependency etc. because of the more detailed argument involved but austrian economics is fully able to convince these people too.

one positive thing that being australian does have over american citizenship is that the ato (irs) doesn’t require that non-resident citizens lodge tax returns. so for fiscal reasons, running away from australia does make sense.

the third world offers more hope of personal liberty, but at the price of higher corruption.

Australia also has more political freedom because minor parties actually get elected to the Parliament here. They aren’t kept off ballots, there’s no first-past-the-post voting (only proportional and preferential) and you will never find a mess like Florida in the 2000 election because we have a single independent election authority, instead of cronyism in the states.

Yeah, right, until you say a racial slur (or anything really, that people say is racist) and run afoul of Austrialia’s anti-discrimination gag laws, as praised by B’nai Brith (a chunk of the ADL). Like it or lump it, America is the ONLY industrialized nation where you are really safe to deny the Holocaust, call someone a racial slur and give out copies of “the Bell Curve”.

We may not agree with what people say when they say these things, but Americans, and the Constitution, still by and large believe in the right to say it.

Move to Australia. Although you won’t be allowed a gun for self-defence, crime is low enough that you probably won’t mind. We regularly rank above the US in terms of economic freedom, and our record on human rights is far superior to the US in spite of your Bill of Rights. In fact, we don’t have a bill of rights.

New Hampshire is another alternative.

Check out breakthematrix.com
This has sprung out of the Ron Paul movement, and is run by the guy who planned his major internet fundraisers that made the news back in November and December. They are planning to start a cable channel, and are in the process of collecting pledges from people who promise to switch to their local independant cable provider (ie not Comcast) should that provider be willing to carry the BTM channel. Last I checked they had 3000 pledges.

Initially they plan to broadcast programs already available, and you can preview and rate these programs on their website. A number of them are on economics and reflect Austrian theory. Ron Paul’s speeches on the House floor, Griffith talking about the Federal Reserve, and other programs meant to educate the masses. They also plan to start original programming and you can find details about that at the website, to include comedy sketches, etc.

I have to admit some of the articles and level of discussion on the website are disapointing; but I remain optimistic that if intelligent people get involved, the BTM channel and website will improve and become just what we need. Currently it is a Digg-type website, with social networking and streaming content. Sadly I think this is our one shot at making something significant happen, coming on the heels of the Ron Paul candidacy.

On your second point, make no mistake, a moral argument ought to persuade and certainly persuades me, but I don’t think your average brainwashed statist can be impressed by a non-relative moral argument. They think with their hearts first, heads a distant second. The libertarian ideal, if such a thing can be taken as a whole, is internally consistent, morally constructive, and economically sound. Unfortunately, most political systems, in ideal form, can be similarly evaluated. In practice however, they all create negative consequences, some much more so than others. This isn’t an argument for pragmatism, but perhaps a good way to put it is in the words of Dirty Harry, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Philosophies that require individual responsibility, prudence, saving over spending, delayed gratification, hard work, intelligence, and moral standards, are a tough sell these days. I’m sure most here agree, they shouldn’t be.

On your first point, you will have a difficult time making a general case for the immorality of war. Hindsight usually clarifies things but moral decisions are not made in hindsight; they are made with the limited information available to decision makers in the present.

re: “The moral argument is quaint, nice, mildly interesting, but not persuasive.”

I disagree, and offer two historic events to argue my case.

The first are the many wars fought at great personal sacrifice by the combatants because the state convinces them (mistakenly) of the high moral ground on which they stand.

The second is the idea propagated by the socialists of the previous century, and still remarkably persistent today, that socialism is morally superior to capitalism. This idea is a cancer in the ideology of the elite class that must be rooted out for libertarianism to take hold. I hear this argument continually by those who defend the welfare state.

You are right about following the money to see why interventionist policy persists. But Mises and Hayek both show that interventionism is the road to serfdom and cannot be sustained. When the system collapses, the public needs to understand, as many of the U.S. founding fathers understood, the true nature of government. Otherwise the collapse could lead to even more tyranny instead of less.

We simply cannot afford to cede the moral high ground to our opponents. That is an open invitation for us to be dismissed as heartless, greedy capitalists who care about ourselves at the expense of the disadvantaged in society.

Even as a renter in Los Angeles for over fifteen years, and not a particularly wealthy one at that, I have always opposed rent control for the obvious reason you state: property belongs to its owner.

That is radical heresy to many Californians not because it is a difficult concept, but because it is morally difficult to admit that the cherished benefits one receives from the state are simply theft, rather than some kind of dividend to the heroic proletariat. Only by dressing up theft in the language of democracy, freedom, human rights etc. can it be made palatable to the conscience. That is an indoctrination which is universal in my state’s public schools, at least from my own experience.

Stripping away those lofty pretenses reveals an ugly picture indeed, and so it is no surprise that your simple statement of fact should generate such outrage and confused sophistry.

I’m glad you don’t take these remarks personally, because you are doing all of us a favor by beating the drum for simple truth. You are opening eyes at the margins and providing tremendous comfort to those of us who live among those addicted to stolen goods.

Matt”

My understanding is that we need to tell people about the negative effects of rent control to change their opinions, and not just wait till ‘that one day’. Mr Galles says educating people is a worthy goal and that not enough people are doing it. I agree, I will keep his words in mind and try to do my part.

With the floodgates of federal and state redistribution pouring money into every corner of our society and the number of beneficiaries far in excess of contributors and everyone voting their wallet, the governing class has things firmly in hand. Cold hard cash bought the moral sense from the masses long ago. The moral argument is quaint, nice, mildly interesting, but not persuasive.

Figure out a way for the government to reach into the section of their pockets where they keep the fruits of their own labors. That’s where you’ll find what’s left of their moral sense.