I care for kids, families, the sick and the elderly, working class, middle class, and every American. To end poverty and advance the American Dream, I am Libertarian Girl.
Note: Libertarian Girl is off to Europe, but while she’s away she’ll be updating with previously written posts about politics and life in the places she’s visiting. She’ll soon be back to her regularly scheduled Libertarian Girl programming.
Today I’ll be flying from Venice into Paris, where I don’t think I can escape from seeing the Louvre again. The Louvre has a vast collection, but one of its most famous paintings within pop culture is Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix.
You can see why.
It’s appropriate, because the Louvre was one of the first state art collections to be opened to the public; the privilege of seeing this artwork was considered to be one of the true benefits of the French Revolution and the more free and open society that resulted in the end.
Note: Libertarian Girl is off to Europe, but while she’s away she’ll be updating with previously written posts about politics and life in the places she’s visiting. She’ll soon be back to her regularly scheduled Libertarian Girl programming.
You can’t get very far in Austria without being reminded of the country’s Nazi past. Austria was invaded by Germany, although it accepted the invasion willingly at the time. Today, the country has erected a “Monument Against War and Fascism” in its capital city, Vienna, to commemorate victims of violence in all wars, but especially those who died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Many Austrian Jews, including the preeminent economist Ludwig von Mises, were forced to flee under the threat of being sent to concentration camps.
Austria learned that it is sometimes best not to take sides in a war, because you may very well be siding with evil.
One particular statue included in the Monument Against War and Fascism includes an image of Orpheus burying his head in the stone on the way to the underworld. According to Rick Steves, it “reminds Austrians (and the rest of us) of the consequences of not keeping their government on track.”
In 1955, after 10 years of joint occupation by the victorious Allies, Austria regained total independence on the condition that it would be forever neutral (and never join NATO or the Warsaw Pact). To this day, Austria is outside of NATO (and Germany).
Perhaps we in other countries could take a lesson from Austria in this way. Why do we need NATO? Why do we need countries meddling in other countries’ business? Austria allowed Germany to take it over because the Austrians thought they were doing the best thing possible for Austria.
Perhaps other countries are making these same mistakes right now. Yesterday I left Vienna for Innsbruck, but this particular lesson is not one that can be left behind.
Note: Libertarian Girl is off to Europe, but while she’s away she’ll be updating with previously written posts about politics and life in the places she’s visiting. She’ll soon be back to her regularly scheduled Libertarian Girl programming.
The Vienna Opera House is beautiful for sure, and it sells out virtually every performance far in advance. However, it never makes money and is kept going solely through the ongoing support of the Austrian government.
To give you an idea of how bad the situation is for the Vienna Opera in regards to making a profit, the only time the Opera actually turns a profit is when there are no operas– the annual Vienna Opera Ball.
How can an independent opera house ever hope to compete with an opera house supported by the entire tax base of Austria?
How can an opera survive if one the likes of the Vienna Opera cannot turn a profit?
Should the state be involved in this sort of thing at all?
Note: Libertarian Girl is off to Europe, but while she’s away she’ll be updating with previously written posts about politics and life in the places she’s visiting. She’ll soon be back to her regularly scheduled Libertarian Girl programming.
The Stephansdom cathedral is one of the central sights in Vienna. As the center of commerce and home to markets in Wien (German for “Vienna”) for centuries, the cathedral has grooves on its outside surface that served to standardize and regulate measurements throughout the centuries, according to Lonely Planet.
It may seem preposterous to us now, but it worked for centuries. Things can be regulated and standardized voluntarily, without government intervention. What an amazing concept.
Note: Libertarian Girl is off to Europe, but while she’s away she’ll be updating with previously written posts about politics and life in the places she’s visiting. She’ll soon be back to her regularly scheduled Libertarian Girl programming.
Today, I head from two extremes: venturing from the very Eastern-European Bratislava, Slovakia into Vienna, Austria, the capital of the Hapsburg Empire and a former imperial city. Austria is a very socialist country, as Arnold Schwarzenegger let us know.
What’s interesting, then, is that Austria lends its name to one of the most free market-oriented strains of economic thought, the Austrian School of Economics. Wikipedia’s article on the Austrian School is virtually incomprehensible, but what it boils down to is this: as little intervention in “the invisible hand” of the market as possible. I had the delight of listening to Austrian-school economist Bettina Greaves speak at UNC-Chapel Hill last year, and she boiled it down in simple terms: from the time the first caveman made something that another person could use and they bartered services, the market has worked and has also been thwarted from working through government intervention, as it is today.
Two of the most famous Austrian economists are Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises (who was Bettina Greaves’ mentor). Hayek was a Nobel Prize-winning professor at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago and is one of the key economists able to influence a return to more liberal (liberal as in free) economic policies in the latter half of the 20th century. He was a thorn in the side of John Maynard Keynes, and their debates were legendary and still continue today among their followers.
Of course, there’s still plenty of government intervention and we certainly don’t have a classically liberal economic system at the moment, but what we do have is an improvement from Keynesian policies.
Hayek was a student of Ludwig von Mises at the University of Vienna and during that time, Hayek began to turn away from the socialism he had previously espoused to favor a more libertarian style of economic freedom with little government intervention. It was a good development for not just libertarianism, but for the world, and it is a lesson that Austria has yet to learn.
So today, Libertarian Girl ventures to the land of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
If it’s true that Dr. Bruce Ivins, a biodefense researcher at the Army’s Medical Research Center on Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Maryland, orchestrated the 2001 anthrax attacks to further his own career and funnel more federal funding toward the study of his speciality, anthrax– and to himself– it perfectly illustrates what I have previously said about the negative effects of federal scientific funding.
This is an aspect of governmental incompetence I hadn’t previously considered, but it was just a matter of time until something like this happened, when scientists now regularly become government employees– Bruce Ivins had spent his entire career in an Army lab. Scientists want power just as much as anyone (read Cantor’s Dilemma for a nicely fictionalized explanation of this), and anyone who’s dealt with, say, a secretary in the local parking department may be aware that government employees often get full of themselves and drunk on their own power.
The work became even more intense in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attack, as the field grew tremendously, with billions of dollars in new federal support for research on anthrax and other potential biological weapons and to buy new drugs or vaccines to handle a possible future attack.
Dr. Ivins was among the scientists who benefited from this surge, as 14 of the 15 academic papers he published since late 2001 were focused on possible anthrax treatments or vaccines, comparing the effectiveness of different formulations. He even worked on the investigation of the anthrax attacks, although this meant that he, like other scientists at the Army’s defensive biological laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., was scrutinized as a possible suspect.
Sure, it’s possible that a maniac could do a similar thing to get more private industry funding into science or patent royalties. However, at least it wouldn’t be taxpayer dollars wasted for the purpose.
Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was indicted today for taking money from a company to remodel his house.
I have two thoughts.
1.) Good riddance.
2.) Who cares?
Most of our members of Congress do worse things than this on their jobs every day. Shouldn’t voting for unconstitutional bills and amendments be an indictable offense in and of itself?
This is certainly not the worst thing Stevens has done during his reign of terror in the Senate. It’s not even the next-to-worst thing or anything approaching the median. Stevens is the guy responsible for the Bridge to Nowhere, which means you’d be hard-pressed to find a worse traitor to the founding principles of our country.
Some Americans may hate our country. They may even want to do things to destroy it, but few get the chance. Ted Stevens has taken his chance and seized it. The policies he has stood for have bankrupted the United States, and he is a disgrace. There are many Senators and members of Congress just like him.
It goes far beyond the $136 million-plus Bridge to Nowhere.
I can’t say I was surprised to see that Ronald Gray is black, even less so that the next in line to be executed, Dwight Loving, is also black. Of the eight members of the Army sentenced to death for various crimes, six are black, one is Asian and one is white.
I’m not saying that Gray and Loving don’t deserve the death penalty. That doesn’t even factor into it. The question is instead: Why is the determining factor in getting the death penalty not which defendants have committed the most heinous crimes, but what color the defendant happens to be?
Why does the Army have an even higher ratio of blacks to whites sentenced to death than the civilian courts, which already have such a distorted ratio?
I would challenge anyone to find a statistic that proves that most Army murders are committed by black members of the Army. Why, then, are almost all of the men sentenced to the Army’s death row at Fort Leavenworth black?
I recently helped a friend find flights he could redeem with Air France miles he’d collected a few years ago, and I was shocked to find that even on a “free” award ticket that he had earned by flying Air France flights, he was expected to pay close to $400 in taxes alone. When I looked up similar fees for other airlines, I found that the American airlines aligned with Air France through the SkyTeam Alliance redeem international award tickets for their frequent travelers for something around $50.
$50 compared to $400 for the same flights (the flights are operated by Northwest)?!? Why the huge discrepancy in fees?
Besides the fuel surcharge (that American airlines will probably also inevitably hit us all with), we can call the problem “The Chirac Tax” because it was started by France’s former president Jacques Chirac. It seems to be his only actual activity while in office (other than not invading Iraq), since as president he seems to have mainly stood inside the Elysees Palace and watched the rioting, jobless crowds out the window, without the thought occurring to him to actually be president.
In other words, Chirac wanted to make it harder for normal people to visit these countries (by piling on hundreds of dollars in taxes) so that we can spend money in these countries for the precise reason that their economies suffer because no one visits them. That’s a fantastic idea! Since there seems to be no such tax on private planes, Chirac himself wouldn’t be affected, of course.
Perhaps this is Chirac’s best legacy, then. Between these taxes and the huge fuel surcharges that Air France and other European airlines are charging, I’m sure his policies are really keeping all those pesky tourists away from Paris.
The Northwest/KLM flights that my friend is taking would have cost him $50 if he had chosen to join Northwest’s frequent flyer program in the beginning rather than that of Air France. Northwest would even allow him to redeem the same amount of miles he used for this flight for Air France flights, for only $50.
In the future, he’ll be collecting Delta Skymiles rather than Flying Blue points.
Of course Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Republican. That can mean a lot of different things to different people. He certainly cared enough about distinguishing himself as that that he did not become a Democrat once marrying into the Kennedy family, which would have been understandable in a way.
He’s hard to pin down as the governor of California, and to be honest I haven’t really liked his policies that much. Whatever the case, though, I found this video of him discussing Milton Friedman’s Free To Choose entirely fascinating.
It’s changed his life and he can’t keep it to himself! He gave it to everyone as presents! (Does that include his uncle-in-law Ted Kennedy?) He is against government intervention due to the oppressive socialist government of his native Austria, where little children already talk about the pension they’ll receive when they retire from their inevitable “civil servant” job! He’s personal friends with Milton Friedman and his wife Rose! It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about economics! It’s amazing.
