Libertarian Think Tank

The state of Mississippi relied on Michael “Magic Glasses” West to solve two henious crimes even though no legitimate forensic expert would corroborate his conclusions. As a result, two innocent men spent 30 years in prison. I don’t know which is worse…the State of Mississippi allowing these victims’ injustice to continue for 30 years or the State of Mississippi relying on a snake oil salesman to lock up innocent men.

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Judge Andrew Napolitano waxes libertarian all over history. Turns out, the Constitution was intended to limit the powers of government. For God’s sake, get this man back into public office.

Megan McArdle astutely explains why Clinton’s plan for the housing market is a very bad idea:

This is, of course, very nice for the people who bought more house than they can afford. It will not be so nice for anyone who wants to get a subprime mortgage in the future, since this move will probably destroy that market for at least a decade or so to come. It will, of course, be very bad for anyone who happens to be a mortgage lender–aka the people the rest of us want to borrow money from in order to buy houses. This move will leave them with a lot less money to loan out to anyone else, so hello, higher mortgage rates. Higher mortgage rates, for those following along at home, generally mean lower house prices, which means that the problem of negative equity will get worse.

In other words, Senator Clinton would like to destroy the mortgage market in order to save it.

Possible responses:

Democrats: ”You mean screwing with the market can screw up the market?”

Republicans: “Can I keep my job in Congress if I do this?”

Liberals: “McArdle doesn’t care about people!”

Conservatives: “What does it matter? We don’t exist anymore!”

The Market: “Really, I can breathe without a respirator”

This is pretty cool. I didn’t know they changed the Navy Jack back to the revolutionary Jack. Observing Colors would have been a lot cooler if I was hoisting a big snake on the ship’s fantail. They changed it in 2002.

The old Jack:

Of course, the number of stars changed as the number of states changed, but the Jack was largely the same for 200+ years. I think the revolutionary jack was inspired by the Gadsden flag:

Seems appropriate that the snake was coiled and ready to strike on the Gadsden flag, whereas the snake is actually striking in the revolutionary one. Turns out that this flag was, itself inspired by a print credited to Benjamin Franklin (Franklin opposed the Bald Eagle as a national symbol because it was a bird of bad moral character):

Note the initials of 8 colonies next to each piece of the snake. This was a plea to unite the colonies during the French and Indian War. Apparently, there was a superstition that snakes could come back to life if their parts were rejoined. I learned as a 6-year-old that doesn’t work with worms.

Seems appropriate to the liberty movement, doesn’t it? The Free State project has something similar, but with a porcupine. I would like to see the coiled snake of the Gadsden flag on the stripes of the Navy Jack. Ideas anyone? Submit your work.

This is rich. Factcheck.org’s Joe Miller wrote an incendiary piece on Ron Paul that was picked up by Newsweek, which was titled “Wrong Paul: Fantasy, fallacy and factual fumbles from the Republican insurgent”. Miller packs it full of false and disingenuous assertions. Some could expose Miller, Factcheck.org, and Newsweek to a libel claim. The rest are just nonsense. Apparently, Miller has a history of obfuscation, if not outright polemics in his fact-checking. His opening paragraphs claim to deliver criticisms of Paul’s more “outlandish claims”, but some of the claims are not even Paul’s.

First,

Paul claims that a secret conspiracy composed of the Security and Prosperity Partnership and a cabal of foreign companies is behind plans to build a NAFTA Superhighway as the first step toward creating a North American Union. But the NAFTA Superhighway that Paul describes is a myth, and the groups supposedly behind the plans are neither secret nor nefarious.

Actually, Paul claimed the exact opposite. He said it was “not secret” and it was “not a conspiracy”. Instead, it is a “contest between ideologies”. That means Paul thinks there are people who are ideologically driven to unify North America. Big deal.

Not only was Miller wrong about Paul’s claim, but Paul’s supposedly “outlandish” claim is actually pretty trite. So why did Paul bring it up? He didn’t. He said it when he was asked one of his three questions at the CNN/Youtube debate. The first was something like: What are you going to do when you lose? The second was: do you believe in all this conspiracy stuff? I think the third one had a little more substance.

So where did fact-checker, Joe Miller get this? Miller cited blogs, no less. One of them came from the Washington Posts’ Fact-Checker, whose quote of Paul omits the part where he said, explicitly, “It’s not a conspiracy”.

This is libel, pure and simple. This piece was clearly intended to hurt Paul. Miller makes references to X-Files’ Fox Mulder and other pop-paranoia to stir it up. You see, it’s fair game to call anything Paul supporters say a “conspiracy theory” because Paul was videotaped being polite to some 9-11 Truthers. Worse, Miller was inexcusably wrong. Finally, while most obnoxious bloggers defend against libel claims by saying they didn’t mean their accusations as ‘facts’, FactCheck.org doesn’t have that luxury. They hold themselves as authorities of ‘fact’, so a plaintiff could easily argue that they are held to the highest standard. There you have it, the three elements of a libel claim. Oh, and you need money to litigate. Unfortunately for Miller, Paul is the best funded Republican candidate and he is in a great position to retain the best libel lawyers on the planet.

For the record, I have no idea whether someone wants to build a superhighway, but the Canadian Government is planning on it. In fact, the linked website used to be called “NAFTA Superhighway” instead of “NAFTA Corridor” before this thing exploded after the CNN debate. There are several pages on that website that use the word NAFTA with regard to highways. And CNN is no stranger to the topic (see video).

Here is Miller’s second criticism:

Paul says that the U.S. spends $1 trillion per year to maintain a foreign empire and suggests that we could save that amount by cutting foreign spending. Paul gets that figure by including a lot of domestic programs that he isn’t planning to cut, like the U.S. Border Patrol and interest payments on the debt.

No, *Miller* gets that figure by including a lot of domestic programs that Paul isn’t planning to cut. Miller takes a winding stroll through assumption and surmise to conclude that Paul is including domestic programs. His source? Some campaign staffer told Miller to check out a website. The website provided is list of national security costs. None of them were exclusively domestic. Miller also criticizes Paul in an attenuated way for including interest and “medical and retirement pay for veterans”.

First, of course we should include the interest. As long as we are on the fiat monetary standard, our dollar is backed by the “Full Faith and Credit” of the United States Federal Government. Know what happens if we go into default? The dollar tanks, badly. So, while ‘interest’ may not concern the legions of Americans whose souls are owned by credit card companies, it should probably be considered when we calculate America’s financial future.

Second, what is “medical pay” for veterans? Does Miller mean disability payments and medical services through the Department of Veterans Affairs? Should we not include that in the cost of a six-year-and-counting war? Miller apparently doesn’t think so, but having worked at the VA, I choose to differ. We are still mounting unanticipated costs for services and payments to Viet Nam veterans. More importantly, the VA is stocked with Viet Nam vets who aren’t going to let their successors suffer the indignity that they did. As a result, it takes far less to get a PTSD claim these days. If a war veteran tells his psychiatrist he saw bullets flying, he will probably get at least 10% and I’ll be the last person to say he does not deserve it. No, I don’t have any documentation for that, I just worked for a psychological trauma facility for combat veterans for three years. My co-workers pretty much wrote the book on PTSD claims. My instinct tells me that any figures for disability payouts in the years to come are going to be low…way too low. And that’s Paul’s point, isn’t it? We’re not paying a trillion dollars per year, right now. The Chinese are paying for it. The figure represents the amount that will be retroactively attributed to the war once politicians can safely distance themselves from it.

This one is a gem:

Paul has run television ads touting an endorsement from Ronald Reagan, but he fails to mention that, in 1988, Paul wanted “to totally disassociate” himself from the Reagan administration.

This is Miller’s indictment of Paul’s ‘facts’? No, here it is:

Paul’s embrace of Reagan’s legacy represents a significant change of heart. Actually, it’s the second time that Paul has changed his mind about Reagan. After endorsing Reagan for president in 1976 and again in 1980, Paul became disenchanted, leaving the Republican party in 1987. The following year, he told the Los Angeles Times:

Paul (May 10, 1988): The American people have never reached this point of disgust with politicians before. I want to totally disassociate myself from the Reagan Administration.

So what? Paul was one of only four Republican Congressmen to endorse Reagan in ‘76. Then Reagan campaigned for Paul. Then Paul decided there were some unsavory characters in Reagan’s administration. Twenty years, and three big-government Presidents later, Paul decided he liked Reagan himself, if not his administration. Fair enough. It’s one thing to complain that politicians flip on issues. It’s just whiny to complain that they flip on friends. But it is downright telling that Miller thinks this is the more “outlandish” of Paul’s claims. Most important, how is this a fact check?

The more obvious reason why Paul puts Reagan in his ads is not that Paul was smitten with Reagan’s administration, of course, but that Paul and Regan are very ideologically similar (see the video). Their insistence on fiscal responsibility is a start. But Miller isn’t stupid. He knows this. That is why Miller’s piece is a disingenuous attack instead of a legitimate check on the facts.

Finally, Miller attacks Paul supporters in an “Introduction to Logic” section. I suppose I should let him have this one because assistant philosophy professors don’t get a lot of validation in life…then again, he has a real job now.

He explains the logical fallacy of “Denying the Antecedent”. I feel competent enough in logic to point out that colloquial sets of sentences, which never contain perfectly atomic elements, generally import some assumptions. Miller’s complaint that the following set is not valid completely misses that problem:

1. If FactCheck.org writes about a candidate, then that candidate makes some inaccurate claims.
2. FactCheck.org has not written about Ron Paul.
3. Therefore Ron Paul does not make inaccurate claims.

You see, the Paul Supporters’ obvious assumption here is that FactCheck.org is diligent and significantly interested in checking facts instead of just posting inflammatory articles. Of course, my forgoing discussion should show that it is neither. But I should be fair, Miller kind-of addressed this:

And that’s the problem with the DailyPaul.com argument. It works only to the extent that you assume that we write about every single inaccurate claim uttered by every single political candidate. We don’t. We just hadn’t gotten around to mentioning many Ron Paul flubs.

We’ve corrected that oversight now.

Well, I look forward to reading that correction, but this ain’t it.

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