leftlibertarian.org

I’d like to welcome our newest contributor at leftlibertarian.org: Matthias Jenny, who recently started a new blog, From the Radio Tower. On his blog you can choose from a German language or English language version. Thanks for throwing in with us, Matt.

If you know of any blogs that belong here, or you write one yourself, contact me. You can see more information on become a contributor here.

Welcome to Matthias Jenny’s new weblog! For information about this blog, see this page and this post.

Enjoy! Feedback is, by the way, always welcome.

I just created a new website, matthiasjenny.name. It will, among other, even more narcissistic things, serve as a platform for my new bilingual weblog Vom Funkturm / From the Radio Tower. This blog will on the one hand replace After:All and an old personal German blog of mine, but it is also intended to serve as a medium for me to write about other things than what is of strict libertarian interest. Since the blog is bilingual, you'll need to bookmark this link or feed this RSS feed to your RSS reader of choice if you want to avoid reading obscure German gibberish. But, of course, feel free to read that stuff too, if my English ramblings should turn out not to be obscure enough.

This means that After:All won't be updated anymore. I think I will, at some point, delete this blog and link it directly to From the Radio Tower.

Enjoy!

Here’s a weird passage from Lew Rockwell’s article in the next-to-last Mises Institute newsletter. Not because the basic point being argued is false, but because of how the argument leaves off at the end:

Now, Ron Paul stands in this tradition of thinkers in every way. Even on the campaign stump, he speaks about the evil of fiat money and Fed management of the nation’s money stock. In a true sense, he says, we’ve put a cartelized gang of central planners in charge of the good that constitutes half of every economic exchange, and we are paying the price in terms of declining purchasing power, exchange-rate chaos, rampant debt, and growing crises in sector after sector.

Is there a way out? Most certainly! It goes by the name of gold. Make the dollar as good as gold and you eliminate the inflation problem and the business cycles that go along with it. Here is the great secret of the gold standard. The problem is not that it is unviable from the perspective of economics; the problem is that there are many people allied against it: the big banks, the creditor class, and government. You see, gold would provide a hard-core anchor for liberty. Under the right form of the gold standard, government could no longer spend with impunity or run up debt without limit. The resources it spent would have to be raised the old fashioned way.

… By stealing it?

I've got another little "lesser known" bit of history, in this case labour history. My feeling arising from the following posting is that some very important events do not get much publicity outside of a local area or country. (Or maybe its just the abysmal quality of the press and television in western Canada.) This item on the Tower Hill Colliery was front page news in the UK back in the nineteen eighties although I was totally unaware of it. I did know something about miners in Wales buying out one of the three last working coal mines in the United Kingdom but very little beyond that. Apparently even one of their tabloid newspapers the Daily Mirror give editorial support to what the miners were doing back then. Seems hard to believe. What came to be called the T.E.B.O. (Tower Hill Employee Buyout) was part of a concerted effort by local residents and the National Union of Mineworkers to fight the neoliberal policies of THE No.1 sleazebag .. you know ol' whatsherface who said "society does not exist". The miners struggle was news around the UK and even resulted in a film now being made in their honour, also books by one of the participates and even an opera.


They were referred to as "the enemy within" by the arch-thug Margaret Thatcher during her declaration of war against the coal industry in England and Wales. Coal miners at Tower Hill Colliery near Hirwaun in Wales told the Iron Lady to 'get stuffed' and used redundancy payments averaging eight thousand pounds each to buy the coal mine from the National Coal Board in 1994. This Welsh village had a long history of labour militancy centred around the ironworks and colliery as described in this Wikipedia article:


" The ironworks was in existence already during the late eighteenth century and passed through a succession of owners before being purchased in 1819 by William Crawshay of Cyfarthfa, in whose family it remained until closure in 1859. The ironworks' blast furnaces required coke, which spurred an increase in local coal-mining activities. Even after the ironworks closed, mining continued. Following the miners' strike however, the only deep coal mine left in Wales is Tower Colliery, which was closed down, bought by its workers and reopened. During the Merthyr Rising of 1831 the red flag that later came to represent socialism was raised on Hirwaun Common for the first time. Originally a white sheet dipped in a bucket of sheep's blood, the symbol has had an enduring appeal worldwide. "

Tower Hill was the only cooperative coal mine in the world and made a continuous profit from 1994 until this year until basically the mine ran out of coal. Reuters put it this way:

" A Welsh coal mine whose defiant workers saved it from closure by buying it from their bosses 13 years ago finally shut down on Friday -- because its coal reserves have run out. Despite gloomy warnings from industry experts, almost 240 miners turned Tower Colliery into a going concern after they used their redundancy money and a bank loan to buy the pit from its managers. They became the first pitmen in history to become owners after the then Conservative government decided to close it down. In its first year, one of the oldest continuously worked pits in the world made a profit of two million pounds. Since then it has provided jobs for hundreds of miners. "

Here are some other facts :

The first year after the buy out the pit made a £2 million profit despite allowing every miner 37 days' holiday and paying them top rates. A Tower Colliery worker takes home £560 a week. A gradual closure of the colliery have given many of the miners time to find new jobs. About 120 of the original work force will find work at other open pit mines at the Unity mine at Cwmgwrach or the Aberpergwm mine. Other sources say the entire original work force of 280 have found work at reopened mines. (This suggests that "clean coal" is becoming a going concern. The Shag will look into this in a further article) The worker's cooperative Tower Anthracite Ltd will continue to own the mine area which will be cleaned up and remade as a park and low cost housing estate. In keeping with tradition, each of the miners has kept a piece of coal from the colliery as a memento.

This is the latest Dispatch at Downsize DC. Excerpt:

A rich person, acting alone, can spend unlimited amounts to support or oppose a candidate, without government interference. But the government will interfere plenty if two, or more, less wealthy people cooperate to match what the rich person spends.

Individuals who cooperate to express opinions about candidates have to consult lawyers and accountants, file reports with the government, and potentially face large fines. They will also be limited to contributions of $5,000 each, while the rich person, acting alone, bears none of these burdens, and can spend millions.

When it comes to political campaigns, one rich person has more rights than an infinite number of poor people.

The federal government has a special gang it uses to control the right of people to cooperate to express opinions about candidates. It's called the Federal Election Commission -- FEC for short.

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

If the difference between an innocent person’s going free and that innocent person’s serving a ten-year prison sentence depended on your say-so, and if you could set that person free with zero risk to yourself, what would you do?

What to say about this really weird Ron Paul ad?