Daniel J. Sanchez
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12 years ago @ Ludwig von Mises Insti... - Inevitable Inflation? ... · 1 reply · +1 points
13 years ago @ Ludwig von Mises Insti... - The Zero-Sum Game of T... · 0 replies · +4 points
13 years ago @ Ludwig von Mises Insti... - The Cold War Paper Tig... · 0 replies · +13 points
Rothbard: "I am not maintaining that the motivation for this unswerving course was any sort of moral nobility..."
13 years ago @ Ludwig von Mises Insti... - The Paradox of Imperia... · 6 replies · +12 points
13 years ago @ Ludwig von Mises Insti... - The Paradox of Imperia... · 9 replies · +12 points
13 years ago @ Ludwig von Mises Insti... - The Paradox of Imperia... · 0 replies · +7 points
What of Stalin’s “expansion” into Eastern Europe? This expansion was scarcely aggression in any rational sense: it was purely the inevitable consequence of Russia’s rolling back and defeating the German aggressor and his Hungarian and Rumanian allies. It is only by a grievous “dropping of the context”, of forgetting that Russia got into the war as a result of German aggression, that we can possibly point the finger of threat of “aggression” at Russia’s military march into the aggressor countries.
As his evidence for alleged Soviet “orders to advance” into Western Europe at the end of the war, Dr. Hospers cites only a paragraph from Professor Carroll Quigley. Yet Professor Quigley is not in any sense a specialist on the history of the Cold War nor does he command any respect whatever in the historical profession. And with good reason. The only place 1 have ever seen Professor Quigley cited as an authority is in several Birchite tracts, tracts which, whatever their devotion to individual liberty, are scarcely noted for the profundity or the accuracy of their scholarship. If any readers are interested in the best scholarly evidence on Russia and the Cold War, let them turn to the excellent and notable researches of such distinguished historians as “Gabriel Kolko, Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, and Gar Alperovitz, researches which back my interpretation to the hilt. I repeat: there is not a shred of evidence of any Soviet aim or plan, much less “orders”, to invade Western Europe at the end of World War II or at any other time. If Dr. Hospers would care to cite some real evidence for his charge, I would be delighted to hear it.
In fact, read correctly. Professor Quigley’s citation is simply one more of numerous indications that it was the United States that launched the Cold War, that it was the United States that brutally and immorally brandished its monopoly of atomic weapons in an attempt to cow Soviet Russia into getting out of the conquered territories of Eastern Europe and to open them to American influence and penetration. In fact, historians from such opposite ends of the political and ideological spectrum as Gar Alperovitz (in his great work, Atomic Diplomacy) and the late Harry Elmer Barnes, have shown that the very genocidal dropping of the A-bomb on an already vanquished Japan was done largely for the purpose of using atomic diplomacy as a counter in the American-launched Cold War.
As for the Cuban crisis of 1962, there is not a single piece of evidence of any Russian aim to drop missiles on the United States. In fact, the Soviets had plenty of their own missiles; and any idea that Cuba would launch a missile attack on the U.S. seems to me in the Great Britain-as-military threat category. In fact, the Soviet missiles in Cuba were as nothing to the missiles with which the United States “devastation. In fact, the Cuban settlement satisfied both parties: Kennedy looked like the macho conqueror, forcing the Russian missiles out of Cuba; while Khrushchev gained the informal but vital concession from Kennedy that the U.S. would launch no further aggression upon Cuba. Unfortunately for Khruschchev, his Soviet colleagues did not appreciate the loss of macho face, and Khruschchev was deposed for his pains.”
13 years ago @ Ludwig von Mises Insti... - The Paradox of Imperia... · 3 replies · +12 points
We all too often forget several crucial facts of modern European history: and one is that, from the point of view of ordinary international relations, Russia (any Russia, not just Soviet Russia) was a grievous loser from the settlements imposed by World War I (Brest-Litovisk, Versailles). Any German, Russian, or Austrian regime would have been “revisionist” after the war, i.e. would have sought the restoration of the huge chunk of territory torn from them by the victorious powers. Old Czarist Russia was shorn of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania “major “revisionist” post-Versailles powers, Germany and Russia. For the essence of that pact was the commonality of revisionist interests by both powers: from that pact, Germany got its lost territories back (plus an extra chunk of ethnically Polish Poland), and Russia peacefully re-acquired its old territories, with the exception of Finland. No dire Russian military threat to the West, let alone’ the United States, can be conjured up out of that."
13 years ago @ Ludwig von Mises Insti... - The European Miracle -... · 3 replies · +7 points
13 years ago @ Ludwig von Mises Insti... - Two Sides of the Same ... · 0 replies · +2 points
13 years ago @ Ludwig von Mises Insti... - In Defense of Non-Aggr... · 1 reply · +14 points
Zwolinski objected to that formulation as follows in another post: "But, first, this response does nothing to mitigate the problem of most air, noise, and light pollution, much of which is detectable by man’s senses and which clearly can interfere with his enjoyment of his property."
But that's not a problem at all. If it does interfere, and the emitter doesn't have a prior easement, then it simply is aggression, and should be prohibited. The emitter simply needs to purchase easements from those affected.
Zwolinski continues, "And second, and more seriously, just who does Rothbard think has the authority to decide what counts as an interference with the owner’s enjoyment, if not the owner himself? If the owner of a piece of property wants it to be free from invasive radio waves, whether because the fear that they might give him cancer causes him distress or because he wants to use the parts of the spectrum they occupy on his property himself, on what grounds can a subjectivist like Rothbard tell him that he’s not really being harmed?"
Whoever actually emits in those parts of a spectrum in that space first homesteads the right to do so. And a person's fear of, in the future, being prevented from enjoying the rivalrous aspects that he's actually homestead, contracted for, or produced, is not the same as actually being so prevented.
In any case, whatever Zwolinski thinks of the soundness of the Rothbardian formulation of aggression, that IS the formulation. So it is highly misleading for him to keep going around repeating that innocuous beams of light would be prohibited under the NAP.