California Fire Storms, Texas and Florida Hurricanes: The Price of Logging

As I predicted long ago, the price of the continued deforestation of the West Coast of the United States, as well as massive logging around the globe, would be a catastrophic rise in temperatures that would lead to unstable air masses and intense fires.

But in the face of these predictions, by both myself and the Greens, ineffectual as we have been, the Democratic Governors of California, Oregon, and Washington, who have been in power for decades, have continued to rape the forests in kowtowing supplication to the Republican timber companies, and the Democrat timber-worker’s unions. The environmental terror that Governors Jerry Brown, John Kitzhaber, Kathleen Brown, and the Washington governors, as well as Democratic Senators Wyden and Merkley, and pro-logging Democrat Congressman Peter DeFazio, have unleashed has been sweeping over Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, the hapless Caribbean Islands, and is currently decimating Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino, with thousands of homes destroyed, and possibly hundreds dead (over 100 currently unaccounted for).

When I ran for Governor of Oregon in 2014 as the Libertarian Party of Oregon Nominee, I proposed a 40-year moratorium on cutting of live trees, with some obvious exceptions like diseased trees, or those that posed a danger to human life. Dead trees could still have been harvested, as proposed in Orville Camp’s logical forestry plan which I included in my platorm, and which would have provided both profit and fire safety of local rural Oregon communities.

The reader should investigate for himself how much deforestation of land in these three Democrat-ruled States has occurred during 2005-2015. Recall that John Kitzhaber, served three terms, and had to resign his fourth due to allegations of corruption. Under him, the forests of Oregon were raped. Huge amounts of cancer-causing chemicals, which are banned in Europe, were helicopter sprayed all over the state, near residential communities and structures, so that the spray poisons drifted onto adjacent properties and were breathed in by local residents. And that hypocrite Kitzhaber was a registered medical doctor. It shows you the deep corruption of the Democrat Party, and how dangerous they are to the survival of the planet and yourself.

Now the people of the North Bay as well as the Floridians, the Puerto Ricans and the Texans, are paying the heavy price for their indifference to the environment and politics, and for their continued re-election of, in my opinion, Environmental Criminals like Governor Brown, and the Oregon and Washington Governors. Unfortunately, the Environmental Criminals will never be tried, but will live out their days comfortably on their governmental rich-man’s pensions, mulcted out of the taxpayer’s pockets, and their gold-plated healthcare plans, which will guarantee they live to 100. These politicians trample on Man’s Inalienable Property Rights while letting the Earth be destroyed by their corporate clients.

It is probably too late now for the environment. The tipping point has most likely been passed. Which means that all action is now futile, and we will quickly come to live in a world of survival only.

As they say, “when there is no insight, the people perish”.

— Paul Grad, Vegan Libertarian

Catalonian Independence and the Currency Issue

One issue in the current Catalonian crisis which I have not heard addressed is the issue of currency. Can the Catalans really be independent if they use a Euro which is controlled by the bureaucrats in Brussels and the ECB? Should not the Catalonians be clamoring for their own independent currency if they truthfully want to call themselves free?

It is worth noting that support for Catalan Independence really got going in 2009, when the financial crisis caused by the new soft Socialist-Fascism, which rules in Europe, the US, Aussie and Canada, led to the inevitable financial crises which Austrian School Economics had predicted would occur. The resulting mass inflation of the money supply, in order to bail out the huge corporate banks and insurance companies at the expense of the Individual Capitalist, the small shop keeper, and the lowest paid workers, brought havoc to Spain, and like everywhere else under socialism, led to massive unemployment and underemployment. The word Greece can easily be supplanted by the word Spain or the word America.

So even if the Catalans win their so-called independence from the Spanish Federal government, and I hope they do, they will still be in thrall to the European Central Bank if they continue to use the Euro.

If they issue their own national currency they will certainly soon run into problems with their import-export market, as well as transaction costs every time they want to convert their Catalonian “Gaudis” (as I think they should name their currency), or perhaps the “Barcelon”, to Euros or Yen.

The only solution to this problem, according to Libertarianism, is to issue their own precious-metal backed currency and coins, and to allow alternative currencies to be used as legal tender for all private debts.

Since the corrupt school systems in Europe and the US have been designed over the last thirty years to keep the young completely ignorant of true economic education and the praxeological axioms of the Austrian School of Economics, which apply to all human beings at all times, I doubt very much that the young rebels of Catalonia have given much thought to the currency issue, or to sound money and the economic implications of adopting a fiat monetary system, which is always prone to general inflation.

Since the level of economic understanding is so dismally low in the West, and Keynesian economic brainwashing continues unabated, and rules every major political party in the West except the Libertarian Party (and even that has a huge number of compromisers),  and with the strong Leftist sentiment among the Catalonians, which is perhaps a legacy of the Spanish Civil War, I think they will run into problems on the currency issue.

Given history, I do not think they will succeed, even if they do secede.

—Paul Grad, Libertarian Vegan

Libertarian Revolution in Catalonia: Secession from the Fascist State

The Socialist-Fascist Union, better known as the EU, is finally breaking down, and, in financially-weakened Spain, it has ultimately led to the Catalans’ getting sick and tired of paying in more than they get back from the Fascist State, as well as wanting to democratically control their traditional cultural region.

The brutal and violent response of the Fascist State Police towards these non-violent Gandhian democrats, who only wanted to vote, shows that the scat-house stink of Franco’s Fascism still hovers over Gaudi’s amazing church towers in Barcelona.

Libertarianism generally holds that one weapon in the armory of Liberty is devolution, or the breaking down of huge bureaucratic States into smaller, independent States, which makes it much harder for power to become absolute, and thus corrupt absolutely, as Jefferson, Thom Paine, and Lord Acton taught us it would if left unchecked.

Rothbard points out that this process of devolution of power, if carried through to its logical extreme, would result in the Individual being the only political entity, and this is a valid argument for anarcho-capitalism, a state in which there was no State government, but there was still law, courts, and jails. Most people never reason down to this level, but usually identify themselves in some way with the land mass they inhabit (“their” country), their religion, their specific ethnic group, or some other badge of identification. Others don’t agree with Rothbard, but do agree that a minimal government, that never violates individual property rights (i.e. the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights) is the best form of government.

What these people clamoring for relative independence, like the Catalonians and the Kurds, seem to forget is that,when they finally achieve a State of their own, they are up against the very same problems they had when they were part of a huge federal entity that trampled on their rights, only on a smaller scale. These inevitable problems arise from the very nature of governments and bureaucracies, in which the worst invariably rise to the top. Those “States Rights” advocates in America are in exactly the same position. The governmental bureaucracies of States like California and New York now far exceed the Federal bureaucracies of eighty years ago, so anyone clamoring for “Independence for California” isn’t going to have many fewer problems than if they’d stayed in the Federal Union. And imagine having to convert your “California Dollars” into “Nevada Silveradoes” and then into “Utah Brighams” and “Nebraska Cornpones” as you crossed the continent and had to exchange your currency for a new currency every time you crossed a State border, probably at a 3-5% charge from the bank doing the exchange. And imagine each state having to fund its own army that was confined to its state borders. There are pragmatic advantages to federalism, as well as terrible pitfalls.

Moreover, we can see the disadvantages of “States Rights” when we look at a matter like segregation and the persecution of Blacks in the old South — when a local community, county, or state blatantly violates the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, it becomes necessary for a federal power, greater than the States, to end that violation of Rights, as Kennedy did when he busted the Segregationists by Federalizing the National Guardsmen who had been, up to that point, enforcing the assaults on the Bill of Rights by their segregationist governor.

On the other side of the street, we can see the Fascist tyranny imposed on the American People by the Democrats who have been throwing people in cages for 80 years continuously for owning some cannabis, while they bray about how much they respect people’s rights and how they really care about people. How many millions suffered and died in agony and rotted in prison for decades, because of the rotten Miscreants infesting the Democratic Party and the Democratic politicians who were elected to high office?

Professor Rothbard discusses this problem of devolution when he quotes John C. Calhoun, the Southern segregationist, who made a plea for States Rights and against the tyranny of the Federal Supreme Court, but who failed to realize that he would have exactly the same problems with his own State Government and State Supreme Court.

So one wishes the Catalan Rebels all the best in their fight against the Socialist  police thugs of Rajoy’s rule, but I think they are rather naive in thinking that after Catalonian independence they will not face the exact same problems they faced in the largely Corporate-Socialist Scathouse of Spain, a nation that practices the Abomination of bullfighting. The same problems, that is, unless they adopt a radical free-market capitalism and libertarianism, that places individual liberty as the highest social value, and vigorously punishes any depredations on individual property rights by government.

No pasaran!

-Paul Grad, Vegan Libertarian