I’m a libertarian nationalist. I believe the nation-state form is a practical reality and that the USA is the only real hope for human freedom in the world. So unlike big-L Libertarians, I don’t support open borders or eviscerating the defense. Quite the contrary, I believe we should empower border agents to shoot-to-kill. A few “incidents” and I think we’d see the tide of illegals reduced considerably.

In terms of economics, though, I believe the government should have virtually no role. Philosophically, I don’t believe in government run schools, or really government run anything except police, courts and military. It’s a bit against-the-grain here, I realize, but I am also a free trader.

Finally, I believe the environmental movement is the greatest threat to human freedom today. Even greater (slightly) than Islamofascism. Our children our being systematically indoctrinated into giving up their freedoms by both the government education system and pop culture. I fear that too many - even too many conservatives - are blind to the environmentalist threat.

I'm also a transplanted Yankee....from suburban Chicago to East Texas. I lived in Chicago suburbs most of my life, but have alway felt culturally that I belonged in the south - though I'm not sure that East Texas is technically considered "The South." Long before I ever knew I'd be moving to Texas I wrote a lengthy blog entry supporting southerners who wish to fly the confederate flag.

At this point, the south is probably the only real hope for America. When I was growing up, the NW suburbs of Chicago (Palatine, Schaumburg, Barrington, Rolling Meadows - that area) was a VERY conservative area. Phil Crane was our rep forever. Over the years, it became less and less so. Now it's represented by a Democrat, Melissa Bean, which would have been positively unthinkable 20 years ago. I blame women. I'm not sure that giving them the vote was such a good idea.

From "The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality" by Ludwig von Mises

The most passionate detractors of capitalism are those who reject it on account of its alleged injustice.

It is a gratuitous pastime to depict what ought to be and is not because it is contrary to inflexible laws of the real uni­verse. Such reveries may be considered as innocuous as long as they remain daydreams. But when their authors begin to ignore the difference between fantasy and reality, they be­come the most serious obstacle to human endeavors to im­prove the external conditions of life and well-being.

The worst of all these delusions is the idea that “nature” has bestowed upon every man certain rights. According to this doc­trine nature is openhanded toward every child born. There is plenty of everything for everybody. Consequently, everyone has a fair inalienable claim against all his fellowmen and against society that he should get the full portion which nature has allot­ted to him. The eternal laws of natu­ral and divine justice re­quire that nobody should appropri­ate to himself what by rights belongs to other people. The poor are needy only because unjust people have deprived them of their birthright. It is the task of the church and the secular authorities to prevent such spoliation and to make all people prosperous.

Every word of this doctrine is false. Nature is not bounti­ful but stingy. It has restricted the supply of all things in­dispens­able for the preservation of human life. It has populated the world with animals and plants to whom the impulse to destroy human life and welfare is inwrought. It displays powers and el­ements whose operation is damaging to human life and to human endeavors to preserve it. Man’s survival and well-being are an achievement of the skill with which he has utilized the main in­strument with which na­ture has equipped him—reason.

Men, cooperating under the system of the division of labor, have cre­ated all the wealth which the daydreamers consider as a free gift of nature. With regard to the “distribution” of this wealth, it is non­sensical to refer to an allegedly divine or natural principle of justice. What matters is not the allocation of portions out of a fund presented to man by nature. The problem is rather to fur­ther those social institutions which enable people to continue and to enlarge the production of all those things which they need.

The World Council of Churches, an ecumenical organi­za­tion of Protestant Churches, declared in 1948: “Justice demands that the inhabitants of Asia and Africa, for in­stance, should have the benefits of more machine produc­tion.”* This makes sense only if one implies that the Lord presented mankind with a def­inite quantity of machines and expected that these contrivances will be distributed equally among the various nations. Yet the capitalistic countries were bad enough to take possession of much more of this stock than “justice” would have assigned to them and thus to deprive the inhabitants of Asia and Africa of their fair portion. What a shame!

The truth is that the accumulation of capital and its in­vest­ment in machines, the source of the comparatively greater wealth of the Western peoples, are due exclusively to laissez-faire capi­talism which the same document of the churches passionately misrepresents and rejects on moral grounds. It is not the fault of the capitalists that the Asiatics and Afri­cans did not adopt those ideologies and policies which would have made the evolution of autochthonous capitalism possi­ble. Neither is it the fault of the capitalists that the policies of these nations thwarted the attempts of foreign investors to give them “the benefits of more machine production.” No one contests that what makes hundreds of mil­lions in Asia and Africa destitute is that they cling to primitive methods of production and miss the benefits which the employ­ment of better tools and up-to-date technological designs could be­stow upon them. But there is only one means to relieve their distress—namely, the full adoption of laissez-faire capitalism. What they need is private enterprise and the accumulation of new capital, capitalists and entrepreneurs. It is nonsensical to blame capitalism and the capitalistic nations of the West for the plight the backward peoples have brought upon themselves. The remedy indicated is not “justice” but the substitution of sound, i.e., laissez-faire, policies for unsound policies.

It was not vain disquisitions about a vague concept of jus­tice that raised the standard of living of the common man in the capitalistic countries to its present height, but the activi­ties of men dubbed as “rugged individualists” and “exploit­ers.” The poverty of the backward nations is due to the fact that their poli­cies of expropriation, discriminatory taxation and foreign ex­change control prevent the investment of for­eign capital while their domestic policies preclude the ac­cumulation of indigenous capital.

All those rejecting capitalism on moral grounds as an unfair system are deluded by their failure to comprehend what capital is, how it comes into existence and how it is maintained, and what the benefits are which are derived from its employment in production processes.

The only source of the generation of additional capital goods is saving. If all the goods produced are consumed, no new capi­tal comes into being. But if consumption lags be­hind produc­tion and the surplus of goods newly produced over goods con­sumed is utilized in further production proc­esses, these pro­cesses are henceforth carried out by the aid of more capital goods. All the capital goods are intermediary goods, stages on the road that leads from the first employ­ment of the original factors of production, i.e., natural re­sources and human labor, to the final turning out of goods ready for consumption. They all are perishable. They are, sooner or later, worn out in the pro­cesses of production. If all the products are consumed without replacement of the capital goods which have been used up in their production, capital is consumed. If this happens, further production will be aided only by a smaller amount of capital goods and will therefore render a smaller output per unit of the natural re­sources and labor employed. To prevent this sort of dissaving and disinvestment, one must dedicate a part of the pro­duc­tive effort to capital maintenance, to the replacement of the capital goods absorbed in the production of usable goods.

Capital is not a free gift of God or of nature. It is the out­come of a provident restriction of consumption on the part of man. It is created and increased by saving and maintained by the abstention from dissaving.

Neither have capital or capital goods in themselves the power to raise the productivity of natural resources and of human labor. Only if the fruits of saving are wisely em­ployed or in­vested, do they increase the output per unit of the input of natural resources and of labor. If this is not the case, they are dissipated or wasted.

The accumulation of new capital, the maintenance of pre­vi­ously accumulated capital and the utilization of capital for rais­ing the productivity of human effort are the fruits of purposive human action. They are the outcome of the con­duct of thrifty people who save and abstain from dissaving, viz., the capitalists who earn interest; and of people who succeed in utilizing the capital available for the best possible satisfaction of the needs of the consumers, viz., the entrepreneurs who earn profit.