No Excuse for Coercion

by Dr. Tibor Machan

I am always baffled and now and then really angered when people defend using coercion against other people.  (Some will say I must be biased since I come from several early years of tyranny and since one of my parents was an out and out brute.  How could I be objective then, about the merits of coercive force?)

For my money coercive force is not only when someone threatens to beat up or kill another unless that other does as told.  I start much earlier, when someone presumes to have the authority to entice or nudge his or her fellow human beings to do as told (hoped for)!  I don't see that the importance of the project that's to be served by such coercive force has anything to do with it – people aren't supposed to be other people's tools, unwilling devices for the sake of achieving even the most magnificent objectives.  Certainly no one is made a morally better individual by way of being beaten or threatened to be beaten into being such, to do what is morally right.  How could they, since moral goodness, if it amounts to anything intelligible at all, must involve the agent's free choice.  Without the chance to choose to do the right or wrong thing any kind of worthwhile conduct amounts at most to good behavior, like what we want from dogs or horses.

But never mind the complications – nearly everything in human life can be made to appear utterly complicated, so that people can be intimidated into thinking they have no way to tell right from wrong about it. Sophistry is a very potent motivation for withdrawing from the moral game, as some philosophers would put it. Make it all appear to be incomprehensible to us, a matter of the facts and laws of highly specialized science, at best, or beyond the pale altogether and only to be intuited by leaders.  As the late Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner proposed, only technologists of human behavior can be entrusted with the authority to make us all do what is desirable to do. Since, of course, there are umpteen schools of psychologists who are candidates for this role, using force to decide in the end who shall be our technologists is immediately unavoidable.  So power will decide!

State Sovereignty in the Face of Ruin and Key Principles

by Ben Faulkner

By all accounts, the past several weeks have been an extraordinarily difficult span of time for the residents of the coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and western Florida. A toxic combination of crude oil along with multiple gasses and chemicals continues to spew unabated into the Gulf of Mexico, the full impact of which is still a giant unknown. Tar balls are washing ashore along the seaboard and crude is oozing into marshes, while fishing has come to grinding halt. Amidst this disaster, a number of troubling stories have begun circulating (some confirmed and some remaining anecdotal) of a media blackout underway along stretches of beach, of troop deployments, of possibly using a tactical nuke to seal the fissure, and of the federal government preventing the impacted States and local communities in some instances from taking the necessary actions to prevent the sludge from making landfall or entering estuaries. Some reports have begun to suggest that scope of this event is several orders of magnitude greater than we are presently being told, a fact which certainly could be a plausible explanation for the effort to tightly control the flow of information from the region.

It is entirely possible that the oil itself is not necessarily the greatest danger afoot in this calamity. Flowing hydrogen sulfide, benzene, dichloromethane, vanadium and the oil-dispersant chemicals employed by BP are rendering parts of the Gulf a veritable grab back of phase-changing poisons. What effect the prevailing winds or a hurricane would have in moving these compounds landside is the billion dollar question at this point. The President is slated to address the public this evening on the disaster, but in all likelihood, he will make no mention whatsoever of the prospect of large-scale evacuations that some are suggesting may take place in the none-too-distant future. I for one do not care to speculate what the coming weeks might hold for the Gulf Region, but an honest assessment at the moment is looking grim.

When the Buck Stops with the President, People Lose

by Gary Wood

Pres. Harry Truman made the phrase, “the buck stops here” famous.  Pres. Obama has embraced a similar stance with his often used “the buck stops with me” line.  Every president between Truman and Obama have told the people the POTUS (President of the United States) is where the buck stops when it comes to many situations such as natural disasters, man created disasters, economic challenges, environmental concerns, and more.

According to the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum the phrase was embraced by Truman when he received a sign for his desk.  The library website shares the following story;

The sign “The Buck Stops Here” that was on President Truman’s desk in his White House office was made in the Federal Reformatory at El Reno, Oklahoma. Fred M. Canfil, then United States Marshal for the Western District of Missouri and a friend of Mr. Truman, saw a similar sign while visiting the Reformatory and asked the Warden if a sign like it could be made for President Truman. The sign was made and mailed to the President on October 2, 1945. (“The Buck Stops Here” Desk Sign)

Coming out of World War II Americans were ready to embrace this message.  From the time of Teddy Roosevelt’s Bully Pulpit we have been taught our POTUS is the center of government for the people.  “By the postwar era, Washington’s humble term “chief magistrate” could no longer adequately describe an office that in power and responsibility had expanded far beyond Hamiltonian hopes or Jeffersonian fears.” (Healy, The Cult of the Presidency, 2008, p. 79)

Cassidy Introduces Gulf Coast Jobs Preservation Act

WASHINGTON – Today, Louisiana Congressman Bill Cassidy introduced H.R. 5519, legislation to overturn President Obama’s deepwater drilling moratorium, which threatens tens of thousands of Louisiana jobs and has been rejected as unnecessary by the President’s own panel of engineering experts.

“The moratorium is a political decision made by President Obama and Secretary Salazar.  Petroleum engineering experts chosen by the President strongly disagreed with the moratorium and recommended it end.  After losing fisheries and coastal tourism to the spill, Louisiana’s economy cannot afford to lose energy jobs to politics.”

Co-sponsored by the entire Louisiana delegation in the House of Representatives, the legislation overturns the May 30 Minerals Management Service Notice to Lessees No. 2010–N04, which established a moratorium on deepwater energy production, by stating that the Notice “shall have no force or effect.”

According to the Louisiana Midcontinent Oil & Gas Association, the deepwater moratorium:

• Shuts down 33 rigs, which employ 180-280 workers apiece, with each worker supporting an additional four jobs in the energy economy
• Jeopardizes up to $330 million a month in household income
• Reduces domestic energy production by 80,000 barrels per day
• Risks $7.6 billion in future government revenues

In addition to the other six Members of the Louisiana House delegation (Reps. Joseph Cao, Charlie Melancon, Charles Boustany, Rodney Alexander, Steve Scalise, and John Fleming), Cassidy’s bill was co-sponsored by the following Members, representing 12 states and from both sides of the aisle: