Mediaboss Marketing

One of the safest foreign policy positions to take in America today, is a call to arm the Kurds. Politicians from both sides of the aisle, including libertarian darling Rand Paul, have called for increased US support for the Kurds, as a solution to the civil wars in the Middle East today.

After all, it allows the United States government to influence events without expending much blood or treasure. However, as attractive as this option seems, it is no cure-all; there are many problems that threaten both American and libertarian interests in Kurdistan.

An obvious issue with calls to arm the Kurds is the question of which Kurds to arm? Between 20 and 30 million people speak Kurdish languages, most of them living in the border areas between Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria.

Kurds are politically, religiously and culturally diverse.

Most are Sunni Muslims, although there are additionally large numbers of Kurdish-speaking Jews, Shia Muslims, and atheists; as well as the Yazidi religious minority and the syncretic People of Truth (Ahl-e Haqq) who also speak Kurdish.

Groups with a specifically Kurdish outlook, include: the Kurdistan Workers Party (or PKK), a guerrilla uprising against the Turkish government; and the Federation of West (Rojava) Kurdistan-North Syria, an organization attempting to create a left-libertarian homeland in contested Syrian border regions.

The former group is considered a terrorist organization by the State Department, while the latter receives US support through the Syrian Democratic Forces alliance.

There are also Kurdish-speaking members of political organizations, ranging from Turkish paramilitaries to ISIS. Politicians, like Rand Paul, are most likely referring to the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) as a candidate for US support.

Technically ruled by Iraq (but self-governing in reality) the KRG has looked to America for support since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Ever since the fall of Mosul to ISIS, in 2014, they have been an important ally of the global coalition against terrorism, and have hoped to leverage this importance into a bid for secession.

However, the KRG is not as perfect a friend of the United States as it may seem. As a close ally of Turkey, the KRG takes a hard line against both the Kurdistan Workers Party, and the Syrian Democratic Forces. In fact, the KRG has been helping enforce a harsh economic blockade on the Federation of West Kurdistan-North Syria.

This regional rivalry has led the KRG to act in disturbing ways towards its minority communities.

After the P Merge (Peshmerga) security forces of the KRG fled Mount Sinjar in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Yezidi religious community was exposed to the genocidal onslaught of ISIS. It took twin interventions one by the Kurdistan Workers Party and one by the United States to liberate Mount Sinjar; however, thousands of Yezidi women and children remain in captivity, and countless communities are traumatized. As a sign of gratitude to the Kurdistan Workers Party, many Yezidi fighters joined its local branch, the Sinjar Resistance Unit.

Fearing a potential rival for control, and wishing to please Turkey, the KRG has attempted to punish the Yezidi communities on Mount Sinjar. Crushing economic regulations have slowed recovery to a halt, while Yazda, one of the most important Yezidi charities in the KRG, was forcibly shuttered by authorities.

Other religious and ethnic minorities have also come under attack for attracting the ire of the KRG. Assyrians and Syriacs, members of the Aramaic-speaking indigenous Christian churches of the region, have ethnic tensions with Kurds dating back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the British occupation of the region. As the KRG nears secession, many Assyrian and Syriac residents of the contested Nineveh Plains have complained of illegal property confiscations and other violations of their rights, aimed at forcing them to leave.

Beyond the ethnic element, the leadership of the KRG has shown disturbingly authoritarian tendencies.

Since the end of a bloody Kurdish civil war in 1994, the two major parties of the KRG have been the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The Democratic Party, which is widely seen as the personal dominion of the wealthy Barzan family, is currently in power; however, a populist third party called The Movement for Change has recently upset this balance of power.

Despite the expiration of his term in 2013, President Mesd Barzan has refused to step down. Instead, the Democratic Party forced through a highly controversial two-year extension, and when that expired in 2015, physically prevented opposition legislators and cabinet members from entering the capital.

Parliament has been suspended indefinitely, in what many Change Movement and Patriotic Union supporters see as an unconstitutional coup dtat. Now holding absolute powers, the Barzan family and the Democratic Party have treated the KRG as their personal dictatorship. Protests have been suppressed by force, and opposition journalists have been arrested, tortured, and killed. It is no coincidence that many important officials are named Barzan, such as Mesds nephew Nrvan, who is Speaker of Parliament.

This concentration of power in one family has also lead to an artificial concentration of wealth.

Ron Pauls assertion that foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country and giving it to the rich people of a poor country certainly holds true for the KRG.

Despite the billions of [taxpayer] dollars in foreign aid poured into Iraqi Kurdistan, the KRG itself remains $18 billion in debt. While teachers go months without receiving a salary from the government, and pensions dry up, the Kurdish Democratic Party has used foreign aid to buy votes with a mix of cronyism and welfare.

These problems are particularly relevant to libertarian discussions on secession. While the KRG is certainly an improvement over the genocidal regime of Saddam Hussein, the total stranglehold of the Kurdish Democratic Party has the potential to return full-blown tyranny to the region. Local control is not necessarily good for liberty if local leaders do not respect the rights of their people.

The United States may have to continue funding Kurdish groups, including the KRG, as the area recovers from the scourge of ISIS. However, such support should not extend to a blank check for an authoritarian regime. Ultimately, Rand Pauls proposal falls victim to the same simplistic view of events as interventionism does.

Like Loading...

See the rest here:
Arm the Kurds? Whose Kurds? - Being Libertarian (blog)

New York Times

The Libertarian Party officially against Donald Trump Border Wall Orlando Political Observer The Libertarian National Committee published a statement on Friday, officially opposing the wall President Donald Trump has approved that will be constructed on the southern Mexican Border. The Wall has been one of Trump most controversial decisions ... Top Democrats Voted For The Border Wall Trump Is BuildingThe Libertarian Republic all 4,936 news articles »

Read this article:
The Libertarian Party officially against Donald Trump Border Wall - Orlando Political Observer

President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order Friday that suspended the entry of refugees into the United States for 120 days, and barred any form of entry from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days.

The seven predominantly Muslim countries are Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

The Order creates an apparent conflict of interest, as none of the countries involved in these executive orders include countries where the Trump Organization does business. The Trump Organization has business in over 20 countriesacross the globe.

This seems to suggest that President Trump could be attempting to avoid making enemies with countries that his organization benefits from, and that he may use the presidency to pursue the advancement of the Trump Organization as opposed to the advancement of free markets.

Trump justified the Order by saying, we want to ensure that we are not admitting into the country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country, and deeply love our people.

While Trump has officially stepped down fromevery other office he holds, which number over 400, this doesnt separate him completely from the possibility of using his power to protect his business interests, especially since he put his sons Eric and Don Jr. in charge of the Trump Organization.

Libertarians were already suspicious of Trump due to the possibility of discrimination on the basis of religion. Trump hasalsostated that persecuted Christian refugees would get priority in entering the country.

If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible, said Trump in an interviewwith CBN News. And the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.

Just prior to signing the Order, Trump said that we must never forget the lessons of 9/11, nor the heroes who lost their lives at the Pentagon, yet he is leaving Saudi Arabia, the country that 15 of the 19 9/11 attackers came from, off of the visa ban list. The Trump Organization have sizable business intersets in Saudi Arabia.

Photo Credit: Daniel Huizinga

This post was written by Nicholas Amato.

The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.

Nicholas Amato is the News Editor at Being Libertarian. Hes an undergraduate student at San Jose State University, majoring in political science and minoring in journalism.

Like Loading...

More:
Trump's Visa Ban Apparent Conflict of Interest - Being Libertarian (blog)

During the Republican presidential primary in 2012, Saturday Night Live, in their parody of the debate, had a questioner ask the actor playing candidate Ron Paul as to whether he would rescue puppies from a burning building; to whit, he replied, No. Its none of my business.

Jokes, as Groucho Marx tells us, are opinions presented entertainingly. The portrayal of a heartless Paul is no doubt how the mainstream media views libertarianismas a kind of reckless freedom without consequences (even right-wingers like Dinesh DSouza have contributed to this perception).

But libertarianism does have a social conscience, as evidenced by its history.

Thomas Jefferson, in many ways the father of libertarianism, formulated an individualist philosophy whose paramount goal was not only protecting citizens from unwarranted state power, but also ensuring that elected officials represent everyone and not for special interests. Thus he argued that farmers should be in office rather than businessmen. For in Jeffersons mind, farmers were truly independent because they owned their own land and thus not in thrall to a landlord and a mortgage as were businessmen. Thus as politicians, farmers could not be bought; businessmen legislators could, especially from businesses they had invested in.

The immediate riposte to Jeffersons theory was that it was designed to protect his own interest as a slave-holder. But he was uncomfortably aware of how individualism-crushing the institution was for blacks and sought to end slavery. As a slaveholder, he was aware of how much the institution needed new territories to surviveand sought to contain it assuring its eventual collapse, by supporting the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 which did not allow slavery to extend west. As President, he added to his containment theory by ending the federal slave trade.

The bible of libertarians was and is F. A Hayeks The Road To Serfdom, published in the collectivist year of 1944. An Austrian economist who fled Hitler, Hayek wrote this defense of laissez-faire economics not to fatten wallets, but out of concerns for individual liberty. Planned economies, he asserted, weakened the desire for liberty and allowed the power-hungry in society government control, the result of which is the concentration camp and the Gulag. Hayeks preoccupation with individual liberty was so apparent that even socialists like George Orwell found value in the economists thesis.

Nor have libertarians been content to sit on the sidelines while great wrongs are occurring. Milton Friedman, an official in the Nixon administration, helped end a draft that was forcing young men into the cauldron of Vietnamso much for not saving puppies. Such moments like this have convinced even leftists like Christopher Hitchens of the value of the libertarian ideal.

One of the few perceptions both social conservatives and liberals share is that libertarianism has no morality. But as shown above, they have one; they just object to forcing it on other people, through laws and policies.

Original post:
Libertarian Morality - The Liberty Conservative

Taxation is theft is an oft-repeated phrase among libertarians, and one that is met with shock, disdain or ridicule from non-libertarians who have not thought about the subject very thoroughly, or who have never questioned the institutions and systems that govern our lives today. But as libertarians, we firmly and actively question the powers and even the very existence of the institutions that govern our lives and the system that gives them life. In keeping with that libertarian virtue, I would like to present a proposal, an alternative if you will, to the present monetary and financial system. I would like, specifically, to present an alternative proposal to the present system of taxation and public spending, which, of course, requires an alternative to our present system of banking and money creation.

In a truly libertarian society, there would be no taxation of any kind. The main purpose of taxation is to garner public funds for public spending. Of course, most of that public revenue goes to service interest on government borrowings. It may also be noted that it is immoral to take from the earnings of people, stealing from the fruits of their labours or ingenuity for whatever purpose or activity. And at the same time, just as it is ridiculous for a sovereign government to borrow money, I believe it is equally ridiculous for a sovereign government, under a fiat monetary system, to have to rely on taxation for funds to finance public works.

I believe in government issued fiat money; I do not believe gold or the gold standard would allow for mobility and prosperity in todays world because so much gold today is concentrated in so few hands, and central banks have helped to confiscate gold over to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for loans to their respective countries. So, let me present my simple and humble proposal for an alternative to the present monetary system, banking system, taxation and public spending. I hope I can keep it simple and I will do so in the following points:

I believe this is one way to fund public works and circulate money without debt or taxation, and it also provides a healthy way to check inflation and deflation. It also allows normal banking practices such as lending and depositing, but all private business must be transacted on the sole risk of the concerned parties. Hence, interest rates on deposits may even be 0, depending on the creativity and business skill of the concerned bank.

* Kitdor Halari Blah was raised and lives in Shillong, India, and is a graduate in commerce from St. Anthonys College. Presently serving in a Regional Rural Bank as Manager.

Like Loading...

See the rest here:
Tender For Tender - Being Libertarian (blog)