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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RON BL who wrote (279247)	7/23/2002 1:56:53 AM
From: Doug R	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

also from mises.org The third pillar of classical liberalism is peace. This means that there can be no love of war, and, when it occurs, it cannot be seen as heroic, but only as tragic for everyone. Yet we continue to hear how war is good for the economy, even though it always and everywhere misdirects resources and destroys them. Even the victor, Mises pointed out, loses. For "war," said Randolph Bourne, "is the health of the state." So is empire. Americans opposed an alien Soviet presence in our hemisphere. Yet we never consider how people in Japan, to take just one example, may feel about large numbers of American troops in their country. By far the largest cause of crime in Okinawa and the rest of Japan is American troops. But do our troops and planes and ships and nuclear weapons "defend" Japan? From whom? No, we continue to occupy the country 51 years after the end of World War II for purposes of control. If you want to discover the real character of a man, forget about what he says about himself, and look at his dealings with other people. The same is true of a government. We can forget its claims; simply look at how it treats others. The classical liberal state is one that protects the rights of its citizens to trade with foreign peoples. It does not pine for foreign conflicts of any kind. It does not, for example, demand that foreign countries buy the products of influential U.S. manufacturers, as Kodak is demanding, backed by U.S. military power, that Japan buy its film. Neither does the truly liberal society send government aid to foreign countries, bribe or arrest or kill their rulers, tell other governments what kind of country they should have, or get involved in global schemes to impose welfare rights on the world. Yet these are all actions the U.S. has undertaken as normal policy since the 1930s. Our rulers seem to think that they must be bribing someone, bombing someone, or both. Otherwise we risk falling into the dreaded "isolationism." Jonathan Kwitney illustrated American foreign policy this way: he asks us to imagine that every few months we take a walk down the block, knocking on every door. At one house, we announce to our neighbor, "I like you, I approve of you, here's $1,000." At the next house, we do the same thing. But at the third house, we say, "I don't like you, I don't approve of you." Then we reach under our coat, pull out a sawed-off 12 gauge shotgun, and blow him and his family away. So we go, down the block, every few months, handing out money to some people, death to others, and making our decisions based on the interests we have at the moment, with no clear rules. My guess is that we would not be very popular. Think about that the next time you see some "anti-American" rally on television. These people might be receiving our foreign aid, but they might also think they could be the next Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, or Panama.