Update: I keep forgetting to do this! The Big Ship and the Wise Old Owl is free for another three days or so.

Yesterday, I thought it was safe to echo a chart on FB showing the relative economic freedom of states in the US. Note, that it was a picture/meme and I didn’t dwell very deeply on their premises. Some of the placements seemed funny – Colorado as high as 17? Really? – but most in general accorded to the “feel” of states I’ve lived in or where I have friends. So I echoed, having seen it while I was logging in to pm a friend.

Why didn’t you guys warn me that we’re in full saturnalia, and fools are running around with underwear on head pretending to be kings? Sheesh, you’d think you would.

The first entrant was a man yelling that the freedom of these states was just freedom of corporations to screw the little man, and we needed more regulations, more, more, more. We’ll ignore for a moment that like soylent green corporations are people, and that people work for and in corporations, and that in fact corporate profits feed retirement funds.

Instead, let’s think of what more regulations do. You see, more regulations means more unintended consequences, and more need for lawyers and corporate accountants and stuff. And that means that more regulations makes it hard for small businesses, be they single proprietorships or corporations (for instance, yours truly is two corporations. It was needed to get my full evil card) to compete with large corporations and ultimately creates a crony capitalist system.

When some of this was pointed to Notary supergenius (don’t look at me. He’s the one who called himself Notary as a first name.) he linked his own blog in which he explains Ayn Rand was a soviet agent bringing libertarian fascism/communism to the US. You only think I am joking.

When we laughed, pointed fingers and made duck noises, he called us mean, said we were attacking his profession (instead of his idiocy in using it as a badge!) and flounced off, deleting his posts as he went, in case someone suspected he was a fool. (Of course this gave the great and magnificent Larry Correia, who intervened this morning, to reconstruct his posts from the replies and add in moon ferrets which, I must say, made Notary Supergenius sound SO MUCH more coherent.)

At this point we were mobbed (trust me, the man is a mob) by this lefty who thinks posting colorful charts is a discussion, and who doesn’t get anything about the statistics he quotes. Then (heaven help me!) he wanted my opinion of TR’s trust busting. I told him I didn’t think very highly of TR’s politics, but I haven’t researched it in any detail, so I wasn’t going to pronounce.

At this point a gentleman who has written for Baen came in. I will not name him because – eye roll – should I ever lose my mind I’d hope people extend me the like courtesy. ( My grandmother used to say “May G-d grant me my mind up to the hour of my death” — she lost it the last two days, but it was still a pretty good run. And I pray likewise.) But he is the proximate reason for this post. Which is why we’ll leave him for last.

At this point a gentleman with a German name came in and told me that free markets are unstable and self-destruct, which is why they need government to regulate them, but this doesn’t make it socialist, etc… At which point I pointed out the free market just is. It doesn’t self-destroy, it changes to accommodate stupid regulations, but it exists everywhere.

I meant, of course, the free market that exists say under the name of “black market” in socialist paradises.

However, this second Supergenius! Self-trapped immediately by telling me that ahah, he’d got me. There has never been a real free market without regulation anywhere, and that’s how we know it needs regulation or it would self-destruct.

You know, my desk is golden oak. You’d think it wouldn’t dent that way. Do these people hear themselves. “This thing that never existed is unstable.” Um… ‘mkay. That isn’t even good Science Fiction.

Anyway, Larry Correia showed up this morning with the armor of righteousness and the sarcasm of nuclear power and all the snow flake seals have run and hid, which is good, because it means I can now write. (It’s already twelve o’clock, not a whore is dressed, the pots aren’t emptied, and the streets are full of Spanish Sailors – found in an old phrase book – or IOW “I must finish this d*mn book and I will not spend my time dissecting internet trolls.”)

BUT to return to number three screamer on the thread. This one came in hot and heavy, yelling that the “free” states weren’t free. They were owned by the Koch brothers. And besides, the Koch brothers are buying this nation’s politics and scream, scream, scream.

When I see “Koch brothers” in a political argument, what I see the person posting doing is this:

I looked up – not hard – a chart which told me the Kochs are actually the number 23 and 24 donors in the nation when it comes to political causes. Most of the others are above them are of course liberal. Which I suppose is why the liberals fixate on the libertarian Kochs. (Who are, as we all know soviet spies for libertarian fascism, just like Ayn Rand. We also know that Freedom is slavery, poverty is wealth, and Eurasia is a cherry pancake.)

But then I wondered why the liberals always need a bad guy in their narrative of the world.

Look, I don’t like Obama very much. (Eh!) And when it comes to liberal journalists who try to suppress the truth and paint it with lies, I could quote puppet masters “I’d turn my gun away from a puppet master to shoot one of the renegades” (metaphorically, of course.)

But the thing is I know where they come from (the concerted attack on western civilization) and what they stand for (a series of idiocy rooted in Rosseau and Marx) and I acknowledge that they are a social trend of sorts, one that has be reckoned with.

The only thing I hate about them is their total inability to process argument, and their insistence on screaming memes and talking points to protect themselves from argument.

But then I sort of expect this from a cult, which is what they are. You can’t be argued out of a position you weren’t argued but instead brainwashed and “felt” (“feeled”) into.

So why do they need to personalize the “enemy” as one person, and one person selected more or less at random. For instance, why did they paint George W. Bush – a Christian socialist at heart) – as a wild-eyed laissez faire guy? And why do they make the Kochs – Libertarians – as “fascists.”

And then I realized it doesn’t matter. They need someone to hate precisely because their ideas don’t work in the real world at all. So a wrecker must be identified, who is keeping the utopia from coming true – otherwise their ideas would be false and that’s impossible, of course – and the characteristics attributed to him which are most convenient to the left discourse.

This happens more or less automatically. One of them identifies someone (George Bush because he kept Al Gore from stealing the election. How dare he?) and starts screaming and the other ones fall behind because they desperately need someone to blame for the abject failure of their policies. Hence, we get these unreasoning, mob-screaming fests about the hated name apropos of anything, whenever they feel their beliefs are threatened.

These two minutes of hate would be funny, if it weren’t for the fact that real people are on the other side of them and COULD get hurt.

In fact, in every communist attempted utopia in the world, they have been hurt, by the massive scores. Entire classes of people – Kulaks, Ukrainians, Middle Men – were designated “wreckers and spoilers” and the graves filled with their corpses.

And that, THAT is the worst feature of the communist/socialist/progressive beliefs. Because they THINK they’re scientific (they wouldn’t know real science if it bit them on the buttocks) and that their victory is pre-ordained, they can’t examine their mistakes, backtrack or admit error.

Instead, they must forge ever “Forward” as their societies collapse, their economies falter, and Emmanuel Goldstein must be killed again and again.

And that is why we must stand up and say “no more.”

I couldn’t care less about the Koch brothers. Never met them, though a friend of mine once worked for them. I’m sure they couldn’t care less about the pointing and shrieking either.

BUT I don’t care to have people arbitrarily declared objects of hate.

Leave Eurasia alone. Calm down and go look for your paradise in the ever-after where men are different. Found the Convent of our Lady of Perpetual Redistribution and show us how communism can totally work on your own time and dime.

Just leave us the f*ck alone, and stop screaming for the blood of innocents. We don’t care how crazy YOU are. We just don’t want to be forced to dance in your macabre saturnalia.