From an exchange on Twitter.
Jeremy Kauffman @jeremykauffman
https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1852719133915263364
If you ever wonder why you want to center a liberty movement around an ethic rather than an ethnicity, consider these two people
Robert P. Murphy @BobMurphyEcon
https://x.com/BobMurphyEcon/status/1852822312359518681
again, I have whiplash from your posts. You are literally the single libertarian I most associate with racialism and literal attempts to rehabilitate eugenics. Okay, I have processed that about you. And yet now you’re lamenting that some people focus on ethnicity and not ethics?
Jeremy Kauffman @jeremykauffman
https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1853044417210294347
A libertarian society will be majority white.
It will (or could) contain a minority of asians, hispanics, and jews, with a sliver of black people.
These are just statistical truths. Libertarians should feel comfortable saying this as easily as “men commit more crimes than women”.
This is not a suggestion that race is deterministic, any more than the above statement about gender is. Nor have I ever made such a suggestion. Sometimes women murder!
I am interested in living in a society that is majority libertarian. If we select for libertarians, we will not get an equal racial mixture.
Since I live in New Hampshire where libertarians are concentrating in absurd numbers, it’s important that Free Staters (libertarians in NH) feel comfortable with the above truths. I’ve tried to normalize them in our community in advance so we don’t freak out about them later.
I’ve never said “only whites can be libertarian”, “only white people should come to New Hampshire”, or anything close to this.
I’ve consistently advocated for libertarians of any race to come here. I point out ethnic differences so that we understand the results we’ll get, as well as understand where and how to market.
I’m sometimes asked “why not just be a white nationalist?”. This post, as well as the thread that started it pointing out how superior Lily Tang Williams is to Maggie Goodlander, is an explanation of why.
Stephan Kinsella @NSKinsella
https://x.com/NSKinsella/status/1853103856181297395
“A libertarian society will be majority white. It will (or could) contain a minority of asians, hispanics, and jews, with a sliver of black people. These are just statistical truths.”
News to me. Most white people are stupid socialists like most non-white people. I don’t see any obvious correlation between race and libertarian-ness. Where are you getting this statistic from?
Jeremy Kauffman @jeremykauffman
https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1853107290481500254
The best study I’ve seen on libertarians by race is this PRRI 2013 survey:
https://www.prri.org/research/2013-american-values-survey/
Stephan Kinsella @NSKinsella
https://x.com/NSKinsella/status/1853113126570299508
How does a current factoid about the current racial makeup of libertarians support your assertion: “A libertarian society will be majority white.”
Let’s say that from 2009 to 2024 99% of bitcoiners are whites. This would not justify the assertion “in the future 99% of bitcoiners would be white.” You would need an argument, someting connecting whiteness with bitcoinness.
For libertarianism, I can imagine some arguments you could supply (but have not, afaik) that connect “whiteness” with “being libertarian.” For example here is one possible argument: libertarianism requires high intelligence as well as a propensity for low-time preference, since it requires abstract thinking, curiosity, courage, the ability to understand complex historical, economic, and sociological concepts. These characteristics do not guarantee libertarian views, not sufficient, but they are arguably necessary. In short, libertarians are “superior” beings and only a subset of humans can ever superior enough to be libertarians.
Whites are superior in terms of IQ and the other related factors which explains why most libertarians are white and it also is why it’s reasonable to predict that going forward, the libertarian superior supermen will predominately come from the white race and only occasionally from the few outliers among the non-white races.
So that would be a somewhat coherent argument, but then it would be explicitly racialist, if not racist, and also it would be based on unfounded racist assumptions; it would be incomplete. I myself think this is a ridiculous view, but if you put it this way it lays bare the naked racialism underlying the claims that are now only implicit, and it would make clearer the assumptions your racialist reasoning is relying on that you could then be asked to prove. What’s next, pointing to unprincipled Popperian scientistic Charles Murray’s pseudoscientific work on race and IQ?
My personal view is that humans are basically all sapient and smart enough to grasp common sense concepts about the benefits of liberty, trade, property rights, and that there is no obvious intelligence barrier to any group being libertarian. In the present only a tiny minority of whites are libertarian anyway? If the “whites are superior” reasoning is right it doesn’t explain why 98% of all whites are still inferior statist-socialist idiots.
If liberty is ever to be achieved it will only be because a large mass of people have come to understand the practical and moral benefits of liberty. If it is ever achieved, it proves that it was not low IQ or intelligence that was the barrier. And if it’s not IQ then there is no reason to think only whites would be the ones escaping the socialist-statist way of thinking.
My view is that liberty may be possible. We do not yet know. If it emerges it won’t be because we (white?) libertarians were running around promoting it, but because it works and over time more and more people came to understand this. For example until the USSR fell in 1991 many people could still argue socialism was superior to capitalism. But that was a teaching moment and now millions of people are aware that free markets and private property work better and are essential to human production and prosperity. They learned this from watching history not from reading Hazlitt.
In my view the main hope for liberty is that because the primary source for wealth is the accumulation of technological knowledge, the human race can keep getting richer every generation. The richer we get the less excuse or need for aggression/crime, and the more people can afford to be “liberal” (cosmpolitan, toleratan, empathetic) and also to devote some time to the study of economics and poltiics. Also they will be witnessing in real time the benefits of capitalism, technology, freedom, information, knowledge, individualism, tolerance, cosmopolitanism–all little teaching moments that accumulate over time. Just as we see happening with bitcoin; more and more people will adopt it as its track record gets longer and they get comfortable with it. And so on. To my mind this is the only hope for liberty, but it also means that there is little we, as activists, can do to bring it about. All we can do is hope, and wait. Which also means that what we can do is recognize this fact and devote sufficient time and attention in our lives in a quasi-free society to trying to survive and flourish in this real world. That means not expecting activism to work, at least not any time soon; accepting reality as it is working to prosper in the face of the illiberal challenges we face.
In any case I don’t expect to see substantial liberty any time soon and if it’s ever achieved I don’t expect it to be “mostly white”.
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