In some physics article I read a while back, the author made the point that a quantum leap is literally the smallest possible jump that can be made in the state of something; so it’s a bit strange it’s used in common parlance to denote a huge, dramatic change.
So now, “you’re a bigot” apparently is the new way of saying, “I don’t agree with you”. Example 1, 2, 3. Disagreement, even personal dislike, is one thing. Ungrounded or false or even speculative accusations of racism, bigotry, anti-semitism, especially in today’s hypersensitive world, are completely beyond the pale. You will note for example that I never have resorted to making fun of, or even referring to, Palmer’s orientation, as an example. For one, it is not relevant. For two, it would be unnecessarily cruel and mean. Third, it is irresponsible and malevolent to attempt to damage someone that you disagree with; especially someone who is clearly at least in significant part a libertarian ally.
For those who have so little control of their emotion or sense of right and wrong that they will refer to a great and decent man as a “bigot” or “racist”, I have decided not to converse with such despicable wastes of quarks as if they are engaged in civilized discourse. For they are not. They have gleefully demonstrated themselves to be human scum.
My baby boy likes raisins. The little ones in the tiny boxes. I espied a tub of “jumbo seedless organic raisins” in Whole Foods so bought them for him. I had never seen them before. He likes them okay but I discovered that they resemble dead cockroaches, especially when he leaves them on the floor.
Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe is under attack by the PC police. As suggested by David Beito, all scholars and academics in favor of academic freedom, and all lovers of liberty and Hoppe’s supporters are urged to follow Beito’s suggestions to help support Hoppe and the cause of academic freedom. Contact info for people to email/fax (here).
In addition to Beito’s suggestions, publicity from the likes of Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, O’Reilly, Hannity & Colmes, Rush Limbaugh, Drudge can only help. Write them too…
See also
The Ordeal of Hoppe (with Jeffrey Tucker), The Free Market, Volume 25, Number 4 (April 1, 2005)
The Ordeal of Hoppe and Defend Hoppe
From my the comments on Steve Horwitz, Thoughts on Sciabarra (archived):
It is not “government” per se that is the problem, as Tibor Machan has noted. We can say that a free society with no states has “government” but no states. The question is whether there is a state. A state is an entity that both taxes people and forcibly outlaws competition. There is no reason to say that private justice agencies would have these characteristics. See on this, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Private Production of Defense, http://www.mises.org/journals/scholar/Hoppe.pdf
[Update: see The State is not the government; we don’t own property; scarcity doesn’t mean rare; coercion is not aggression]
“You can call it a non-government, but the entity with the most capacity for force is going to BE a government as far as I’m concerned.”
But this assumes there is one dominant agency (even then, I would not assume it’s going to “be a government” [state]).
Horwitz: “I don’t think the case for anarchism is completely convincing.”
Does there need to be a “case” for anarchy? Anarchy simply means the absence of an institutionalized means of aggression. If one is already against aggression, why does a “case” need to be made that it is good to avoid having an institutionalized source of aggressoin? And if one is not against aggression… to whom is the “case” to be made, and by whom?
Libertarians should not have to be defensive and prove their “contention” that they have rights. If someone wants to attack you, you don’t have some obligation to first “prove” your rights; rather, you simply fight back as best you can–hopefully obliterate the uncivilized naked ape who is attacking you. Likewise, the question re anarchy is whether the *statists* have proved their “case” that the state is justified. If the state–which obviously uses aggression–is not shown to be justified, then it is what it appears to be: a mafia that has fooled knaves and dupes into believing it is “legitimate”. The person who is NOT fooled has no obligation to “justify” why he is not fooled.
“A case needs to be made because in the real world, states are overwhelmingly preponderant. This is particularly so in industrialized societies, which have never to my knowledge had a functioning anarchy.”
Well… I don’t see what the argument is here. Murder is prevalent in every country and society on earth. That does not mean a “case” needs to be made by those who oppose murder; rather, the opposite is the case (no pun).
“As to the state employing force, of course it does.”
Of course, I said it’s an institutionalized source of aggression, not force. Libertarians don’t equate aggression with force. We are not pacivists. It is aggression–initiated force–that is prohibited, not all force. Responsive force–force in response to initiated force–is not aggresion.
Campbell: “Your line of argument assumes that defense agencies or protection agencies under free-market anarchy would not themselves be institutionalized sources of aggession. Indeed, that they could not be institutionalized sources of aggression.”
I don’t think it assumes that at all. I simply say that states, because they necessarily commit aggression, are therefore immoral and unjustified. The recognition of this fact does not imply that a PDA would not be a state–what it implies is that IF a PDA is an institutional source of aggressoin, it is then a state or like a state in that it is immoral and unjustified.
Recognizing that something is aggression and immoral has nothing to do with a prediction about whether it’s possible to eradicate it. I can state that all murder is wrong and all murder should stop or be stopped, and this normative proposition is not contradicted by the *fact that* murder will not be completely stopped.
“People who don’t already agree with you are most unlikely to grant that assumption.”
As I’ve noted before, libertarians always want for some reason to convert a substantive issue into a question about tactics and strategy–they want to judge a statement’s validity or truth by asking whether it’s a good strategical argument in the “fight” for liberty. I don’t know if you are doing this, but it seems like you’re hinting at it.
1. Calling a government a mafia is not an argument. It is merely a slur, and I do not feel the need to respond to it.
2. When there is not a dominant agency, there is almost inevitably civil war: How else do you expect multiple agencies all employing force to compete with each other–if not by force?
The mafia employs both retributive and initiatory force all the time, but if possible I would move it toward only the first type.
… the entity with the most capacity for force is going to BE a mafia as far as I’m concerned. After that, the only question is whether it is a good or a bad mafia.
When I wrote “force,” do note that I did not write “initiatory force.”
The state employs both retributive and initiatory force all the time, but if possible I would move it toward only the first type.
Robert Campbell’s analysis of anarcho-capitalism above more or less sums up what I believe of it too: You can call it a non-government, but the entity with the most capacity for force is going to BE a government as far as I’m concerned. After that, the only question is whether it is a good or a bad government.
Stephan,
Your line of argument assumes that defense agencies or protection agencies under free-market anarchy would not themselves be institutionalized sources of aggession. Indeed, that they >i>could</i> not be institutionalized sources of aggression.
People who don’t already agree with you are most unlikely to grant that assumption.
Robert Campbell
“If one is already against aggression, why does a “case” need to be made that it is good to avoid having an institutionalized source of aggressoin?”
A case needs to be made because in the real world, states are overwhelmingly preponderant. This is particularly so in industrialized societies, which have never to my knowledge had a functioning anarchy.
As to the state employing force, of course it does. Certain people are always going to be more inclined to force than others, and the state is a clever device for making them fight against one another–state versus mafia, state versus gangs, state versus terrorists. Without the state, those who incline toward force would perhaps join one of these other institutions. The state is a two-way check on violence, and that’s another reason why I think it’s worth keeping.
Historically, it is preposterous to say that statism is an early mistake of liberalism–as if any bona fide theory of anarchism existed in the days of Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke. It just didn’t happen that way. Liberalism has almost always contained a theory of the state in some form, and anarchists have generally considered this a fundamental difference between themselves and liberals.
You may argue that anarchism is preferable to statism–and even to a minarchist liberalism–but that’s quite another issue.
Statism is an early mistake of liberalism, but that doesn’t make it the core.
I completely agree with Dr. Horwitz on both counts. However, I think there must be a much firmer distinction between the terms “anarchist” and “libertarian.” Libertarianism as a doctrine is simply the extension of liberalism. At its core, it holds a belief in the state, albeit an aggressively limited one. This is in distinction with anarchism (or anarcho-capitalism, or market anarchism, etc.). While there is certainly a fair amount of agreement between the two groups, they are two distinct concepts and for the purpose of verbal clarity, there should be a strict delineation.
Comments to Sciabbarra, “Capitalism”: The Known Reality:
Roderick, what term do you prefer to describe “socialism”–I have always liked Hoppe’s definition of socialism as a system of institutionalized aggression against private property. This seems to get to the essence of what is wrong with “Socialist” or “communist” societies, and put this way it shows that all non-minimalist states are to a degree “socialist”–theocracies, welfare-states, what have you. And in Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, he indeed analysis Socialism Russian-Style, Socialism Social-Democratic Style, the Socialism of Conservatism, the Socialism of Social Engineering, etc. ( http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications.php#soc-cap )
Curious if you bifurcate institutions or interpersonal actions or laws into 2 types, this way, and if so, what labels you apply.
To me, the word used is not that crucial. It’s just semantics. What is important is that the single concept (whatever word tags it) identifies something common to all forms of (what I’m calling here as socialism), even though there are also significant differences. I suppose criminal or criminalism could be used, but this implies the existing legal code outlaws it; obviously, the state’s laws are “legal”. I think the trick is to realize that there are both private/individual forms of aggression, i.e., crime; and public forms of it, more organized forms of it…. the state in all its variants is thus some type of socialism or public, institutionalized aggression.
Not sure waht the best label is, but there are commonalities among all public forms of it, and even between public and private types of aggression or border-invasion. Maybe we call them property snatchers, or second-comers. I don’t know.
I usually hesitate to sign onto discussion boards that require logins, because I’m horrible at keeping track of the passwords. But this is too interesting to pass up.
A very thought-provoking post, Chris–and some great discussion in the comment thread. I’m currently digesting a blog post on the main points here, but thought I’d add my $0.02 on this interesting discussion of the term “socialism.”
Mises’ equation of “socialism” with state ownership/planning was ahistorical IMO, and flew directly in the face of earlier usage.
Even Friedrich Engels, arguably the father of “vulgar Marxism,” only saw state involvement in the economy as a step toward socialism, or maybe even a precondition–not as socialism itself. Even for Engels, “socialism” still carried its earlier meaning of a system in which the actual workers exercised real political and/or economic power. As an unreconstructed Tuckerite, I still hold onto the earlier usage of “socialist” myself, along with the “free market” label.
Engels argued in Anti-Duhring that state ownership and control might serve as a bridge to socialism, if workers seized political power. But if capitalists retained power in the state, state ownership and control would function as a component of an overall capitalist system of class-rule. Engels saw the Junker Socialism or “gas light socialism” of his day as just another example of the capitalists acting through their own executive committee, the state, to stabilize and plan capitalism and make their profits more secure. And he certainly would have ridiculed the use of the term “National Socialist” by the corporatist regimes of a later generation.
For Engels, the mixed economy had a dialectical character. The capitalists played a leading role in creating it for their own purposes; but some aspects of it (like the welfare state) were created at least partially in response to pressure from outside, from the working class. And although both state ownership/planning and the welfare state might be used by capitalists as an instrument of their own class-domination, the state became an arena of struggle in which the working class contested capitalist control over the mixed economy and attempted to redirect it to their own purposes.
So even for a state socialist like Engels, whether statism was a precursor of socialism or only an intensifier of capitalist exploitation depended on the outcome of the class struggle in the political arena.
The issue is further complicated by the assertion of Rosa Luxembourg and other assorted libertarian communists that the statist system implemented in the USSR was not “socialist” at all, because it was in its essence a class system for exploiting the worker. Luxembourg coined the term “state capitalist” to describe it, with the Party apparat replacing the old capitalists as owners of the means of production and extracting surplus value through the state. The Frankfurt School people argued that Marxist-Leninist systems were a post-capitalist form of class society, which they called “bureaucratic collectivism.” As Luxembourg put it, a post-capitalist collectivist society was inevitable–the only question was whether it would be socialism or barbarism.
Me, I like Immanuel Goldstein’s term “oligarchical collectivism.”
Sorry for the long rant.
Stephan,
I agree that getting a precise and theoretically useful concept is more important than the specific word you use to tag it; I’m perfectly willing to talk with people who use “socialism” in a Hoppean sense and I agree that questions of lexicography shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of analysis and discussion.
But, granted all that, I also think that it can be worthwhile to look at how the choice of a particular word for your stipulate definition eases or obscures communication with others about the content of the theory. I mean, I take it that Hoppe didn’t think of himself as offering a pure neologism–if he did, then he would have made up a word or phrase that doesn’t have a fixed meaning–but rather catching ahold of, and clearly setting out, what is essential to a historical common usage.
I think that’s a mistake, but you’re right that the mistake isn’t a serious mistake as far as the development of the theory is concerned. But there are questions as to what sort of problems in the gaps between the historical usage of “socialism” and Hoppe’s (and other 20th century libertarians’) stipulative definition of “socialism” might cause for the communication and application of the theory. (In particular, I’d argue that the use of the term in such a way that libertarians become *by definition* anti-“socialist” has encouraged libertarians to overestimate their proper distance from the Left and even more substantially underestimate their proper distance from the Right. If this can partly be traced to the Left and libertarians simply talking past each other when they use terms like “capitalism” and “socialism” (in ways that libertarians did NOT use them in, say, the 19th century), then that may be a reason to reconsider the words. Not necessarily a decisive reason, but at least a prima facie one.
As for what word to use… well, again, what’s wrong with “statism?” Doesn’t that already mean institutionalized aggression against private property, especially for a specifically anarcho-capitalist libertarian like Hoppe? Or if you think that runs the risk of making the account seem tautologous at first glance (“states are bad because they’re statist”), why not just use the term “institutionalized coercion” instead? Or “a racket,” if you want something a bit punchier. These are all terms that get the point across clearly and wouldn’t raise any objections from even the most ardent Tuckerite.
The use of these terminologies leave us with quite an important issue, and an important opportunity as well. The pre-Austrian (and by that I mean prior to the introduction of Mises to American circles of scholars and free-marketeers in the late 1940’s) economic thinkers were Thomas Nixon Carver (who was known as “Mr. Capitalism” at Harvard, where he taught) was the author of many books and articles on economic theory, and Carl Snyder, primarily with the publication of his magnificant book, “Capitalism, the Creator.”
It may be well worth reviewing Charles T. Sprading’s influence in popularizing the “libertarianism” from the time of the publication of his “Liberty and the Great Libertarians” and the usage that he made of the term. His emphasis on “mutualism” and “cooperation” may well be keys in helping to resolve, or possibly expand, this topic.
Just a thought.
Just Ken
[email protected]
So what is it then you want to call that system? Free market, or perhaps, as I would prefer, it is some sort of Trade-ism 😉
Kinsella: “I have always liked Hoppe’s definition of socialism as a system of institutionalized aggression against private property.”
Stephan, one of the problems with this definition is that there are many clear cases of people who called themselves socialists, and were recognized as such by other folks at the time, but did not accept any kind of aggression against private property, institutionalized or otherwise, especially Benjamin Tucker and the Liberty circle in the late 19th and early 20th century. Of course, they recognized at the time, and defined themselves in opposition to, statist socialists such as Marx. But they viewed this as an internecine struggle within “Modern Socialism” over a question of means (both constitute and instrumental, for what that’s worth), and identified the State-capital nexus, not statist socialists, as the primary target of their struggle. (Of course, the seizure of the state by the most monstrous forms of state socialism in the 20th century couldn’t help but change the rhetorical stance that libertarians would take. But while the change may have been understandable, there may be good reasons to think that it’s had plenty of unfortunate consequences.)
Of course, you might say, “Well, look, they may have called themselves socialists, but if they didn’t endorse institutionalized aggression against private property then they weren’t really socialists at all; they were libertarians.” I agree that they were libertarians, but I think that conceding the term “socialists” to the Marxists and the welfare statists gives the doctrinaire pronouncements of statist butchers entirely too much credence. Just because specifically Marxist socialism was clearly ascendent from ca. 1921 onwards doesn’t mean that the Marxists have any firmer claim to determining the content of the word “socialist” than the many other competing conceptions of socialism that were common in the 19th century. If Tucker used the word “socialist” in such a way that socialism was conceptually compatible with a thoroughgoing free market (as, in fact, he did), I don’t see any reason to take Marx’s word over his as to what “socialism” means.
Or, while we’re at it, to take Hoppe’s stipulative definition over either historical conception. It’s good to point out that welfare liberalism, fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, theocracy, “progressivism,” etc. all have something importantly in common with one another. But isn’t the best word for what they have in common just “statism,” or, if you prefer, “coercion?” Why not save socialism for what its practitioners actually took it to pick out–a tradition of thought and action with the aim of placing the means of production under workers’ control–rather than expanding it (so as to encompass all other forms of statism) and contracting it (so as to eliminate many forms of anarchist socialism) so as to make it fit a concept that we already have a perfectly good word for?
In a course I took about Latin American democracies, the teacher used the term “corporatism” to refer to a historical stage in Latin America when many countries sought to promote economic development and push industrialization via very heavy government involvement in industry and partial socialization of the economy, and applied the term to this type of system in general. I used the term to explain to someone the distinction between capitalism as I believe in it and the system we have in the U.S. I said that I would consider the system we have here to be corporatism, meaning a kind of capitalism where companies compete in markets but are in bed with the government, and don’t hesitate to use government to achieve their ends when it suits them. I don’t know if using that term might help define the debate more precisely.
The terminology problem seems to come down to an attempt to capture too many axes of difference in a single term. When we examine a sociopolitical system, we can characterize it by the classes (if any) on whose behalf the political means (coercion, violence, expropriation) are used. We can characterize it by the principles on which the society is broadly organized. We can characterize it by the economic mechanisms that predominate. These axes are not totally independent, but they are also not tightly enough correlated to let a very few terms suffice.
For instance, I have generally divided societies on the first basis — the control of the political means of the state. Thus, anarchist (no political means), capitalist (holders of capital in control), socialist (representatives of “social interests” in control). But in each of these cases, plenty of social organizations and economic mechanisms could exist.
Unless we want to populate the whole three-dimensional space with technical terms that nobody will understand or remember (and I’ll admit, it’s tempting) we need to defer to the wider understanding of terms. And in the world outside of our rarified libertarian cloud, what prevails today in the US is capitalism and a voluntarily-organized society is anarchism. If those are the terms we have to work with — and for the larger discourse, they are — then I’m an unapologetic anarchist.
–G
Plus, one can be a “market liberal,” or even a “radical libertarian” (e.g., Chris) without being an anarchist. and “anti-statist” might convey merely being against statism rather than being against the state.
Rand embraced terms like “capitalism” and “selfishness” as a kind of the-hell-with-it defiance. I’m not inclined to embrace those terms, but I confess my liking for “anarchism” expresses a similar mood.
But there’s another factor. I’m a big fan of the 19th-century individualist anarchists and think they had many things right. “Anarchism” stresses libertarianism’s continuity with that tradition while “capitalism” has the reverse effect.
That’s true, and maybe I’m being inconsistent in remaining fond of “anarchism” as a term. But I do see one difference:
There are plenty of people who have no fundamental objection to the system that most libertarians call “capitalism” but who still object to the term because it has negative associations for them.
By contrast, people who have no fundamental objection to the system that I call “anarchism” tend to object to the term, when they do, only because it has negative associations for others (i.e., for people who, given their current views, wouldn’t like anarchism even if it were called something else).
Stephan, I don’t have any preferred word there. I use “state socialist” for governmental socialism, but I don’t have a term that distinguishes non-governmental-but-still-rights-violating socialism (as in the nastier versions of anarcho-socialism) from genuinely voluntary socialism (as in the nicer versions of anarcho-socialism). I’m open to suggestions!
What you say here about labels is all true – I rarely use “capitalism” with lefties because for them it’s definitionally bad — but this also goes to your use of the word “anarchism.” For pretty much everyone, that’s definitionally bad too. Not that I have any better suggestions — anti-statism? radical libertarianism? market liberalism? — but the deck is already stacked against you using the a-word.
Let me offer an example to suggest how sensitivity to where others are coming from rather than thinking in slogans can have a positive effect.
Karl Hess, jr., Randal O’Toole, Rocky Barker, and I (and possibly others) have been working from complementary directions on the idea of democratic national forest trusts as an alternative to national forests. Currently, such forests mean a substantial percentage of especially western land is under the incompetent oversight of Congress and the lunatics in the executive branch.
Democratic trusts would be free from governmental control, their boards elected by citizens who chose to join the trusts. They would be responsible for raising their own money – but would not be organized like corporations, where market prices are basically commands rather than serving as signals. There is much more to the proposal, but think a decentralized version of the National Trust of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
If they were successful, they could also be adapted to BLM lands.
The concept is voluntary, frees land from government control without thereby subjecting it to corporate control, and constructively addresses issues that many environmentalists hold dear, while also being open to local communities. It serves what we political theorists term public values. (These are different from what economists call public goods.)
For some time I have been speaking about the idea with the staff of Wild Earth, one of the best, and most influential, radical ecology journals – you know, the ones the likes of Fred Smith like to denounce as the implacable enemy of everything good. They say they will be printing an article of mine arguing for the concept.
I’ve largely stopped using the words “capitalism” and “socialism” because they’re so misleading. I still use the terms “state capitalism” and “state socialism” (both evil), but to most right-libertarians “socialism” just means “state socialism” and to most left-libertarians “capitalism” just means “state capitalism.”
That’s also why I generally describe myself as a “market anarchist” rather than an “anarcho-capitalist.”
I’ve been thinking on this issue ever since I read Fernand Braudel’s extraordinary “Civilization and Capitalism” trilogy. Braudel, a doctrinaire Marxist in aradigm and vocabulary if not quite in practice, distinguishes effortlessly between “free markets” and “capitalism” — indeed, to him they are opposites. While I had tended to look at subsidies, tarriffs, regulations, and the like as flaws in a capitalist order, I realize increasingly that these are simply epiphenomena of capitalism, and distinguish capitalism from actual free-market liberty.
I think that Marx got it right. Capitalism is the dedication of the political means to the projects of holders of capital. This is a system quite different from free markets, and is in fact doomed for largely the same reasons that Marx identified. Because at any particular moment the current capitalist classes must oppose innovations that would devalue their existing capital, they can deploy the political means to stifle such innovation. Innovation is the revolutionary class struggle; the political class opposes it with the political means. In the absence of productive innovation, efficient markets rapidly degenerate into zero-sum games. An analogous argument about diversity worsens the situation even more.
I believe that advocates of liberty and of free markets must separate themselves from this system of social organization, and I believe that it has for better or for worse taken the name “capitalism.” The efforts of revisionists like Rand notwithstanding, liberty has lost the war to define capitalism. The more that we speak of capitalism as an ideal, the more we make asses of ourselves.
I favor liberty and free markets, and their child prosperity. I oppose capitalism and socialism, and their bizarre hybrid, fascism.
That makes a lot of sense to me.
By the way, Kevin Carson’s very interesting book is the subject of an upcoming symposium issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies.
50 Cent’s new video, Disco Inferno, is amazing–just a relentless sequence of nearly naked black women shaking their large rears in the camera and topless white chicks french kissing. I suppose even MTV can’t show this. Of, course, I really object to this misogynistic objectification of women. No one should watch this. Don’t do it. (thanks to Pete Canning)
Update: now Youtube exists
From an interview with Milton Friedman (2, 3), a good story about Mises and the Mont Pelerin Society. It’s told to critique him; but to me, it shows Mises’s integrity and principles.
INTERVIEWER: Some of those debates became very, very heated. I think [Ludwig] von Mises once stormed out.
MILTON FRIEDMAN: Oh, yes, he did. Yes, in the middle of a debate on the subject of distribution of income, in which you had people who you would hardly call socialist or egalitarian — people like Lionel Robbins, like George Stigler, like Frank Knight, like myself — Mises got up and said, “You’re all a bunch of socialists,” and walked right out of the room. (laughs) But Mises was a person of very strong views and rather intolerant about any differences of opinion.
Lew Rockwell has a great discussion of all this here. All these conservatives who are in favor of social security, welfare, etc.–let’s not ourselves–they’re all a bunch of socialists!
In Provincetown Massachussets–gay nirvana–a few years ago (with my wife, okay?), a friend of a friend, an older, gay Austrian or German guy named Klaus, while unsuccessful at persuading me to do a “bump of coke” with him, did get me to admit, after getting me totally sloshed on scotch, that I was 1% gay. It made him so happy, and it’s no skin off my back. Heck, even Joe Sobran admits he’s gay, in a certain sense.
Some time ago I posted about Per Christian Malloch, a smart college kid who apparently OD’s on drugs a few years back. I had posted a few of his wacky works he had sent me, on Satanism and Amoralism. I just received a note from a friend of Per’s, Canon Pence (so-called), stumbled across my post about Per and sent me this: For Per: Collected Works of Per Malloch, compiled by Canon Pence, 10/6/2001–12/6/2001. Not necessarily recommending it, but I might as well warehouse it, as he can’t do it.
The Heroic Institute for Justice and Its Good Works, and my reply.
Palmer also posted Phony “Radicalism” from a Reactionary Confederate Revivalist (attacking his bete noire, LRC, natch), to which Daddy also replied.
***
The Heroic Institute for Justice and Its Good Works, and my reply
The Institute for Justice is one of my very favorite organizations. They litigate for liberty, for justice, for rights. The New York Times (requires simple registration) has a piece today on their work to defend the rights of property owners not to be robbed, dispossessed, and shoved out by city councils that prefer a “higher class” of subjects. The piece highlights the good work of one of my favorite warrior goddesses for liberty, Dana Berliner, shown here in a jaunty pose:
P.S. If you’ve got a few bucks after paying your taxes this year and you’re wondering where to send them….the Institute for Justice is a good place. After the Cato Institute, of course.
In my reply to the dreadful, malicious attack on Tom Woods and his new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History on the Is That Legal blog, the comments section cut my reply off, so I am posting it here so I can link to it from there.
***
Horwitz wrote:
I’m a long-time libertarian and I *cringe* when people who claim to be libertarians write stuff like this. The romance by some small quarters of the libertarian movement with the lovers of the Confederacy is an unmitigated disaster, both morally and strategically.
For anyone who frequents this blog who knows little of libertarians, and history done by those with libertarian leanings, do not start with this crap. There’s real scholarship out there.
[…]
my original comment was not about the book per se, but the wide variety of romances that the paleo right has with various racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise unsavory folks, with lovers of the Confederacy being one such group. Whether this particular book is or isn’t a species of this problem is one question, but Eric’s evidence is pretty convincing. The real question for me is why people feel the need to smear shit all over the word “libertarian” by calling themselves one and then associating with the slimy folks that they do.
Steve, it is outrageous and libelous for you to smear Dr. Woods as you do, to insinuate he is racist and anti-semitic, and not a real scholar. If you’ll read him you’ll see he’s impeccable and very learned. The tactics of of the cocktail party, rehabilitated PC libertarians–resort to ad hominem, etc.–is becoming, like that of regular PC liberals, increasingly shrill. It’s as if you guys really hate the South and Southerners just like the arrogant, New York liberal intellectuals do. I believe it’s actually this smug city-boy superiority that caused Bush to win–blue collar types who would normally be democratic are sick of being condescended to by the brie cheese set who think you have to live in a rent-conrolled apartment and go see Cats and vacation in P’town or Martha’s Vineyard to really be a person worth associating with.
It is also a bit collectivist to keep lumping people together. On the one hand, you people accuse the Rockwell crowd of being almost a cult; on the other, the diversity of opinions there and the freewheeling nature of discourse and various types of people represetned there drive you batty. I am from the South and while I personally dislike the stupid Rebel Flag displaying, Lee Greenwood Proud to be an American singing, civil war reenactment bullshit, it is loathsome when the cocktail party libertarians continue to lump people together and attribute to them others’ views, and to have a hare-trigger alert for any signs of deviation from the cocktail party model of “acceptable” opinions and to accuse any deviation as being a sign of racism etc. You guys have overussed the racism, antisemitism, etc. cards to the extent where it’s now a joke. It’s almost a badge of honor to be called that now. For a perceptive column on this, see Playing the Holocaust Card. The PC types have cried wolf too many times, they’ve shot their wad. It doesn’t work any more.
You claim Eric’s evidence is convincing. It is nothing but a libelous smear attack on a fine individual and scholar, Tom Woods, whose book, yes, does support the cause of liberty by debunking liberal and government-spread propaganda and lies.
For example, this Eric character writes of Woods,
(He has also spoken at similar meetings of other organizations, like the Southern Historical Conference and Bonnie Blue Ball, where he shared the lectern with speakers on the “Myths and Realities of American Slavery” and “Why Slaves Fought for Their South.”) … And while Christianity is a necessary condition for Dr. Woods’ organization’s concern, it is not sufficient. You also need to be “Anglo-Celtic”
Now, I personally have not joined the League of the South because I don’t like all that stupid rah-rah Confederacy or Southern crap. But that’s just me. I’m from Lousiana but too much of a Randian-type individualist to want to base my worth or identity on membership in a given little group, that I didn’t even choose or earn. But that’s just me; most people are more group-related than that. Blacks do Kwanzaa and name their kids African names; Scots eat haggis; Jews do their holidays and sometimes kvetch about their kids marrying gentiles; whatever. Who gives a crap.
The point is that if some libertarian were to join a group whose goal is preserving a religion or culture or race even–Christianity or Anglo-Celtic–what in the world is wrong with this? Why single out white Christian males as the only goddamned group that is prohibited from this kind of interest in and activism about their race or heritage? It’s getting pathetically silly. Israel is explicitly religious and racist in its immigration and other policies; ACLU and hare-trigger PC libertarian types who go apeshit about a judge having a Ten Commandments statue don’t bat an eye at other nations’ even worse support of official religion or racism. Goddamned hypocrites. These double standards are just pathetic.
All this is just really stemming from sneering, arrogant, yankee superiority and disgust at what they view as “beneath them” Southerners. It’s getting old. It’s why Kerry lost, in my view. People are getting sick of being spat at and tread upon. Your average Joe Sixpack wonders why he’s racist to want his daughter to marry a white guy or even to go to school in a school that’s not in the ghetto… while in the meantime he sees public service announcements about Black History Month etc.
Note also the implicit collectivism in the comment that Woods “shared the lectern” with certain others, as if he is responsible for their views. This is just stupid. Where do you draw the line with your responsibility for others’ actions due to some kind of “association” with them? After all, I admire Woods, yet am blogging here on your site, so I guess you are 4 handshakes away from evil; oh no, you are sanctioning the sanctioner of the sanctioner of the sanctioner. This stupid Randianism is getting old. Attribute to Woods what he writes, not what others do; but to do that he’d need to read it, and would not need to waste time trying to come up with ad hominem critiques.
Further, his alleged crime is “sharing the lectern” with speakers on the “Myths and Realities of American Slavery” and “Why Slaves Fought for Their South.” What is obviously racist about these topics? This is polictal correctnes run amok.
The coctail party libertarians are so eager to hate the South and Southerners, and to pretend to wring their hands over the slavery issue–it’s long dead, people. It was over a hundred goddamned years ago, and it was none of our fault. Quit blaming the South. If you want to blame anyone, blame the idiot white Yankees who founded this country on the backbone of slaves.
The attack on Woods is groundless and I believe it is utterly immoral and wicked. Any responsible, professional libertarian who does this should be ashamed.
Great article in the NY Times by Ami Eden, on how the anti-semitism card has been overused and is now backfiring. Excerpts:
[F]or the Jews, the main targets of Nazi racism, they face a very different sort of problem today, one that is partly of their own making. Jewish organizations have pursued an effective campaign to combat bigotry through a combination of protest and education, hoping to shame wrongdoers and encourage the next generation to shed old prejudices. And yet, as they look around, they see a world increasingly hostile to them and to Israel. It is time Jews recognize that the old strategies no longer work.
Jewish organizations and advocates of Israel fail to grasp that they are no longer viewed as the voice of the disenfranchised. Rather, they are seen as a global Goliath, close to the seats of power and capable of influencing policies and damaging reputations. As such, their efforts to raise the alarm increasingly appear as bullying. […]
[T]he eagerness of Jewish civil-rights groups to play watchdog, and their tendency to err on the side of zealousness, leads them all too frequently to blur distinctions between real bigotry and the verbal blunders by well-meaning individuals.
[]For more than half a century, Auschwitz has rightly stood at the heart of virtually every moral argument put forth by spokesmen for the Jewish community, a powerful testament to the consequences of otherwise decent people remaining silent in the face of evil. Yet this legacy is in peril, threatened by an increasing reliance on raw political muscle over appeals to conscience.
As the world recalls the horrors and liberation of Auschwitz, Jewish organizations and advocates for Israel should remember that “speaking truth to power” does not work when you are seen as the powerful one.
Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and retired patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020), and The Universal Principles of Liberty (2025).
My Failed Libertarian Speaking Hiatus; Memories of Mises Institute and Other Events, 1988–20192025
While we’re on the topic of people who deserve our money, let me suggest Dr. Norman Borlaug of Texas A&M University. So far he’s saved at least one billion (!) people from starvation, and he’s still at it at age 90.
I should also mention Stanislav Petrov, a former colonel in the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and living Avatar of Vishnu. If you can read this, it’s because Stan exercised good judgement on a tough day.
Norman Borlaug has been involved in many improvements in agricultural technology and techniques, and is known as the father of the Green Revolution. It is estimated that one billion people (1/6th of the worlds population) are being kept alive as a result of Borlaug’s research and activism. (Note that this is a much stronger claim than what I made above.)
His most important single development has probably been the development of dwarf corn. Dwarf corn has a faster growing cycle than normal corn. This is important in the monsoon-prone regions of India and Bangladesh where heavy rains tended to wipe out the corn crops before they could be harvested, leading to mass starvation on the order of tens of millions of people. Borlaug not only developed dwarf corn, but he personally distributed the seeds and instuctions for their use in the affected regions after encountering resistance and apathy from the local governments.
At present he’s trying to solve the problem of starvation in Africa. His primary problem is getting the corrupt African governments to allow him to work without severe restrictions.
Each of these men have individually saved more people than were killed in all of the wars of the 20th century combined.
But the First Amendment only prohibits “Congress” from taking certain actions; and arguments that the First Amendment’s protections are “incorporated” into the Fourteenth Amendment are, in my view, flawed and inconsistent with libertarian principles such as federalism and other structures aimed at limiting centralized power.
I cannot blame any individual victim from using whatever weapon at his disposal to protect himself from depredations of the state. I would sue a state in federal court if I thought I could use this means to vindicate my rights. Nevertheless, the federal government has no right under the Constitution to overturn such state laws, and libertarians should not refrain from recognizing this just because they like the results in particular cases.
Additionally, IJ appears to fight for vouchers, http://www.ij.org/schoolchoice/index.html , which are also problematic from a libertarian point of view, as they mean increased taxation and education-welfare expenditures and increased state control of private schools.
Further, as far as courts’ abilities to overturn state legislation, it’s completely clear that, as an original matter, the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to force states to adhere to the guarantees of the Bill of Rights; as a textual matter, the Fourteenth Amendment forces states to respect certain basic freedoms (such as, in the cited California Department of Real Estate case, the ability to publish without prior government licensure); and, as a practical matter, the Constitution SHOULD require states to respect certain individual rights. The notion that individual liberty is in some way served by specifying that (all other things being equal) Group X, rather than Group Y, gets to prescribe the rules of my conduct is, frankly, absurd.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Now reasonable people may differ over precisely what that amendment requires, but it is far from obvious, as Mr. Kinsella seems to think it is, that the phrase “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” has no restrictive power over the states.
For Mr. Kinsella and his friends at the Ludwig von Mises Institute (and their little cluster of groups and publications), “federalism” (which, in any case, most of them don’t like, since they would prefer to be living under the Confederacy) means that the federal government simply has no responsibilities at all. The states can (and maybe even should) engage in all kinds of restrictions of the “rights” (the use of scare quotes by Mr. Kinsella around the phrase “violate rights” is informative) of the people living there. Yet the federal constitution not only contains the Fourteenth Amendment, but also Article IV, Second 2, Clause 1 of which reads,
“The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.”
Section 4 of Article IV reads,
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”
So even the unamended Constitution guaranteed the rights of Americans to a republican form of government (with which, arguably, vicious forms of racial oppression were inconsistent) and to the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states. Add to that the protections of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and you have a quite unmistakable role for the federal government to stop the states from infringing on rights. In a federal system, the federal government has restrictions placed on its powers, but it also has powers to protect rights. Otherwise, what justifiction could there be for it at all?
Sure. And as I said, I don’t blame individual victims today of State action from using federal courts if it works. But the idea is that centralized state power is, other things being equal, more dangerous than dispersed power.
Moreover, as a matter of fact, the federal government is the biggest danger to us, and as a matter of fact they were limited by the Constitution to enumerated powers; and when they simply ignore the limits in the document that they claim also gives them their legitimacy, they become all the more dangerous.
“Further, as far as courts’ abilities to overturn state legislation, it’s completely clear that, as an original matter, the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to force states to adhere to the guarantees of the Bill of Rights”
Actually, it is not clear at all that this was what the 14th originally meant. There is, at the least, lots of debate on this. Even now, the entire Bill of Rights has not been incorporated.
“as a practical matter, the Constitution SHOULD require states to respect certain individual rights”
I don’t agree at all; any more than the federal Constitution should have a clause purporting to order, say, Indonesia to respect certain rights.
“The notion that individual liberty is in some way served by specifying that (all other things being equal) Group X, rather than Group Y, gets to prescribe the rules of my conduct is, frankly, absurd.”
Tell it to the Founders.
Palmer:
“Now reasonable people may differ over precisely what that amendment requires, but it is far from obvious, as Mr. Kinsella seems to think it is, that the phrase “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” has no restrictive power over the states.”
I don’t think this at all (unless you argue that the 14th is null and void because it was illegally ratified). Even Raoul Berger said it restricts the states in some way; and I tend to lean toward his interpretation which is that it limited the states only regarding certain narrow rights having to do with national citizenship. It seems obvious to me that if the 14th had clearly stated that it incorporates most of the rihts from the Bill of Rights and authorizes Congress to tell states what to do (e.g., to nullify Texas’ sodomy law), then it would not have been ratified. Therefore the original understanding of the 14th was NOT clearly that it empowered the feds to nullify state laws that violate the first 8 amendments.
(Further: there is the logical problem that the 14th explicitly subjected states to a due process requirement similar to that of the 5th amendment; there would be no need to do this if the P-or-I clause incorporated the 5th already!)
It seems to be very very clear that at best, the original udnerstanding of the P-or-I clause was uncertain–some thought one thing, others thoght another. Given this, it seems to me that it shoudld not be construed to grant many new powers to the feds. Just as real estate can only be sold by a written agreement, so such a fundamental change to the existing federal-states structure–espeically one that moves in the direction of greater centralization of power–should be effected only by an explicit amendment, not one that is ambiguous.
“For Mr. Kinsella and his friends at the Ludwig von Mises Institute (and their little cluster of groups and publications), “federalism” (which, in any case, most of them don’t like, since they would prefer to be living under the Confederacy)”
the pejorative “little” is cute, but out of place, distracting and insulting.
Actually I would prefer to be living under a minarchist or anarcho-capitlaist socieyt; but yes, I do believe we would be better off had the Union not prevailed in their war to prevent southern independence. We probably would not have entered WWI as we did, and Hoppe explains in his Introduction to his Democracy book how that intervention in WWI arguably helped contribute to the rise of Hitler, WWII, and Naziism, communism, and the cold war.
” means that the federal government simply has no responsibilities at all.”
Well, I don’t agree. To the extent we have a federation or union, the federal governemnt does have some duties–national defense, and even striking down internal trade barriers under the interstate commerce clause (with abuse by the feds limited by the right to exit, or secede).
“The states can (and maybe even should) engage in all kinds of restrictions of the “rights” (the use of scare quotes by Mr. Kinsella around the phrase “violate rights” is informative) of the people living there.”
Mr. Palmer, this is uncharitable and unfair, and just wrong. States should NOT violate individual rights; and in fact I support STATE judges striking these laws down, under a concurrent review theory. I would even be in favor of changing state constitutions to deny them general police power and making THEM states of enumerated powers. Etc. The quotes around “violate rights” was not scare quotes for purposes of expressing doubt about the fact that states do violate rights, but only to indicate that the feds might decree something to be a rights violation which is not.
Take the TExas sodomy case. I disagree with the Court’s reasoning in the Lawrence case (as I explained here), and also disagree that the decision is a libertarian one, because it erodes the important structural limits on central power of federalism as well as enumerated powers. But if a Justice on the highest court in Texas in criminal matters, the Court of Criminal Appeals (and I did run for this on the LP ticket a few years back, got 71,000 votes), I would have voted to acquit the defendants accused of violating the anti-sodomy law on at least 2 grounds: 1, that the law violated the STATE constitution; and 2, that the law is immoral aggression and I have a duty as a human being not to participate in enforcing aggression.
“So even the unamended Constitution guaranteed the rights of Americans to a republican form of government (with which, arguably, vicious forms of racial oppression were inconsistent) and to the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.”
Well–it depends on what you mean “guaranteed the rights” of someone. The question is whether the mention of a right confers a POWER on the feds, or a limit (or both). Clearly it’s a limit on federal action. Whether it also conveys a power on the feds to interfer with states, is another matter. It is clear for example that the mention of “rights” in the first 8 amendmnets of the Bill of Rights did not grant to Congress or the federal gov’t a power to stop the states from infringing these rights. This is not disputed by anyone serious. There were state established religions (Congregationalism in Mass., e.g.) in effect in 1791. Therefore, it’s clear to me that listing a right in the Constitution is just another way of limiting the feds from invading it; or making it clear the feds are not granted this power in the first place.
Moreover, think about this. The fed gov’t was based on enumerated powers; the ninth and tenth amendmnts make this clear. The ninth amendment makes it clear that the rights listed are not exhaustive. This is compatible with the idea that the fed gov’t only has the powers enumerated; and no otherse.
But the states had general police power. It would be confusing to say the ninth amendment applies to states (states did later adopt versinons of it in their own constitutions, but I contend this is just confusion) because the ninth amendment is compatible wiht enumerated powers, but seems to conflict with the idea of general police powers. If you read the ninth amendment literally, it would basically denude the states of their general police powers.
My point anyway, is that the recognition of a right in the Constitution is not necessarily a grant of power to the feds to regulate the states in this regard. Just as it is not a grant of power to regulate China’s affairs. I can write a private contract with my wife that says, “the right to freedom of speech is recognized” but that mere declaration does not purport to give me the authority to force China to respect those rights. Likewise with the feds and the sovereign states.
” Add to that the protections of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and you have a quite unmistakable role for the federal government to stop the states from infringing on rights.”
No; on some rights only, not on rights in general, and not on all those listed in the Bill of Rights.
“In a federal system, the federal government has restrictions placed on its powers, but it also has powers to protect rights. Otherwise, what justifiction could there be for it at all?”
Mr. Palmer I know you are too familiar with our revolutionary history to be unfamiliar with the answer. The feds could have a role in national defense, even in ensuring internal free trade; and in settling disputes between States, or between States and other nation-states. That does not imply that they need to have the power granted to them to force states to abide by certain standards. The founders all thought of the states and the state constitutions as the primary protection of individual rights.
Do you honestly believe the founders, or even the framers of the 14th amendment, would have voted for ratification if they had thought the federal government would have the right to strike down state laws like this? I think it is clear that they would not; and this is an indication of waht the original understanding was.
Further, if there were a grant of powers, it needs to be clear and express, not just implied from a statement recognizing a given right. And as I have noted, while the 14th and other provisions do grant the the feds some additional powers over the states (undermining your other argument that the original P-I clause grants the feds powers–for if it did, why is it restated in the 14th?), these powers are limited. Where it is ambiguous or not express, we should ere on the side of less centralization of power.
What is unreasonable or racist about any of this, Mr. Palmer, even if you don’t agree with all of it?
Hoppe’s democracy introduction: http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications.php#democracy
my article on the Lawrence sodomy case: http://www.lewrockwell.com/kinsella/kinsella11.html
my run for Texas justice: http://www.stephankinsella.com/election2002.php
I disagree, because I put libertarian results above decentralist results. It’s a question of which construction principle ought to be used, and since I hold libertarian values in the highest regard, those ought to be used in construction.
Decentralism is not a bulwark against government wickedness, which even a cursory glance at American history reveals.
– Josh
“Decentralism is not a bulwark against government wickedness, which even a cursory glance at American history reveals.”
The question is whether, when *setting up* an institution, which one is more likely to generate more libertarian results. A system where the central state is limited by a written constitution to certain enumerated powers (implying that other powers are left to the states, or to the people), is one good technique, at least to the extent the central state abides by the limits set on it in its authorizing document.
What has become clear is that a written Constitution is not really a very good way of limiting the state, since it simply disregards or twists the express provisions limiting its powers. What is worse, it has taken provisions meant to limit its powers–like the listing of rights in the Bill of Rights–and now uses them as *grants* of powers. It is not surprising the state will always try to twist things in its favor, but what is surprising is to see libertarians endorsing this.
I do not say that a libertarian should oppose the result of a particular case where the federal government disregarded limits on it to nullify an unlibertarian state law; but the libertarian should also have qualms that the means used to achieve this (good) result are also harmful to rights. The libertarian who not only cheers the results of Lawrence but the Court’s reasoning and the Constitutional right to do this is basically advocating tearing down Constitutional limitations on the feds; he is advocating a rule that the central state does not need to abide by limits placed upon it.
I’ve got news for Mr. Kinsella. Public education is not going to be abolished any time soon. However, it could be whittled down to nothing and the states could save significant amounts of money if parents could get their children out of public schools and into private schools.
Of course, public money introduces distortions into the market. But the current system is abysmal, and there’s no reason to think that vouchers necessarily lead to more statism. That’s an open question.
I’m at Duke University and just finished some hours of talking about free trade. But I wish to address one point in Mr. Kinsella’s posts above: he conflates an “original intention” approach to constitutional interpretation with an “original meaning” approach. They’re significantly different. “The Founders” (the drafters? the ratifiers? who?) may not have “intended” this or that outcome, but the “meaning” of what they wrote may encompass more than they intended. Randy Barnett treats that issue quite elegantly in his work on an “originalism for originalists” and in his book *Restoring the Lost Constitution” (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691115850/qid=1107577988/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/103-2447442-6709449 ).
This is a question that always seems to be dodged. It is clearly relevant to understanding what a given provision is supposed to mean, that those who ratified it would NOT have dones so if they had thought it meant what is being suggested years later.
For anyone who thinks language means anything, or that contracts, agreements, treaties, Constitutions, and other binding documents have any meaning that is related to their text and purposes … then I can only think of 2 responses to an argument that the founders would have voted against it if it had stated explicitly the interpretation being urged now: (a) the original understanding does not matter, because the Constitution is a “living document”; or (b) the Framers WOULD HAVE voted for it if it had been made explicit.
I hope Mr. Palmer has not gone so far down the modernist road that he would urge (a). As for (b), it does not pass the laugh test. It is just outright stubbornness; those ignorant high school students educated on Cap’n Crunch and Saturday Morning propaganda like I’m Just A Bill, might believe Congressmen just after the War to Prevent Southern Independence would have voted for a law permitting the feds to overturn state laws prohibiting homosexual sodomy–just like they believe the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, or that Women’s Suffrage is terrible and should be banned. Anyone with any sense at all knows that the 14th Amendment would have lost virtually unanimously if the ratifiers had thought it would mean this. That does not mean I agree with their unlibertarian sentiment; but it seems clear beyond cavil to me that this is so. Given this, this is mighty powerful evidence that the meaning of the words of the 14th Amendment do not and cannot mean what the Libertarian Centralists (in Gene Healy’s words) want it to mean.
What baffles me is the lack of honesty in Constitutional discourse. I personally wish the Constitution did not permit Congress to enact patent and copyrihgt laws. I wish it did not have a 14th amendment at all. I wish it listed more rights in the Bill of Rights. I wish the Ninth were clearer. I wish that income tax were not authorized. But in honesty, I have to admit that unfortunately, what I wish is not the case. The Constitution is not a perfectly libertarian document. Where it is not libertarian, I will declare it and advocate that it be either changed, or disregarded… or at least, recognized as being nonlibertarian.
The centralist libertarians WANT the feds to be able to strike down unlibertarian state laws. That is understandable (though I have qualms about this for structural reasons); but it does not mean this is what the constitution SAYS. Look, I even grant you that you guys at least do have an argument. Barnett’s arguments re the 9th amendment, Roger Pilon’s and David Mayer’s and Michael Kent Curtis pro-14th amendment arguments… are respectable, if I think incorrect (and a bit biased and nonobjective… too results-oriented, or makeweight). I think the overwhelming weight of argument lies on our side. But the pro-14th Amendment side ought to grant that the issue is not 100% clear, and that the libertarian opposition to their expansive reading of the 14th is also respectable–from both a Constitutional, AND libertarian perspective. To pretend that the “issue is settled” is either ignorant or dishonest. And to imply that opponents of the expansive reading of the 14th amendment are racists or slavery-apologists is utterly despicable and a sign of desperation. When no substantive arguments are left any more, someone cornered either admits defeat, or resorts to ad hominem or personal attacks.
Tsewen, bookmarks newest and bookmarks
***
Phony “Radicalism” from a Reactionary Confederate Revivalist
It seems to me that maybe I just might be at least one of the persons that Lew Rockwell has in mind in this coy essay. Evidently, because I: A) don’t want to see American soldiers butchered by jihadis; B) don’t consider Iraqi police and soldiers to be “quislings” and “traitors”; C) don’t favor the return to power of the thugs who’ve been ruling Ukraine since the breakup of the USSR; D) believe that, having made a stupid decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam, the U.S. government should not announce that all U.S. troops in Iraq will henceforth be on their own and that they should make their own way back to the U.S., struggling through the Iraqi population as it is massacred by Islamic radical jihadis, fascist Ba’athists of the former security apparatus, and warring factions in an at-least-three-way-civil-war, then it must follow that I am a “moderate.” And not only that, but one who depends wholly on the state’s favor,
Indeed,
Poor, sad Lew Rockwell, surrounded by his anti-Semitic, segregationist, and racist friends, whistling Dixie and wishing for the Confederacy to Rise Again. If he’d look into the editions of Socialism(by Ludwig von Mises), The Fatal Conceit (by F.A. Hayek), The Economic Way of Thinking (by the late Paul Heyne), and a variety of books by Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and other classical liberal anti-communists (well, certainly the ones printed in Russian in the USSR), he’d find that the title pages thank one “Tom Palmer” for having arranged for their translation and publication. What a moderate that jerk must have been! And how courageous Lew Rockwell must have been! (True, when I talked to the fellow who arranged for all those publications, he didn’t recall any “Lew Rockwell” at the time in Moscow, Budapest, Prague, Tirana, Bucharest, Warsaw, Berlin, Sofia, Zagreb, Belgrade, Krakow….or well, anywhere like that. It must have been the “radical” thing to do to stay in Alabama. And not only that, but courageous, too!)
But seriously folks, the idea that screaming from the sidelines, retreating from intelligent debate and instead scuttling under a rock to cozy up to anti-Semites and racists, and denouncing attempts to formulate strategies to disengage the state’s talons from civil society is “harder” or “courageous” is, well, laughable. Those things are actually easy. You don’t have to do any hard thinking and you don’t have to reckon with any consequences. What’s hard is to grapple with real problems, to acknowledge both the bad and the good consequences of choices, and to reject fairy tales in favor of realism. To do that you have to realize that, unlike impotent caricatures such as Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo, you have to take responsibility for what you propose. And that’s never easy.
Note: For documentation of some of the harm that Lew Rockwell does to libertarian ideas, see a number of the items under “The Fever Swamp.” I thought I’d give the issue a rest for a while, since there are actually lots of good things going on in the world on which to comment and report…but Rockwell seems deliberately to present such an easy target and his latest column was such a clear challenge. (Expect later some more material I discovered about his connections to truly spooky holocaust deniers and racists — even scarier than those documented in the entries in The Fever Swamp.)
Note: I’ve posted again a very sad posting that Mr. Stephen Kinsella had put on a rather catty web site that antiwar.com has created to post attacks on me. In any case, after I linked to it, they took it down and oddly replaced it with a colorful bit of revisionist (i.e., completely made up) history by Justin Raimondo. So here’s Mr. Kinsella’s defense of Lew Rockwell’s truly nutty belief that the black mayor of San Francisco called Condoleeza Rice before 9/11 to warn her not to fly. (My original post was here.) And here Download file is Mr. Kinsella’s rather sad response. It is truly one of the saddest pleas for understanding I’ve ever read.