I see that my colleagues are referring to the new online Encyclopedia of Libertarianism as a Wikipedia for libertarianism. I suppose thats sort of true, in that its an online encyclopedia. But its not exactly Hayekian, as Jimmy Wales describes Wikipedia. That is, it didnt emerge spontaneously from the actions of hundreds of thousands of contributors. Instead, editors Ronald Hamowy, Jason Kuznicki, and Aaron Steelman drew up a list of topics and sought the best scholars to write on each one people like Alan Charles Kors, Bryan Caplan, Deirdre McCloskey, George H. Smith, Israel Kirzner, James Buchanan, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Jeremy Shearmur, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Norman Barry, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, and Vernon L. Smith, along with many Cato Institute experts. In that regard its more like the Encyclopedia Britannica of libertarianism, a guide to important topics by top scholars in the relevant field.

The Britannica over the years has published articles byAlbert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie, Leon Trotsky, Harry Houdini, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Milton Friedman, Simon Baron Cohen, and Desmond Tutu. They may have slipped a bit when they published articles by Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Lee Iacocca. And particularly when they chose to me to write their entry on libertarianism.

See more here:

Is the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism like Wikipedia? - Cato Institute (blog)

The Poles have the historical appearance to have been oppressed by both the Nazis and the Commies/Marxists. Countries in Eastern Europe who went through being occupied by Nazis and Marxists often speak out loudly about their dangers. Yet, out here in the West, it seems our people are willing to only hear half of it, as the Marxists are spreading like wildfire.

Socialism, National Socialism (Nazism for those who somehow dont know this), Communism and any other variation of Marixsm, as well as any racial supremacist groups, including the KKK, have no place in the United States. You have the right to your beliefs but you do not have the right to enforce those beliefs on the people via policy and/or law, and this has to be the libertarian position. These political beliefs violate the non-aggression principle, and the overall rights of the individual. If we were to allow any socialist policies to go forth, including such things as universal healthcare or free college/university we would be failing (I hate to sound like a collectivist) the people of the United States. Through these types of policies, we, the people, would essentially be financially responsible for the lifestyles and educational choices of the rest of the country through taxation, which brings me to my next point.

The general libertarian view on taxation is that it is coercion. The state is essentially stealing our money through threat of force; this means that the state itself is in violation of the NAP. Would we, in turn, suggest that the state itself be dissolved? Many say yes, yet this enters the realm of anarchism, and less of libertarianism. Libertarianism, as I know it, isnt for the complete dissolution of government but for the reduction of government. But how can a government exist without money? Weve already answered this in thousands upon thousands of conversations: through donation and charity.

The government works today as a middle man: it takes our money and funnels it into things such as infrastructure and welfare. It does so via coercion through threat of force and while we know that these services can be provided solely through the market, we must think of those who arent capable of a self-sustainable life: seniors, the mentally and physically disabled, and in some cases, children whose parents are unable to provide resources needed to live.

What we need is tax reform and we already know the solution (in fact, we rant about it all the time): volunteerism. Make it so that taxation is a voluntary system and that we, the people, get to decide where our money gets to go to. If you want to donate $2,000 to the welfare of the mentally ill than thats where the money will go. If you want to donate $10 to fill a pot hole, have at it. In short, the government is supposed to work for the people, but through threatening us in order to provide us services, it is doing more harm than good. Without the threat of jail time or even a forced quota system, government could be, at its essence, a charitable organization. Isnt that what the government is supposed to be anyways, for the people and by the people?

This being such a radical idea, and already with so many holes in it for a large country to implement suddenly, I would suggest if we want to make any progress towards a truly free and liberty focused society we find a way to test a system such as this. It could be proposed and put up for a vote in a small town somewhere and tried out for a set period of time. Probably the best two things about this theory is that it is doesnt violate the NAP in any way and that it is a volunteer based system.

In a time of radicals on every side of the aisle and high tensions, I cant think of a better time to try to actually test out this theory and bring the country back to sanity. Benjamin Franklin supposedly said, Im an extreme moderate. I believe anybody not in favor of moderation and compromise ought to be castrated. It is best that the only radicals in society be those who promote individualism and liberty instead of those who promote collectivism and obedience.

* Jarod Goodwin is an archaeology student in his mid-twenties. Hes worked in the grassroots movement for the election of Jim Webb in 2016, and in informing foreigners and locals alike to the different political sides of things like Brexit, the Dutch election, French election, Canadian, Swedish, and Brazilian politics.

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Marxism, Nazism and a Potentially Radical Theory for Libertarianism - Being Libertarian

Libertarianism, political philosophy that takes individual liberty to be the primary political value. It may be understood as a form of liberalism, the political philosophy associated with the English philosophers John Locke and John Stuart Mill, the Scottish economist Adam Smith, and the American statesman Thomas Jefferson. Liberalism seeks to define and justify the legitimate powers of government in terms of certain natural or God-given individual rights. These rights include the rights to life, liberty, private property, freedom of speech and association, freedom of worship, government by consent, equality under the law, and moral autonomy (the pursuit of ones own conception of happiness, or the good life). The purpose of government, according to liberals, is to protect these and other individual rights, and in general liberals have contended that government power should be limited to that which is necessary to accomplish this task. Libertarians are classical liberals who strongly emphasize the individual right to liberty. They contend that the scope and powers of government should be constrained so as to allow each individual as much freedom of action as is consistent with a like freedom for everyone else. Thus, they believe that individuals should be free to behave and to dispose of their property as they see fit, provided that their actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.

Liberalism and libertarianism have deep roots in Western thought. A central feature of the religious and intellectual traditions of ancient Israel and ancient Greece was the idea of a higher moral law that applied universally and that constrained the powers of even kings and governments. Christian theologians, including Tertullian in the 2nd and 3rd centuries and St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, stressed the moral worth of the individual and the division of the world into two realms, one of which was the province of God and thus beyond the power of the state to control.

Libertarianism also was influenced by debates within Scholasticism on slavery and private property. Scholastic thinkers such as Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria, and Bartolom de Las Casas developed the concept of self-mastery (dominium)later called self-propriety, property in ones person, or self-ownershipand showed how it could be the foundation of a system of individual rights (see below Libertarian philosophy). In response to the growth of royal absolutism in early modern Europe, early libertarians, particularly those in the Netherlands and England, defended, developed, and radicalized existing notions of the rule of law, representative assemblies, and the rights of the people. In the mid-16th century, for example, the merchants of Antwerp successfully resisted the attempt by the Holy Roman emperor Charles V to introduce the Inquisition in their city, maintaining that it would contravene their traditional privileges and ruin their prosperity (and hence diminish the emperors tax income). Through the Petition of Right (1628) the English Parliament opposed efforts by King Charles I to impose taxes and compel loans from private citizens, to imprison subjects without due process of law, and to require subjects to quarter the kings soldiers (see petition of right). The first well-developed statement of libertarianism, An Agreement of the People (1647), was produced by the radical republican Leveler movement during the English Civil Wars (164251). Presented to Parliament in 1649, it included the ideas of self-ownership, private property, legal equality, religious toleration, and limited, representative government.

In the late 17th century, liberalism was given a sophisticated philosophical foundation in Lockes theories of natural rights, including the right to private property and to government by consent. In the 18th century, Smiths studies of the economic effects of free markets greatly advanced the liberal theory of spontaneous order, according to which some forms of order in society arise naturally and spontaneously, without central direction, from the independent activities of large numbers of individuals. The theory of spontaneous order is a central feature of libertarian social and economic thinking (see below Spontaneous order).

The American Revolution (177583) was a watershed for liberalism. In the Declaration of Independence (1776), Jefferson enunciated many liberal and libertarian ideas, including the belief in unalienable Rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness and the belief in the right and duty of citizens to throw off such Government that violates these rights. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, according to the American historian Bernard Bailyn, the major themes of eighteenth-century libertarianism were brought to realization in written constitutions, bills of rights, and limits on executive and legislative powers, especially the power to wage war. Such values have remained at the core of American political thought ever since.

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During the 19th century, governments based on traditional liberal principles emerged in England and the United States and to a smaller extent in continental Europe. The rise of liberalism resulted in rapid technological development and a general increase in living standards, though large segments of the population remained in poverty, especially in the slums of industrial cities.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many liberals began to worry that persistent inequalities of wealth and the tremendous pace of social change were undermining democracy and threatening other classical liberal values, such as the right to moral autonomy. Fearful of what they considered a new despotism of the wealthy, modern liberals advocated government regulation of markets and major industries, heavier taxation of the rich, the legalization of trade unions, and the introduction of various government-funded social services, such as mandatory accident insurance. Some have regarded the modern liberals embrace of increased government power as a repudiation of the classical liberal belief in limited government, but others have seen it as a reconsideration of the kinds of power required by government to protect the individual rights that liberals believe in.

The new liberalism was exemplified by the English philosophers L.T. Hobhouse and T.H. Green, who argued that democratic governments should aim to advance the general welfare by providing direct services and benefits to citizens. Meanwhile, however, classical liberals such as the English philosopher Herbert Spencer insisted that the welfare of the poor and the middle classes would be best served by free markets and minimal government. In the 20th century, so-called welfare state liberalism, or social democracy, emerged as the dominant form of liberalism, and the term liberalism itself underwent a significant change in definition in English-speaking countries. Particularly after World War II, most self-described liberals no longer supported completely free markets and minimal government, though they continued to champion other individual rights, such as the right to freedom of speech. As liberalism became increasingly associated with government intervention in the economy and social-welfare programs, some classical liberals abandoned the old term and began to call themselves libertarians.

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In response to the rise of totalitarian regimes in Russia, Italy, and Germany in the first half of the 20th century, some economists and political philosophers rediscovered aspects of the classical liberal tradition that were most distinctly individualist. In his seminal essay Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (originally in German, 1920), the Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises challenged the basic tenets of socialism, arguing that a complex economy requires private property and freedom of exchange in order to solve problems of social and economic coordination. Von Misess work led to extensive studies of the processes by which the uncoordinated activities of numerous individuals can spontaneously generate complex forms of social order in societies where individual rights are well-defined and legally secure.

Classical liberalism rests on a presumption of libertythat is, on the presumption that the exercise of liberty does not require justification but that all restraints on liberty do. Libertarians have attempted to define the proper extent of individual liberty in terms of the notion of property in ones person, or self-ownership, which entails that each individual is entitled to exclusive control of his choices, his actions, and his body. Because no individual has the right to control the peaceful activities of other self-owning individualse.g., their religious practices, their occupations, or their pastimesno such power can be properly delegated to government. Legitimate governments are therefore severely limited in their authority.

According to the principle that libertarians call the nonaggression axiom, all acts of aggression against the rights of otherswhether committed by individuals or by governmentsare unjust. Indeed, libertarians believe that the primary purpose of government is to protect citizens from the illegitimate use of force. Accordingly, governments may not use force against their own citizens unless doing so is necessary to prevent the illegitimate use of force by one individual or group against another. This prohibition entails that governments may not engage in censorship, military conscription, price controls, confiscation of property, or any other type of intervention that curtails the voluntary and peaceful exercise of an individuals rights.

A fundamental characteristic of libertarian thinking is a deep skepticism of government power. Libertarianism and liberalism both arose in the West, where the division of power between spiritual and temporal rulers had been greater than in most other parts of the world. In the Old Testament (I Samuel 8: 1718), the Jews asked for a king, and God warned them that such a king would take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day. This admonition reminded Europeans for centuries of the predatory nature of states. The passage was cited by many liberals, including Thomas Paine and Lord Acton, who famously wrote that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Libertarian skepticism was reinforced by events of the 20th century, when unrestrained government power led to world war, genocide, and massive human rights violations.

Libertarians embrace individualism insofar as they attach supreme value to the rights and freedoms of individuals. Although various theories regarding the origin and justification of individual rights have been proposede.g., that they are given to human beings by God, that they are implied by the very idea of a moral law, and that respecting them produces better consequencesall libertarians agree that individual rights are imprescriptiblei.e., that they are not granted (and thus cannot be legitimately taken away) by governments or by any other human agency. Another aspect of the individualism of libertarians is their belief that the individual, rather than the group or the state, is the basic unit in terms of which a legal order should be understood.

Libertarians hold that some forms of order in society arise naturally and spontaneously from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals. The notion of spontaneous order may seem counterintuitive: it is natural to assume that order exists only because it has been designed by someone (indeed, in the philosophy of religion, the apparent order of the natural universe was traditionally considered proof of the existence of an intelligent designeri.e., God). Libertarians, however, maintain that the most important aspects of human societysuch as language, law, customs, money, and marketsdevelop by themselves, without conscious direction.

An appreciation for spontaneous order can be found in the writings of the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu (fl. 6th century bc), who urged rulers to do nothing because without law or compulsion, men would dwell in harmony. A social science of spontaneous order arose in the 18th century in the work of the French physiocrats and in the writings of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Both the physiocrats (the term physiocracy means the rule of nature) and Hume studied the natural order of economic and social life and concluded, contrary to the dominant theory of mercantilism, that the directing hand of the prince was not necessary to produce order and prosperity. Hume extended his analysis to the determination of interest rates and even to the emergence of the institutions of law and property. In A Treatise of Human Nature (173940), he argued that the rule concerning the stability of possession is a product of spontaneous ordering processes, because it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. He also compared the evolution of the institution of property to the evolution of languages and money.

Smith developed the concept of spontaneous order extensively in both The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). He made the idea central to his discussion of social cooperation, arguing that the division of labour did not arise from human wisdom but was the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility: the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. In Common Sense (1776), Paine combined the theory of spontaneous order with a theory of justice based on natural rights, maintaining that the great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government.

According to libertarians, free markets are among the most important (but not the only) examples of spontaneous order. They argue that individuals need to produce and trade in order to survive and flourish and that free markets are essential to the creation of wealth. Libertarians also maintain that self-help, mutual aid, charity, and economic growth do more to alleviate poverty than government social-welfare programs. Finally, they contend that, if the libertarian tradition often seems to stress private property and free markets at the expense of other principles, that is largely because these institutions were under attack for much of the 20th century by modern liberals, social democrats, fascists, and adherents of other leftist, nationalist, or socialist ideologies.

Libertarians consider the rule of law to be a crucial underpinning of a free society. In its simplest form, this principle means that individuals should be governed by generally applicable and publicly known laws and not by the arbitrary decisions of kings, presidents, or bureaucrats. Such laws should protect the freedom of all individuals to pursue happiness in their own ways and should not aim at any particular result or outcome.

Although most libertarians believe that some form of government is essential for protecting liberty, they also maintain that government is an inherently dangerous institution whose power must be strictly circumscribed. Thus, libertarians advocate limiting and dividing government power through a written constitution and a system of checks and balances. Indeed, libertarians often claim that the greater freedom and prosperity of European society (in comparison with other parts of the world) in the early modern era was the result of the fragmentation of power, both between church and state and among the continents many different kingdoms, principalities, and city-states. Some American libertarians, such as Lysander Spooner and Murray Rothbard, have opposed all forms of government. Rothbard called his doctrine anarcho-capitalism to distinguish it from the views of anarchists who oppose private property. Even those who describe themselves as anarchist libertarians, however, believe in a system of law and law enforcement to protect individual rights.

Much political analysis deals with conflict and conflict resolution. Libertarians hold that there is a natural harmony of interests among peaceful, productive individuals in a just society. Citing David Ricardos theory of comparative advantagewhich states that individuals in all countries benefit when each countrys citizens specialize in producing that which they can produce more efficiently than the citizens of other countrieslibertarians claim that, over time, all individuals prosper from the operation of a free market, and conflict is thus not a necessary or inevitable part of a social order. When governments begin to distribute rewards on the basis of political pressure, however, individuals and groups will engage in wasteful and even violent conflict to gain benefits at the expense of others. Thus, libertarians maintain that minimal government is a key to the minimization of social conflict.

In international affairs, libertarians emphasize the value of peace. That may seem unexceptional, since most (though not all) modern thinkers have claimed allegiance to peace as a value. Historically, however, many rulers have seen little benefit to peace and have embarked upon sometimes long and destructive wars. Libertarians contend that war is inherently calamitous, bringing widespread death and destruction, disrupting family and economic life, and placing more power in the hands of ruling classes. Defensive or retaliatory violence may be justified, but, according to libertarians, violence is not valuable in itself, nor does it produce any additional benefits beyond the defense of life and liberty.

Despite the historical growth in the scope and powers of government, particularly after World War II, in the early 21st century the political and economic systems of most Western countriesespecially the United Kingdom and the United Statescontinued to be based largely on classical liberal principles. Accordingly, libertarians in those countries tended to focus on smaller deviations from liberal principles, creating the perception among many that their views were radical or extreme. Explicitly libertarian political parties (such as the Libertarian Party in the United States and the Libertarianz Party in New Zealand), where they did exist, garnered little support, even among self-professed libertarians. Most politically active libertarians supported classical liberal parties (such as the Free Democratic Party in Germany or the Flemish Liberals and Democrats in Belgium) or conservative parties (such as the Republican Party in the United States or the Conservative Party in Great Britain); they also backed pressure groups advocating policies such as tax reduction, the privatization of education, and the decriminalization of drugs and other so-called victimless crimes. There were also small but vocal groups of libertarians in Scandinavia, Latin America, India, and China.

The publication in 1974 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a sophisticated defense of libertarian principles by the American philosopher Robert Nozick, marked the beginning of an intellectual revival of libertarianism. Libertarian ideas in economics became increasingly influential as libertarian economists were appointed to prominent advisory positions in conservative governments in the United Kingdom and the United States and as some libertarians, such as James M. Buchanan, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Vernon L. Smith, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. In 1982 the death of the libertarian novelist and social theorist Ayn Rand prompted a surge of popular interest in her work. Libertarian scholars, activists, and political leaders also played prominent roles in the worldwide campaign against apartheid and in the construction of democratic societies in eastern and central Europe following the collapse of communism there in 198991. In the early 21st century, libertarian ideas informed new research in diverse fields such as history, law, economic development, telecommunications, bioethics, globalization, and social theory.

A long-standing criticism of libertarianism is that it presupposes an unrealistic and undesirable conception of individual identity and of the conditions necessary for human flourishing. Opponents of libertarianism often refer to libertarian individualism as atomistic, arguing that it ignores the role of family, tribe, religious community, and state in forming individual identity and that such groups or institutions are the proper sources of legitimate authority. These critics contend that libertarian ideas of individuality are ahistorical, excessively abstract, and parasitic on unacknowledged forms of group identity and that libertarians ignore the obligations to community and government that accompany the benefits derived from these institutions. In the 19th century, Karl Marx decried liberal individualism, which he took to underlie civil (or bourgeois) society, as a decomposition of man that located mans essence no longer in community but in difference. More recently, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor maintained that the libertarian emphasis on the rights of the individual wrongly implies the self-sufficiency of man alone.

Libertarians deny that their views imply anything like atomistic individualism. The recognition and protection of individuality and difference, they contend, does not necessarily entail denying the existence of community or the benefits of living together. Rather, it merely requires that the bonds of community not be imposed on people by force and that individuals (adults, at least) be free to sever their attachments to others and to form new ones with those who choose to associate with them. Community, libertarians believe, is best served by freedom of association, an observation made by the 19th-century French historian of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville, among others. Thus, for libertarians the central philosophical issue is not individuality versus community but rather consent versus coercion.

Other critics, including some prominent conservatives, have insisted that libertarianism is an amoral philosophy of libertinism in which the law loses its character as a source of moral instruction. The American philosopher Russell Kirk, for example, argued that libertarians bear no authority, temporal or spiritual, and do not venerate ancient beliefs and customs, or the natural world, or [their] country, or the immortal spark in [their] fellow men. Libertarians respond that they do venerate the ancient traditions of liberty and justice. They favour restricting the function of the law to enforcing those traditions, not only because they believe that individuals should be permitted to take moral responsibility for their own choices but also because they believe that law becomes corrupted when it is used as a tool for making men moral. Furthermore, they argue, a degree of humility about the variety of human goals should not be confused with radical moral skepticism or ethical relativism.

Some criticisms of libertarianism concern the social and economic effects of free markets and the libertarian view that all forms of government intervention are unjustified. Critics have alleged, for example, that completely unregulated markets create poverty as well as wealth; that they create significant inequalities in the distribution of wealth and economic power, both within and between countries; that they encourage environmental pollution and the wasteful or destructive use of natural resources; that they are incapable of efficiently or fairly performing some necessary social services, such as health care, education, and policing; and that they tend toward monopoly, which increases inefficiency and compounds the problem of significant inequality of wealth. Libertarians have responded by questioning whether government regulation, which would replace one set of imperfect institutions (private businesses) with another (government agencies), would solve or only worsen these problems. In addition, several libertarian scholars have argued that some of these problems are not caused by free markets but rather result from the failures and inefficiencies of political and legal institutions. Thus, they argue that environmental pollution could be minimized in a free market if property rights were properly defined and secured.

Excerpt from:

libertarianism | politics | Britannica.com

I am feeling energetic today, and I thought I would tackle an issue that I have been thinking about for weeks now. As with many deep discussions, it started with a beer between friends.

The topic of discussions were the merits of Libertarians and the philosophy.

Maybe it is the contrarianin me, but Ive come to the conclusion that I think the Libertarians philosophy is wrong.

Before we begin, there are some ideas from Libertarians that I find attractive I like the idea of a smaller government, and I like the idea of allowing markets to operate more freely; however, when you take a Libertarians at their word, I think the entire philosophy starts to break down.

First lets define Libertarian as I see it:

Again, we are going to take Libertarians at their word, and we are going to set aside the contradictory notion that people who think everyone should live their lives as they want, attempt to make the world operate under their philosophy.

I also do understand there are different strands of Libertarianism ranging from Chomsky to Paul but for this blog post, we are going to work with the definition above.

Lets start with the light lifting:

1) At its heart Libertarianism is incredibly selfish. Libertarians wont call it that, but at its core, Libertarianism is indulgent, narcissistic, and just plain selfish.

2) The current Libertarianism coalition will split among social issues. Libertarians are cool kids at the moment.

When I attend Libertarian meetings, I see friends. Some of these friends I KNOW for a fact are conservative Christians. At the moment, economic issues are more salient to them; therefore, they are willing to caucus with the Libertarians to work on those issues.

However, as a country, we dont have the luxury of working only on fiscal issues. Social issues will come up and they will matter when that happens the current libertarian coalition will splinter.

That is a problem with breaking away from the GOP when you are forced to put on paper what it actually means to be a Libertarian, it fractures the current Libertarian club.

3) Libertarianism is cruel. Markets fail and markets are unfeeling and damn right cruel. Here is a thought exercise: If someone is in the process of making a terrible decision that will result in their immediate death, do we watch them die or intervene?

4) There are some societal functions that do not respond to markets. Example: Pollution. If totally unregulated, corporations will pollute. Okay, if you assume eventually the market will correct it, eventually may take 20 years and in the meantime an entire generation of children have jelly for brains.

5) If markets are completely unregulated, then all market segments will naturally move towards monopolies. There will be collusion to maximize profits. Humans cheat, that is what we do. So in the end, if you take Libertarians at their word, we all end up slaves to large monopolies and are at their whim. Ironically, the effort to decentralize has the result of centralizing power and economic wealth.

6) When disputes arise, who decides? If you are on your property blaring Lawrence Welk music at 2 am in the morning declaring your Liberty, am I not harmed? Yes, you have the right to your property and I have the right to sanity? Who wins? Who decides? Is it just the strongest person able to force their will? Is it Lord of the Flies? You just cant say we have a court someone wins who is it? Who decides the restrictions on rights?

Ok, but here is some heavy lifting:

7) In my opinion, humans are not wired for Libertarianism, and the philosophy does not make sense with my understanding of the human condition.

If you read anything about human decision making, it is highly irrational.

When given unlimited choices, humans suffer from the paradox of choice. In the face of unlimited choice humans freeze, become anxious, and indecisive. We just dont know what in the hell to do with ourselves.

8) Finally, in my biggest criticism, from all of my reading of modern psychology, absolute freedom is not good for humans.

Again, if we take Libertarians at their word everyone decides what is good for themselves and retreats to their plot of land. If that happens, there is no community, no common bonds.

PLEASE do not mistake me for some collective liberal, Im not.

But in its purest form, there is nothing binding people together. There is no core.

This is in conflict with our natural tendencies to form groups.

What we are talking about is achievinganomie,the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community.

When we sever these human connections, we see scientific evidence in the rise of suicide and all kinds of ills.

Humans are just not wired for Libertarianism.

For example, if everyone retreats to their acre and we have nothing in common, we no longer have a country. Even our founding fathers (who were Libertarian leaning) realized there must be something that binds us together.

In summation, there must be something MORE that binds us together other than roads, military, and courts.

Finally,

9) No Libertarian can make a coherent argument of HOW to get to a Libertarian vision.

Some have proposed moving en mass toNew Hampshire others want a floating boat in international water(not kidding).

However, even over beer, no one has been able to express to me the HOW. They can tell me what is currently wrong, they can tell me their vision for the future, but they cant tell me HOW.

Most just selfishly say BLOW IT UP. The irresponsibility to humanity that comes with BLOW IT UP is mind blowing.

Every time I end up taking a path down Libertarianism, I end up in treacherous landscape.

Choice? Yeah, well if the South wants slaves, then so be it. (Rand Paul, later retracted)

Taxes? Revolution!

Nothing but roads, military, and courts? What about currency? Multiple currencies and bit coins for all and when something goes wrong? Markets baby!

Education? Private schools for all? But difficult students who require more attention, time and effort? There will be little profit in that! Do we not educate them and turn them lose in society with no skills? Do they not then commit crimes? OK, home school everyone? What if the parent can barely read? Do they get to homeschool? If not, who regulates?

Again, it is interesting, but for me, it just breaks down the more you think. The more you move away from bumper stickers, Libertarianism collapses when it meets with the human condition.

There is always tension between freedom, rights, protection, security, and fairness. There should be.

In my opinion, most Libertarians I have discussed this with seem to have an overly simplistic worldview and simplistic understanding of the human condition.

As you may know, I rejectabsolutismto any philosophy. For me, these philosophies (Libertarianism, capitalism, etc) are a little like simplified economic models. They have little basis in reality, but are helpful for learning concepts and testing.

When we place the philosophies next to each other, for me the truth lies some where in-between the pure forms. The right answer lies in the tension between the choices.

The entire key is to keep things in equilibrium. My equilibrium is leaningtowards Libertarianism, but with nuance and conditions.

The problem is there is not an ideologue in the world that would agree with me on that and have a discussion on the location of the line.

PS. As a final thought Isolationism is plain wrong.

discuss.

See the original post:

Why Libertarianism is wrong - Ozean Media

The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, published in 2008 in hard copy, is now available free online at Libertarianism.org. The Encyclopedia includesmore than 300 succinct, original articles on libertarian ideas, institutions, and thinkers. Contributors include James Buchanan, Richard Epstein, Tyler Cowen, Randy Barnett, Ellen Frankel Paul, Deirdre McCloskey, and more than 100 otherscholars.

A couple of years ago, in an interesting discussion of social change and especiallythe best ways to spread classical liberal ideasat Liberty Funds Online Library of Liberty, historian David M. Hart had high praise for the Encyclopedia:

The Encyclopedia of Libertarianismprovides an excellent survey of the key movements, individuals, and events in the evolution of the classical liberal movement.

One should begin with Steve Davies General Introduction, pp. xxv-xxxvii, which is an excellent survey of the ideas, movements, and key events in the development of liberty, then read some of the articles on specific historical periods, movements, schools of thought, and individuals.

He goes on to suggest specific articles in the Encyclopedia that are essential reading for understanding successful radical change in ideas and political and economic structures, in both a pro-liberty and anti-liberty direction. Heres his guide to learning about the history of liberty in theEncyclopedia of Libertarianism:

I could add more essays to his list, but Ill restrain myself to just one: Along with the essays on the Constitution and James Madison, read Federalists Versus Anti-Federalists by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.

By the way, you can still get the beautiful hardcover edition. Right now its half-price at the Cato Store.

Link:

Learn the History of Liberty with the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism - Cato Institute (blog)

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about the Republican Party foolishly purging supporters they should be willing to embrace. The focus was mostly on small-c conservatives and small-l libertarians who were a thorn in the side of either congressional leadership, gay, or grassroots activists. These are people who probably have long hair, dyed hair, tattoos, piercings and probably listen to punk rock, metal, rap, or Top 40 more than whats considered your typical Republican fare of country or patriotic tunes. They also make up a larger part of the movement, and could help the party win more elections down the road, fight back against the leviathan of government (federal, state, and local), and educate a new generation of voters on why safe spaces, political correctness, and increased government spending are rotten ideas. They wont always agree with the typical GOP platform, but if theyre fans of freedom and liberty, it beats being fans of authoritarianism, right?

Whats interesting is that the people who railed against reaching out to this version of conservatives and libertarians the most are the ones who are now in the news the most: the alt-Right and white supremacists. This group of angry white boys, to steal a line from Kevin D. Williamson, yowled that they were the ones who needed to be brought in because they were being forgotten. Donald Trump certainly acquiesced to them, bringing in Stephen Bannon while also embarking on populist rhetoric not heard since Andrew Jackson. Trump is now in the White House and white nationalists feel their voices have been heard and its time to take the power back, as Rage Against the Machines Zack de la Rocha might howl. It doesnt matter if Trumps victory may have been chiefly due to how awful a candidate Hillary Clinton was, with her campaign ignoring states like Michigan, which swung towards Trump. The white mob is ready to use their newfound anger to drive out freedom lovers and cuckservatives with their tiki torches, polo shirts, and Adolf Hitler quoting tees.

Its time to flip the script and purge these racist, fascist Neanderthals from the conservative and libertarian movement, once and for all.

There are going to be people who read this and rightly say, But this is a small group, who arent really conservative/libertarian, so I shouldnt care at all about them. The problem is these Richard Spencers and Peter Brimelows got their start in the movement, under the guise of paleoconservatism, while others are part of the Hans-Hermann Hoppe bloc of libertarianism. They are the wolves in sheep clothing looking to draw more and more people into their pack while ripping away at the foundation of freedom and liberty at the same time.

These backwards-thinking white nationalists and the commentators who cater to them need to be rejected, not just because of their policies but the fact that they give certain politicians and media outlets the chance to paint a broad brush across actual conservatives and libertarians. For every Justin Amash or Mike Lee, there is a neoconfederate-backed Corey Stewart. For every Ludwig von Mises or Thomas Sowell or Matt Kibbe, who preach the importance of liberty and limited government open to all, there is a Paul Gottfried or Pat Buchanan or Chris Cantwell, who charge after the windmill of multiculturalism while moralizing about the strong state like a preacher spitting out epithets on hellfire and brimstone. These grifters of American values are indeed the minority, but ones who will not stop trying to sneak in with the crowd inside the big tent.

Why do white nationalists, fascists, and their fellow travelers try to get into the conservative and libertarian circles? Because they believe the left is already filled up! The nationalists believe the same as the socialists in the power of the all encompassing state but are uninterested in a war until it suits their purposes, or at least goes after a target they hold sacred.

They have long sought to infiltrate those groups who believe in smaller, weaker government with racial and quite loony beliefs. William F. Buckley recounted his fight against John Birch Society founder Robert Welch in Commentary, describing a 1964 clandestine meeting between he, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, and American Enterprise Institute founder William Baroody. The quartet decided to attack Welch in various different ways, to keep him from gaining further strength within the movement. Libertarians were quick to expunge Merwin Hart for anti-Semitism, thanks to the work of Foundation for Economic Education creator Leonard Read. The guardians of the gate were quick to make sure no white supremacists sneaked in, regardless of whatever Trojan horse they tried to hide inside.

Yet the conservative and libertarian movement of the last decade has passively accepted these insufferables, as long as they give lip service to limited government or key social conservative viewpoints like abortion and gay marriage. The white supremacists saw their chance during the heyday of the Tea Party and strolled back into the movement like Professor Harold Hill did in River City, Iowa in The Music Man. But unlike Hill, who found redemption through Marian the Librarian, these mountebanks are more in line with The Wizard of Oz, using tricks and sly words to get into power, and rule with an iron fist.

For whatever reason, the thinkers and organizers saw no reason to drive these individuals out as their ancestral leaders saw fit to do. One Latina libertarian friend of mine recounted being told, No apologies! by a Republican state office candidate after someone at a conference told her to return to Mexico. Her horrific crime which deserved a scarlet letter, much like Hester Prynne? Explaining why its important to be compassionate, yet not compromise principles! Tea Party organizers also decided to expand their vision from a critique on government spending, and freedom for all, into other topics, to increase their own numbers and draw more in. The intellectuals also failed in their mission. Richard Spencer was accepted by Duke Conservative Union and The American Conservative, while libertarians let Augustus Sol Invictus speak at New York Libertyfest last year. Cantwell was on Tom Woods show in 2014, while Cathy Reisenwitz wrote too many libertarians decided to just ignore Cantwell, instead of denouncing him. It is certainly honorable to be open to all, but whenever totalitarians see an opening, theyll present themselves as an ally before usurping like Napoleon did the Council of Five Hundred. Organizers and thinkers need to be good shepherds, keeping watch over their flocks to make sure no sheep go astray into danger or destruction. It also denies the fascists the chance to gain power.

The key way of rejecting these fakers isnt through violence or the government because that allows the wolves to play the victim card and whine into their keyboards how life isnt fair. They can also coerce more people into their ranks, by tossing sympathy around like a business card and pretending to be martyrs. The strategy of shutting up the opposition through laws and violence also is completely anathema to the tenets of liberty and freedom of association, press, and speech. People have the right to believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of how hare-brained and cockamamie it might be. The idea of a nation just for white, black, or brown people is rather absurd within itself, even if those who want to put race on top believe it will lead to utopia.

It should be society who tells these con artists to go away, much like they did when the KKK attempted to stay relevant after most of America left them behind. As my friend, Jason Pye, wrote at Townhall, his mother raised him to respect everyone and treat them how I wanted to be treated. It was society who deemed the Klan inconsequential and treated their attempts into the public eye with scorn and derision, until their sideshows became as unpopular as MySpace: still around, but hardly worth mentioning unless one is remembering what not to do. There is nothing wrong with peacefully removing racist thought leaders from conventions, much like the libertarians did to Spencer at ISFLC in February, but the power of the state should not be used.

As for those who complain about the lefts violence, to them I say, grow up! These people are doing their best imitation of a toddler pointing fingers at another child howling they did it first! while the adults stare at both with cocked eyebrow and disappointed gaze. There is violence on the left, make no mistake, but it behooves those in the freedom and liberty movement to decry and condemn violence as a whole, no matter who does it. The good news is that there are more adults than toddlers in the world and most of them have already denounced what happened in Virginia, along with other actions by the so-called alt-Right. The adults who are lagging behind need to ponder long and hard whether the left should remove its eye plank, before the right does.

To those who believe violence is the way to wipe out white supremacy, I would say, no because violence puts innocents in the middle. It damages those who have no interest in being involved in a particular fight, and who simply want to live their lives in peace. To those who say the government is the answer to snuffing out white supremacy, I say, no. The heavy hand of government has no business in wiping away an ideology no matter how horrific it might be.

It falls on society to rid the world of hatred. Its also up to intellectual and community leaders, along with politicians, to make sure these small-minded wannabe Jabroni try-hard nationalists are rejected and marginalized, and their philosophy tossed onto the dung heap of history.

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The conservative and libertarian movements need to purge white ... - Hot Air

1. According to the libertarian, we experience our own freedom when we make choices. But in our dreams, we have the feeling that we are making choices even though we know that dreams are the product of the physiological and psychological causes that produce them. Hence, we can feel as though we are free even though causes are producing our behavior. 2. According to some thinkers, the scientific view of the world is based on the conviction that events follow fixed laws and that there is a cause for everything being the way that it is. If this statement is a correct account of science, does libertarianism then fl y in the face of modern science? If so, because nothing can compete with modern science in unveiling the nature of reality, don't these facts negate libertarianism? 3. According to libertarianism, every free act is based on a volition or an act of the will. But in a given case, why did a particular volition come about at the precise time that it did and why was it directed toward this or that outcome? (Why did you decide to listen to music at this precise time and not three minutes earlier or later? Why did you decide to listen to this particular CD and not the others that were available?) Isn't the libertarian forced to admit that either our volitions pop into our heads uncaused (in which case, they are unexplained, indeterministic events that happen to us) or they are the result of previous acts of the will? In the latter case, we are caught in an infinite regress. For example, your decision to listen to music was based on your decision to relax, which was based on your decision to take a break from studying, which was based on your decision to do x, and so on. Doesn't it seem that libertarianism leads to the notion that our free actions are based on an absurd and impossible infinite series of willings? 4. Isn't it the case that the better you get to know a person, the more his or her actions are predictable? Doesn't this finding indicate that the more knowledge we have of people's past, their personality, and the present circumstances that are affecting them, the more we understand the causes that are operating on them to produce their behavior? Aren't we convinced that a person's past experiences are a key to understanding why he or she became a saint or a serial killer? If so, doesn't this argument undermine libertarianism?

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3.7 Libertarianism Flashcards | Quizlet

The diversity memo written by a now-fired Google engineer instigated days of debate this week, sparking a vibrant conversation about sex and censorship. But the memo, and Google's reaction to it, also provided an opening for a discussion too seldom had even by the staunchest advocates of free expression.

The culture of political correctness doesn't only censor people's beliefs, it attacks the very process by which we arrive at them.

Nick Gillespie explored how the controversy surrounding the Google memo illustrates this in Reason. "Political correctness has in many ways stymied any sort of good-faith conversation about issues touching on race, class, gender, and other highly charged topics," he observed.

Gillespie, writing from the libertarian perspective, contrasted the arrogance of the philosophy behind political correctness with the "epistemological humility" of libertarianism. "Libertarianism is ultimately grounded not in anything like knowable, objective, scientific truths, but in epistemological humility built on (per Hayek and other unacknowledged postmodernists) a recognition of the limits of human understanding and that centralization of power leads to bad results."

"That is, because we don't know objective truths," Gillespie continued, "we need to have an open exchange of ideas and innovation that allows us to gain more knowledge and understanding even if we never quite get to truth with a capital T."

Even those who believe their world views are grounded in objective truths should be sympathetic to that argument, recognizing the process by which we develop certainty in our beliefs involves the exchange of differing ideas we must compare to draw conclusions.

Not only do the proponents of political correctness censor those who express what people like me might label objective truths for instance, biological sex differences they also seek to censor anybody who expresses anything that subverts progressive orthodoxy. The result, ironically, is a shutdown of the very process by which many of them probably arrived at their own beliefs in the first place.

"We need to allow as many 'experiments in living' (to use John Stuart Mill's phrase) as possible both out of respect for others' right to choose the life they want and to gain more knowledge of what works and what doesn't," Gillespie wrote, concluding, "Political correctness is not simply an attack a given set of current beliefs, it is an attack on the process by which we become smarter and more humane. That's exactly why it's so pernicious and destructive."

There's an ascendant reflex to shout down ideas simply on the basis of their perceived wrongness. Inaccuracy, objective or subjective, is tolerated less and less in the public square.

With the obvious exception of journalists reporting on the news, it's okay for people to express ideas that are wrong, objectively or otherwise. I suspect some of this attitude stems from outrage culture on social media, where people on every point of the ideological spectrum race to belittle other worldviews. To the contrary, we need to respect the value of listening to falsehoods and bad ideas. You can't actually debunk them without knowing they exist in the first place.

Google employees should recognize that it's okay to work with a person you believe is wrong. The memo in question was explicitly respectful and appreciative of diversity. Rather than advocating for the firing of its author, why not take a deep breath, recognize the good intentions, look past your reflexive disagreement, and accept it as an opportunity to prove the correctness of your own views?

After all, one day you might just get something wrong too.

Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.

Read more:

Political correctness attacks the entire learning process - Washington Examiner

August 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Friedman Print

So now we finally know. Libertarians arent the ditzy bumblers exemplified by 2016 presidential candidate Gary (What is a leppo?) Johnson. Nor are they ideological extremists, like the proprietor of the Ayn Rand School for Tots. In reality, the libertarian movement is a cabal of racist plutocrats engaged in a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance at the behest of their billionaire paymasters, the Koch brothers.

Or so Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, tells us in her widely discussed book,Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America. As a long-time critic of both libertarianism and the branch of economics, public-choice theory,[1] on which MacLean focuses most of her attention, I was open to being persuaded by her dark musings. Yet, as a small army of aggrieved libertarian bloggers has pointed out, MacLean presents no evidence for her sensationalistic accusations. Instead what she presents are quotations taken out of context or so mangled by ellipses that they suggest the opposite of the quoted libertarians intentions (some examples can be found here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here). As a work of history, this book is a fiasco.

Nevertheless, it is worth reading. Libertarians can benefit from it if they put aside the authors conspiracy theorizing and think about how their movement is perceived by those outside it. Non-libertarians can take the occasion to wonder if MacLeans Manichean view of politics is not uncomfortably similar to their own. Theorists of democracy can think about how close public-choice theory is to one of the most common forms of political criticism in mass democracies: the very form of criticism MacLean directs at libertarians. In short, everyone can profit from the chance to reflect on why MacLean, who in previous work showed herself to be a fine historian, was able to call forth no interpretive charity in attempting to understand libertarians in general and, in particular, her bte noir, James Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel laureate in economics and founder of the public-choice school.

Libertarianism as a Conspiracy of Evil

Consider MacLeans most explosive claim: that public-choice theory was motivated by Buchanans desire to preserve the way of life of white Southerners who in the 1950s, early in his career, were being threatened by desegregation (p. xiv). MacLean doesnt provide a shred of evidence to back up this claim. Seeking to channel Buchanan, who was born in Tennessee but was teaching in Virginia when Brown v. Board of Education was issued, MacLean writes: Northern liberals were now going to tell his people how to run their society. And to add insult to injury, he and people like him with property were no doubt going to be taxed more to pay for all the improvements that were now deemed necessary and proper for the state to make. What about his rights? . . . . I can fight this, he concluded. I want to fight this. (p. xiv, italics in original.) One of MacLeans libertarian critics makes much of the fact that the words she italicizes are not actually quotations from Buchanan: unwary readers might assume otherwise. But MacLean doesnt even provide evidence that Buchanan held the un-italicized thoughtsshe puts into his head. She allows back-handedly that Buchanan was not a member of the Virginia elite. Nor is there any explicit evidence to suggest that for a white southerner of his day, he was uniquely racist or insensitive to the concept of equal treatment. Yet she doesnt provide any indirect evidence that he was at all racist or insensitive to the concept of equal treatment.

The source of MacLeansanti-empirical historiography can be found in the next sentence: And yet, somehow, all he saw in the Brown decision was coercion (emphasis added). The somehow implies that Buchanan did not really believe what he said he believed (despite the absence of evidence for this). But MacLean fails to recognize that libertarians are positively obsessed by coercion, blinding them to just about everything else. It is wrong to accuse them of anything more than the narrowness that marks the thinking of any ideologue.

Breaking: Ideologues Can Be Obtuse

Yet, to be charitable to MacLean, she clearly finds it incredible that libertarianism could make sense to any intelligent person. Therefore, she has little choice but to think that libertarianism must be a mask for something deeper and darker. The tacit premise of the book is that nobody can honestly believe that the opposite of coercion, freedom, overrides claims of need and welfare. But having been a libertarian myself, I can testify that thats exactly what libertarians honestly believe. Orto be charitable to themwhat they honestly think they believe.

Libertarians take the sanctity of liberty (or freedom) for granted. And they fail to question the legitimacy of private property ownership, so they include property rights among our sacrosanct freedoms. Thus, government incursions on property rights are as impermissible as coercion by private actorsalso known, they are eager to point out, as criminals. To libertarians, then, taxation is theft. Conscription is slavery. And government, whose every action is backed by men with guns (the police), is inherently suspect. All of these beliefs are, to libertarians, simply logical consequences of their commonsensical commitment to liberty.[2]

Political theorists argue that libertarians use of terms such as coercion, liberty, and freedom is moralized. In other words, libertarians definitions of these terms beg the question against those who think that, for example, private property diminishes the freedom of the poor or of workers.[3] In response, libertarians will ferociously argue about the correct definition of these terms.[4] Such arguments serve to emphasize how far removed libertarians are from the concerns that have persuaded so many peoplethe vast, vast majority, across the entire planetto embrace government intervention, even if it violates freedom. These concerns revolve around the concrete social and economic problems suffered by people in modern societies. MacLean makes it abundantly clear that she, too, is absorbed by these concerns. So (apparently) she refuses to accept that libertarians obtuse preoccupation with liberty, correctly defined, explains their (apparently) cold indifference to the victims of social and economic problems. Thus, she searches for racist, plutocratic explanations of their indifference.

The Epic Libertarian Fail

Yet while it would have been more charitable, and more accurate, for MacLean to interpret libertarians as obtuse, it would not have been entirely fair. On the other side of the equation is the singular entanglement of libertarianism with economicsparticularly Austrian and Chicago-school economics.

No other political movement has as one of its bibles a tract entitled Economics in One Lesson.[5] No other movements first institution of any significance was called the Foundation for Economic Education. Yet if libertarians really believed, deep down, what they tell themselves they believe about the sanctity of liberty-cum-private property, the teachings of economics would be irrelevant to them: the freedom of property owners would be inviolate regardless of its economic effects. Yet libertarians are even more obsessed with these effects than they are with the linguistics of liberty. While they do honestly believe that government is inherently suspect because it is inherently coercive, they also honestly believe that government action to solve social and economic problems is inherently counterproductive. At the heart of libertarianism is not a deliberate, sinister defense of privilege, but a confused acceptance of two potentially contradictory ideas: a philosophical critique of government as inherently coercive and an economic critique of government as inherently counterproductive.

In my experience, libertarians tend to be drawn into their worldview by the economic critique of government, adding the philosophical critique only when they plunge in and read the works of the key libertarian ideologists, Ayn Rand and the lesser known but equally influential Murray N. Rothbard (or the works of their many epigones). Rand and Rothbard were themselves deeply influenced by Austrian economics, and MacLean acknowledges that Buchanan was converted to libertarianism in 1946, while he was a student of Frank Knight in the graduate program in economics at the University of Chicago. (However, she maintains, again on the basis of no evidence, that it is unclear whether his conversionwas the result of the cogency of Knights teaching or the upheaval on Chicagos South Side as steel and meatpacking workers downed tools in the most massive strike wave in Americas labor history [p. 36]. Here she footnotes three different pages of Buchanans autobiography, where he repeatedly proclaims Knights influence on him butsays nothing at all about the strike.)

MacLeans lack of charity proves especially unfortunate in this connection, for libertarians economic preoccupations lead directly to the need, in their ideological system, for public-choice theory. The key doctrine conveyed by free-market economics, in both its Austrian and Chicago variants, is that unintended consequences may frustrate attempts to solve social and economic problemsand that these attempts frequently cause more harm than good. That is, the governments problem-solving attempts backfire so badly that they hurt the very people they attempt to help. Classic examples are the housing shortages that economists often attribute to rent control, and the unemployment they often attribute to minimum-wage laws.

However, while libertarians have been profoundly affected by the Austrian and Chicago idea that unintended consequences are ubiquitous, neither Austrian nor Chicago economists ever proposed a theory to explain why this should be the case; or why unintended consequences, when they do occur, are more likely to be harmful than beneficial. Such a theory would be about politics as much as economics: it would explain why political decision makers are likelier to do harm than good. Instead of such a theory, libertarians adopted a different theory of politics: Buchanans theory of public choice.

Public Choice: Uncharitability as a Political Theory

I well remember the buzz in elite libertarian circles when, in 1983, public choice began to be discovered by them. (MacLean does not recognize that public choice was a relatively late addition to the libertarian creed.) Public choice, libertarians exclaimed at the time, was the theory of politics that libertarianism had always lacked. But instead of explaining why the unintended consequences of public policies are (supposedly) rife, and (supposedly) negative, public-choice theory goes in the opposite direction. Buchanan asserted that people are just as self-interested in politics as in other areas of life.[6] So we should expect self-dealing from political actors, not benevolence. If they are in it for themselves, then it is logical to expect them to do more harm than goodnot unintentionally, but deliberately. Public choice took a very old and often-legitimate worrythe worry about corruptionand turned it into a universal law.[7]

MacLean is rightly outraged at this. Buchanan and his followers, as she puts it, projected unseemly motives onto strangers about whom they knew nothing (p. 98). In particular, she is offended that public choice deglorif[ies] the social movements that have transformed America since the nineteenth century, and recast[s] the motivations of the government officials who rewrote the laws (p. 76). Buchanans reductionist analysis turned young Americans with a passion to live up to their nations stated ideals into menaces who misrepresented their purposes for personal gain (p. 107). This reductionism, however, brings Buchanan much closer to MacLean than she recognizes. Public-choice theory rules out interpretive charity in advance. All that is left is the imputation of bad motives to ones political opponents. Public choice is MacLeans own method, systematized.

By the same token, however, it is rich to read public-choice libertarians begging MacLean for interpretive charity. Their entire careers have been dedicated to denying interpretive charity to the political actors with whom they disagree. Indeed, one defender of public choiceconfessing that he has not read MacLeans booknotes that MacLean benefited from public funding in writing it. Gotcha, Professor MacLean!

MacLean and public-choice theorists, of course, are not unique in ascribing the worst to their political opponents. Everybody does it. This is an immense problem in modern politics, one we see playing out right now. If ones political opponents are not just mistaken but evil, one may well feel that anything is justified in combating them. MacLeans practice, and Buchanans theory, can lead to a war of all against all.

The Politics of Good and Evil, and an Alternative

Manicheaism is not only politically dangerous but a barrier to sound scholarship. Evil is an accusation, not an explanation. Actions may be objectively evil, but subjectively, everyone is doing what they think is somehow justified. Attributions of (subjectively) evil motives end the process of scholarship before it can begin. In studying politics, we want to know (among other things) why evil results may flow even from good motivesas an unintended consequence.

The Niskanen Centers Institute for the Study of Politics will ask that question insistently. (Watch this space on Wednesday mornings.) Even in considering the objective evils of our time, such as rampant nationalism, we shall try to understand their proponents as they understand themselves. This means starting with their own explanations of their actions and questioning their motives only if this is warranted by charitably interpreted evidence.

Interpretive charity is not merely good ethics, or a salve for raw political divisions. It is essential to the scholarly task: the task of understanding each othera task to which all of us, not just academics but political actors, must attend.

[1] E.g., Jeffrey Friedman, Whats Wrong with Libertarianism, Critical Review 11(3): 407-67 (on public choice, see p. 442).

[2] E.g., David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (1997), pp. 87, 110, 149, 171, 225, 276, 300.

[3] E.g., G. A. Cohen, Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat; Justin Weinberg, Freedom, Self-Ownership, and Libertarian Philosophical Diaspora, Critical Review 11(3) (1997): 323-44.

[4] E.g., Tom G. Palmer, G. A. Cohen on Self-Ownership, Property, and Equality, Critical Review 12(3) (1998); and Whats Not Wrong with Libertarianism: Reply to Friedman, ibid.

[5] Hazlitts Economics in One Lesson is not merely a primer for libertarians who want to brush up on economics for purposes of policy debate. It has been the embarkation point for many a journey into libertarian ideology.

[6] James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, pp. 19-20.

[7] It turns out that it is not even a good generalization. For a summary of empirical evidence against it, see Leif Lewin, Self-Interest and Public Interest in Western Democracies (1991). In a twentieth-anniversary symposium on this book, two of the leading proponents of public-choice theory, Dennis Mueller and Michael Munger, essentially conceded that they were unaware of this evidence and had no answer to it. See Dennis C. Mueller, The Importance of Self-Interest and Public Interest in Politics, Critical Review 23(3) (2011); and Michael C. Munger, Self-Interest and Public Interest: The Motivations of Political Actors, ibid. This is not to say, however, that laws are everywhere and always designed to serve the public interest. See, e.g., Terry Moes Vested Interests and Political Institutions; or The Captured Economy, by the Niskanen Centers Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles. On the tendency of public-choice theory to be removed from reality, consider the words of the Niskanen Centers namesake: Much of the [public choice] literature is a collection of intellectual games. Our specialty has developed clear models of first and second derivatives but cannot answer such simple questions as Why do people vote? (William A. Niskanen, The Reflections of a Grump, p. 151).

Jeffrey Friedman, the Director of the Niskanen Centers Institute for the Study of Politics and the editor ofCritical Review,is a Visiting Scholar in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley.

Originally posted here:

Public Choice Theory and the Politics of Good and Evil - Niskanen Center (press release) (blog)

Certain quarters of the libertarian universe are in an absolute tizzy because Mises Institute President Jeff Deist invoked blood and soil in a recent speech. In the minds of some PC brain-addled libertarians, this is clearly an indication that the speaker was dog whistling to Nazis. This is both profoundly clueless and shameless PC grandstanding.

Proof that blood and soil can only be some sort of cryptic reference to Nazism is supposedly supplied by a Google search of the term which brings back a lot of links to wrongthink websites. I respect many libertarians. I have many libertarian friends, both real and virtual, but too many modern libertarians inhabit a world that exists only in their heads, and they can be grossly unfamiliar with the intellectual (and real) world outside the echo chamber that is their segment of libertarianism.

Blood and soil is, in fact, a rather mundane formulation that is used to express an undeniable aspect of reality. To deny that attachment to blood and soil is a fundamental aspect of the human condition identifies someone as intellectually unserious, but that is what ideology can do to people. It makes otherwise smart people stupid as they try to force reality to conform to their tidy theories, rather than letting reality inform their theories.

Man has been attached to blood and soil, hearth and home, kith and kin, for the entirety of human history. In fact, much of human history is a tale of blood and soil. Such is certainly hardwired into our DNA, which makes perfect Darwinian sense. Attachment to blood and soil is very logical from a survival standpoint.

For making a statement similar to this during a Facebook debate, I was accused of peddling baseless pseudoscience. Huh? Because other primates do not demonstrate attachment to kin and territory? Because no other mammal does? You cannot penetrate this sort of ideological blindness.

Far from being some exclusively Nazi code, blood and soil have long been invoked within American conservative circles, for example, as part of the long-running debate between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives over the nature of America. Paleocons assert that these United States are a continuation of old Europe in the New World, not some radical new departure or experiment. Neocons on the other hand assert that the U.S. is instead an idea or proposition nation unlike the blood and soil nations of Europe. I certainly side with the paleocons in this debate because an idea nation is an ideological conceit that is inherently leftist. It is also important to note that other countries that claimed to be idea nations were the old Soviet Union and post-Revolution France. Not exactly stellar company.

But even if you concede that the U.S. is an idea nation, the claim is that it is uniquely so. Therefore, by implication, other nations are not and follow the model. Arguably, every nation on earth is a nation founded on blood and soil to a greater or lesser degree, and the degree to which it is lesser is largely dependent on how many differing blood and soil groups it is attempting to make coexist under one national roof. The only nations that are arguably not based on blood and soil are the modern nation states that were artificially cobbled together by others, such as Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, and we saw how well those little experiments worked out. They were led by strongmen and held together by force, but when that fell apart, they naturally separated into their blood and soil constituencies with much messiness. So Iraq is not a natural blood and soil nation, but Kurdistan within Iraq is. So, according to the PC libertarian thought police, is Kurdistan inherently a Nazish country? Are all Kurds therefore Nazis?

I asked one of the Rightthink Enforcement Brigade in my aforementioned debate if he considered a Cherokee Indian Reservation to be a manifestation of blood and soil Nazism? Are the Cherokees who live there therefore Nazis? Needless to say, I didnt get a straight answer. Off course, Nazi-esque Indian Reservations would be a bit of a difficult thing to pull off since the Reservations predate Nazism, but history has never been the righthinkers strong point seeing as how they are peddling a laughingly novel intellectual formulation.

Aside from all of this ridiculous hoopla, I highly recommend that you read the Deist speech. Far from a dog-whistling screed as the PC libertarians have characterize it, it is actually eminently reasonable and a much needed counterbalance to the detached-from-reality brand of libertarianism being peddled by the hypersensitive PC-obsessed new breed.

The speech is very well done, and comes at a very important time as many libertarians are going astray. The Anarchist Notebook calls it probably the most important libertarian speech made in the last decade. What Deist is essentially doing in his speech is defending a concept that, while some will object to the term, used to be called paleolibertarianism. I do not intend to diminish Deists speech in anyway, but what he articulates is not new or groundbreaking. He makes some observations that are really truismsthat people value family, faith, culture, place, and so forthand then makes some arguments that men and women of good will could have an honest debate about, such as the relative role of universalism vs. self-determination.

Early on in his speech, Deist describes and defends orthodox Rothbardian libertarianism. What he defends in theory is a stateless form of libertarianism. It isnt even minarchism that he is defending. He goes on to defend the paleolibertarian belief that the institutions and sentiments that undergird civil society such as family, faith, culture, tradition, attachment to place, etc. are essential components that will hold society together in the theoretical absence of the state, rather than impediments to liberty as many of the new breed libertarians see them. He defends decentralization, secession, and self-determination as political ends that libertarians should strive for rather than the imposition of a universal moral ethic.

Deist concluded his speech with a call to action. In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance, he said. This statement is true on its face. These things do manifestly matter to people and libertarians certainly ignore them at the risk of their own irrelevance, but it is apparently this line more than any other that has the PC libertarian thought police so hysterical.

There is something not normal about a person who can read a defense of the stateless society and decentralization, secession, and self-determination as means of achieving it and immediately think Nazi because of a reference to the obvious reality of blood and soil. This is a sorry attempt by competing power centers in the libertarian orbit to marginalize a mindset that they disagree with at the expense of the greater movement as a whole. Perhaps some of the not-too-bright spear carriers arguing over this really are ideologically brain addled, but I simply cannot believe that people like Steve Horwitz, one of the main ringleaders of the PC jihad, are really that stupid. Theyre not. They are arguing in bad faith by exploiting the reigning PC zeitgeist rather than have an honest debate. Shame on them.

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Defending Jeff Deist From The Politically Correct Libertarians - The Liberty Conservative

Viking, AmazonNo recent book has caused a bigger splash in libertarian circles than Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains. The Duke historian avers that Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, who helped created what's known as public choice economics, had racist, segregationist intentions in his life's work of analyzing what he called "politics without romance"; that the Koch brothersCharles and Davidare not-so-secretly controlling politics in the U.S. and are devoted to disenfranchising Americans, especially racial and ethnic minorities; and that libertarians are deeply indebted to the pro-slavery philosophy of John C. Calhoun and that we wish "back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation."

None of this is true, but that doesn't mean MacLean should go unchallengedor that libertarians don't need to explain themselves better if we want to gain more influence in contemporary debates over politics, culture, and ideas.

In the latest Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Michael Munger of Duke's political science department, who has written a caustic, fair, and even generous review of MacLean's book for the Independent Institute. Even as he categorizes Democracy in Chains as a "work of speculative historical fiction" that was "in many cases illuminating," he concludes that her book is wrong in almost every meaningful way, from gauging Buchanan's influence on libertarianism to her inconsistent views toward majoritarian rule as an absolute good to her attempts to smear Buchanan as a backward-looking racial conservative.

Munger, who ran for governor of North Carolina as a Libertarian in 2008 and maintains a vital Twitter account at @mungowitz, also discusses how that experience changed his understanding of politics, why he's a "directionalist" advocating incremental policy changes rather a "destinationist" insisting on immediate implementation of utopian programs, and how the movement's heavy emphasis on economics has retarded libertarianism's wider appeal.

"Many libertarians celebrate something like the perfection of the market," he says. "And so we end up playing defense. When someone says, 'Look at these problems with the market,' we say, 'No, no. Actually, the problem is state intervention, the problem is regulation. If we get rid of those things, then perfection will be restored.' The argument that I see for libertarianism is not the perfection of markets, it's the imperfections of the state, the institutions of the state."

It's a wide-ranging conversation that touches on growing up in a working-class, segregated milieu and possible futures for the libertarian movement.

Munger's home page is here.

Read Reason's coverage of Democracy in Chains here.

Audio post production by Ian Keyser.

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This is a rush transcriptcheck all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Hi, I'm Nick Gillespie. This is the Reason Podcast. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you're there. Today I'm talking with Mike Munger, a political scientist at Duke, about the new book Democracy in Chains by a Duke historian, Nancy MacLean.

In her controversial work, MacLean argues, among other things, that Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan, who helped create what is known as public choice economics, had racist segregationist intentions in his life's work of analyzing what he called "politics without romance", that the Koch brothers, Charles and David, are not so secretly controlling politics in the US and are devoted to disenfranchising Americans, especially racial and ethnic minorities, and that libertarians, as a group, are deeply indebted to the pro-slavery philosophy of John C. Calhoun, and that we wish "to go back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of mid-century Virginia, minus the segregation".

We're going to talk about all that and more, including Mike Munger's journey from economist to political scientist then his past history of selling drugs. Michael Munger, thanks for joining us.

Michael Munger: It's a pleasure to be on the podcast.

Gillespie: You wrote a comprehensive and archly critical review of MacLean for the Oakland-based Independent Institute, it's up on the Independent Institute's website, in which you characterized Democracy in Chains as "a work of speculative fiction". Elaborate on that for a bit. What is speculative about it or what is speculative fiction about her account of James Buchanan?

Munger: Well, there's a history of history being speculative interpolation of here's what might have happened given the few points we're able to observe. It's as if a strobe light at irregular intervals illuminates something, and all you get is a snapshot. It's hard to say what people were thinking, what they were saying, but given these intermittent snapshots, you then interpolate a story. Sometimes those stories are pretty interesting, particularly if we don't know much about what otherwise was going on.

The difficulty that Professor MacLean has, I think ... And I think she's surprised. Frankly, I think she is surprised that so many people knew so much about James Buchanan and about public choice, more on that in a minute. What she did was admirable. She went to the very disorganized, at the time, archives at the Buchanan House at George Mason University, and she spent a long time going through these documents and got these snapshots.

To her credit, she did go to the archives. To her discredit, she was pretty selective about the snapshots that were revealed that she decided to use to interpolate between. There's plenty of exculpatory evidence that she ignored, put aside, misquoted, but she came up with a really interesting story. I found myself, when I'm reading the book, Democracy in Chains, thinking, "If this were true, it'd be really interesting." I can see why many people who don't know the history of Jim Buchanan in public choice and libertarianism, on reading it, would say, "That's a terrific story," because it is a terrific story, it's just not true.

Gillespie: I mean the large story that she is seeking to tell is that James Buchanan and other libertarian leaning oftentimes, pro-free ... I mean, I guess, always pro-free market, classical liberal ideologues, or scholars and ideologues and what not, want to put limits on what majorities can do to people, and they often talk about that pretty openly. She reads that as a conspiracy of disenfranchisement.

Munger: Right, because she doesn't know anyone who believes that. The fact that that's actually just standard in not just public choice, but political science since Aristotle, she finds that astonishing. It's something that...

Gillespie: Well, is she being honest there? Because I mean you've mentioned Aristotle, well, I'll mention Magna Carta, where even the King of England, at a certain point in time, had to admit that his powers were limited and that Englishmen had rights that could not be abrogated by even a king much less any kind of majority. I mean is she just being willfully opaque or thick there, or does she, in these moments ... And I guess I'm asking you to speculate on her motives, but does she really believe that?

Munger: Well, in my review, I invoke what I call the principle of charity, and that is that until you really have good evidence to the contrary, you should accept at face value the arguments that people make. She seems to say that we should respect the will of majorities, full stop. I'm willing to accept that as what she believes.

I had an interesting interview with a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Education, who said, "Can you explain what's wrong with this book?" I sent him four pages with examples handwritten so that he could see. He said, "No, that's too complicated. I don't understand that," so I simplified it. He said, "No, it's too complicated. I don't understand that." Then, finally, I said what I just said, "She appears to believe there should be no limits on majorities," and he said, "Oh, no. That's too simple. Nobody could believe that."

Gillespie: Well, I mean the opening of the book, in many ways, the taking off point is the Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954, which itself was an act by the Supreme Court invalidating a majority position that local school districts could segregate students based on race, not based on majority rules. It seems very confusing from the beginning.

Munger: Yeah, not just the Supreme Court, but federal troops sent in directly and explicitly to thwart the will of majorities.

Gillespie: Yeah, but she, at the same time, is saying that any limits on the majority's ability to do as it wants with 50% minus one vote of the population is somehow cataclysmic and calls to mind ...

Munger: Well, but to your question, no, I don't think she actually believes that. She's a political progressive. When you dig down, when you drill down on the progressive position, they're not that sure that actual majorities know what they want, and so they need the assistance of experts and technocrats. On some things, that probably is a sensible position, that we could debate whether the Food and Drug Administration, in all of its particulars, is useful, but you've got to at least understand a reasonable person could believe that there are some things that we can't really leave up to the particulars of voting, rather it's what the people would want if they were well-informed. That's what progressives think they're trying to implement.

Gillespie: I mean what is the goal of progressivism in this? Is it on a certain argument it's to say that there's no limit on the government's ability to tax people or regulate people or redistribute wealth and resources? Because obviously she doesn't believe if a majority ... I mean she's not a true procedural due process person, where as long as a majority, a simple majority, votes on something, that's the law.

Munger: Well, what she is worried about is any limitation on the ability of the state to act on the rightly understood will of the people. Anything that the First Amendment or ... It's fairly common among progressives to say anyone who defends freedom of speech is racist, anyone who defends freedom of property is a plutocrat who is defending ... That's a caricature of their position, but what they're saying is any limit on what the government can do when it's trying to do the right thing, we don't want that. They believe they know. They actually believe that they know the right thing.

I have to admit that I have enjoyed going around to my colleagues who, throughout the Obama administration, were pretty happy with what I saw were excessive uses of executive invocation of power. They would say, "As long as my guy's in charge, I don't really mind," but their guy's not in charge anymore. They'll admit, "I just never expected Trump to be in charge."

Gillespie: Right. Well, if we take for granted that progressives tend to be majoritarians, in fact, when their people are not in power, I should point out, they're less likely to be interested in a simple majoritarianism, right?

Munger: Yeah, yeah. Well, but that's why they have to come up with stories for why there's some conspiracy, there's someone who's suppressing the vote, there's someone who's spending money behind the scenes because if actually left up to the people, as Hillary Clinton said, she'd be ahead by 50%.

Gillespie: Right. One of the charges that MacLean makes in the book is that ... And she goes back and forth between implying that libertarians are somewhat racist by design, other times it's by default, or that they're not sufficiently interested in the outcomes of particular policies such as school choice, essentially both in a form that was practiced in mid-century Virginia, in the 1950s, as a result of federal orders to integrate their schools. Virginia and a couple of other states talked about vouchers.

That's actually where Milton Friedman got the idea for school vouchers. He talks about it openly in the 1955 essay where he first talked about school vouchers. That libertarians are insufficiently concerned about certain policies' effects on racial and ethnic minorities. Do you think there's truth to that charge?

Munger: There is some truth to it in the sense that libertarians tend to take property rights as given and to the extent that the distribution of power and wealth reflects past injustice. In the case of the south where I grew up, it's not debatable. The distribution of power and wealth does, in fact, reflect past injustice, and saying we're going to start from where we are. It's one of the things Jim Buchanan often said; as a political matter, we're going to start from where we are. The reason is that to do anything else endows not the state, but politicians with so much power that we expect it to be misused.

That's the public choice part of this is that many progressives imagine a thing called the state that's well-informed and benevolent, naturally has the objectives that they attribute to it, but if instead you think politicians are likely to use that power for their own purposes, and it's actually unlikely that we'll achieve the outcomes even that progressives think that we'll get. You might concede, suppose that that were actually achievable, we could at least debate whether it would be a good thing. That's not how the state is going to use the power that the libertarian of public choice person would say. As a result, we have to start from where we are. It's not perfect, but we have to start from where we are.

Gillespie: Let's talk about Buchanan and the response to Brown versus Board of Education by people like Milton Friedman James Buchanan, who, despite having various connections, are very distinct thinkers. On a certain level, they advocated for school choice in the 1950s. School choice in that iteration would have allowed essentially a voucher program, let's say, where a local government, a state government, a federal government gives parents of students a certain amount of money to spend however they wish on education. That would have allowed conceivably for parents to choose segregated schools for their children while also allowing a lot of poor parents as well as racial and ethnic minorities freedom to leave racially-segregated schools.

How should libertarians talk about that? I mean nowadays school choice is primarily driven by explicit concern for and results that are good for poor students in general and ethnic and racial minorities. I guess I'm groping here for the question of should libertarians replace such a prioritization of property rights or of autonomy, individual autonomy, with questions about racial and ethnic disparities? I mean is that something that should come from a libertarian perspective?

Munger: Well, the reason that this is a hard question to ask is that it's a difficult issue for libertarians to take on in the first place. I found this when I was running for governor in 2008. My platform when I was running for governor for education was means-tested vouchers because wealthy people often have some kinds of choices. Now what we should worry about is making sure that those.

Gillespie: Just to point out, you ran for governor of North Carolina as a libertarian.

Munger: As a libertarian.

Gillespie: What percentage of the vote did you end up polling?

Munger: I got 2.8%, 125,000 votes, but I found that libertarians themselves were the hardest ones to convince about a voucher program because they just thought the state shouldn't be involved in education at all, but it already is involved in education; the question is how can we improve it?

I think one of the arguments for vouchers is that if you look at parents, the parents who ... And you already said this, but I want to emphasize it. The people who really favor voucher programs tend to be those who otherwise see themselves as having few choices they're happy with. A lot of them are poor African American inner city parents who really care about their children, but have no means of sending them to a better school.

To be fair, there's a famous letter from Milton Friedman to Warren Nutter in the mid-'50s. Warren Nutter was one Buchanan's partners at University of Virginia. In it, Friedman points out that vouchers may be a way around the problem of segregated schools. The reason is that, yes, schools are going to be segregated, there's not really a way around that, but this means that African American parents will have more resources to send their children to better schools. If they're still segregated, at least they're better schools. It's a way of giving more resources to parents.

Gillespie: Do you think somebody like Milton Friedman ... He's an interesting case because he stressed, for instance, about the war on drugs, that it had a disproportionate effect on racial minorities, and he did that with other programs as well. Was he hopelessly or willfully naive about the meanness of American society, I think, where he would ... And a lot of libertarians say this, and there's some truth to it, but there's also some accommodationist thinking going on, where as long as your dollars are green, racial attitudes will ... And you empower people with more money, say, in an education market that people will integrate or get along more easily. Is that just ridiculously idealistic?

Munger: Well, for Friedman, in particular, he himself had been subject to discrimination, very explicit, open discrimination. I think for Friedman, in particular, he was quite aware of the problem and was concerned in a way that many people are not. Libertarians generally often just say, "What we need is a race-blind society." Since it's unlikely that we have that, having institutions that otherwise seem fair may not be a very good solution, but Friedman himself advocated for policies that he thought would at least make discrimination more expensive or would allow people to work around discrimination.

The answer to your question is complicated. I do think that libertarians have, at a minimum, a public relations problem because of the tin ear that we have in talking about this, but I also think that there's a substantive problem in the way that you say that it might be that having some sort of ... Well, what I favor, and this is something that Jim Buchanan favored, is to avoid the waste that's involved in denying something like equality of opportunity to almost everyone.

Buchanan was very concerned about unearned privilege. He actually favored a confiscatory estate tax, inheritance tax because he thought that was honoring the privilege, making sure that people, regardless of where they start out, are able to achieve is not just in their interest, but in all of our interests. They're more productive, the society produces more, people are better consumers and better citizens. Equality of opportunity is something we should advocate for more explicitly.

Gillespie: Part of that is that libertarians often try to pass as anarchists, it seems to me. They simultaneously will say, "Well, I'm a libertarian," which is one thing, and it's easily defined or quickly to defined as somebody who believes in a strictly limited government. Almost always from any given starting point, libertarians are going to argue to reduce the size, scope, and spending of government, but a lot of us play-act as anarchists, saying there should be no state, so that the answer to everything, if it's gay marriage, it's like, "Well," or marriage equality, it's the state shouldn't be involved in marriage at all. If it's about public school or about school policy, the state shouldn't be involved in schooling at all and education.

Was Buchanan and Friedman ... Or most of the libertarian, major libertarian figures of academics, certainly an economist like Friedrich Hayek, like Friedman, like Ludwig von Mises, like Buchanan, they are not anarchists at all. They take the state as a given, and then it's a question of do you move it in a more libertarian direction or a less libertarian direction. Is that accurate?

Munger: I think it varies a bit. Mises is a hero to anarchists. I think it's complicated, but Murray Rothbard took Mises and, I think, in some ways, overinterpreted, but the Mises-Rothbard approach is much closer to being anarchist. Their claim is that anything that the state does, it will either do wrong or it's just inherently evil; whereas equality of opportunity is a more complicated question.

One problem with equality of opportunity is that it's much easier to take opportunities away from the wealthy than it is to give them to the poor. It's just a knee-jerk argument against redistribution is that all we're going to do is cut the top off the distribution. The problem is not inequality, the problem is poverty.

But a lot libertarians, I think, would not even admit that poverty is a problem on which the government should ask should act. What should happen instead is all we need to do is get rid of taxes and regulations and the market will respond by creating equality of opportunity. There is a point to that in the sense that the best welfare program is a good job.

Gillespie: Right. Well, to cut to the chase, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and there were multiple Civil Rights Act in the years, decade leading up to 1964, but that's a flash point because it's often seen as a ... Barry Goldwater who later in his life espoused a lot of libertarian-sounding platitudes and ideas and policies. In 1964, when he was running against Lyndon Johnson, was definitely ... I mean he was the favored candidate of National Review conservatives and of libertarians. If you talk to older libertarians, a lot of them talk about being actualized into politics through the Goldwater campaign in '64. He also courted segregationists; although he had a long history of actually integrating things like a family department store in Phoenix as well as the Arizona National Guard and the schools in the Phoenix area and what not.

But the civil rights acts in the mid-'60s are often castigated by libertarians for redefining places like hotels, theaters, businesses that were open to the general public as public accommodations, meaning that the state, local, and federal law could force business owners to integrate or to serve all customers regardless of race, color, creed, gender. Do you think the stock orthodox libertarian reading that that went too far? That's actually what Goldwater said when he had voted for everything before that, voted against it. Are libertarians wrong to interpret the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or rather the creation of public accommodations? Are they wrong to say that that is taking government action too far to remedy racism or prejudice?

Munger: That's an interesting question because what Goldwater would have said, and I think many people would rightly defend him for having said, is that the merits don't matter, this is a states rights question. The state needs to be able to govern itself in terms of the way that it decides on voting rights, and individuals need to be able to govern themselves in terms of the uses of their own property. Do you persist in that view when it turns out that the states are systematically misusing that ability to create an apartheid society?

I grew up under Jim Crow laws. I grew up in the '50s and '60s in rural Central Florida, and school busing was taking the black kids who live near my nice white kids school and taking them 15 miles away to a rat-infested, horrible place because that was the black kids school. The beginning of forced busing ended busing. It meant that the black kids could now walk to the nice white kids school.

The state systematically misused this. If individuals systematically misuse their property, at what point does the state say, "All right. That's not really your property. We're going to intervene." I think those are really different questions, but they get conflicted severely by the state.

Gillespie: Right. Also, if I can add, I mean that's one of the things that's interesting is that federal law's often seen as just coming out of nothing as opposed to addressing local and state laws or customs that have the force of law, so that ... Simply to focus on federal action misses the point that there's other levels of government doing things that are directly opposite of what the feds were talking about.

Munger: Yes, you cannot defend the right for states to do what they want when what they want is just manifestly evil and which violates the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. There were clear violations of the US constitution that the federal law was finally trying to change. Both the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965 addressed really legitimate problems that the states were misusing the power that they had been given. Now you can lament that the federal government took that power back. It's in violation of the Tenth Amendment.

Okay, the states deserved it because there's no such thing as states, what there is is politicians. Politicians cannot really be trusted. Saying that these are states rights, what it meant was that majorities, and we're back to MacLean now, majorities in these states got to act on evil racist impulses, and those majorities had to be controlled by the federal government. I don't think any other outcome was possible. Certainly no other outcome would have been better than the actual military intervention, which is what we saw: the 101st Airborne with tanks occupying some southern cities and enforcing what should have been the Civil War end of slavery amendments from the 1870s.

Gillespie: Well, you mentioned, bringing it back to MacLean, you also brought the conversation back to Buchanan and his idea of politics without romance by saying there aren't states, there's politicians who use power in ways that are specific and more individual. Just as I think libertarians oftentimes invoke the market as if it's some kind of Leviathan made up of all the different decisions, but it's a walking, strutting humanoid figure, we do that with the state, too.

If you could discuss a bit about Buchanan's characterization of public choice economics. Is that part of what gets under MacLean and other progressive skin? Because he actually is saying that we're not talking about a value free or a progressive values state, what we're talking about are individuals who amass power and then use it.

In a crude way, what public choice economics is about is looking at people in the public sector, elected officials, non-government organizations, in ways that they're similar to actors in the private sector. They want to increase their market share, they want to increase their revenue, but instead of profits, they get more tax dollars or more attention and more resources. That is very punishing to progressives or people who believe in good government. Is that part of what you think is irking her and other people who react negatively to libertarians?

Munger: Sure. It's exactly what is irking them. I think the odd thing is Professor MacLean's indictment of Buchanan as being the embodiment of this, because for him ... And I tried to talk about this in my review. It's a little complicated so let me just hit the high spots. The three things that public choice tries to do is methodological individualism. You have to start with individuals partly for reasons of autonomy, but also that's the reason people get to vote.

The second thing is what they call behavioral symmetry, but it's what you said, that politicians after all are not so different from the rest of us. Maybe they're public-spirited, but they also have their own objectives. We can't assume that they're either all-knowing or benevolent, which is often an assumption we make about the state.

The third thing, though, that Buchanan talks about, and this is different from a lot of public choice theory, is that we should think of politics as exchange, that is political institutions are a means of getting groups of people to cooperate in settings where markets might not work. We need some sort of way of choosing as groups. Here, Buchanan really was worried about the problem with political authority. The problem with political authority in philosophy is when can I be coerced? When can the state use this power, which is the definition of what the state is, which is violence, when can the state use violence against me?

The answer that Buchanan wanted was consent, when I have actually consented; not tacit consent, not something that we've made up, not hocus-pocus, actual consent. That's a hard problem, but he did believe that there was such a thing as political authority, but it took something like consensus. We're not all going to agree, but we all have to consent to be coerced. If we are, then we can do it. Under what circumstances can the 101st Airborne be brought into an otherwise sovereign state and force those citizens to do something that they don't want? It's a real problem because they did not consent to be coerced that way.

If you think that the constitution, with the Tenth Amendment reserved certain rights to the states, now maybe they're being misused, but there's a contract called the constitution that says this is what we can do. What we need to do perhaps is change the contract. He was probably too worried about constitutions, but you need to understand that Buchanan's main concern is political authority operating through an agreement called the constitution.

Gillespie: To my mind, and again, I guess, when did Buchanan's ... I guess it's considered one of his greatest works, The Calculus of Consent, which he wrote with Gordon Tullock. That was around 1960, 1962, something like that?

Munger: '62, yes.

Gillespie: There was a flowering of libertarian intellectuals, including people like Buchanan and Thomas Szasz with The Myth of Mental Illness, which came out around the same time, and even Hayek with The Constitution of Liberty, that we're all very much explicitly interested in how do you regulate power and how do you disperse power and then reserve coercion for particular moments. It parallels almost perfectly people like Michel Foucault, the French social theorist, who was also obsessed and focused on issues of power.

It has always struck me that there is so much common ground between a Foucauldian reading of power and a libertarian reading of power that was coming out 15 years after World War II and both a Nazi totalitarianism that was vanquished as well as Soviet and communist totalitarianism that was still rising. It boggles my mind that people can't seem to acknowledge that, that left-wing scholars don't want to admit that libertarianism speaks to issues of power and libertarians, if you invoke somebody like Foucault or certainly almost any French thinkers, that they go apoplectic.

It seems to me that Buchanan ultimately is engaged in one of the great questions that arose in the 20th Century of total institutions, total governments in big and small ways, big businesses, giant corporations, schooling that was designed to create citizens rather than educate people and create independent thinkers. Is there something to that? In your political science work, who are the thinkers that you think Buchanan could be most profitably engaged in a dialogue with that we don't necessarily think of off the top of our heads?

Munger: There is much to what you just said. I think that it's easy for us to lose track because ... Your conclusion is right. Those conversations didn't happen, and it seems now we've split off, but during the '60s, if you look at the work of Murray Rothbard reaching out to the left, they actually thought that exactly that synthesis was not just possible, but it was the direction that libertarianism should take.

It didn't work out very well because libertarians tended to be skeptical of state power. The left has this contradiction, a complicated contradiction, between saying, "We want the people to have power. We want to be able to protect the power of people." In fact, Foucault, at the end of his life, became very interested in problems of concentration of power in the state, not just in the market, and said some pretty libertarian things.

Gillespie: He had, in some of his last University of Paris lectures, told the students to read with special care the works of Mises and Hayek. He ultimately rejected a classical liberal way of reining in power, but definitely was interested in that. I guess Hayek and Jurgen Habermas overlapped at various institutions in the '60s as well, which is fascinating to think about.

Munger: There was some contact. I think it's partly that the left turned in the direction of endorsing the state, and libertarians ... One of our problems is we tend to value purity. That sort of conversation, a lot of people just wanted to kick Murray Rothbard out of the club because we all know that the state is evil and the most important thing is property rights. Anything that in any way vitiates or questions property rights is a mistake.

Buchanan is an economist. He's worried about trade-offs and he's worried about agreements. The reason is that in a voluntary exchange, we both know that we're better off. The argument for markets is you want the state to create and foster reductions in transactions cost that multiply the number of voluntary transactions, because the state doesn't know what we want, it doesn't know what we need. We do know, but if we're able to engage in more and more voluntary transactions, we get more wealth, more prosperity, more individual responsibility, and the world is a better place.

What Buchanan's question was can we scale up from that instead of having bilateral exchanges where I pay you to do something and we're both better off as a result? Can groups of us cooperated problems, like David Hume said, where we have to drain a swamp, there's a mosquito-laden swamp? It's very difficult for us to get together to do this. We have the free riding problem. Is there some institution that will allow us to have something that looks like a tax, but it's actually voluntary because all of us agreed that we're going to pay, just like I go to the grocery store, I voluntarily pay for something. Not all payments are involuntary, not all taxes have to be involuntary. That's the direction that Buchanan took. I actually think that libertarians just dropped the ball. We stopped thinking in those terms.

The oddest thing about MacLean's discovery, and you were saying earlier on that MacLean is indicting libertarians, I suppose that's true, but she really literally thinks there's this one person, James Buchanan, and his work is the skeleton key that allows us to unlock the entire program. In fact, Jim Buchanan has not been that much of an influence in economics. In some ways, public choice theory has become dominant in political science to a much greater extent, but that's because the study of constitutions in the ways that rules, limit majorities is just orthodox.

Buchanan's contributions to increase the number of analytical tools in the toolkit for analyzing majorities, he won, but it's off for MacLean to assign herself the straw man position and give Buchanan the orthodox position. I actually think that the argument in the book is just confused.

Gillespie: Well, we were on the same agenda in an Australian libertarian conference earlier this year, and one of the things you said there which I want to bring up now because it seems like a good time, you complained to a group of [AMSAC 37:02] libertarians that libertarians are too indebted to economists and that we think too much in economic terms, in economistic terms. You yourself, although you've always worked as a political scientist, as an academic, you were trained in economics. What is the problem there? Can you run through your case against being too indebted to economic thinking?

Munger: Many libertarians celebrate something like the perfection of the market, and so we end up playing defense. When someone says, "Look at these problems with the market," we say, "No, no. Actually, the problem is state intervention, the problem is regulation. If we get rid of those things, then perfection will be restored." The argument that I see for libertarianism is not the perfection of markets, it's the imperfections of the state, the institutions of the state.

I've had some debates with my Duke colleague, Dan Ariely, about this. Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist, and he writes about how irrational consumers are. He has a point. Consumers can be manipulated in all sorts of ways. My answer is every flaw in consumers is worse in voters. Every flaw in consumers is worse in voters.

All the things that Dan Ariely points to, the fact that free stuff is too important, that advertising about general principles or things that look cool can make us want something. In markets, at least, when I buy something and it doesn't work, I can buy something else. The problem is there's not any real feedback when it comes to voting. I don't get punished for voting in a way that makes me feel good about myself because I don't really affect the outcome anyway.

I think the thing that we, as libertarians, need to spend more time thinking about is looking at actual policies and saying, "What's a viable alternative to what the state is doing?" not, "If the state does nothing, everything will be perfect," because very few people are persuaded by that. Something will happen. A magic thing called the market will grow up.

Now I understand that. As an economist, I understand that. We talked earlier about the Food and Drug Administration. What would happen if there were no Food and Drug Administration? Well, what would happen is that things like Consumer Reports or other private certification agencies would license drugs, and brand name would become more important.

Would it be better? I don't know. It would work, though. It's not true that in the absence of state action, there would just be chaos, the Wild West would govern the drug market. But to say all we need to do is get rid of the Food and Drug Administration and markets will take care of it is not very persuasive. You would need to specify an actual alternative that utilizes the incentives that people can recognize.

The short answer to your question is libertarians tend to say, "Markets are great if the state would stop interfering. Everything would be perfect because markets are terrific." No one believes that. As a libertarian candidate, I found out no one believes that.

Gillespie: What were your most successful ways of reaching out to new voters or to new audiences, I guess both as running for governor, but also in your academic work and also your work as a public intellectual? What would you recommend are good ways to enlarge the circle of libertarian believers or people who are libertarian or people who are libertarian-curious?

Munger: Well, I have found that conceding that the concerns of the people I'm talking to are valid and we just disagree about the best means of achieving that is a big step, because what libertarians tend to want to do, their answer to almost everything is we should do nothing. There's a problem with property, "Yeah, but if we do anything, it'll make it worse, so we should do nothing," or there's a problem with healthcare, "Yeah, what we need to do is nothing because as soon as we do nothing, things will get better. Saying, "That's actually a real problem, and I see what you're talking about. Here's what I think there were some difficulties with your approach and here's how my approach might work better," that means you have to know something about actual policies rather than just always saying no.

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Do Too Many Libertarians Celebrate a False 'Perfection of the Market'? [Podcast] - Reason (blog)

Duke University historian Nancy MacLean recently issued Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, an alas quite hot book that purports to expose the dark secrets of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan and the "radical right"/libertarian movement he's allegedly the brains behind.

Democracy in Chains/Amazon

MacLean has been convincingly accused by many who understand his work and the libertarian movement with both less built-in hostility and more actual knowledge than she has (including me here at Reason) of getting nearly everything wrong, from fact to interpretation. She recently took to the Chronicle of Higher Education to allegedly reply to her critics.

A quick wrap up of many specific problems found in her book by her criticsby no means allthat MacLean ignores even while allegedly "respond[ing] to her critics," and which the editors at the Chronicle let her ignore:

Her claim of meaningful similarity between John Calhoun's constitutional vision and that of Buchanan and his public choice school cannot be reasonably maintained.

Her assertion that the modern public choice/libertarian constitutionalist vision has nothing to do with James Madison is not true.

Buchanan did not, contra MacLean, believe that all taxation above voluntary giving is theft akin to a mugger in the park.

She attributed to Buchanan the belief that those receiving government aid "are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to animals who are dependent" though he used that phrase to describe the attitude that was the opposite of his.

Her attribution of Buchanan's use of the Hobbesian term "Leviathan" to (racist, uncoincidentally for her rhetorical smear purposes) Southern Agrarian poet Donald Davidson rather than, well, Hobbes, falls apart with study of when and how Buchanan began using the term in his work.

She regularly cites libertarian thinkers as saying nasty things implying a contempt for the poor or for democracy that are not supported by the full context of the quotes; victims of her malicious misinterpretation including David Boaz and Tyler Cowen.

It's a pattern of hostile incomprehension, and her "response" indicates that this is partly because she's deep-down unable to view thinkers or funders who advocate limiting government's scope, expense, or power any other way.

MacLean speaks to none of the above specific critiques of her book in the Chronicle, merely generically complaining about being attacked and insisting that people who critique her work clearly hadn't read or understood it, or linking to people who sophistically defend some possible meanings in a manner far more subtle and complicated than she bothered to do.

Mostly eschewing factual or interpretational specifics, she reached instead for sympathy by complaining these specific critiques on her methods and understanding as a historian made her "feel vulnerable and exposed" and interpreting an intellectual metaphor for a physical threat.

She does a cute turnaround insisting against all evidence that those who praised her book were the only ones who read it, and that the very political forces she inveighs against in her book "helped create the current toxicity" allegedly exemplified by academic experts explaining how she got so many things so very wrong in her attempt to make her readers hate and fear anyone who wants to restrict government's power to manage our lives.

She certainly does not address a core problem with her book I detailed in my review: the "historical fact" upon which her entire thesis depends, her book's distinguishing selling point, which she claims to have uniquely discovered through diligent archival work, that James Buchanan was the secret influence behind the political funding machine of Charles Koch and that that machine is deliberately and conspiratorially disguising its libertarian goals, is completely invented. She creates an illusion of proof by citing documents that do not support the thesis in any way, shape, or form.

The most telling part of her defense in the Chronicle is how hard, well-nigh impossible, it is for her to imagine that people who might want the government to do less are actually a legitimate part of any public policy debate:

Sam Tanenhaus, in his otherwise favorable review in The Atlantic, said, "a movement isn't the same thing as a conspiracy. One openly declares its intentions. The other keeps them secret. It's not always clear that MacLean recognizes the difference." As a scholar, I understand the problems of conspiracy theories and while I never called this movement a conspiracy in the book, we do face a problem that our language has not caught up to our world.

In hindsight, I wish I'd said more about that in my book because we do not yet have a conceptual system adequate to capture what is happening....a messianic multibillionaire [has] contributed vast amounts of dark money to fund dozens upon dozens of ostensibly separate but actually connected organizations that are exploiting what Buchanan's team taught about "the rules of the game" of modern governance in a cold-eyed bid to bend our institutions and policies to goals they know most voters do not share....

....The world has never seen anything like it before; no wonder it's hard to find the right term to depict it. It's a vexing challenge to understand, let alone stop, and in hindsight I wish had been more explicit about that conceptual challenge....

What she is writing about is, yes, exactly what Tanenhaus called it: a movement. There is no need for her peculiar hyperventilating pretense that it's utterly unprecedented that donors and intellectuals in a democratic Republic would attempt to spread ideas or pass legislation in the direction of limiting government's expense or reach.

Despite her pretense that Buchanan is some secret linchpin to this movement, he always played a minor role in any kind of explicit policy terms (you wouldn't know it from this book but he explicitly eschewed reducing his high-minded constitutional musings to policy recommendations or political activism) in the loose association of free market thinkers dating back at least to the 1940s.

Had she known more about the history of free market and libertarian advocates and organizations since the '40s, she would have known that musing over various ways to actuate their goal of turning the culture more toward free markets have been consistent and often amount to nothing in particular, and cannot meaningfully be read as a secret conspiracy. The very fact that respected historians like MacLean can have this bizarrely uncomprehending attitude toward the libertarian movement is the very reason it needs to exist, and why it still fights an uphill battle.

When MacLean, for example, treats one particular 1973 memo from Buchanan skylarking about a "Third Century Project" to spread free market ideas as something of great significance, she seems to hope she's discovered another "Powell Memo," a 1971 memo written for the Chamber of Commerce by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell that similarly, and similarly in a long tradition, mused about how defenders of free enterprise could fight back in a world they (rightly) felt was rallied against them.

That Powell memo has also been overemphasized by academics dipping into the history of free market ideas as some secret origin of the modern right. It was just one more effort in a continuing, and still-fighting-for-air, movement to limit government growth. It only seems weird and secret to intellectuals of the mainstream or left because they don't know much about it.

That strong free market policies don't currently reign in the American public is exactly why an intellectual movement she considers sneaky and evil arose, to try to convince Americans both public and elite that liberty is the path to prosperity and peace. It is not destroying democracy to try to shape public discourse, even if MacLean doesn't like the way libertarians are trying to shape it.

Her belief that libertarianism is so inherently horrendous she is unable to conceptualize it as perfectly legitimate and totally predictable led to her kookoo public declarations of a deliberate organized conspiracy to discredit heragain without actually defending her work's credibility on any specificson the part of academics who are part of this, yes, movement.

On a personal note, while she states that her book is the "first detailed picture of how this movement began...and how it evolved over time" (see, using the word "movement" wasn't so hard there, was it?), she also cites my own book that does exactly that (Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement) over a dozen times.

For the most part, she does so reasonably and accurately. The one doozy of an exception is designed, unsurprisingly, to feed her "secret thesis" (one she spends a third of her book implying but never actually stating, so she can avoid having to explicitly defend it) that libertarian attitudes toward the state were essentially created by anger with the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated public schools.

She cites to three pages of my book, and to other sources that similarly in no way support it, the idea that "Brown so energized this ragtag collection of outraged radicals of the right that some were no longer happy calling themselves 'libertarian.'"

Suffice it to say, nothing in the three pages of mine she cites, or the other sources in her cluttered endnote, support the contention that anything about Brown did anything to libertarians in the 1950s to make them question the term, or (outside of James Kirkpatrick, a right-wing segregationist fellow traveler) particularly motivate them in any way.

But that weird assertion is central to MacLean's purposes: making her readers think less of anyone who might want to restrict government power in a way she disapproves.

To baldly declare her real central point, which is that "I prefer, and I believe Americans prefer, more taxing and spending and redistribution than James Buchanan and libertarians want," would reveal her confused alleged historical epic as what it truly is: a hypertrophied polemical op-ed larded with often irrelevant smear and speculation, telling a story about James Buchanan that is neither true nor relevant to "the radical right's stealth plan for America."

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To Duke Historian Nancy MacLean, Advocating Free Markets Is Something 'The World Has Never Seen Anything Like ... - Reason (blog)

One of the first usages of the phrase government schools occurs in the work of an avid admirer of Dabneys, the Presbyterian theologian A. A. Hodge. Less concerned with black paupers than with immigrant papist hordes, Hodge decided that the problem lay with public schools secular culture. In 1887, he published an influential essay painting government schools as the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.

But it would be a mistake to see this strand of critique of government schools as a curiosity of Americas sectarian religious history. In fact, it was present at the creation of the modern conservative movement, when opponents of the New Deal welded free-market economics onto Bible-based hostility to the secular-democratic state. The key figure was an enterprising Congregationalist minister, James W. Fifield Jr., who resolved during the Depression to show that Christianity itself proved big government was the enemy of progress.

Drawing heavily on donations from oil, chemical and automotive tycoons, Fifield was a founder of a conservative free-market organization, Spiritual Mobilization, that brought together right-wing economists and conservative religious voices created a template for conservative think tanks. Fifield published the work of midcentury libertarian thinkers Ludwig von Mises and his disciple Murray Rothbard and set about convincing Americas Protestant clergy that America was a Christian nation in which government must be kept from interfering with the expression of Gods will in market economics.

Someone who found great inspiration in Fifields work, and who contributed to his flagship publication, Faith and Freedom, was the Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony. An admirer, too, of both Hodge and Dabney, Rushdoony began to advocate a return to biblical law in America, or theonomy, in which power would rest only on a spiritual aristocracy with a direct line to God and a clear understanding of Gods libertarian economic vision.

Rushdoony took the attack on modern democratic government right to the schoolhouse door. His 1963 book, The Messianic Character of American Education, argued that the government school represented primitivism and chaos. Public education, he said, basically trains women to be men and has leveled its guns at God and family.

These were not merely abstract academic debates. The critique of government schools passed through a defining moment in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, when orders to desegregate schools in the South encountered heavy resistance from white Americans. Some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private segregation academies for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes. Dabney would surely have approved.

Many of Friedmans successors in the libertarian tradition have forgotten or distanced themselves from the midcentury moment when they formed common cause with the Christian right. As for Friedman himself, the great theoretician of vouchers, he took pains to insist that he abhorred racism and opposed race-based segregation laws though he also opposed federal laws that prohibited discrimination.

Among the supporters of the Trump administration, the rhetoric of government schools has less to do with economic libertarianism than with religious fundamentalism. It is about the empowerment of a rearmed Christian right by the election of a man whom the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. calls evangelicals dream president. We owe the new currency of the phrase to the likes of Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council also bankrolled in its early years by the DeVos family who, in response to the Supreme Courts ruling allowing same-sex marriage, accused government schools of indoctrinating students in immoral sexuality. Or the president of the group Liberty Counsel, Anita Staver, who couldnt even bring herself to call them schools, preferring instead to bemoan government indoctrination camps that threaten our nations very survival.

When these people talk about government schools, they want you to think of an alien force, and not an expression of democratic purpose. And when they say freedom, they mean freedom from democracy itself.

Katherine Stewart is the author of The Good News Club: The Christian Rights Stealth Assault on Americas Children.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 31, 2017, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: What Government School Means.

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What the 'Government Schools' Critics Really Mean - New York Times

Ralph Northam and Ed Gillespie won their parties respective primaries in June and are campaigning fiercely to be Virginias next governor. But theyre not the only candidates in the race.

The Libertarian Party of Virginia hosted a special convention in May and nominated Cliff Hyra, a 34-year-old patent attorney who lives in Mechanicsville with his wife and three children. After meeting the states petition requirements, Hyra recently officially announced his candidacy and will be a third option on the ballot in November.

AltDaily had the chance to ask him a few questions by phone.

AltDaily: Youve said you became a Libertarian in college. Can you elaborate on that?

Cliff Hyra: Sure. I guess when I was a kid I considered myself a Democrat, but I just started to be exposed to more of the idea of freedom. I started reading a little bit of [Friedrich] Hayek and [Ayn] Rand and [Milton] Friedmanstarted to get interested in the idea that even if you disagree with what somebodys doing, it may be better if everybody leaves each other alone, as long as theyre not harming anybody. So that began my journey to Libertarianism, and I think it crystallized for me in law school. I went to George Mason, and its known for its economics and maybe more Libertarian bent. I had some excellent professors like Don Boudreaux and Tyler Cowen, who are pretty well-known Libertarian thinkers, and I think they added to that idea of personal freedom and libertythe idea that Libertarianism really has a lot of solutions to real-world problems. The evidence shows that Libertarian economic solutions are very successful. So since then, Ive been voting Libertarian for my entire adult life.

And youve got a ready response for anyone who points out that you dont have any legislative experience?

Yes. About a quarter of sitting governors havent held any prior elected office, so its not unusual to go straight into the state executive position without previous political experience. Im a business owner and life-long resident of Virginia. Im a family man. I have three children and another one on the wayso Im very familiar with the problems that people face here in Virginia.

Ralph Northam and Ed Gillespie have raised more than $11 million combined. Whats your strategy for competing against the major parties?

You know, you can do very well working with a smaller budget. Its all about getting your message out there, so any way that we can do that: traveling around the state and meeting with different groups, trying to do as much media as possible, targeted ad spending.

Fundamentally, its about the ideas. Even in the last presidential election, when ideas got people really excitedeither in a positive or a negative waythey really got a lot of exposure, even without spending a lot of money. That race was quite different than this one, but even so, theres a lot of opportunities when youre pushing ideas that people are interested in.

Whats the status of you getting into any of the planned debates?

I have not been invited to any of the debates Theyve said, Well, these are our standards for getting in, but theyre quite subjective.

Ive heard that Ralph Northam claims that hes open to my participation in the debates. Ed Gillespies camp, theyve stated that theyre not open to it. Im not sure, really, what theyre afraid of, but I think people would really be well-served by participation of a third party.

Ive listened a lot to what the other candidates have said, and too much of what theyre talking about is just political gotchatrying to score points on the other side. Even looking at their websites, they have a lot of nice goal statements, but they dont really talk much about how to get there. I think it would be great for me to be in the debate and forcing the other candidates to respond to some of these policy proposals and say where they stand. At this stage, we havent seen any evidence that were going to get that. Were certainly working with the debate sponsors and the other candidates to do everything we can to get in the debates, but we havent seen much positive progress so far.

You grew up in northern Virginia, you went to college at Virginia Tech, and you live outside Richmond now. It seems like you could draw support from a lot of parts of the state. Im wondering: How well do you know Hampton Roads, and do you have any campaign stops planned here?

Hampton Roads is one of the first places that I visited after I announced that I was planning to run, and I visited with several groups down there. Ive never lived there or worked there, but I know a lot of people down there, and I certainly plan to come back again and again over the course of the campaign and get to know as many people and voters groups down there as I can.

Every locality has their own issues. As Ive learned down in Hampton Roads, you guys dont like tolls too much! I think there was one specific project that was handled very poorly. In other areas of the state, theyve been handled a little bit better, and theyve worked out much betterespecially some of the HOT lanes that run between northern Virginia and closer to where I am nowtheyve been really successful. Each area has its unique issues, and Im certainly committed to getting out to every location in the state and addressing the peoples concerns.

One of the tenets of your campaign is civility and respect. I wonder if you could say at least one positive thing about your opponents?

I think that Northamhes making some of the right noises about drug legalization. For example, hes come out in favor of decriminalization of marijuana. Im certainly partial to that. On Gillespies side, hes come out and recognized that theres a need for tax reform in the statethat we have a really absurd state income tax. Its never been cut; the brackets havent been adjusted in over 50 years. He recognizes theres something to be done there. I think both of them fall short on their ideas in both areas. I would go much further than them in both cases.

Its very easy for me, honestly, as a Libertarian, to look at good things on each side because Im not really a left-right kind of guy. I recognize that theres good ideas on both sides, and thats one of the advantages that I would have as a governor: the ability to pick and choose the right solutions from either side of the aisle and work with whoever I need to to get that done without the worry that I have to satisfy other people in my party.

I see a lot of positive positions on both the left and the right. Im not interested so much in partisanship, but just really arriving at the right answer and looking at what people have done in other states, trying to be more innovative and adopting some of the best practices that have already been found to work. We could have the same good results here in Virginia if there was the political will for it.

You and your wife are expecting your fourth child in August. How does she feel about you campaigning with a newborn baby in your lives?

Well, that was the first thing I did when considering runningwas talk to her about what she thought. She was all in favor of it. Shes always been very supportive of everything that Ive done, and shes really amazing and a wonderful wife. When I started my law practice, she was very supportive of that, and we were just expecting our first child at the time. It was really as the recession was just getting started. I had planned it ahead of that, and then the economy kept getting worse and worse. She said, No problem. I have confidence in you. Go out and do it. And I did. Thats the wonderful thing about her. Shes really strong. Shes great with the kids, and we have a lot of family close by. Im sure it wont be the easiest thing weve ever done, but if you dont challenge yourself, you dont grow.

You just announced your candidacy in the last two weeks. Youve got about 1,200 likes on Facebook and $28,000 in the bank. If we talk again in October, where do you think youll beor where do you hope to be with your campaign?

The skys the limit. Im running the campaign to win it. I think thats importantthat you set out with that goal in mind. Realistically, I understand that the chances of that are low. At the same time, weve seen how things can snowball. Again, even with the election last year: very unexpected, very surprising. Never say never.

If its not the year that happens, another great thing would be if we could hit 10 percent vote mark, which it looked like Rob Sarvis was going to hit for a while back in 2013 and got pretty close to it. If we can build on some of that momentum, hit that 10 percent markthats kind of the magic number for the Libertarian Partythat would give us automatic ballot access as a major party for the next four years.

That would be really good both for Libertarians, of course, but also for the people of Virginia. Theres a lot of racesespecially at the state levelthat are uncontested. I think at least 70 percent of races are uncontested, so you dont even have a choice. Wed love to field candidates in all those races and give people a choice, an alternative, but because we dont have the automatic ballot access, its really difficult to get on the ballot. We have to get so many petitions signed and so forth. So that would be a major milestone if we could reach that 10 percent level of support.

Even if the level of support isnt that high, if I can affect the debate, if I can force the other candidates to talk about some of these issues that I think are really important and that they seem to be shying away from, thatll be a success as well.

Im hoping that we do talk againmaybe in a couple monthsand we can focus more on the issues. For now, maybe you could summarize your ideas on tax reform?

Sure. As I was mentioning, Virginias taxes are really unusual. We hit our top rate at only $17,000 of income per year, so somebody whos making $30,000 in Virginia is paying more than double the state income tax that someone would pay in California. Californias, of course, well known as one of the highest tax states in the nation, if not the highest. My proposal would be to exempt the first $60,000 of household income from the state income tax. Thats $3,000 back in the pockets of the average family each year. The average family would pay no state income tax. Of course, people could do so much with that money, investing in themselves, their children, their businesses, their futures. Thats the crux of that.

Some of the other reforms Im talking about help to deal with the fiscal impact, although the fiscal impact of that cut is really muted compared to the positive impact on peoples lives because its well-targeted at the people who are paying the most disproportionate amount under the current tax system.

How does that work mathematically to be revenue-neutral? Do you tax higher incomes at a higher rate?

Im not proposing increasing any taxes. Im proposing to pay for the cut out of spending. Theres a lot of low-hanging fruit in Virginia where were spending money, and were really not getting anything back in return.

One of the issues that I like to talk about a lot is criminal justice. Elsewhere in the country, drug arrests are going down a lot, along with violent crimes and property crimes. Here in Virginia, weve had the same thing: Violent and property crimes have been going down, which is wonderful, but drug arrests have been going the opposite direction; theyve been going way up. Theyve about doubled in the last 15 years, to the point where were arresting about 3,000 Virginians for drug crimes each year60 percent of them for marijuana, 80 percent of those for just possession. It costs quite a lot of money just in direct costsover $25,000 a yearto incarcerate one person. This is for something that is legal in 29 other states and the District of Columbia. It has a really disproportionate impact on some of the African-American, disadvantaged communities here in Virginia.

We would actually be better off taking that money and setting it on firebecause at least we wouldnt be making things worse. Its not only not benefiting us in any way, its actually making things worse. Youre taking people away from their families and from their jobs, so the total impact on the economy is actually much greater than that. Thats something that we can cut, and not only will it not harm anybody, but actually by cuttingby decriminalizing marijuana and hopefully legalizing itwe can generate additional tax revenue. We can make peoples lives better.

Theres a lot of areas we can cut without having to make a cut to state services, just by making the state government more innovative, more inclusive, and focusing on those areas where its benefiting all Virginians and having respect for them and leaving them to make their own decisions, make their own choices in their own lives, as long as theyre not hurting anybody else.

What else do you want people to know about you?

One of the other issues that Im pushing is school choice. Were widely recognized to have one of the very worst charter school systems in the entire country. We recently had a bill vetoed in May that would have been a real good start there. I think there are some other states where weve seen tremendous progress. We can have the same benefits here in Virginia if we had the political willif we had the right person in the governors office.

And also healthcare. Theres a limit to what we can do here in Virginia, but we can start by introducing more choice, more competition, getting rid of bad regulations. We can increase access and reduce costs.

If anybodys interested in the ideas that Im putting forward, I would encourage them to learn more at my website: CliffHyra.com. They can sign up for the email newsletter. They can check out some of my upcoming events on Facebook. I hope to meet everybody out on the campaign trail in the coming days.

comments

Jim Roberts lives in Norfolk with his wife and two children. He grew up in Virginia Beach, earned degrees at Virginia Tech and William and Mary, and works in corporate communications at Huntington Ingalls Industries.

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Release the Hyra: Libertarian Party Candidate Is Challenging Northam and Gillespie in Governor's Race - AltDaily

"Conservatives and libertarians were always portrayed as the shrill and unhappy guys, and the left and liberals were always the people who are having fun," says Greg Gutfeld, host of Fox News' The Greg Gutfeld Show, co-host of The Five, former host of Red Eye, bestselling author, and Reason magazine intern reject.

"What you're seeing now is a lot more fun on the libertarian and right side than you've ever seen on the left."

Gutfeld sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss his "ugly libertarianism," Donald Trump's love of Red Eye, why he was excited about the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and why Trump's comments on the campaign trail were best understood in the context of a Comedy Central roast.

The interview took place on stage at Freedom Fest 2017, an annual gathering for libertarians in Las Vegas.

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Greg Gutfeld: Trump Turned Liberals Into Dean Wormer [Podcast] - Reason (blog)

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"Conservative," "liberal," and "progressive" don't mean what you think they mean. But it's not your fault.

In common American parlance, we use "conservative" to refer to those who want a smaller government meaning lower taxes, less spending (especially domestic welfare spending), and a less active regulatory state. Of course, the term has implications for social and foreign policy, too, but the connection there isn't quite as strong. Consider that we use modifiers like "social conservatism" or "paleo-conservatism" or "neo-conservatism" to specify some of those positions, but no modifier is necessary to communicate the affection for small government.

"Liberal" and "progressive," meanwhile, are used almost interchangeably to designate those who want a bigger government meaning higher taxes (mainly on the rich, of course), more spending (again, principally on social programs), and a more active regulatory state.

These definitions are deeply misleading. They are holdovers from an earlier era of American politics that have become anachronistic, sowing confusion and frustration in the process.

Properly understood, all three of these approaches are fundamentally positional, which is to say each only exists in reference to the politics and culture of the present and recent past. None of them offers a static vision of the proper role of government and shape of society like what we get from non-positional views like socialism, libertarianism, or monarchism.

Properly understood, a progressive is someone who looks at their country and government as it is now and recently has been and offers ideas for how to advance, or progress, the human condition, significantly (though not entirely) through positive government action. A liberal is someone who, on making the same assessment, has suggestions for liberalizing, which is to increase individual choice, equality, and freedom. A conservative is someone who takes in the same view and attempts to conserve valued aspects of the status quo, whether by maintaining them or, if they have recently declined, reviving those traditions.

As you can see, the starting point for any of these views is of enormous importance. What is progressive in one context may be conservative in another. A program that is liberalizing in a very restrictive time and place might itself be restrictive in a more liberal society.

The contrast with content-based philosophies like socialism, libertarianism, or monarchism is evident: A socialist, for example, wants to move toward collective ownership of the means of production and distribution regardless of starting point. The path to that goal might vary depending on whether it begins with feudalism or anarchy or liberal democracy or what have you, but the socialist's ideal is not positional.

In American politics, we've come to define positional terms incorrectly because we've tied them to their referential location from about a century ago. To be conservative in the time of Calvin Coolidge meant conserving small government, because that was the position of the United States in the present and recent past of the 1920s. It is not the present and recent past of the United States today, saddled as she is, for better or worse, with a sprawling state bureaucracy whose scale and scope has long since grown past anything that might be reasonably called "small."

Thus, to be conservative today cannot mean to be an advocate of small government. That is a goal that can be sought and is sought by libertarians or those with some libertarian impulses but it is not a status quo that can be conserved.

And that brings me to the Republican government of President Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The GOP brands itself as America's conservative party, and that's true, but not in the way the GOP itself and the bulk of the American public believes. Republicans are conservative (as indeed are many Democrats, notably in the Hillary Clinton wing of the party), but only under the correct definition, which is to say they like to keep things mostly as they are. They seek to conserve what they value in the status quo and recent past.

You can see this truth writ large in the GOP's failure to repeal and replace ObamaCare despite promising to do exactly that and controlling both houses of Congress plus the White House. To get rid of ObamaCare, at this point, would mean making an enormous change to the status quo, which is not conservative in the proper sense of the word.

This equally explains why, for all the talk about reining in Washington, electing a Republican government does not produce any substantial cuts to the size and scope of the state. Republican administrations don't make government radically smaller because doing so is not conservative from the current starting point.

Republican conservatism also at once explains the GOP's lust for the great, big, beautiful border wall as well as its failure, so far, to actually build it. (I must pause here to note the too-ignored fact that border walls and fences already cover just about all the parts of our southern border where they realistically can be built.) The wall is intended to maintain the United States' cultural and political status quo, but actually building it, particularly with Mexico footing the bill, would be a new and therefore in this sense non-conservative thing.

This disparity between how the GOP's conservatism is broadly understood and how it functions in governance is at once fostered and concealed by our sloppy political language. I confess that I don't have much hope of that sloppiness going away; attempts to reclaim or redefine words in popular conception are almost never as effective as their advocates intend. Still, without some change to our public lexicon, or at least an update to the reference point of these positional terms, that confusing, frustrating disparity will only grow.

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Of course Republicans can't repeal ObamaCare. It's because they're conservative. - The Week Magazine

Nancy MacLeans Democracy in Chains portrays the late economist James Buchanan as a central figure in the modern libertarian movement. An individual can be influential in different ways; he can be an institution-builder, inspire strategy, or directly influence other activists and movement intellectuals with his ideas. MacLean suggests that Buchanan was a supremely important institution-builder and strategy-inspirer, though I think she greatly exaggerates his role in both spheres.

But what of his direct influence on activists and movement intellectuals? As I noted in my first post on the book, my impression is that Buchanan was a peripheral or tangential figure in the development of modern libertarianism. It eventually occurred to me that there is at least one objective contemporary indicator that I am right.

In 1988, Liberty Magazine surveyed its readers regarding which important figures influenced their political views. Liberty was a small-circulation libertarian magazine that, unlike the outreach Reason magazine, was written to appeal to activist libertarians, the sort of people who work at think tanks, who are active in the Libertarian Party, or who promote libertarian causes like drug legalization. It wasnt a scientific survey but still provides some interesting data.

Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986. MacLean claims that this advanced the cause as nothing else had to that point. Strange that hard-core activist libertarians didnt notice. The editors explained how they chose the names on the survey list: The names were chosen during the editorial meeting attended by Cox, Bradford, Holmes and Virkkala. An attempt was made to include on the list the most important contributors to libertarian thought, as well as figures believed by the editors to be influential among libertarians, and some individuals about whose influence that the editors were simply curious. James Buchanan wasnt on the list.

This could have been an oversight, but apparently not. Readers wrote in several names multiple times, including such now-forgotten figures as Robert Ringer, and even Buchanans sometime collaborator, Gordon Tullock. Buchanan wasnt among the write-ins, either.

For the curious, the most influential modern libertarians, in order, were Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. Note that contrary to MacLeans (almost entirely undocumented) suggestion that libertarianism was motivated to a large degree by Southern hostility to desegregation in general and Brown v. Board of Education in particular, none of these figures were Southerners, 60 percent of them were European refugees, 80 percent (all but Hayek, who had Jewish relatives) were Jews, and all lived in Chicago or New York.

Its also worth noting that despite MacLeans tracing of libertarianisms lineage to John Calhoun, he also unlike other historical figures such as Locke, Jefferson and abolitionist Lysander Spooner does not appear on the list.

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How influential was James Buchanan among libertarians? - Washington Post

There are so many reasons to be a Libertarian in this day and age. In a nation where Republicans and Democrats each advocate for big government in their own ways, the Libertarian Party is the one true representation of pure liberty.

Libertarians promote freedom, capitalism, private property rights, and more. Likewise, Libertarians oppose unnecessary wars, statism, taxes, and the like.

People who subscribe to libertarianism believe each American is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, so long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others. Espousing libertarianism will help the citizens of this nation cherish the values that America was originally founded on.

According to the Free Republic, one of the core creeds of our Founding Fathers stated that life and liberty are secure only as long as the rights of property are secure.

In essence, property rights are as follows: Americans reserve the rights to create and use goods, earn income from their productions, and distribute the goods to others if they so choose. This is a critical component of capitalism.

Detractors of capitalism assert that it is an unfair system which favors the wealthy and privileged. In reality, capitalism favors individuals who are able to produce marketable goods and services. Capitalism has engendered many Americans to escape the crippling bonds of poverty.

Libertarians are staunch defenders of a capitalist society because we realize the importance and necessity of Americans being able to engender their own wealth and success as opposed to receiving crippling government handouts.

Contrary to what many radical liberals preach, nobody is entitled to someone elses income. Becoming a libertarian opens ones eyes to all of the existing possibilities and opportunities available to those who are willing to work hard.

Just as libertarians embrace property rights, liberty, and capitalism, we also vehemently oppose destructive and anti-American forces such as wars, statism, and crippling taxes. These toxic influences are direct extensions of big government.

As stated on the foreign policy page of the Libertarian Partys official website, Libertarians aspire for America to steer clear of war. In doing so, countless fatalities and injuries will be prevented.

Quite frankly, a plethora of wars are preventable and many politicians enter them due to matters like ego.

If the United States is attacked, this nation reserves the right to defend ourselves, but if not, our leaders have no business antagonizing other countries. Imagine if everyone applied this train of thought in their daily lives. The promotion of peacefulness and individualism embodies libertarianism.

Statism and taxation are additional forces that libertarians oppose due to their devastating impacts on Americans. In essence, the state is a part of the government. From the time of its conception, the government was always meant to be controlled by the people of this nation, not vice versa. Also, taxation is merely an offshoot of statism.

Those in favor of taxation often claim that this practice is the only way in which our roads could be built or maintained. These people underestimate the power of self-interest, which Libertarian Prepper accurately pinpointed.

Business owners, shipping companies, and other free market forces will voluntary pitch in to ensure the upkeep of our roads. Additionally, roads maintained out of self-interest would most likely not be plagued with pot holes and other hazards.

Taxation is unnecessary and it steals hard earned proceeds from working Americans.

Whether or not one chooses to embrace libertarianism is entirely up to the individual. However, the decision to subscribe to a liberty minded ideology will provide a more productive worldview, encourage the pursuit of success, and prevent unnecessary conflicts.

Becoming a libertarian emboldens each and every person to embrace individualism and ultimately realize that pure liberty is what America was originally founded on.

Gabrielle Seunagal is an intelligent, witty, and iconic libertarian. She is very proud to be self-employed and happily works full time as a freelance writer. In her spare time, Gabrielle loves to read, travel, eat out, and go on adventures. You can follow her on Twitter @ClassySnobbb.

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Embracing Libertarianism Will Make You a Better American - Being Libertarian

Milton Friedman was a kindred spirit to James McGill Buchanan in terms of a philosophy of deconstruction of the government. (Photo: Wikipedia)

When and how were the seeds sown for the modern far-right's takeover of American politics? NancyMacLean reveals the deep and troubling roots of this secretive political establishment -- and its decades-long plan to change the rules of democratic governance -- in her new book,Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. Get your copy by making a donation to Truthout now!

Many individuals who follow politics and journalists think that the right-wing playbook began with the Koch brothers. However, in her groundbreaking book, Nancy MacLean traces their political strategy to a Southern economist who created the foundation for today's libertarian oligarchy in the 1950s.

Mark Karlin: Can you summarize the importance of James McGill Buchanan to the development of the modern extreme right wing in the United States?

Nancy MacLean:The modern extreme right wing I'm talking about, just to be clear, is the libertarian movement that now sails under the Republican flag, particularly but not only the Freedom Caucus, yet goes back to the 1950s in both parties. President Eisenhower called them "stupid" and fashioned his approach -- calling it modern Republicanism -- as an antidote to them. Goldwater was their first presidential candidate.He bombed. Reagan, they believed, was going to enact their agenda.He didn't. But beginning in the early 2000s, they became a force to be reckoned with.What had changed? The discovery by their chief funder, Charles Koch, of the approach developed by James McGill Buchanan for how to take apart the liberal state.

Nancy MacLean. (Photo: Viking Books)Buchanan studied economics at the University of Chicago and belonged to the same milieu as F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, but he used his training to analyze public life. And he supplied what no one else had: an operational strategy to vanquish the model of government they had been criticizing for decades -- and prevent it from being recreated. It was Buchanan who taught Koch that for capitalism to thrive, democracy must be enchained.

Buchananwas a very smart man, the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics from the US South, in fact. But his life's work was forever shaped by the Supreme Court'sBrown v. Board of Educationdecision. He arrived in Virginia in 1956, just as the state's leaders were goading the white South to fight the court's ruling, a ruling he saw not through the lens of equal protection of the law for all citizens but rather as another wave in a rising tide of unwarranted and illegitimate federal interference in the affairs of the states that began with the New Deal. For him what was at stake was the sanctity of private property rights, with northern liberals telling southern owners how to spend their money and behave correctly. Given an institute to run on the campus of the University of Virginia, he promised to devote his academic career to understanding how the other side became so powerful and, ultimately, to figuring out an effective line of attack to break down what they had created and return to what he and the Virginia elite viewed as appropriate for America. In a nutshell,he studied the workings of the political process to figure out what was needed to deny ordinary people -- white and Black -- the ability to make claims on government at the expense of private property rights and the wishes of capitalists. And then he identified how to rejigger that political process not only to reverse the gains but also to prevent the system from ever reverting back.He sought, in his words, to "enchain Leviathan," which is why I titled the bookDemocracy in Chains.

Why, until your book, has his importance to the right wing been largely overlooked?

There are a few reasons Buchanan has been overlooked. One is that the Koch cause does not advertise his work, preferring to tout the sunnier primers of Hayek, Friedman and even Ayn Rand when recruiting. Buchanan is the advanced course, as it were, for the already committed. Another is that Buchanan did not seek the limelight like Friedman, so few on the left have even heard of him. I myself learned of him only by serendipity, in a footnote about the Virginia schools fight.

His importance to the right wing could only be identified by working through the archival sources that provide context for his published work. That's what I did after discovering that Buchanan had urged the full privatization of Virginia's public schooling in 1959, and then learning that he later advised the Pinochet regime on a capital-protectingconstitution that could withstand the end of the dictatorship. Even with both of those data points, I don't think I could have gleaned the full import of his project had I not moved to North Carolina in 2010, where a strategy informed by his thought has been applied with a vengeance by the veto-proof Republican legislative majority that came to power in the midterms that fall. After Buchanan died in 2013,I was able to get access to his private papers at George Mason University, where the documentation is incontrovertible.

In fact, Buchanan's records provided a kind of birds-eye view into collaboration between the corporate university and right-wing donors that at least I have never seen before, and I've done a lot of research in this area over the last two decades.

How would you draw a line connecting Buchanan to the Koch brothers?

Charles Koch supplied the money, but it was James Buchanan who supplied the ideas that made the money effective. An MIT-trained engineer, Koch in the 1960s began to read political-economic theory based on the notion that free-reign capitalism (what others might call Dickensian capitalism) would justly reward the smart and hardworking and rightly punish those who failed to take responsibility for themselves or had lesser ability. He believed then and believes now that the market is the wisest and fairest form of governance, and one that, after a bitter era of adjustment, will produce untold prosperity, even peace. But after several failures, Koch came to realize that if the majority of Americans ever truly understood the full implications of his vision of the good society and were let in on what was in store for them, they would never support it. Indeed, they would actively oppose it.

So, Koch went in search of an operational strategy -- what he has called a "technology" -- of revolution that could get around this hurdle. He hunted for 30 years until he found that technology in Buchanan's thought. From Buchanan, Koch learned that for the agenda to succeed, it had to be put in place in incremental steps, what Koch calls "interrelated plays": many distinct yet mutually reinforcing changes of the rules that govern our nation.Koch's team used Buchanan's ideas to devise a roadmap for a radical transformation that could be carried out largely below the radar of the people, yet legally. The plan was (and is) to act on so many ostensibly separate fronts at once that those outside the cause would not realize the revolution underway until it was too late to undo it. Examples include laws to destroy unions without saying that is the true purpose, suppressing the votes of those most likely to support active government, using privatization to alter power relations -- and, to lock it all in, Buchanan's ultimate recommendation: a "constitutional revolution."

Today, operatives funded by the Koch donor network operate through dozens upon dozens of organizations (hundreds, if you count the state and international groups), creating the impression that they are unconnected when they are really working together -- the state ones are forced to share materials as a condition of their grants. For example, here are the names of 15 of the most important Koch-funded, Buchanan-savvy organizations each with its own assignment in the division of labor: There's Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Mercatus Center, Americans for Tax Reform, Concerned Veterans of America, the Leadership Institute, Generation Opportunity, the Institute for Justice, the Independent Institute, the Club for Growth, the Donors Trust, Freedom Partners, Judicial Watch -- whoops, that's more than 15, and it's not counting the over 60 other organizations in the State Policy Network. This cause operates through so many ostensibly separate organizations that its architects expect the rest of us will ignore all the small but extremely significant changes that cumulatively add up to revolutionary transformation. Gesturing to this, Tyler Cowen, Buchanan's successor at George Mason University, even titled his blog "Marginal Revolution."

In what way was Buchanan connected to white oligarchical racism?

Buchanan came up with his approach in the crucible of the civil rights era, as the most oligarchic state elite in the South faced the loss of its accustomed power. Interestingly, he almost never wrote explicitly about racial matters, but he did identify as a proud southern "country boy" and his center gave aid to Virginia's reactionaries on both class and race matters. His heirs at George Mason University, his last home, have noted that Buchanan's political economy is quite like that of John C. Calhoun, the antebellum South Carolina US Senator who, until Buchanan, was America's most original theorist of how to constrict democracy so as to safeguard the wealth and power of an elite economic minority (in Calhoun's case, large slaveholders). Buchanan arrived in Virginia just as Calhoun's ideas were being excavated to stop the implementation ofBrown, so the kinship was more than a coincidence. His vision of the right economic constitution owes much to Calhoun, whose ideas horrified James Madison, among others.

And from that kind of thought, Buchanan offered strategic advice to corporations on how to fight the kind of reforms and taxation that came with more inclusive democracy. In the 1990s, for example, as Koch was getting more involved at George Mason, Buchanan convened corporate and rightwing leaders to teach them how to use what he called the "spectrum of secession" to undercut hard-won reforms through measures that have now become core to Republican practice: decentralization, devolution, federalism, privatization, and deregulation.We tend to see the race to the bottom as fallout from globalization, but Buchanan's guidance and the Koch team's application of it through the American Legislative Exchange Council and the State Policy Network reveals how it is in fact a highly conscious strategy to free capital of restraint by the people through their governments.

Another way all this connects, indirectly, to oligarchic racism: wanting to keep secessionist thought alive for this practical utility, the billionaire-backed right necessarily gives comfort to white supremacists. A case in point: the Virginia governors who supported the Buchanan-Koch enterprise at George Mason University also promoted a new "Confederate History and Heritage Month." Likewise, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which honors one of Koch's favorite Austrian philosophers, is located in Alabama and led by Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr., a man who has long promoted racist neo-Confederate thought, yet was still thought fit to run the Koch-funded Center for Libertarian Studies. It's thus a mistake to imagine that the Koch and so-called alt-right causes are wholly separate; there's a kind of mutual reinforcement if you understand what Koch learned from Buchanan and how they operated.

As I conclude in the book, as bright as some of the libertarian economists were, their ideas gained the following they did in the South because, in their essence, their stands were so familiar. White southerners who opposed racial equality and economic justice knew from their own region's long history that the only way they could protect their desired way of life was to keep federal power at bay, so that majoritarian democracy could not reach into the region. The causes of Calhoun, Buchanan and Koch-style economic liberty and white supremacy were historically twined at the roots, which makes them very hard to separate, regardless of the subjective intentions of today's libertarians.

What would a society based on Buchanan's principles and goals look like?

Tyler Cowen, the economist who co-presides with Charles Koch over the cause's academic base camp (yes, that Tyler Cowen, host of the most visited academic economics blog), has spelled that out. You might want to sit down to hear what he envisions for the rest of us. He has written that with the "rewriting of the social contract" underway, people will be "expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now." While some will flourish, he admits, "others will fall by the wayside." Since "worthy individuals" will manage to climb their way out of poverty, "that will make it easier to ignore those who are left behind." And Cowen didn't stop there. "We will cut Medicaid for the poor," he predicted. Further, "the fiscal shortfall will come out of real wages as various cost burdens are shifted to workers" from employers and a government that does less. To "compensate," this chaired professor in the nation's second-wealthiest county advises, "people who have had their government benefits cut or pared back" should pack up and move to lower-cost, poor public service states like Texas.

Indeed, Cowen forecasts, "the United States as a whole will end up looking more like Texas." His tone is matter-of-fact, as though he is reporting the inevitable. Yet when one reads his remarks with the knowledge that he has been the academic leader of a team working in earnest with Koch for two decades now to bring about the society he is describing, the words sound more like premeditation. For example, Cowen prophesies lower-income parts of America "recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil-like environment" complete with "favelas" like those in Rio de Janeiro. The "quality of water" might not be what US citizens are used to, he admits, but "partial shantytowns" would satisfy the need for cheaper housing as "wage polarization" grows and government shrinks. Cowen says that "some version of Texas -- and then some -- is the future for a lot of us" and advises, "Get ready."

You conclude your book ironically with a Koch maxim: "playing it safe is slow suicide." How does that apply to those who support a robust, non-plutocratic society?

I ended the book that way because I understand the many pressures that lead people not to act on their anxiety over what they are seeing unfold in Washington and so many states. Union leaders have fiduciary responsibilities that make bold action risky. Nonprofits have boards of directors to answer to. Young faculty must earn tenure. People in public institutions worry about their next appropriations. Parents have to budget their time. And so on. We tell ourselves, "Well, if it were that serious, surely others would be doing something about it." So, I wanted to alert people that what is happening now is radically new -- and designed to be permanent. We may not get another chance to stop it.

Having said that, though, I also believe that panic is the last thing we need. There is great strength to be found in the simple truth thatBuchanan and Koch came up with the kind of strategy now in play precisely because they knew that the majority, if fully informed, would never support what they seek.So, the best thing that those who support a robust, non-plutocratic society can do is focus on patiently informing and activating that majority. And reminding all Americans that democracy is not something you can just assume will survive: It has to be fought for time and again. This is one of those moments.

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Misinforming the Majority: A Deliberate Strategy of Right-Wing Libertarians - Truth-Out

A section of the cover of Hobbes Leviathan with engraving by Abraham Bosse, 1651. Image via Wikipedia.

At first glance the fact that Donald Trump and Theresa Mays neo-Conservative agenda mixes a libertarian ideology with a strong authoritarian streak seems contradictory. In the United States we see Trump using an autocratic executive order to mandate that two rules for business must be repealed for each new one enacted in Congress. In Britain a similar mantra of a bonfire of red tape is accompanied by the attempt to use the Royal Prerogative to force through Brexit decisions. But autocracy was built into Libertarianism when it first appeared centuries ago!

It is not just in religious texts that people die and get buried only to be resurrected and live a far more celebrated second life; or at least their works do. It happened to the composer J.S. Bach, whose music disappeared for over a century before it was resurrected by Felix Mendelssohn in the mid Nineteenth Century. It also happened to a man who died just before Bach was born, the seventeenth century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Ironically for one of the founders of liberal and libertarian thinking, (along with John Locke) a primary aim of Hobbes was a defence of sovereign power and autocratic government. Hobbes works include Leviathan, published in 1651 in which he developed his Social Contract Theory.

His efforts were largely aimed at opposing the radical politics which emerged during the English Civil War of the previous decade (partly as a result of the radical Leveller group) and the theories of the High Republicans during the English Commonwealth of the early 1650s (1).

Strangely, although Hobbes ideas were applicable to a Royalist settlement as well as the Council of State of their bitter opponent Parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell, both sides found his views unpalatable. So, just like the work of the composer Bach, Hobbes theories fell into obscurity for over a century to be revived during the debate over American Independence in the 1770s.

So what lay behind Hobbes insistence on an absolute monarch? It comes from Hobbes concept of society which viewed people atomistically, in perpetual motion trying to gain economic advantage and influence over each other. From this a natural structure to society emerges with individuals all seeking their own best interests.

But if society is of this nature, what stops it falling apart in some kind of anarchic fight for ultimate power? Why, none other than a universally accepted absolute sovereign charged with passing and enforcing laws to ensure the continued health of the competitive system.

To keep the sovereign above the throng he or she would have the power to appoint their successor (what better than the eldest son!). Importantly, the Sovereign was not necessarily an individual in the Hobbes system, but could also be an elite ruling group or even, surprisingly, a democratically chosen chamber. What concerned Hobbes was not so much the source of the power but the absolute manner in which it was wielded.

Hobbes claimed that the legitimacy for his theory came from the freedoms which man possessed in the state of nature. But as C. B. MacPherson showed in his book Possessive Individualism, this was a fallacy.

What Hobbes did was to take the contemporary mid-seventeenth century English economic structure of small traders and freelancers and hypothesize how they would behave if laws were removed. Crucially, his version of liberty rested on the fact that a person is free to the extent that he/she is not constrained by laws; the Sovereign is there merely for the stability of society and the health of a free market.

For Hobbes, so-called freedom by non-interference was key and as freedom is maximised when the number and extent of laws are minimised, it is actually irrelevant whether the laws are passed by an elected chamber or an absolute monarch. The idea of liberty through non-interference, also expounded by John Locke, was later developed by Jeremy Bentham and became the prevalent view which still dominates today.

But it turns out that this idea of liberty is not nearly strong enough and not only must there be non-interference, but there must be no possibility of interference (so-called non-domination). Furthermore, the state itself must also be free, prevented from being subverted by individual or sectarian interests. In this view a sovereign must be restrained from creating arbitrary laws to their own advantage or blocking new laws to extend liberty in some facet of society.

Thus to a modern day British Republican (and more widely to any real Democrat as a believer of rule by the people) the mere existence of the Royal Prerogative along with Royal Assent (though not used since 1707) and Queens Consent which can be used to prevent debate in the House of Commons is unacceptable. As Philip Pettit in his book Republicanism writes:

Liberty as non-domination republican liberty had not only been lost to political thinkers and activists; it had even become invisible to the historians of political thought.

As activists we need to recover this idea of republican liberty. Remember that the theory calls for the wielding of absolute power (or as close as we can get in the form of Prerogative or Executive Order). Although Hobbes can be seen as the progenitor of the concept, modern Libertarians are actually critical of Trump and May, viewing the size of the Government they propose as being far too large. Nevertheless the autocratic Libertarian elements of both leaders must be opposed for a compassionate and fair society with effective individual rights to survive. The recent debacle suffered by Theresa may in this General Election greatly increases the chances of a successful outcome in the near future. But the ideology is as old as the hills and we can be certain that sooner or later it will flourish again.

Notes

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Trump, May, and Autocratic Libertarianism - Bright Green