Category Archives: Libertarianism

Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders Paragraph 3.4 of the 2016 Libertarian Party platform

I have nothing against Libertarians. In fact, some of my best friends are Libertarians. If one of my children wanted to marry a Libertarian, like Tevye the Milkman I would question G-d, grit my teeth, put on a brave face, and give them my blessing and my permission.

On the one hand, there is about 80 percent overlap between Libertarian and Conservative political values, and in practice we tend to arrive at many similar policy positions: the rule of law, strong private property rights, freedom of contract and of association, free trade, respect for constitutional authority, low taxes, light and economically literate regulations, federalism, a government of limited and enumerated powers, frugal fiscal policies, monetary discipline, and so on.

On the other hand, Libertarians dont have much use for the Conservatives attachment to tradition. In fact, some Libertarian positions seem utterly unmoored, not just from tradition, but from reality. Take for example, the Libertarian view of migration, expressed, inter alia, in the above-cited 2016 party platform. Without any limiting principle, this position would mean the end of both nations and states. Even on the level of utopian fantasy, I dont get the appeal.

On the other hand, Libertarians advance a powerful universal moral claim that is consistent with both traditional liberal values and advanced economic thinking. Here, for example, is Alex Tabarrok, professor of economics at George Mason University, making this moral claim:

There are fundamental human rights. There are rights which accrue to everyone, no matter who they are, no matter where they are on the globe. Those rights include the right to free expression. They include the right to freedom of religion. And I believe they should also include the right to move about the Earth.

And Here is Michael Clemens, another Libertarian economist at the Center for Global Development, making the economic case:

So, you know how in real estate they say that value is all about location, location, location. Its the same for the value of your labor. And that has a remarkable implication. It means that barriers that keep you in places where youre less economically productive keep you from making the contribution you could make. And for every person whos kept in a poor country, thats a tiny little drag on the world economy that adds up. So, what that means is that even a modest relaxation of the barriers to migration that we have right now Im talking about one in 20 people who now live in poor countries being able to work in a rich country would add trillions of dollars a year to the world economy. It would add more value to the world economy than dropping all remaining barriers to trade, every tariff, every quota and dropping all remaining barriers to international investment combined.

Tabarrok again:

Its actually very simple. You take a person from a poor country, a country like Haiti for example, and you bring them to the United States or another developed country, and their wages go up.Three times, four times, fives times. Im told, sometimes as much as ten times. So, its an incredible increase in living standards simply by moving someone from where their labor has low value, moving them to where their labor has high value. Its far more effective than any other anti-poverty program weve ever tried.

There is a kind of voodoo economics quality at work here: simply exposing a person from a poor country to the spacious skies and purple mountains majesty of the United States creates a ten-fold increase in that persons welfare, and a net increase in the welfare of the world. Amazing. Are there any negative externalities associated with this transaction, multiplied millions (or billions) of times over? Neither economist tells us. If there are, presumably they are negligible, and its in poor taste to ask. (Pay no attention to Hamburg and Malm.)

On the other hand, both Tevye and his creator Sholem Aleichem were immigrants who settled in New York City. Aleichem did well there, and I have to believe that Tevye did too.

On the other hand I also believe strongly in individual rights, and I think that elevating group rights to preeminence, which is what we are doing here in the United States, is incompatible with our political traditions and notions of liberty. We will come to grief for it. But I dont see how it can be a universal individual right to live anywhere on the globe one pleases. I may be a simple barefoot Virginia country lawyer, but I am used to thinking of a right as a claim for which a duly constituted political or judicial body has the power to grant relief or redress. No such body can grant relief for the claim advanced by Professors Tabarrok and Clemens, which has little basis in custom or practice. It is a purely abstract assertion that founders on such deeply rooted legal principles as state sovereignty.

Libertarianism shares with Marxism and other bastard stepchildren of the Enlightenment this abstract ideological quality, disconnected from the realities of lived human experience. For Marxism, the fatal conceit is its obsession with equality; for Libertarians, it is hyper-individualism. Like most primates, human beings are social, hierarchical, and tribal. Hierarchical means that humans are constantly jockeying with one another for social status, and a society of perfect equality is therefore a dangerous delusion. Tribal means that we are deeply, irrationally attached to exclusive collective identities, as anyone who has ever attended an American high school or a major team sporting event can tell you. There is no escape from the tribalism, its so deeply ingrained in us. Try to suppress it, and it comes out in other forms. Dissolve the 20th century American national identity, and you get the vicious and stupid identity politics of the 21st.

It seems to me that the error at the root of social contract theory is the understanding that the basic pre-political social unit is the individual. This understanding is ahistorical and wrongheaded as a matter of anthropology and psychology. The basic pre-political social unit is the family and tribe (which is really just extended family). Being an Old World immigrant myself, as well as a member of Tevyes very ancient tribe, I am deeply sympathetic to Edmund Burkes insight that human societies have an organic character, that their members are connected to each other and to past and future generations through bonds of partnership and obligation, and arent merely fungible, interchangeable economic units. Like any partnership, this is a kind of contract, but very different from what Libertarians and liberals believe. It encompasses nationalism, for one thing, whereas those other views tend to lead to borderless one-world utopianism. Of course, from a certain point of view modern nationalism is a deliberately manufactured construct. But what makes nation states such powerful political actors, and nationalism such a potent force in international politics, is that they are both the political manifestations of, and tap into, a very deep human feature.

On the other hand, wasnt it nationalism that brought us the worst crimes and conflagrations of the 20th century?

No. Western elites learned all the wrong lessons from the 20th century. After the Second World War they came to see in the nation-statenotthe fullest political expression of peoplehood, the seat of law and legitimacy, a celebration of human variety, and the font of culture, art, and human flourishing, but rather the heart of genocide. They completely misconstrued Adam Smiths dictum that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The horrors of the 20thcentury were caused not by nationalism in general, but byGermannationalism in particular.

The true lesson of the 20th century is that public policy works best when it works with the grain of human nature, not against it. Perhaps overcoming our irrational tendencies is a worthy individual goal. But the road to anti-human hell is paved with attempts to eliminate them altogether. The main challenge for the modern social order is managing and moderating the more malign and destructive forms of our nature. No one said it was going to be easy.

On the other hand

No. There is no other hand.

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Tevye the Milkman, Libertarianism, and the Open Borders Fantasy - Ricochet.com

Being Libertarian

Why the Youth in the UK are Generally Left, and Why They Should Prefer Libertarianism Being Libertarian The election in the United Kingdom has demonstrated that, once again, young people are far more left-leaning than the rest of the electorate. A recent poll has shown that the socialist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is far more popular among young ...

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Why the Youth in the UK are Generally Left, and Why They Should Prefer Libertarianism - Being Libertarian

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)

There is a secondary discussion beyond the obvious (and redundant) back-and-forth about who was worse during the 2016 Presidential election, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump:

Is the duopoly (a.k.a. the stranglehold on American politics perpetrated by the Republicans and Democrats) in need of retirement?

Many (if not most) people agreed it was indeed time to switch things up.

As we can see, most agreed the best way to do that was to put a non-politician into office in the form of Donald J. Trump so be it.

Like it or not, President Trump is indeed doing things in an unconventional manner (to put it VERY mildly) and my sincere hope is that this will loosen the grip of establishment politics on Washingtons throat.

The reality TV star and real estate mogul (turned president) will pave the way for more unconventional candidates who are equally sick of all the bullshit (there is no other way to put it in my mind , sorry for the profanity).

But Trump only has two terms, thats the law of the land.

Then what?

I highly doubt that we will ever (and overwhelmingly hope that we never) end up with a President Pence; it would be a throwback to a Republican Party most do not want.

I guess my bourbon fueled rant comes to one, single point: who replaces the Republicans and Democrats once they are gone?

The obvious answer is the Libertarian Party (LP).

For starters, (dont worry, we will tackle the rest in a second sweetheart) it is the third largest party in the country and the only one whos numbers have actually grown in the last decade. But who does it replace; the Republicans? Hmmm, I question that one.

While the economics and constitutional approach is certainly on par with your average Elephant, the southern US is still far too socially conservative to fall in with legal weed and a nuanced policy on abortion.

The LP replacing the Democrats is an even trickier concept to tackle.

In the first scenario, the social conservatives are really the only ones left out. Luckily, they still have the Constitution Party (what a joke of a name that is).

With Democrats, a major chunk of them would have to abandon how they were raised when it comes to fixing economic problems. They would have to learn that its people, not government, that fix economic and societal problems.

But, in my experience, most Democrats know very little about libertarianism, let alone the Libertarian Party.

In this last election, I was able to convert so many to either classical liberalism or straight-up libertarianism solely on its merits also because a few were pot heads who liked Gary Johnsons stance on marijuana legalization.

The overall reaction however, was this shit is great! How have I gone my whole life not knowing about this?

Yes I said confidently, remembering my own trip from the moderate left to libertarianismhow indeed.

But it wasnt how indeed. It was a sickening look at modern-day academia that pushes the divisive narrative that only a Republican or Democrat can win, and in a way its true.

Our current system was only built to accommodate two major parties. Any third party (a term I despise) simply throws the election to the House of Representatives for the office of President, and to the Senate for the office of Vice President.

We would literally be handing more power to people we consistently criticize for already being there too long and having too much power!

I think most of us dont want that!

But lets move past that and ask (as well as answer) another obvious question: no matter which side the Libertarian Party replaces, who will replace the other side?

Of course it is completely possible only one party even gets replaced, but lets just say for the sake of argument they both get replaced; who becomes the new opponent?

If youre thinking the Green Party, think again!

A party so left-wing that it makes Democrats go yeah, those hippies are fucking crazy? They are right too (you just need to listen to the music of Jill Steins failed second career to figure this out).

Will it be the Constitution Party? Yeah right!

I do not want any kind of a theocracy even one based around my own religion!

So here we are, back to square one; we are either infiltrating the two parties from within (which has failed repeatedly) or we will have to continue to try and force either the donkeys or elephants into extinction.

As I conclude this article I hope you did not think I was going to suggest which way this will go I dont know. But I am hoping to spark an idea, a thought, and a debate.

Do we finally put our foot down and say enough is enough! You guys all equally suck! or do we continue to run non-establishment candidates with Rs and Ds next to their names, in hopes of change from within?

One thing is for certain, we all have a very big decision to make in 2019 and 2020.

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Is it Time to Retire the Duopoly? - Being Libertarian

When trying to attract members from the center of both the left and the right into libertarianism, its extremely tempting to carve out a spot in the middle in order to attract the centrists. Its not all a bad strategy, but its best to be careful not to win a battle and lose the war. Its important to consider that only by convincing people of the merits of libertarianism that they will become true supporters. There is a good case against moderating for the sake of moderation.

In most cases, the desire to moderate for gaining greater influence extends from the belief that most people are in the middle, and therefore, a more moderate message will bring more people into the fold. The two major US political parties have, more often than not, made this mistake in their primary elections for decades, and they have also made the same mistake in attempting new legislation and new ideas. The entire debacle of fixing health care has been stymied by members of the GOP who believe that moderating their stances will gain greater support from constituents. The problem is that stances without principle become utterly unconvincing.

Because a desire to moderate often extends from a desire to make messaging have a broader appeal, it is essentially marketing that is being considered. There are three parts to marketing: product, price, and promotion (the three Ps). The product, in this case, would be the core of libertarianism and all its representative philosophies. It is what defines libertarianism as true political ideals. If the product is modified, then it is no longer libertarianism, but then becomes something different, like centrism.

There is nothing wrong with centrism, in and of itself. It is a real set of political positions and philosophies that can be principled. However, it is a different product. It is not the same thing as libertarianism. Changing the product is doing something different from changing messaging. One does not have to become a centrist to make libertarianism convey a message appealing to centrists. This refers to both the price and the promotion.

There is a term in economics called opportunity cost that expresses the cost of an opportunity not taken. For example, I might pass on an opportunity to buy Bitcoin and instead use my money for a down payment on a new car. If the value of Bitcoin doubles, then I have had an opportunity cost of that gain versus the value I place on owning a new car. In the case of political marketing, I would think of part of the price portion to be similar to opportunity costs. If one accepts a political position, there is an opportunity cost of having rejected an alternative. So, by accepting a candidate for office that subscribes to libertarianism, one is rejecting alternative philosophies, such as the left or the right and in some cases even the center. Maybe someone from the center might say to themselves, If I select a libertarian, I am losing out on some policies that taxes the rich more heavily than the poor, or I am losing out on some socially conservative policies that I believe make the country a safer place. But, I am gaining a position of social acceptance and less extreme government spending.

So, the second part of that equation the centrist might be considering is the promotion part of the marketing. The promotion is the messaging of what benefits are gained for the opportunity costs paid. If I have a customer come into my retail store, in order to have the best chance at making a sale, I present the benefits of the potential product of interest in a way I think will most interest the customer. I would be a fool if I attempted to sell the customer something by presenting him with everything I think he might dislike about the product. I am not hiding anything. If he asks me about the negatives, I happily discuss them with explanations of why I believe they are actually a positive for him, in the end.

While business marketing demands a serious consideration of changing a product when it isnt selling well, that isnt much of an option for political philosophies. We have to focus more on the price and promotion. We do not have to change libertarianism in order to sell it. We simply present the aspects to each group of potential supporters to fit their interests. When people say there is a benefit to changing libertarianism to a more centrists stance, and when people want to moderate libertarian positions to make them more palatable to non-libertarians, they are changing the product. We can present a different and appealing message without changing the underlying principles. Moderating for the sake of moderation is unprincipled, and people see right through nearly every time. In almost every case where a moderate position is sought out for the sake of creating a moderate position, it does not sell. Without the principles to back up the position, it cannot stand.

There is nothing wrong with tailoring a message, and there is nothing wrong with trying to recruit centrists to support libertarianism. There are very open opportunities for doing so, especially in the US, where centrists dont typically have a very good voice. However, positions must always tie back to core principles that do not change. Truth always remains truth, and if you believe you have the truth, there is absolutely no reason to step away from it until someone convinces you otherwise. We dont have to hide things away from people because we fear they might not like it, but we should always present the benefits different groups of people will like the most.

This post was written by Danny Chabino.

The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.

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Red Dirt Liberty Report: Unprincipled Moderation - Being Libertarian

The split between left-leaning and right-leaning libertarians has reached a fever pitch after Jeff Deist, Director of the Mises Institute, gave an iconic speech during his annual Mises University event about blood and soil libertarianism, an idea encompassing cultural conservatism as a barricade against state power.

It is reasonable to believe that a more libertarian society would be less libertine and more culturally conservative for the simple reason that as the state shrinks in importance and power, the long-suppressed institutions of civil society grow in importance and power, Deist said.

And in a more libertarian society, its harder to impose the costs of ones lifestyle choices on others. If you rely on the family or church or charity to help you, they may well impose some conditions on that help.

While these sentiments may seem benign in nature, they were immediately picked up upon by frenzied analysts at the Cato Institute as inherently racistfilled with dog-whistles that appeal to the alt-right bogeymen that they have imagined is lurking around every corner.

If you keep saying things like heil Trump and blood and soil and putting slightly-modified Nazi flags in the backdrop of your [social media picture], you really, REALLY need to stop complaining about the way people react, Cato analyst Adam Bates wrote on social media in an attempt to equate Deist and his supporters to racists. Quit pretending youre being misunderstood. Youre not that smart, and the rest of us arent that dumb.

Fringe academic Steve Horwitz, also connected to Cato, first implied that Deist was a Nazi before launching a bizarre rant bemoaning Ron Pauls success in growing the libertarian movement.

Comparing Deists words to that of Holocaust deniers or sympathizers, Horwitz said, I await the new [Mises Institute] lecture on how entrepreneurship and personal responsibility help spread liberty, which will surely be titled Work Will Set You Free.' Work Will Set You Free was the slogan posted by the Nazis at Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

Although Horwitz compares blood and soil libertarianism to Nazism, he has no problem standing for blood and soil when it comes to the state of Israel. Horwitz is an avid Zionist, and sees no hypocrisy in his reflexive defense of nationalism and ethnic pride when defending his beloved Jewish state.

Horwitz followed his Nazi hysteria with a condemnation of Ron Paul saying, I have no love or admiration for Ron Paul. I think his contributions to building a sustainable libertarian movement are overrated and his role in attracting folks who found the alt right attractive has been damaging.

This rift within the libertarian movement has been festering for decades, and shows no signs of slowing down. When it is all said and done, libertarians will need to decide whether they are going to choose leaders who want to form common bonds with ordinary people or leaders who want to collect paychecks in Washington D.C. and promote degeneracy. The choice should not be very difficult.

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The Libertarian Split Continues As Blood And Soil Speech Triggers Another Racial Witch Hunt - The Liberty Conservative

Millennials, millennials, millennials it seems as if we cant ever stop talking about these kids.

As a millennial, I always find it amusing to watch the old guard try so desperately to get a grasp of our motivations and often times our lunacy.

I imagine elders trying to understand the youth of the day is a concept as old as society itself.

I find that most contentions with millennials are precarious in nature, but there is one that I find genuine: the rise of socialism and other Marxist ideas among my peers is downright terrifying.

Many have tried to articulate why this particular ism is so popular with todays youth. Some say its because of a lack of historical and economic knowledge; some say its because of the bleak and uncertain economic future that has been bestowed upon the generation. These points are valid, but I feel they miss the mark almost completely.

Forget about your rationality for a moment and you may be able to see what I see.

I see a generation living in a truly rational era. We are long past God is dead, we are now living on his all but entirely rotten corpse. So very little is intact of the cornerstone of Western society, that it makes sense to me that millennials are the most susceptible (generation) to the dangers of isms because their options are to either grasp desperately to dead ideologies or slip into a dark nihilistic abyss.

How else do you expect us to learn up from down?

The rational mind is a deceptive one. You can make a logical argument for anything there are people actually fighting for pedophile acceptance!

So, therefore, the first man to come along screaming of revolution can take full advantage of the youthful craving to change the world and most importantly give them their first sense of purpose ever.

A purpose is what were looking for, nothing more.

This criticism can be said for anyone who whole-heartedly believes in any ideology; its just that libertarianism, or say, liberalism or conservatism has never killed 200 million people, so Im less concerned with those particular beliefs.

In a post-God is dead society, we will continue to see the rise in utopian ideals and the massacres that come along with those ideals until we find a way to revive God himself with our rational minds.

I understand the criticisms of Christianity; Ive been quite the critic myself. But, Im beginning to understand the father like representative that God is to Western society.

David Foster Wallace once said, The postmodern founders patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans.

When you have an overbearing father, the best way to combat his militance is to become strong and independent, to become your own separate entity.

Just because you find your father tyrannical doesnt mean you should murder him in cold blood, youve got to find a way to bring him down to size.

We live in a time where we could be cultivating the greatest minds in history.

Information is abundant and affordable the majority of historys greatest books are available for free, or at most, for 99 cents.

But instead, the youth and the majority of elders are captivated by ideologies and hold no interest in becoming individual thinkers; because that would be difficult, it would require the type of discipline only a father could provide.

* Christian Farrar is a comedian, podcast host, and often times and accidental provocateur. He has been an activist for libertarianism for the last three years.

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Godlessness Leads to Socialism - Being Libertarian

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

What initially attracted you to the liberty movement or to the ideas of liberty?

Whether it was a foundation in the principles of freedom learned from parents or in school, a desire to be rid of oppressive bureaucracy, or a speech (or set of speeches) from Ron Paul or some other advocate of liberty, most likely what attracted you were the ideas, or the picture of the change for good that liberty brings.

There is a movement, a tribe, gathering around these principles, because the ideals of liberty and what they offer to a person are attractive, they are desirable.

I truly believe, from what Ive seen of libertarianism and the rise of the classical liberals and constitutional conservatives, that these ideals resonate with everyone; from Uganda to South Africa, from China to the United States, people have an inherent desire for personal freedom and individual liberty.

Even the leftists, in their misguided ways, often come from a place of desiring freedom, though they tend to pursue freedom for themselves and their allies at the expense of everyone elses freedom. The underlying reasons for why many of them do what they do and fight for the ideals they desire (e.g. equality of outcome), is to bring about what they perceive as greater freedom for the people they consider oppressed.

Liberty is an attractive platform; its an inherent human desire, it just needs to be channeled towards the things that will bring actual liberty.

But, whats one thing thats never influenced you to change for the better? What has the opposite effect, making you shut out an idea rather than causing you to introspect and search yourself, the opposite effect of convincing you to pursue an idea further?

For me, that one thing is someone using a non-argument or insults to tell me that Im an idiot for my desire to make my world a better place. Let me explain.

Imagine you are a person who cares deeply for the poor and downtrodden, youve seen your single mother struggle to survive yes, its not societys fault its circumstance, or your absentee fathers, etc.

But because of her struggle, you have a certain empathy for others who struggle.

You want to see society step in and fill the gap that your extended family and community did not. A part of Americas greatness, that De Tocqueville spoke of, was its communitys involvement with helping the people of the community, being involved in helping the poor, the widows, the orphans, etc.

Maybe you dont understand either the economics nor the philosophical underpinnings behind the future you hope for, maybe you dont understand the blow struck to your own liberty when you involve bureaucracy and power-hungry individuals in more and more of the individuals everyday life. Maybe youve never seen the other side, or have only seen them as those who (because they are able to care for themselves) are too greedy to want to share with others.

So, you support government-run healthcare, you support greater welfare, free (or greatly subsidized) university, and higher minimum wages; you support the governments importing of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and the illegal crossing of many, many, more, because you see them all as people who are struggling without realizing the effects this may have on society.

You look at policy through your lens of struggle and choose anything you think will help change that. You may not even realize how these very policies actually undermine your own goals: as higher taxes, minimum wage increases, and inflation drive prices ever higher, the over supply of labor makes jobs more difficult to find, and the free universities become bureaucratic nightmares, overcrowded and pushing whatever nonsense is expedient to what is politically correct or whatever supports more government intervention and bureaucracy.

You dont realize this.

Rather you just want help for the people you know who are struggling day in and day out to survive, to feed their families, to pay their medical bills.

Then you come across a libertarian, and this embodiment of liberty rather than taking the time to explain to you how so many of the problems youve faced can be solved by introducing more liberty, by an acceptance of more freedom (individually and in the markets).

Rather than showing you whats so amazing about liberty, and how this mindset could help change your life through personal responsibility to help you and those you love drive towards improving your skills and providing value to others; how less government bureaucracy would lessen the tax burden (felt by all) and make reaching that middle-class lifestyle much more attainable; how ideas like the NAP could help curb the incessant appetite for foreign intervention and the costs (of both life and treasure) that come with it, and how so many bad laws and ideas could be changed if they were judged through the lenses of cost to freedom vs improvement of the freedom of others; instead of showing you the reason why so many of us were drawn to liberty, the libertarian calls you a statist or a Marxist and mocks you and your lack of understanding. Or worse, they use a weak strawman argument to point out some fallacy in your ideas.

This libertarian calls you out for being a freeloader, for being a socialist, or just straight up calls you an idiot and then moves on to the next internet debate leaving you with nothing of substance, only a deepened perception of capitalists being assholes and socialists being the ones who care driving you deeper into the arms of flawed logic.

Im not saying its wrong to debate on the internet, and Im not saying that every leftist online wants to objectively approach the ideas of liberty but how many of us were won over from the left or the right, and what was it that won us over? Was it a witty remark, or a really good burn? Or was it a set of ideals that made sense, and that we saw some person or some group of people not only espousing but truly living that set of ideals that showed the true character of what a world with liberty as its core virtue could look like?

Its not good enough to tell someone that their desire for free healthcare is akin to stealing from others to pay for yourself, its not enough to say that Canadas (or Scandinavias) healthcare systems are in shambles, because an objective onlooker would say that they are just fine, and quite frankly cheaper than the convoluted and increasingly bureaucratic systems like Medicaid and Medicare and the slew of insurance companies and bureaucracies in the United States.

But there is an idea to strive for, one where the red tape and government favoritism, the bureaucracy and high tax burden would be done away with; where medicine would be like any other service, subject to the competition of the market that brings lower prices and better services.

We need to remember to promote the goals of liberty and the outcomes that arise from increased freedom.

We need to remember to be the example of what we want to see, and to show that there is an alternative, not just become yet another voice in the cacophony of political bickering.

This post was written by Arthur Cleroux.

The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.

Arthur Cleroux is an individualist who balances his idealism with a desire for an honest, logical and objective approach to politics and political issues. Originally Arthur found that his values aligned well with the political right; however as time went on his desire for transparency and honest discourse of ideas in the political realm led him closer and closer to the center of the political spectrum! He found that on either wing there was a strong and dangerous type of groupthink, where people supported unnecessary and even bad policies because of a need to conform to the party line. As an individualist with a strong understanding of the importance of what Ayn Rand called the smallest minority on earth, the individual; he finds himself falling very closely in line with the ideals of liberty. Arthur is a lot of things but more important than anything he is a father to two amazing children! Caring for them, making sure they know that they are now and always will be loved is his primary goal, and along with that, comes a desire is to raise them to be free thinkers, to question and study the world and why it is the way it is, and to have character and grit to do what is necessary to succeed!

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Libertarians, Don't Become What We Hate About the Left and Right What Are We Thinking? - Being Libertarian

William Shatner at FreedomFest 2017 in Las Vegas Friday night. Credit: Emile Doak/The American Conservative

Is there a free mind? Are our minds free? Are we programmed by something up there to follow our fate? Or are we programmed by Mom and Dad at a very early age? So is there free will? Do we make choices?

So wondered William Shatner during his July 21 speech at the annual Las Vegas convention of libertarians and other free-marketeers called FreedomFest. He urged the audience to stick to its principles, not compromise as he says he did when he directed Star Trek V by giving up on his original vision of having the real God attack the crew with an army of lava men in the films climax.

Compromising principles is a mistake, suggested Shatner. Nobody can tell you what to do. Somewhere inside us is a core.

Is William Shatner a libertarian, you might ask? If not, whats he doing there? Well, it seems more like hes an environmentalist worried about overpopulationand hes a Canadian, of coursebut hes also expressed some populist longings for someone to sweep away the bureaucrats and make American democracy work again. And he avoids commenting on Donald Trump. Maybe call Shatner a frustrated technocratic populist? Sounds like sort of a Reform Party guy to me, leavened by an inevitable Star Trek-veteran love of science and education.

None of this makes him too much weirder than a previous FreedomFest speaker who went on to bigger things, namely Donald Trump. I suppose the question is how big you want the libertarian tent to be. You probably want a tent big enough to let in optimists who still believe we can invent and build things, but not a tent so big that it lets all the carny-barkers inside. A friend of mine in Colorado reports seeing someone flying around downtown Denver with a jetpack a couple weeks ago, so we know futuristic technological progress is officially going strong, but I worry more about unrealistic promises in politics these days.

I noticed some people joking online that theyd love to hear Shatner tell the assembled libertarians to get a life in the fashion of his notorious 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch about obsessive Trekkie conventioneers. I probably would have laughed harder at that joke myself a decade or two ago, when it seemed that the worst thing that could happen to the libertarian movement is that it might get too screechy and radical and alienate mainstream Americans. Everybody relax, I would have thought.

Nowadays, I worry more that in American politics, even the most radical road always leads back to the same mushy centrist middle, with a few highly predictable TV pundits guarding that middle against the emergence of any truly new ideas. So, if Shatner is unlikely to express a precise, coherent philosophical argument, I should at least root for him to leave crowds slightly confused, even if he says something stupid. That can spur thought. It beats sticking to safely-ambiguous, nigh-universal sentiments that are deployed as if to build coalitions but are really used mainly to make the speaker himself seem as non-threatening as possible, often boosting his career without doing much to shore up the hypothetical broader coalition. Absent utopian unanimity, one should root for competition, always.

Im beginning to feel the same way about fictional continuity in Star Trek, to my surprise.

A sci-fi geek, I have been as eager as anyone over the years to see massive fictional continuities like that of the Star Trek universe or the DC Comics universe kept perfectly consistent. Inevitably, though, things fall apart eventually. New writers and new producers like Star Trek/Star Wars director J.J. Abrams come along and cavalierly decide theres a certain scene they want to depict or a character they want to bring back, and out goes the whole timestream as were asked to pretend vast swaths of prior fictional history never happened. I used to think this process was as heartbreaking as watching footage of the old Penn Station being demolished.

But there comes a point when you realize that the hope of maintaining a consistent continuityor a large political coalitionis probably rooted in a misguided optimism. The editors are too busy to care about all the details, and the politicians and most popular pundits are too busy or corrupt to care about philosophical purity. So, then the disappointed idealist starts to root for chaos. Perhaps thats a little of what happened in November 2016.

Let my fellow libertarians fight viciously and devolve into factions (pausing to enjoy the occasional near-meaningless Shatner speech or other entertainment). Like small and decentralized states, the factionalism might afford a better chance for truth to survive out there somewhere than would one bland, homogeneous consensus version of the philosophy with all the rough edges polished and gleaming.

And if the new Star Trek: Discovery TV series comes out this fall and has a throwaway line in it suggesting that this timeline may replace both the Abrams films and all the TV material we know from the 60s and 90s, well, now Im okay with that possibility, too. I am preemptively embracing that anarchic conclusion before the monarchShatnerhas a chance to insult us all again. Let a hundred Omicron Ceti III flowers bloom.

In Vegas terms, until we really hit the jackpot, Im grateful so long as we can keep rolling the dice.

Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners. He writes for SpliceToday.com and can be found on Twitter at @ToddSeavey.

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Is Star Trek Icon William Shatner a Libertarian? - The American Conservative