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Fascism and American Reactions, 1922 | Libertarianism.org

Posted: October 3, 2016 at 12:54 am

1922

In the United States, Mussolinis March on Rome (1922) inspired self-reflection and visions for the near future; some mystically hopeful, others soberly scared.

In late October, 1922, Benito Mussolini followed a column of 30,000 Black Shirts into Rome, where he was greeted with an automobile furnished by the King of Italy himself, Victor Emmanuel III. The king refused a petition to declare martial law tendered by the existing government led by Prime Minister Luigi Facta, tacitly recognizing Fascisti rule in the personage of the new movements leader. In the following months, Mussolini and the Fascists terrorized their enemies throughout Italy and consolidated political power; the movement birthed in Mussolinis private circles of veterans only a few years earlier bloomed into an international curiosity, Fascism. In the United States, American opinion-makers exhibited reactions ranging from shocked disbelief to impartial curiosity and what can properly be described as jubilant and mystical support for a nation of people reclaiming their government from leftist radicals and feckless politicians alike. The Kansas City Star identified Mussolinis fascism with the by-then familiar concept of 100 per cent Americanism, while joining a host of other observers in praising the Fascists unmatched anti-communism and supposed returns to individualism, the rule of law, and respect for private control of property. Papers like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reacted to Mussolinis rise to power with measured unease rooted in fears of another general European war sparked by Italian conquests along the Adriatic. Even many of those who supported his anti-communism feared Mussolinis militaristic rhetoric. Common to these accounts is the certainty that fascist success depended upon appeals to the Italian middle class and veterans of the First World War. As such, many American citizens positively identified with the fascist movement and found the events in Italy useful for interpreting their own more immediate, local world. In the years of its infancy, fascism provided Americans with either an image of what they could achieve as a united, 100 per cent American whole, or a portent of disruption, war, and desolation to come.

Anthony Comegna

Assistant Editor for Intellectual History

Fascisti Idea to SpreadExiled Russians Would Adopt Plan in Own CountryOne Million Men in Italy are Banded Together to Advance Nationalism and War on Socialists and Communists.

Rome. Aug. 9.

FOUNDED BY AN EDITOR

Fascism is not three and a half years old, having been founded in Milan by Sig. Mussolini, editor of Popolo dItalia in April, 1919. The first action took place April 19, immediately after its organization, when only 350 members, all distinguished war veterans, attacked and destroyed the offices of Avanti, a Socialist newspaper. Since then with each attack on anti-national forces, thousands of youths have flocked to Mussolinis banner, just as sixty-two years ago they flocked to the army of Garibaldi, who started the war of redemption for Italy in Sicili with one thousand men and by the time he reached Naples had nearly one hundred thousand followers.

The Fascistis ideals consist of 100 per cent nationalism. They believe in applying patriotism with force; they not only have no patience with 50 per-cent Italianism, but they believe also in clubbing 50 per centers. They have no special theory of government, but want the best government that is obtainable. For the time being they are monarchial, but if tomorrow they should see that a republic would be better for Italy they would be republicans. What they want is the greatest well being and the maximum prosperity for the nation, not by class struggle, but by co-operation among the various classes.

NOT A SECRET ORGANIZATION.

Fascism is not a secret organization like the Ku Klux Klan, for everybody knows its constitution, and its members wear uniforms which everybody can see. They use illegal means because the constitutional powers do not deal with the situation.

Sig. Mussolini is only 38 years old. Until the end of 1914 he was an ardent Socialist and director of Avanti. The world war converted him to nationalism. He founded the Popolo dItalia, fought bravely in the war, was elected a deputy at the last elections and is now considered the most powerful man in Italy. One million men obey him without ever questioning his orders.

Disciplineand Work Aim of Italys Man of Hour and Fascisti Head

By the United News.

Rome. Aug. 20.Benito Mussolini, Italys Man of the hour, is planning for the future, when the Fascisti, which he leads, comes into political power, according to him.

The Fascisti, at a word from Mussolini, have laid down their arms and are organizing as a political party. They came into existence in 1919, since when their chief object has been to combat Socialism and Communism.

Mussolini, who shies from interviewers, answered questions briefly.

What would be the first step you would take if in power?

Discipline.

And then

Discipline for all. That covers everything for a beginning.

And your foreign policy?

Equilibrium and conciliation.

What definite steps would you enforce to put Italy on a firm economic basis?

Work. Discipline and work. Fascism is great because it is a constructive, creative working force. Italy can be the same.

Italys three political parties will be Mussolinis, the Popolari and the Socialists.

Of the last named, Mussolini said:

They have become bourgeois. As soon as they are definitely removed from Bolshevism, need from extreme Fascism will be over.

Referring to the Popolari, or clericals, Mussolini said: Priests should celebrate mass and not mix in politics.

Fascisti Leader Backed by 1,000,000 Armed Men is Now Unchallenged Ruler of Italy

By Paul Scott Mowrer

Paris. Oct. 30.Benito Mussolini, leader of the Fascisti, seems to be the unchallenged dictator of Italy.

Owing to the severe censorship that has been established in Italy the news from that country must be taken with some allowance but it appears that the black shirts and army helmets of Benito Mussolinis nationalist reactionaries are already supreme. The Fascisti, of whom there are said to be 1,000,000, are mobilized. Barracks and armories have been occupied and arms seizedAlready masters of Piedmont and Lombardy fascisti hold Florence, Siena and Pisa. In Rome they occupied the railway stations and public buildings until they were taken over by the army, which is honeycombed with fascism.

Made Feeble Protest.

Before disappearing the Facta government made a faint show of resistance and ordered up a poster accusing the Fascisti of sedition and promising to preserve order at all costs. It also desired to proclaim martial law but the King refused to sign the decree. It is therefore Benito Mussolini who has proclaimed and is executing martial law. All the bourses have been closed and Parliament, which was to have reconvened Nov. 7, will probably be dissolved.

Italian Free Masonry has issued a proclamation recognizing the Fascisti movement and the Pope, through the bishop, has appealed for peace and union. The Fascisti have proclaimed loyalty to the King, who is apparently well disposed toward the Fascisti.

The Fascisti program is frankly nationalist and perhaps even reactionary. The Fascisti proclamation announces that military, political and administrative powers are transferred to a committee of action of four members with dictatorial positions.

The rights of workers of all categories will be respected, according to the proclamation, which adds that the new regime will be generous toward nonmilitant adversaries but inexorable toward others. The aim of the movement is declared to be the safety and grandeur of Italy.

The chief points of the interior program appear to be the exaltation of the army and a strong patriotric union of all Italy and especially of the north and south. Fascism originally sprang from the disgust of the moderate conservative elements at the governments failure to uphold the laws when the workmen seized the factories two years ago and at the apparent powerlessness of the government to repress the communist violence which followed.

Reds Were Fought.

Groups of Fascisti were first formed to combat the reds with their own weaponsassault and riot. They were so successful that communism seems to be effectively rowed in Italy. The army and navy are sympathetic; the organizations of war veterans are on their side and they also claim to have enrolled 800,000 workmen from the labor unions. Their professed desire is to put an end to the undignified feebleness and vaccilation which have marked the Italy policy, not only internal but especially external, ever since the armistice. They promise to insure respect for Italians and Italian interests all over the worldThey will insist on greater recognition of Italys claims in the Mediterranean and especially in the Adriatic. They demand that Jugo Slavia shall free Montenegro and they talk of annexing Dalmatia.

This program, unless modified, seems somewhat ominous for peace with Italys neighbors.

Men and Affairs

Washington, as well as the rest of the United States, has been struggling the past few days to get itself straight on Fascism, the Fascisti and the new Fascist government in Italy. It is not likely, however, that the Fascisti will ever have the vogue in this country that the Bolsheviki had. Americans soon go the idea that the Bolsheviki was somebody against the government, and against everything, so America adopted the word and it is now an indelible part of the English language. It is not so easy to classify or place the Fascisti and Fascist does not roll off the tongue like Bolshevik.

Mussolini, the Fascist premier of Italy, says that Fascism is a purely Italian question that as bolshevism is a purely Russian matter. It is possibly true that bolshevism is a purely Russian matter, but lots of American people have been officially classed by their friends or enemies as Bolsheviks and bolshevicks they will be until they die.

Fascism seems a bit more intricate. It means, as far as can be judged from this distance, Italy for the Italians. The Fascisti in this country call it America first. When it was said of Mr. Wilson that he kept us out of the war, it was a fascist sentiment that said it. When it is said of Mr. Harding that he kept us out of the League of Nations, it is again the fascist sentiment that speaks.

There are plenty of the Fascisti in the United States, it seems, but they have always gone under the proud boast of 100 per cent Americans. The English language appears to grow more and more inelastic. It is pitiful to have to say such awkward compound words as pro-leaguer and anti-leaguer, when in most of the foreign languages an expressive single word would suffice. Of course we have had in this country a faction known as the Wilsonites, but even that is not a pretty word like Fascisti or Bolsheviki.

Some of Premier Mussolinis political opponents recently accused him of flirting with the Germans and possibly with Russians with the idea of forming an international Fascisti, or a sort of reactionary international movement. He denounces this as absurd, the Fascisti are for Italy first, last and all the time, and the rest of the world can go hang. The Democrats say it was the American Fascisti won the election in 1920.

Revolt Against Socialism

Both the accession to power of the fascisti in Italy and the defeat of the labor party in the British municipal elections point the same wayrevolt against socialism and return to individualism as the way to bring cost of government within revenue and to reduce it further in order to reduce taxes

National ownership of railroads, telegraphs and telephones, municipal ownership of public utilities and government monopolies of such commodities as tobacco are common in EuropeFascism began in Italy as a revolt against socialism, and Mussolini evidently intends to go the whole way in restoring the public services and monopolies to private enterprise. That will relieve the government of enormous losses and will remove a horde of people from the public payroll. If the experience of France is an indication, all public services are greatly over-mannedHe evidently sees that hard work and economy from the head of the government down to the humblest workman must be combined with that efficiency that is possible only for private enterprise in order that Italy may pay its way, reduce its debts and regain prosperity.

The deplorable fact about this return to economic sanity is that it is undertaken by a distinctly militarist party. If the fascisti should attempt to make good the claim to all the territory that was once Italian, they will embark their country in wars that will destroy all the fruits of their economic reforms.

Middle Class Takes Fascism to Gain RightsRevolt in Italy Projected by Underpaid White Collar Folk, Says Writer

By J. W. T. Mason. (Written for the United Press)

The Fascisti success in Italy marks Europes turning toward the middle classes. If the young and untried men Premier Mussolini has taken into his cabinet show an ability to handle the technical machinery of government, there will be a full recovery of the economic ground lost by the middle classes during the war.

As Bolshevism was an attack against all classes by the Russian workingmen, so the Fascisti movement is an attack against both the idle rich and overpaid laboring classes by the white collar men.

Alliance Formed.

Mussolini has formed an alliance with various workingmen groups. But, this is for the purpose of using them against the capitalists who crush the middle classes. Mussolini supports the policy of syndicalism. That is to say, he wants the workingmen to have a voice in the management of the factories. By setting workingmen and capitalists thus at odds, Mussolini expects the middle classes to hold the balance of power and acquire more for themselves.

The gravest problem Europe has had to face since the war has been the plight of the white collar classes. The workingmen of Europe have never before had such high wages, measured either by a money standard or by purchasing power. Similarly, the capitalists reaped enormous profits when war prices reigned.

Middle Class Loses.

But, the middle classes have lost ground. Their wages have not kept pace with the increased cost of living. The problem is especially acute in Italy, where middle class technical education has far outrun working class education. Italy in consequence has too many doctors, lawyers and other professional men for the number of inhabitants who have been educated to the point of using their services.

This is the fundamental reason why the middle class revolt against postwar conditions has started in Italy rather than in any other country. There is that additional burden for the middle class Italians to bear. If Mussolini can solve his own middle class problem, therefore, other countries will be incited to taking action themselves, since their own difficulties are not so complicated.

Only Hope of Recovery.

Without a recovery of the European middle classes, it is hopeless to expect the world ever to get to right. The cultural responsibilities of the middle classes will not be assumed by the other classes. The white collar men alone among the Europeans are willing to make sacrifices for social progress as distinct from economic progress.

But, under the financial burdens imposed on them by the war, they have been unable to do much more than keep alive. They are wearing the same old clothes, concealing their poverty as best they can.

They are now reaching the end of their patience. The Fascisti movement represents to them the possibility of successful self-assertion. For that reason, Italy has suddenly become the middle class leader for all Europe.

The Cure for Bolshevism

Five years agoand lessEurope meditated in anguished accents the need of a defensive front against the advance of bolshevism. Today, communism, through its third international, searches fanatically for means to combat the tide of fascism. This is as it should be. The pendulum swings.

So long as communism is only the goal of a fraction of the worlds population it was inevitable that it should flow back to its mean limits. So long as fascism is only the goal of a part of the population, that, too, in time, must flow back to its boundaries. Fascism came into existence as a result of communism, the disease gave birth to the remedy.

Fascism is not far removed from normalcy; it is the existing order reduced to the terms of the small merchant and wage-earner who does not believe in millenniums but clings pathetically to the practical need of three meals a day. Bolshevism in Italy brought starvation and chaos, fascism drove out communism, which is in hiding, and reasserts popular authority. There is only one weapon bolshevism can use to repel advances against it and recapture its superficial influence, and that is to abandon communism. The majority, where not held in subjection as in Russia, inevitably asserts its desires.

Communism, on the fact of the facts, is not one of them.

Letter Tells of Conditions Now in Italy

An interesting letter has been received from Mrs. Gerda Hellberg Castelli of Romewritten of the conditions and especially the Fascisti in Italy, to Mrs. R. D. Campbell of this city. Mrs. Castelli and Captain Castelli will be remembered as residents here some years ago

The letter follows:

Favor Organization.

We, both my husband and I, are great Fascisti and bless Mussolini who swept away the clique of rotten and selfish and incompetent politicians! I do not marvel if the countries abroad do not understand all what this means and have to judge Fascisti, but one who has lived here for long and knows the Italians, feels that such a marvelous movement could not grow up so quick in any other country but Italy. It has been grand to witness, and I was sorry my husband way away at a congress in Bologna just the days of the revolution! Because such it was, but one where not a workman went on strike, not a peasant left off work; it was done before they had time to think and move. Both peasant and workman of the saner type were glad for and desired the change, as it was felt everywhere Italy had no government at all! And chaos cannot last for long. And really it is quite a spiritual movement as well as patriotic, and idealistic, and we needed that badly after all these years of demagogism and party Socialism, and the world everywhere needs a bit of Fascism, it seems to me.

Mussolini is marvelous, so far at least; he speaks in a manner quite new (and more honest) to diplomacy and commands respect just for his fearless outspokenness. It is quite a pleasure to read the papers, now. And to see some sixty thousand young, fine and handsome men between eighteen and thirty years go in cortege in the Corso the 31st of October was a sight not to be forgotten. Half a million young men dead in the war, and yet so many fine ones left! Really, this country is inexhaustible!

Wants G. F. News.

I am looking forward to seeing Ruth Carothers here a hear news about all in Grand Forks which we keep in such a good memory! I wonder if we ever shall come over to the United States again. I would like it very much, I assure you

And here in Rome the sun shines always this autumn; such lovely weather we are having.

Now I must stop, with best wishes for a happy Christmas and good New Year to Dr. Campbell and yourself from us both.

Always yours sincerely,

Gerda Hellberg Castelli.

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Incompatibilism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted: August 10, 2016 at 9:05 pm

Incompatibilism is the view that a deterministic universe is completely at odds with the notion that people have a free will; that there is a dichotomy between determinism and free will where philosophers must choose one or the other. This view is pursued in at least three ways: libertarians deny that the universe is deterministic, the hard determinists deny that any free will exists, and pessimistic incompatibilists (hard indeterminists) deny both that the universe is determined and that free will exists. Some of these incompatibilistic views have more trouble than the others in dealing with the standard argument against free will.

Incompatiblism is contrasted with compatibilism, which rejects the determinism/free will dichotomy. Compatibilists maintain free will by defining it as more of a 'freedom to act'a move that has been met with some criticism.

Metaphysical Libertarianism argues that free will is real and that determinism is false. Such dualism risks an infinite regress however;[1] if any such mind is real, an objection can still be raised using the standard argument against free will that it is shaped by a higher power (a necessity or chance). Libertarian Robert Kane (among others) presented an alternative model:

Robert Kane (editor of the Oxford Handbook of Free Will) is a leading incompatibilist philosopher in favour of free will. Kane seeks to hold persons morally responsible for decisions that involved indeterminism in their process. Critics maintain that Kane fails to overcome the greatest challenge to such an endeavor: "the argument from luck".[2] Namely, if a critical moral choice is a matter of luck (indeterminate quantum fluctuations), then on what grounds can we hold a person responsible for their final action? Moreover, even if we imagine that a person can make an act of will ahead of time, to make the moral action more probable in the upcoming critical moment, this act of 'willing' was itself a matter of luck.

Libertarianism in the philosophy of mind is unrelated to the like-named political philosophy. It suggests that we actually do have free will, that it is incompatible with determinism, and that therefore the future is not determined. For example, at this moment, one could either continue reading this article if one wanted, or cease. Under this assertion, being that one could do either, the fact of how the history of the world will continue to unfold is not currently determined one way or the other.

One famous proponent of this view was Lucretius, who asserted that the free will arises out of the random, chaotic movements of atoms, called "clinamen". One major objection to this view is that science has gradually shown that more and more of the physical world obeys completely deterministic laws, and seems to suggest that our minds are just as much part of the physical world as anything else. If these assumptions are correct, incompatibilist libertarianism can only be maintained as the claim that free will is a supernatural phenomenon, which does not obey the laws of nature (as, for instance, maintained by some religious traditions).

However, many libertarian view points now rely upon an indeterministic view of the physical universe, under the assumption that the idea of a deterministic, "clockwork" universe has become outdated since the advent of quantum mechanics[citation needed]. By assuming an indeterministic universe libertarian philosophical constructs can be proposed under the assumption of physicalism.

There are libertarian view points based upon indeterminism and physicalism, which is closely related to naturalism.[3] A major problem for naturalistic libertarianism is to explain how indeterminism can be compatible with rationality and with appropriate connections between an individual's beliefs, desires, general character and actions. A variety of naturalistic libertarianism is promoted by Robert Kane,[4][5] who emphasizes that if our character is formed indeterministically (in "self-forming actions"), then our actions can still flow from our character, and yet still be incompatibilistically free.

Alternatively, libertarian view points based upon indeterminism have been proposed without the assumption of naturalism. At the time C. S. Lewis wrote Miracles,[6]quantum mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, but still Lewis stated the logical possibility that, if the physical world was proved to be indeterministic, this would provide an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically described as an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality (noting that, under a physicalist point of view, the non-physical entity must be independent of the self-identity or mental processing of the sentient being). Lewis mentions this only in passing, making clear that his thesis does not depend on it in any way.

Others may use some form of Donald Davidson's anomalous monism to suggest that although the mind is in fact part of the physical world, it involves a different level of description of the same facts, so that although there are deterministic laws under the physical description, there are no such laws under the mental description, and thus our actions are free and not determined.[7]

Those who reject free will and accept Determinism are variously known as "hard determinists", hard incompatibilists, free will skeptics, illusionists, or impossibilists. They believe that there is no 'free will' and that any sense of the contrary is an illusion.[8] Of course, hard determinists do not deny that one has desires, but say that these desires are causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. According to this philosophy, no wholly random, spontaneous, mysterious, or miraculous events occur. Determinists sometimes assert that it is stubborn to resist scientifically motivated determinism on purely intuitive grounds about one's own sense of freedom. They reason that the history of the development of science suggests that determinism is the logical method in which reality works.

William James said that philosophers (and scientists) have an "antipathy to chance."[9] Absolute chance, a possible implication of quantum mechanics and the indeterminacy principle, implies a lack of causality[citation needed]. This possibility often disturbs those who assume there must be a causal and lawful explanation for all events.

Since many believe that free will is necessary for moral responsibility, this may imply disastrous consequences for their theory of ethics.

As something of a solution to this predicament, it has been suggested that, for the sake of preserving moral responsibility and the concept of ethics, one might embrace the so-called "illusion" of free will. This, despite thinking that free will does not exist according to determinism. Critics argue that this move renders morality merely another "illusion", or else that this move is simply hypocritical.

The Determinist will add that, even if denying free will does mean morality is incoherent, such an unfortunate result has no effect on the truth. Note, however, that hard determinists often have some sort of 'moral system' that relies explicitly on determinism. A Determinist's moral system simply bears in mind that every agent's actions in a given situation are, in theory, predicted by the interplay of environment and upbringing. For instance, the Determinist may still punish undesirable behaviours for reasons of behaviour modification or deterrence.

While hard determinism clearly opposes the concept of free will, some have suggested that free will might also be incompatible with non-determinism (often on the basis of lack of control associated with pure randomness).[10][11][12] This is hard incompatibilism, and has been used as an argument against Libertarian incompatibilism.

Under the assumption of naturalism and indeterminism, where there only exists the natural world and that the natural world is indeterministicevents are not predetermined (e.g., for quantum mechanical reasons) and any event has a probability assigned to itno event can be determined by a physical organism's perceived free will, nor can any event be strictly determined by anything at all.

Hard incompatibilism differs from hard determinism in that it does not commit to the truth of determinism.[13] By and large, supporters of hard incompatibilism accept both libertarian critiques of compatibilism and compatibilist critiques of libertarianism.

In recent years researchers in the field of experimental philosophy have been working on determining whether ordinary people, who aren't experts in this field, naturally have compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility.[14] Some experimental work has even conducted cross-cultural studies.[15] The debate about whether people naturally have compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions has not come out overwhelmingly in favor of one view or the other. Still, there has been some evidence that people can naturally hold both views. For instance, when people are presented with abstract cases which ask if a person could be morally responsible for an immoral act when they could not have done otherwise, people tend to say no, or give incompatibilist answers, but when presented with a specific immoral act that a specific person committed, people tend to say that that person is morally responsible for their actions, even if they were determined (that is, people also give compatibilist answers).[16]

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Transportation, Land Use, and Freedom | Libertarianism.org

Posted: July 14, 2016 at 4:17 pm

Transcript

Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Im Trevor Burrus.

Tom Clougherty: And Im Tom Clougherty.

Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Randal OToole, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in urban growth, public land and transportation issues. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Randal.

Randal OToole: Hey, Im glad to be here.

Trevor Burrus: So the first question is the big one as we often do on Free Thoughts. How is transportation important to human freedom and flourishing?

Randal OToole: Well mobility is really important because mobility gives people access to more economic resources, more social resources, more recreation opportunities. Mobility of course has completely transformed in the 20th century. Before 1800, hardly anybody in the world had ever traveled faster than a horse could run and lived to tell about it. Although during the

Trevor Burrus: Lived to tell about it, its like people who fell out of hot air balloons and

Randal OToole: Or off a cliff.

Trevor Burrus: So they got a quick moment of OK.

Randal OToole: Yeah. So by 1900, we had developed steam trains and bicycles and streetcars and cable cars and those things accelerated the pace of life for many people and yet by 1910, most Americans were no more mobile than they had been in 1800 because frankly streetcars and steam trains and things like that were more expensive than the average American could afford.

Most Americans still lived in rural areas and they didnt have access to those, to streetcars or bicycles. Even Americans in urban areas, only middle class people could afford streetcars. Pretty much working class people had to walk to work. It was only when Henry Ford developed a moving assembly line that allowed him to both double worker pay and cut the cost of his cars in half, which made automobiles affordable to the working class that suddenly mobility was democratized and suddenly travel speed is accelerated from an average of 3 miles an hour to an average of 30 miles an hour or more.

That gave people access to far more jobs. If you were producing something, it gave you access to a far bigger consumer market. If you wanted to socialize with people who were like you, you didnt have to live right next door to them. You could get into your car and be near them. You have access to recreation opportunities. Things like national parks became popular only after the car became popular. Before cars the number of people visiting Yellowstone and people like places like that were numbered in the hundreds or low thousands each year. Now its the millions.

Trevor Burrus: Now you certainly have no Disneyland without people being able to drive to it and

[Crosstalk]

Randal OToole: You dont have Costco. You dont have supermarkets. You dont have Wal-marts. You dont have a lot of things that we take for granted today. Shopping malls, a lot of things. So the auto mobility transform lives for many people. For example, the only way blacks were able to boycott buses in Montgomery, Alabama after Rosa Louise Parks refused to get walk to the back of the bus was because they had enough cars that they could transport each other to work.

So cars were called by Blacks freedom vehicles. Cars play a huge role in womens liberation. It was only when families became two-car families and both the husband and the wife could own it, could have a car and become wage or salary earners that womens liberation became truly an important change in our lives.

So cars have transformed everybodys lives. Cars have transformed farming for example. Before cars, at least a quarter, perhaps a third of all of our farmland was dedicated to pasture for the horses and other livestock needed to power the farms.

By releasing that land, we ended up getting 100 million acres of forest lands, 100 million acres of crop lands. We have far more lands available for growing crops than we had before because of the internal combustion engine, powering tractors and trucks and other farm vehicles.

Trevor Burrus: Well, if you talk to people now though, its kind of I mean it is this mind-blowing thing when you start thinking about the effect that the car had on American life. But now a lot of people want to say that cars are bad for a variety of reasons, not seeming to understand the effect on this and a lot of the kind of urban planning and ideas of what a city should look like, it seems to be kind of anti-car in some basic level.

Randal OToole: Thats absolutely right. Theres a huge anti-automobile mentality out there, especially among urban planners and curiously, every city in the country has urban planners on their staff because they think theyre the experts. But its actually because the Supreme Court has made decisions that have said that the property rights clause or the Fifth Amendment of the constitution can be amended if you have an urban can be ignored if you have an urban planner on your staff. Basically, you dont have to worry about that if you have an urban planner who has written an urban plan for your city.

Trevor Burrus: This is like Kelo pursuant

[Crosstalk]

Randal OToole: Every single Supreme Court decision that has taken away peoples property rights has mentioned in that decision that the city or other entity that wanted to take away peoples property rights had written an urban plan. So if you have an urban planner on your staff, you can ignore property rights. You can take land by eminent domain. You can regulate land without compensation if you have an urban planner on your staff.

So they all have urban planners and urban planners all go to the same schools and most of these schools are architecture schools where they learn that we shape our buildings and our buildings shape up.

So if we want to shape society, we have to design our cities in a way to shape the way people live. Well, it has been proven over and over again that it doesnt work. It doesnt get people out of their cars, to force people to live in high densities.

San Francisco for example, the San Francisco Bay area increases population density by two-thirds between 1980 and 2010 and per capita driving increased. Per capita transit ridership declined by a third. It didnt change anything at all except for it made a lot more congestion.

So theres an anti-automobile mentality and the reality is most of the virtually all of the problems with automobiles can be solved by treating the problem, not by treating the automobile.

Trevor Burrus: Like congestion you mean.

Randal OToole: Well, congestion, air pollution, greenhouse gases, energy, traffic accidents, whatever. In 1970, people drove about 40 percent as much as they do today and we had 55,000 people killed per year. So today were driving 150 percent more and we only had 33,000 people killed last year. So fatalities are going down because they made both automobiles and highways safer. Thats only going to increase.

In 1970, many of our cities were polluted. You had a mile of visibility or less. In Portland, you couldnt see Mount Hood. In Seattle, you couldnt see Mount Rainier because the pollution is so bad. So we created the Environmental Protection Agency to solve the problem and they said lets do two things. Lets put pollution control requirements on new cars but lets also encourage cities to discourage driving by spending more on transit and increasing densities to encourage people to live closer to work.

Well, they did both things and today, pollution has gone down by more than 90 percent. Total pollution has decreased by more than 90 percent from what it was in 1970 and 105 percent of that decline is due to the pollution controls they put on cars. Negative 105 because

Trevor Burrus: More than 100 percent.

Randal OToole: Right, because the other thing they did that investing in transit and increasing densities to get people out of their cars failed. Instead what that did is it increased traffic congestion and cars pollute more in congested traffic than they do in free flowing traffic. So we ended up having more pollution thanks to the policy of trying to get people out of their cars. It failed miserably and yet were still pursuing that policy in many places supposedly to reduce greenhouse gases, to save energy and so on. It wont work but were doing it anyway.

Tom Clougherty: So I think one of the interesting, maybe disturbing things about transportation policy is that you have an obvious problem in congestion, a problem which is very costly. You also have a solution that virtually every economist is going to agree on and thats congestion pricing.

You also have on top of that a widespread perception that its politically impossible, that it will never happen. So therefore we have to go into a lot of these other things, which as youve pointed out may not be effective.

Do you see any future for congestion pricing? Could you maybe elaborate on that principle a little bit?

Randal OToole: Well, there are two things that are going to happen in the next 10 years. First of all, a lot of cars are going to become self-driving cars and thats going to be a very rapid transformation because starting in about 2020, you will be able to buy a car that will be able to drive itself on the vast majority of American streets and roads without your input at all.

Pretty soon you will be able to drive a car buy a car that will drive itself everywhere and they wont even have steering wheels. Well, a lot of congestion happens because of slow human reflexes and as soon as we get self-driving cars which have much faster reflexes, the capacity of roads is going to increase tremendously. Its typical that an urban freeway lane can move about 2000 vehicles an hour at speed.

With self-driving cars, we will be able to increase that to 6000 or more vehicles an hour. So thats going to take care a lot of the congestion problem right there. The other parallel development is that were moving away from gas guzzlers.

Cars that burn gas are burning less and less gas all the time and a lot of cars are not burning gasoline. That means that gas taxes which have paid for our roads have really paid for 80 percent of all the roads weve built and 100 percent of all the state highways that have been built in the country and interstate roads.

Those gas taxes arent going to be around anymore. So were going to have to find a new way of paying for roads. My home state of Oregon was the first state to have a gas tax to pay for roads in 1919 and today my home state of Oregon is experimenting with mileage-based user fees. Its the first state to experiment with them and what theyve done is theyve asked people to volunteer to pay a mileage-based user fee rather than a gas tax and I was one of the first people to volunteer.

They opened up volunteers at midnight on July 1st and at 12:01, I sent in my application and they sent me a little device that I plug into my car and now it keeps track of how many miles I drive and if I leave the state, I dont pay anything. In the state I pay a penny and a half per mile and they refund me all my gas taxes that I pay when I buy gas.

So the intention is to phase this in over time. So if you buy an electric car, you will have to get a mileage-based user fee device. If you buy a gasoline-powered car, you will be encouraged to do it and over time, we will transition from all gasoline or all gas taxes to all mileage-based user fees.

Well, with mileage-based user fees, it will be real, real easy to make a congestion fee, to make it a variable fee. Presumably the device you plug into your car when you say I want to go to work, you will tell your car take me on this to this address. The car will say, well, here are three different routes. If you go this way, youre going to have to pay this fee. If you go this way, you will have to pay this fee and it will take you five minutes longer. If you go this way, you will have to pay a lower fee and it will take you 10 minutes longer or whatever. You will have a choice of which route, which fee you pay and you will make that choice and that will encourage people to avoid congested routes and eventually solve that $200 billion congestion problem.

Trevor Burrus: This is interesting because you see all these technologies which werent even thought about a few years ago, whether its the device to measure how much your car is driving or a driverless car.

It kind of reminds me were talking about urban planners and who these people are and were and to sort of whether or not any urban planners in 1980 thought about driverless cars or the possibility of having something to measure how much youre driving and that and they probably did and so

Randal OToole: Well, the real question is are any urban planners in 2016 thinking about

Trevor Burrus: Yeah, so thats a better at the Car History Museum, I know you at one point were in Denver for the light rail fight. In the car museum, they have a Denver urban plan from 1955 or something like that. Its a 50-year urban plan. So this was what Denver looked like in 2005, which is just ludicrous. I mean it seems absolutely ludicrous.

Tom Clougherty: You mean they didnt get it right?

[Crosstalk]

Randal OToole: In 1950, nobody had ever taken a commercial jet airline flight. Nobody had ever direct dialed a long distance phone call. To make a long distance call, you had to call the operator and have them dial it for you. Of course almost nobody had ever programmed a computer. There was certainly no internet. Nobody could predict in 1950 what was going to happen in 2000.

Well today we can see driverless cars on the horizon but nobody can predict what is going to happen. Is everybody going to use an Uber-like car or are we going to own our own cars? Is it going to make people drive more because more people are going to be driving? Because you can be nine years old and drive a driverless car. I can put my dogs in the car and send them to the vet. I dont need to go with them.

Trevor Burrus: Thats going to be a service. It could be like Bark Car and they just put them in there and it drives them to the vet, yeah.

Randal OToole: Or is it going to lead to less driving because everybody is going to be not owning a car but Uber-ing their car? The thing about that is when if you own a car, when you say Im going to go to the store now, you figure Im going to pay the marginal cost to driving, the cost of gasoline. But if youre renting a car, you have to pay the average cost which is a much higher per mile cost. So thats going to change the calculus. Those people who decide not to own a car will probably travel less themselves than they would have traveled if they had owned a car because of that.

So is it going to lead to more or less driving? Nobody knows the answers to these questions. Urban planners, they know they dont know the answers to these questions. So their solution is to ignore the problem, to ignore the issue, design for the past because they know the past. So they design for streetcars. They design for light rail because those are the past forms of travel. They know how people lived when those were the forms of travel that people used.

So they designed cities to be streetcar cities. Thats really the urban planning fad today is to design cities to be like they were in the 1920s when the people who got around not on foot took streetcars.

Of course there were still a lot of people who got around on foot because they couldnt afford the streetcars and that of course is going to be a complete failure. Its not going to work. Its going to impose huge costs on those cities because theyre going to be designing for the wrong thing. Its going to put a huge cost on the people in those cities but theyre doing it anyway because thats the urban planning fad.

Trevor Burrus: So theyre thinking of sort of high density urban development with a lot of public transportation like streetcars and light rail and things like this, which is odd but it kind of makes you wonder if the entire concept of urban planning is just kind of silly. Are you kind of saying that?

Randal OToole: It doesnt make me wonder that. Its not kind of saying. Urban planning is a profession that doesnt deserve to exist. Thats why I call myself the antiplanner and I have a blog called The Antiplanner. Look up antiplanner and Im the first thing on the list. I write about this every day.

Urban planning always fails. They cant predict the future. So instead of predicting it, they try to envision it and they envision a past that they understand. Then they try to impose that on the future by passing all kinds of regulations and all kinds of laws.

Trevor Burrus: As I went to Tom being British, a town called Milton Keynes in or Keynes I think is how they say it.

Tom Clougherty: Milton Keynes. Its a must-see.

Trevor Burrus: In England, which is one of these post-war, fully-planned towns. I mean down to especially in England. They were really big on this. Have urban planners become less hubristic? I mean in England, they were just planning entire towns, entire blocks, trying to figure out everything that people wanted. Have they become less hubristic and a little bit more respectful of human freedom or are they just as planning as ever?

Randal OToole: Absolutely not. They have not become less hubristic and a lot of places a lot of private developers have built what are called master plan communities. The private developers did the planning and they were planning for the market. They were trying to figure out what do people want to live in and will build them a community like they want to live in.

They figure out, well, they want to be somewhat close to stores. So they have to have as many enough people in their community to convince a supermarket to open up a store, to come into Costco or something like that, to open up a store. They like to be near some nice restaurants. But they also like to have a yard. They also like to have wide streets to drive on.

So they plan for what people want. The urban planners that Im talking about are government planners and they plan for what they think people should have. They plan for what they think people should want, not what they do want. They think people should want to live in higher densities, that they should want to get around on transit, rather than driving, and so thats what they planned for even though nationwide only about two percent of travel is by well, one percent of travel and about two percent of commuting is by mass transit. Its insignificant outside of New York City, Washington and about four other urban areas. Transit is irrelevant really.

Tom Clougherty: Yeah. I mean its interesting that youre talking a lot about how contemporary urban planning is certainly anti-car, anti-automobility and yet I wonder whether the darkest era of urban planning was excessively pro-car. If you think of a lot of post-war development, the interstate highway system often driving major roads through established neighborhoods. Really trying to change peoples lives and the whole way they lived in the opposite direction of what theyre trying to do now. Is what we have now in urban planning almost a reaction to some of the mistakes of the past?

Randal OToole: No. I think what you have to whats consistent about urban planning is that its pro-middle class and anti-working class, anti-low income people. They call working class neighborhoods slums. This has been the trend for 125 years. Working class neighborhoods are slums. So we have to clear out those slums as if if we move the people out so that we dont have to look at them, they dont exist anymore.

Urban renewal in the 1950s was called by some negro removal because a million people were displaced by the urban renewal movement and most of them were Blacks, so 80 percent of them were Blacks.

They had to move from places that they could afford to places that were less affordable because they werent slums anymore. So the problem that urban that cities had in the 1940s and 50s that they saw they had is that the middle class people had moved to the suburbs and the people who were left were had lower incomes and they said, OK, these are slums. We have to get them out of here. You get the middle class people back into the cities and they looked at the interstates as a way of doing it.

The original interstate highway system as planned by the transportation engineers was going to bypass all the cities, was not going to enter the cities. They brought this proposal before congress and the cities went to congress and said, No, we want our share of the interstate money.

So they rewrote the system. They added 10 percent more miles all of which were in the inner cities and came back to congress in 56 and congress passed it with the endorsement of the urban mayors because the mayors wanted to use interstate highways as a vehicle for slum clearance.

They were to clear out the slums that the highways were built on. They would clear out the neighborhoods around those highways with eminent domain. That was all approved by the Supreme Court in the famous 1952 case here in Washington DC. Yeah.

And forced the people out and then build nice middle class neighborhoods. Today its the same thing. The whole complaint about urban sprawl is not a complaint about wealthy people moving in suburbs. Wealthy people started moving to the suburbs in the 1830s and nobody complained about urban sprawl then.

Middle class people started moving to the suburbs in the 1890s and nobody complained about it then. Weve had suburban sprawl for almost 200 years.

It was only when middle class people or simply when working class people started moving to the suburbs in the 1920s because they were able to buy Henry Fords affordable cars that people started complaining about urban sprawl.

The early complaints about urban sprawl were very class-oriented. You have these inelegant people out there in all stages of dress playing this ridiculous music on their Victor-Victrolaphones and dancing wildly and gesticulating and eating weird food.

Trevor Burrus: Showing their ankles.

Randal OToole: Doing all kinds of things that were horrible and it was very class-oriented and their prescription Im reading to you from a book called the Town and Country Plan. It was written by a British author and the prescription was we will pen all those people up in high-rises in the cities and in 1947, Britain passed the parliament passed a Town and Country Planning Act that put greenbelts around the cities for bidding development and then put high-rises in the cities that people lived in for a few years but was really only acceptable because a lot of housing had been palmed out. But as soon as people lived in it for more than 10 years, they realized we dont want to live like this. These are awful places to live in. So they revolted but

Trevor Burrus: This racial class part of the story seems to be I mean its you cannot separate it from the whole history of urban planning. Its about class and race and we have red lining. We have zoning. We have all these different things and its about the powerful who happen to be politically powerful in a given time trying to impose their view upon their fellow citizens and what the kind of city that they would like to live in which may not include you and your kind at least in my neighborhood.

Randal OToole: Well, I have a friend in California named Joseph Perkins whos a black radio talk show host and he says that he looks at urban planning smart growth as the new Jim Crow. He says the Sierra Club is the new KKK because theyre promoting these ideas and he goes to some place like Marin County, California which is just north of San Francisco and has very strict urban growth boundaries and low density zoning and he says he goes there and they he goes to these hearings and people are saying, We want to keep those people out.

He said, Well those people are people like me. But it isnt just people of color. Its a class thing. They want to keep the working class out. We dont like to talk about class in this country much but there definitely is a class structure.

You look at the progressives. They say, Well, we care about the working class. Well you might care about the working class but you dont like their values. They play country Western music which you hate. They drive around in big pick-ups.

Trevor Burrus: They drink soda.

Randal OToole: Yeah, they drink soda.

Trevor Burrus: They smoke cigarettes.

Randal OToole: They smoke cigarettes. They drink beer, not wine.

Trevor Burrus: Budweiser

Randal OToole: And they support Donald Trump and they oppose abortion and they do all the things that you say you care about them and yet your actual attitude is one of seething contempt.

Really zoning has always been about keeping working class people out of middle class neighborhoods and the whole planning today is about OK, were going to design transportation systems for the working class that will take them to work so that they can serve us and then take them home to places different from where we live and they can live a nice lifestyle in their high density apartment and walk down the stairs and go shopping so they dont have to shop in the same stores that we drive to. It sounds very idyllic if you

Trevor Burrus: Can afford it.

Randal OToole: No. If you can afford to not live that way, if youre a middle class person. But its not idyllic for the working class.

Trevor Burrus: So lets talk about some of these public transportation issues because I have this great classic Onion article because its tied in with all these ideas that public transportation is something that well, the headline is Report: 98 Percent Of US Commuters Favor Public Transportation for Others and weve had a spate of light rail, weve had streetcars and all these things have come up which it seems like the people who make them are not really theyre not using them. I expected them to probably not use them. They think other people should be using them. That seems to be a big story of public transportation.

Randal OToole: Well, theres a recent story that unfortunately it wasnt in the Onion but it was an authentic story in the Los Angeles Times that said despite the fact that were spending billions of dollars on transit, transit ridership is declining and thats true here in Washington DC as well. Transit ridership seems to have peaked about just before the financial crash and its not really recovering since the financial crash.

Really transit has been on a downhill since 1960 or 1950, the end of World War Two. What were seeing is people plowing more and more money into it and productivity is going down. The number of transit riders carried per transit worker is steadily declining.

The amount of money we spend to get one person out of their car has gone from a dollar in 1960 to $25 or more today just to get one person out of their car for one trip. We build transit lines that are so expensive that it would have been cheaper to give every single daily round trip rider on that transit line a new Toyota Prius every single year for the rest of their lives than to keep running that

Trevor Burrus: Im laughing and crying at the same time.

Randal OToole: And there are a lot of forces at work here. It started out in the 1970s. Congress had given cities the incentive to take over private transit. In 1965, almost all transit in America was private. By 1975, it was almost all public. Congress had said to cities you take over transit. We will pay for your new buses. We will pay for your capital costs. You just have to pay the operating costs.

So cities took them over and then in 1973, congress said, Oh by the way, if you have an interstate freeway thats planned in your city and you decide to cancel it, you can take the capital cost of that freeway and use it for transit capital investments. Well, cities thought that was great except for buses are so cheap that they couldnt afford to operate all the buses that you could buy for the cost of an interstate freeway.

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Transportation, Land Use, and Freedom | Libertarianism.org

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Transportation, Land Use, and Freedom | Libertarianism.org

Posted: at 1:53 am

Transcript

Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Im Trevor Burrus.

Tom Clougherty: And Im Tom Clougherty.

Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Randal OToole, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in urban growth, public land and transportation issues. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Randal.

Randal OToole: Hey, Im glad to be here.

Trevor Burrus: So the first question is the big one as we often do on Free Thoughts. How is transportation important to human freedom and flourishing?

Trevor Burrus: Lived to tell about it, its like people who fell out of hot air balloons and

Randal OToole: Or off a cliff.

Trevor Burrus: So they got a quick moment of OK.

Trevor Burrus: Now you certainly have no Disneyland without people being able to drive to it and

[Crosstalk]

Trevor Burrus: This is like Kelo pursuant

[Crosstalk]

So theres an anti-automobile mentality and the reality is most of the virtually all of the problems with automobiles can be solved by treating the problem, not by treating the automobile.

Trevor Burrus: Like congestion you mean.

Well, they di
d both things and today, pollution has gone down by more than 90 percent. Total pollution has decreased by more than 90 percent from what it was in 1970 and 105 percent of that decline is due to the pollution controls they put on cars. Negative 105 because

Trevor Burrus: More than 100 percent.

Do you see any future for congestion pricing? Could you maybe elaborate on that principle a little bit?

Randal OToole: Well, the real question is are any urban planners in 2016 thinking about

Tom Clougherty: You mean they didnt get it right?

[Crosstalk]

Trevor Burrus: Thats going to be a service. It could be like Bark Car and they just put them in there and it drives them to the vet, yeah.

So is it going to lead to more or less driving? Nobody knows the answers to these questions. Urban planners, they know they dont know the answers to these questions. So their solution is to ignore the problem, to ignore the issue, design for the past because they know the past. So they design for streetcars. They design
for light rail because those are the past forms of travel. They know how people lived when those were the forms of travel that people used.

Trevor Burrus: As I went to Tom being British, a town called Milton Keynes in or Keynes I think is how they say it.

Tom Clougherty: Milton Keynes. Its a must-see.

Urban renewal in the 1950s was called by some negro removal because a million people were displaced by the urban renewal movement and most of them were Blacks, so 80 percent of them were Blacks.

Middle class people started moving to the suburbs in the 1890s and nobody complained about it then. Weve had suburban sprawl for almost 200 years.

Trevor Burrus: Showing their ankles.

Randal OToole: Doing all kinds of things that were horrible and it was very class-oriented and their prescription Im reading to you from a book called the Town and Country Plan. It was written by a British author and the prescription was we will pen all those people up in high-rises in the cities and in 1947, Britain passed the parliament passed a Town and Country Planning Act that put greenbelts around the cities for bidding development and then put high-rises in the cities that
people lived in for a few years but was really only acceptable because a lot of housing had been palmed out. But as soon as people lived in it for more than 10 years, they realized we dont want to live like this. These are awful places to live in. So they revolted but

Trevor Burrus: They drink soda.

Randal OToole: Yeah, they drink soda.

Trevor Burrus: They smoke cigarettes.

Randal OToole: They smoke cigarettes. They drink beer, not wine.

Trevor Burrus: Budweiser

Randal OToole: And they support Donald Trump and they oppose abortion and they do all the things that you say you care about them and yet your actual attitude is one of seething contempt.

Trevor Burrus: Can afford it.

Randal OToole: No. If you can afford to not live that way, if youre a middle class person. But its not idyllic for the working class.

Trevor Burrus: Im laughing and crying at the same time.

Is this the dawn of bake-me-a-cake libertarianism …

Posted: June 29, 2016 at 6:17 pm

The Libertarian Party just nominated two former governors, New Mexico's Gary Johnson for president and Massachusetts' Bill Weld for vice president, in a year when more voters than ever may look for a third choice.

But Johnson and Weld at times seem to be working hard to push away one particularly homeless voting bloc that could ally with Libertarians this year: social conservatives. From their rhetoric to their policy proposals, the Libertarian nominees seem to be running against conservatives more than for liberty.

Weld and Johnson held their first post-nomination joint interview on Tuesday, on liberal network MSNBC. "We've never bought into this anti-choice, anti-gaysense of the Republican Party," Weld said, as his first comment to the national television audience.

The message was clear: We don't need those backward Christian Right bozos as much we need as you MSNBCers.

Johnson has sent similar signals, suggesting that his love of liberty is second to his revulsion to religion. In January, for instance, Johnson said he would make it a federal crime for women to wear the Burqa, the full-body covering worn by women in certain strains of Islam. Johnson recanted a day later, while continuing his warnings about the threat of Sharia Islamic law in the U.S.

This spring, Johnson pushed aside freedom of conscience. When asked in an Oregon debate about laws and lawsuits requiring caterers to participate in gay weddings, Johnson took the big-government side for coerced baking in the name of gay rights. When later asked about this anti-liberty view, Johnson made the standard liberal conflation between selling off-the-shelf cupcakes to a gay customer (which is straight-up discrimination against a person) and refusal to participate in a ceremony (which is a freedom of conscience issue, a freedom of association issue, and often a free speech issue).

The dress-code libertarianism and bake-me-a-cake libertarianism Johnson has embraced isn't libertarianism at all it's left-wing social engineering enforced at gunpoint. Coming from Johnson and Weld, it reeks of raw identity politics. The only consistent theme is that religious people are bad.

Johnson's quick reversal on his Burqa ban, and his logical fallacies and weird arguments on coerced baking suggest that he doesn't hold libertarianism as a principle he is really just a social liberal and economic conservative, as he says. This is the heart of Weld's campaigning, too.

Maybe Weld and Johnson haven't been paying attention since they left office, and that's why they conflate "socially liberal" with libertarian. These days, it's not the conservatives trying to use government to enforce their morality. The Obama administration is trying to compel nuns to provide contraception for their staff. The ACLU is suing to force Catholic hospitals to abort babies. Gary Johnson's own state fined a Christian wedding photographer for refusing to participate in a gay wedding.

Also from the Washington Examiner

Hillary Clinton is back to her April level lead over Donald Trump.

06/29/16 6:07 PM

The "anti-choice" side in America today is usually the cultural Left.

At the very moment when social conservatives would be most open to libertarianism, though, the libertarian nominees are running against conservatives.

This puts Johnson and Weld at odds with the rest of libertarianism. The Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation both filed amicus briefs on behalf of Hobby Lobby, the Christian-owned store that objected to Obama's contraception mandate.

Even on abortion, Johnson and Weld could find common ground with social conservatives. The most libertarian GOP candidates in recent cycles Rand Paul and Ron Paul were both pro-lifers who pointed out that libertarianism doesn't preclude protecting babies from homicide. In fact, all the most free-market lawmakers are staunch pro-lifers. For instance, the three senators with the highest 2015 Club for Growth scores are Mike Lee, Ben Sasse and Marco Rubio. You have to go down to No. 48 on the Club's ranking to find a senator who's a legitimate moderate pro-lifer all the top 47 are strong pro-lifers.

Social conservatives are homeless this election. They are also increasingly the victim of big-government culture wars. It won't come naturally to Johnson and Weld, but they could reach out to social conservatives this election. Such outreach would expand the coalition, and maybe help persuade some social conservatives that the fight today is mostly about limiting government's role in our lives.

Also from the Washington Examiner

House lawmakers said that the payments are illegal and the admin. has stonewalled attempts to get docs.

06/29/16 5:57 PM

Johnson and Weld just need to decide whether they are more dedicated to liberty or to identity politics.

Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.

Top Story

Abedin testified that only she, Clinton and Chelsea used accounts hosted by the "clintonemail.com" server.

06/29/16 2:58 PM

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Is this the dawn of bake-me-a-cake libertarianism ...

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Myths of Individualism | Libertarianism.org

Posted: June 27, 2016 at 6:18 am

Sep 6, 2011

Palmer takes on the misconceptions of individualism common to communitarian critics of liberty.

It has recently been asserted that libertarians, or classical liberals, actually think that individual agents are fully formed and their value preferences are in place prior to and outside of any society. They ignore robust social scientific evidence about the ill effects of isolation, and, yet more shocking, they actively oppose the notion of shared values or the idea of the common good. I am quoting from the 1995 presidential address of Professor Amitai Etzioni to the American Sociological Association (American Sociological Review, February 1996). As a frequent talk show guest and as editor of the journal The Responsive Community,Etzioni has come to some public prominence as a publicist for a political movement known as communitarianism.

Etzioni is hardly alone in making such charges. They come from both left and right. From the left, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. argued in his book Why Americans Hate Politics that the growing popularity of the libertarian cause suggested that many Americans had even given up on the possibility of a common good, and in a recent essay in the Washington Post Magazine, that the libertarian emphasis on the freewheeling individual seems to assume that individuals come into the world as fully formed adults who should be held responsible for their actions from the moment of birth. From the right, the late Russell Kirk, in a vitriolic article titled Libertarians: The Chirping Sectaries, claimed that the perennial libertarian, like Satan, can bear no authority, temporal or spiritual and that the libertarian does not venerate ancient beliefs and customs, or the natural world, or his country, or the immortal spark in his fellow men.

More politely, Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) and David Brooks of the Weekly Standard have excoriated libertarians for allegedly ignoring the value of community. Defending his proposal for more federal programs to rebuild community, Coats wrote that his bill is self-consciously conservative, not purely libertarian. It recognizes, not only individual rights, but the contribution of groups rebuilding the social and moral infrastructure of their neighborhoods. The implication is that individual rights are somehow incompatible with participation in groups or neighborhoods.

Such charges, which are coming with increasing frequency from those opposed to classical liberal ideals, are never substantiated by quotations from classical liberals; nor is any evidence offered that those who favor individual liberty and limited constitutional government actually think as charged by Etzioni and his echoes. Absurd charges often made and not rebutted can come to be accepted as truths, so it is imperative that Etzioni and other communitarian critics of individual liberty be called to account for their distortions.

Let us examine the straw man of atomistic individualism that Etzioni, Dionne, Kirk, and others have set up. The philosophical roots of the charge have been set forth by communitarian critics of classical liberal individualism, such as the philosopher Charles Taylor and the political scientist Michael Sandel. For example, Taylor claims that, because libertarians believe in individual rights and abstract principles of justice, they believe in the self-sufficiency of man alone, or, if you prefer, of the individual. That is an updated version of an old attack on classical liberal individualism, according to which classical liberals posited abstract individuals as the basis for their views about justice.

Those claims are nonsense. No one believes that there are actually abstract individuals, for all individuals are necessarily concrete. Nor are there any truly self-sufficient individuals, as any reader of The Wealth of Nations would realize. Rather, classical liberals and libertarians argue that the system of justice should abstract from the concrete characteristics of individuals. Thus, when an individual comes before a court, her height, color, wealth, social standing, and religion are normally irrelevant to questions of justice. That is what equality before the law means; it does not mean that no one actually has a particular height, skin color, or religious belief. Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.

It is precisely because neither individuals nor small groups can be fully self-sufficient that cooperation is necessary to human survival and flourishing. And because that cooperation takes place among countless individuals unknown to each other, the rules governing that interaction are abstract in nature. Abstract rules, which establish in advance what we may expect of one another, make cooperation possible on a wide scale.

No reasonable person could possibly believe that individuals are fully formed outside societyin isolation, if you will. That would mean that no one could have had any parents, cousins, friends, personal heroes, or even neighbors. Obviously, all of us have been influenced by those around us. What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.

Libertarianism is not at base a metaphysical theory about the primacy of the individual over the abstract, much less an absurd theory about abstract individuals. Nor is it an anomic rejection of traditions, as Kirk and some conservatives have charged. Rather, it is a political theory that emerged in response to the growth of unlimited state power; libertarianism draws its strength from a powerful fusion of a normative theory about the moral and political sources and limits of obligations and a positive theory explaining the sources of order. Each person has the right to be free, and free persons can produce order spontaneously, without a commanding power over them.

What of Dionnes patently absurd characterization of libertarianism: individuals come into the world as fully formed adults who should be held responsible for their actions from the moment of birth? Libertarians recognize the difference between adults and children, as well as differences between normal adults and adults who are insane or mentally hindered or retarded. Guardians are necessary for children and abnormal adults, because they cannot make responsible choices for themselves. But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both left and right believe. Libertarians argue that no normal adult has the right to impose choices on other normal adults, except in abnormal circumstances, such as when one person finds another unconscious and administers medical assistance or calls an ambulance.

What distinguishes libertarianism from other views of political morality is principally its theory of enforceable obligations. Some obligations, such as the obligation to write a thank-you note to ones host after a dinner party, are not normally enforceable by force. Others, such as the obligation not to punch a disagreeable critic in the nose or to pay for a pair of shoes before walking out of the store in them, are. Obligations may be universal or particular. Individuals, whoever and wherever they may be (i.e., in abstraction from particular circumstances), have an enforceable obligation to all other persons: not to harm them in their lives, liberties, health, or possessions. In John Lockes terms, Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. All individuals have the right that others not harm them in their enjoyment of those goods. The rights and the obligations are correlative and, being both universal and negative in character, are capable under normal circumstances of being enjoyed by all simultaneously. It is the universality of the human right not to be killed, injured, or robbed that is at the base of the libertarian view, and one need not posit an abstract individual to assert the universality of that right. It is his veneration, not his contempt, for the immortal spark in his fellow men that leads the libertarian to defend individual rights.

Those obligations are universal, but what about particular obligations? As I write this, I am sitting in a coffee house and have just ordered another coffee. I have freely undertaken the particular obligation to pay for the coffee: I have transferred a property right to a certain amount of my money to the owner of the coffee shop, and she has transferred the property right to the cup of coffee to me. Libertarians typically argue that particular obligations, at least under normal circumstances, must be created by consent; they cannot be unilaterally imposed by others. Equality of rights means that some people cannot simply impose obligations on others, for the moral agency and rights of those others would then be violated. Communitarians, on the other hand, argue that we all are born with many particular obligations, such as to give to this body of personscalled a state or, more nebulously, a nation, community, or folkso much money, so much obedience, or even ones life. And they argue that those particular obligations can be coercively enforced. In fact, according to communitarians such as Taylor and Sandel, I am actually constituted as a person, not only by the facts of my upbringing and my experiences, but by a set of very particular unchosen obligations.

To repeat, communitarians maintain that we are constituted as persons by our particular obligations, and therefore those obligations cannot be a matter of choice. Yet that is a mere assertion and cannot substitute for an argument that one is obligated to others; it is no justification for coercion. One might well ask, If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command? If one wants a coherent theory of obligations, there must be someone, whether an individual or a group, with the right to the fulfillment of the obligation. If I am constituted as a person by my obligation to obey, who is constituted as a person by the right to obedience? Such a theory of obligation may have been coherent in an age of God-kings, but it seems rather out of place in the modern world. To sum up, no reasonable person believes in the existence of abstract individuals, and the true dispute between libertarians and communitarians is not about individualism as such but about the source of particular obligations, whether imposed or freely assumed.

A theory of obligation focusing on individuals does not mean that there is no such thing as society or that we cannot speak meaningfully of groups. The fact that there are trees does not mean that we cannot speak of forests, after all. Society is not merely a collection of individuals, nor is it some bigger or better thing separate from them. Just as a building is not a pile of bricks but the bricks and the relationships among them, society is not a person, with his own rights, but many individuals and the complex set of relationships among them.

A moments reflection makes it clear that claims that libertarians reject shared values and the common good are incoherent. If libertarians share the value of liberty (at a minimum), then they cannot actively oppose the notion of shared values, and if libertarians believe that we will all be better off if we enjoy freedom, then they have not given up on the possibility of a common good, for a central part of their efforts is to assert what the common good is! In response to Kirks claim that libertarians reject tradition, let me point out that libertarians defend a tradition of liberty that is the fruit of thousands of years of human history. In addition, pure traditionalism is incoherent, for traditions may clash, and then one has no guide to right action. Generally, the statement that libertarians reject tradition is both tasteless and absurd. Libertarians follow religious traditions, family traditions, ethnic traditions, and social traditions such as courtesy and even respect for others, which is evidently not a tradition Kirk thought it necessary to maintain.

The libertarian case for individual liberty, which has been so distorted by communitarian critics, is simple and reasonable. It is obvious that different individuals require different things to live good, healthy, and virtuous lives. Despite their common nature, people are materially and numerically individuated, and we have needs that differ. So, how far does our common good extend?

Karl Marx, an early and especially brilliant and biting communitarian critic of libertarianism, asserted that civil society is based on a decomposition of man such that mans essence is no longer in community but in difference; under socialism, in contrast, man would realize his nature as a species being. Accordingly, socialists believe that collective provision of everything is appropriate; in a truly socialized state, we would all enjoy the same common good and conflict simply would not occur. Communitarians are typically much more cautious, but despite a lot of talk they rarely tell us much about what our common good might be. The communitarian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, in his influential book After Virtue, insists for 219 pages that there is a good life for man that must be pursued in common and then rather lamely concludes that the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man.

A familiar claim is that providing retirement security through the state is an element of the common good, for it brings all of us together. But who is included in all of us? Actuarial data show that African-American males who have paid the same taxes into the Social Security system as have Caucasian males over their working lives stand to get back about half as much. Further, more black than white males will die before they receive a single penny, meaning all of their money has gone to benefit others and none of their investments are available to their families. In other words, they are being robbed for the benefit of nonblack retirees. Are African-American males part of the all of us who are enjoying a common good, or are they victims of the common good of others? (As readers of this magazine should know, all would be better off under a privatized system, which leads libertarians to assert the common good of freedom to choose among retirement systems.) All too often, claims about the common good serve as covers for quite selfish attempts to secure private goods; as the classical liberal Austrian novelist Robert Musil noted in his great work The Man without Qualities, Nowadays only criminals dare to harm others without philosophy.

Libertarians recognize the inevitable pluralism of the modern world and for that reason assert that individual liberty is at least part of the common good. They also understand the absolute necessity of cooperation for the attainment of ones ends; a solitary individual could never actually be self-sufficient, which is precisely why we must have rulesgoverning property and contracts, for exampleto make peaceful cooperation possible and we institute government to enforce those rules. The common good is a system of justice that allows all to live together in harmony and peace; a common good more extensive than that tends to be, not a common good for all of us, but a common good for some of us at the expense of others of us. (There is another sense, understood by every parent, to the term self-sufficiency. Parents normally desire that their children acquire the virtue of pulling their own weight and not subsisting as scroungers, layabouts, moochers, or parasites. That is a necessary condition of self-respect; Taylor and other critics of libertarianism often confuse the virtue of self-sufficiency with the impossible condition of never relying on or cooperating with others.)

The issue of the common good is related to the beliefs of communitarians regarding the personality or the separate existence of groups. Both are part and parcel of a fundamentally unscientific and irrational view of politics that tends to personalize institutions and groups, such as the state or nation or society. Instead of enriching political science and avoiding the alleged naivet of libertarian individualism, as communitarians claim, however, the personification thesis obscures matters and prevents us from asking the interesting questions with which scientific inquiry begins. No one ever put the matter quite as well as the classical liberal historian Parker T. Moon of Columbia University in his study of 19th-century European imperialism, Imperialism and World Politics:

Language often obscures truth. More than is ordinarily realized, our eyes are blinded to the facts of international relations by tricks of the tongue. When one uses the simple monosyllable France one thinks of France as a unit, an entity. When to avoid awkward repetition we use a personal pronoun in referring to a countrywhen for example we say France sent her troops to conquer Tuniswe impute not only unity but personality to the country. The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and-blood men and women who are the true actors. How different it would be if we had no such word as France, and had to say insteadthirty-eight million men, women and children of very diversified interests and beliefs, inhabiting 218,000 square miles of territory! Then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: A few of these thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis. This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions. Who are the few? Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis? And why did these obey?

Group personification obscures, rather than illuminates, important political questions. Those questions, centering mostly around the explanation of complex political phenomena and moral responsibility, simply cannot be addressed within the confines of group personification, which drapes a cloak of mysticism around the actions of policymakers, thus allowing some to use philosophyand mystical philosophy, at thatto harm others.

Libertarians are separated from communitarians by differences on important issues, notably whether coercion is necessary to maintain community, solidarity, friendship, love, and the other things that make life worth living and that can be enjoyed only in common with others. Those differences cannot be swept away a priori; their resolution is not furthered by shameless distortion, absurd characterizations, or petty name-calling.

Myths of Individualism originally appeared in the September/October 1996 issue of Cato Policy Report.

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Libertarianism Against the Welfare State: A Refresher …

Posted: at 6:18 am

I'm a hard-core libertarian who defines libertarianism broadly. If you think voluntarism is seriously underrated and government is seriously overrated, you're a libertarian in my book. I also strive to treat others with common decency regardless of their political views. That includes libertarian apostates. People sometimes cease to be libertarians even on my broad definition - and when that happens, the proper reaction is not anger and ostracism, but friendliness and curiosity.

In recent years, I've heard many libertarians expressing new-found appreciation for the welfare state. This is most pronounced at the Niskanen Center, but that's only part of a broader trend. If the revisionist position were a clear-cut, "Sure, most of the welfare state is terrible, but the rest of okay. We should cut social spending by 80%, not 100%," their libertarian credentials would not be at issue.

When libertarians start describing Danish "flexicurity" with deep admiration, however, I don't just doubt their libertarian commitment. More importantly, I wonder why they changed their minds. And to be honest, the more I listen to them, the more I wonder. The most enlightening path, I think, is to restate what I see as the standard libertarian case against the welfare state, and find out exactly where they demur. Here goes.

Soft-Core Case

1. Universal social programs that "help everyone" are folly. Regardless of your political philosophy, taxing everyone to help everyone makes no sense.

2. In the U.S. (along with virtually every other country), most government social spending is devoted to these indefensible universal programs - Social Security, Medicare, and K-12 public education, for starters.

3. Social programs - universal or means-tested - give people perverse incentives, discouraging work, planning, and self-insurance. The programs give recipients very bad incentives; the taxes required to fund the programs give everyone moderately bad incentives. The more "generous" the programs, the worse the collateral damage. As a result, even programs carefully targeted to help the truly poor often fail a cost-benefit test. And while libertarians need not favor every government act that passes the cost-benefit test, they should at least oppose every government act that fails it.

4. "Helping people" sounds good; complaining about "perverse incentives" sounds bad. Since humans focus on how policies sound, rather than what they actually achieve, governments have a built-in tendency to adopt and preserve social programs that fail a cost-benefit test. Upshot: We should view even seemingly promising social programs with a skeptical eye.

Medium-Core Case

5. There is a plausible moral case for social programs that help people who are absolutely poor through no fault of their own. Otherwise, the case falters.

6. "Absolutely poor." When Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to save his sister's son, he has a credible excuse. By extension, so does a government program to tax strangers to feed Valjean's nephew. If Valjean steals a smartphone to amuse his sister's son, though, his excuse falls flat - and so does a government program designed to do the same.

7. "No fault of their own." Why you're poor matters. Starving because you're born blind is morally problematic. Starving because you drink yourself into a stupor every day is far less so. Indeed, you might call it just desserts.

8. Existing means-tested programs generally run afoul of one or both conditions. Even if the welfare state did not exist, few people in First World countries would be absolutely poor. And most poor people engage in a lot of irresponsible behavior. Check out any ethnography of poverty.

9. First World welfare states provide a popular rationale for restricting immigration from countries where absolute poverty is rampant: "They're just coming to sponge off of us." Given the rarity of absolute poverty in the First World and the massive labor market benefits of migration from the Third World to the First, it is therefore likely that existing welfare states make global absolute poverty worse.

Hard-Core Case

10. Ambiguity about what constitutes "absolute poverty" and "irresponsible behavior" should be resolved in favor of taxpayers, not recipients. Coercion is not acceptable when justification is debatable.

11. If private charity can provide for people in absolute poverty through no fault of their own, there is no good reason for government to use tax dollars to do so. The best way to measure the adequacy of private charity is to put it to the test by abolishing existing social programs.

12. Consider the best-case scenario for forced charity. Someone is absolutely poor through no fault of his own, and there are no disincentive effects of transfers or taxes. Even here, the moral case for forced charity is much less plausible than it looks. Think of the Good Samaritan. Did he do a noble deed - or merely fulfill his minimal obligation? Patriotic brainwashing notwithstanding, our "fellow citizens" are strangers - and the moral intuition that helping strangers is supererogatory is hard to escape. And even if you think the opposite, can you honestly deny that it's debatable? If so, how can you in good conscience coerce dissenters?

Personally, I embrace all twelve theses. But even the Soft-Core Case implies radical opposition to the welfare state as it currently exists. My questions for lapsed critics of the welfare state: Precisely which theses do you reject - and what's the largest welfare state consistent with the theses you accept?

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Libertarianism Against the Welfare State: A Refresher ...

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Myths of Individualism | Libertarianism.org

Posted: June 26, 2016 at 10:51 am

Sep 6, 2011

Palmer takes on the misconceptions of individualism common to communitarian critics of liberty.

What distinguishes libertarianism from other views of political morality is principally its theory of enforceable obligations. Some obligations, such as the obligation to write a thank-you note to ones host after a dinner party, are not normally enforceable by force. Others, such as the obligation not to punch a disagreeable critic in the nose or to pay for a pair of shoes before walking out of the store in them, are. Obligations may be universal or particular. Individuals, whoever and wherever they may be (i.e., in abstraction from particular circumstances), have an enforceable obligation to all other persons: not to harm them in their lives, liberties, health, or possessions. In John Lockes terms, Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his
life, health, liberty, or possessions. All individuals have the right that others not harm them in their enjoyment of those goods. The rights and the obligations are correlative and, being both universal and negative in character, are capable under normal circumstances of being enjoyed by all simultaneously. It is the universality of the human right not to be killed, injured, or robbed that is at the base of the libertarian view, and one need not posit an abstract individual to assert the universality of that right. It is his veneration, not his contempt, for the immortal spark in his fellow men that leads the libertarian to defend individual rights.

Libertarians recognize the inevitable pluralism of the modern world and for that reason assert that individual liberty is at least part of the common good. They also understand the absolute necessity of cooperation for the attainment of ones ends; a solitary individual could never actually be self-sufficient, which is precisely why we must have rulesgoverning property and contracts, for exampleto make peaceful cooperation possible and we institute government to enforce those rules. The c
ommon good is a system of justice that allows all to live together in harmony and peace; a common good more extensive than that tends to be, not a common good for all of us, but a common good for some of us at the expense of others of us. (There is another sense, understood by every parent, to the term self-sufficiency. Parents normally desire that their children acquire the virtue of pulling their own weight and not subsisting as scroungers, layabouts, moochers, or parasites. That is a necessary condition of self-respect; Taylor and other critics of libertarianism often confuse the virtue of self-sufficiency with the impossible condition of never relying on or cooperating with others.)

Myths of Individualism originally appeared in the September/October 1996 issue of Cato Policy Report.

Myths of Individualism | Libertarianism.org

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Libertarianism and White Racial Nationalism | The …

Posted: June 21, 2016 at 6:28 am

Greg Johnson, the previous editor of TOQ, had the wonderful idea for an issue on how Libertarianism intersects with issues of White racial nationalism. The topic is an important one. Unlike explicit assertions of White identity and interests, libertarianism is considered part of the conservative mainstream. It doesnt ruffle the feathers of the multicultural powers that be. Indeed, as discussed in several of the articles hereparticularly the article by Simon Krejsa, libertarianism is an ideology of national dissolution that would greatly exacerbate problems resulting from immigration.

IGNORING THE REAL WORLD: LIBERTARIANISM AS UTOPIAN METAPHYSICS Several prominent libertarians have advocated open borders except for immigrants clearly intent on violating personal or property rights. As Krejsa notes, libertarians ignore the reality that the peoples crowding our shores often have powerful ethnic ties and that they are typically organized in well-funded, aggressive ethnic organizations. These ethnic organizations have a vital interest in a strong central government able to further their interests in a wide range of areas, from welfare benefits to foreign policy. In other words, they act far more as a corporate entity than as a set of isolated individuals. Further, the immigration policy advocated by Libertarians ignores the reality of racial and ethnic differences in a broad spectrum of traits critical to success in contemporary societies, particularly IQ, criminality, and impulsivity. Social utility forms no part of the thinking of Libertarianism.

In reading these articles, one is struck by the fact that libertarianism is in the end a metaphysics. That is, it simply posits a minimal set of rights (to ownership of ones own body, ownership of private property, and the freedom to engage in contracts) and unflinchingly follows this proposition to its logical conclusion. The only purpose of government is to prohibit the physical invasion of anothers person or property. It is a utopian philosophy based on what ought to be rather than on a sober understanding of the way humans actually behave. Not surprisingly, as Simon Lote and Farnham OReilly point out, there have never been any pure libertarian societies. There are powerful reasons for that.

Indeed, libertarianism philosophy reminds me of Kants categorical imperative which states that one must Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. The imperative defines a conception of moral obligation, but it certainly does not follow that others will behave in a moral way. One would be naive indeed to suppose that a philosophy of moral obligations would make people nicer. Kant would never have said that we should arrange society on the supposition that people will behave in the ways that they are morally obligated.

Similarly, the libertarian idea that we should alter government as if the governed are an atomistic universe of individuals is oblivious to the fact that a great many people will continue to behave on the basis of their group identity, whether based on ethnicity or on a voluntary association like a corporation. They will continue to engage in networking (often with co-ethnics) and they will pursue policies aimed at advancing their self-interest as conditioned by group membership. If they have access to the media, they will craft media messages aimed at converting others to agree with their point of viewmessages that need not accurately portray the likely outcomes of policy choices. Media-powerful groups may also craft messages that take advantage of peoples natural proclivities for their own profit without regard to the weaknesses of othersa form of the unleashing of Darwinian competition discussed in the following.

This minimal list of human interests is grounded in neither theology nor natural science. A focus of Trudie Perts essay is the conflict between libertarian philosophy and traditional Catholic collectivism with its group-protecting function based on the concept of natural law. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, a society engineered according to libertarian ideology would unleash a Darwinian struggle of competition between individuals and groups. Since, as Vitman Tanka notes, there is nothing in libertarian ideology to prevent voluntary associations, people in a libertarian society would naturally band together to advance their interests. Such groups would see their own interests as best satisfied by a strong government that is on their side.

The libertarian utopia would thus be chronically unstable. Indeed, Krejsa quotes Peter Brimelow who notes that a libertarian society with completely open borders would result in enormous pressures for powerful state control immigration as the Viagra of the state: Immigrants, above all immigrants who are racially and culturally distinct from the host population, are walking advertisements for social workers and government programs and the regulation of political speech that is to say, the repression of the entirely natural objections of the host population.

A libertarian utopia would also unleash exploitation of the weak and disorganized by the strong and well-organized. Both Pert and Krejsa point out that a libertarian society would result in violations of normative moral intuitions. For example, parents could sell their children into slavery. Such behavior would indeed be evolutionarily maladaptive, because as slaves their reproductive opportunities would be at the whim of their master. But such an option might appeal to some parents who value other things more than their children as the result of genetically or environmentally induced psychiatric impairment, manipulative media influence, or drug-induced stupor in a society lacking social controls on drugs.

Moreover, in the libertarian Eden, regulations on marriage and sexual behavior would disappear so that wealthy men would be able to have dozens of wives and concubines while many men would not have access to marriage. Sexual competition among males would therefore skyrocket.

In fact, the social imposition of monogamy in the West has had hugely beneficial consequences on the society as a whole, including greater investment in children and facilitating a low pressure demographic profile that resulted in cumulative investment and rising real wages over historical time. In other words, progress.

Admittedly, benefits to the society as a whole are of no concern to libertarians. But, from an evolutionary perspective, they ought to be. An evolutionary approach has the virtue of being solidly grounded in a science of human interests, both explicit and implicit, whereas Libertarianism relies on metaphysical assertions. The fact is that dysfunctional societies are ultimately non-viable and likely to be pushed aside by more functional groups. Without the economic expansion brought about by the social controls on sexual behavior, the West may well have not embarked on the expansion and colonization beginning in the 15th century. Ultimately, social controls on sexual behavior benefited the vast majority of Whites.

The same can be said of social controls on sexual behavior. Social support for high-investment parenting has always been a critical feature of Western social structure until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then, all of the markers of family stability have headed south including divorce rates and births out of wedlock for all races and ethnic groups. (Nevertheless, there are very large differences between races and ethnic groups in conformity with J. Philippe Rushtons life history theory of race differences.) But this relative lack of social support for marriage has had very different effects depending on traits like IQ. For example, a well-known study in behavior genetics shows that the heritability of age of first sexual intercourse increased dramatically after the sexual revolution of the 1960's. In other words, after the social supports for traditional sexuality disappeared, genetic influences became more important. Before the sexual revolution, traditional sexual mores applied to everyone. After the revolution, genes mattered more. People with higher IQ were able to produce stable families and marriages, but lower-IQ people were less prone to doing so. These trends have been exacerbated by the current economic climate.

The triumph of the culture of critique therefore resulted in a more libertarian climate for sexual behavior that tended to produce family pathology among people at the lower end of the bell curve for IQ, particularly an increase in low-investment parenting. This in turn is likely to have decreased the viability of the society as a whole.

COULD WHITE ADVOCACY BE THE OUTCOME OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS? It is interesting to consider whether a vibrant White advocacy movement could be the outcome of voluntary association in a society constructed along libertarian lines, as proposed by Tanka, who uses the Amish as an example. That is, Whites could come to realize that they have a natural interest in forming a voluntary association to advance their interests as Whites, much as Jews have done since the Enlightenment. (In traditional societies, Jewish groups were tightly controlled to prevent defection and cheating, i.e., engaging in acts such as undermining Jewish monopolies or informing on other Jews that were deemed harmful by the Jewish community as a whole. Traditional Jewish society was the antithesis of libertarianism.)

Such an outcome is theoretically possible but (like the rest of the libertarian wish list) would be unlikely to occur in the real world. In the real world, media-powerful groups and groups able to dominate prestigious academic institutions would indoctrinate people against identifying as Whites bent on pursuing White interests, as they do now. In the real world, there would be financial inducements to avoid White advocacy, including well-paid careers opposing White advocacy and economic consequences meted out by powerful voluntary associations, especially associations dominated by non-Whites hostile to White identity and interests also the case now. A White advocacy movement would therefore have a great deal of inertia to overcome.

And yet, voluntary association is the only way that a powerful White advocacy movement could develop. We are seeing the beginnings of such movements, especially in Europe with the rise of explicitly anti-Muslim and anti-immigration parties.

However, if a White-advocacy movement gains power, it would be foolish indeed to retain a libertarian political structure of minimal government. As noted by Farnham OReilly, the rights of the individual must remain subservient to the welfare of the group. If indeed White interests are worth defending, then furthering those interests must be the first priority. That would mean acting against media-powerful interests that produce messages countering White identity and acting against voluntary associations (such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League) that mete out economic penalties against Whites who identify as White and wish to pursue their interests as Whites. (It is noteworthy at of the nine authors of this issue of TOQ, seven use pseudonyms. The exceptions, Robert Griffin and I, both have tenure and thus have protected positions.)

Indeed, one might note that the greatest obstacle to the triumph of a White advocacy movement now is that current Western societies are organized along (imperfectly) libertarian lines. That is, the Western commitment to economic individualism (which allows vast concentrations of wealth by individuals) combined with the legitimacy of using that wealth to influence government policy, control media messages, and penalize White advocates, has allowed the creation of a semi-Darwinian world where very powerful interests have aligned themselves against White advocacy. This in turn is leading to natural selection against White people as they become overwhelmed demographically by non-Whites. In such a world, Whites, especially non-elite Whites, will eventually be at the mercy of hostile non-White groups with historical grudges against them a category that at the very least includes Jews, Blacks, and Mexicans. Again, there is no reason whatever to suppose that a society engineered along libertarianism lines would prevent associations based on ethnic/racial ties. The racialization of American politics in the semi-libertarian present is well advanced, with over 90% of Republican votes coming from Whites, and increasing percentages of Whites voting Republican.

LIBERTARIANISM FITS WITH THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF WHITES Nevertheless, having pointed to the pitfalls of libertarianism, it must be said that the individual freedom and liberty that are the hallmarks of libertarianism feel good to us Europeans, as emphasized by Simon Lote and Robert Griffin. All things equal, we would rather live in a society with minimal restraint on individual behavior.

(However, all things may not be equal, as Simon Krejsa points out, since the vast majority of Whites would prefer to live in a non-libertarian society that was predominantly White rather than a libertarian society that was predominantly Black. Race matters.)

In my view, individualism is an ethnic trait of Europeans the only group to have invented individualistic societies. (Ironically, for the reasons set out above, the semi-libertarian structure of contemporary Western societies may ultimately be the demise of the West.) This judgment is based on a variety of data. For example, European family patterns indicate that Europeans, far more than other groups, have been able to free themselves from clan-based social structure (a form of collectivism) and develop societies with a high level of public trust needed to create modern economies.

Thats perhaps why reading Ayn Rand has been so exciting for so many of us, as emphasized by Gregory Hood in his prize-winning essay. We thrill to the idea of talented, productive, competent people who are able to create their own worlds and are not bound by the petty conventions of society who seem larger than life. It is, as Hood points out, a White World, peopled by heroic Nordics, with an Aryan code of achievement, appreciation of hierarchy, and a robustly defended philosophy of greatness; it is a world where uniquely Western values such as individualism, the rule of law, and limited government are taken for granted.

I confess that when I first read Atlas Shrugged in high school, I was very much taken with it. Readers of her work naturally cast themselves in the role of John Galt or similar Randian super-person. Her characters appeal to our vanity and our natural desire to live free of burdensome constraints and to be completely in charge of our own destiny. I recall when driving across the country shortly after reading it that I took special notice of all the signs of eponymous businesses Johnsons Lumber Co., Hansens Furniture, Marios Pizza, Ford auto- mobiles. All were the creations of individuals with drive and ambition people creating their own worlds.

Its an attractive image, but as an evolutionist I understand that humans must think in terms of the larger picture what Frank Salter terms ethnic genetic interests. And to effectively further our ethnic genetic interests, we must take account of the real world and accept the need for restraints on peoples behavior, as argued above. The good news is that, as Hood notes (see also Tankas essay), the road to a sense of White advocacy and a sense that Whites have interests often begins with Ayn Rand and libertarianism.

The European tendency toward individualism is also associated with moral universalism (as opposed to moral particularlism, famously, Is it good for the Jews?) and science (i.e, inquiry free from in- group/outgroup biases, with each scientist an independent agent unattached to any ingroup). The tendency toward moral particularism is especially important when thinking about Libertarianism. The European tendency toward moral universalism implies a relatively strong commitment to principled morality that is, moral principles that are adhered to independent of cost to self or family. This contrasts with non-European societies where there is a much greater tendency for family and kinship ties to color moral judgments.

This devotion to principled morality is most apparent in the Puritan tradition of American culture likely the result of prolonged evolution in small, exogamous, egalitarian groups in northern Europe. An egregious example is Justice John Paul Stevens who recently vacated the court, allowing President Obama to replace him with Elena Kagan, an undistinguished law school graduate who benefited greatly from Jewish ethnic networking and who is likely to reflect to values of the mainstream left-liberal Jewish community.

Stevens therefore is the ultimate non-ethnic actor, allowing himself to be replaced during a Democratic administration that would be very unlikely to appoint someone like himself. This lack of an ethnic sense is reflected in his writing:

The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach, he wrote in an unusually lyrical dissent [in a 1989 flag burning case]. If those ideas are worth fighting forand our history demonstrates that they areit cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection.

Ideas are worth fighting for, but Stevens has no interest in advancing the cause of WASPs as an ethnic group. Here he idealizes non-White Filipinos fighting alongside Whites to secure a set of principles. He has no concern that there will be no more WASPs on the court for the foreseeable future, presumably because he thinks that whats important is that certain ideas will continue to guide the country.

The multicultural left should build statues to Stevens and David Souter also appointed by a Republican president and replaced by a non-White [Sonia Sotomayor] in a Democrat administration) as heroes of the hopeful non-White future. Their principled sense that ideas matter and that race and ethnicity are not at all important is exactly how the multicultural left wants all Whites to behave WASPs as the proposition ethnic group heralding America as the proposition nation.

This devotion to universalist ideas is a strong tendency in the liberal WASP subculture that has been such an important strand of American intellectual history. (The exception was during the 1920s when the Protestant elite sided with the rest of America when they led the battle to enact the immigration restriction law of 1924 which drastically restricted immigration and explicitly attempted to achieve an ethnic status quo as of 1890. Even then, there were substantial numbers of WASPs who opposed immigration restriction.)

In the 19th century, this liberal WASP tradition could be seen in their attraction to utopian communities and their strong moral revulsion to slavery that animated the cause of abolition. Ideas matter and are worth fighting for, even if more than 600,000 White people died in the battle Let us die to make men free as the Battle Hymn of the Republic urged. They had the idea that people are able to fashion moral ideals and then bring them into being as a result of political activism, a view that is certainly borne out by contemporary psychology. They were individualists who saw the world not in terms of in-groups and outgroups, but as composed of unique individuals. Their relatively tepid ethnocentrism and their ethnic proneness to moral universalism made them willing allies of the rising class of Jewish intellectuals who came to dominate intellectual discourse beginning at least by the 1930s. Even by the 1920s, the triumph of Boasian anthropology meant that appeals to WASP ethnicity would fall on deaf ears in the academic world.

Libertarianism thus fits well with this tradition. Indeed, Eric Kaufmann labels one of the 19th-century liberal American traditions libertarian anarchism, typified by Benjamin Tucker, publisher Liberty, a journal devoted to unfettered individualism and opposed to prohibitions on non-invasive behavior (free love, etc.). Moreover, as noted above, libertarianism is nothing if not strongly principled. Indeed, libertarianism is addicted to its fundamental principles of individual freedom no matter what practical costs may result to self, to others or to the society as a whole. The sign of principled behavior is that other interests, prototypically self-interest (paradoxically enough in the case of libertarianism), are irrelevant, and that is certainly the case with libertarianism.

IS LIBERTARIANISM A JEWISH INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT? Finally, we must ask, Is it good for the Jews? Simon Lote notes that libertarians tend to be cosmopolitan White males [who] are led by a smaller but more eminent group of Jews who are attracted to the political philosophy for entirely different reasons. Jews are attracted to libertarianism because

[the] cosmopolitan universalism at [the core of libertarianism] is a mighty ideological weapon to weaken White identity and loyalty and so ensures that Jewish interests are better preserved and advanced. After all, if one regards property rights as sacred, the idea of breaking the Jewish stranglehold over the media by government anti-trust legislation would be considered abhorrent. Libertarians also tend to be in favor of massive non-White immigration which is also favored by Jews as an ethnic strategy aimed at lessening the political and cultural influence of Whites.

Indeed, Trudie Pert begins her essay with the following quote from The Culture of Critique:

Jews benefit from open, individualistic societies in which barriers to upward mobility are removed, in which people are viewed as individuals rather than as members of groups, and in which intellectual discourse is not prescribed by institutions like the Catholic Church that are not dominated by Jews.

Libertarianism was not reviewed as a Jewish intellectual movement of The Culture of Critique, although the discussion of the Frankfurt School as a Jewish movement in Chapter 5 emphasizes that it pathologized the group commitments of non-Jews while nevertheless failing to provide a similar critique of Jewish group commitment. It noted that

a common component of anti-Semitism among academics during the Weimar period [in Germany] was a perception that Jews attempted to undermine patriotic commitment and social cohesion of society. Indeed, the perception that Jewish critical analysis of non-Jewish society was aimed at dissolving the bonds of cohesiveness within the society was common among educated non-Jewish Germans, including university professors . One academic referred to the Jews as the classic party of national decomposition.

In the event, National Socialism developed as a cohesive non-Jewish group strategy in opposition to Judaism, a strategy that completely rejected the Enlightenment ideal of an atomized society based on individual rights in opposition to the state. As I have argued in [Separation and Its Discontents] (Ch. 5), in this regard National Socialism was very much like Judaism, which has been throughout its history fundamentally a group phenomenon in which the rights of the individual have been submerged in the interests of the group.

Further:

The prescription that society adopt a social organization based on radical individualism would indeed be an excellent strategy for the continuation of Judaism as a cohesive, collectivist group strategy. Research on cross-cultural differences in individualism and collectivism indicates that anti-Semitism would be lowest in individualist societies rather than societies that are collectivist and homogeneous apart from Jews. A theme of [A People That Shall Dwell Alone] (Ch. 8) is that European societies (with the notable exceptions of the National Socialist era in Germany and the medieval period of Christian religious hegemonyboth periods of intense anti-Semitism) have been unique among the economically advanced traditional and modern cultures of the world in their commitment to individualism. The presence of Judaism as a highly successful and salient group strategy provokes anti-individualist responses from [non-Jews]. Collectivist cultures [like Judaism] place a much greater emphasis on the goals and needs of the ingroup rather than on individual rights and interests. Collectivist cultures develop an unquestioned attachment to the ingroup, including the perception that ingroup norms are universally valid (a form of ethnocentrism), automatic obedience to ingroup authorities, and willingness to fight and die for the ingroup. These characteristics are usually associated with distrust of and unwillingness to cooperate with outgroups. In collectivist cultures morality is conceptualized as that which benefits the group, and aggression and exploitation of outgroups are acceptable.

People in individualist cultures, in contrast, show little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, independence, individual responsibility, and finding yourself. Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup members and are more likely to behave in a prosocial, altruistic manner to strangers. Because they are less aware of in-group-outgroup boundaries, people in individualist cultures are less likely to have negative attitudes toward outgroup members. They often disagree with ingroup policy, show little emotional commitment or loyalty to ingroups, and do not have a sense of common fate with other ingroup members. Opposition to outgroups occurs in individualist societies, but the opposition is more rational in the sense that there is less of a tendency to suppose that all of the outgroup members are culpable for the misdeeds of a few. Individualists form mild attachments to many groups, whereas collectivists have an intense attachment and identification to a few ingroups.

The expectation is that individualists will tend to be less predisposed to anti-Semitism and more likely to blame any offensive Jewish behavior as resulting from transgressions by individual Jews rather than stereotypically true of all Jews. However Jews, as members of a collectivist subculture living in an individualistic society, are themselves more likely to view the Jewishnon- Jewish distinction as extremely salient and to develop stereotypically negative views about non-Jews.

Perts article suggests that libertarianism functioned as a Jewish intellectual movement for at least some of its main Jewish proponents. (No one is saying that libertarianism is a Jewish movement to the extent that, say, psychoanalysis was in its early years, when virtually all its practitioners were Jews. For the reasons indicated above, libertarianism is very attractive to Europeans.) In order for a movement to qualify as a Jewish movement, participants must have a Jewish identity and see their work as furthering Jewish interests. Particularly interesting is the animosity shown by Ludwig von Mises toward Christianity and particularly toward the Catholic Church as enemies of freedom. (One might also note Ayn Rands one-sided and impassioned defense of Israel and her denunciations of Arabs as racist murderers of innocent Jews indicate a strong Jewish identity and an unwillingness to condemn Jewish collectivism, either in Israel or in traditional and to a considerable extent in contemporary Diaspora societies. She also remonstrates against the racism of U.S. foreign policy prior to FDR, again suggesting views that are highly characteristic of the Jewish mainstream.)

For the reasons indicated above, there is little doubt that Judaism would benefit from a libertarian social order. In addition to lowering anti- Jewish attitudes, Pert notes that Jews as an well-organized, highly networked elite would be likely to be able to exploit non-Jews economically because non-Jews would not be protected by the state and because non-Jews would not likely be able to form cohesive protective groups in the absence of state involvement. (I have proposed that in the 4th century, voluntary associations centered around the Catholic Church served a protective function against Jewish economic domination, particularly the enslavement of non-Jews by Jews. As expected, this protective society then attempted (and succeeded) in obtaining political power by seizing control of the state.

In other words, these Catholics actively fought against a social order in which there were no safeguards against the exploitation of non-Jews by Jews. (To the extent that it permitted slavery of non-Jews by Jews, the previous social order was libertarian.) The libertarian rationalization of voluntary servitude is particularly noteworthy given the reality of Jewish economic domination in several historical eras.

Kevin MacDonald, The Establishment and Maintenance of Socially Imposed Monogamy in Western Europe. Politics and the Life Sciences 14, 3-23, 1995. http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/Monogamy1995.pdf

2 J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 1994).

3 M. P. Dunne, N. G. Martin, D. J. Statham, W. S. Slutske, S. H. Dinwiddie, K. K. Bucholz, P. A. F. Madden, and A. C. Heath, Genetic and environmental contributions to variance in age at first sexual intercourse. Psychological Science 8 (211216, 1997).

4 Kevin MacDonald, The Dissolution of the Family among Non-Elite Whites. The Occidental Observer (April 9, 2010). http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/04/kevin-macdonald-the- dissolution-of-the-family-among-non-elite-whites/

5 MacDonald, What Makes Western Culture Unique?; Kevin Mac Donald, Eric P. Kaufmanns The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. The Occidental Observer (July 29, 2009). http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-Kaufmann.html

6 Frank K. Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006; originally published by Peter Lang [Frankfurt Am Main, 2003]).

7 Kevin MacDonald, Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture: Applications to Moral Idealism and Political Philosophy. Politics and Culture (2010[Issue 1], April). http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/04/29/evolution-and-a-dual-processing-theory-of-culture-applications-to-moral-idealism-and-political-philosophy/

8 Kevin MacDonald, Psychology and White Ethnocentrism. The Occidental Quarterly 6(4) (Winter, 200607, 746). http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/WhiteEthnocentrism.pdf J. G. Miller and D. M. Bersoff, Culture and Moral Judgment: How Are Conflicts Between Justice and Interpersonal Responsibilities Resolved? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62 (541554, 1992).

9 MacDonald, What Makes Western Culture Unique?

10 Jeffrey Toobin, After Stevens: What Will the Supreme Court Be Like without Its Liberal Leader? The New Yorker (March 23, 2010). http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/22/100322fa_fact_toobin?curr entPage=all#ixzz0tJXKtDE6

11 Mac Donald, Eric P. Kaufmanns The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.

12 Kevin MacDonald, American Transcendentalism: An Indigenous Culture of Critique. The Occidental Quarterly 8(2) (Summer 2008, 91106). http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Gura-Transcendentalism.pdf

13 Kevin MacDonald, Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture.

14 Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique (Blooomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2002; originally published by Praeger [Westport, CT, 1998]), Chapter 7.

15Ibid., xxix.

16 Harry C. Triandis, Cross-cultural studies of individualism and collectivism. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1989: Cross Cultural Perspectives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 55.

17Ibid.

18 Harry C. Triandis. Cross-cultural differences in assertiveness/competition vs. group loyalty/cohesiveness. In Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior (ed. R. A. Hinde & J. Groebel; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 82.

19Ibid. 80.

20 Triandis, Cross-cultural studies of individualism and collectivism, 61.

21 Ayn Rand on Israel and the Middle East. You Tube video of a public inter- view from 1979. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU

22 Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism. (Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library, 2004; first published by Praeger [Westport, CT, 1998]), Chapter 3.

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