(*Sleme = slimy meme.)

GARY (chartier and charles) JOHNSON 2012. (Sorry.)

Check out two recent interviews, one with Charles and Gary and one just with Charles.

I don’t have much of a dog on either side of this fight, since the three institutions he mentions (at least in anything like their present form) are all ones I think should be abolished. So Sandel’s question moves me about as much as the question “should the right to beat one’s slaves be a marketable commodity”?

Rick Santorum has been selling himself as the candidate who’s reliable and consistent, in contrast with Romney’s flop-flipping. But here’s what Santorum has said in the past:

Republicans, I think to our credit, have sort of morphed away from the Goldwater idea that government needs to be smaller, it needs to do less, it needs to be doing nothing except what its core functions are. … I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. … We are not a group of people who believe in no government. … They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues – you know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world …. There is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

And here’s what he just said today:

We don’t need a manager. … We need someone who’s going to pull up government by the roots and throw it out … and liberate the private sector.

Um … uh … welcome to the revolution, comrade?

“I had catfish for the second time. It was delicious, just like the first time.” – Mitt Romney

“And I’m really enjoying this so called … ‘iced cream.’” – Montgomery Burns

One of the makers of the Anarchism in America video (about which I’ve previously blogged) has a piece up at HoughPough on Ron Paul, Libertarianism, and the Anarchist Connection. Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Ezra Heywood, Angela Heywood, Emma Goldman, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Murray Bookchin all get name-checked.

The friendly words quoted from Bookchin do not reflect his later views (on which I’ve blogged glancingly).

Now clearly one can abide by the non-aggression principle without acting to promote liberty; the NAP is a purely negative duty, while an obligation to promote liberty would be positive. So Walter now thinks that being a libertarian involves commitments beyond non-aggression! (Indeed, that makes his libertarianism even thicker than mine, as I’ve never made acting on such commitments a condition for being a libertarian.)

Alas, Walter invokes this distinction in order to show that Wendy McElroy is not a libertarian – on the grounds that she does not support the candidacy of Ron Paul. Walter makes this argument despite the fact that Paul supports a number of policies that Walter would agree with Wendy are anti-libertarian (including anti-abortion laws, anti-immigration laws, and most notoriously the existence of the state itself). If we anarchists can lose our libertarian credentials for refusing to support a statist, something’s gone wrong somewhere.