The bad news: Barr beats Ruwart for the LP nomination. (No word on a running mate yet.)
The good news: at least it was damn close.
Agorist Demerit Count: 3
57 Responses to Farewell LP
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Third Party Watch » Blog Archive » Roundup of Calls For LP Unity (and Divorce) -
May 31, 2008
[…] Brad Spangler wants the LP to switch its branding from “libertarian” to Cato-style “market liberal”. Roderick Long explains that it’s good for radicals to leave the LP, but it’s also good to have radicals to remain in the LP and fight for it. This was prompted by a long but interesting discussion from which some Less Antman comments are required reading. He says perceptively that “radical minarchists” (like David Nolan?) are “just anarchists unable to admit that a government that doesn’t aggress, doesn’t tax,and allows secession isn’t a government as most market anarchists define it”. He also says: “I don’t hate the state any more than I hate unicorns. There are only people: government is a word people use to legitimize aggression, and if we remove the legitimacy from acts of aggression, our job is basically done. The rest is crime control.” […]
@Less — Before I even consider attempting to compose a longer reply addressing the many points you raise; I just need to say that I would expect that you, of all people, would know that education is part of agorism. You appear to be mistakenly equating “agorism” with “counter-economics” and while that’s good in one sense it’s irritating as all heck in another.
Agorism is the ideology; counter-economics is the revolutionary praxis of that ideology. Like any other ideological movement, education is also essential.
One of the reasons this gets on my nerves so much is that confusing agorism with counter-economics plays right into the hands of the sort of political con-artists who would like to convince the gullible that political campaigns are a *necessity* for the carrying on of libertarian educational work. I don’t think that’s quite what you’re saying, though, is it?
Aster,
It’s interesting that you and I both agree that the libertarian movement is too centered on the USA, yet you hold up the tottering old social democracies of Europe as the wave of the future!
Are you aware that, from the perspective of most human beings on this planet, the USA, as well as Canada, simply are European countries, that due to various historical accidents are on the farther side of the Atlantic (a similar point is true of the Aussies and the Kiwis)?
You wrote:
>But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink.
Aster, do you actually know anything about China or Chinese culture?
I married into a family of Chinese immigrants. My wife’s cousins travel back and forth across the Pacific a great deal, and I have a chance to hear their eyewitness reports on developments in China.
From what they say, and from what I also see in the independent media, China may now be a more free country economically (e.g., in terms of starting a business) than the US. Yes, it is a “dictatorship” – “dictatorship” being the term that democratic dictatorships use to distinguish themselves from all the non-democratic dictatorships.
China is, sadly, controlled by a government, human rights are therefore not secure, and that is a shame. But, again, from what I hear from both my in-laws and from news sources, if you refrain from playing political games in China, life, liberty, and property are reasonably secure compared to much of the planet. Let’s remember that here in the US, hundreds of children can be seized from their parents without any proof of reasonable cause, and that, in the Europe you so love, people have recently been sent to jail for “Holocaust denial” (yes, I know the Holocaust happened).
Sadly, Europe, China, and the US are all oppressed by their respective governments.
At least China is not sending hundreds of thousands of its troops half-way around the world to conquer countries that pose no threat at all to itself! If some country is to be accused of being the greatest and most extensive threat to world peace and security on the planet, it would seem to be the USA, not China.
For you to single China out as “the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet” seems, well, eccentric.
You also wrote:
> The real battle today is not to save the Enlightenment in America. It is not even to save Enlightenment *from* America. It is to make sure that the destruction of the nation created by the Declaration of Independence does not bring down that declaration along with it.
Again, I fear this smacks of the American megalomania that sees the whole course of human history as hinging on the United States!
I am a theoretical physicist (Ph.D. from Stanford). I know that modern science and mathematics originated in the European nations. But, because I know that science and math are of universal validity, I know that they transcend Europeans and European culture.
If Europe and the US cease to exist, I am quite certain that Asians can and will continue to maintain science and mathematics. Indeed, wander through any first-rate university physics, math, or engineering area and you may conclude that the transfer of Western science to Asians is already nearly complete.
If the principles of the Enlightenment and, specifically, of the Declaration are indeed true for all human beings, as the men of the Enlightenment maintained, why worry that the collapse of the US will drag the Enlightenment down with it, any more than science or math?
Frankly, the Asians I know are much more committed to the Enlightenment than most Americans I know – this is stunningly so not only in science but also music and other areas.
Yes, the future of the US is dim. But America is small potatoes historically – a flash in the pan that is now fading. The future of the human race is in Asia, and that future is bright.
My kids and I are studying Chinese.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Less Antman wrote:
> there are so many long-time non-party libertarians whose first knowledge of the philosophy was the result of the LP that I do wish some of them would concede that it has been a useful feeder organization for the movement for all its faults
Really? That has not been my experience.
The LP did help make me aware of the word “libertarian.” But I actually had learned about the philosophy several years earlier (indeed before the LP itself was formed) from the writings of Rothbard and Rand. (And I later found out that I had a pamphlet a friend of our family had given me even earlier with an explanation of the conservative/libertarian distinction written, I think, by Karl Hess. I had forgotten about the pamphlet, but perhaps the ideas stuck.)
My own observation has been that people who are brought into the movement by the LP tend to be eternally stuck either at the “winning elections is the goal” stage or, even worse, at the “lower taxes/legalize drugs” stage.
I can’t think of anyone I’ve known personally who was brought into the movement by the LP and who eventually acquired a decent understanding of “libertarianism” in the sense I outlined in my earlier post (i.e., natural rights, and only individuals being truly responsible for their own actions, not abstractions like “the government,” the army etc.).
No doubt I missed someone somewhere who contradicts my observations, but I was involved in the LP for many years and knew many people. (My LP experience was solely in the California LP; other parts of the country may be different.)
Less also wrote:
> I have deep respect for those following the agorist strategy, but we need both agorism and education, and so long as there is a party with the name libertarian in it, what it does impacts the education side.
Does the LP help with education? Open discussion of the anarchist perspective has, as many have noted, been rather strongly suppressed within the LP for decades. I saw a great deal of reluctance in the LP to even come out and say that all taxation was wrong.
During all the years I was in the LP, the public message (even to LP members) tended to be: we’ll reduce the size of government significantly and that will make your lives happier, the strategy Rothbard derided as the “more bathtubs” strategy.
It certainly would have been interesting to see Ruwart run a truly “libertarian” (in my and your sense) campaign. But the “hook” by which third-party candidates get media and voter attention is the pretense that they might really be elected and that they are proposing policies that they would really follow if elected.
A true libertarian cannot convincingly play that game. After all, if I were elected President, I’d pardon almost everyone in federal prisons, discharge all the members of the armed forces, and it would only take a day or two after that for the Congress to impeach me and remove me from office.
Sadly, by the rules which the media and the voters play by, this does not make a very credible campaign speech.
But, if any true libertarian is nominated, Ruwart or anyone else, that is the real truth of what their Presidency would mean.
I can’t see the LP ever nominating anyone who openly runs on the platform I just suggested.
I therefore think we libertarians can never be in control of the LP.
Less, I think we have a problem.
Dave
Brad, Less isn’t saying that electoral politics is indispensable to education. What he’s saying is that so long as there is a self-pronouced libertarian party, whatever it says or does is going to have an impact on people’s perception of libertarianism, so it would be better for educational purposes to have a radical candidate like Ruwart than a conservative candidate like Barr.
(Of course that desideratum has to be balanced against the agorist argument that radicals should spurn the LP because we should try to disassociate our education from electoral politics. Fair enough, but that’s a different point. Let me address it in my next post.)
Dave,
My own observation has been that people who are brought into the movement by the LP tend to be eternally stuck either at the “winning elections is the goal” stage or, even worse, at the “lower taxes/legalize drugs” stage.
For what it’s worth, I’m an anecdotal exception to the rule. I first discovered libertarianism through the LP, by way of the right-wing talk radio show host Neal Boortz. It did take a lot of time and effort to get past those initial stages to anarchism, though.
Roderick,
[S]o long as there is a self-pronouced libertarian party, whatever it says or does is going to have an impact on people’s perception of libertarianism, so it would be better for educational purposes to have a radical candidate like Ruwart than a conservative candidate like Barr.
On the other hand, one could argue that having a more moderate candidate like Barr gets more people through the door, who then can be convinced of more radical libertarianism once inside. I think it’s an open question which strategy returns better results.
Micha,
I’m sure there are also other exceptions to my observations besides yourself. What bothers me more than the fairly small number of exceptions is the fact that this seems to be an inherent problem with the LP: i.e., given that the LP is a “political party” that at least pretends to be in the game for electoral purposes (if they openly admitted that they have zero chance of winning the Presidency, who in the media or the public would take them seriously?), the LP tends naturally to attract either pragmatists who want a “practical program” that can “attract voters” or deluded fools who seriously believe that the LP is on the verge of winning the Presidency – just a couple more elections, and we’ll win, you know!
I knew a huge number of both types in the LP, myself.
The US government as we know it will fall eventually, but, based on history, I’d bet on one of the following three scenarios:
1) External forces destroy the US state as happened to the Nazi state
2) Things fall apart and the populace simply abandons the state as happened in the old Soviet Union in ’91.
3) The populace gradually moves in a libertarian election and the old parties adopt libertarian positions to maintain their market position.
I’ve ranked them in order of my guess as to likelihood: i.e., I doubt the gradualist approach will work. Note that none of these involves the LP actually winning.
When I was an LP activist, I would from time to time make such points; the result was almost always that I would be denounced for some sort of party disloyalty.
On Rod’s and Less’s advice, I have started reading Mary’s book “Healing Our World.”
Her policy positions do seem to be fairly hard-core, probably consistent with anarchism.
But, her tone in the book does seem to be the “more bathtubs,” pragmatic approach. For example, the US government is now the overwhelmingly greatest threat to world peace on the planet. It has bombed, attacked, or invaded far more countries in the last half-century than any other state on this planet by a long shot. The US elite, both the neo-con mavericks and the traditional foreign-policy elite, are bent on establishing and preserving a US hegemony in which the US dominates the world and plays by a different rule set than other countries are forced to play by.
When Ruwart discusses this topic, her focus seems to be, well, mistakes were made, there’s been unfortunate “blowback” from those mistakes, US foreign policy is not really serving our interests abroad, foreign aid aimed at helping the poor actually lines the pockets of the dictators, etc.
That really misses the point: it needs to be pointed out explicitly that US foreign policy serves the purposes of the power elite rather nicely, but that the US power elite is the enemy both of the American people and of the human race outside the US.
The US government is the enemy of the human race.
But, of course, to make that point clearly and forcefully, a point Rothbard, for example, was happy to make, does not to fit nicely into a book with the title “Healing Our World.”
Rod had a question a while back as to why many of us paleos were a bit uncomfortable with Mary. I think this may be part of the answer. Rothbard once declared that the fundamental political question is “Do you hate the state?” That caused a big uproar with the “nice” libertarians denouncing Murray for being so “negative.”
Well, American political campaigns certainly do discourage people who are “negative.” But if one is dealing with malignant cancer or an out-of-control fire, one should aim ruthlessly to cut out the cancer or extinguish the fire. The state is a cancer. It needs to be killed.
Mary seems to be unwilling to openly say that (and of course most LP candidates are indeed worse than her).
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Dave-
Yes, I do know a few things about Chinese culture. My mother pursued an Asian studies program at university and managed an Asian art shop in Washington D.C.; she was incidentally born in Tokyo, as her father worked in the State Department during the occupation. Half of my grandmother’s and mother’s friends (in the latter case, while patriarchy permitted her to have any) were Chinese-Americans, and things Chinese were one of the few interesting subjects of family dinner table conversation. It is possible that some of these conversations influenced me in ways which my parents had not intended.
I personally find a great deal to admire in Chinese civilisation (especially in its aesthetic sense, celebrate of worldly happiness, and respect for the intellect), and an equal amount which I deeply do *not* admire (its heirarchy, familialism and collectivism, for instance). I certainly have no love for the current dynasty, which manages to synthesise the worst of Chinese collectivism with some of the worst barbarisms to ever come out of Europe.
I recently read about a case in which a woman had an affair with a man who worked in the same factory in China; the boss found out, and as a result she was internally deported to work at another factory halfway across the country. I think of what it would do to me to live in such a society, and I come to the conclusion that I would not wish to live within it. Now perhaps you believe that the right to love and express yourself freely is less essential to the flourishing of the human spirit than the liberty to pursue socioeconomic advancement through commerce. If so, then we simply disagree. I have noticed that my values and priorities on these issues seem to be hopelessly out of sync with most members of the human race and certainly with bourgeois libertarians, and this has a great deal to do with the fact that I feel a stronger emotional affinity for (left-)anarchism and social democracy than for libertarianism, which has proven that it furthers neither my ideals nor my interests.
I gladly confess to ‘eccentricity’; as an individualist I consider the term ‘eccentric’ to be a *compliment*. However, if the notion that China’s fascist dictatorship is hideously oppressive is now ‘eccentric’, then I shall gladly share my social exile with the world’s saving remnant of sanity. It is precisely the fact that libertarians, with their obsession with tht mere existence of governments, cannot seem to see the difference between open and closed societies which makes them largely irrelevant to my sense of what freedom means at heart.
I agree with you immensely that the principles of the Enlightenment transcend European culture. I would in fact argue that *all* cultures are essentially prisons, and that the Enlightenment is not essentially a European phenomenon but rather a partially successful emergence of the human race away from a cultural prison which in this case happened to be European. I think the equivalence of individualist society with the European ancient tribalism which it fought bloodily against for centuries is disastrous and implies an atavistic failure to understand the meaning of individualism and reason. I greatly welcome the liberation of the human race from other caves and see no reason why rational people should fetishise one set of arbitrary set of cultural conventions over another. No one would be more happy than I to see an individualistic way of life flourish in contemporary Asia, and I do not think that Asian traditional culture is any less suited to Enlightenment than traditional European culture- primarily because *both* tribalisms are at heart deeply hostile to people who think, feel, and live by their own perceprions and passions. And to the degree that premodern patterns can serve as material and inspiration for people that think for themselves, I would encourage everyone to learn from Asian cultures.
And, as I explained, the reason I believe that the collapse of America could very well result in the collapse of the Enlightenment is *not* because I believe that Enlightenment is peculiar to any particular continent. The trouble is that *all* societies carry a legacy of thousands of years of tribal collectivisms and are very easily scared back into them, and that the collapse of a what was once the flagship liberal democratic society will give immense rhetorical aid and comfort to all the illiberal power-structures, ideologies, and religions which are always waiting. Enlightenment is not uniquely American (which today is very much *not* modernity’s flagship), but everyone who hates individualism and the free life will try to get us to believe so, in order to discredit individualism. A great deal of anti-Americanism has always been simply cover for people who hate individualism and don’t see anything wrong with collectivist socieites which choke off oxygen for anyone who doesn’t think and feel like the herd surrounding them (which doesn’t mean that anyone should excuse the American government’s atrocities, nor the cultural brutalities specific to the American herd).
I don’t hold up the ‘tottering social democracies’ of Europe as ‘the wave of the future’. I don’t really think in terms of ‘the wave of the future’, and I’m not at all sure that there *is* likely to be much of a future worth contemplating. My observation (and it could be wrong) is merely that those of us who wish to live as individuals and free-spirits, contemporary Europe seems to be the most trustworthy centre of cultural influence (I’m not counting the UK as part of Europe in this context, incidentally).
I certainly do not regard laws against Holocaust denial to be signs of a hopelessly authoritarian society, and I’m rather cold to libertarians who seem to fear these unjust but peripheral laws far more than the mentality behind Holocaust denial itself. As for child protective services, I agree many in the United States are horrible. But the destruction of the individual spirit by abusive and authoritarian parents is far more severe, pervasive, and socially accepted than any crimes by CPS. And my first trouble with American CPS is that they usually do little against real abuse but a great deal to persecute parents who are nontraditional or simply poor. But genuine protection of the individual rights of children from the otherwise near-absolute power of their parents (whether by minarchist or anarchist means) is a good thing, and I enthusiastically approve of New Zealand’s recent ‘anti-smacking’ legislation. State protection of small people against genetically related larger people is a perfectly proper function of government, if there is to be such a thing.
I must regretfully conclude that my sense of what constitutes tyranny has little in common with yours. That said, I’m impressed with your intellectual ambition to learn Chinese, and with the free choice of your children to do the same. I am always in favour of learning to read and write.
Dave Miller,
That really misses the point: it needs to be pointed out explicitly that US foreign policy serves the purposes of the power elite rather nicely, but that the US power elite is the enemy both of the American people and of the human race outside the US.
Yes, but that’s precisely what Ruwart says. See, for example, p. 314.
Rod,
What I see on p.314 of Mary’s book is a quote from Smedley Butler and a claim, by Mary, that the policy of “eternal war” benefits certain privileged interests (specifically, that the Iraq mess serves certain oil interests).
That general claim is hardly controversial: who would doubt that some companies benefit from war? Every time a war starts or threatens to start, the “stock-pickers’ try to figure out which stocks will gain. It’s Econ 1.
And, indeed the MSM have covered rather nicely some of the hideous ways in which Cheney’s old firm has benefited from the war.
Making that point, which after all no one seriously doubts, is a far cry from my statement:
> The US government is the enemy of the human race.
Rothbard was happy to make that point quite explicitly, again and again. Neither the overall tone of Mary’s book, nor any explicit statement that I have yet seen, seems to make that crucial point.
And it really is the central point. Until people not only come to see the US government as a criminal gang that carries out in broad daylight actions that most criminals would only dare carry out surreptitiously but also come to face the fact that the US government is the greatest and most dangerous rogue nation in history, they are unlikely to do what is necessary to abolish that government.
I suspect that most Americans, if they read through Mary’s book, would view it as a set of well-intentioned prescriptions for making the world a bit better.
But the book does not seem to project the deep moral outrage and disgust that will motivate people to turn away from the “civl religion” that causes them, for example, on Memorial Day to really believe the nonsense about Americ’a dead soldiers having died to “keep us free.”
Most Americans believe in this sort of “Americanism” much more deeply than in any nominal religion.
Mary’s book does not seem to me to forthrightly challenge that.
I’m not accusing Mary of being an evil person, and, for all I know, she may personally feel that outrage towards the American regime herself. But, if so, it does not appear to me that it comes thorough in the book.
As I’ve said before, we are debating here an issue of strategy and tactics, and perhaps I am wrong and Mary’s approach will work. But, from what I’ve seen of fanatical religious behavior (and I’ve seen more than I’d like!), I think that this is what American nationalism essentially is, that it is nearly universal among the American people, and that Mary’s approach will not suffice to deal with it.
The problem is deeper than that.
Dave
Aster,
I responded to your bizarrely vicious statement:
>But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink
In my response, I pointed out that even the oh-so-wonderful Western democracies routinely do some pretty nasty things – the US conquest of Iraq, the Europeans’ jailing of the poor deluded “Holocaust deniers,” etc.
And the best response you could come up with to prove that China is “the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet” is:
> I recently read about a case in which a woman had an affair with a man who worked in the same factory in China; the boss found out, and as a result she was internally deported to work at another factory halfway across the country.
I assume that this was a government factory? I doubt that a private employer would care, and, indeed, it is hard to see how a private employer could have her “internally deported.” If, as you claim, you actually know much about China, you know there is a good deal of internal migration: why doesn’t the woman just quit her job and move to another city?
Your story sounds fishy: perhaps if you can provide us with the URL we can find out if you just made it up.
I’d guess, from what you’ve said, that the woman worked for the government, and, to keep her government job, let herself be sent to another town. There are now many private employers in China: why doesn’t she just quit her government job and become an honest woman by getting a job in the private sector?
Frankly, since no one has a right to a government (or any other) job, I’m not convinced that there is any violation of rights here at all, at least not until you tell us your source and we can see the details.
What I find especially bizarre about your response is that it would be so easy to find, as I pointed out in my previous post, examples in which the Chinese government really is oppressive: a recent example is the suppression of the Tibetan independence movement.
I already agreed that of course the Chinese government is oppressive, just like the US, German, Canadian, etc. governments are.
Unfortunately, while I am happy to condemn Chinese government oppression, you seem rather lukewarm about condemning oppression by Western governments. For example, you wrote:
> I’m rather cold to libertarians who seem to fear these unjust but peripheral laws far more than the mentality behind Holocaust denial itself.
Excellent point. I’m indeed one of those libertarians. I do not fear the Holocaust deniers at all. They’re insignificant, intellectually sloppy, senile old nobodies who will never have any power at all. But the sorts of laws being used against them can and have been used against others, as some cases in Canada have recently shown.
Indeed, it seems to me that your own anti-Chinese remarks may count as crimes under European anti-hate laws: the laws are rather broad, you know. Would you mind if I contact some European prosecutors and see if they will consider taking action against you for this? Or would you prefer to have a higher standard applied to you than to Holocaust deniers?
Let me try this one more time. Germany recently jailed some homeschooling fathers for the horrific crime of educating their children at home – seems there is a Hitler-era law that the Germans still have on the books that makes it clear that children belong to the state. Here ( http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-08/11/content_467993.htm ) is a story from ’05 which seems to show that China is much more tolerant of homeshoolers.
I’m a homeschooling dad myself. If I lived in Germany, they’d put me in jail.
I don’t claim China is utopia, or even that it is better than Germany or the USA on balance.
But can you still claim with a straight face that China is the “the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet”?
Come on!
You also wrote:
> I’m impressed with your intellectual ambition to learn Chinese, and with the free choice of your children to do the same.
Oh, c’mon, Aster, young chap! I’m pretty sure you’ve already figured out that our family does not work that way.
My wife and I have a deal with the kids: we provide food, clothes, shelter, and a bunch of other goods and services, and, in exchange, the kids do the schoolwork we tell them to do.
Think of me and my wife as the evil capitalists and our kids as wage slaves.
So far, the kids seem to have decided that they have pretty good working conditions and are not seeking an alternative source of income.
Now, of course, from your perspective, my wife and I are evil, authoritarian, coercive parents. Frankly, given the obvious divergence between your and my values, if you approved of our parenting approach, I would be very worried indeed!
You spoke derisively of “bourgeois libertarians” and of the Chinese “familial” orientation and of the Chinese repressive attitude towards sexuality.
Well, to be quite open, some of the reasons I don’t much like the mainstream libertarian movement in the US is that it is not bourgeois enough for me, that it is not sufficiently familially oriented for my tastes, and that it share the general American obsession with sexuality.
You and I agree that the libertarian movement is too American-centric. But, as you seem to understand, at least in the case of China, most of the world holds more to “bourgeois morality,” to a “familial” orientation, and to a less over-sexualized approach to human life than the US and Western Europe.
These are some of the reasons I am rather fond of several non-Western cultures: they’re so bourgeois, familial, and non-sexualized (okay, there’s also the food).
You wrote:
> I have noticed that my values and priorities on these issues seem to be hopelessly out of sync with most members of the human race…
I think your attitudes are more typical of Americans than you realize, Aster. But, yep, Americans are out of sync with most of the human race. That’s why I’m a paleo-multicultural-internationalist libertarian.
Asia über alles!
I’m really looking forward to the new Asian-centric future (not to mention the food). But, Aster, I don’t think you, and indeed most American libertarians, are going to like it at all.
Not at all.
Dave
Dave-
I am not a chap, and would appreciate if you would apologise for words which, to a transsexual woman, come across as a very serious and I assume wholly unintentional personal insult.
Otherwise, it should be considered bad form to gloat over the potential oppression and marginalisation of others. I would have once said: especially if one calls oneself a libertarian.
I consider laws against homeschooling to be horrible, of course.
-Aster
As powers become imperial when and where they can, the asian-centric future will be at least as bloody and horrifying as the 20th Century.
I’m trying to catch up with life after the Denver convention, and apologize for any delay in responding.
Sorry, Brad: I do know better. SEK3 and I were very friendly with each other back in the early 1980s when I lived in Orange County, California. But agorists regularly deny the educational value of the LP (see Physicist Dave above).
Last week, we came within 60 votes of having a hardcore anarchist as the LP presidential candidate. There were 400 open delegate slots, and far more than 60 anarchists who could have gone to Denver but didn’t. I think it would have been a great opportunity to spread the message of liberty, if only by increasing the sales of Mary Ruwart’s books, including the most popular left-libertarian primer yet written, Healing Our World In An Age Of Aggression. I think we lost a major educational opportunity. But we were 45%: that isn’t a hopeless cause.
I don’t think the LP is necessary: I would prefer a world in which the Molinari Institute was the largest libertarian organization in the country. But it isn’t, and as long as there is an LP, I want it to promote a platform as libertarian as possible. Let me add that I don’t think counter-economics is necessary, and I see no correlation between black markets and liberty.
In my view, changing people’s ideas, their preferences, in the direction of the non-aggression principle is all that is needed. All institutional changes will then automatically take place, “as if guided by an invisible hand.”
Physicist Dave – I am one of those who came into the movement because of the LP, but I’m afraid you probably don’t count me as a true libertarian. I don’t hate the state any more than I hate unicorns. There are only people: government is a word people use to legitimize aggression, and if we remove the legitimacy from acts of aggression, our job is basically done. The rest is crime control.
And if the world adopts the non-aggression principle because the Dalai Lama has convinced everyone it is more skillful means, we will have a free society without people being filled with hate or believing in natural rights (or the existence of the self, for that matter). I think Rothbard was wrong that we need hate. Hate is the Health of the State, too.
So come on, let’s all hold hands and … well, maybe not.
Aster wrote to me:
>I am not a chap, and would appreciate if you would apologise for words which, to a transsexual woman, come across as a very serious and I assume wholly unintentional personal insult.
Aster, young chap, in my vocabulary, “chap,” like “guy,” is gender neutral. Since I am not sure whether I would consider you male or female, this seems appropriate. I’m not sure, for example, whether by “transsexual woman” you mean someone who was born biologically female and now passes for male or the other way around. And, even if you choose to fill us in on that, I’m still not sure which I would consider you to be. Frankly, I don’t really care, which is why I use terms that I consider gender neutral: as I said, one of the things I like about Chinese culture is that it is not quite as over-sexualized and obsessed with gender as American culture. Even Chinese spoken personal pronouns are gender neutral, and I know a lot of Chinese who are unable to master the stupid English “he vs. she” grammatical distinction.
And, since you still seem unwilling to retract your bizarrely false statement:
>But China? A world whose future lies with the most brutal and extensive dictatorship on the planet? Get me a drink
it does appear to me that you are also a racist. I can think of no other reason why you single out the Chinese for such a libelously malicious attack.
Now, could you provide us with a link to this story about the Chinese woman who was, you claim, internally deported, or did you just make this up like your general accusation against China?
Dave
Less wrote of me:
> But agorists regularly deny the educational value of the LP (see Physicist Dave above).
Less, I don’t think I count as an agorist: for example, I supported and voted for Ron Paul in the GOP primary (and have spoken out in his behalf on the Web here and elsewhere), which, I think, is “un-agorist.”
I did not mean to deny that the LP might occasionally have educational value, but, in my experience in the LP, that net value seemed to be negative. For example, as we’ve all discussed, the LP has often actually served to cement in the minds of some libertarians the idea that libertarianism is inconsistent with anarchism. At least from what I saw of the LP during the years I was involved, the LP seemed to project a “low-tax liberalism”/”pot-smokers for lower taxes” image to the public, which I think actually makes it harder for the public to grasp the idea of principled libertarianism.
I think these problems are structurally inherent to the LP: third parties tend to collect slightly (!) kooky adherents, the game third parties play to get media attention is to pretend that they might really win and that they have “practical” and “responsible” policy proposals, etc.
Ron Paul avoided some of these problems as a GOP candidate: I doubt that anyone views Ron as a pot-smoker for low taxes, for example! And, I think he did a better job of projecting sensible middle-class anger and disgust at the state than most LP candidates do.
On the other hand, he did still have the problem of hiding radical libertarian views under “responsible” policy proposals.
Less wrote to me:
> Physicist Dave – I am one of those who came into the movement because of the LP, but I’m afraid you probably don’t count me as a true libertarian. I don’t hate the state any more than I hate unicorns. There are only people: government is a word people use to legitimize aggression, and if we remove the legitimacy from acts of aggression, our job is basically done. The rest is crime control.
Well stated. If I had been more precise, I would have said not “hate the state” but rather something like “hate the inculcation of the delusionary idea of the state and the use of this delusion to confuse people so as to continue criminal activities.”
Less also wrote:
> In my view, changing people’s ideas, their preferences, in the direction of the non-aggression principle is all that is needed. All institutional changes will then automatically take place, “as if guided by an invisible hand.”
Right on! How to do that is the question. I am inclined to think that activities such as Rod’s blog, the Rockwell blog, and even the Paul candidacy in the GOP are likely to do this better than the LP. But I might be wrong.
I don’t think you or Mary Ruwart or Ron Paul (or Rod or RadGeek or Brad) are evil or duplicitous people. I view our debate simply as a matter of which tactics are likely to work. As you know, I actually admire your efforts over the years in the LP to inject some seriousness and concern with principle (as when you edited Caliber so many years ago). I tried this for several years myself (not as long or energetically as you!), but I finally decided it was fruitless.
I wish you well. I just do not think, based on what I saw of the LP over many years and of my understanding of the dynamics of third parties, that you are likely to succeed.
But you may well prove me wrong. Good luck.
All the best,
Dave
“Let me add that I don’t think counter-economics is necessary, and I see no correlation between black markets and liberty.”
Some time ago I would’ve just engaged in a merciless mocking of you and your ideas after reading something that I disagree (and I do disagree with the above), but I’ve come to prefer a tack of understanding instead. So let me ask, in the spirit of understanding:
Do you see any correlation between markets (not specifically black) and liberty?
If you do, what is it about black markets that changes things? As you and I are libertarians I’m going to assume it’s not the absence of state interference that’s the cause.
If you don’t see any correlation between markets and liberty then… are you sure you’re in the right place?
Dave-
I don’t reply to spurious and ridiculous accusations. Anyone can read my comments and see that I was criticising the current totalitarian Chinese government, not Chinese people or even Chinese culture (which, as i said, in some respect I highly admire). In the same sense, I loathe the American government.(which still isn’t as bad as China’s), but do not believe in making clueless collective judgements against people who happen to be or to have once been Americans.
As for citations, I don’t recall where I read that article- and it doesn’t matter, given that anyone with even a passing knowledge of world events is aware of the extremely brutal record of fascist (‘Communist’) China. I don’t exchange words with patronising bigots if I can possibly avoid it in any case. I am here merely very much disappointed to find that Roderick apparently has no objections to your ignorant, patriarchal, and deliberately cruel behaviour.
Anyone who wishes to believe you is welcome to. If libertarians today can’t see what is wrong with the planet’s largest dictatorship, and don’t care if one of their own gleefully looks forward to a time of growing collectivist repression of the human spirit (or simply salivates at the thought of human pain), then they are hopeless in any case. Like, whatever. Nothing I hear a libertarian say will surprise me any more.
PhysicistDave:
I absolutely know that the comments by you, Rod, Brad, Rad, etc. are all part of a healthy discussion on what we can best do for liberty (which will, of course, not be the same activities for all of us, any more than all of us need to choose the same profession). I come here because of the generally high level of rational discussion among people who are able to disagree without being disagreeable. This site and Liberty & Power are my two favorites in this regard, with somewhat different though overlapping participants as the explanation.
I’m actually of a similar mind as Rod in that I view my participation in the LP (which is almost exclusively in a writing capacity) as representing my assessment of where I personally can provide the greatest marginal utility, rather than as an endorsement of the collective decision to form and maintain the LP. I had a debate with George Smith back in the good old days of Caliber in 1982 at the LPC Convention, and really annoyed LP Founder David Nolan (who was attending the debate) when I said that I wouldn’t have formed the LP if it had been up to me, but given that it exists, it is essentially a sunk cost, and now the question for each of us is whether we can do more for liberty by working within it or not. I’m pretty sure I scored some points against George, a worthy opponent, since a walkout from the party didn’t follow, and SEK3 came up afterwards and said, “Less, you’re dangerous.” And Nolan forgave me, and was delighted to see me in Denver this past week.
I certainly don’t claim the LP is necessary nor the best choice for anyone else. Over the years, though, I think I have helped make it more radical in the late 1970s early 1980s than it would have been without my participation (and think it slipped when I was gone, in part because I was gone, if you can believe my insufferable ego). I know my writings helped educate many LP members to more fully accept the philosophy and be better persuaders for it, and I think this was a good thing. At the moment, it once again feels like the most useful activity for me. For me.
And I will do my best to prove you wrong. 😉 I’m too heartened by the 45% vote for Mary Ruwart to give it up.
Black Bloke:
Yes, of course, I believe there is a correlation between markets and liberty (approximately 100%). I do not think black markets change the minds of people toward the benefits of markets particularly well, in part because they are crippled in their ability to create wealth and in part because they are more limited in their ability to communicate with those people whose minds need changing. I also think the evidence is that the countries that are closest to liberty have the lowest levels of black market activity. I certainly see no evidence that the percentage of black market activity has a positive correlation with liberty. Do you?
As I suggested, I believe the entire task is changing people’s ideas in the direction of the non-aggression principle. I weigh strategies against the metric of how effectively they change people’s minds. If we expand the agorist strategy to include all educational efforts, I’m an agorist, but if we explicitly exclude educational efforts in connection with political campaigns, I’m not. Those who deny that Ron Paul has advanced the cause of liberty have not persuaded me.
I know many people get into the discussion of whether getting people elected to dismantle power, civil disobedience, or creating alternative institutions will be the principal method of moving to a totally free society, but I see all of that as secondary to finding the best methods of persuasion and changing people’s minds. After that, I trust the market to find the method.
By the way, I hope it is clear that I consider black markets and civil disobedience to be entirely legitimate, and condemn the idea that we should obey government laws except to the extent we are already obligated not to aggress or to the extent we are making reasonable decisions not to fight a criminal because of the harm to us or our loved ones that will result.
I think the most interesting thing that could happen is: what if Barr and Root win, say, 7 million votes? That would be a much higher total than ever before. Lots of Republicans won’t vote for McCain, but might well vote for Barr (scratch and sniff test, he smells Republican).
What does that mean? It means that the reform caucus will shout from the rooftops that the LP is only successful when it runs a candidate so much like the Republicrats and Demopublicans that he is indistinguishable as a “libertarian” of any sort. Which, quite frankly, proves the point of the agorists.
But, it has other consequences. We’ll see a huge number of people who really are radical anarcho-capitalist agorist sorts leave the LP (good) and many others won’t go there to start because they’ll no it is no place for them at all. That second bit is bad, folks, because we’ll have to go find them.
Yes, the LP has been my hunting grounds, and I’m proud to say that I have found fully fledged buck agorists in the field there and dragged them to the door into freedom. Some have even opened the door, imagine that. A few walked through, praise freedom.
So, here we are, at the end of the first decade of the third millennium, and we’re about to see our favorite hunting grounds turned into a fookin’ sheep pasture. Spit.
But, Tom Knapp, seeing this coming at us in 2006, like a freight train it was, jumped on the obvious solution. He formed the Boston Tea Party. Bit of work, hard fought battles on principle, and maybe some artful ballot access nudge-nudge, we’re back in bidness.
And if they win the presidency, the reform caucus will REALLY be in charge. 😉
I don’t think there’s much chance of a multi-million vote total: they haven’t even raised $70,000 since the convention. I agree that any major success will result in the LP abandoning radicalism forever. Whether that results in a jump to the Boston Tea Party or out of politics entirely is a matter on which I won’t speculate. I do think that’s your best chance, although I don’t see how your platform is going to attract more radicals than the LP. But I know you’re committed to your strategy for now.
My guess is that the ticket will disappoint all expectations among reformers, and that the 45% I keep mentioning will become the majority, the 2012 election campaign will be the most consistent libertarian campaign in the history of the LP, and it will either prove the worth of the party or be the death of both the LP and the BTP. Then we all go to work for Brad Spangler.
Less:
I’m glad to have read the “By the way…” add-on before I replied. Your acknowledgement that it is the state that is really illegitimate and not the black market or the black marketers that are, is reassuring. You said before that you don’t think that counter-economics is necessary, but I believe the opposite. I believe that counter-economics is the most natural response to an aggressive economic entity like the state, as it literally means spurning that aggressive entity and choosing liberty from it. It seems like it has in fact been the only way people have ever moved from rule by one state to rule by another state, I’m certainly hoping that it will be the way for people to move from rule by a state to statelessness. Ordinarily I see an act of counter-economics in the real world as a person rejecting an old regime for a new one, and that is the representative switching of loyalties.
Communication, and mind-changing, and education, are very well and good (and necessary) but I’m afraid that those methods only work with people who are willing to communicate, willing to have their minds changed, and willing to be educated. Perhaps I’m jaded, but I see less and less of that the longer I live, and looking back on it I’m not sure I found much of it years ago. What it seems most people respond to is something tangible. Some good or service that they can grasp with their senses and not with their reason, seems to be a fantastic tool for convincing people. They are usually willing to listen from that point on. Building up a theoretical world of freely acting individuals, and making the attempt to illustrate to people how things would work simply seems (from experience) to be inferior to just showing them.
No positive correlation between the percentage of black market activity and liberty is different from your original statement (the one which I originally replied to). If what we mean by liberty is the absence of aggression and the freedom for an individual to do as he wills (within the confines of logic), and the black market as liberty applied to markets, then I see a 100% correlation between the level of black market activity and liberty. Almost every action that I take everyday when freely interacting with other people I consider a black market activity. The liberty as seen in the western world today seems to me to be more like the freedom to do as the state says, or to do what the state has said it will permit. So the countries that are closest to liberty in my opinion have the highest amount of black market activity. Any kind of taxation, any kind of regulation, any kind of restriction, or control is a negation of liberty for me, and the “free” countries of the world seem to be steeped in those things. Perhaps you disagree with that assessment. Perhaps when you hear the phrase “black markets” you only think in terms of the transports of necessities like food, water, and arms (a lot of folks I talk to seem to only have in mind Eastern Europe or the Middle East when they think of black markets). I think you just have to widen your vision of black markets beyond what is called black market activity by the evening news.
Of course I also think that the Agorist method will be the only viable method for finally eliminating the state. I’m not sure where I read it now, but I read it recently: if the state were abolished tomorrow, people would the next day go about setting it back up again. The reason is because people associate certain services with the state, and think that they can only be provided by the state. Convincing them that this isn’t the case is the end of the state. Now you may interject at this point and exclaim, “That’s what I’m talking about! Educating people that the state is unnecessary!” And that’s correct to an extent. You’re work in educating people will definitely be necessary and helpful in spreading understanding, but I think showing people an already functioning non-state alternative will be even more effective. The Agorists’ work will be in establishing those non-state institutions. You already know the rest from here on out about how every hour we spend in electioneering, is an hour taken away from building those alternative institutions, so I won’t repeat the whole spiel.
If counter-economic institutions include the American Arbitration Association, ADR (alternative dispute resolution) attorneys, private security firms, doormen, and neighborhood watches that provide alternatives to what are comically referred to as “essential government services” then I am in complete agreement that they are necessary to educate people on the benefits of liberty and, therefore, necessary to the achievement of a free society. I DO use what I think is the conventional definition of a black market when I refer to business activities that are illegal under current government law. I consider such black markets to be entirely moral and, in some especially repressive societies, essential to survival,, but do think I have a point about the difficulty in accumulating wealth and the limitations on one’s ability to communicate their benefits to people while remaining free of government retaliation.
I don’t believe there are many human beings who, in the final analysis, are better off in the present society than in a free one, including the majority of people serving as government employees and the majority of people working for or owning shares in businesses that have cozied up to the government, so I don’t think there would be sufficient power on the other side to oppose the move toward a non-aggressive society if everyone who would be better off in one realized it.
This is why my metric is educational value, and why I think taking the opportunity political elections offer to reach people who normally don’t think of politics is useful, and why I think creating alternative institutions that can operate openly without the threat of statist aggression is far more useful for the causes of liberty than those that have to operate out of sight and out of mind of most people..
I’m not as discouraged as you might be about the possibility of direct persuasion working. Part of it is that I’ve had a decent amount of personal success, but mostly its because I’ve watched how most libertarians persuade, and their problem is not radicalism but rudeness. In that sense, I think the most useful organization in the movement is Advocates for Self Government, which focuses on making libertarians better salespeople for liberty, and which actually reaches a pretty good number of people (their newsletter goes out to more than 70,000, and their world’s smallest libertarian quiz, while flawed, has been taken by over 10 million people).
So long as black markets, or counter-economic institutions, if you prefer, include all non-aggressive institutions, I’m obviously in no substantive disagreement. But in the name of clarity, I do think it is more straightforward to say that I believe our fundamental task is simple: DELEGITIMIZE COERCION. The market can be trusted to make all appropriate institutional changes as that occurs, and the value of all strategies should be weighed primarily against the measure of how effectively they change people’s minds in that direction. Power comes from legitimacy, not guns, and I don’t see success as a class struggle because I don’t think there are many people on the other side objectively (in the sense of being net beneficiaries of coercion). I do think the rejection of class analysis put me on the opposite side of the analysis provided by most people I know who refer to themselves as agorists.
But another clarification is in order: SEK3 and I were very friendly with each other, and I know our respect was mutual, from some things he said to me and about me. He was a hero of libertarianism, and his advocacy was one thing that kept the LP from straying as far as it might have done as fast as it might have done. I think non-LP critics of the LP do a great service to the extent they criticize any advocacy of aggression by LP candidates and activists (although I disagree with those who believe that its very existence is an act of aggression). I also think critics who remain friendly (Roderick Long being the prototype) do the most good.