My Misesian friends are hailing Ron Paul’s candidacy as the second coming. My agorist friends wouldn’t vote for him at gunpoint. 
I’m somewhere in between. But I did get a kick this past week from seeing the clusters of Ron Paul rEVOLution signs that seem to be sprouting up along all the major streets in Auburn. I don’t know who’s been doing it (at least I don’t know them de dicto; I probably know them de re) but it’s fun to see.
Tag Archives | Democracy
Sam Konkin Endorses Ron Paul!
Okay, not really. But Konkin does appear as one of the “long-standing tradition of voluntaryist thinkers” listed in this Ron Paul video – along with such folks as Molinari, Spooner, Tucker, Mises, Rothbard, and even your humble correspondent.
Beat Your Swords Into Thetans
I just saw a commercial in which a girl acting in a school play suddenly breaks from the script and asks why soldiers should obey an unjust ruler’s order to go into battle, and why government should be allowed to serve only a few rather than everybody. Radical stuff, especially the former. (The latter is a pipe dream, though a well-intentioned one.)
So I went to the advertised website and discovered it’s some L. Ron Hubbard outfit. Does that mean the Scientologists are pushing military civil disobedience now? I didn’t know they swung that way.
Still, on said website one of the listed 21 Ethical Precepts is “Don’t Do Anything Illegal,” which would seem to conflict with the aforementioned suggestion of endorsing civil disobedience. Of course on a Socratic-Scholastic-Spoonerite understanding of law there’s no conflict, but is that what they mean?
I suppose I could satisfy my curiosity by shelling out 18 bucks for a bundle of booklets; but the last Hubbard tract I read did not awaken within me any desire to tackle another.
JLS 21.2: What Lies Within?
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
The latest issue (21.2) of the Journal of Libertarian Studies features James R. Edwards on the advantages of private charity over government welfare; Brian Smith on the implications of Tocqueville’s ideas for the prospects of free-market anarchy in a democratic culture; Raymond J. Krohn on the contrast between the genuine libertarianism of Lysander Spooner and the pseudo-libertarianism of the Jacksonian Democrats; Laurence Vance on the federalist case for the Kelo decision; David Gold on the origins of laissez-faire constitutionalism in resistance to pro-business legislation; Dan D’Amico on Alex Tabarrok’s anthology on private prisons; and Norbert Lennartz on Michael van Notten’s and Spencer MacCallum’s defense of Somali customary law.
Read a fuller summary of 21.2’s contents here.
Read summaries of previous issues under my editorship here.
Read back issues online here.
Subscribe here.
Honour or Face?
In the GOP debate tonight Ron Paul had an exchange with Huckabee (I think – one of those doofuses anyway) which ended with Huckabee saying the U.S. had to stay in Iraq to save its “honour,” and Paul replying by asking how many more lives had to be lost for the U.S. to “save face.”
On Hannity & Colmes they just now replayed the exchange – cutting off just before Paul’s reply.
Gotta love that fair-and-balanced Fox ….
Burr Blur
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
I’ve been interested in Aaron Burr revisionism for a while. Burr had the bad luck to make enemies of both Jefferson and Hamilton, thus earning the ire of historians across the political spectrum; but I’ve long suspected that Burr, like Jefferson and Hamilton, was a complicated mix of good and bad and not the plaster villain he’s been cast as. (Besides, a man who wears a locket of Mary Wollstonecraft can’t be all bad!)
I just saw a C-Span talk by Nancy Isenberg on her Burr-revisionist book Fallen Founder. The book sounded interesting, and less blindly adulatory of Burr than, say, Roger Kennedy’s book. (Kennedy’s Burr, an uncompromising abolitionist hero trying to carve out a territorial enclave of racial and sexual equality, always seemed a bit too good to be true.)
Unfortunately, I was put off by the fact that Isenberg said several things that seemed to me historically dubious:
1. Isenberg said that Hamilton wrote ahead of time that he planned to fire into the air during his duel with Burr. No; he wrote ahead of time that he planned not to fire at all. (Or at least he said that he planned to “reserve and throw away” his shot. “Throw away” is ambiguous, I suppose, between firing into the air and not firing, but “reserve” seems to favour the latter.)
2. She said that James Monroe’s military interventionism was at odds with the anti-interventionism of his own Monroe Doctrine. No; the Monroe Doctrine was not anti-interventionist – quite the contrary.
3. She said that Hamilton was a slaveowner. Maybe; but although Hamilton was complicit in slavery in various ways, as far as I know his actually owning slaves hasn’t been proven. (He had black servants, but I don’t believe it’s ever been determined whether they were free or slave. Of course, I haven’t read her book; perhaps she proves this?)