So if these guys are so eager to convince us that they’re nonpartisan and equally friendly with right and left, why do they use the language of the Communist Manifesto? Is it irony or code? Anyone know what their deal is?
Tag Archives | Left and Right
A Match Made in Hell
Libertarians who recognise the oppressive effects of statism everywhere – but insist that we are currently living in a society in which women have achieved effective legal and social equality, and indeed a certain degree of legally-mandated superiority.
Feminists who recognise the oppressive effects of patriarchy everywhere – but insist that we are currently living in a free market in which government intervention has been scaled back to nearly nothing.
Tea and Sympathy
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Justin D.’s been nagging me to blog about the Tea Parties, so here’s my two pence:
Whichever party is out of power always begins to emphasise its libertarian-sounding side in order to divert anti-government sentiment toward support of that party rather than toward genuine radical opposition to the entire establishment.
By the same token, the party that’s in power employs alarmist rhetoric about the other side’s supposed anti-government radicalism in order to drum up support for its own policies.
Thus events like the Tea Parties serve the interests of both parties; people with libertarian leanings get diverted into supporting one half of the bipartisan duopoly, the antistate message getting diluted by mixture with (in this case) right-wing statist crap about war and immigration and the Kulturkampf. Those turned off by this creepy right-wing stew get diverted into supporting the other half of the bipartisan duopoly, with any libertarian sentiments likewise getting diluted into (in this case) left-wing statist crap about gun control and the need to impose regulation on some imaginary laissez-faire economy. And so the whole power structure ends up being reinforced.
I saw this game under Clinton, I saw (almost) everyone switch teams under Bush, and now they’re all switching back again. And so we get Republican pundits and politicians suddenly howling about Obama’s fascism when they’ve never supported anything but fascism in their entire lives; and on the other side we get Democrats ridiculing the very sorts of concerns about oppression and civil liberties violations that they pretended to take seriously under Dubya’s reign.
Is it worth libertarians’ and/or anarchists’ while to participate in such events? Sure; because while the voices at the podium tend to be statist apparatchiks, the crowds will tend to be a mixture of statist yahoos and genuinely libertarian-leaning folks, and outreach to the latter is always worth a try – in Kierkegaard’s words, “to split up the crowd, or to talk to it, not to form a crowd, but so that one or another individual might go home from the assembly and become a single individual.” But of course the organisers of such events are on the lookout for us and always do their best to try to narrow the boundaries of discussion.
Without the Gaoler We Should Soon Want for Gruel
I’ve often noticed how right-libertarian criticisms of left-libertarians look a lot like statist criticisms of libertarians in general.
My bud (I was going to say “my compadre” before I found out what it actually means) Stephan (who, I must in fairness point out, is by no means a right-libertarian across the board, but who nonetheless is incontinently* prone to reveling in his right-libertarian side whenever opportunity permits) seems bent on proving my point; he thinks it’s a score against left-libertarianism that these prosthetic legs were developed by a capitalist corporation. How is this different from the statists’ notion that the state’s provision of roads, mail service, and the like is some kind of score against libertarianism?
Votre théorie s’arrête à ce qu’on voit, ne tient pas compte de ce qu’on ne voit pas.
* I use the term in the Aristotelean sense of excessive susceptibility to temptation, not in the medical sense of poor bladder control – though the meanings are not unrelated.
The Atrocity of Hope, Part 3: Hail the Immune Sovereign
He’s more likable than Bush. He’s more articulate than Bush. But when it comes to essentials, Obama’s not a hell of a lot different.
Check out Kevin Carson’s latest C4SS editorial.
Democrats For Plutocrats
Left-leaning libertarians and libertarian-leaning leftists have been saying for years that “liberals” (in the mainstream sense), far from wielding the club of governmental regulation against big business, have been among the chief enforcers of corporate interests.
Now we get confirmation straight from the horse’s mouth. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (Conical hat tip to Lew Rockwell and Ralph Raico), Obama, Biden, and Clinton all have a higher “pro-business” record than Ron Paul – because (and give them credit for their honesty) the Chamber’s criterion for being “pro-business” is support for corporate subsidies and special privileges, not support for free markets.
The right-leaning Washington Examiner’s story makes it sound as though it’s liberals rather than conservatives that are pawns of the plutocracy (hence their headline “New Chamber index shows conservatives aren’t corporate pawns”), but a look at the winners of the Chamber’s “Spirit of Corporate Welfare Enterprise” award shows Republicans and Democrats both eagerly filling the trough – with my own state’s Senator Richard Shelby at the top of the list.