This piece is useful for noting a) the success of private boycotts, direct action, etc., against the Charlottesville racists, as well as b) the shocking revelation that racists are also sexists.
Note also white nationalists’ fondness for the slogan “Blood and Soil.” Who knew?
The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville today is attempting to promote a mass movement in which, inter alia, libertarians are supposed to make common cause with neo-Nazis.
If you’re a libertarian who’s not down with this, please consider signing the statement here:
Some quick comments on Jeff Deist’s latest:
[W]hile libertarians enthusiastically embrace markets, they have for decades made the disastrous mistake of appearing hostile to family, to religion, to tradition, to culture, and to civic or social institution[s] – in other words, hostile to civil society itself.
This is a dubious package-deal. Many libertarians have been hostile to religion (often for good reason). Hostility to family per se is not terribly common (leaving aside Molyneux), though hostility to family-based oppression is. As for tradition, libertarians – like everybody else – embrace some traditions and reject others.
But the real howler is the alleged hostility to “culture, and … civic or social institutions.” Where are there any examples or evidence of this?
[I]t is reasonable to believe that a more libertarian society would be less libertine and more culturally conservative – for the simple reason that as the state shrinks in importance and power, the long-suppressed institutions of civil society grow in importance and power. And in a more libertarian society, it’s harder to impose the costs of one’s lifestyle choices on others.
As I see it, this gets things precisely backwards. States impose uniformity; civil society, freed of state control, caters to diversity. It’s true, to be sure, that a libertarian society makes it “harder to impose the costs of one’s lifestyle choices on others” – but what is cultural conservatism if not a massive attempt to impose the costs of lifestyle choices on others? (On this point, see my critique of Rothbard on patriarchy here.)
If any evidence is needed of the dangers of cultural conservatism, notice that Deist feels moved to invoke an actual Nazi slogan in his closing paragraph:
In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance.
In response to this, I can’t help thinking of these lines from C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle:
And all the Calormenes banged the flats of their swords on their shields and shouted, “Tash! Tash! The great god Tash! Inexorable Tash!” (There was no nonsense about “Tashlan” now.)
So end all attempts to combine liberty with its opposite.
So apparently Rothbard is Doctor Who now:
Well, that explains his conversion from lefty to paleo: it was a regeneration! Kind of like from Five to Six.
In a recent defense of mandatory national service, establishment media apparatchik Mark Shields writes:
Contrary to Ayn Rand, we all do owe much to each other and to our country. And mandatory two-year national service – civilian or military – is imperative to help us understand the responsibility, as well as the rights, of citizenship and build our connections with our fellow citizens. Two years, with no deferments and no exemptions.
It’s an unintended compliment to Ayn Rand that Shields feels the need to bash her in order to defend slavery.
[cross-posted at BHL]
I’m pleased to announce (belatedly) a new anthology from the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS): Free Markets & Capitalism?: Do Free Markets Always Produce a Corporate Economy?, edited by Cory Massimino and James Tuttle.
One third of Free Markets & Capitalism? (not to be confused with C4SS’s earlier anthology Markets Not Capitalism) reproduces an online exchange from last year among Kevin Carson, Derek Wall, and Steve Horwitz on the question of whether corporate capitalism would indeed wither away in a genuinely freed market, as left-libertarians contend, or whether instead, as both capitalist and socialist critics of left-libertarianism maintain (whether cheerfully or gloomily), market incentives would tend to reproduce much of the structure of corporate capitalism even without state intervention to support the process.
The other two-thirds of the book are devoted to background readings (most by Kevin Carson – including his classic, The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand – but also a couple by me, and one by the late Roy Childs) expounding the left-libertarian position on the issue.
Buy a copy today! Buy two copies tomorrow! Buy four copies the next day, and eight the day after that, and so on ….