42 posts tagged “paleolibertarian”
Mr. Sobran is of course brilliant. Read his latest piece available online, "The Nixon I Didn't Know," by clicking here.
"Hey, Neocon": Paleos are winning on the web.
(Plus see A Few More Thoughts)
Paul Gottfired talks about his new book, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right . . .
--- The Neoconning of the American Right at LRC.
--- Buy Making Sense Of The American Right! at VDARE.
--- My Book at TakiMag.
Lew Rockwell on War Without End.
Justin Raimondo: Vietnam, Again.
War With Iran? It has already started, says Raimondo.
An Acid Trip Gone Bad by Fred Reed.
A Political Theory of Geeks and Wonks by Jeffrey Tucker (Which are you? Geek or Wonk?)
(I did take the time to watch this, despite a slow connection. Great interview! And a very nice look inside the wonderful Mises Institute and its, from all I have seen, delightful atmosphere and, dare I say, culture.)
Download The Bastiat Collection [PDFs]
Ms. Karen De Coster links to her wonderful 2002 article “Since When Is 'Private Property' Not Self-Explanatory?” in this recent LRC blog entry.
Excerpt:
Libertarian guru Murray Rothbard called them "modal libertarians." They are an assemblage of leftover Marxists, 60s-70s drug users, cultural leftists, assorted members of the Arts-and-Croissant crowd, and Christian-hating atheists. They latch onto the libertarian name because, somehow, they think "libertarian" means "do-whatever-the-heck-you-want" in the name of freedom. ...
Read the entire article here.
She expands on the topic of discrimination, immigration, and political correctness. I echo her views in the article.
***
Brainstorm to What's Coming Up (Tentative) on The Paleo Blog:
I do want to do a summary on Chodorov's Rise and Fall of Society. Maybe at the end of the week I will type it up. The same goes for The Market for Liberty by Linda and Morris Tannehill. There are a lot of other things I would like to touch on in next couple of weeks or so: From Anti-Trust Laws to Rothbard on Feminism...
Sean Gabb gives a report on the second meeting of Hans Hoppe’s Property and Freedom Society. You can read it here. (Hat Tip: My Internet buddy ‘paleolibertarian.’)
The Property and Freedom Society stands for an uncompromising intellectual radicalism: for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one's personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of "outcome" or "opportunity," and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians. As such it seeks to avoid any association with the policies and proponents of interventionism, which Ludwig von Mises had identified in 1946 as the fatal flaw in the plan of the many earlier and contemporary attempts by intellectuals alarmed by the rising tide of socialism and totalitarianism to found an anti-socialist ideological movement. Mises wrote: "What these frightened intellectuals did not comprehend was that all those measures of government interference with business which they advocated are abortive. ... There is no middle way. Either the consumers are supreme or the government." (“Observations on Professor Hayek’s Plan,” typewritten memorandum dated 31 December 1946; Grove City Archive: MPS files; unpublished.)
As culturally conservative libertarians, we are convinced that the process of de-civilization has again reached a crisis point and that it is our moral and intellectual duty to once again undertake a serious effort to rebuild a free, prosperous, and moral society. It is our emphatic belief that an approach embracing intransigent political radicalism is, in the long run, the surest path to our cherished goal of a regime of totally unfettered individual liberty and private property. In thus seeking a fresh and radical new beginning, we are heeding the old but frequently forgotten advice of Friedrich Hayek's: "We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty..., which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. ... Unless we can make the philosophical foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost."
Prior to the bloodbath of Statism that we have today, the prerequisite for the shift from an ideology of individual liberty to statism required a change in the ideology of the majority of people. Contra some paleo beliefs in the supposed goodness of “populism,” which I relatively find more wickedness than goodness, shifts in ideology arise out of elites and intellectuals. Society is hierarchical (more or less), even in a stateless society. The great mass of people chase inline the ideological trends of the establishment. They parrot what the leaders (elites, intellectuals, and/or government officials) say. It is a rare man who truly thinks of something genuinely new and/or revolutionary. Even those that “lead” typically just gather their thoughts from an assortment of other elitist men.
Man is born unequal to each other. Man grows and develops unequal vis-à-vis each other. Some men will accomplish much and some little in their lives. Out of these men what will arrive are natural elites and intellectuals, but they are the rare breed. Equality is a myth and is antagonistic towards human nature. It is these natural elites and intellectuals that play a primary role in mending minds. Those “higher on top,” so to speak, can help ideological changes. Transformations in ideological compositions require that the new ideology be institutionalized.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains in his essay “Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State” that exogenous origins of governments is faulty. Instead Bertrand de Jouvenel presents that governments came about, says Hoppe, through “the monopolization of the function of judge and peacemaker” from naturally arriving noble families. Private property is hierarchical. Family is patriarchal. It is understandable how natural elites could form into monarchies, if they, as they could, institutionalize the idea that it would be better for them, the people, to only come to one noble family for protection and resolution of deputies. This natural elite would shun out all the others with the support of the majority of the people. This began the march towards statism.
It can sheds light on how to move back to individualism and freedom. To quote Hans Hoppe:
The mass of people, as La Boetie and Mises recognized, always and everywhere consists of "brutes," "dullards," and "fools," easily deluded and sunk into habitual submission. Thus today, inundated from early childhood with government propaganda in public schools and educational institutions by legions of publicly certified intellectuals, most people mindlessly accept and repeat nonsense such as that democracy is self-rule and government is of, by, and for the people. Even if they can see through this deception, most still unquestioningly accept democratic government on account of the fact that it provides them with a multitude of goods and benefits. Such "fools," observed La Boetie, do not realize that they are "merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them." Thus, every social revolution will necessarily have to begin with just a few uncommon men: the natural elite. [Democracy - The God That Failed, p 92]
Hoppe recommends that one withdraw oneself, as much as possible, from any connection to or support of government. Libertarian intellectual elites (or elites in the business world) must pursue not only uncompromising intellectual radicalism but also must live morally outstanding lives. This institutionalization of libertarian ideas must get to the public. He suggests that it must be radical and simple for the message to get out:
In fact, there must never be even the slightest wavering in one's commitment to uncompromising ideological radicalism ("extremism"). Not only anything less be counterproductive, but more importantly, only radical----indeed, radically simple----ideas can possibly stir the emotions of the dull and indolent masses. And nothing is more effective in persuading the masses to cease cooperating with government than the constant and relentless exposure, desanctification, and ridicule of government and its representatives as moral and economic frauds and impostors: as emperors without clothes subject to contempt and the butt of all jokes. [p 94]
Classical Liberalism
Leaving aside the question of how classical liberalism was born, it was institutionalized. In the North America it was institutionalized in the Declaration of Independence, but also in the culture: writings, plays, music, etc. This ethic is sometimes called the “Protestant Ethic.” So too was statism institutionalized for it to come into being.
But, firstly, how did classical liberalism decline?
“Mr. Libertarian,” the great Murray N. Rothbard, has addressed this topic in-depth. The answer is that it lost its radicalism. It started to seek power in the Leviathan State. Liberalism became pragmatic and hence utilitarian. It lost its natural rights tradition.
Losing its radicalism made it permissible for socialism to take over as the new ideal of hope---the new radical ideology. Liberalism then started to associate itself with conservatism and defending the status quo. The switching of the ideological terms “conservative” and “liberal” occurred. The aims of classical liberalism were morphed into the aims of the new statist liberalism, where collectivism would “free” the man. "[I]t tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means," wroth Rothbard.
The "basic reason," wrote Rothbard, for the decline of liberalism
was an inner rot within the vitals of liberalism itself. For, with the partial success of the Liberal Revolution in the West, the Liberals increasingly abandoned their radical fervor and, therefore, their liberal goals, to rest content with a mere defense of the uninspiring and defective status quo. Two philosophical roots of this decay may be discerned. First is the abandonment of natural rights and "higher law" theory for utilitarianism, for only forms of natural or higher law theory can provide a radical base outside the existing system from which to challenge the status quo; and only such theory furnishes a sense of necessary immediacy to the libertarian struggle by focusing on the necessity of brining existing criminal rulers to the bar of justice. Utilitarians, on he other hand, in abandoning justice for expediency, also abandon immediacy for quiet stagnation and inevitably end up as objective apologists for the existing order. [Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature, pp 25-6]
The second reason, said Rothbard, was Social Darwinist Theory. It saw the future as always progressing forward. For this reason liberal ideas would manifest themselves through time by default. Consequently it established a Whig Theory of history as truth in intellectual and ideological development as always evolving, in the long run, towards progress. Of course, using history as a guide, anything but progress has occurred in the struggle between chaining and unchaining man.
Errors of Classical Liberalism
Perhaps even more fundamentally and deadly to classical liberalism were some of the thoughts it held were erroneous and for that very reason doomed to failure. The only exception, that I am aware, of a classical liberal being a libertarian was Gustave de Molinari (1819-1911). Beyond him, the acceptance of a State to provide law and order was universally accepted without question.
However, as people like Rothbard and Hoppe have shown, a coercive monopolist providing law and order will distort law and order continually in favor of itself. Monopolists will cause the price of their services and/or products to rise and the production and quality to fall. The allocation of government’s protective functions will be uncoordinated and distorted because they do not have to respond to the real demands that people have (i.e., the market price signals that exist). The very idea of a State to be a protective institution is in error. It exists contradictory to protecting the lives, properties, and pursuit of happiness of individuals. Governments do not exist as an institution of defensive protection but of exploitation and aggression. In order to “protect” someone, it must first act in violation of its goal of protecting people from aggression!
And, as Hoppe has written extensively about, democracy was accepted as an improvement over classical monarchy. This is yet another error. Instead of the entry to government to be of a selected noble family, it was opened up for competition. Competition in the production of governmental functions is to improve those very functions of exploration and aggression. Mass democracy stirs up openly competing groups to acquire its power to rule over others. Secondly, democracy is akin to a publicly owned government. Its aggressive actions will be less calculating than a privately owned government. It will take the short-term look versus the long-term look. A monarchy is not a temporary ruler. Instead it wants to preserve the family rule for the future. That is to say, a monarchy owns the government in a private way. It not only owns the present use, but also the future. This gives a monarchy, unlike a democratic government, the incentive to be more conservative. Thus, under democracy, its control of individuals will invariably explode irrationally. The market place will be severely distorted and will throw man into a habitual political animal.
Social Environmentalism and Egalitarianism
Government has an interest in institutionalizing its existent and its expansion. Shocking this should not be. No further explanation is required here. Democracy compounds this process. The ideology of egalitarianism is party to blame. But, as paleoconservative Sam Francis suggested, it is not so much that egalitarians themselves subscribe to its philosophy, but use it to lure the dull masses.
One of the leftist creeds that I have not really written about on The Paleo Blog is the creed of environmentalism. No, not the communist anti-human Mother Nature worshipers, but an ethic that denies individualism.
It says that all the individual is is but a product of his environment and no free will or individuality exists. This thought gives rise to the inspiration of social engineering. It says that all problems one individual may have, is not his doing but that of society. (How much better is it for one to blame others for one’s problems then to blame oneself!? Democracy is a great way for those to express this infantile emotion.) Frank Chodorov called this the “Freudian Ethic.” This ethic denies any inborn traits. We are all “equal.” And any inequality or differences is consequently due to society and its environment. It is this environment that, the statists claim, can be molded by calculation to bring about “equality.”
"[T]he whole trust of environmentalism is toward relativism, the denial of moral absolutes, and behaviorism," wrote Francis. This is particularly pronounced in the court system. Lawyers use to to try to excuse, for example, murders to be just the product of their environment. And hence claim that punishment would be cruel. But, as Francis, so correctly stated: "it does not seem to have occurred to him [the given lawyer] that their executioners could equally claim to be merely their victims of their own environments."
Egalitarianism played a central role in the Progressivist ideological challenge, and the main form it assumed in the early twentieth century was that of "environmentalism"----not in the contemporary sense of concern for ecology but in the sense that human beings are perceived as the products of their social and historical environment rather than of their souls, or their innate mental and physical natures. Egalitarianism was implicit in environmentalist ideology. If the natural or inborn traits of human beings according to class, race, sexuality, nationality, culture, etc. is rooted in social environments rather than nature, then human beings are conceptually reduced to a set of identical reflexes and may be said to be "equal." [Shots Fired, p 209]
It has been taken to justify statist interventionism at all times and places. And from the welfare state has created a class of people that are dependent, who have lost all independence in reason and action, and have moved man to become increasingly political than productive. It has turned him into an inferior person intellectually and morally. As the welfare sate rewards failure and unproduction, it punishes success and production. Proliferation of the former role will increase.
By politics and maybe this form of environment ideology, says Chodorov, we now see handouts as due:
Society----that indefinite something that is more than the sum of its parts, and has an existence quite apart from that of the individuals, who compose it----owns us all a living. . . . If a man is provided with all the comforts of life, with little or no effort on his part, his psyche will demand more of these comforts----free gratis, and he will lose that independence of spirit that only through the exercise of will in overcoming obstacles to the satisfaction of his desires. He is likely to become like an animal waiting for the food that is thrown to him, unable to forage for himself. He is likely to become a malinger. [Out of Step, pp 20, 22-23]
Embracing Freedom --- Not Ideology
To come back to the beginning of this entry to The Paleo Blog, one must take Hans Hoppe’s advice and distant oneself from all political institutions. Libertarianism must be radical and embrace complete Rothbardism, least it becomes less radical and deteriorates any more than it has. It must be anti-establishment.
One must recognize that the State is not an institution of peace or order, but war and chaos. Free markets bring peace and order, States destroy it. One must also embrace the social intermediate institutions of society: family, kinship, church, community, etc. These things bring order and a moral society (a culturally conservative society). The State detaches and atomizes the individual, as the great paleoconservative Robert Nisbet has taught us, from these naturally arising market institutions. By doing this, the government destroys order and takes away social-cultural restraints to allow anti-natural behavior of man. Hence the State is not only a institution of war and chaos, but also moral degeneration.
Only
groups and institutions that support dismantling the States should be
supported. There is no way to reform governments. (E.g., “fair” tax
proposals, social security reforms, etc. must all be rejected.) One
must only support ideas that actually eliminate government functions.
Decentralization and all secession groups must be supported.
The great Thomas E. Woods, Jr. is the author of New York Times Bestseller, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. He is also the author of The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, among others. Both of the two books just mentioned I have read. I highly recommend both.
According to Amazon, his new book is coming out in July. It is called 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask.
Here is a sneak peek at the table of contents:
Contents
Introduction Hoaxes and History
Chapter 1 Did the Founding Fathers support immigration?
Chapter 2 Did Martin Luther King Jr. oppose affirmative action?
Chapter 3 Were the American Indians really environmentalists?
Chapter 4 Were states' rights just code words for slavery and oppression?
Chapter 5 What was "the biggest unknown scandal of the Clinton years"?
Chapter 6 How wild was the "wild West"?
Chapter 7 How antiwar have American liberals really been over the years?
Chapter 8 Did the Iroquois Indians influence the United States Constitution?
Chapter 9 Did desegregation of schools significantly narrow the black-white educational achievement gap?
Chapter 10 Was the Civil War all about slavery, or was something else at stake as well?
Chapter 11 Can the president, on his own authority, send troops anywhere in the world he wants?
Chapter 12 Is it true that during World War II "Americans never had it so good"?
Chapter 13 How does Social Security really work?
Chapter 14 Was George Washington Carver really one of America's greatest scientific geniuses?
Chapter 15 Was the U.S. Constitution meant to be a "living, breathing" document that changes with the times?
Chapter 16 Did Indian wisdom help the Pilgrims grow corn?
Chapter 17 Who is most responsible for the "imperial presidency"?
Chapter 18 Is discrimination to blame for racial differences in income and job placement?
Chapter 19 Where did Thomas Jefferson's radical states' rights ideas come from?
Chapter 20 What really happened in the Whiskey Rebellion, and why will neither your textbook nor George Washington tell you?
Chapter 21 What made American wages rise? (Hint: it wasn't unions or the government.)
Chapter 22 Did capitalism cause the Great Depression?
Chapter 23 Did Herbert Hoover sit back and do nothing during the Great Depression?
Chapter 24 Did Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal lift the United States out of the Depression?
Chapter
25 Does the Constitution's commerce clause really grant the federal
government the power to regulate all gainful activity?
Chapter
26 Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to do
whatever it thinks will provide for the "general welfare" of Americans?
Chapter
27 Does the Constitution really contain an "elastic clause" that
gives the federal government additional, unspecified powers?
Chapter 28 Did the Founding Fathers believe juries could refuse to enforce unjust laws?
Chapter 29 What do foreign-aid programs have to show for themselves?
Chapter 30 Did labor unions make Americans more free?
Chapter 31 Should Americans care about historians' rankings of the presidents?
Chapter 32 Who was S. B. Fuller?
Chapter 33 Did Bill Clinton really stop a genocide in Kosovo?
Conclusion Schools and Superstition
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
(Via http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip079/2007001347.html)
I guess Dr. Woods likes to get in trouble. It looks like a great book. I look forward to it. I added it on my long wish list of books. When it comes out, I'll be sure to get it...
It must be an Ayn Rand thing with libertarians. (?)
In some ways, I am a “moderate”: Like Dr. Walter Block, I will tell you that libertarianism is not a philosophy of life. So you can be an atheist. Fine. But you atheists cannot tell us of faith that it is incompatible with libertarianism. It, obviously, is compatible as long as it does not violate the non-aggression axiom. Secondly, I am a “big-tent” kind of a guy. Nor do I (or would I) ever harass principled libertarians (or anyone else for that matter) on points of disagreement. I am not that kind of person. (And, boy, do some libertarians nitpick, without giving a fellow libertarian the credit of the doubt---ever.)
In other ways, I am an “extremist”: Like Dr. Hans Hoppe, I will tell you that cultural conservatism is the “outcome” of a truly free market and cultural lefitsm is the result of statism. Thus, promoting leftist culture is the wrong way to go for true libertarians (libertarian 'anarchists'). To quote Hoppe: “conservatives today must be antistatist libertarians and, equally important, ... libertarians must be [cultural] conservatives.” (He goes through an extensive economic analysis of government interventionism into the cultural life. In a true libertarian society, many leftists would not be pleased.) So I am weary of libertarians that excessively promote cultural leftism.
Well, there is a thing about many libertarians when it comes to atheism. Believe me, I am tolerant and so forth. But, sometimes, it is hard to say for that for the militant atheist libertarians.
Take a look at Mr. Joe Sobran’s latest article: “The Sanctimony of the Atheists”
"Liberals generally wish to preserve the concept of "rights" for such "human" rights as freedom of speech, while denying the concept to private property. And yet, on the contrary the concept of "rights" only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard..."
Read Here. (Excerpted from chapter 15 of The Ethics of Liberty.)
Listen to it on MP3 by Jeff Riggenbach here.
Something I keep coming across is the claim that Jesus was an egalitarian socialist. It is consequently used to justify statism. This is a large and complex topic, and maybe in the future I will attempt to address in more detail. Both counts are wrong: the egalitarian claim, as people generally define it as, and the socialist claim.
Jesus did not come down with the sword to bully the sinners, which even included tax collectors. He sat down with the sinners to convert them. No coercion or whipping of prostitutes took place by Jesus, even though they were clearly sinners.
Paleolibertarian Joe Sobran, a devoted Catholic (I'm Catholic myself), wrote a great short article called “Jesus’ Government.”
Please take the time and read it here.
Sobran talks about how government is purely organized force. All of the main evils express themselves through the state, including war. And what organization killed Jesus in the end? It was the state. The rhetoric of Jesus and the Bible does not to look to government for salvation or solutions. In fact, Jesus was non-political and told people to look up to the Heavens and God.
At the end of the article Sobran says:
“My government is not of this world.” I think that’s a fair paraphrase of his [Jesus’] words.
See Also:
- “Jesus Is An Anarchist” by James Redford
- LRC: Christianity and State Archive
PS --- As usual, Mr. Sobran has a great new article, “What Obama Can Do.” Visit Sobran.com.
Even More on Immigration and The Death of the West
“Lockean Libertarians vs. Hume-an Nature” by Paul Gottfried is an interesting article I found. Some things I disagree with, but it is nonetheless an interesting article. Also worthy to note, Dmitry Chernikov at his website has a good reply letter to it.
***
In chapter ten of State of Emergency by Pat Buchanan, he quotes Sam Francis. In a nutshell, Francis made the comment in 1994 that only Western civilization could have made Western civilization. As Buchanan writes:
Had Francis sad this of Chinese civilization and the Chinese people, it would have gone unnoted. But he was suggesting Western civilization was superior and that only Europeans could have created it. If Western people perish, as they are doing today, Francis was implying, we must expect our civilization to die with us. No one would deny that when the Carthaginians perished, Carthaginian civilization and culture perished. But by claiming the achievement of the west of Europeans, Francis had passed beyond the bonds of tolerance. [pp 164-5]
This leads me to the main topic of this entry to The Paleo Blog...
Radical Individualism & Organic Culture
I.
Libertarianism is about radical individualism. Methodologically it takes an individualist stance. But as a libertarian myself and supporting the two things just mentioned (although, I believe in aristocratic individualism----like Albert Jay Nock), I also understand that individuals form institutions and relationships between each other. It is a sad thing that so many libertarians, especially many "in the Beltway" and leftist-libertarians, disregard culture as minor or unimportant.
One libertarian wrote on Strike-The-Root.com how people have to abandon “the group.” The problem was that he took it to the extreme. It is silly. People form groups. They are also apart of distinct groups. People belong to a specific gender and race. Like-people come together to form churches to worship. Like-people come together to share in culture and tradition. People come together in the free market to create businesses (which is kind of group). The world of commerce depends on man being social. Man is a social animal. He is also a spiritual animal------much to the detestation of some libertarians that have an irrational dislike of any kind of religion.
It is true that groups are nothing greater than the individuals that compose them. Butler Shaffer gave the example that a subway does not have a soul, anymore than a nation does. The soul belongs to distinct individuals, but they do interact with each other. Coercive powers to reshape the individual into a collective is destructive. Likewise, people abandoning their individuality for a collective is also destructive. But to think that individuality does not lead to individuals expressing themselves through the market place, family, friendship, kinship, culture, art, religion, and so forth with other individuals is foolish.
II.
In the same way, it is foolish not to see how a free society would form relationships with each other that include covenants, concordats, or whatnot. This would a major civilizing force. A force that would tighten the ability (that is, lack of ability) of atomistic individualism to express itself in whatever direction----destructive endeavor----that it wanted. Not all lifestyles are healthy individually, for one's family, or the growth and vitality of society at large, after all.
And I must say to traditional conservatives: If the majority of the public does not adopt traditional conservative values, then the government will most certainly not (unless it happens to be a traditional monarchy, perhaps). If these values are so weak (I do not believe so, and I bet most traditional conservatives do not either), then they will remain that. However, if they are strong and truer values, a free society can flourish them. Centralization of governmental power can only damage that. How could it not? Any natural outgrowths in a society in a statist condition become replaced with government centralization of power.
To go back to Butler Shaffer. He as a libertarian (see this article), along with many other libertarians, respect and admire the Amish. The Amish community is a perfect example of an organic and natural culture (although, maybe at the extreme end). It is a free and private community. THIS is freedom. That is, a representative of freedom.
We must all learn that freedom is the key prerequisite to a truly healthy culture and society. It allows individuals to truly express themselves together and flourish to the fullest. It is thus not something to be imposed by the point of the gun. Just as there are perverse unintended consequences of trying to economically engineer people, there are also perverse unintended consequences to socially or culturally engineer people.
III.
Occasionally people label someone like me as hating the poor and not wanting to help them. It is not like I am against helping the poor. And, really, how many people do you know like to see others suffer? Left-liberals and other statists know better, but they use childish emotionalism to attack people that actually use reason to see that the government interventionism increases poverty and misery. One method to help the poor is actually accountable and can help and the other one is not accountable and does not help on net. One increases community ties: of the nuclear family, the extended family, kinship relationships, neighbor & community relationships, the church, and so on. The other breaks this up. It is in freedom that these social intermediate institutions are strongest. Even as a libertarian, I understand this. It is this that helps to show the importance of cultural and social conservatism to mankind.
Someone that wants to socially engineer people in their limited image will always fail for obvious reasons. While it is true, I believe, that man will gravitate towards more conservative and traditional values because they are most natural and consistent, partly for the reasons just mentioned. And this is not to mention, as Hans Hoppe argues, conservatism is sociologically and praxeologically compatible to libertarianism unlike cultural leftism which propagate under statism with its promotion of high time preferences and its transfer of authority from traditional institutions to the State. But, still, men are different with each other as individuals and even categorically as groups or races.
It is therefore the preservation and promotion of the "old" culture (the transcending culture) is an important task in today’s world. It fights against statism and the centralized state. When people embrace statism versus actually engaging in productive free market and social-cultural activities, the death of Western civilization will be certain.
As mentioned here, production comes through actual voluntary transactions in a free market place of capitalism. Things that are really in need and that are really wanted by people will be produced because a demand exists. Government does not produce, but takes. Things that it creates with its looted goods is a system that is compulsory and monopolistic. Unlike the free market, its allocations will be faulty to the things it creates. Furthermore, the welfare state subsidizes bad behavior. Atomization of the individual from the ties of social institutions occur. Governments break these community and cultural ties apart. These social intermediate institutions are a natural part of society, i.e. the natural organic culture. They fulfill man's needs. ----- They fulfill man's spiritual and emotional needs.
The truth is that society needs to think about this, even a libertarian one. Because if people wanted to, they could stay home and become self-sufficient isolated households within their nuclear family. (It could happen now.) It would not violate libertarian ethics of conduct, but it would doom civilization. Or people could choose suicide. Again it would not violate libertarian ethics, but it too would obviously doom civilization----it would end it. (Thus we see here that libertarianism is only the foundation of society. Society is more than a foundation.)
IV.
To be honest, I think it is a falsehood when people say that we live in a culturally conservative nation. They use the example of homosexual "marriage" (a contradiction in terms) and say how most are against it. But if you turn on the TV, you see the majority of Americans watching all of this Hollywood crap. And if you turn the clock back only thirty or forty years, the values that people hold today would appear (and rightfully so) immoral to them.
This is a problem that the masses have----and will probably always have to a certain degree. In natural hierarchy in a free society, this is the only way that this can be changed. This must be combined with a free society's natural incentives and its returning of authority to its proper places.
Now for a word on the minority of people that really are concerned with today’s cultural leftism: Sadly, most of them think that all of this can be changed through politics and centralization. It cannot. The problem in the first place is statism. That is the heart of the issue and it and the things that have flown from that-------ideas----wrong ideas.
V.
Often (paleo)libertarianism is branded as a utopian idea. Maybe mankind as a whole will never get over its primitive instincts of using violence to control others by the point of the gun. Well, maybe.
But what really is utopian is the idea that paleoconservatives have. They believe that government can somehow be turned into a force for good. How can you turn government into a force for good? Government is meant to protect us, but it must first mug us. It is a contradiction.
They also fail to see that true (paleo)libertarianism expresses true (paleo)conservatism in a way that it could never.
I hope the above somewhat illustrated this. For instance, if you are Catholic and want to live under Canon Law, then you would have the freedom to do so. You could even get together with other like-minded people to develop such a community. It would be a private law society, but completely voluntary. The full expression of Catholic tradition and culture could be seen in anarcho-capitalism. So too could other cultural and religious traditions.
The authority in a free society would return to private property owners. The right to discriminate would be back. The right to from these types of groups would be back too. And so forth.
See "The Idea of a Private Law Society" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
