39 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 shift from an ideology of (relative) individual liberty to collective slavery 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 in terms of the politics thereof, 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. The pondering man who philosophically questions the status quo is a rare man. Most men do not think about such things and just live their life in the status quo.
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 bring about ideological changes. Change is therefore more of a top-down thing than a bottom-up thing, at least at the beginning of any revolutionary change in society.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains in his essay "Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State" that exogenous origins of governments is faulty. Instead Bertrand de Jouvenel shows that governments came about, says Dr. 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 the people to only come to one noble family for protection and resolution of disputes. Thus this given family elite would shun out all the other family elites with the (necessary) support of the majority of the people. This began the march towards statism.
All of this can shed light on how to move to 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----especially the federal government. Libertarian intellectual elites (or libertarian elites in the business world) must pursue not only uncompromising intellectual radicalism but also must live morally upstanding lives. The institutionalization of libertarian ideas must get to the public. He suggests that such spreading of ideas 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 North America it was "institutionalized" in the Declaration of Independence, and also in the culture: writings, plays, music, and so on. Some men have called this liberal ethic the "Protestant Ethic."
But 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 "liberalism" were morphed into the aims of the new statist left-liberalism, where collectivism would supposedly "free" man. "[I]t tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means," wrote Rothbard.
Now 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 bringing 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 basic 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 deadly to classical liberalism was that 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 full 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 not lead to the ideals of classical liberalism or libertarianism. Being that a government is in the position of being the monopolist of law making and adjudication, it can make laws that are beneficial to it, at the expense of everyone else. It will distort law and justice for its own benefit. No outside party, in a "vertical" or "horizontal" sense, exists to keep government in check! And monopolists, after all, work without any direct pressure, from competitors, to produce low cost and high quality goods/services. They can work at high costs and produce low quality stuff. The very incentive structure of government is to do such. Additionally, the allocation of government's protective and judicial functions will be uncoordinated and distorted because there are no profits-and-losses. There are no market price signals, which require free and private markets, which tell them how and where they should allocate their operations (or when to allocate to "where"). It can only be arbitrary and chaotic in terms of the various and diverse needs of consumers. The same is true for what, and how much of that "what," to input into their operations. Even more fundamentally, 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 institutions of defensive protection but of exploitation and aggression. In order to "protect" someone, a government must first act in violation of its goal of protecting people from aggression! That is, by first involuntarily robbing men, and then calling it "taxation."
And, as Hoppe has written extensively about, democracy was accepted as an improvement over classical monarchy. This is yet another error. Instead of entry into government being restricted only to a single noble family, it was opened up theoretically to anyone and everyone. What this has done is lessened the public's resistance to government expansion. The public then sees the government and the people as one and the same. It produces (bad) competition over who rules and operates governmental functions. It stirs up openly competing groups in who obtains power to rule over others. As a result, it makes living under democracy worse than living under monarchy. 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, on the other hand, is not a temporary ruler and 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. It can derive income in the present and in a couple of decades from now. It accordingly must keep in mind its capital stock. Democracy, instead, is filled with temporary politicians who do not own the capital. Thus they will derive present income despite its effect on capital. A monarchy, in a way, really owns "its" property and can even sell it. All of this gives a monarchy, unlike a democratic government, the incentive to be more conservative. Thus, under democracy, government's control of individuals will invariably explode. The market place will be severely distorted and will throw man into becoming a habitual political animal.
Social Environmentalism and Egalitarianism
Government has an interest in institutionalizing its existence. It obviously must; otherwise it would be out of business. To expand, it must continue to institutionalize the idea that government is a necessary to life and that it is the most important organization to civilization. Democracy compounds this process.
The ideology of egalitarianism is partly to blame. But, as paleoconservative Sam Francis suggested, it is not so much that egalitarians themselves subscribe to their philosophy in its totality, but use it to lure the unthinking masses. They use it as a political weapon.
Hand-in-hand with this ideology is social environmentalism.
This ideology says that the individual is but a product of his environment, nothing more. That little to no free will exists and that there are no inborn (hereditary) traits in the individual. Naturally, this thought gives rise to the inspiration of socially engineering men with the power of the government. 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 than to blame oneself!? Democracy is a great way for men to express these infantile emotions.) Frank Chodorov called this the "Freudian Ethic." To iterate, this ethic denies any inborn traits. It says that we are all "equal." And any inequality or differences is due to society and its environment. It is this environment that, the statists claim, can be molded by scientific calculation to bring about "equality."
"[T]he whole thrust of environmentalism is toward relativism, the denial of moral absolutes, and behaviorism," wrote Francis. This is particularly pronounced in the court system. Lawyers use it to try to excuse, for example, murderers by saying that they are only 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]
This ideology has been used to justify statist interventions at all times and places.
The welfare state, one of this ideology's products, has created a class of people that are dependent, who have lost all independence in reason and action, and has moved man to become increasingly political than productive. It has turned man 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, as it has today.
By politics and this environmental 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 comes 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
To come back to the beginning of this entry to The Paleo Blog, one must take Hans Hoppe's advice and distant oneself from 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 them. One must also embrace the "intermediate institutions" of society: family, kinship, church, covenant, community, etc. These things bring order and a moral society. The State detaches and atomizes the individual from these naturally arising market institutions. By doing this, the government destroys order and takes away social-cultural restraints, which then allow anti-natural and destructive behavior of men to proliferate. Hence, the State is not only an 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.
The following is a moving and exciting three hours with Ernest Hancock in 2005, when he guest hosted for Charles Goyette. Yes, it is long. But it is worth listening! He plays clips of movies that convey a freedom message. Ernest Hancock also add excellent freedom commentary too.
The Fog of War http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
The Siege http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133952/
Wag the Dog http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120885/
The Lord of the Rings http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120737/
The Patriot http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0187393/
Braveheart http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112573/
Gladiator http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0172495/
The Matrix http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
Download them and put them into your MP3 player to listen:
- Listen to the MP3 Audio - part 1 (14.08 MB)
- Listen to the MP3 Audio - part 2 (13.75 MB)
- Listen to the MP3 Audio - part 3 (14.59 MB)
Great stuff.
