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Mistakes Were Made...and Fixed
Everyone loves to complain about the accelerated pace
of modern life. Remember the good old days, they say, when life was
leisurely, commerce was more genteel, and everyone watched the same
television and read the same newspaper?
Lest we get too nostalgic, keep in mind the upside of a sped-up world:
President Bush put steel tariffs in place in March 2002. Less than two years later, in December 2003, he rescinded them. This is something most politicians don't do. But because the tariffs caused such a sharp rise in the price of steel, small and mid-size businesses complained loudly. The unintended consequences became visible to most American's very quickly.
Remember the bad old days?
The unintended consequences of the New Deal took too long to show up in the economy. As a result, by the time the pain was publicized, the connection to misguided government policy could not be made. Today, in the midst of Internet Time, this is no longer a problem. So, despite protestations from staff at the White House, most people understand that food riots in foreign lands and higher prices at U.S. grocery stores are linked to ethanol subsidies in the U.S., which have sent shock waves through the global system.
When we are bombarded with tons of up to-to-the-minute info from all sides, "Policy mistakes will be ferreted out very quickly. As a result, any politician who attempts to change things will be blamed for the unintended consequences right away."
Related: Virginia Postrel on the paradox of choice.
|6.11.08 @ 12:20PM|#
So, despite protestations from staff at the White House,
most people understand that food riots in foreign lands and higher
prices at U.S. grocery stores are linked to ethanol subsidies in
the U.S., which have sent shock waves through the global
system.
I think it's a huge mistake to believe that "most people"
understand the issue (or, really, any political issue), let alone
think about it.
|6.11.08 @ 12:23PM|#
Good News!
As corn prices shot up over the $6.50 mark on the Chicago Board
of Trade, ethanol processing margins actually turned negative.
Unsubsidized gross refining revenues, which were 63.5 cents a
bushel at the end of May, turned to a loss of 7.25 cents a bushel
by the first weekend of June when ethanol prices slumped.
|6.11.08 @ 12:43PM|#
Cory Doctorow post? There was no a Cory Doctorow post; never has
been. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Come with me, Episiarch, the doctor is ready for you. now.
Invisible Finger|6.11.08 @ 12:46PM|#
Why of course. It certainly isn't election-year agitprop. No no, not at all. It's how smart we all are because of the internet. Why, because of our fast paced world, we're certain to recognize a housing bubble in a matter of months, rather than the 20 years it took us to recognize the last one way back in 2007.
Apaulogist|6.11.08 @ 1:06PM|#
From the very beginning, the laissez-faire movement was beset by
the thrilling but utterly mistaken idea that progress toward
liberty is inevitable, a long, slow, steady process that coincides
with the march of modernity. The rise of the movement for personal
liberty and economic freedom was coincident with the growth and
development of industrial civilization: as the standard of living
rose, so did the advocates of laissez faire gain intellectual and
political traction. Yet none of this was inevitable.
In a series of revolutions that rocked Europe and much of the
world, laissez-faire liberalism overthrew the Old Order, and yet,
as Murray Rothbard pointed out, there was a fatal flaw in the
classical liberalism of the 19th century, an "inner rot," as he put
it, that ate away at the ideological core of libertarianism even as
the movement began to achieve some of its goals. The flaw was made
manifest in the abandonment of natural rights philosophy, and a
strategic timidity-one seemed to follow from the other-that
reverted to a defense of the status quo.
Secondly, liberalism was lulled to sleep with the seductive lure of
evolutionism-the doctrine of Social Darwinism, which saw history as
an ever-ascending spiral of progress. According to this theory, the
triumph of liberty is inevitable because Reason, Science, and
Enlightened Thinking are on our side. The history of the 20th
century would soon refute this, but at the time it seemed, well,
reasonable: after all, society was progressing, peoples were
freeing themselves from the yoke of feudalism and mercantilism, and
it looked-if only for a moment-that the cause of liberty might
triumph, however long it took.
This Pollyanna-ism was swept aside with the advent of the 20th
century and the rise of the totalitarian ideologies-liberalism's
darkest hour. Yet, as proof that no error is ever finally refuted,
we see its echo, today, in the abstruse theories of certain Beltway
Deep Thinkers who seem to believe that because they're getting
richer, so is everybody else-and that rising income means the
increase of freedom. But of course the business cycle is alive and
well-thanks to the persistence of fiat money and the central
banks-as we are beginning to rediscover. Also raising its ugly head
is the specter of constant warfare, the favorite pastime of
empires, and this, too, threatens our liberties as well as our
lives.
If the 19th century saw the rise of a worldwide movement toward
liberty, the 20th saw the progress that had been made repealed and
the clock turned back: in the world of ideas, political absolutism
ruled the day, and all around the world, the inevitability of
socialism was simply assumed. In the U.S., the Great Depression
brought about the utter collapse of the old Spencerian illusion
that liberty would triumph simply on account of some mechanism
inherent in the nature of things. Two world wars shattered the
fragile shell of constitutional government in America and opened
the door to the demise of our old Republic.
The remnants of classical liberalism went virtually underground;
the tides of public and intellectual opinion were running so
heavily against them that their ideas were not even considered. The
old-time liberals-such as John T. Flynn-were simply out of the
running. Park Avenue Bolsheviks such as James Burnham were
confidently proclaiming the demise of capitalism and the rise of
the "managerial" class of bureaucrats and steely-eyed men in
spectacles who would soon put society to rights. Socialism,
Leninism, fascism, and all sorts of idiosyncratic social movements
and sects sprang up, like mushrooms after a heavy rain, as the
Great Depression wreaked havoc on people's hopes.
Arrayed against these overwhelming currents, a valiant band of
counter-revolutionaries fought a heroic rear-guard action: these
were the men and women of the Old Right. Forged in the flames of a
world at war, the loosely aligned political leaders, resident
intellectuals, and publicists who made up this movement began to
cohere a fairly consistent set of ideas:
That war breeds tyranny and subverts republican forms of
government; that we were fighting national socialism overseas only
to witness its triumph on the home front; and, central to it all,
an acute consciousness of America's tragic destiny as an
(anti-)imperial power, doomed, like all the others, to degenerate
into a parody of itself.
Forced underground in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Old Right
persisted-in the voluminous private correspondence of that tireless
letter-writer, Rose Wilder Lane. In scattered circles of
like-minded individualists, and a few organizations and one-man
propaganda outfits, libertarianism persisted, like a subterranean
river periodically bursting up to the surface and disrupting the
socialist-interventionist consensus. Such stalwarts as John T.
Flynn, who continued his radio program well into the late 1940s,
and churned out books at a record rate, kept up the fight. In the
dark days of postwar America, when the socialist-interventionist
consensus was virtually unanimous, a young Murray Rothbard
regularly tuned in to Flynn's broadcasts.
A student of the famed Ludwig von Mises, whose economic theories
are the foundation stones of today's Austrian school of economics,
Rothbard is the bridge between the Old Right of the 1940s and the
libertarian movement as it exists today. I've told Murray's story
in my book, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard,
in which I perhaps overemphasize his role as a political activist
at the expense of his monumental achievements as a scholar. I took
this tack, I can see now, because Rothbard's life and career is
really a narrative account of the decline and rebirth of the
organized libertarian movement, a history spanning the period from
the 1940s to the 1990s.
Rothbard wrote for National Review, where he was restricted to the
economics beat, but in private there was conflict: in an exchange
of letters with Buckley, Rothbard dissented from the cold warrior
fanaticism that animated the Buckleyite right. He was eventually
convinced that the NR crowd pined for a third world war in which
they wouldn't hesitate to use nuclear weapons-in which case, we
were all cooked. Rothbard had thoroughly absorbed the so-called
"isolationism" of Flynn and the old America Firsters, and had
developed early on a libertarian perspective on the foreign-policy
question that was a logical extension of the non-coercion
principle.
Just as state violence against its own citizens was to be limited
as much as possible, so it is desirable-from a libertarian
perspective-to limit, isolate, and restrict states from engaging in
coercion beyond their own borders. War, in the words of Randolph
Bourne, is the health of the state, and the limited government and
free market economics that are supposed to be the cardinal
principles of American conservatism have been time and again
betrayed on account of their worship of the War God, to whom they
owe their primary loyalty.
Rothbard's break with the conservative movement, and his sojourn
into the New Left, occurred at a crucial juncture in our history:
the tumultuous 1960s, when war and repression of protest movements
were the key issues of the day. A day not unlike our own, at least
in certain respects. The Vietnam War was the focus of the national
debate, and the rising youth revolution coincided with this
development, giving libertarians an opportunity to bring the
message of freedom to a wider audience than ever before. The war
provided an opening for Rothbard and his growing circle to make an
appeal to the left, and their journal, Left and Right, introduced
the classics of the Old Right, such as the essays of Garet Garrett,
to a whole generation of SDSers-the main youth protest movement
with chapters on hundreds of campuses.
The effort had an effect on the more intelligent SDS leaders, such
as Carl Oglesby, the group's first elected leader who later quoted
Garet Garrett and favorably cited the Old Right's anti-imperialism
in his book, Containment and Change. By that time, however, he had
been purged from the group he had been instrumental in founding for
the crime of "right-wing deviationism."
SDS and the anti-war movement had by then gone into their
ultra-Left phase, and went out in a blaze of botched bombings and
self-destructive melodrama. Also, at this point, the movement that
gathered regularly in Rothbard's living room had grown too large to
fit into that small space, and the first libertarian activist
conferences were being held, and the libertarian press was
developing apace. Aside Rothbard's own Libertarian Forum, there was
Reason magazine, which started out as a stapled-together 12-page
fanzine.
It was only a matter of time until a Libertarian Party was founded,
and that occurred in 1972. The LP has been the battlefield on which
the whole question of how to function as an organized political
movement has been fought, and as such its history provides us with
a rich source of material for our speculations as to the future of
libertarianism, be it dark or bright.
The party grew, the movement grew, and, by the late 1970s, Rothbard
and his associates took it to the next level-with the help of a
generous benefactor, whose largess made possible a great leap
forward in the pace and quality of libertarian activism.
Let us go back to the year 1978, and look at what had happened to
the organized libertarian movement. Suddenly there sprang up the
Cato Institute, along with an array of satellite organizations
including a student group and the Libertarian Party itself, which
became a cog in what we used to call the Koch Machine.
This mighty ideological center was made possible by the largesse of
Charles G. Koch, an heir to the Koch family fortune, and Koch
Industries, one of the largest privately-owned companies in the
U.S.: the father, Fred C. Koch, had made his money in oil,
engineering, and cattle, and passed on his fortune to his sons, at
least two of whom-Charles and David-shared his libertarian
beliefs.
From the outside looking in, all was well: magazine and newspaper
articles hailed libertarianism as the Next Big Thing, and profiles
of the Institute and its spin-off groups published in the
mainstream media glowed with admiration for their organization and
enthusiasm, if not praise for their ideas. In the mid-1970s, when
Charles Koch contacted Rothbard about what he could do to advance
the movement's goals, the late great libertarian theorist wrote a
long memo that projected the creation of a mighty apparatus of
libertarian cadre organizing in virtually every arena of American
political and intellectual life.
Koch had the money, and Rothbard had the vision. At the core of it
all was Rothbard's conception of the Cato Institute-which, by the
way, he came up with the name for-as a thinktank devoted to the
development, spread, and popularization of the Austrian school of
economics, free market solutions to social problems on the home
front, a devotion to the preservation and expansion of civil
liberties, and a consistent opposition to U.S. imperialism.
The split between Rothbard and the Institute he had inspired and
essentially founded, was occasioned by the presidential campaign of
1980, which Rothbard was most unhappy with. In an incident that has
become legendary in LP circles, the party's candidate, Edward
Clark, an oil company lawyer, went on national television to
explain to interviewer Ted Koppel that libertarianism was basically
just "low-tax liberalism."
This outraged Rothbard for any number of very good reasons, not the
least of which was its strategic wrongheadedness.
The Cato Institute strategy was to target the elites, especially in
the media, but also in the two major political parties and
government circles. Rothbard, on the other hand, took the
diametrically opposite view: he envision a populist revolt against
the elites, who profit from the maintenance and growth of State
power. Libertarians, he believed, must make their appeal to
ordinary people. Instead of aspiring to a position at court in the
hope of whispering advice in the king's ear, it is necessary to
appeal to the great masses of Americans, so that libertarianism
would become a living and vital political movement, and not just an
intellectual parlor game.
When Clark, under the tutelage of the Cato high command, refused to
come out for the abolition of the income tax, on the grounds that
this constituted an unacceptable radicalism, Rothbard essentially
broke with Cato, although the formal divorce didn't come until a
bit later, at the Libertarian Party's 1983 national convention.
Rothbard attacked the Clark campaign in a series of articles that
mocked the campaign's timidity and its rather pathetic appeal to
the narrow interests of "low-tax liberals" of a certain class and
age.
Rothbard's erstwhile followers in the Cato group made their appeal
to influential sympathizers who must be kept blissfully ignorant of
the more controversial aspects of libertarian theory. This was
symbolized by their move to Washington, where they built themselves
a glass and steel headquarters and set up shop as resident
libertarians in the corridors of power.
Rothbard, on the other hand, pursued the path of populism. He
insisted that libertarian political action must be directed at the
majority of the American people, and not tailored to suit the
cultural prejudices and ideological idiosyncrasies of New York
Times-reading white-wine-and brie liberals.
Rothbard and Cato went their separate ways, and so did the two
wings of the movement-one gravitating in the direction of
Washington DC, and the other concentrated in the hinterlands,
especially in the West, where a wave of right-wing populism was
beginning to rise up in opposition to a regnant liberalism. The
Beltway faction of the libertarian movement adapted itself to its
surroundings with chameleon-like instincts, while Rothbard and his
supporters organized in the countryside, so to speak, planning a
guerrilla insurgency and cultivating conservatives who were
beginning to resent the incursion of the neocons-invaders from the
Left-and the effective takeover of the official conservative
movement by former leftists and right-wing Social Democrats.
The Rothbard-Cato split has sundered the libertarian movement to
this day, and that was certainly underscored by the response of the
Beltway libertarians to the unprecedented success of the Paul
campaign. As the Good Doctor began to garner a fair share of media
attention, and his polls numbers began to rise, the Beltway crowd
sneered that he was too old-fashioned, too culturally conservative,
and not likely to make any headway. When he did make headway, and
was addressing crowds of many thousands at rallies across the
country, and the record campaign contributions began to get the
campaign noticed, the Beltway crowd - most notably, the editors and
writers at Reason, a Koch-funded enterprise that styles itself the
leading libertarian magazine - began to back off, and offer their
reluctant (although still condescending) support. But not for
long.
The Koch machine was merely revving up its motors for a smear
campaign of unparalleled viciousness. Just as the Paul campaign was
beginning to break through the wall of silence and liberal media
bias, the New Republic magazine came out with a piece by one Jamie
Kirchick that accused the Paul campaign and Ron himself of
appealing to thinly-disguised racism. In particular, the target of
Kirchick's scrutiny was a series of Ron Paul newsletters written
during the early 1990s that violated the canons of political
correctness as much for the style they were written in as their
contents. The Reason crowd immediately took up the cry of "racism!"
and devoted endless articles and blog entries to the ensuing
controversy, as the Beltway "libertarians" crowd gleefully prepared
for a righteous purge.
Writing in the online edition of Reason, David Weigel and Julian
Sanchez (the latter of the Cato Institute) claimed that the whole
episode was rooted in a "strategy" enunciated by the late Murray N.
Rothbard, the economist and author, and Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.,
founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, designed
to appeal to those dreaded "right-wing populists."::
"During the period when the most incendiary items appeared-roughly
1989 to 1994-Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray
Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class
resentment to build a coalition with populist "paleoconservatives,"
producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially
charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial
Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic.
"….The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay
Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report,
titled "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement."
Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were
too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a
libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph
McCarthy as models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks," which would
fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by
targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a
former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a
1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to
oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an "unholy
alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business and media elites, who,
through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a
parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and
oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in
America."
Reason, of course, in it's new incarnation as the official organ of
the libertarian movement's aging hipsters and would-be "cool kids,"
vehemently opposes reaching out to middle and working class
Americans: that is far too "square" for the
black-leather-jacket-wearing Nick Gillespie, and his successor,
Matt Welch. Right-wing populism? As far as the Reason crowd is
concerned, one might as well tout the appeal of "right-wing
botulism." Libertarianism, as understood by the editors of Reason,
is all about legalizing methamphetamine, having endless "hook-ups,"
and giving mega-corporations tax breaks (so Reason can keep
scarfing up those big corporate contributors). The decidedly
"square" Dr. Paul-a ten-term Republican congressman from Texas, no
less, and a pro-life country doctor of decidedly conservative
social views-was and is anathema to Team Reason.
This railing against populism-that is, against any appeal to
ordinary Americans-is part and parcel of the Beltway's perversion
of libertarianism, which relegates its pet libertarian ideologues
to the role of court jesters, whose intellectual preoccupations-the
legalization of drugs, and the celebration of cultural
libertinism-are considered amusing and mostly harmless.
In considering the future of libertarianism, one has to imagine at
least two futures: one for the kept intellectuals of the Beltway
set, and the other for the populist grassroots movement that roiled
the American hinterlands with its radical opposition to imperialist
wars and fiat money.
The former will persist as long as its subsidies continue, but the
so-called Orange Line Mafia has discredited itself with its vicious
hostility directed at Ron Paul, which was on display long before
the newsletter controversy broke out. On the other hand, the Paul
wing of the movement has all the energy, the vitality, and the
staying power of a movement that really does have a future.
Foreign policy-the question of whether we're going to be imperial
or return to republicanism-is the overriding issue of our day, and
anyone who abstains in this realm really ceases to be relevant. I
find it odd, therefore, that the leading libertarian print
magazine, Reason, took no editorial stance on the invasion of Iraq,
but merely opened it up for "debate." That's funny, to these
people, such issues as drug legalization and gay marriage are never
debatable: the "correct" libertarian position is simply assumed.
Yet when it comes to the question of mass murder-well, that's just
a matter of opinion.
The error made by the Cato crowd, especially after their fateful
move to Washington, DC, is similar to that made by those French
libertarian theorists, including the economist Fénelon, who hoped
to persuade the French ruling class to give up its power over the
economic life of the nation and inaugurate an era of peace and
freedom. Their strategy was to tutor the Duke of Burgundy, second
in line to succeed to the French throne, and ally themselves with
the Burgundians at court. When the king's first heir died, their
hopes rose: these were dashed, however, as the Duke himself, and
his entire family, took sick with the same illness, which likewise
proved fatal-dealing a death blow to their plans to make France a
laissez-faire paradise.
Writing of the tragic end of the Burgundians in his An Austrian
Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Rothbard was
clearly addressing himself, at least in part, to his factional
opponents in the libertarian movement, namely the Cato group, which
had chosen the path of influencing the elites rather than making a
populist appeal to ordinary Americans against the power
elite:
"The tragic end of the Burgundy circle," he writes, "illuminates a
crucial strategic flaw in the plans, not only of the Burgundy
circle, but also of the physiocrats, Turgot and other laissez faire
thinkers of the later eighteenth centuryy. For their hopes and
their strategic vision were invariably to work within the matrix of
he monarchy and its virtually absolute rule. The idea, in short,
was to get into court, influence the corridors of power, and induce
the king to adopt libertarian ideas and impose a laissez-faire
revolution."
The Burgundy circle learned it couldn't be done, but when it comes
to libertarians, no strategic error is so egregious that it isn't
repeated at least once a generation, if not more-and always with
the same results. The Beltway libertarians are, for the most part,
pursuing the Burgundian course, and they will have no better
results than Fénelon and Turgot.
On the other hand, the Paulistas-the radicalized, fully energized,
and decidedly non-Beltway activists who were and are inspired by
Ron Paul's untrammeled vision of liberty-have had some
success.
Surely, the Paul campaign has done more to popularize
libertarianism than the combined efforts of the Koch-funded
organizations have over the past two decades.
It's no accident that the Paul campaign springs from the radical
Rothbardian wing of the movement. Populism-an appeal to the great
majority of the American people-on behalf of liberty is no vice.
And if that is extremism, then let the denizens of the Beltway make
the most of it.
Apaulogist|6.11.08 @ 1:09PM|#
From Justin Raimondo:
The history of libertarianism as a doctrine and an organized
political movement is of interest these days on account of all the
attention garnered by Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas congressman known as
"Dr. No," in his quixotic yet attention-getting and surprisingly
successful campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. Where do
these libertarian types come from, and where are they going? Is
their bid to restore respect for the Constitution in American
political culture a passing phase, or a portent of things to come?
Whether Dr. Paul fought a rear-guard action, or in fact launched
the first wave of a continuing assault on the Welfare-Warfare Sate
remains to be seen, but if the GOP is dragged down to a crushing
defeat by the neocons' war and its economic consequences, then the
Paulistas might have a fighting chance of taking back the
Republican party for the heirs of Robert A. Taft and the Old
Right.
Yet the Paul campaign wasn't received with universal hosannas
within the libertarian movement. While the great majority of the
freedom movement's rank-and-file were wildly enthusiastic about the
Texas troublemaker, a group of self-styled libertarian
"leaders"-namely, the infamously smug and self-satisfied minions of
Charles Koch and Ed Crane over at the Cato Institute and the
editors of the Koch-funded Reason magazine-sneered and sniffed at
the culturally conservative, pro-life Paul and wondered aloud if he
wasn't a bit of an embarrassment. In a war of words reported by The
Nation, the two wings of the libertarian movement squared off and
fired shots. Christopher Hayes reported this eye-popping
denunciation of Rep. Paul by the unbearably pompous Brink Lindsey,
a Cato Institute "scholar" and recently appointed vice president
for research,
"He doesn't strike me as the kind of person that's tapping into
those elements of American public opinion that might lead towards a
sustainable move in the libertarian direction."
Here's a new logical fallacy: the argument from snobbery. He isn't
our "kind of person." What kind of person might that be? Well, it's
not at all clear. What is clear, however, is who isn't "our kind of
person." As Senor Lindsey puts it:
"You have this weird group of people. You've got libertarians,
you've got antiwar types and you've got nationalists and
xenophobes. I'm not sure that is leading anywhere. I think he's a
sui generis type of guy who's cobbling together some irreconcilable
constituencies, many of which are backward-looking rather than
forward-looking."
Oh, those backwoods anti-IRS hicks, with necks redder than the
reddest state, hopeless Neanderthals who would never read Lindsey's
book, The Age of Abundance, wherein he describes the supposedly
"libertarian" utopia being ushered in by "the sexual revolution,
environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health care boom and
the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the
rise of a 'creative class' of 'knowledge workers.'"
It sounds like a Georgetown cocktail party, rather than a political
or ideological movement, but there you have it. Lindsey and his
fellow creative geniuses are too good for the poor untutored hoi
polloi who don't go to the gym four days a week and are neither
feminists nor gay. In Lindsey's lexicon, "Forward-looking" means
"people like me," and "backward-looking" stands for non-feminist
non-gay non-gym-going proles, who don't count anyway.
In any case, sneers Lindsey, Paul "comes from a different part of
the libertarian universe than I do." Yes, you bet he does.
I had to laugh when I read how Hayes demarcates the pro-Paul
"populist" libertarians from the anti-Paul crowd-the latter are
deemed the "cosmopolitan" faction! Yeah, as in Cosmo
magazine.
Lindsey's haughtiness is really a joke, especially when it's
married to his clueless political analysis: who are these
"xenophobes" he talks about - the overwhelming majority of
Americans who don't support his "open the borders" position. And as
for these alleged "nationalists" flocking to the Paulian cause: I
guess this means they're attracted to Ron's questioning of why
we're going to war on account of UN resolutions and entangling
alliances. Otherwise, I can't imagine a less "nationalistic"
candidate, in the modern sense of aggressive expansionism - which
is a term surely better suited to Lindsey's own position in favor
the "liberation" of the Middle East.
Indeed, Lindsey's whole critique of Paul is really rooted in
Lindsey's pro-war position. He argued in favor of the Iraq war in a
piece for Reason, basically making the neocon "weapons of mass
destruction-they'll-greet-us-as-liberators" argument, while Paul,
of course, was against the war from the beginning. Having abandoned
the core libertarian stance - opposition to mass murder by the
State - Lindsey and his ilk are on their way out of libertarianism,
as I've explained elsewhere, while Paul and his "backward-looking"
brethren represent the future of the movement.
The Cato/Reason crowd is motivated by a different energy than that
which fuels the Paulian cause. They represent an entirely different
outlook from the one advanced by the Good Doctor, and his
intellectual allies and influences, and this is just the latest
chapter in the long history of two contending tendencies in the
long, tortuous story of the fight for human liberty.
DidntReadItAsshole|6.11.08 @ 1:15PM|#
Hey Paulista,
I want to kick you in the head for that unreadable screed.
[but that would be coercion and would be wrong]
|6.11.08 @ 1:22PM|#
Apaulogist,
That is an excellent article but I think the problem is not that
Cato, Reason and Lindsey are so different then the "non-feminist
non-gay non-gym-going proles" only that for a short amount of time
they forgot who writes their pay checks.
The shift from pro-Paul to anti-paul to pro-paul here at Reason was
was so swift as to be neck breaking....most of this garbage is
under the bridge and has turned into a running joke.
The Epic Awesomeness of that joke should not be
underestimated...still it is a joke.
T|6.11.08 @ 1:43PM|#
Yet the market distorting agricultural subsidies and tariffs
linger on, even after everybody with any intellectual honesty has
realized the negative effects they have on, well, everybody who's
not a European or American farmer. Hmm.
Perhaps the speed of information isn't the issue here. Maybe the
amount of political will that can be focused upon changing a policy
is the key variable. Which means things are different, how,
exactly?
economist|6.11.08 @ 1:54PM|#
My favorite part is how the neoco-whoops!sorry.-"cosmotarians" jumped ship and have now determined that Barack Obama is their man because he opposes the Iraq War. Why, with such similar changes regarding their stance on the Iraq war, they should have more sympathy for Hillary Clinton
T|6.11.08 @ 1:57PM|#
Oh, and is Apauligist just cutting and pasting huge chunks from LR.com or is that just what it seems like?
mattl@mattl.com|6.11.08 @ 2:03PM|#
Apauligist,
Could you just record that and post it as an .mp3. Reading takes
too long but I might be able to listen to it while I drive to work
and drink my coffee. Right now I have too many emails to answer and
there are some videos on you tube I want to check out. Thanks.
|6.11.08 @ 2:19PM|#
The shift from pro-Paul to anti-paul to pro-paul here at
Reason was was so swift as to be neck breaking....most of this
garbage is under the bridge and has turned into a running
joke.
Yeah - that one is going to go down in history along side of
Richard Goldstein's review of Sgt. Pepper for the New York
Times...
Naga Sadow|6.11.08 @ 2:24PM|#
The article itself is kinda . . . heartening. Oh, and Apauligist, use a link please. My eyes hurt just from the scrolling down.
|6.11.08 @ 2:43PM|#
Vlad,
I can read 1000-word essays with no problem -- but I don't make a
habit of reading those from known trolls on a public message
board.
economist|6.11.08 @ 3:35PM|#
On the upside, maybe the "cosmotarians" will be just as strongly against the welfare state expansions in a few years, when its effects become visible, and when it will be 100% impossible to reverse it.
economist|6.11.08 @ 3:47PM|#
Lindsey before the Iraq war: Bring 'em on!
Lindsey by 2006: Ignorant far-rightists pulled us into the war, so
let's ally ourselves with our enlightened far-leftist friends in
hopes that they will end the war and legalize pot. Who, me,
supporting an ill-advised war?
Apaulogist|6.11.08 @ 4:05PM|#
I admit the cross post was a breach of netiquette, but that
doesn't make me a troll.
BTW, the content of both earlier posts were the work of Justin
Raimondo. I am not nearly that good of a writer.
ckr|6.11.08 @ 4:09PM|#
I admit the cross post was a breach of netiquette, but that
doesn't make me a troll.
BTW, the content of both earlier posts were the work of Justin
Raimondo. I am not nearly that good of a writer.
Oh, where to begin.
|6.11.08 @ 4:41PM|#
You're using the modern "definition" of troll, which works out to "someone I dislike who disagrees with me."
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