print“Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy” is the new essay, now on WND. It tackles the “economic reductionism, typical of the impoverished analysis of South Africa, offered so authoritatively by libertarian economists stateside.” Excerpted below are two sections therefrom:
… LITE LIBERTARIANISM VS. THE RIGHT KIND
Herein lies the difference between the paleolibertarian analysis and what this column has termed the lite libertarian one, philosopher Hans-Hermann Hope being the finest example of the former. The rest fall into the latter, lite category.
A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional–a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values.
Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure. “The pursuit of the … paleolibertarian ideal,” explained Catholic philosopher Jack Kerwick, Ph.D., “is the pursuit of an ideal of liberty brought down from the clouds to the nit and the grit of the history and culture from which it emerged.” …
… FREEDOM VS. EGALITARIANISM
Contra the economic reductionism of the lite libertarian, free-market capitalism is a necessary but insufficient condition to sustain freedom in a country of South Africa’s complexion.
The truth absent from the phantasmagorical formulations critiqued is this: Economic freedom does not necessarily reduce so-called wealth inequality. Inegalitarainism is a feature of a free economy. If history is anything to go by, certain minorities will achieve prosperity from poverty, no matter how gravely the state and society impede them. Jews did it in Europe. Levantines and Indians in Africa and the Middle-East. Chinese in southeast Asia and everywhere else they go. Europeans in South Africa.
Moreover, “While all people want safety and sustenance for themselves, not everyone is prepared to allow those whom they dislike and envy to peacefully pursue the same.” (P. 4.) Free-market capitalism is not enough to safeguard ordered liberty in racially riven societies like South Africa, where the majority will always covet the possessions of immensely wealthier minorities and associate these riches with racial privilege.
Ultimately, the rights to life, liberty and private property will forever be imperiled in a country whose constitution has a clause devoted to “Limitation of Rights,” and where redistributive “justice” is a constitutional article of faith. (P. 101)
This, paleolibertarians (all three of us) know too well.
In “The Cannibal” chapter entitled “Saving South Africans S.O.S.,” secession is explored as one solution, it being a species of the private-law society delineated by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe, of course, has never been afraid to speak to the “unequal civilizing potential” (in James Burnham’s coinage) of different people and peoples. …
Read the complete essay. “Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy” is now on WND.
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