Category Archives: libertarianism

UPDATED: ‘At Peace’ In War

Iraq, Just War, libertarianism, Military, Paleolibertarianism

He’s a fine man (inside and out), which is why it is numbingly absurd, if predictable, for a CNN correspondent to have drawn a moral equivalence between Jordan Matson’s mission and that of 100 or so other Americans, who’ve flocked to fight alongside the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

You see, Matson is an American soldier fighting, voluntarily, with the Kurds against ISIS. And he is not part of Rome’s tax-funded Army’s. Rather, after praying “about what to do for a month or two,” Matson resolved to help the Kurds: “For me, it’s for the Kurdish people,” Matson told CNN.

Matson is “from Sturtevant, Wisconsin, a ‘mom and pop town’ as he described it, with just a few restaurants and three gas stations. He worked the third shift at a food packaging company,” before enlisting with the Popular Protection Unit (YPG), “a Kurdish militia set up to protect the Kurdish areas” from ISIS.

Unless they are pacifists—a quality as odious as militarism—libertarians ought to have no issue with Matson: He is risking his own life, doing what he believes in, is fighting a Just War, and is not funded by the American taxpayer.

Although there is no doubt that this man would rush to the aid of his “little platoons” in America—Edmund Burke’s description of a man’s social mainstay, his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers—there is, seemingly, no place for Matson in an increasingly feminized, manliness-averse, honor-free America:

“Civilian life just wasn’t for me. The normal 9-to-5, I just wasn’t comfortable with it,” he said.

As to why there is no moral equivalence between Matson and ISIS enlistees:

* Matson is a Christian who prays to the G-d of the Hebrews and the Christians. Some of us think that Islam is problematic and that “ISIS is Islam.”
* Matson does not behead, rape, enslave anyone, much less innocent civilians.
* Matson is not fighting an expansionist aggressive war, his is a defensive war against an aggressor.
* Matson is on the side of the only people that has made good on their sovereignty; are westernized and are profoundly pro-American (G-d only knows why).

UPDATE (10/28): Tinny libertarianism, again. From the Facebook thread:

Myron Robert Pauli: Funny thing but I said about the various neocons like Krauthammer and Kristol that they ought to put their $$ where their mouths are and lead volunteers to fight rather than commit a collective national effort. Jordan Matson decided to do as an individual fight against some international evil that he personally cares about – fine for him. It is the policy of forcibly dragging the nation as a whole into imperial efforts that I object to.

Ilana Mercer: Myron Robert Pauli, so ISIS is just some amorphous “international evil.” Don’t lapse again into tinny, “lite libertarianism.”

Myron Robert Pauli: ???? ???? ISIS has not attacked the US. They have attacked Kurds, Shiites, or opposing Sunnis in Syria and Iraq which, last time I check, are not in the US – which makes them external – now perhaps I should have used the word external instead of international. But a non-interventionist policy for a limited-government republic would not “go around searching for monsters to destroy” (John Quincy Adams). So maybe we have a disconnect but I am not sure what you call “lite libertarianism” here – people overseas have the responsibility to defend themselves against the scumbags that attack them but we don’t have an obligation to help them (and it usually is counterproductive when we “help”) but if some individual wishes to help, that is probably fine.

Ilana Mercer WTF, Myron Robert Pauli: From the fact that ISIS has not attacked the US, it does not follow that one is morally neutral as individuals to their deeds against other innocents. We went over this “argument” when I wrote “Masada on Mount Sinjar.” By your “argument,” no individual had the right to mess with the Germans who murdered close on 6 million Jews and others.

Blaming Men For Women’s Groupthink

Gender, Government, libertarianism, Sex, Welfare

You heard it from the mouth of the Daily Beast’s Eleanor Clift herself, on the McLaughlin Group. Women are less likely than men to identify as independent or libertarian and more inclined than men to stick with the “major brands,” the Demopublicans (the Democrat and Republican colluding quislings). Awful Eleanor, naturally, blames men for the female conformity and affinity for big government: Women know they can’t trust men, so they look to Sugar Daddy Sam to take care of them (by taking from some to give to others).

Via LRC.com

Via the Pew Research Center come some more well-known yet interesting demographic and socioeconomic correlations with libertarianism.

UPDATED: Lite Libertarians & Fracking: ‘Progress’ Over Private Property (The Cornerstone Of Civilization)

Economy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, libertarianism, Private Property, Technology

Lite libertarians—who always put “progress” above private property—just love fracking, the colloquial for “hydraulic fracturing” for natural gas. The great John Stossel has extolled the merits of fracking in his columns and broadcasts. Myself, I don’t know enough about “the drilling method that uses water, sand and other additives to expand fissures in underground rocks to free oil or natural gas trapped within them.” But I do know about the natural right to private property.

A legalistic ploy like the “split estate,” whereby “the right to develop oil or gas deposits is severed from the surface”—in other words, you own only the land surface, not the minerals below the surface—amounts to a lien on private property. Unless, of course, the “split estate” arrangement is clearly specified in the property deed of sale. Namely, “A” sells the land to “B,” under the condition, specified in a contract, that “A” retains rights to what’s underground.

Currently, some fracking operations are set up on the private land of hapless owners, who either did not know that “mineral rights had been sold off long before” their acquisition of said land. Or, could “still be forced to allow gas mining [on their land], if a majority of [their] neighbors sign leases with drillers.”

“Thin libertarians” think that generally approving of all technology makes them forward-thinking and ever-so hip. However, contra the angle mined by Mr. Stossel and his philosophical kin, the central problem with fracking is that it is done, for the most, in violation of homesteader, private-property rights.

By granting permits to allow vertical penetration of someone’s land with heavy equipment, state lawmakers are screwing the landowner out of his rightfully owned land and the privacy, peace and tranquility he is entitled to on that parcel of land.

Clearly the problem with grants of mineral rights by state or federal lawmakers is that these grants of privilege by government, local or federal, violate the landowner’s natural rights of private property.

UPDATE: In answer to the Facebook thread:

* Neighborhoods could also form a neighborhood association whereby buying into the community came with either a fracking permit or a ban on the practice.

* Reminder: The post is not about “fracking,” but about property rights, the cornerstone of libertarianism—and civilization itself.

UPDATED: FBI: The Face of Treason

Government, Justice, Law, libertarianism, Natural Law, Political Correctness, Terrorism, The State

FBI Director James Comey believes that “unless [his] passport is revoked,” an American citizen who holds an American passport and who has fought for ISIS—maybe even decapitated a dhimmi or two—“is entitled to come back” to the US.

Comey was discussing American exported fighters for ISIS on “60 Minutes.” This traitor to the people who pay for his keep promised to “track them very carefully.”

That makes me feel much better. How about you?

Judge Andrew Napolitano’s retort, on “The Kelly File,” was to praise this FBI director’s mettle, in general, while disputing the legal grounds for Comey’s odd position:

“He forgot there’s a statute called providing material assistance to a terrorist organization,” Napolitano said of Comey. “So if he knows that Americans have been fighting with ISIS and he also knows that the secretary of state has declared ISIS a terrorist organization, that is more than enough evidence for him to arrest them upon their re-entry to the U.S. It is crazy to let them back in and wait and see what they do.”

“Is this treason,” Kelly wanted to know. She was referring, of course, to the returning ISIS terrorists, and their position vis-a-vis the US.

What about the clear-cut case of Comey?

UPDATE: “Lite libertarians” or “thin libertarians” live in la-la land and don’t much care about the rights to property and life of innocent friends, family and neighbors. Let me make this simple: Individuals who want to behead Americans: yes, the nightwatchman state has a case of limiting their access to heads. To limit their access to American heads is not aggression. To say, “No, you creep, you can’t come in,” is not aggression. OK, leave “creep” off if it offends left-libertarians.