Category Archives: libertarianism

UPDATED: Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy

Free Markets, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Private Property, South-Africa

“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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UPDATE (12/22): INTERESTING DISCUSSION @ PRAGG.ORG, to which I have replied.

King Dude Refuses To Bow To The Church Of Mandela

Founding Fathers, libertarianism, Propaganda, South-Africa, Terrorism, The State

The great American spirit is awakening. On the one hand you have the effete, libertarian Independent Institute grieving for Mandela, who was statism personified.

On the other hand you have Sirius’ Mike Church of “The Mike Church Show” roundly rejecting the Mandela-Founding Fathers comparison.

Sacrilege says I.

I believe that only two formidable, liberty loving patriots are with me so far: Jack Kerwick and Mike Church.

Genocide Watch (via Jack Kerwick), whose founder Dr. Gregory Stanton is cited in “The Cannibal,” has kept up its reports of white genocide in South Africa. Needless to say, no mention did these martyrs—upward of 5000—receive from Saint Mandela.

Turley Testifies To The Emergence Of An Über-Presidency

Barack Obama, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism

The Anti-Federalists ought to be the nation’s heroes and not its anti-heroes. Libertarians who are with the Anti-Federalists, and who believe the Constitution is a dead letter (check)—and was doomed to so become (check, again)—will find Jonathan Turley’s testimony, Tuesday, as to the danger our “tripartite system of equal branches” finds itself, endearingly naive.

Still, Turley’s testimony before the Committee on the Judiciary is important (and certainly elegantly written). The Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University is perhaps the only honest constitutional scholar on the left that I can think of, since the death of the great Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.).

Turley spoke about the chief executive’s “circumvention of Congress,” about Obama having “crossed the constitutional line between discretionary enforcement and defiance of federal legislation,” of his “use of executive orders to circumvent federal legislation”; of the increasing “shift toward the concentration of executive power” and the consolidation of the “imperial presidency.”

Obama, contends Turley, has “reduced the legislative process to a series of options for presidential selection.” By “claiming the inherent power of both legislation and enforcement, he risks becoming “a virtual government unto himself”; “the very danger that the Constitution was designed to avoid.”

“The Framers were clear that they saw such concentration of power to be a danger to liberty.”

Well, some—the Anti-Federalists—proved that the Framers were either wrong in the direction they took the country, or wrote a very vague document indeed.

MORE.

Über Alec, Barking-Mad Bashir, Death-Defying Libertarians

Ann Coulter, English, Family, Feminism, Gender, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, libertarianism, Objectivism, Political Correctness

“Über Alec, Barking-Mad Bashir & The Death-Defying Libertarians” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

…. BLACKOUT. “Phony panic” and “urban myth” is how the “prestige press” is characterizing widespread reports of en masse, black-on-white Knock-Out attacks. “Boys behaving badly,” noodled one jocular Democratic strategist about the sucker-punching to death of a few people, so far.

The mischief-makers must be laughing. They couldn’t care a fig. In fact, the rhetorical reprisals the perpetrators deploy to define their crimes are as precise as the blows they land on their pale victims: “polarbearing,” Jew hunting, and so on.

But some libertarians were having none of it, insisting à la the left, that to frame the felons in anything but race-neutral terms is collectivist and racist.

In the face of such dogged denial, I worry that libertarians who reject reality may be doomed to extinction.

Picture this: You walk past a feral gang of black youths, like the ones depicted in all these terrifying YouTube clips. You grin bravely, place honky hands on ears and hum loudly as you saunter by, until… you are coshed on the head by a black youth. Then another. And another.

As you fall to your knees near death, you congratulate yourself on cleaving not to reality, but to a noble “theory” instead. You die a happy, theoretically pious libertarian.

It must be abundantly clear to any thinking man that this is idiotic, not individualistic.

Those who’re derided as apostles of intolerance—”collectivists”—for cleaving to reality will likely outlive the self-sacrificing, self-styled individualists, sacrificed to an idea that has no basis in objective reality. …

The complete column is “Über Alec, Barking-Mad Bashir & The Death-Defying Libertarians.” Read it on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

• At the WND Comments Section. Scroll down and “Say it.”

• On my Facebook page.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” this week’s “Return To Reason” column.

Happy Private-Property Day.