Category Archives: Paleolibertarianism

UPDATE III: On Living In Sin: The Sin of Abstraction (BHO: An Alien Species Hostile To Life On Earth)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Labor, libertarianism, Liberty, Natural Law, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Ron Paul, The State

Anyone who’s read my columns over the years recognizes that The Articles of Confederation are my kind of founding documents; the US Constitution, not so much. To the extent the Constitution comports with the natural law it is good; to the extent it doesn’t, it is bad, in my book. Simple. That has always been my position.

Personally, I have a healthy contempt for most politicians too, even the libertarian ones—all the more so in view of the kind of empire builders they all ultimately prove to be: They see nothing wrong in using their fame and the public dime to flog their “products” and wares.

Some politicians are less sickening than others, but all fit snugly on The Sick-Making Scale.

And the people—at least those of us who’ve never fed from the “public” trough, unlike every single politician and his aide—are always morally superior to the politicians.

The reason I have a problem arguing from anarchism is because one is unable to logically wrestle with reality from this perspective. This is not to say that I would not prefer a government-free universe than the one we currently inhabit; I would. Again, anyone who’s read my columns over the years recognizes that.

However, the paleolibertarian has to use a philosophical device that helps to anchor his reasoning in reality and in “the nit and the grit of the history and culture from which it emerged.”

Unless remarkably sophisticated and brilliant (as Hans-Hermann Hoppe indubitably is), the anarchist invariably falls into sloth. Forever suspended between what is and what ought to be, he settles on a non-committal, idle incoherence, spitting venom like a cobra at those who do the work he won’t or cannot do. This specimen has nothing to say about policy and politics for fear of compromising precious libertarian purity.

Suspended as he is in the arid arena of pure thought, this libertarian will settle for nothing other than the immediate and absolute application and acceptance of the non-aggression axiomatic ideal. And since utopia will never be upon us, he opts to live in perpetual sin: THE SIN OF ABSTRACTION.

This mindset is not only lazy but—dare I say?—un-Rothbaridan.

Murray Rothbard did not sit on the fence reveling in his immaculate ideological purity; he dove right into “the nit and the grit of the issues,” and got dirty.

You’re not going to like what I’ve got to say, but Jack Kerwick’s “Romney or Obama: A Choice Between Two Evils?” is arguably written in this vigorous, Rothbardian tradition.

Sadly, it has been quite some time—arguably a century-and-a-half—since America has had anything even remotely approximating a federal government of the scope and size delineated by our Constitution. So, Paul supporters know—or at least should know—that if such a lost governmental structure is ever to be restored, it is not going to happen over the next four to eight years—regardless of whether our President over this time is named Obama, Romney, or Paul.
We must judge matters from where we are at. In other words, ignorance of our reality—ignorance of the immensity of our national government, say, and ignorance of the sheer powerlessness of any one person or even group of persons to scale it back to so much as a shadow of its counterpart from the eighteenth century—is inexcusable. To make a decision regarding something as momentous as the future of our country on the basis of this sort of ignorance—even if it accords with one’s conscience—is to condemn oneself. …

MORE.

While I disagree with Jack’s conclusion in this column; I wholeheartedly agree with and admire his method.

UPDATED I: I don’t vote. And, although eligible, I have chosen not to become a citizen of Police State USA. There you have it. I guess that’s “radical.” Moreover, as Loren E. Lomasky observed, “As electorates increase in size, the probability that one’s vote will swing the election approaches zero” … “[I]n large-number electorates, there is a vanishingly small probability that an individual’s vote (or voice) will swing an election … [F]or citizens of large-scale democracies, voting is inconsequential.” So obviously, I’m not with Jack on the lesser evil thing.

Also, given that Romney will take us to war at the drop of a hat, I do not know that he’ll reduce the size of the state. As I put it the other day, “Make no mistake; should he succeed in vanquishing Obama, come Nov. 6, Romney’s brand of ‘repeal-and-replace statism’—not to mention maniacal militarism and Sinophobia—will be no victory for liberty.”

I am with Jack, however, in that he is in there “mixing it up,” arguing the issues (rather than adopt the attitude described here).

In fact, some left-libertarians argue for Obama. At least they are not intellectually lazy and are arguing the issues, which is what Rothbard did. That’s my point.

UPDATE II: THOSE who refuse to “mix it up”; to get down and dirty and debate the issues, will also typically be unprepared to admit to nuance in the personalities involved. What do I mean? Recognizing that Romney may be wrong on almost all issues of policy should not prevent one from acknowledging that he’s a lovely man. As a person, he has way more merit than Obama.

Ann Romney, herself a delightful lady, is a lucky woman. Romney is a great provider, fabulously devoted to family and church, consistently generous and charitable to all those around him, and brilliant in all endeavors, academic and other. Unlike those of Obama, Romney’s university transcripts will stand scrutiny.

As I see him, Barack Obama belongs to an alien species hostile to life on earth.

UPDATE III: Mining Men are some of the most heroic workers, tied in the literary mind to great works such as Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 classic “How Green Was My Valley” (your children should have read it). It depicts the reality of mining men in an achingly beautiful way. The book haunted me for years after I had read it, as a kid. “Margaret’s Museum” achieves a good deal on celluloid.

So you read about these miners whom BHO, that alien who is hostile to life on earth, thwarts. And you wonder: Could Romney perhaps save their proud livelihood? The key being that you wonder … you wrestle with the issues.

Protectionist USA

Business, China, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Labor, Paleolibertarianism, Private Property, Trade

If you’re in the market for “cheap rooftop solar panels,” you might have to reconsider. The Commerce Department has slapped “tariffs ranging from about 34 to nearly 47 percent on most solar panels imported from” China.

Tariffs, quotas, anti-dumping penalties, or any other trade barrier, force the American consumer to subsidize less efficient local industries, making him the poorer for it. Hundreds of industries—“the burgeoning business of installing cheap rooftop solar panels,” for example—are destined to shrink or go under in order to keep local, politically efficient industries in the lap of luxury.

This is not in the interest of the American consumer and it violates his freedom of contract and association.

The meddlers in Commerce had “determined that Chinese companies were benefiting from unfair government subsidies and were selling their products in the United States below the cost of production, a practice known as dumping.”

Dumping is good for American consumers. Antidumping penalties are typically imposed by the West on poorer nations to stop them from selling their wares bellow market prices. Such protectionist policies are detrimental to less- developed and Third-World countries, which gain advantage through the use of one of the only resources they have, their labor.

The US flouts freedom when it meddles in the affairs of the Chinese and the US consumer. The latter loves cheap Chinese products.

Columnist Jack Kerwick Parses Paleolibertarianism

Classical Liberalism, Ilana Mercer, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy

Who is paleolibertarian? Yours truly argues political philosopher Jack Kerwick, in his New American column, “Ilana Mercer and the Paleolibertarian Ideal” :

“It is [first] the conviction … that a world in which men and women are free to order their lives in accordance with their own moral purposes, not those of the governments under which they live, is an ethical ideal worth aspiring toward.”

But that’s not all:

In addition, a paleolibertarian is someone who rejects “the contemporary Western temptation to indulge in abstractions,” and labors tirelessly “to remind us of something that this generation of liberty’s defenders are all too ready to forget: Liberty is as dependent upon historical and cultural contingencies as is any other artifact. And it is just as fragile.”

“The pursuit of the … paleolibertarian ideal,” concludes Kerwick, 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.”

The complete column, “Ilana Mercer and the Paleolibertarian Ideal,” is at The New American.

Jack also blogs at Belief.Net.

UPDATED: Conservatives And The Diversity Dross (NASCAR Drive for Diversity)

Affirmative Action, Conservatism, Founding Fathers, Government, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Paleolibertarianism, The West

The next news item is unremarkable. “The U.S. government,” reports Fox News, “paid a Chicago consultant hundreds of thousands of dollars to put on diversity training workshops that, according to one watchdog, included an exercise in which employees were told to chant ‘our forefathers were illegal immigrants.'”

What do you expect from “the U.S. government”? It’s a criminal gang out to erase every vestige of a history that might rekindle in a pliant people the quest for freedom. The government, and its excrescences, does these things reflexively rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy. Like a big amorphous amoeba—a simple, single-celled organism—government will instinctively act to preserve its own integrity.

The people to condemn in his story are the “Conservative group Judicial Watch.” While we are grateful to JW for uncovering the bestialities of bureaucrats—in the substance of their complaint, they are almost as complicit as government. They complains that,

“Instead of being diversity-oriented or tolerance-oriented, it’s more about adopting a mindset,” said Lisette Garcia, a senior investigator with the group.

Garcia of Judicial Watch is quite fine with the government conducting mind-control workshops on taxpayers dime, so long as these indoctrination sessions transmit true “diversity and tolerance,” as promised.

What kind of a conservatism is this? The watch dogs are worse than the dogs in power (my apologies to dogs). At least the people who dreamed up the “diversity intelligence advantage course” know what they are after. What do Garcia and her friends want?

A truly conservative watch dog would, first, object to the unconstitutional appropriation of taxpayer funds. Second, they would reject the diversity doxology. Americans should not relinquish their birthright for a mess of pottage.

Were Lisette Garcia of Judicial Watch a true conservative she’d take the opportunity to mention that “Thomas Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.”

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

UPDATE (10/7): NASCAR DRIVE FOR DIVERSITY. Another “initiative” conservatives doubtless would endorse:

Drive for Diversity is the industry’s leading development program for minority and female drivers and crew members. The Drive for Diversity program currently supports drivers in two of NASCAR’s developmental series – the NASCAR K&N Pro Series and the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series. The Drive for Diversity Initiative also supports crew member candidates through a year-long pit crew training program. Crew members have gone on to compete in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series and the NASCAR Nationwide Series.
The Drive for Diversity program has been successful in creating meaningful opportunities for minority and female competitors. The program helps to further diversify NASCAR’s participant and audience base. The program has seen continuous growth since its inception in 2004.

The only thing that should matter to the conservative-minded person is merit. But like progressives, conservatives buy into the construct upon which social tinkering is based, both in private and public settings (corporations love this stuff). That of built-in bias. Conservatives agree that patriarchal society is innately hostile to “minorities and females,” and that therefore, these special interests need a helping hand.