Category Archives: Political Philosophy

Political Philosophy Is Not Like Sexual Orientation

Ilana Mercer, Labor, libertarianism, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy

Here’s my one reply to comments at The Unz Review about “The Curious Case of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian”:

Political philosophy is not like sexual orientation: You don’t just come out to the world, call yourself a thinker, and expect to be get embraced. You shouldn’t get away with that, although some try and succeed.

You do the bloody hard work, day-in, day-out. You write, you think; you get panned or praised; and you get up and do it again the next day.

You can’t just come out every day and proclaim, ‘I’m a perfect paleolibertarian, I believe everything Murray Rothbard said. Look at me, ain’t I neat, unlike Mercer,” not having written a coherent systematic sentence in your life.

And by systematic I mean, don’t just parrot the greats! The work involves, yes, applying the political philosophy as you see it to the political reality, doing it in fresh, new ways, without fear or favor.

You can’t sit on the fence, lazily, proclaiming your purity; forever suspended between what “is” and what “ought to be,” and revel in your immaculate conception (while throwing stones at me, as so many in this community have done).

In a word, you can’t be lazy, smug; an intellectual nullity that tears the hard-working down (love split infinitives).

As to The Mercer Image posted at The Unz Review: The editor organizes the page and the images on it; not the writer/myself. The Unz Review is a tightly edited website.

Why would anyone familiar with the ways of the press, print or pixels, imagine I posted a picture of myself at The Unz Review. Ridiculous!

The point of the essay is simple. My work over 2 decades (voluminous) speaks for itself. Good or bad.

It is systematic; it is paleolibertarian. Any scholar of substance would locate it squarely in the paleolibertarian tradition. Such a scholar might also distinguish a salient thing that sets this thought apart from some of those surveyed in the volume under discussion. As I wrote in defense of John Derb:

I cop to Western man’s individualist disdain—could it be his weakness?—for race as an organizing principle. For me, the road to freedom lies in beating back the state, so that individuals may regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will.

As for Israel: Why not ask the Ron Paul 2007 campaign why it commissioned a brief think piece from me and adhered to its tenets pretty well throughout the campaign—until someone likely told Paul that Mercer was un-kosher, and until someone instructed the campaign to quit calling on Mercer?

“Unshackling Israel,” mentioned in “Is Ron Paul Good For Israel?,” was commissioned by the Paul camp and repeated on the Paul campaign trail to good effect.

[SNIP]

The article under discussion: “The Curious Case of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian.”

UPDATE II: Chris Matthews Offers Profundities On What’s Behind Trump

America, Donald Trump, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Nationhood, Political Philosophy, Republicans

Chris Matthews of Hardball offered a most unusual commentary, unusual because insight and depth are rare these days at MSNBC (the network that fired Pat Buchanan):

Trump stands out there with something the other candidates lack, a compelling message. Trump speaks, like it or not, as an American. He goes after Putin [sic], the Chinese, the Pope and the presidents of Mexico. He even says he’ll be even-handed with Israel and its neighbors.

Trump speaks as a nationalist, that’s how he talks. He speaks not of how he’ll handle the job of president—how he’ll operate the government of Washington, what bills he will sign or veto, but, rather, how he will lead America in the world.

Trump’s rivals for the presidency speak of government; he speaks of country, this country, and that makes all the difference. Someone like Rubio cannot contest Trump on this level. It’s too late for him to try or even imagine fully what Trump is doing. Rubio cannot at this late stage muster a winning strategy.

Trump has one. It’s in his slogan. Make America great again.

WATCH Matthews & This extraordinary situation in the GOP.

UPDATE I (2/27):

UPDATE II:

The Russell Kirk We love Is …

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, War

… the Russel Kirk who, “Toward the end of his life, … returned to his anti-war beginnings. He went so far as to say that ‘not a single American war … had been absolutely necessary.’ He denounced the neoconservatives as warmongers; and he had no use for National Review. ‘Kirk came to believe that Buckley had sold out to the neocons, claiming in a private letter to [Peter] Stanlis, ‘As Patrick Buchanan remarks, National Review is now the New York office of the New World Order.’”

David Gordon is always streaks ahead of the rest of us mortals. Read David’s review of Russell Kirk: American Conservative, by Bradley J. Birzer (University Press of Kentucky).

I will say that I knew, from my edition of The Conservative Mind, “that Kirk in the 1940s was himself a libertarian, or close to it.” And that: “… he strongly opposed America’s war policy, in particular the use of atomic weapons and the internment of Japanese Americans.”

I didn’t, however, know that Kirk “corresponded with both Albert Jay Nock and Isabel Paterson, both renowned libertarians. Indeed, he favorably discussed them in the first edition of The Conservative Mind.”

Best tidbit from David’s review:

Buckley was a former CIA agent, and the principal point of the [NR] magazine was to reorient the American Right from a noninterventionist foreign policy toward a militant pursuit of the Cold War against Russia and to purge those who dissented from militarism and war. Four of the editors, Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, Frank S. Meyer, and Willi Schlamm, favored preventive war against Russia. Kendall and Burnham were also former CIA agents; and the late great George Resch told me that Henry Regnery, Kirk’s publisher, called National Review a CIA operation.

READ “The Real Russell Kirk” by David Gordon.

Left-Liberal LA Times Calls Trump Supporters Fascists

Capitalism, Communism, Constitution, Fascism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Philosophy, Socialism

“Bernie Sanders’ socialist inclinations do not bother his fans,” blared a Los Angeles Times headline. Just kidding. That’ll be the day a left-liberal ignoramus hypocrite at the LA Times lobs insults at the beloved Bernie’s supporters.

The real title to this fatuous piece is, naturally, “Donald Trump’s fascist inclinations do not bother his fans.” Because the author is ignorant about everything, not least political philosophy and history, he sees nothing comparably vile, detestable and totalitarian about other candidates’ socialist prescriptions and proclivities. You’ll never hear a word from moron media members (David Horsey) to the effect that professing anything remotely socialist ought to be stigmatized as totalitarian.

Of course, no fascism is involved. As at least one legal scholar writing at the New York Times offered, “Trump’s Anti-Muslim Plan Is Awful. And Constitutional.” In other words, a president’s plenary power to prevent a possibly dangerous cohort from obtaining immigration status is not fascistic, it’s just not “nice.” In line with the writer’s liberal asininity, the rest of this bloke’s article (David Horsey) consists in appeals to authority, not argument: “Megyn Kelly said, Max Boot said, Paul Ryan said.”

George Reisman, PhD, explains “Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian”:

… apart from [the great economist] Ludwig von Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed.

The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands.

What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive. The position of the alleged private owners, Mises showed, was reduced essentially to that of government pensioners.

De facto government ownership of the means of production, as Mises termed it, was logically implied by such fundamental collectivist principles embraced by the Nazis as that the common good comes before the private good and the individual exists as a means to the ends of the State. If the individual is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.

But what specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936. These were imposed in response to the inflation of the money supply carried out by the regime from the time of its coming to power in early 1933. The Nazi regime inflated the money supply as the means of financing the vast increase in government spending required by its programs of public works, subsidies, and rearmament. The price and wage controls were imposed in response to the rise in prices that began to result from the inflation.

The effect of the combination of inflation and price and wage controls is shortages, that is, a situation in which the quantities of goods people attempt to buy exceed the quantities available for sale. …

…

… Read “Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian.”