Category Archives: Political Philosophy

UPDATED: Libertarians Should Look Inward For Reasons Funding Drying Up*

Ilana Mercer, Intellectualism, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy

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Jim Ostrowski has posted to Facebook a column by EPJ’s Robert Wenzel titled “LewRockwell.com in Financial Trouble?” Jim, who has never enjoyed a feature column on the “libertarian sites” he slavishly touts (sorry pal; just standing up for what you deserve), and has been called by Murray Rothbard “one of the finest people in the libertarian movement” (damn straight), should contemplate the following:

If these iconic, but waning, sites had not diligently and systematically expunged or marginalized their best and brightest, presumably because we do not conform strictly to party-lines; they’d have long since harnessed the energies, intellectual and other, of individuals who, after working in the trenches like dogs for little to nothing, and without ANY libertarian support—are in a position, finally, to boost atrophying sites and help increase their audiences.

Robert Wenzel is right. The problem of dwindling funding (usually associated with reduced readership) is not all the doing of the neocons or the libertarians who don’t like cookies or pop-ups. (The love of cookies inspired the title of a chapter in my next book, not that you’ll hear about any of my books, all good for liberty, from the libertarian sites you know.)

Non-establishment libertarian sites operate in as cultish a manner as do beltway libertarians. In the liberty-oriented community, people tend to huddle in atrophying intellectual attics, and quibble about detecting and expelling contrarians. Dare to dissent, and keepers of the flame will take it upon themselves to read you out of the movement (check).

This, naturally, makes for tribalism, not individualism. The bad, moreover, have a nasty habit of crowding out the good. Or, as one Objectivist wag once wrote, “Quality is never the result of intellectual purges: the most creative and independent thinkers are the first to go.” That makes perfect psychological sense: those who remain feel more secure, group cohesion having trounced intellectual vitality.

Infrequently, on the occasion that this column is featured by one of the sites discussed, I will invariably get the odd letter or two to say: “Wow, never heard of you. Where have you been hiding? Why aren’t you a regular?”

Why am I persona non grata in libertarian circles after, oh, close to 20 years of quality writing? Take a guess?

The last of the letters I quote verbatim:

“Next to Rothbard, I believe you and Hoppe are the best libertarian writers I know of. I’ve read all your articles. I had been arguing with x and others about immigration for months. Some of the self-proclaimed dictatarians [sic] of libertarianism blocked me because I disagreed with them. You were the only person who challenged the libertarian establishment on immigration, and you were right.”

No, the Ron Paul Revolution is over and it is not the only act in town. If Ron-Paul-Only institutions are faltering, they need to look beyond the neocons and “the bizarre anti-ad perspective of many ‘libertarians,'” in the words of Wenzel, and do a little navel-gazing.

UPDATE (12/8): Jim Ostrowski knows I’m right, but won’t “Like,” because he’s being … lawyerly. He, like myself, deserves the prominence which would have PAID dividends to those who gave it. So, I’m sorry: You huddle in compliant ideological attics; you never tolerate the slightest dissent; you behave like mainstream; you’ll dry up.

*****

* For the same reason, The Independent Institute should stop hitting me up for money on Giving Tuesday or on any other day. (I’ll choose The World Parrot Trust and Project Perry any day. And I did.)

UPDATED: Continuum Of Propaganda: Yale, U Of Missouri & YOUR Child’s School

Constitution, Education, Founding Fathers, Government, Political Correctness, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Religion

Parents with a traditionalist, conservative or libertarian mindset please pause to carefully consider the following: If your kids are in the country’s primary, secondary and tertiary educational gulag, however well they are doing, they are being brainwashed.

The specter of frightened white men, on the nation’s campuses, resigning in fear of a mob rising in rage against … hurtful words and gestures—all constitutionally protected speech—is an organic extension of the entire American educational ethos, down to YOUR child’s school. What these affluent kids are rioting for—to silence and purge dissent and dissidents—they were taught in varying degrees in secondary, even primary schools.

You cannot counter it by yourself; you’re too busy being productive, living a good life. Pedagogues rely on your life being too chaotic to familiarize yourself with, for instance, the politicized process of textbook and course material selection that ensures your child never ever comes away believing in the correctness of the philosophy that animated the republic’s Founding Fathers, or in the originalist intention of the US Constitution. (Don’t be gulled: Kids will learn about theories of constitutional interpretation. But they’ll also come away with the distinct belief that originalism is a quaint thing reserved for kooks.)

But in order to counter the Sovietized nature of the schooling system, a parent cannot be remiss—he must be aware of it, know he is powerless to counter its complex, systemic, enervating nature alone, and access suitable resources to supplement a child’s education.

For example: Homeschool Courses by historian Tom Woods. Or this writer’s economics and other columns, always richly sourced, to be found in the Articles Archive. (Friends of liberty, please write in, here and at Facebook, with your suggestions of scholarly material. I have opened this blog post for your Comment.)

Having a child in the public schools system comes with the responsibility to know your child is being programmed and to be prepared to deprogram or unshackle him.

Consider: The University of Missouri is one of the nation’s top-tier R1 institutions. Yale needs no introduction. There is nothing unique in Mizzou’s militant mob, now joined by Yale’s equally odious protests, as these losers unite against hurtful words and unpleasant ideas. The horrifying thing is that the histrionics at Yale are the winners of tomorrow; the people who’ll man (or woman) the human resources department of America’s companies, to enforce conformity.

Fact: Yale and Mizzou students are oblivious to the cherished American tenets of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion; diversity of thought. Why? When Allan Bloom wrote the Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, in 1987, he addressed what he knew: the modern university.

But the rot didn’t happen there and it didn’t unfold overnight. The making of our mindless, philosophically and ethically bereft millennials happened over time.

The seeds of the bizarre contagion spreading across American campuses were sown in your kids’ schools.

UPDATE (11/14): Following the Paris attacks of 11/13, B. Hussein Obama blah-blahed about America’s flaccid affinity for liberty, equality, fraternity, the French national motto. Thanks to our public school system, your kids are none-the-wiser about the fact that America’s founding principles of life, liberty and property are the philosophical opposite of the French Revolution.

Did not the Jacobins eliminate, butcher, massacre the clergy class, to name but one kinda significant difference? Our Founders revered institutions of faith and their role in a self-governing, moral society

Can’t Wait For The 1st, 2016 Democratic Primary Debate (Just Kidding)

Democrats, Elections, Political Philosophy, Socialism

If he’s smart, and he is, Jim Webb, former senator from Virginia, and Democratic candidate for 2016, will ignore his revolting rivals during the first, upcoming, 2016 Democratic Primary Debate, and make eyes (by which I mean aim to please) at Donald Trump and his broad base. The last includes Southern Democrats, believe me.

By the way, when is this much-anticipated snore-cum-puke fest? (Found the date: October 13, 2015.)

How many viewers do you think the first, Democratic Primary Debate will draw? I’ll throw out a guess: 4 million? (As opposed to …)

Who are the other participants, aside Webb, Bernie-For-Socialism-But-Some-2nd-Amendment-Rights Sanders, and Hillary Rodham Clinton? Do you know? Jim Webb will probably be the only candidate worth watching.

In “Trump Should Triangulate,” Webb was recommended to Trump as a candidate for the Trump ticket:

James Webb, the decorated Marine who served as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy, is no GOP loyalist, either. Webb, indisputably the last salt-of-the-earth Democrat, is considering a bid for president as a … Democrat.

Trump would do well to triangulate, à la Bill Clinton, and place the talented Mr. Webb on the Trump ticket. Then, make immigration a central theme in the campaign, advance a principled, major, pro-black policy by speaking to the legalization or decriminalizing of drug use and sale—and Trump will have secured the vote of blacks, white southern Democrats and other Reagan Democrats. Like no other, drug legalization is a proxy black issue, worthy of the endorsement of the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

A ticket sporting two Alpha Males, moreover, is likely to infuriate the Alpha females of media (including those with the Y chromosome).

Wendy McElroy On The Invasion Of The Libertarian Body Snatchers

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism

Libertarian theorist Wendy McElroy worries that she might have to leave the movement she practically founded, because, to use a biblical quote, “there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph.” A new generation of self-styled libertarians that doesn’t know the meaning of libertarianism has arisen, according to which Wendy, and certainly myself, are deemed “brutalists.”

I wrote “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist” about one of their luminaries, before I understood the extent of the revisionism in which the “humanitarians” were engaged.

So numerous are the libertarians who condemn me that I have long since stopped giving a damn. Most are like the proverbial (or metaphysical) tree falling in the woods. We know they say stuff, but nobody wants to stick around to hear them make the tedious sounds they make.

Over to Wendy, who is heartbroken over “the attempt to change the ground rules of libertarianism through introducing left-leaning attitudes and concepts”:

… the absurd and manufactured debates [is] about “”thin” and “thick” libertarianism – the “humanitarians” versus the “brutalists.” It is an attempt to introduce political correctness into libertarianism so that it is not enough to advocate nonviolence; you have to advocate it for the right reason, as defined by those who provide themselves as moral filters. They call me a brutalist. This means I will never violate your rights; your children, your property are safe in my presence because I respect your right to live in peace. But I don’t protect your children for the right reasons. For this, I am to be excoriated. This is the second approach to a new definition of libertarianism: People wish to analyze society not according to whether it is voluntary but in order to ferret out signs of power and privilege which they self-righteously condemn. Consider open source software. It has been castigated as a realm of privilege because it predominantly consists of white men. Open source software is source code that is thrown into the public realm so that anyone can modify and enhance it. It is a pure expression of free speech; the product is available to everyone for free; there are no entry barriers or requirements other than caring enough to learn code. Learning code is also available and free to all.

I think it was the condemnation of open source software that made me crack. Out of the goodness of his heart, my husband has devoted substantial time to what amounts to an intellectual charity. He pursues it for the same reason he repairs and gives computers for free to underprivileged children; he believes in the power of technology to lift people out of poverty. (BTW, I strongly suggest no one criticize my husband to my face on this point; I am likely to render the most Irish of all responses.)

Open source software is condemned for no other reason than it involves few women or minorities. This reflects nothing more than the choice of those women and minorities. It costs nothing to learn coding. Tutorials are available for free to all and everywhere. Correction: It does cost time and effort. The individual has to exert him or herself. I’m not willing to make the investment but neither do I blame the first white guy I see for my own inertia. If there is something in the culture of women and of specific minorities that prevents them from rising, then blame the culture. Don’t blame a white man like my husband who is falling over himself to provide a free service. (Correction: my husband is Hispanic … but that won’t give him a free pass. I mean, after all … the genitalia. And the grand critics of society don’t really care for accuracy.)

Last night, I contemplated my exit from a movement that considers me to be a “brutalist” after years of unpaid work promoting nonviolence. I found myself engaging in an emotional release that I’ve used for many years. I wrote a letter to my father. My dad died when I was ten years old. I loved him. …

Read “A Letter to My Father” By Wendy McElroy