Einzige's blog

You cannot have one without the other. Why, then, do those who seem to earnestly champion economic liberty seem so at home with cultural repression?

Free markets require free men. If I am a slave to the prevailing cultural mores, then I am not likely to have a great deal of freedom on the market.

Introduction

Our present crisis is the direct result of nearly a century of economic mismanagement, and has not gone unexpected to any astute observer of the defining trends of capitalism. We of the left have long predicted the fall of this dark winter over the springtime idyll of industrial development; we of the libertarian left have have always known that it would be the result of an overreliance on centralized industry, and a monopolization of the means of production by forces who preserve their economic hegemony by way of the State.

For the traditional political divide in America, conservative and liberal, over the size and scope of the government, is in reality an intentional misdirection from the truly pressing issue: the State's dogmatic support of corporatism and cartelization, that is, its insistence on supporting the national industry through means both overt and covert. And, for its part, industry has been more than happy to allow the State to play its role of sworn defender of the profits of its shareholders; indeed, business exerts its control over the machinery of government whenever it can, so as to take possession of the State's monopoly of violence to apply to its own uses. From the "Banana Wars" in Central America during the administrations of McKinley and T. Roosevelt to our present, sprawling military-industrial complex, industry and the State have walked hand-in-hand at every turn in an incestuous fashion, each owing its successes to the other.

And yet no political programme today in proposal by either of the major Parties even pretends to challenge this state of affairs. Our conservatives feign allegiance to the cause of small government, save when they require that self-same government to exert force in the defense of their traditional social hegemonies; and, when they mouth the dogmas of their puerile misunderstanding of the laissez-faire society, what they mean by it in reality is a corporatist nightmare: they would destroy trade and regulatory barriers to economic expansion, but do absolutely nothing to halt - indeed, actively promote - the continued centralization of the economy in the hands of an elite few.

Our leftists are little better. For nearly eight decades now they have championed the advances of the State in nearly every aspect of life: from taxation to regulation, they suppose that the economic difficulties now making themselves known can be corrected through the continued, judicious application of State power. They are wrong, and they know it; for they lived, as we left-libertarians were forced to, under the shadow of the Bush Administration's efforts to sanctify and whitewash the use of force in the social sphere, to achieve its own perverse ends.

And just what are those ends? The continued monopolization of economic resources; the destruction of wealth through excess; the enforcement of legislation designed to actively give established economic interests an advantage over any potential competitors, fundamentally distorting the true meaning of the free-market economy; the establishment of a police-state - both our "conservatives" and our "liberals" march together in lockstep towards this, their final goal.

This is an extremely bleak picture of America's present, but if it is not painted over, the future is likely to become only worse. Fortunately, the means to avert this destiny are closer to our grasp than ever before. Only the will to implement them, and to re-evalute our fundamental values in the process, is lacking.

The Entrepreneurial Society

The economically free man is the economically stable man. Our agrarian ancestors, though certainly materially poor in comparison to even those in our modern society who exist on the fringes, were nevertheless not nearly so subject to the twists and turns of the financial markets as we are today. For their lives were in their own hands; and they alone were responsible for seeing either that their harvests came in on time, or that their handicrafts had a market - no man and no market downturn could take from them their sources of wealth.

I do not dare propose that we attempt to stem the advent of modernity; far from it. Agrarianism worked well in the past for material reasons relating to the vastly smaller and more diffuse population and the absence of modern farming techniques and technology - to retreat back into premodernity, as many of our conservative populists and cowardly "paleoconservatives" seem to want, would be deadly folly.

What is needed instead is a new modernity, which masters the forces of physical production and places them in the hands of productive individuals. For, in freeing one's self from the bonds of the State-controlled corporate markets, one assers control over his own economic fortune, and, in doing so, breaks the authority of both State and business over his own being, over his very own individuality.

Accordingly, a new strategy is needed. The left-libertarian does not shy from using the State to undermine itself; far from it. If the power of government can be manipulated to further the cause of liberty - always, of course, resulting in its own eventual dissolution - then it is only appropriate that such actions be taken.

Therefore, the left-libertarian seeks to cause the State to invest in those technologies which will ultimately be the source of its own undoing. We have seen this occur naturally, without a concentrated effort to realize this end - the Internet itself (surely the greatest threat in our modern world to State power) was itself the product of Cold War paranoia realized in its ultimate form and given life through DARPA. Today it threatens to undo the stability upon which the modern nation-state relies, by rendering physical borders obsolete and tearing down cultural barriers.

This same fundamental process can be applied towards the goal of rendering individuals fully self-sufficient in the area of economic production. Already potentially disrupting technologies like personal rapid fabrication and desktop manufacturing threaten the traditional mores upon which the mass mobilization of labour is founded - we can rock these foundations further by investing in such technologies and ensuring their speedy availability to enterprising individuals.

Eventually the technology will exist to render collective industrial employment and all of the difficulties it entails - labour costs and conflict, the need for a welfare-State, and reliance on the whims of capitalist chieftans as guarantors of social progress - irrelevant. Man does not truly own himself until he exerts total ownership over himself; by turning every man into an owner, every man will do just that.

The Peaceful Society

"The only real purpose of government is the defense of its citizenry." This conservative canard is as false as it is ancient; for the State has served its historical purpose and must be permitted to die away.

In times of old - and here we see the source of conservative nostalgia - the State was an unfortunate necessity, when, prior to the Treaty of Westphalia and the rise of the modern nation-state, standing armies were a rarity in Western society and the bribing of corps of mercenaries was the typical means by which the feudal and mercantilist orders secured their defense.

Today, of course, as the threat of truly international, universal war such as that which racked the last century recedes into the distance, the Western world finds itself confronted with a dilemma: how does a State which relies on a standing professional military to inflate its employment numbers and provide contracts to a centralized and uncompetitive defense industry continue to justify military spending in the absence of potential conflict?

The United States has hit upon one potential solution: perpetual war without the aim of perpetual peace, but instead the radical transformation of a competitor society whose alternative form of monotheism offends the popular (vulgar) mass sentiment and whose basic similarities frighten it, like a reflection in a fogged-over mirror.

How incoherent, how self-contradictory both "wings" of our politics have been in response! Indeed, on security matters, the American political establishment is akin more to an ostrich than an eagle. Our "leftists" - that is to say, our liberals - demand a more 'humane' art of war, proving in one stroke their utterly lack of artistic taste. Moreover, they expose their own hypocrisy every time they do so: for in this instance, and this alone, they quietly acknowledge what we libertarians have always known - that so long as the nation is defended by a military whose sole justification is the continued subsidization of the armaments industry, there can be no lasting peace. And the political wing which led us into the three most destructive wars of the past century has no moral authority whatsoever on the issue.

Our conservatives, of course, are no better, and are in many ways worse yet. They will cry and hue regarding the deficit, and yet any effort to tear down the shrine they've erected to the gods of machismo in the professional miliary is regarded as something approaching heresy. Boeing is regarded more favorably among their ranks than the independent contractor; their preferred form of welfare is welfare for Lockheed Martin and Boeing. To this both the genuine leftist and the genuine libertarian cry: enough!

We will no longer tolerate a military whose Constitutional justification is nonexistent and whose purpose it is to slave at the beck and call of industrial leaders and their slaves in the Federal government. We instead demand a return to the legally obligatory form of defense as provided for in the United States Constitution: a self-organized and thoroughly voluntary militia. Only when the apparatus for making war has been ground into dust and salted over can a genuinely peaceful society be established.

The Free Society

Capitalism without personal freedom is industrial slavery. This maxim must become second-nature to anyone who professes a personal conviction towards liberty.

For the past five centuries, capitalism has played a pivotal role in destroying those social conditions which stifle technological innovation by impeding personal initiative. By creating the economic progress that drives technical achievement, free enterprise gave forth the tides of material bounty that in turn constructed the world in which we live today, a world that grows ever-more open to a philosophy predicated upon individualism and creates ex nihilo those choices that allow men to conduct themselves according to their own personal orientations. This is, in a word, liberty.

But today this progress is threatened by the very forces that erstwhile pretend to champion the cause of capitalism. The forces of reaction have seen this new world, and fear it mightily, for reasons rooted primarily in their own base instincts and ignorance.

The modern Luddite, for instance, fears the continued development of capitalism because, he claims, it has a negative environmental impact - paying no heed to the fact that technological innovation is inherently capable of minimizing its own destructive tendencies by rendering itself ever more efficient in its application. The theocrat, to the contrary, bemoans its destructive effects upon "community" and "tradition": utterly neglecting the potential of communication technologies to bring forth new communities and new traditions out of the ashes of the old.

Neither of these causes of cowardice are cause for alarm. Both will be defeated in the ultimate course of things. The danger lies in the possibility that these retrograde crusaders will temporarily inhibit the eternal advance of man by causing him to doubt his aims, to doubt himself, and thereby to destroy himself.

Progress requires economic freedom, which in turn relies upon personal liberty. If society is tamed by primitive savagery, if it harnesses its potential in a sheath of superstition, it cannot possibly expect to overcome the difficulty it presently faces.

Conservatives have long complained that a kulturkampf is being waged against them and against their values. They are absolutely correct. The left-libertarian ultimately intends the final destruction of their collectivistic values-regime, which demands absolute obedience to the "higher authority" of conventional wisdom while rejecting the true tradition of the West, which is absolute freedom of thought and will.

Conclusion: The End of Society

It will be charged, of course, that our final aim is to end society as we know it. And we stand, guilty as charged. For we find that society itself is quickly undermining the very need for its own existence; its tendency is towards self-devaluation and thereby self-destruction. The very need for organized civility declines as the atomizing effects of technological progress increases.

This needn't be a painful process, though the vulgar mind will, of course, imagine it to be just that. By isolating the causes for collectivism, we can actively pacify mankind, making him more social by obviating the need for it.

And therein lies the victory.

And since there is such an extraordinary quantity of prophecies, apocalypses, signs, and insights in our age when so little is being done, there is probably nothing else to do but go along with it, although I do have the unencumbered advantage over the others' burdensome responsibility to prophecy and forebode that I can be sure no one will dream of believing me.- S. Kierkegaard, Two Ages

For nigh-on fifty years, the libertarian movement has worked ceaselessly to ensure Republican electoral success. Long before the Southern Democrats broke ranks and invaded the GOP, we have been toiling in the rear, making good on the Republican pledge to minimize statism and increase personal liberty in all of its manifold forms.

And what have we to show for it? In 1980, we worked to secure the Republican nomination for Ronald Reagan. In 1988, we were no more free when he left office than when he assumed it (it is convenient to forget that Jimmy Carter was the first President to begin the push for deregulation), with a larger deficit to boot. But still we stayed true to the faith.

We acquiesced to the nomination of George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988; we voted for him en masse on the promise of "no new taxes". And we were no more free when he left office in 1992 (indeed, Bill Clinton was far more fiscally conservative than he; even in his first campaign he pledged to lower the deficit). We were lied to.

We showed our real strength in 1992. Ross Perot may not have been an ideological libertarian, but one cannot deny that he appealed to our kind in a way that few nominees in recent history have. We broke the back of the Republican machine.

And then, in 2000, we came back to the fold, and voted for a man who pledged us a 'humble' foreign policy and smaller government. We were deceived yet again - at the end of his term we were involved in two budget-busting wars, were laden with a theocratized central State, and left all the poorer for it.

And in every recent poll I've seen, Mike Huckabee has led the Republican pack.

This represents, I fear, something more than the results of 'fusionism', that outdated political philosophy we have hued to since 1964. It represents nothing less than the systematic shutting-out of political power on the part of certain elements within the Republican Party of their libertarian base.

For I am not at all convinced that those aforementioned Southern Democrats ever really abandoned their big-government, populistic political persuasions. To be sure, they can mouth the credo of "small government" like anyone. But what they mean by it is something quite other than what we who are earnest with it mean.

For them, "small government" is a catch-all phrase behind which lies one talismanic symbol: a cross. For them, "small governent" is any government that uses and abuses its monopoly of force in the pursuit of whatever cultural cause is en vogue with them at the moment. It has not yet occurred to them that a genuinely small government could never pay for the wars they so love to fight.

To yearn for freedom, to strive for liberty not only for one's self but for one's fellow men: this is the meaning of libertarianism. And it is fundamentally incompatible with purient nationalism. But I see no alternative offered by Republican policy makers.

Consider the "War on Drugs". Every Republican politician I know of - particularly those from the South - support it. And then they simultaneously pretend to be fiscal conservatives. But if they knew anything about which they speak so well, they'd know how much of a disaster that War has really been, how much an example it is of the big government they love to hate.

I am discontent with the present situation. And I reject the status quo. This does not mean that we are to automatically turn to the Democrats; it does mean that, if we fail in our fight to secure the future direction of the Republican Party, the time has come to collapse the "big tent". And the Tea Partiers are most certainly not the answer - they are one and the same with the abortion-protesting herd I loathe so much.

The political axis of the twenty-first century will not be defined by the old and outdated paradigm of liberal capitalism as against socialist collectivism. In the future the war will be waged, in the social arena, between individualism and authoritarianism. It is our purpose, as lovers of liberty, to fight always and everywhere against the man who would set himself up as God, or as the prophet of a dictatorial God, and take it upon himself to decide the destiny of free men everywhere.

In our being together as nation or State we are only human beings. How we deport ourselves in other respects as individuals, and what self-seeking impulses we may there succumb to, belongs solely to our private life; our public or State life is a purely human one. Everything un-human or "egoistic" that clings to us is degraded to a "private matter" and we distinguish the State definitely from "civil society," which is the sphere of "egoism's" activity.

The true man is the nation, but the individual is always an egoist. Therefore strip off your individuality or isolation wherein dwells discord and egoistic inequality, and consecrate yourselves wholly to the true man -- the nation or the State. Then you will rank as men, and have all that is man's; the State, the true man, will entitle you to what belongs to it, and give you the "rights of man"; Man gives you his rights!

So runs the speech of the commonalty.

- Max Stirner

I am disappointed because, when push came to shove, they demonstrated clearly that flaw of democracy that we libertarians have long sounded the alarms about: the masses simply cannot be trusted with it.

I support gay rights for the same reason I consider myself a small-government libertarian - I cannot, in good conscience, demand that the State both stay out of my bedroom and impose my will on those with whom I disagree (and, for the record, I don't especially disagree with homosexuality).

What we see today, increasing with distressing frequency, is a tendency on the Right to want to use the mechanics of the State to impose itself upon those social elements with whom it takes grievance. This is an historical error: for a very long time, the free market was regarded as a liberating force in society, in which men of any background, any social status, could make good on their inherent potential by allowing the objective forces of the market to equalize any subjective discrepancy in their social relations.

That same principle ought to apply - but does not, in our allegedly 'free' society - to these hot-button controversial issues as well. Marriage is especially important: for marriage is, above all, a contract; and if we applied contract law equally to marriage as we do to every other exchange of material or moral worth, we would find that the State has no business in hindering the formulation of contracts whatsoever.

But, unfortunately, our society is hardly free.

I will push on as I always have, trying to right (and Right) the wrongs foisted about American conservatism by the New Right and its cronies in FOX and the National Review. And I want you to help me.

Just curious. Most of the "libertarians" on this forum seem more than content to gobble theocrat cock when its promises them another tax rebate check.

A simple question.

For many long years the political Right has had difficulty in whipping up a solution to the environment problem. For a while, it seemed as if it would win simply through denying it; Ronald Reagan contemptuously removed the solar panels Carter had installed on the White House rooftop, in a chauvinistic display of everything wrongheaded and unthinking by modern Rightists.

But there is a movement afoot that will one day give rise to an economy as alien from the industrial one we now inhabit as this one was from our agrarian ancestors - and it's using principles the Right has long abandoned. By combining a forward-thinking, libertarian entrepreneurial spirit with a progressive committment to solving the economic issues we face in our rapidly-decaying industrial capitalist economy, a group of rogue scientists will save the world.

Behold, the fabber.

... A funny name for a world-saving device, isn't it? In fact, what is it? According to the fabbists themselves:

 The sharing of music and movie files in peer-to-peer exchanges on the Internet has opened a Pandora’s box of controversy on how to control and profit from creative properties in the digital era. Yet music and movies are only the “tip of the iceberg” in the world of valuable intellectual property. Technologies currently under development and in limited commercial use today present the future possibility of distributing physical products on the Internet by downloading and manufacturing directly in customers’ homes and offices or in local facilities (“3-D Kinko’s”).

     Digital manufacturing is performed by a family of modern technologies that capture, transmit, and manifest 3-D digital descriptions of physical products. The central technology is the digital fabricator or “fabber,” also called a 3-D printer because it does 3-D digital output in solid material. Invented for use by engineers in “rapid prototyping” of all manner of products, from automobiles to zippers, fabbers are now also used by physicians and scientists, Hollywood prop makers, digital sculptors, and even pornographers.

     As fabbers improve in user friendliness and decline in price, their proliferation among professional and recreational computer users will provide a whole new purpose for peer-to-peer exchanges like Napster, Gnutella, and FreeNet. With fabbers instead of MP3 players and *.fab files instead of *.MP3, the inventories distributed by such networks naturally expand from information products to the real and physical: toys, clothing, furniture, sports equipment, consumer electronics, and even, one day, automobiles.

Essentially, fabbing involves the full and mature use of the Internet on a scale previously unknown: by sending a three-dimensional 'copy' of an item through the Internet to a rapid prototyping machine, objects can be built using 'layered' materials to fashion it. This technology has existed since 1986, but only in the past decade has it been feasible to begin to realize the full and awesome implications it will have on our future economy.

How does this help the environment? Simply this: by cutting out most of the middle-men -- the only need for shipping companies now would be to bring the raw material in and supply it; and that could probably be reduced itself by recycling -- we could stave off peak oil until the technology to totally avoid it becomes fully feasible.

Of course, not everybody is going to like it. The old order will cling to power, using its influence in the high offices of the land to attempt to smash this burgeoning industry before it can get off of its feet. Make no mistake of it: this is class-warfare, against both business and governmental interests.

This is why a reconsideration of the principles of libertarianism is so important: as we have seen so recently in cases involving Napster, Limewire and the RIAA, old mass industries are (rightfully) terrified that, once the full power of free individuals utilizing the Internet for progressive ends is unleashed, it will be the end of them. As it well should be.

The old political alliance between Big Business and libertarians has got to go; we can only invest in this technology as long as Network Neutrality - that is to say, the right of free men to use the technology in their possession to whatever egalitarian end they wish - is protected and respected. The government, of course, will not see to this; because the government exists solely to prop up the business interests of a ruling elite. Only through this radical re-adjustment, and re-evalutation of our present values, can we achieve the future - today.

We stand at the threshold of ideology: the old debate between the New Dealing liberals and the minarchist Right has ceased to be of any informative value or political use. No longer do either the Rooseveltians or the Reaganists offer up a smorgasboard of ideas that is palatable; rather, their respective notions have become quaint, outdated, and utterly lacking in value.

What is required today, for liberty-minded men, is to reacquaint themselves with a very old tradition, one that has been wholly smothered by men of the Right and co-opted for their own gain: that of left-libertarianism. To be sure, there are many different formulations, running a gamut from decentralized (non-State) socialism emerging without the use of coercion or force - possible through the utilization of New Technologies like the 3-D Printer - to anarchocapitalists who wholly reject the basic inhuman and authoritarian nature of social conservatism.

What are some of the essential credos of this new political paradigm? As Reason magazine has it, left-libertarianism

"combines the libertarian premise that each person possesses a natural right of self-ownership with the egalitarian premise that natural resources should be shared equally. Left-libertarianism holds that unappropriated natural resources are either unowned or owned in common, believing that private appropriation is only legitimate if everyone can appropriate an equal amount, or if private appropriation is taxed to compensate those who are excluded from natural resources. This contrasts with right libertarians who argue for a right to appropriate unequal parts of the external world, such as land."

Accordingly, I resent and reject the lame attempt by conservatives - who, from the time of Edmund Burke, have never been genuinely concerned with opposing the State's encroachments on the liberties of free men and always concerned with the preservation of the social order they themselves have a vested interest in - to amalgamate the true spirit of libertarianism with such social ills as anti-environmentalism or race-reactionism.

Hence I propose a ten-point left-libertarian programme:

1. The left-libertarian, unlike the Marxist, believes it to be the responsibility of the individual to take ownership for that which he himself creates. Likewise, it is the domain of the individual to produce that which he sells. Therefore, the left-libertarian ought to co-opt the growing desktop manufacturing movement and endorse and promote it (through such projects as Fab@home  and RepRap), in order to liberate the individual man from consignment to the current, rotting industrial-capitalist order. This movement is the seed that will one day germinate into the New Post-Industrial Economy, as opposed to the ideological swill we have been force-fed every day for the last thirty years. Only a genuinely de-centralized economy can pull us through this crisis. And by relocating the means of production in the individual home, the stress inflicted upon the environment by industrial production will be massively reduced, conserving the existing oil supplies for the transition.

2. Starting immediately, the U.S. Highway System is to be privatized and sold into individual hands. It is hopeful that environmentally-minded co-operations can be formed to buy up the Highway System and gradually replace it with a for-profit system of mass public transportation.

Likewise, any corporation dedicated to the production and implementation of environmentally-sound technologies to be untaxed.

3. The current merger between the State and the military-industrial complex must be wholly destroyed. The military must be replaced immediately by private military contrators with immanent jurisdiction over the execution of their duties. Likewise, it must be beyond the purvey of the State to engage in acts of torture.

4. The production of marijuana must be made legal, over any religious or ideological objections, so as to ensure the economic solvency of States and regions capable of supporting the plant. For too long thinly-veiled anti-immigrant rhetoric has been used to keep the plant barred; but, like Prohibition eight decades before it, freedom will win out in the end.

5. The  Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) must be dissolved, as must all public unions. Network Neutrality  in the 21st century is a direct extension of the individual liberties the State is responsible to protect; any party or parties seeking to abrogate these freedoms must be checked by the State.

6. The Federal Crop Insurance Corporation must be dissolved, and control over the affairs of agriculture returned to the private purvey of the family farm.

7. Lands unclaimed for industrial, commercial, or agricultural use must be made available by the Federal government to their reclamation by co-operatives seeking to put that land to industrial, commercial, agricultural, or religious use. Voluntary socialist communes to be legalized.

8. The American borders with Mexico and Canada are to remain open, so as not to violate the liberty of travel of Americans and to ensure that South Americans looking to escape the harsh collectivist policies of many Latin American dictators remain free to start a new life in the Northern hemisphere.

9. Abortion shall be made the purvey of the Several States, to be voted up or down by the inhabitants thereof.

10. The Federal government shall overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, and all of the tax incentives to marriage, and permit each religious institution to decide upon its own marriage policy. The States will oblige each religious organization or institution that decision, and recognize those marriages each church, synogogue, mosque, or other institution accepts as valid.

The old Keneysianism that served so well in extricating America from the crisis of the 20th century - whether in the form of State Keneysianism under Roosevelt, Military Keneysianism under Eisenhower, or Supply-side Keneysianism under Reagan - will no longer suffice in this Digital Age; continued reliance on any of them would be a mistake of the first magnitude. We must therefore rethink the American political spectrum, and find new places within it, if we are to survive. 

I was very young in 2000, a year which helped to greatly shape my political committments now, nearly ten years on.

I remember at the time being something of a young 'Dittohead': I'd lay in bed next to my grandfather (a man who by virtue of his age missed both the Second World War and Vietnam) while listening to the Rush Limbaugh show on his old transistor. I remember his bellicosity regarding the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal; his utter distaste for Clinton's alleged heresies during his time studying in England; and --

-- his vocal support for Elian Gonzales, and his hatred for Janet Reno for sending the boy back to Cuba.

Now, there are many things I believe my grandfather was wrong about. I have very little respect for his positions on race relations or on gay marriage. I believe that both are integrally tied into the philosophy of individual liberty I espouse - while it is immoral for the government to force religious organizations to marry homosexuals, for instance, it is equally unethical for religious groups who would be open to the concept to not be permitted to wed those who love one another. I also am vastly more tolerable to the concept of drug legalization than he happened to have been; I distrust almost instinctively that politician who does not admit to drug use in some form or another.

And yet there are areas in which my political convictions do not differ from his, and among them is my belief that the forced resettlement of Elian Gonzales in Cuba was reproachable. Especially damaging to those who agree with Janet Reno's position is the fact that now, ten years on, Gonzales has joined Cuba's Communist Party. This sickening turn of events, so disturbing to me (who identified strongly with Elian in my youth), has led me to consider the plight of others in similar situations.

There are some among us who call for a total shutdown of the American border with Mexico, who argue that, for the sake of preservation of American job and the American culture, we ought to protect ourselves pre-emptively by closing down what is, for many, the only opportunity they have to make something of themselves.

I reject this. I reject it because many of these immigrants - and no immigrant, no human being is ever 'illegal' - are simply escaping from the turmoil and tribulations of a life lived under the reign of statist dictators and other collectivists in the fetid political jungles of South America. And so to Mr. Pat Buchanan and his ilk, I say: how many of you protectionists would consign freedom-seekers to the abyss that so often is South and Central American economies to make things easier on yourselves?

I am unwilling to do so, and I am unwilling to a part of any Party that insists on it. For too long have American's institutions been constantly refreshed by streams of immigrants looking to make lives for themselves in peace and harmony; we must not make the mistake of closing our borders to ward off another 'Yellow Peril'. We did much the same in the first decades of the last century, which brought Europe to the brink of overcrowding and harmful ethnic and which, led almost directly to the rise of fascism and the Second World War.

We must have this debate now, while we are on the political outs; we cannot return to the old way of doing business, that is, to the way that says that it's alright to play up to the prejudices of the masses in order to seize the reigns of power and use them for our own ends. Let us be clear: I am not a proponent of forced or coerced multiculturalism. I do not believe that much of anything can be solved by forcing two people to sit down together who genuinely dislike one another and forcing them to share the same slice of the political pie. All the same, I am not prepared to abanadon one-fifth of humanity to despots who seek to deny to their subjects the basic liberties to which all life is entitled.

We must remake America to be the envy of the world and the destination for freedom seekers the world 'round once more. There must be no more Elian Gonzaleses.

Rather than getting yourself in a tizzy regarding the President's inane and outdated proposal, show that the libertarians can do it better. Rather than act in a reactionary fashion by promoting an outdated and socially harmful form of populism that betrays the efficiency and innovation the free-market is known for, encourage debate on the subject. In a word:

1. The Republican Party, starting yesterday, needs to adopt a policy that offers massive tax incentives to those corporations that are capable of making the effort to invest (for the duration of the present crisis) in an efficient program of modernization; that is, we need to show them - and the people - that we, too, demand progress on this issue, and that we are every bit as dedicated to solving the energy crisis.

We have to be serious on this, though. We cannot allow a repeat of Reagan removing the solar panels from the White House roof - it's neither in the interests of the country or the country's business interests to pass up this singular moment in history to reground the American economy in a firm foundation. If we continue to slack off, we will lose their trust as right as rain, and for good reason. We must take the lead, not follow the pack.

2. Starting immediately, we must break strongly and forcefully with the inane conservative notion that the world never changes. Our present economic system is decaying so that a new one might grow. This is natural and inevitable - to use a phraseology my socially-conservative counterparts might hold dear, this is a time of separating the wheat from the proverbial chaff. We can take the lead on inaugurating the 21st-century economy, if we prioritize and accept that the political paradigm that was established in 1980 is no longer valid.

3. We need to compete on both a pragmatic and ideological level: where the Democrats are concerned in the main with a pie-in-the-sky notion of collective climate change, we must demonstrate to the individual that we wish to save him from economic catastrophe in the form of massively increasing gas prices and lines that will circle the block. By emphasizing and nurturing the individual nature of this crisis, and the individual damage it can and will inflict on countless lives, we can take the lead in winning his trust once more.

Do I expect it to happen? No. We are all wearing collective blinders; an entire generation of Republicans have grown up -- but haven't really grown up -- to react against anything that smacks of the 1960s, including the energy issue. But we must meet this challenge; and we will, even if the Republican Party cannot and does not will to. Because we are men, and because we are Americans.