Einzige's blog

It is perhaps unfashionable in certain quarters to speak ill of the late Ronald Reagan. But fashion and courage are often at loggerheads, and where fashion fails, then courage must make its stand.

The old politics of the political Right - a contradictory mis-mash of small-government rhetoric and big-government corporatism - will simply not suffice going into the years ahead. And what is corporatism? Why, you've seen it yourself; you have been part of it yourself. When you cast your ballot for Ronald Reagan in the election of 1980, you voted for the largest increase in military spending in American history. To whom do you think those public funds went? To more pie-in-the-sky liberal social programmes? No, not at all. It went to Raytheon, to Boeing, to Lockheed-Martin.

When you pulled the lever for George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988, what sectors of the economy benefitted? Most certainly not the working class - unless, that is, they were employed by the same industries mentioned above, in which case they saw their earnings skyrocket in the run-up to the First Gulf War.

After you polled in support of George Walker Bush, did we see a massive cut in government spending? The very idea is ridiculous. Once again a "small-government administration" promised big things, and delivered big pay-outs to the military-industrial establishment that Ike Eisenhower warned us against.

I am a fan of the comedian George Carlin. I think he understood better than most the plight that I, and millions of voters like myself, go through every four years; in fact, I'm sure he did. Every four years, those of us who are adamant about the principles behind what conservatives call "small-government" are lulled into a false sense of serenity by smooth snake-oil salemen. We tend to ignore the fact that we are very far apart from these people on most cultural issues - many of us are pro-choice, and most of us are vehemently anti-War on Drugs and anti-police state. We're even willing to turn the other way when confronted with issues of war and interventionism, which must inevitably be coupled with increases in State spending.

But even a dog, when abused enough times, will turn eventually upon its master. We are angry, angry not only with the "liberals" (and ah, how so many of us wish we could reclaim that word from the socialists!), but with the political Right itself. What do you offer us, that we should remain in your fold? Are you really so uncompromising that you cannot reconsider issues of corporate welfare and conservative forms of social spending?

This video, featuring Reason Magazine editor Brian Doherty, is I think a fine summation of the state of libertarian-conservative relations. Bill Buckley, the great founder of fusionism, made a famous quote to the effect of, "(w)e have got to accept Big Government for the duration--for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." (emphasis mine) This, from a man most "small-government conservatives" treat like a saint!

This reckoning has long been in the making. Better to have it out now and find some more workable arrangement than to continue making no progress on this front into the future.

And this is why I hate the Religious Right:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal.

 My non-libertarian conservative friends expect me to pass over statements like this. I mean, after all, Pat Robertson's a political ally - right?

Well, no, not really. I dislike and distrust the Religious Right; I do not believe they have the liberty of man in mind when they espouse their policy positions. And things like this simply seem to confirm my suspicions.

I've noticed a lot of libertarians who demand immediate measures to stem what they see as an ever-increasing flow of illegals from south of the border. Many of them have made an entire career off this material - Beck in particular has a huge amount of cachet with those whose chief concern is illegal immigration.

I must admit that I fail to see the reason for this furor. Moreover, I am exceedingly wary of the measures many of these people wish to enact towards their stated ends. You wish to see Big Government personified? Why, a State large enough to keep accurate track of the inflow of immigrants into any nation - with genetic databases, with cameras on every street corner - would be the very definition of it. Moreover, who is to pay for this programme of deportation? Not I. If ever tax resistance would be justified, this would most certainly be that time. 

 And, of course, I question the very need for it. You say they are a drain on our health care service? Then work to privatize health care. If they lay bare the flaws of our present mongrelized system, then I cannot but consider them allies in this endeavor. You say they take "American jobs"? That strikes me as being a very nearly protectionist sentiment. Whither the controversy, and why do so many of these people proclaim themselves to be libertarians?

When Ronald Reagan spoke of his Shining City whose walls had doors for anyone with the heart to get in, I doubt very seriously he meant the police state many of these "small-governmenters" seem to want to propose.

Though the knowledge may distress some of our resident fascists, conservatism has historically been a movement opposed to internationalism in all of its guises: the same political impulse that led the great Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) to oppose entry into the United Nations caused him also to despise the internationalist faction led by Rockefeller and Eisenhower that called for an expansion of the Cold War into armed proxy conflicts.

Where has this great American tradition - beneficient neutrality based on freedom of trade and non-aggression - gone? In this area our President is not nearly "liberal" enough: the recent 'sure' in Afghanistan will fail, just as surely as all 'surges' have failed - where the political will for democracy is non-existent, it cannot be imposed by foreign powers.

Our Republican "conservatives" (read: reactionaries) are most certainly not any better. They may hue and cry about the deficit all they wish, but at the end of the day it is their mindless subservience to the military-industrial complex and utter devotion to the concept of spreading revolution by gun that has largely done us in on the deficit. Where are the principled, authentic conservatives to demand a reduction in scope of the State in all its guises, not just those that benefit their present political coalitions?

Something needs to be done, but the cowards on this site surely aren't the ones to do it.

A resolution is being circulated by RNC members which calls for candidates to support at least eight of the ten items listed below or face action by the RNC:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama's "stimulus" bill;

(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run health care;

(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

(4) We support workers' right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership

Apparently, in Michael Steele land, it is impossible to be a genuine small-government conservative, or to be a libertarian who wants to keep the government out of all facets of his life. The fact that the very first item on this list contradicts the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth items is apparently beyond Steele's ken.

 We need less Ronald Reagan and more Robert Taft.

And by this I don't mean such trivialties as promoting economic redistribution, which the Republicans obviously do not. I mean something more fundamental: when did the GOP choose to sacrifice all credibility upon the altar of populism, and begin to speak out of the bloodied mouth of the vox populi?

If you don't believe it, my conservative friends, then I'd recommend you read What's The Matter With Kansas?. Though I am almost the political opposite of Frank Rich, I nevertheless agree with his unstated conclusion: the Republican Party's descent into the puerile strata of populism, fueled by its reliance on the socially conservative blue-collar vote, marks a fundamental shift in the political situation: any Republican who pines for the days when the Reagan Raiders rode to the defense of Wall Street and had only to throw a bone to the masses on social issues is a downright imbecile.

There are the facts: Populism is of the Left. Elitism is of the Right. I welcome the charge of elitism as directed against myself, though I am likely poorer than a vast majority of posters here. And I am also a Democrat. My favorite liberals are latte-liberals. I hate the culture of Middle America, and I hate Middle Americans. I am also a libertarian, who "worships at the church of the market", to use Rich's phrase.

Whither this change?

1. End Nixon's War on Drugs. How many billions do we spend on this useless program, again?

2. End Bush's Faith-Based Initiatives. Preserving the Wall is essential to preserve individualism.

3. Pull out of Iraq. We spend nearly a hundred million dollars a day on it; is this really what fiscal conservatives want?

4. End all government subsidies to business. Giving free money to industry stifles competition.

5. End all tax breaks to married families. Encouraging marriage threatens the individuality of perpetual bachelors.

Or what, exactly, are we libertarians 'conserving'?

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