The New Fusionism: The ascent of left-libertarianism in the 21st century

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the Reaganists offer up a smorgasboard of ideas that is palatable; rather, their respective notions have become quaint, outdated, and utterly lacking in value.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.