Conservatism Is Not Libertarianism

US Representative Justin Amash (R-MI) is far from the first, and is unlikely to be the last, politician to equate libertarianism and conservatism (“Rep. Justin Amash: Conservative and libertarian ‘basically the same philosophy,’” by Jack Hunter, Rare, February 16).

But the comparison is not only just plain wrong: It benefits supporters of statism on both the putative “left” and “right” at the expense of liberty. It allows conservative politicians to pretend to be libertarians (pandering to, and often fooling, libertarian-leaning voters) and “progressive” politicians to falsely caricature libertarians as conservatives (so as to preemptively defeat libertarian ideas without having to actually engage them).

It’s not that conservative politicians can never be “libertarian-leaning,” as Amash himself arguably is (a rarity among conservatives, he actually DOES usually vote against big government instead of just talking the “smaller government” talk out of one side of his mouth while growing government as fast as he can with the other). It’s that any similarities between libertarianism and conservatism are contingent and coincidental, not essential.

The central tenet of libertarianism is liberty. While there’s considerable debate within the libertarian movement itself as to the nature and scope of the liberty to be protected, libertarians generally defend the freedom to do as one wills, provided one does not coercively infringe the freedom of others.
The central tenet of conservatism is conservation. Similarly, there’s considerable debate within the conservative movement as to WHAT must be “conserved” — Amash wants to “conserve” the long-dead “classical liberal principles” of America’s founders, which are nominally libertarian in many respects; some conservatives would repeal the New Deal and “conserve” Coolidgeism; most modern conservatives want to “save” the New Deal by putting it on a more reasonable fiscal footing, but would love to ditch the Great Society — but once again there’s no doubt about conservatism’s philosophical lodestar: “Protecting” society from radical change.

To explain the difference in terms of one issue, take same-sex marriage:

For  libertarians, the answer to “should a same-sex couple be permitted to marry?” is “it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg — end of discussion.” Libertarians have held this position ever since the issue first came to their attention.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are at odds with each other on it.

Amash, for example, tweeted last year that the “[r]eal threat to traditional marriage & religious liberty is government, not gay couples who love each other & want to spend lives together” — a libertarian answer, but also the answer one would expect from someone who wants to “conserve” a Madisonian/Jeffersonian view of government’s role.

Then there are conservatives (e.g. Jonah Goldberg) who now tentatively support, or have at least stopped actively opposing, same-sex marriage because they regard the fight as pretty much over. They’re coming around to “conserving” the emerging new status quo rather than the old one.

And of course there are conservatives who still want to “conserve” a past in which same-sex marriage was illegal. They’re afraid of the prospective effect of rapid and radical social change on existing institutions (and power/authority relations), and want to use the force of the state, in a very un-libertarian way, to stop and/or reverse that social change. This is the conservatism which, per William F. Buckley, Jr., “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

As an anarchist — a libertarian who takes the principle all the way and advocates the abolition of the state — I think that Amash wastes his libertarian pearls by casting them before congressional swine. On the other hand, I can’t really hold it against him and it’s nice to see someone speaking truth to power on Capitol Hill. I just wish he’d give up the silly notion that “conservatives” can ever be more than temporary allies of convenience.

Citations to this article:

• Thomas L. Knapp, No, Congressman Amash, Conservatism Is Not Libertarianism, Before It’s News, 02/17/14

No, Congressman Amash, Conservatism Is Not Libertarianism by Thomas L. Knapp


  Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society

  Republished under Creative Commons

An Interview with Walter Block

In this interview hosted by the Louisiana Tea Party Students and Louisiana Young Americans for Liberty, I discussed my views on the role of the Federal Reserve—specifically how their monetary policy negatively affects us in regard to inflation, devaluing the US dollar, and destabilizing the economy from distorting prices which leads to the misallocation of resources. Then, the topic moves to the various roles of government (e.g., anarcho-capitalism, minarchism, classical liberal).-Walter Block

Larry with Some Thoughts on Libertarianism

As I mentioned, I'm going to be debating/speaking with a Libertarian on campus next week. I have some questions about Libertarianism I'm hoping he will answer.

The most obvious questions is, what precisely is Libertarianism? Is it just a laundry list of political positions? There's nothing wrong with that — both the Democratic and Republican parties take this approach; it's called a "platform" — but it would be nice to know if there really is a cohesive, non-trivial philosophy underneath.

Without putting words in anyone's mouth, the most concise description of Libertarianism I've heard is that state power should prohibit the initiation of coercion, and only the initiation of coercion. But this description doesn't seem coherent; specifically, the initiation of coercion seems to equivocate with the use of force the speaker does not like or that goes against his or her personal or class interests. Again, there's nothing wrong with a specialized, subjectivist, interests-based political philosophy, but it doesn't seem helpful to label a subjectivist philosophy as objective, and it's dishonest to justify a specialized interpretation with our moral intuitions about the general, literal interpretation.

Is Libertarianism better because it's more moral, or is it more moral because it's better? In other words, is Libertarianism justified on moral grounds or pragmatic grounds?

Are there objective reasons to consider the use of economic power non-coercive? Or is it just that Libertarians approve of economic power and disapprove of physical, directly violent power? Again, it's unproblematic to approve of one kind of power and disapprove of another, but does Libertarianism make the distinction explicit, and does it refrain from equivocation to leverage moral intuition?-The Barefoot Bum: Thoughts on Libertarianism

posted under Creative Commons

Libertarian Mom Takes On Two Party System

Betsy is running for US Congress for these reasons: to reduce the size and scope of the Government, to restore the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, to reduce federal spending by 50%, to end the wars (including the absurd “war on drugs”) and to expose the ponzi scheme which is our Keynesian economy. Her positions are very clear, with individual liberty as the source. Her goal is to magnify the growing Liberty movement – the one that champions individual freedom, personal responsibility, and small government – all under the umbrella of non-aggression. Let your neighbor be, and just be.-http://votebetsy.com/

via The Victory Report

VoteBetsy.com

Karl Hess on Anarchism and the Libertarian Party

Anarchism in America DVD

What Do Libertarians Do?

click image to enlarge

Penn Jillette: Reconciling Atheism with Libertarianism

Thoughts on Ron Paul 2012

Some thoughts on Ron Paul and his role in the libertarian movement by XOmniverse.

Libertarians Without Borders: An Interview with Tom Palmer about the Arab Spring

"The kindling, the material that has burst into flame in Syria, or Egypt, or Libya or Tunisia, are all different cases. But the spark that went from one to the other was common," says Atlas Economic Research Foundation's Tom Palmer.

Palmer speaks to Reason.tv's Matt Welch about liberty on a global scale, particularly in reference to revolutions in the Middle East this past year. "It's been a movement of astonishing courage and bravery," he says, "It has shown a demand for dignity."





Atlas Economic Research Foundation

reason.tv

Robert Anton Wilson

Prometheus Rising

Is There Hope for Liberty in Our Lifetime?

Presented by Jacob Huebert at the Mises Circle in Chicago: "Strategies for Changing Minds Toward Liberty"

Libertarianism and the Civil War

Why did the southern states want to leave the Union? And why did the northern states refuse to let them go? Just because slavery is the answer to the first, it does not necessarily follow that it answers the second. These two questions are often conflated because so many Americans approach the Civil War with an implicit and unchallenged prejudice in favor of national unity.

Yet secession and war are distinct issues. For secession to lead to war, northerners had to be determined to hold the Union together with violence. And scholarly research has demonstrated that slavery had very little, if anything, to do with that determination, either on the part of President Abraham Lincoln or of the northern public generally.-The Question of Slavery

See all the articles in this special issue of The Freeman here

Libertarian Party Calls for Permanent Government Shutdown

Libertarian Party Executive Director Wes Benedict said, "Just think how a permanent government shutdown would allow so many Americans to regain the blessings of liberty.

"Education would blossom as the Department of Education ended its War on Learning, no longer wasting our money and preventing educational innovation with one-size-fits-all centralized mandates.

"Job opportunities at companies big and small would multiply, providing opportunity and choice for American workers.

"The world would enjoy peace as we withdrew our forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Our government spends almost as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. Millions of industrious men and women who work for the military and its contractors could be focusing on building up our economy, rather than tearing down others'.

"Crime would plummet as the government's War on Drugs ended, no longer sustaining a giant violent black market and overfilling our prisons.

"The life of many poorer Americans would improve as welfare programs stopped, no longer trapping low-income families in an endless cycle of government dependency.

"All Americans would feel a huge burden lifted every April, as they were no longer required to wrestle with a byzantine and oppressive IRS.

"But most importantly, Americans would once again be free of unjust and unconstitutional violations of their unalienable rights."

From Press Release, Libertarians call for permanent government shutdown

Interview with Matt Zwolinski on Libertarians and Social Justice

Can A Libertarian Be An Advocate For Social Justice?


Matt Zwolinski, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, has a blog, Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Libertarian?

In the end, of course, the case for Mohandas Gandhi as a libertarian is closed by the fact of his pacifism. In online forums where blowhards with little information pontificate on subjects in which they are particularly uninformed, you often run into the assertion that "libertarianism is not pacifism." "Perhaps you have confused libertarianism and pacifism," a self-appointed pundit will intone, with an air of great confidence and certainty. And there is a grain of truth behind all this posturing.

It's true that libertarianism is not pacifism -- at least, not necessarily. On the other hand, pacifism is libertarianism. If you abjure all violence, you must abjure the state. Thus, while not all libertarians are pacifists, all pacifists are libertarians, whether they realize it or not (and, admittedly, a great many pacifists have not realized it). Gandhi, it appears, did realize it.

As all the world knows, Mohandas Gandhi returned to India in 1914, at the age of 44, just after the outbreak of what later came to be called World War I. Over the next three decades he organized and led the movement to free India from British control, a movement that succeeded in its aims.

On January 30, 1948, while on his way to the platform from which he was to address a prayer meeting in Delhi, he was murdered by a Hindu nationalist wielding a pistol -- "assassinated" is the term usually employed, because Gandhi was both a political activist and a public figure. He was 78 years old.

Does he deserve a place in the libertarian tradition? I'd say so.



Does Gandhi Deserve a Place in the Libertarian Tradition?

A Bleeding Heart Libertarian Blog

Andrew Sullivan says : "The gulf between the Obama administration's campaign rhetoric and governing record on civil liberties shows that building the left-libertarian alliance is more important than ever".

I’ve created this blog as a forum for academic philosophers who are attracted both to libertarianism and to ideals of social or distributive justice. Labels are often a greater source of confusion than insight in academic discourse, and no doubt most of the contributors to this blog will wish to qualify the sense in which they fit this description. Some, for instance, will qualify their libertarianism with a label – “left-libertarian,” or perhaps “liberaltarian." Others might prefer to think of themselves as “classical liberals” or even “market anarchists.” But libertarianism, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is a broad intellectual tradition bound together more by rough agreement than by meeting a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. What we have in common on this blog is an appreciati0n for market mechanisms, for voluntary social cooperation, for property rights, and for individual liberty. But we appreciate those things, in large part, because of the way they contribute to important human goods – and especially the way in which they allow some of society’s most vulnerable members to realize those goods.

Beyond this, there is almost certainly a tremendous range of disagreement among our participants, not only regarding labels but regarding deep substantive issues as well. I hope the conversation on this blog, both among our authors and among our commentators, will help to explore these disagreements, as well as our points of commonality.

Bleeding Heart Libertarians

The Myth of the Small Government Libertarian

I’ve always considered myself a political smoker and drug user. I don’t smoke or take drugs, but I don’t politically oppose their legality. While I don’t oppose their use, I find it foolish to believe that they should go completely unregulated.

Nurses shouldn’t be allowed to smoke in the nursery of a hospital where newborns are sleeping. You shouldn’t drink if you’re about to perform surgery. You shouldn’t be allowed to smoke crack while driving (at least pull to the side of the road… you know who you are).

But all in all, I think the availability of personal vices should be unlimited, with the primary rule being, “My right to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”

On May 23rd, it will no longer be legal to smoke cigarettes in New York City parks.

Now, I thought they went too far when they banned cigarettes from bars. That decision didn’t make any sense to me. Was there a problem of people saying, “Um, excuse me, I’m trying to meet someone who I can drive home drunk with so I can have unprotected sex… and you’re blowing smoke in my face!”

Frankly, I think fighting should be legal in bars. If you don’t like it, stay the fuck out of bars. I don’t go to bars, and I am in no way oppressed by it. I don’t start a campaign to legally mandate better lighting, more food options, and kitsch on the walls, thereby turning every bar in the country into Applebee’s. I don’t like bars, so I don’t go in them. It’s not calculus.

Now, while I think you should be able to have drunken fist fights in bars, I almost get the NYC ban on smoking in parks. Almost. I’ve been to NYC a few times, and the parks are about the only place you can go to escape the ever-present scent of car exhaust, homeless people, and food carts (I’ve never been so nauseated and hungry at the same time before). I don’t know if smoking in parks was ruining the whole experience for some people, and I can’t pretend to care what goes on in NYC, so I won’t bother commenting on it further.

But there is a rising backlash against this legislation. As one can imagine, it is largely right-wing Republicans who oppose it, but I believe the most vocal group in opposition to these types of measures are Libertarians.

Which brings me to San Francisco Happy Meals. Not long ago, the City by the Bay decided to put firm restrictions on the content of any meal served with a toy (regardless of the type of restaurant, McDonald’s, fast food or otherwise). In the end, you can get a healthy kid’s meal with a toy or an unhealthy kid’s meal without a toy.

I don’t know if this legislation was the result of spineless West Coast parents being unable to tell their kids “No,” or if there was a problem in regards to a lack of healthy options available. I really don’t care, because (again) I don’t live there.

When the Happy Meal fervor was still fresh news, I said (and I’ll point it out again now that NYC is banning smoking in parks): why are “small government” advocates so opposed to the actions of… well… a small government?

It’s not a mystery, I don’t have to explain it to you. It’s not difficult to grasp the fact that “small government” doesn’t actually mean anything, and that it’s merely a slogan for opposing federal measures that are disliked on other grounds. So, why is this canard so often repeated as a founding principle among a group that routinely opposes the actions of small governing bodies?

Small government is implied to mean a local government more in tune with the individuals making up that community. The idea behind lionizing “small government” is that it’s easier to govern a state or city in a way that is approved by its citizens, much easier than catering to the myriad of needs across a nation of over 300 million people (I would argue it’s not… but I’ll get to that later).

But there is a glaring fallacy in the assessment I have presented: simply saying that one is in favor of smaller government does not mean that one is required to agree with everything a smaller government does. I support not only a national government, but a global one spanning every person on Earth… though that doesn’t mean a global government measure which issued a law banning black people from having children would be something I support.

In short, agreeing with a system of government does not mean one supports everything about a particular government’s agenda. With so many small governments across the country, it would be hard imagine a libertarian being in favor of every single measure that each town and state managed to come up with.

Kennesaw, Georgia may not be a town you have heard of, but many people outside of the US recognize it as the place that has mandated that all heads of household must own a gun.

*takes a deep breath*

You can choose to turn the comments into a gun “debate” (see also: circle jerk), but I will ignore anything discussing guns. The point here isn’t whether guns make anyone safer… it’s that there is a government mandate for you to purchase something (which is the very thing people who oppose the questionable healthcare bill from last year claim is tyrannical).

Meanwhile, South Dakota and many other states seek to turn their female population into concubines, nothing more than birth factories who are at the whim of any rapist. Decide what happens with your own body? Not a chance when it comes to abortion. Hell, they want it to be legal to kill an abortion doctor. Where are the Libertarians in these battles?

Another definition of “small government” is simply the belief that government should get off our backs and stop telling us what to do… supposedly. When it comes to something like gun ownership or abortion, these right-wingers abandon this principle of government neutrality and non-intervention because the government is, in their perception, correct.

Funny… it’s only oppression when left-wing policies are enacted by small governments. When right-wing policies are shoved down our throats… it’s just plain, good-old fashioned common [non]sense.

Of course, when you do any real research and find that nearly all Libertarians vote Republican (if they vote at all), that the Libertarian party is co-funded by most of the same pro-crony, big-business interests, and that “Libertarian” candidates like Ron Paul are actually just abortion hating Republicans who vote along party lines like every other right-winger…

You start to realize that Libertarians are the “New Coke” to the Republican’s “Coca-Cola Classic;” like New Coke, Libertarians won’t be around for long (only until they lose their usefulness and their cover is blown), and like New Coke… it’s all a marketing scheme to just get you to buy another Coke product.

[As a side note, I wanted to include the Tea Party in my drink analogy, but the only beverage I could manage to associate it with was whole milk… nothing else was fatty or white enough. I know, “tea” is already a drink, but can you honestly picture any of those people sitting down in a café with a cup, a saucer, and a scone? Maybe southern sweet tea…]

My point is this: tyranny has nothing to do with the size of a government. Tyranny is not stopped by dividing the world into quarrelling sub-groups that wish to oppress their citizens in their own unique ways. Unlike a penis, it’s not the size of a government that counts: it’s how you use it. And before you ask, yes, I worded that correctly. I don’t care what your dad told you about the “motion of the ocean,” he was just trying to make you feel better.

A bad policy is a bad policy whether at the global, national, state, city, or even household level. Whenever I hear people going on and on about how small government is superior, I can’t help but think of another concept practiced by tyrants: “divide and conquer.”

Libertarian Class Analysis

Say the words “class analysis” or “class conflict” and most people will think of Karl Marx. The idea that there are irreconcilable classes, their conflict inherent in the nature of things, is one of the signatures of Marxism. That being the case, people who want nothing to do with Marxism quite naturally want nothing to do with class analysis.

So it ought to be of interest to learn that Marx did not originate class analysis or the idea of class conflict. These things have their roots in radical liberalism, or libertarianism, predating Marx’s writings. Indeed, Marx himself paid homage to the originators, a group of historians in post–Napoleonic France who have been neglected by all but a handful of modern-day libertarians.

Sheldon Richman: Libertarian Class Analysis [pdf]

Zero Aggression Principle

The state's very existence violates the Zero Aggression Principle!


via Kent's "Hooligan Libertarian" Blog

Q&A with Michelle Fields of Students for Liberty

Students For Liberty