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| A Good Reply |
| 06.20.05 (6:12 am) [edit] |
I am impressed with the quality of responses i get here. Most are reasonable even those who I disagree with. With t the exception of the posts i deleted everyone has been civil. I will do my utter most to try to respond. Here is one post that was made which I wanted to give more prominence. (Partly because it is good and partly because the comments box is too difficult to read.). I am leaving the name on since this was publicly posted already but private communications I receive are not identified by me. I will make comments along the way if that’s fine since it is easier than trying to keep track of it all and putting it all in one spot. My comments will be in brackets and have a RW at the beginning to try and keep them separate.
Bill Woolsey [outside user] Monday 06.20.05 [8:33 am]
The history here is mostly consistent with my observations--though I guess I should be glad I never visited San Francisco in the late seventies.
[RW: That you for the confirmation. Don ‘t be too harsh on the city. It’s like one giant Disneyland. You get the bizarre costumes on a daily basis and now and then the entire city goes bouncing around like one big ride. Sure there are wacky characters but that gives the city it’s charm. I enjoy it and think everyone should live in San Francisco at least at some point in their life.]
I would add some observations.
By the time I was active in the SLS, there was already a split between the initial leadership and the radical caucus Rothbardians.
[RW: Well the people I met at SLS were the people who ran the RC. Rothbard wasn’t there but many of his followers were.0]
SLS started at about the time of the Clark campaign, and that is when there was a split between Rothbard and Cato, SLS, etc.
The Rothbardians were dead set against the ant-nuclear power "strategy."
[RW: Some Rothbardians were and some weren’t. I don’t mean to imply at any point that they were all united on issues. They often weren’t. And as I said I am speaking of Mr. Rothbard’s supporters and the people who surrounded him who today make up a certain amount of the Paleo crowd.”
Also, the Clark campaign had a "leftish" approach. The theory was that stagflation had discredited "liberal" economics. So, the libertarians would offer liberals and dovish, McGovernite foreign policy, and ACLU view on personal liberty, and a sugar coated scheme of market-oriented reform. It didn't work.
[RW: Let’s be fair to the Clark campaign. It didn’t work in that he didn’t get elected. But then we had the principle Bergland campaign and the results were worse. We had the Paul campaign and Badnarik campaign. None of them work in the sense of victory. But my view is that all of them help push the ideas of liberty a bit.]
That SLS would try to get involved in the anti-nuke movement, as well as anti-draft stuff was consistent with the Clark campaign approach. It didn't work.
[RW: I did see efforts to join the anti-draft campaign but not the same effort on the nuclear issue (thankfully). But I did see the anti-nuke stuff that came out of head office and out of Libertarian Review.]
SLS disappeared. Cato continued on with a "moderate" libertarian approach--well, moderate relative to the Rothbardians.
[RW: My impression watching Cato since those Montgomery Street days is that they’ve been pretty consistent, pretty decent and relatively effective.]
As I see it, the paleo turn came from the fall of the Soviet Union. Rothbard thought that there was an opportunity to reconstruct the entire right on an isolationist basis. All of the puportedly disciplined libertarian revolutionaries were supposed to turn on a dime, and follow our leader into rightwing political work. Personal liberty issues would have to be downplayed. Our common ground of the freemaket emphasized and, of course, a new foreign policy introduced in place of anti-communism.
[RW: Agreed. MR did seem to think we should be a discplined vanguard following the leader. He, of course, being the leader. I always say us as the alternative to Left and the alternative to Right. I don’t mind strategic issue alliances but I didn’t think we should downplay our free markets with the Left or our social freedom with the Right.]
Many of Rothbard's followers in the libertarian movement, refused to follow. Pesonal liberties issues were too important too them. They couldn't stomach working closely with Christian conservatives. [RW: Amen.]
(Of course, many libertarians weren't about to follow Rothbard anywhere. This really only applies to Rothbardian libertarians who failed to follow the twist in the strategic line during the late eighties.)
[RW: Well it was sometimes damn difficult to keep up. Mr Rothbard was quick on his feet and could turn on a dime.]
Rothbard's line of attack on those who were supposed to be taking his orders was that they refused to give up on personal liberties issues and start working with cultural conservatives is because they personally had unconventional habits. They were only libertarians to be free to do these various unconventional things--as opposed to heroically hating the state.
So, gay people or drug users who followed Rothbard in his twists and turns are fine. The "left libertarians" in the sense of counter-culture types really just applies to a small segment of the libertarian movement. I guess from a Rothbardian perspective, those who didn't follow Rothbard weren't really libertarians at all. You know, people associated with "Treason" magazine or those Republican lite folks at Cato, etc.
[RW: I think you a tad bit harsh with Cato. They certainly have had some good stuff on foreign policy and in opposition to Bush. I wish they would do more on civil liberties. But all in all I’m okay with them even if we part company now and then.]
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posted by: BillWoolsey (reply)
post date: 06.21.05 (3:07 am)
Like usual, my writing is less than clear. I was a "Rothbardian" for about two years in the mid-seventies. Oddly enough, it was the "fractional reserve banking as fraud" position that led me to break with that position. By the time I was involved in SLS, I was opposing the radical caucus people from a "moderate" position. I was horrified by the backlash against Clark. I rather like both Reason and Cato.
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