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| Some interesting material |
| 06.22.05 (1:14 am) [edit] |
A couple interesting things have cropped up that I’ll share just as background information. I was happy to see the Rothbard/Hoppe Institute has republished the article that Rothbard wrote for the New Left journal Ramparts. I mentioned that article previously. It starts out:
“TWENTY YEARS AGO I was an extreme right-wing Republican, a young and lone "Neanderthal" (as the liberals used to call us) who believed, as one friend pungently put it, that "Senator Taft had sold out to the socialists." Today, I am most likely to be called an extreme leftist, since I favor immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, denounce U.S. imperialism, advocate Black Power and have just joined the new Peace and Freedom Party. And yet my basic political views have not changed by a single iota in these two decades!” http://www.mises.org/story/18...
He has my sympathy all over again. Twenty years ago I was considered a right-wing libertarian. My views over that period have gotten more conservative in some ways (as a personal life style choice and as the way I recommend for others but I don’t yearn for the state) but now I’m called a “left libertarian”. But when I’m not a “left libertarian” I’m a “neo-conservative&r dquo;. And what is fun is that the same people who accuse me of being a “neo-con” on one day will accuse me of left-libertarianism the next.
In the article Rothbard says with admiration: “A new, younger generation of rightists, of "conservatives," ; began to emerge, who thought that the real problem of the modern world was nothing so ideological as the state vs. individual liberty or government intervention vs. the free market; the real problem, they declared, was the preservation of tradition, order, Christianity and good manners against the modern sins of reason, license, atheism and boorishness.” He is lamenting this. But it strikes me that the Paleo-libertarians today have also said that the real problem with libertarianism is that we “left libertarians” weren’t working for the “preservation of tradition, order, Christianity and good manners against the sins of reason, license, atheism and boorishness.”
Rothbard made it clear then that libertarianism was “in opposition to throne and altar, to monarch, the ruling class, theocracy and war.” He wasn’t salivating over Hapsburgs or yearning for a return of the Confederacy which was the friend of “order and regulated freedom” in conflict with “atheistic individualism and an unrelenting rationalism in politic, in favor of a Christian understanding of authority, social order and theology itself” as Mr. Woods would put it.
I have argued that “counter culturalism” was a movement of the New Left. It was born then and thrived there and from there moved outwards. I would think that a libertarian would find some of it acceptable on the legal level but not necessarily so on the individual, moral level. So the New Left was where woman’s lib, gay rights, freedom from censorship, the drug culture, etc was founded. Rothbard at the time was quit enthusiastic about how the New Left was moving in a libertarian direction. I didn’t think so. I saw some agreement on minor issues but not on many. And I felt it had the seeds of a more authoritarian sentiment within it. That, I think, proved to be the case.
Murray referred to himself and his band of merry followers “ex-rightist libertarians”. He saw within the New Left a “remarkable shift toward libertarian and anti-statist positions” which I must confess I didn’t see. I, like many Rothbard admirers, did try to work with the New Left on issues of war and the draft for instance. But I only saw a louder, more obnoxious version of the Old Left. I didn’t see them as advocates of a new freedom worthy of an alliance. Nor did it appear that the Right was much better. I still bought into the idea that libertarianism is neither Left nor Right! I still do.
There is an interesting blog commenting on this subject here:
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/06/rothbard-arti cle-online-rothbardian.html" title="http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/06/rothbard-arti cle-online-rothbardian.html" target="_blank"http://mutualist.blogspot.com... I don’t necessarily agree with the site in all details or even most. I just thought the comments of interest.
If you didn’t see it one of the individuals posting comments here wrote that the illusive Thomas Woods essay in favor of ordered freedom and against the evils of individualism can be found here. http://web.archive.org/web/20...://reformed-theology.org/html/issue04/christen dom.htm
I have several new items to work on for the site. But it was not my intent to post something new daily. After all, in the grand scheme of libertarianism, this is really a minor topic. Libertarianism is still a fringe movement and the Paleo’s are the fringe of the fringe so one would not spend too much time on it. And demands at work require my attention as well and I still would like to get out of the city by the weekend for a few days away. Though I do hope to stay in touch with the marvels of technology it’s more a matter of finding time.
I should say something about our name. In recent discussions with other libertarians there was a concern expressed by the rise of the radical right: the racist, homophobic, bigoted kind of theocratic thinking that I think is so dangerous. A few of us decided to write about that so we established the blog. The others dropped out due to time constraints. Well I was going to discuss the rise of such ideas within libertarianism. They were going to tackle it in other areas. So the focus narrowed but the blog was already there. But I am assured by the others that they do still intend to make such a contribution and some have said they will send me links and information on my topic as well. So at some point we may widen our focus As I have said before feel free to write RWtblog@hotmail.com
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