About Those "Libertarians" - Larken Rose

[CCTelander]

Another good one from Larken.

[Krugminator2]

The 90s were a golden age for small government people. Spending was flat in inflation adjusted dollars after Republicans took the House in 1994 for Bill Clinton's last six years. Bill Clinton added fewer regulatory employees than any modern President before him. Trade was freer. The United States finished that era 2nd in economic Freedom behind Hong Kong and still ahead of Singapore. It is now 25th.

The 1994 Republican Congress was a grand slam homerun success.. Dick Armey was an economist who was a big fan of Mises and was the House Majority leader. Phil Gramm was a Milton Friedman economist. Mark Sanford had a voting record rivaling Ron Paul's for how small government it was.

[ClaytonB]

Another good one from Larken.

While Rose is logically correct, there are a few points that he overlooks in his analysis (and these are problems in his outlook overall).

The absence of a State in our current world would not result in freedom. There have been many times and places of near total power-vacuum in human history and what emerges is invariably something like a Mad Max condition. In lieu of outright plunder and pillaging, the State offers an annuitized, regularized version. Both are evil conditions, but the point is that there is no flourishing condition that will automatically arise in the absence of the monopolist of violence who annuitizes plunder and pillaging. For this reason, the pragmatism of a political party based on the philosophy of freedom is not a philosophical inconsistency. It's not a failure to take the evil of the State seriously.

The use of the party system and the rest of the apparatus of the State is not inherently immoral. Picking up a firearm could be argued to be an inherently immoral act because, absent aggression, there is no morally justifiable condition for its use. Obviously, if you truly hold to the values of life, liberty, and property, then your motives for taking up the political apparatus cannot be the same as the motives of statists, without becoming inconsistent. I can't judge the motives of the LPMC leadership, but my hope is that they are guided by the desire to bring about the political conditions in which their fellow Americans can become free.

There is a valid argument for something which we might call "displacement theory." It is often argued that all good men ought to leave professions like policing and soldiering because these professions are frequently abused by those who hold power for tyrannical ends. But there is a flaw in this argument -- every cop who does not participate in aggressive, anti-community policing is filling a seat that would otherwise be filled by a bad cop. And the same for soldiers, and so on. Internal complaints do check the amount of aggression that would otherwise occur and, without good guys on the inside, there would be nobody to file those complaints. And so on. The exact same argument applies to the political apparatus generally. I would rather have a MAGA filling any local government seat than mainline R/D because that seat is much less likely to be used as part of a tyrannical agenda. Even if they are not able to positively bring about conditions of liberty, they at least impede tyranny somewhat by sheer occupancy.

In respect to coming to conflict with the State, there is a strain of libertarianism that holds that our willingness to use force against the State is what checks the power of the State. In fact, the State cares very little, if at all, about individual armed citizens. Yes, dealing with them involves some minor risk of injury or perhaps even death in rare cases, but the outcome of staged conflict in such cases is always the same: the State just bulldozes (often literally) the resister. However, the power of the State is not unchecked and there are forces which cause the State to lose sleep at night. If they were truly omnipotent, as they pretend to be, we would long since have been rounded up into CCP re-education camps. However, the existence of these forces is incompatible with the kind of rhetoric used by "Don't Tread On Me" libertarians.

Another way to see this is to translate it into terms of home-invading crooks. You can post a sign outside your house to the effect that you are armed. That will deter many crooks. However, there are more aggressive crooks who are willing to take the risk and will simply use the sign as pre-notification that their ambush needs to be more effective than usual. But when society is generally armed and there are no signs in anybody's front yards to that effect (the crooks don't know who is armed and who is not, or how proficient they are), even the specialized home-invaders will be extremely reluctant to break in to any home because they don't know what to expect. They could be stepping into the hornet's nest at any time. In other words, for DTOM to be a truly effective threat, it must be a silent threat.

Yet another example of this in action is international diplomacy. The subtext of all international diplomatic negotiations is "Well, if you don't go along with what we want, we could do XYZ to you, which would hurt ABC citizens in your country in DEF ways." The unspoken threat is virtually never spoken aloud because speaking it aloud makes it a crass threat, which is viewed as an escalation. It's the diplomatic equivalent of raising your fists. Nevertheless, the threats are occasionally followed through with. The anti-state approach to DTOM is in an even tighter straitjacket than statist diplomats because, at the end of the day, we deny that anyone has a moral right to aggress, whether states, individuals or non-state groups. So, DTOM exists game theoretically but proliferating DTOM threats and symbolism can only properly be part of direct action (that is, deployed at the point where use-of-force actually is justified). Care must be taken not to draw the boundary between violence and language so finely that we end up denying that verbal threats can ever be tantamount to assault.

When entering the moral argument, one of the things that quickly becomes clear is that you're going to need bigger guns than just common-sense morality. You need a common foundation for moral argument and the problem in the modern world is that the individual sees himself or herself as the final moral authority in their own moral opinions. This might seem like the natural condition of freedom until you realize how Caesar is able to use this to divide-and-conquer the moral argument about the State before it even begins. Instead, a common foundation is needed, like the common foundation of logic or mathematics. And that's why you need divine authority. The idea of spiritual anarchism (that what you think is just like how you choose to use your material property... you can do with it whatever you wish) is actually the single most powerful weapon of real tyranny. And we are seeing this play out on the world stage like never before...

[Invisible Man]

The 90s were a golden age for small government people. Spending was flat in inflation adjusted dollars after Republicans took the House in 1994 for Bill Clinton's last six years. Bill Clinton added fewer regulatory employees than any modern President before him. Trade was freer. The United States finished that era 2nd in economic Freedom behind Hong Kong and still ahead of Singapore. It is now 25th.

The 1994 Republican Congress was a grand slam homerun success.. Dick Armey was an economist who was a big fan of Mises and was the House Majority leader. Phil Gramm was a Milton Friedman economist. Mark Sanford had a voting record rivaling Ron Paul's for how small government it was.

I think that the key factor was gridlock, not a dominance of small government principles in Congress.

But I'm all for gridlock.

[TheTexan]

The absence of a State in our current world would not result in freedom. There have been many times and places of near total power-vacuum in human history and what emerges is invariably something like a Mad Max condition. In lieu of outright plunder and pillaging, the State offers an annuitized, regularized version. Both are evil conditions, but the point is that there is no flourishing condition that will automatically arise in the absence of the monopolist of violence who annuitizes plunder and pillaging.

The State is evil, so its absence would invariably result in there being less evil in the world.

I will take the Mad Max condition any day, because at least there, evil is openly recognized and fought against. With the State however, the evil has been institutionalized, and become so abstract, that it is no longer recognized for what it is. But it is evil, of the most heinous kind.

[ClaytonB]

The State is evil, so its absence would invariably result in there being less evil in the world.

I will take the Mad Max condition any day, because at least there, evil is openly recognized and fought against. With the State however, the evil has been institutionalized, and become so abstract, that it is no longer recognized for what it is. But it is evil, in the most heinous form, for it is not recognized as such.

I get it and, like you, if I had a choice, I would choose rugged self-reliance any day. But the vast majority will not now, or ever, prefer rugged self-reliance. That's not some flaw in their thinking, it's just how the cookie crumbles in terms of their preferences between the lesser of two evils.

The eventual solution -- and it is coming as surely as the sun rises in the morning -- is the fullness of the Kingdom of God, that is, a global theocracy in the form of direct, divine rule by God (no papal intermediaries, for example). God created man to be even more free than Larken Rose wants people to be, but we can't get there merely by hacking away at a few branches of the ocean of brambles that is the State. A categorically more powerful force is required...

[TheTexan]

A categorically more powerful force is required...

[ClaytonB]

Great gun. But categorically not enough force.

[TheTexan]

Great gun. But categorically not enough force.

Eh, it may not be the best tool for the job, but it'll get 'er done.