In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
It is against statism that we have to vote. It is statism that has to be defeated - and defeated resoundingly.
OK. Buh-bye!
OK. Buh-bye!
Ciao.
That wasn't much of a conversation. With no body language, either something good or something bad happened and I can't tell which is which. Can you?
Now that I can agree with.Libertarians ought to completely divorce themselves from reality. No wait they've already managed that, good job guys.
Libertarians ought to completely divorce themselves from reality. No wait they've already managed that, good job guys.
You make a lot of demands for someone who is opposed to such constrictive requirements. There's a term for that...
I'm guessing that you skipped going to church today?Ah, right. I'd forgotten that conservatives alone have insight into 'reality' - complete with a zombified Jew-cum-creator-Deity who murdered Himself to appease Himself to forgive our sins and who loves America and makes it rain when He cries.
'Reality', indeed.
I'm guessing that you skipped going to church today?
Once Paschendale's socialist dystopia has fully implemented you nutty Libertarians will be ground up for dawg food right along with all the Conservatives.
The conservative mouths the word 'freedom'; what he really means by it is "you are free - to be as I am, to value the same things as me."
That, in a nutshell, is what happened there. A much more purely libertarian movement will be called 'anarchism' (I see no reason to object to the label) and denounced as Satanic, as corrupting of the youth (we'll be led to our hemlock), and the conservative apparatchiks will see to it that we are denounced as heretics.
Any libertarian with the slightest inkling of historical understanding realizes that at no point in time has American history made contact with anything approaching libertarian ideals. Consequentially, there is no history, no tradition, for an American libertarian to 'conserve'.
I mean more than simply politically - though the Republican Party is assuredly bankrupt as anything approaching a vehicle for our ideals, and the Ron Paul wing of the Party is woefully inadequate to do so.
I mean rhetorically: the conservative wants to conserve a past that was not even close to being libertarian (the Constitution itself was the product of a betrayal of the American Revolution by the Federalists in the service of the eastern protoindustrial aristocracy). I mean historically: the Republican-dominated 1920s were most emphatically not remotely libertarian; H.L. Mencken, who was, had this to say about the GOP of his era:
We must not be content to once again play the lackey to a conservative Establishment, no matter whether that Establishment be 'neo' or 'paleo' in its leanings. We must repudiate the neoconfederates; it was the Confederacy that began the long American tradition of race-based Statist legislation with the Fugitive Slave Acts, compelling individuals to return into bondage escaped slaves who fell under their take. We must categorically reject Christian collectivism, that socialism-of-the-spirit that seeks to compel herd conformity to some imagined social standard.
We must likewise refuse the temptations of Randianism. During the height of the Vietnam War - a war as profoundly damaging to liberty as has ever been waged by Americans - she had this to say about the political choice of 1972:
That she then went on to suggest that a vote against Richard Nixon was "immoral", given "the circumstances", suggests a sort of Orwellian doublespeak: for Nixon was far more purely Statist than his opponent, the New Left-leaning George McGovern.
Digression aside, we must re-embrace a few former libertarian fundamentals that have been forgotten because of our alliance with the Right:
1. Unions, when had under the auspices of the private sector economy, are not Evil Incarnate. Quite the opposite: whilst the AFL-CIO is useless and corrupted, organizations like the IWW - "The Wobblies" - ought to have always had our fullest support.
2. Freedom, not capitalism, is the highest virtue, and the two are not synonymous. A syndicated industry, voluntarily owned by a worker's collective, can be much freer than a hierarchically-organized capitalist industry, depending upon the specifics of the business in question.
3. State and local governments can be every bit as tyrannical as the Federal government, and the tyranny of one is in no wise preferable to the other. Our end and aim is to free men, not to promote one form of subservience over another.
FAR MORE RELEVANT...Libertarians ought to divorce themselves from Democrats. Except the "Libertarian Left" types... :roll:I mean more than simply politically - though the Republican Party is assuredly bankrupt as anything approaching a vehicle for our ideals, and the Ron Paul wing of the Party is woefully inadequate to do so.
I mean rhetorically: the conservative wants to conserve a past that was not even close to being libertarian (the Constitution itself was the product of a betrayal of the American Revolution by the Federalists in the service of the eastern protoindustrial aristocracy). I mean historically: the Republican-dominated 1920s were most emphatically not remotely libertarian; H.L. Mencken, who was, had this to say about the GOP of his era:
We must not be content to once again play the lackey to a conservative Establishment, no matter whether that Establishment be 'neo' or 'paleo' in its leanings. We must repudiate the neoconfederates; it was the Confederacy that began the long American tradition of race-based Statist legislation with the Fugitive Slave Acts, compelling individuals to return into bondage escaped slaves who fell under their take. We must categorically reject Christian collectivism, that socialism-of-the-spirit that seeks to compel herd conformity to some imagined social standard.
We must likewise refuse the temptations of Randianism. During the height of the Vietnam War - a war as profoundly damaging to liberty as has ever been waged by Americans - she had this to say about the political choice of 1972:
That she then went on to suggest that a vote against Richard Nixon was "immoral", given "the circumstances", suggests a sort of Orwellian doublespeak: for Nixon was far more purely Statist than his opponent, the New Left-leaning George McGovern.
Digression aside, we must re-embrace a few former libertarian fundamentals that have been forgotten because of our alliance with the Right:
1. Unions, when had under the auspices of the private sector economy, are not Evil Incarnate. Quite the opposite: whilst the AFL-CIO is useless and corrupted, organizations like the IWW - "The Wobblies" - ought to have always had our fullest support.
2. Freedom, not capitalism, is the highest virtue, and the two are not synonymous. A syndicated industry, voluntarily owned by a worker's collective, can be much freer than a hierarchically-organized capitalist industry, depending upon the specifics of the business in question.
3. State and local governments can be every bit as tyrannical as the Federal government, and the tyranny of one is in no wise preferable to the other. Our end and aim is to free men, not to promote one form of subservience over another.
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