I think that’s too oversimplistic. There is a lot more involved in libertarian political theory than just the NAP. This isn’t to deny its importance, however.
I’m sorry, it’s downright silly to deny any weight to the criticism at all. Some libertarians do sometimes fall into the mistake of defending the effects of corporatist state intervention in the name of the free market, or predict an outcome from free market processes that are more or less identical to what we have now. This has already been covered. It’s your own shortcoming if you choose to be willfully ignorant or blind to the existance of this error. What woud be more reasonable is to question the scope by which libertarians make this error or how often or how many of them actually do. But to outright deny that the mistake can be made is simply silly.
If anyone is strawmanning here, it is you. Noone ever claimed to have much in common with contemporary “left liberals”. I have very little in common with them. I think the problem here is your constant temptation to interpret “left” as being synonamous with certain things, particularly state-socialism. But left-libertarians are not state-socialists and do not really advocate allying with them per se. You don’t seem to understand the context in which left-libertarians use the term. I think you’ve misinterpreted this whole matter grossly. And I don’t think it even takes a left-libertarian to be aware of libertarian-conservative fusionism (which is dominant in the American libertarian movement in particular).
Yes, let’s dissect this.
I’ve asked repeatedly. Show me the libertarian who does this.
Opinion. I don’t have time for all of the adjectives you apply to describe yourself. Sorry, but the weight of all those classifications is your rhetorical burden to bear, not mine.
Where did I make a personal attack? Quote me. As far as a rebuttal, I posted Larry Sechrest’s “Barbarians at the Gate” which I thought was sufficient, but you claim I was out of order to discuss here. I wasn’t aware that I am not allowed to post Austrian rebuttals to Austrian criticisms by the great Kevin Carson here at Mises.org.
I did make constructive criticism. Kevin Carson should be more like Ron Paul.
It wasn’t random. He’s a part of the left Long/Carson movement. People here have been spoken down to for advocating political action, and then a so-called apolitical anarchist leader organizes a political demonstration. Why not vote? VOTE RON PAUL!
Perhaps. I’m open minded enough to admit I could be wrong. Of course, if someone could specifically point out where I am wrong, as Irenicus did in the abortion thread, then I can be persuaded. But trolling and rhetoric really doesn’t goose my pimples.
Nah, I think they are too ineffectual and lazy to hijack anything. Unfortunately, they attract a lot of the young people with their faux radicalism.
Congratulations on outing yourself.
Et tu Brute?
Yeah, we can’t have things be too simple. They should be really complicated. That’s how you grow a movement. That’s how you maintain transparency. That’s how you eliminate factions. Obfuscate and complicate.
Stop playing stupid. It doesn’t refer to one person per se, it refers to a tendency and an ideological error. Your outright denial of the issue is simply ridiculous.
No you did not. You have yet to directly address any of the ideas in question or anything he has specifically written. You’ve only made an on the spot psycho-analysis of something you clearly don’t understand or have no adequately investigated.
An individualist anarchist should be more like a minarchist politician? I think you have your priorities backwards.
You misunderstand. You’re throwing around the term “leftist” as a uniform label, as if you’re refering to all “leftists” and as if these are all the same people with the same beliefs. In short, you seem to be trapped in the typical left-right dichotomy (which I reject, btw, in the context of the contemporary political spectrum).
Oh, come on. You said “Carson this, carson that”. You mentioned Spangler. You simply made claims about them as people out of nowhere.
You’re deliberately evasive when I specificaly address you and you continually proceed to personalize the discussion.
Is that all you do? Just make personalized statements about people? Sheesh.
Then why, despite several posts discussing it, and being presented with a direct question, can you not answer the simple question, WHO? WHO are these anti-state statists? Just answer the question BP. JC said Kinsella. Do you believe that Stephan is a vulgar libertarian?
Oh really? That Rothbard was sane when he appealed to the left, but crazy when he hung out with Pat Buchanan? Gimme a break BP, it’s been posted dozens upon dozens of times on this forum, and I am fairly certain you have even posted such!
And being wimpy. And whiny.
Funny you never corrected Nicky on that. You seem to have an interest in correcting all of my posts.
Of course. It’s all me.
What fusionism dude? It doesn’t matter where people come from. If they want to be libertarian, and they are anti-state, anti-coercion, pro-market, they are 99.5% there, and only someone with too much time on their hands is going to waste time debating the remaining 0.5%.
rolls eyes
Come on, dude. Remove the chip from your shoulder so there can be an actual discussion. Don’t just froth at the mouth. If anyone is making discussion impossible here, it’s you.
I don’t have a chip on my shoulder. For some reason, you keep posting regarding my posts, so I respond to you. I have repeatedly told you I do not want to discuss with you. You aren’t getting the hint (although it was a hint applied with a sledge hammer).
Because clearly you’re looking for a personalization rather than a discussion of actual ideas. You’re trolling for a conflict over a person and I’m not taking the bait. You’re deliberately evading the actual question here.
No, you simply have a gross misconception of my own position and the position of left-libertarians in general, and I refuse to be misrepresented. You tend to use terms like “the left” in the context of the contemporary political spectrum, which is a misnomer.
Only because they tend to be riddled with misconceptions, strawmen and statements about people’s characters that are false or exaggerated.
It’s not a question of where people come from. I’m refering to libertarianism literally fusing with conservatism, libertarians becoming more like conservatives, libertarians selectively taking conservative positions on various issues. This isn’t about a 0.5% disagreement, this is about the difference between fundamentals.
Who? What positions?
Immigration restrictionism (in contrast with the traditional libertarian position against political borders), for one thing. The majority of minarchists I talk to now support state-enforced borders and state-enforced immigration restrictionist policies. Or support for intellectual property law (incidentally, the right-libertarian Kinsella has been excellent on this issue!). One “libertarian” I talked to thought that Ray-gun was the best thing since sliced bread. For God’s sakes, look at who is the pick of the “Libertarian” Party: Bob Barr, an icky conservative. We have neocon hacks like Neal Boortz claiming the mantle of libertarianism. Do you know many times Ie been told by a self-proclaimed “libertarian” point blank that “libertarianism is not anarchy, we’re for small guvment!” and how many times I’ve had to clarify to them that libertarianism original was a cloak term for anarchists and that anarchists have always been the radical end of the libertarian movement?
Libertarianism has been mainstreamized (and consequentially watered down and all but nullified) by the political right.
Ok, so pretty much none of the people on this forum. Good. I was getting tired about hearing about conservatives here, when the conservatives being discussed here, are not, in fact, here.
Now if only I could track down those anti-state statists that the term “vulgar libertarian” applies to.
Btw, I don’t think I have ever heard Stephan refer to himself as a right libertarian. That’s what I am talking about.
Well, I use the term to describe anyone, possibly including Brainpolice himself, who thinks that coporate shareholders own corporate assets, when the agreement they knowingly and voluntarily made states that ownership does not lie with them, but with a legal fiction. I will refer to you as “Vulgar” if you say that they can benefit from their collusion with the state according to this agreement, while not facing the natural justice of taking them at their word when the authority of government is defied. That is vulgar to me, that you should take one definition of corporation when it helps you, and another when it hurts you.
Oh, it most certainly does include some of the people on this forum. Just take a look at the threads on immigration. Pretty much any of the Hoppeans here I’d consider right-libertarians and an example of the outcome of libertarian-conservative fusionism. I also wasn’t talking about vulgar libertarianism but conservative-libertarian fusionism in general, since you questioned its existance as well. In either case, you’re still being willfully blind to the existance of the error of vulgar libertarianism, which is ridiculous. If you seriously think that no libertarian has ever misapplied free market theory to defend the effects of corporate statism, then I think you’re simply being naive. This is what conservatives do all the time.
I view the corporate charter as a government construct/intervention in the market, I think that corporate personhood is a collectivist negation of individual responsibility, and I think that its ridiculous that some libertarians refuse to recognize this and argue as if the corporate form as it currently exists came about through a free market process when it clearly did not. I also refuse to be mischaracterized as some kind of state-socialist for taking this position, since all I’m doing is opposing government interventions in the marketplace to benefit plutocrats.
I’ve also concluded that capitalism, even as Ludwig Von Mises defines it (a state that is for the purpose of protecting property), is inherently a statist system in which the state protects arbitrary property claims generally to the benefit of a small few of specially connected elites at the expense of the masses at large. Hence, I actually make a distinction between free market and capitalism, with the former being a voluntary process of economic interaction and the latter being a statist political system. I make no bones about not confusing state protection of property titles with a free market.
prepares of the assault
Yeah, dude, you’re in for it now. Tee-hee. [6]
You mean the threads where you argue theory, and other people argue reality?
I don’t really care what you think. My point is, you self-identify as left, and then identify people you disagree with as right.You’re the one making the left-right, good-bad distinction.
I don’t see right libertarians spending a lot of time discussing left-libertarians. It’s a completely manufactured paradigm.
I noticed you tried to change the subject.
In a free market, I am allowed to be willfully blind as long as I do not coerce others. I can also be ridiculous. You’ll have to learn to deal with people in these modes if you really want to give a free society a chance.
As far as the existence of vulgar libertarianism, all you have is a theory of a vulgar libertarian individual. I still have not seen any example or citation to show that one such creature has ever existed. People have theories about aliens no one has ever seen before. I take them as equally seriously as the notion of the anti-liberty libertarian.
Well hold on here. This smells of a bait and switch. No libertarian ever has made a error in logic or understanding? Holy strawmen batman!
And conflating conservatism no less. Well now we truly have come full circle. We’ve got your vulgar libertarians who might be making an innocent intellectual mistake, projected onto the right libertarians, which is any anti-left libertarian position. Which put together says, right libertarians are vulgar. They come from a perspective of intellectual inconsistency or error.
Well how very arrogant of you BP!
I’m loving deconstructing your word games even though I have better things to do with my time. You are making it very exciting, dancing around direct answers.
Is it a rhetorical tactic to call me naive, instead of providing an example, instead of appealing to some mystical libertarian we all assume exists, but you refuse to identify specifically? It’s funny that you would use the term, but when asked to identify an example of this type of person or perspective, you don’t have one. You only provide hypotheticals.
Now last I checked, there are a LOT of what you would call vulgar libertarian conservatives. How come you won’t finger or quote a single one? And why do you keep conflating conservatism with libertarianism? Some conservatives might be friendly to libertarians, but are not libertarians themselves. I don’t see how the two positions are compatible, so again I will ask, who is this conservative libertarian? Are you referring to Stephan Kinsella when you call him a right libertarian? Ron Paul? Lew Rockwell? Who?
I find your appeal to realism in this context to be disingenous. Taking a conservative position on immigration is not realism. Furthermore, the typical distinction between theory and practise is a misnomer (one thing I agree with Rand about). It’s disingenous to act as if the anti-immigration side doesn’t argue “theory”, of course they do. And their theory is wrong. Incidentally, the right-libertarian Walter Block is with me on the immigration issue, taking the correct and traditional libertarian position.
Not really. The people I’m thinking of have explicitly and openly associated themselves with conservatism and “the right”, so I’m hardly strawmanning them by taking them at their word.
Once again, you seem unable to concieve of anything in a non-personalized context. This isn’t a theory of an individual, it’s about ideas and their application. Instead of talking about the tendency and ideas in question, you constantly try to personalize.
Sorry, you’re grasping at straws and seem to misinterpret me. I never said that. Now you’re simply jumping through hoops to tell me what I think for me. Stop doing this, it’s really silly.
I’m not playing word games. You seem to be. You’re practically frothing at the mouth and just want to fight. Your tactics are childish.
I’m sorry, I am forced to conclude that you have no idea about what I’m talking about and are quite isolated from the inner-libertarian discussion I refer to. I’m using interrelated concepts and you’re not grasping how they relate. You clearly do not understand left-libertarianism, mostly because you don’t want to. There’s no hope trying to communicate with you, and you are purposefully derailing communication anyways.
I’m really sad to see Thomas Sowell moving away from anything involving economics (in which he is trained and usually brilliant) – I would characterize him now as a vulgar libertarian. Now all of his articles involve criticizing anything that might be “weak” in foreign policy.
The first time I heard this term it was from Lakota secession guy Russell Means about Ron Paul. Of course, Means may be calling the kettle black if he is right about RP – Means isn’t exactly anarcho-capitalist and is really unclear in his opinions about property rights and free markets.
For the umpteenth time, who argues this?
All you are doing is constructing strawmen.
I don’t think any genuine libertarian would disagree with you about the end portion. However capitalism is not exclusively a state system. That’s the fallacy of the anti-capitalist mindset. Capitalism occurs whenever a free market trade is conducted. I think you are confusing fascism and capitalism. They are not the same.
Again, you’re erecting a strawman. Who confuses state protection of property titles with a free market?
A free market by nature cannot be socialistic or fascist. It is indeed capitalistic, where all profits and losses are private, not public.
I really think you lefties spend a lot of time trying to discredit capitalism, when everyone understands what it means. Lew Rockwell uses it. Rothbard used it. Mises used it. Hayek used it. Ron Paul uses it. I think Austrians and libertarians “get it”.
Why the left libertarians, particularly the mutualists insist upon defining it the way progressive liberals do strikes me as odd. But then, catering to progressive liberals in their social agendas is the name of the game. Hence the support for IWW and political protests with anarcho communists and anarcho syndicalists.