Quote of the day...

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era.--We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them--they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their's was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

How then shall we perform it?--At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide...

Read the rest here.

-Abraham Lincoln

The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions:

Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois

January 27, 1838

Libertarians Tried to Warn You About Trump (link corrected)

Libertarians can be annoying, with our constant bellyaching about privacy and taxes, our obsession with the First Amendment and our fearmongering about jackbooted thugs.

But in light of how the past year has unfolded, consider cutting your friendly neighborhood libertarian some slack. After all, we did try to warn you.

On immigration, speech and trade, Americans are living in a libertarian’s nightmare. Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement. Armed National Guardsmen walk the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order. Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on Gaza and Charlie Kirk. Tariffs on China have been set at 10, 20, 54, 145 and 30 percent in just the last few months. The ownership of TikTok, Intel and U.S. Steel have all become matters in which the president has taken a personal interest — and threatened dire consequences if his wishes are not taken into account.

These stories represent a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long-held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism.

Libertarians have argued that the only way to prevent such abuses is to reduce the power of the federal government itself — abolishing unaccountable federal agencies, scaling back the administrative state, cutting spending — and to restore the balance of powers by reining in the executive. This path has generally been treated as hopelessly naïve at best, and morally suspect at worst.

Each of the major parties has pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it. Libertarian voices have gradually gone quiet in the halls of the capital — bullied into silence, primaried out or resigning in despair.

Yet it has never been more obvious that the grab-and-grow approach to power is a destructive and self-defeating way to conduct politics.

Read the rest here.

Honestly, I was somewhat surprised (pleasantly) to see something like this on the op-ed page of the NY Times. 

(Note: I just noticed that I accidentally linked the wrong page. The link has been updated. Grrr.)

Argentina: Libertarians score decisive legislative election win

BUENOS AIRES — Argentines woke up to a politically emboldened President Javier Milei after a dramatic victory in midterm elections on Sunday.

The libertarian president and staunch Donald Trump ally secured more than 40% of the popular vote, and solidified his hold on power in the National Congress, where he had previously struggled to push parts of his agenda through.

The scope of the victory surprised even Milei. His La Libertad Avanza party earned roughly 9 points more than the left-leaning Peronist opposition, and also eked out a victory in the powerful province of Buenos Aires, where Peronists usually dominate. Just over one month ago, the president's party had lost badly in legislative elections in the province of Buenos Aires.

But the story Sunday was very different, and sent a clear message following two years of austerity measures that drastically cut public spending, and helped drive down chronically high inflation. Corruption scandals, and a wild few weeks of economic instability did not dampen the support that he maintains among a sizable part of the population.

The value of the Argentine peso also strengthened considerably on Monday, a show of confidence from the markets after Milei's victory.

Read the rest here.

A Libertarian Argument for an Interventionist Foreign Policy

Individual Liberty and the Responsibility to Protect: Toward a Neolibertarian Foreign Policy

From here.

Side note: Due to my mother's death there will be little blogging until the 9th of Oct. However, I found this to be a really good read and thought I'd share it. My sisters and I will be quite busy during the mourning period settling mom's affairs. Lastly, I am deeply grateful for the many expressions of sympathy and prayers posted here and communicated privately. They have been a source of comfort in a very dark and painful moment. Thank you.

Reflections on the Decline of Civil Discourse

In the Ruins of Public Reason, Part I: The Problem of Dialogical Illiberalism

In the Ruins of Public Reason, Part II: The Barbarians at the Gates

In the Ruins of Public Reason, Part III: When the Barbarians Are at the Gates; Fascism, Bullshit, and the Paradox of Tolerance

I found much of the above to be pretty insightful, and at times, a bit uncomfortable reading.

Argentina: One year of Javier Milei

Argentina’s Milei marks one year in office. Here’s how his shock measures are reshaping the economy

Argentina's Mr Market Javier Milei wants to make austerity great again

Javier Milei's Argentina in 6 Charts

Libertarians Pass on Trump and RFK

The Libertarian Party chose one of its own as its presidential nominee on Sunday night, capping a grueling day of elimination voting and a boisterous four-day event, where both Donald J. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unsuccessfully sought to court the group’s backing.

The nominee, Chase Oliver — an openly gay former Democrat who in 2022 forced a runoff in a race for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia — beat out nine other candidates at the party’s national convention in Washington, including Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. Kennedy, who was a late addition to the official list of potential nominees on Sunday morning, was eliminated in the first round of voting Sunday afternoon, with 19 votes — just 2 percent of the total. Mr. Trump, who was not an official candidate, received six write-in votes in the first round.

The Libertarian Party is among the better-established minor parties, with name recognition and placement on the majority of state ballots in November. The Libertarian nominee is guaranteed to be on the November ballot in at least 37 states, a number that party leaders say they expect to grow in the coming months.

With its emphasis on unfettered individual liberties and limited government, the party draws supporters from across the political spectrum. Libertarian Party faithful call for the dismantling of the regulatory state — including, for some, the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service and the F.B.I. — as well as the legalization of drugs and sex work. Broadly, the party has embraced cryptocurrency, opposed tariffs and foreign military spending, and called for the release of the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who is being held in the U.K. and faces espionage charges in the U.S.

A theme of the party’s convention, displayed proudly on badges and signs at the convention, was: “Become Ungovernable.”

On Sunday, it almost was. The party took more than seven hours, and seven rounds of elimination voting, to get a presidential nominee — and even then the party nearly ended up without any candidate at all, as more than a third of the final voters cast ballots for “none of the above.”

Read the rest here.

Say what we will of the Libertarians, they just had a real political convention, complete with shouting, floor fights and multiple ballots to get a nominee. Neither the Democrats nor the GOP have had one in my lifetime. Their conventions are a tightly scripted three day long political commercial. 

On a side note, I have to give a very rare polite nod to Donald Trump, who actually stepped outside his cult bubble to address their convention. I have no idea what he was hoping to accomplish. But he went there and spoke to them. Not surprisingly, the most authoritarian and bigoted former president (and candidate) since Woodrow Wilson got a chilly reception from a party that is about as antithetical to Trumpism as any group I can think of. But he showed up, (Biden didn't although he was invited), and he kept his cool despite being heckled and getting his fair share of what we might call the "Bronx salute." 

Quote of the day: Javier Milei unloads at Davos

Milei's 2024 Davos talk, directly translated to English by AI (by heygen), in his own accent. Better than the dubbed version imo. pic.twitter.com/8OAGELuqxl

— Aaron Slodov (@aphysicist) January 18, 2024

"Socialism always and everywhere makes people poorer. It has failed in every country where it has been tried. Failed economically, socially and culturally. And it has murdered more than a hundred million people."

Memo to My Fellow Trump Haters: Libertarianism isn’t Republicanism

Now that Donald Trump has all but wrapped up the Republican nomination — and, with it, foreclosed any lingering claims that the GOP is the party of limited-government conservatism — a small cohort of notable Republicans have signaled that they are shifting their affiliation to the Libertarian Party. The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, already leaning that way, tweeted that he’s making the switch and longtime Republican strategist Mary Matalin recently explained that she would “never vote for Hillary and never Trump means always liberty. Hence, Libertarian.”

Wrong.

If all that these converts see is a safe house where they can ride out the storm, they’re missing the point: The libertarian ideal and the Libertarian Party stand as reminders that neither of the two major parties is committed to the principle that individuals are superior to the state. And in this election year, if fear of a President Trump results in libertarianism morphing into Republicanism-lite, it would cease to serve that purpose. While I’m not active in Libertarian Party politics, as a small-“L” libertarian, I want no part of diluting this core principle just to boost electoral success.

But I get it. The GOP has been taken over by a know-nothing vulgarian. For Republicans still invested in their party’s traditional priorities — big military budgets, tax cuts and morality-based social policy — Trump’s ever-changing views on nearly every issue present a real dilemma.

Libertarianism, though, isn’t a subsidiary of Republicanism. Like Republicans, we want limited government, but we reject the corporate welfare of auto-industry bailouts, the military adventurism of the Iraq War and the interference with individual liberty represented by initiatives such as North Carolina’s H.B. 2 — all policies that Republicans embrace. Matalin, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, and other Republican expats surely believe in liberty as a concept, but her support for Bush’s big-government conservatism suggests that at heart, she’s a statist. Which is her prerogative. But it places her, and many other Republicans, at loggerheads with libertarianism.

Read the rest here. The comments are also quite interesting.

There is a lot about libertarianism that I really like and admire. My problem is that when you dig down you find that most of the hardcore libertarians are really closet anarchists. Sorry, but that is a bridge too far for me. An orderly society can't function without some sort of authority.

I guess I just have to accept that there is no perfect system for the organization of society and go with the least bad.

RIP: Irwin Schiff

A very intelligent man who ultimately over indulged in the  libertarian Kool-Aid. His son Peter has followed in his footsteps. They are both heroes to the anarcho-libertarian wingnuts. I however, do not view him in that light.To my mind he was a political crank who got a lot of people in serious trouble peddling the legal equivalent to snake oil.

My sympathies to those who no doubt loved and cared for the man. But I will pass on the political canonization. Thanks anyway.

Rothbard (etc.) on Egalitarianism

There are a lot of things you can say about the left, but one of its most salient characteristics is its total rejection of logic, mathematics, science, and anything that can be considered 'thinking.' With the left, it's all feelings. This is why the left seized on the principle of equality before the law and twisted it into a notion of the intrinsic equality of all people everywhere, an idea, as Orwell put it, so absurd that only an intellectual could entertain it. Of course, he mean [sic] self-styled intellectual, people who reject facts and dress up their whims and enthusiasms with logical-sounding rhetoric. And whims are the opposite of logic, and enthusiasm for an idea is no proof of its validity.

Read the rest here.
HT: The Young Fogey

Some Thoughts on College

Friend of the blog Anti-Gnostic has a perspicacious post up on some of the problems with college today, in particular its unhealthy relationship with government. I encourage everyone to read it here. To this I will add a somewhat less irenic critique of the socio-political culture on modern campuses from Messrs. Penn & Teller.

Part 1

Part 2

Warning: For the uninitiated, Penn & Teller tend to be VERY frank on just about any topic they (really Penn is the only who talks) are addressing. Which is to say that the two linked videos are definitely Rated PG-13, mostly for potty language. So yeah, some blog readers may wish to skip this post.

A Rising Generation of Libertarian Democrats

...Although a majority of younger voters today are reliably Democratic, there are key issues on which they differ notably from their elders within the center-left coalition. The July Pew survey identifies two predominantly white core Democratic constituencies: the “solid liberals” of the traditional left, which is 69 percent white, with an average age of 46, who exhibit deep progressive commitments on both economic and social issues; and younger voters, 68 percent white, with an average age of 38, which Pew calls the “next generation left.”

The two groups were asked to choose whether “most people can get ahead if they’re willing to work hard” or whether “hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people.” A decisive majority of the older “solid liberal” group, 67 percent, responded that hard work is no guarantee of success, while an even larger majority, 77 percent, of the younger “next generation left” believes that you can get ahead if you are willing to work hard.

According to Pew, the older group believes, 73-20, that “government should do more to solve problems.” Only 44 percent of the younger group agrees — and of younger respondents, 50 percent believe that “government is trying to do too much.”

Read the rest here.

WAPO's Hit Piece on a Libertarian Camp Rally

The bias is so naked and extreme  it could pass for comedy.

Foot, meet gun

So arch-libertarian and gun rights activist Adam Kokesh actually carried out his long standing threat to openly carry a weapon in DC last year. He videotaped himself loading a shotgun in Freedom Plaza and broadcast it, with predictable results. He was arrested and charged with possession of an unregistered firearm with drug possession thrown in for good measure as he had some in the house when the cops came knocking.

Today this sad chapter in idiocy came to a close with Kokesh entering guilty pleas in exchange for a suspended sentence with probation, less time served (about four months in the clink). Of course, he also now has a felony criminal record. So no more guns for Mr. Kokesh... anywhere.

Libertarian Humor

See also...
Libertarian ice fishing
24 types of libertarians
Individual responsibility... or why libertarians make bad lifeguards

Virginia: Libertarian Sarvis could shake up the election for governor

WASHINGTON, September 18, 2013 — With both Republican Ken Cuccinelli and Democrat Terry McAuliffe bringing scandal and bad press to the Virginia gubernatorial election, Libertarian Robert Sarvis could become the deciding factor in November’s election.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday shows McAuliffe and Cuccinelli in a virtual tie.  While the poll technically gives McAuliffe a slight lead over Cuccinelli, that lead falls within the margin of error.

Although polling shows that it is unlikely Sarvis will outright win the election, he has held a surprisingly high percentage for a third party candidate ranging between 5 and 10 percentage points. That could split votes and push one of the major candidates into victory.

Read the rest here.

WAPO: Five myths about libertarians

The specter of libertarianism is haunting America. Advocates of sharply reducing the government’s size, scope and spending are raising big bucks from GOP donors, trying to steal the mantle of populism, being blamed for the demise of Detroit and even getting caught in the middle of a battle for the Republican Party. Yet libertarians are among the most misunderstood forces in today’s politics. Let’s clear up some of the biggest misconceptions.

1. Libertarians are a fringe band of “hippies of the right.”

In 1971, the controversial and influential author Ayn Rand denounced right-wing anarchists as “hippies of the right,” a charge still leveled against libertarians, who push for a minimal state and maximal individual freedom.

Libertarians are often dismissed as a mutant subspecies of conservatives: pot smokers who are soft on defense and support marriage equality. But depending on their views, libertarians often match up equally well with right- and left-wingers.

The earliest example of libertarian principles in partisan politics might have come in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,when Anti-Imperialist League Democrats rejected empire and war — and believed in free trade and racial equality at a time when none of that was popular. More recently, civil libertarians such as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) supported Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in his filibuster on domestic drones and government surveillance.

Read the rest here.

Libertarians flex their muscle in the GOP

Way back in 1975, a Republican agitator named Ronald Reagan had this to say about an esoteric young movement that was roiling politics: “If you analyze it, I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”

Neither the GOP old guard nor the rowdy libertarians ever quite bought that argument.

They both lay claim to the same conservative economic philosophy. But libertarians are more isolationist and antiwar than Republican orthodoxy allows on foreign policy and more permissive on social issues.

Still, in the nearly four decades since Reagan made those comments, the two have managed — at least most of the time — to maintain an uneasy marriage of expedience.

Libertarianism once again appears to be on the rise, particularly among the young. However, its alliance with the Republican establishment is fraying, as demonstrated by the increasingly personal war of words between two leading potential 2016 presidential contenders.

Read the rest here.

How libertarian will Republicans be in 2016?

Two things happened last week that revealed the basic dynamic of the fight for control of the Republican Party in 2016.

The first was a vote on the House floor that would have significantly curtailed the NSA’s phone-surveillance program as outlined in the Patriot Act. A vote that was widely regarded by congressional sharps as an opportunity for civil libertarians to “blow off steam” nearly passed the House. In total, 94 House Republicans (41 percent of the GOP conference) voted for it.

The second were comments made by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at a panel at the Aspen Institute on Thursday. “As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, I just want us to be really cautious, because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought,” Christie said.

Taken together, it’s quite clear that the choice in 2016 will be heavily defined by just how much libertarianism Republicans want in their party. The answer isn’t clear yet. But it is telling that more than 40 percent of the Republican conference voted for legislation that would significantly curtail the reach of a government agency designed, at least in part, to prevent future terrorist attacks. So, too, is the fact that Christie, widely expected to run in 2016, picked a fight with libertarians — and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, in particular — in the summer of 2013.

Read the rest here.