Libertarian Thread

Discussion in 'The Mainboard' started by Rumpus StillStiff, Jun 28, 2016.

  1. LuPoor

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    Of THE enlightenment
     
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  2. Nelson

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    can't leave out this critical piece
     
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  3. Rabid

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    The video is totally over the top and for that I laughed at it when I initially watched it. The reason I posted it was because Reason and libertarians in general were going out of their way to say these people are not us. Some members of the alt-right may have said they were one of us at one time but their core beliefs are the antithesis of our belief system and philosophy. I mean Cantwell was expelled from the free state project which says a lot considering how much libertarians support the right to free speech even if they disagree with the speech.
     
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  4. OHW

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    No true scotsman aside, the subtext of that video is very clear. Libertarians are losing people to the alt-right (shocker) and they're trying to out-logic them into sticking with the team.
     
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  5. Nelson

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    I think that's a pretty fair assessment
     
  6. Joe_Pesci

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    i was looking forward to a thread about fedoras
     
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  7. Nelson

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    get kuk'd
     
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  8. LuPoor

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    Have you guys tried explaining to the alt-righters that this is the purest ideology there is?
     
  9. Nelson

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    [​IMG]
     
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  10. theriner69er

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    Guys, our ideology is untainted
     
  11. LuPoor

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    Good article. Refute it without using a no true Scotsman fallacy please.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ou-to-think/?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.515760e9c139

    Libertarians have more in common with the alt-right than they want you to think


    By John Ganz
    After the alt-right march on Charlottesville last month, Matt Lewis, writing at the Daily Beast,
    pointed out the existence of an apparent “libertarian to alt-right pipeline,” an ideological trajectory through which those who begin life as ordinary, freedom-loving libertarians wind up more aligned with the torch-wielding demonstrators.

    Members of the non-mainstream right were quick to distance themselves from the alt-right, which is a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state. Taylor Millard, writing on Hot Air, heaped abuse on the alt-right, calling them “grifters” and “fakers,” and calling on his fellow conservatives and libertarians to decisively “purge” the alt-right from their ranks. Nick Gillespie, an editor at the libertarian magazine Reason, denied that there is any “pipeline” between libertarianism and the alt-right, arguing that real, liberty-loving libertarians reject the collectivism and authoritarianism of the alt-right. Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing in the National Review, similarly asserted that there’s not much to the whole idea of a “libertarian-to-fascist” pipeline, that fringes will be fringe, and that “kooks” will always congregate there.

    It’s probably true that some of the overlap between libertarians and alt-righters can be explained by their companionship as members of the political fringe. But it’s not purely accidental, either. Historically, prominent libertarian thinkers have made the decision to cultivate ties with the nationalist far right, and have viewed racial demagoguery both as an efficacious political tool and an intellectually defensible position. The libertarian-to-fascist pipeline may have been forged partially by coincidence, but it was also crafted and maintained.

    In the early 1980s, economist Murray Rothbard left the libertarian Cato Institute, which he had helped found. Rothbard’s impatience with respectability politics and the moderate tone enforced by the Kochs on their organization (including Reason magazine) led to his departure. He made common cause with another dissident libertarian named Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute, a home for a more hardcore brand of thought than was permitted at Cato.

    A self-confessed admirer of Joseph McCarthy’s political tactics, Rothbard wanted to put some emotional meat on the spare, abstract bones of libertarian economics. Rockwell, who shared Rothbard’s strategy, penned a series of virulently racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic newsletters on behalf of Ron Paul, in hopes of crafting a viscerally appealing emotional aura around libertarianism. “We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational,” one missive went. “I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” said another. With these themes, Rothbard and Rockwell brought sensation and visceral feeling to a libertarianism that had otherwise been a matrix of lofty abstractions.

    The fullest articulation of Rothbard’s strategy — and a piece of political cynicism for the ages — appeared in his 1992 essay “Right Wing Populism,” an apologia for former Ku Klux Klan grandee David Duke’s failed presidential run. Rothbard found much to like in Duke’s positions: “lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites: What’s wrong with any of that?”

    Rothbard went on to argue that the mainstream libertarian project of trying to convince “intellectual elites” by spreading “correct ideas” through institutions such as Cato and Reason had failed. Libertarian intellectuals were, after all, part of a corrupt and feckless ruling class, so they had an invested self-interest in perpetuating their situation. The elites had to be overthrown.

    Rothbard’s eight-point program for toppling these elites included a call to “abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point out that the root of such quotas is the entire ‘civil rights’ structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American.” Also in his program was a call for economic nationalism, under the ominous heading “America First.”

    Perhaps it’s not fair to lay blame for Rothbard the heretic at the feet of the mainline libertarian church, which attempted to purge him. But even putting Rothbard aside, his views were too widely shared to be dismissed as a fluke. Rothbard’s disciple Hans-Hermann Hoppe has kept alive his master’s dialogue to this day: His Property and Freedom Society’s yearly symposiums have hosted talks by Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE, the anti-immigration site that also counts Hoppe as a contributor.

    Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God that Failed” cites specious scholarship on the IQ differences inherent in race to support his arguments, presents an “anarcho-capitalist” defense of segregation as the prerogative of property owners, and is so unabashedly anti-egalitarian he doubts the basic humanity of people who don’t fit into his ideological schema. A characteristic passage goes: “A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person, but falls instead in the same moral category as an animal — of either the harmless sort (to be domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a “free good”) or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest).”

    How did Rothbard, Hoppe and others end up keeping company with the likes of Spencer, Taylor and Brimelow? The problem is that libertarian principles, which revolve the abstract notion of self-interest, are really not principles at all; they have no content and allow anything to be attached to them. Abstract self-interest alone can provide no instructive rule of thought and can disqualify no particular course of action, because each person is free to concoct what is in their best interest, and because “aggression” can be and has been defined in a variety of spurious ways.

    It was the very bareness of the idea of self-interest and liberty as such that allowed Chris Cantwell, the weeping neo-Nazi made infamous in Vice’s coverage of Charlottesville (and avid reader of Hoppe and Rothbard) to make conceptual space for racism: “People should be free to exercise complete control over their own person and property. If blacks are committing crimes, or Jews are spreading communism, discriminating against them is the right of any property owner.”

    It’s a quick step from here to full-on white nationalism, which interprets history and politics as the story of different races pursuing their collective self-interest. It shouldn’t come as a great surprise that enshrining self-interest as the core of morality would lead to a cynical worldview that takes all action to be struggle or manipulation. The “liberty” of libertarianism is merely negative; and a mind guided with the mere concept of its own interest can be led to anything or to nothing. For this reason, the intellectual wasteland of libertarianism continues to provide a safe space for fascists: It simply has philosophical room for them, and no particular injunctions to turn them away
     
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  12. VaxRule

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    I think this is the money passage.
     
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  13. LuPoor

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    That is a good passage. Despite the alleged purity of the ideology it has always struck me as extremely malleable to whatever you want it to mean. The only thing they seem to agree on is that poor people deserve it.
     
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  14. glimmer

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    When that's your starting point, it's not even worth fucking with.
     
  15. LuPoor

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    I agree, that's why I don't adhere to libertarianism. Just can't get with any philosophy that uses that as a starting point.
     
  16. Rabid

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    I don't care to argue with or correct simplistic notions but Matt Welch will for you to read.
    http://reason.com/blog/2017/09/22/using-negative-collectivist-generalities
     
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  17. Redav

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  18. Redav

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    Why did you wait three days to respond? I see the date on that article is today so that may be part of the answer.
     
  19. glimmer

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    Turns out Rabid is Matt Welch
     
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  20. OHW

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    no true Matt Welch
     
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  21. OHW

    OHW Well-Known Member
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    pfffft from the sidebar on that site :roll:

    [​IMG]
     
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  22. VaxRule

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    Let’s examine his attack on my favorite passage from the opinion piece TwoPoor posted:
    And
    Well let’s look at what those listed Libertarian philosophers thought about self interest.
    Adam Smith: “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest”

    F.A. Hayek: “If we put it concisely by saying that people are and ought to be guided in their actions by their interests and desires, this will at once be misunderstood or distorted into the false contention that they are or ought to be exclusively guided by their personal needs or selfish interest, while what we mean is that they ought to be allowed to strive for whatever they think desirable.”

    Ludwig von Mises: “man becomes a social being not in sacrificing his own concerns for the sake of a mythical Moloch, society, but in aiming at an improvement in his own welfare.”

    Ayn Rand: Come on. She wrote a fucking book called “The Virtue of Selfishness”

    Milton Friedman: “It is whatever it is that interests the participants, whatever they value, whatever goals they pursue. The scientist seeking to advance the frontiers of his discipline, the missionary seeking to convert infidels to the true faith, the philanthropist seeking to bring comfort to the needy - all are pursuing their interests, as they see them, as they judge them by their own values.”

    Robert Nozick, Libertarian: “There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more.”

    Nozick after abandoning libertarianism “The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate”

    &

    “There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion.”
    The value of self interest is central to the concept of libertarianism and the freedom to act on that interest is the defining principle of the philosophy. It is not reductivist to say so. It is the one unifying principle of many disparate interpretations of the philosophy. That’s the entire point of the passage he criticizes. And he denies it’s veracity by citing authors whose positions actually support it. Those authors had differences of opinions on selfishness vs self-interest, sure, but that again highlights the point of the critical passage. Deifying self-interest is in no way a unifying principle and leaves open a door for people whose individual self interest is telling minorities to feel free to go someplace other than here to practice theirs.
     
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  23. Redav

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    Those things don't count/those people aren't libertarians on second thought
     
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  24. Rabid

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  25. Rabid

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    I think this is what he addressed:
     
    #1525 Rabid, Sep 22, 2017
    Last edited: Sep 22, 2017
  26. Redav

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    I mean you could try. There's a detailed answer right above you that you skipped over
     
  27. Redav

    Redav One big ocean
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    You can also do condescending posts all day long but you've made no substantive argument here. You waited three days to post a story that basically says "yea but that's not libertarianism" when it seems like it clearly is.
     
  28. Rabid

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    I'm not trying to be condescending. I just don't have the time or inclination to engage in the conversation beyond reposting the writing of others that do.
     
  29. VaxRule

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    But it’s disingenuous writing that denies the fundamental importance of the individual self interest being the cornerstone of libertarianism. It is not a substantive response to that potion of the article that points that fact out. It’s a lie.
     
  30. Rabid

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    Are we still going with Rabid is Matt Welch?
     
  31. VaxRule

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    No. I am going with Rabid thinks Matt Welch made good points and shared them in response instead of getting into it himself.

    Matt Welch did not make good points.
     
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  32. Rabid

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    I just skimmed it while taking a dump and remembered seeing a question over here the other day.
     
  33. LuPoor

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    Shit in, shit out
     
  34. Fran Tarkenton

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  35. LuPoor

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    Hahahahahaha
     
  36. OHW

    OHW Well-Known Member
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    boy libertarians are quick to jump on the Republican racist stuff

    down goes another scotsman RIP Rand
     
  37. Fran Tarkenton

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    guess Social liberty is the price we must pay for Freedom

     
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  38. OHW

    OHW Well-Known Member
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    true libertarian values on display
     
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  39. LuPoor

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    Is the ideology still pure? Libertarians, please advise.
     
  40. Fran Tarkenton

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    Standing up for the constitution = guy who has lost job for undermining the Constitution

    invertebrates
     
  41. Can I Spliff it

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  42. Fran Tarkenton

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    seems to be a consistent theme for these unicorn types

    the societal side of the equation is always expensed
     
  43. OHW

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  44. LuPoor

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    Stereotypes exist for a reason
     
  45. Redav

    Redav One big ocean
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  46. OHW

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    I ventured into the comments in that article.

    As always, never read the comments.
     
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  47. LuPoor

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    Shame on Rand for holding back the purity of the ideology
     
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  48. Teflon Queen

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    The age of consent is government tyranny anyways