How did you find the article in it's explanation of the changes in the parties and our current alternatives?
When will Americans realize that collectivism, whether it's corporatist, socialist, or facist, ALL lead to totalitarianism incrementally and eventually? It can not be refuted, and we have more a mix of them today and less freedom than ever before in our history?
I agree with you here, but I found this article to be off the mark. But then, I depart from Rothbard in that I do believe in the need for a Nozickian "night watchman state" to maintain public order, protect property rights and provide for contract enforcement.
In an attempt to recruit libertarians from the ranks of the New Left, Rothbard and Long engage in obscuritantism themselves. Although Long regards the "free market" as the proper ideal, he scarcely speaks of property rights save for a concern that, among libertarians "the distinction between defending property rights and defending the propertied classes was beginning to blur". But when did the New Left ever defend property rights? Isn't the socialist attack on the propertied class always simply a personalized attack on property rights?
Long also approvingly cites Proudhon:
The attitude on that farthest left toward law and order was summed up by an early French anarchist, Proudhon, who said that 'order is the daughter of and not the mother of liberty.' Let people be absolutely free, says this farthest of the far, far left (the left that Communism regularly denounces as too left; Lenin called it 'infantile left')…. "
But Proudhon maintained that "property is theft", and that only collective ownership of property was morally justifiable. How does this make one more "free"? It is the freedom of the Spanish anarchist commune or the gulag.
Also, this passage made me laugh out loud:
[W]hile the typical Old Left goal is to move into the seats of State power, and maneuver the State into piecemeal "reforms" to be imposed upon the public from above, the New Left scorns statism and social reformism and aims to stimulate the people themselves to build "parallel institutions" outside of, and confronting, the State apparatus.
Really? By the late 1960s, it was obvious to even the hidebound welfare statist that public housing as conceived in the US was a failure. So the New Left opposed public housing, and the Vietnam War. In what other instance did the New Left oppose the expansion of the state, particularly the regulatory and welfare state?
And, finally:
It's time for libertarians to stop fighting the left and take up the challenge of leading the left.
The left would sooner hang me and empty my wallet than be led by me. I have no desire to aspire to leadership of a ragtag herd of malcontents who simply reject all authority, and make no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority.