Posted on 05/09/2014 6:19:54 PM PDT by RKBA Democrat
For a country where the national flag flies from front porches and convenience stores and where children recite the Pledge of Allegiance each morning at school, we’re remarkably resistant to the notion of being governed. In the fall of 2013, the Pew Research Center found that only three in ten Americans trust the federal government to do what’s right ‘most of the time’. The self-conception of most Americans, with their visions of pioneers and plucky underdogs fighting for independence, is all about freedom. The flip side of that vision, however, is all about distrusting government.
And ‘government’, in US political discourse, is ideological. The right claims that excessive government hampers the ability of companies to create jobs; the left that it protects the public from the worst excesses of businesses. The divide is patently artificial: the vast majority of government economic policy draws no fire from conservatives. Still, by setting up ‘government’ as a dirty word in their anti-Democrat campaigns, the Republicans can claim freedom as their brand.
But if you really want to talk about what it means to oppose the government, the place to start isn’t with Republicans. It’s with the one group in the US political landscape that absolutely promises to take our rhetoric about freedom seriously: libertarians. Libertarians really do believe that government is the problem, as Ronald Reagan said back in 1981, and they’ve decided to get rid of it, or at least shrink it dramatically.
Enter Liberty Forum – an annual conference organised by the Free State Project, a group of activists who are trying to get 20,000 libertarians to move to the state of New Hampshire, where I live. These are people who gladly pit themselves not just against the welfare state or the regulation of business, but against military spending, state-funded schools, federal highways and government-issued money.
The Free State Project began life in 2001 with a call-to-arms by Jason Sorens, then a political science PhD student at Yale. Sorens suggested that a few thousand activists could radically change the political balance in the small state. ‘Once we’ve taken over the state government, we can slash state and local budgets, which make up a sizeable proportion of the tax and regulatory burden we face every day,’ he wrote. ‘Furthermore, we can eliminate substantial federal interference by refusing to take highway funds and the strings attached to them.’
Sorens’ views — which focus on problems with taxes and regulations and don’t dispute the government’s role in protecting commerce and conducting foreign policy – suggest a more-Republican-than-the-Republicans sort of outlook. But some people who’ve responded to his call subscribe to an entirely different ideology: an anarchism that sees government as a tool of wealthy capitalists. The rest fall somewhere in between. Free Staters say that what brings them together is a common belief that government is the opposite of freedom.
The crowd that gathered in February for Liberty Forum 2014 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Nashua was a pretty good reflection of the US libertarian movement: mainly male, and overwhelmingly white. A few people openly carried guns, which is thoroughly legal in New Hampshire.
One of the first speakers, Aaron Day, a Republican activist and member of the Free State Project board, railed against government plans to expand Medicaid. His PowerPoint flashed images comparing President Barack Obama’s health insurance reforms to the Soviet famine of the 1930s, when Stalin shipped away Ukraine’s wheat, leaving its people to starve. Day announced he’d be running for state Republican Party chair and called for everyone in the audience to seek local office. If I was looking for the embodiment of right-wing libertarianism, here he was, a true believer in cutting the government down to size from within – starting with programmes that benefit the poor.
I meet conservatives who’ve moved towards a live-and-let-live attitude that calls for government to stay out of issues such as sex and drugs
Johnna and Cory Bartholomew, a couple from California who sat among the crowd watching Day, plan to join the influx to New Hampshire soon. Even at a glance, it’s not hard to recognise the Bartholomews as a military couple, despite the pink streaks in Johnna’s hair. Cory wears a crew cut, and both of them radiate a friendliness rooted in bedrock self-confidence. For their 20th anniversary, they visited Hawai’i. This year, for their 30th, they flew east for Liberty Forum, as a sort of final test before moving to the state.
The Bartholomews met as Mormon students at Brigham Young University in Utah. Over the years, their conservatism on social issues dropped away and they left the Church. Cory doesn’t like to call himself an atheist. As an Air Force pilot whose job revolves around technology, he prefers ‘scientist’ – a believer in the empirically provable. ‘I’m not a person of faith,’ he says, ‘I’m a person of “show me”.’ I end up hearing many such stories at Liberty Forum: conservatives who say they’ve slowly drifted from a focus on social issues towards a live-and-let-live attitude that calls for government to stay out of issues such as sex and drugs. But if Aaron Day comes across as essentially right-wing, the Bartholomews seem different. For one thing, they talk more about free speech than taxes.
‘Our kids grew up hearing us talk about politics,’ Cory told me. When they were small, he and Johnna had their three children memorise the preamble to the US Constitution, with its promise to ‘secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity’. Now in their 20s, two of their boys have taken up political activism against government overreach. They’ll protest against police cameras that photograph drivers’ licences at traffic lights, or they’ll hold up signs warning drivers about a drunk-driving checkpoint ahead.
One day in 2011, the brothers donned the Guy Fawkes masks made famous by Anonymous and held up a huge sign bearing the message ‘Taxes=Theft’ on a highway overpass. They got arrested after refusing to show their IDs to the cops. Eventually, two charges against them, relating to posting a sign on government property and wearing masks while committing a crime, were dropped. They ended up sentenced to probation for ‘delaying an officer’. To Johnna, the conviction was typical of a justice system that, despite its rhetoric, has little real respect for free speech: ‘We think “I have this little box of treasure called my rights,” but the moment you bring one of those out and try to exercise it, people are afraid.’
Their sons had already signed on for the Free State Project when the Bartholomews decided to follow their lead. Johnna says that her upbringing in the Mormon Church, founded by families who crossed a continent for their faith, inspires them and makes leaving their daughter and Johnna’s mother behind seem more manageable. ‘If you really believe in something and want to be part of something, then you leave; you leave what you’re used to and you may go somewhere you’re not so comfortable.’ This is, of course, what the Free State Project depends on – people willing to adopt a frontiering mentality so that they’ll leap cross-country to get beyond the current political landscape.
The Free State Project draws recruits with a mishmash of different philosophies, which isn’t surprising given libertarianism’s history. By some accounts, the first thinker to describe himself as libertarian was Joseph Déjacque, a mid-19th-century French anarcho-communist writer. Déjacque’s beef wasn’t just with government, but with capitalist bosses and religious hierarchies. Any kind of authority was an assault on individual autonomy. He even opposed families, with their elevation of husband above wife and parents above children. For about a century, this is what people meant when they said “libertarianism”: a far-left vision of autonomous individuals working as equals.
Then, beginning in the 1950s, a new definition of ‘libertarianism’ emerged in America, defining its love of freedom in ways that directly contradicted Déjacque. The new philosophy drew on the classical liberalism of Thomas Jefferson, filtered through an economic lens that made property rights central. This was the libertarianism of the Cato Institute think tank, formed in 1977 by economist Murray Rothbard, corporate right-wing superstar Charles Koch, and Edward Crane, a leader of the then-fledgling Libertarian Party. Here, the government was faulted not for standing with capital against the people but for getting in the way of progress by promoting socialist welfare systems.
To get a better handle on what sort of libertarianism was at play at Liberty Forum, I asked attendees what their ideal society would look like. The answer, for the most part, was that it would be completely different from the world we know. Drugs and prostitution would be legal. Education and medical care would be market commodities or gifts. In the absence of government support, individuals would be forced to help each other. Without liability protection or the ability to lobby for favours from the state, corporations as we know them would disappear in favour of smaller, more dynamic companies. The vision is so distant and theoretical that even Déjacque-style anarchists and Cato-esque reformers can work side by side in the same movement.
A good thing about working with libertarians is that no one expects to coerce you into participating in something you don’t approve of
James Davis, who plans to move his family to New Hampshire this fall, believes in a libertarianism that looks a bit like Déjacque’s: he wants to free regular people from oppressive institutions. When his first child was born, Davis and his wife got interested in parenting theories that advocate giving children as much freedom as possible. ‘We came upon these ideas of philosophical libertarianism,’ he said. ‘If people don’t trust adults, how can they trust children?’ The couple took over the management of a foundering summer camp in upstate New York and applied their ideas about freedom to it, giving campers as much leeway as possible to make their own choices. It’s the sort of vision that progressives have promoted for decades through democratic schools such as Summerhill, in Suffolk, England, and also one that many Free Staters embrace by home schooling their children and letting them help organise their own educations.
Philosophically, Davis doesn’t believe in government-funded benefits for the poor – drawn from taxation and backed up by prisons and guns. Having worked in non-profit organisations, he’s convinced that in a post-government society people will come through to help the needy without prodding. But he believes that society is a long way off. For now, he’s moving to New Hampshire to be among a community of people who want to improve the world through voluntary action. ‘I suspect it’ll be much like living anywhere,’ he said, ‘but around people who inspire me to be better.’ Davis doesn’t necessarily expect to encounter like minds everywhere, but says that a good thing about working with libertarians is that no one expects to coerce you into participating in something you don’t approve of.
The Bartholomews share Davis’s notion of building a better world outside government mechanisms. As a member of a local school board in California, Johnna recalls being faced with the question of whether to borrow money to pay for desperately needed repairs on a school. ‘I said, definitely, this school needs help, but we haven’t asked one business, we haven’t asked one person, to voluntarily give us one dollar.’
To long-time New Hampshire libertarian Jack Shimek, that focus on voluntary methods is the key to libertarianism. Shimek got interested in politics as a college student in Texas around 1969, a time when young US men worried less that the government would tax them too much than that it would ship them off to a jungle battlefield where they would die. A friend introduced him to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of radical, selfish individualism. Within a few years, he had moved to New York City and into Déjacque’s branch of libertarianism, to argue that the authoritarianism of capitalist bosses is inextricably connected to government tyranny.
Ayn Rand’s Objectivism contained a ‘fatal flaw’, says Shimek. She confused capitalism, a system that gives wealthy owners control over workers, with free markets, which depend on individual autonomy. ‘Capitalists are always in favour of keeping their piece of the pie through political power,’ Shimek told me. ‘When General Motors screws up, it has enough power to convince the government to bail it out.’ Another thing corporations can do, he says, is flood libertarian think tanks and magazines with money: ‘The libertarian movement, originally radical, was invaded by conservative reformers.’ Behind that, says Shimek, are corporate funders with an agenda: ‘They [just] want it to decrease regulation on them, they want it to lower taxes on them.’
Shimek was already living in New Hampshire when Jason Sorens’s idea of a Free State Project took hold. He was thrilled with the influx of people into the tiny libertarian community, but not with the focus on running for office and voting. ‘I said, wait a minute, we’re libertarians, we don’t believe in government.’
For libertarians, Bitcoin is a technology with the potential to circumvent a lot of what’s wrong with the world
At Liberty Forum, Shimek runs Alt Expo, an unofficial series of alternative programmes, with topics such as organic farming and local currencies. The idea is not to confront the government but to live outside it as much as possible. If the power of the state comes from coercion, creating alternatives uses a different kind of power, based in example and persuasion. Though this year’s Alt Expo was sparsely attended, Shimek said it had been a success anyway, because the official programming is now full of these kinds of ideas.
Plenty of people at Liberty Forum think electoral politics is a drag. Carla Gericke, president of the Free State Project, told me she finds politics ‘soul-numbing’. Sessions on farming and gardening – concrete methods of evading government-subsidised industrial agriculture – drew bigger audiences than the ones about lobbying or running for office. Ditto for presentations about technology, which expand the vision of voluntary action beyond government to a global scale. One session is run by two cousins with a start-up who envision a post-industrial economy where individuals trade goods, services and labour online, through portals such as Uber and Airbnb. Everyone is talking about Bitcoin. In the mainstream, the cyber currency comes up mostly as a curiosity, but at Liberty Forum it’s a technology with potential to circumvent a lot of what’s wrong with the world. At one session, panelists wax poetic about paying friends for rides, patronising local businesses, and buying clothes from Australia without taxes, credit card fees, or any contact with the global web of government and private banks.
At another tech sessions, Jeffrey Tucker draws huge crowds. He wears a suit, bow tie, and a mischievous expression, and is prone to phrases such as ‘outrunning troglodyte systems of power’. Tucker points to his smartphone as the symbol of a new society, one with frictionless information exchange, free online education and peer-to-peer lending. To Tucker’s mind, technology is transforming both corporate structures and banking, and politics simply doesn’t much matter. The goal is simply to circumvent dull and lumbering government bureaucrats. ‘We’re going to displace all the institutions of the state,’ he promises gleefully.
By the second-to-last night of the forum, Cory Bartholomew has snapped selfies with a handful of people he calls his ‘liberty heroes’. People such as Cody Wilson, who helped invent the first plastic guns that can be produced on 3D printers, and Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack, former government employees who became whistle-blowers, exposing domestic government surveillance and the illegal interrogation of terror suspects. Their stories make Cory wonder if he was naive about the military earlier in his career.
Other delegates flock to an unofficial party at the Quill, a private club and meeting space inside an unmarked storefront in Manchester, New Hampshire. Downstairs, dance music plays and colourful lights throb between the old ceiling beams. Antigone Darling, a slight, 20-something podcaster who’s the host of the party, hands out sex toys to anyone in her audience who yells loud enough: one to Amanda Billyrock, an anarchist who became a libertarian star after she met allegations of drunk driving with counter-allegations of police misconduct; another to ‘Objectivist Girl’, who wears dramatic eye make-up and makes videos explaining the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Upstairs, a late-night dinner is for sale: grass-fed beef burger with grass-fed bacon and broccoli slaw salad – technically illegal since the cook refuses to get a food service permit. A group of young men stand in a circle talking about their tech start-up, a company that facilitates the use of Bitcoin.
J J Schlessinger, the Quill’s manager, explains a plan to distribute blankets to homeless people who live near the club. He’s also interested in discouraging vandals, not by calling the cops but by keeping an eye on them, maybe asking if their mothers would approve of what they’re doing. Schlessinger uses the word love a lot. He runs the Quill out of love, and wants to help his neighbours with love. The important thing, he says, is for people to reach out to each other in person, not delegate the job to government.
It’s easy to see the Free State Project as a sort of outsize version of the government-hating right. There are issues that libertarians and the left oppose together – high defence spending, corporate subsidies – but they are hard to get at: mostly legislated at the federal level and protected by wealthy interests. It’s much easier to get elected to the local school board and slash local budgets, or to lobby the state legislature against the expansion of health benefits. Republican Party-style libertarians are thus much more visible, and they spend a lot of time trying to cut taxes and reduce spending, invoking the revolutionary spirit of 1776 as they go.
But, looking at the party at the Quill, there’s the suggestion of another American myth: the one about pioneers, often bearing wildly idealistic notions, who come together to build new institutions. Anyone with a passing knowledge of US history knows how fraught with missteps and malice the realities of that process have been, but the myth is a powerful one: if we distrust the government, then we have to trust each other. It’s a notion around which anarchists, Republicans and almost anyone else can find common ground, given sufficient optimism about building a new society.
As Liberty Forum winds down, Johnna and Cory Bartholomew are excited about moving. Johnna’s just seen a panel of volunteers who started charitable organisations to encourage self-sufficiency, and she thinks it’s something she’d like to do. This is the thing, ultimately, that seems to bring people to the Free State Project. They become libertarians because they hate taxes, or fear a police state, or distrust collusion between the state and corporate power. But they move to New Hampshire because they want, more than any of these things, to build something new together.
So now you are going to start spamming us with Lew Rockwell articles rather than you own opinions and positions in your own words?
Subject: articles
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:53:23 +0000
From: bob.wallace@att.net
To: Webmaster@freerepublic.com
Your site is permanently banned from posting any of my articles from LewRockwell, Strike the Root, Libertarian Enterprise, Price of Liberty, and Endervidualism.
Bob Wallace
To: Starfleet Command
It is for the exact same reason why we don’t allow anything from racist sites like Stormfront, conspiratorial propaganda like Alex Jones, radical liberal sites like Huffington Post (where Lew Rockwell writes), pornography, violence, etc. This is a private site, by and for Conservatives. This is about a FREE REPUBLIC. In a Free Republic, private property rights are honored, including the desire of this site to remain a Conservative forum versus a soapbox for every crank in the world.
The First Amendment says the government cannot restrict free speech, it does not give anyone the right to come on your or my private property and yell whatever they want to. It is a restriction on government, not a restriction on the standards you set for your property.
If you look at the posts here, it is pretty clear what the community thinks of Lew Rockwell.
By the way, people aren’t banned for just expressing their view, it is how they express that generally gets people banned or if their view is, for example, racist propaganda.
27 posted on 1/16/2009 11:56:58 AM by Admin Moderator
The thread so far has 181 comments. At least eleven individual FReepers on this thread are at ease with and even in agreement with the small-l libertarian philosophy of smaller government.
At most five individual FReepers on this thread, dominated in posts very heavily by one individual, accuse small-l libertarian thinkers of supporting, advocating, and enabling heinous moral abominations, and by extension grievously insulting the honor and integrity and basic human decency of .. well, ELEVEN FReepers at least, not to mention countless lurkers.
FIVE measly people who willfully indulge in false witness to "support" their arguments, versus ELEVEN level-headed patriots who understand, as does Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, that small-l libertarian principle is the foundation of limited government, which is in turn the foundation of living MORALLY.
Jim and Admin Mods, how is it that you have deleted posts and chastised Yours Truly for doing MUCH LESS than the one hysterically anti-libertarian poster on this thread has done here and over many months past.
How many FReeper donations aren't you getting because of newbies who come here looking for kindred spirits -- which more than doubles the non-kindred spirits on this thread in REAL numbers -- but who are made to feel so unwelcome by what looks like more than a few guys accusing said small-l libertarians of wanting to enable and legalize child porn and abortion?
Hullllo?
"By some accounts" conceals a lot. Déjacque wasn't the first person to call himself a libertarian by any means, and given all the vicissitudes of a word like "liberal" down through the years, maybe she shouldn't imply that an obscure figure like the anarcho-communist Déjacque somehow owns the word "libertarian."
Wow, that sounds menacing, you count five conservatives opposing 11 libertarians, and send JR a message.
This is a conservative site, Lew Rockwell is a libertarian site. Strange post, you get into JR's finances, and mention him losing money by not restraining his conservatives and letting them resist libertarianism, and you complain that someone at FR disagrees with libertarianism.
Since this is a conservative site, and libertarianism is against conservatism, then of course it will be challenged and exposed here.
It’s like calling everyone who disagrees with obama a RACIST.
Would advise you both to quit stalking each other. FR is a big place.Just avoid each other.
Would also advise you both to unwind your panties. Must be pretty uncomfortable with them all wadded up like that.
No it isn’t at all, you don’t think that libertarianism is largely based on opposing the social conservatism and national defense positions of conservatism?
Based on opposing two legs of the stool?
>> What isn’t chronicled are the folks who went home to their children and got up early the next morning to go to work or church.
Of course because that’s not a popular talking point.
Interesting posts on the thread. Thanks for posting some of the info up thread. Very informative.
Unfortunately, I violated the first rule of troll management on this thread: don’t feed them. Oh well. Live and relearn.
Sage advice. Wish I had remembered it up thread.
“Of course because that’s not a popular talking point.”
Yeah, you’re right. It really isn’t. Only depravity and perversion are discussed. Not decency or humanity. Sinister as it has the effect of attracting those who would tend toward depravity and discouraging those who aren’t.
Would you go ahead and add me on? Not a libertarian, but I agree with y’all enough.
Ping.
They still try to say they are “Conservative”, but still avoid the main topics that divide Conserv/Lib (Libertopian and Liberal)... and we both know, it goes beyond that... Not even worth pinging them, they will still deny/avoid :po
Equating all libertarians with the Libertarian party is like saying ALL conservatives are Republican. We know that is not the case. I am going to try to outline a few positions for you, and if you still think they are leftist when I am done then all I can say is you may want to learn the difference between statism and liberty.
Marriage: I and many other libertarians agree that when one gets married they are actually getting married twice. Once in the eyes of God and once in the eyes of the state. We can argue whether government should be involved in marriage (I don’t think it should) but the fact of the matter is that it is for the forseeable future. Because of this, as a libertarian, I am OPPOSED to gay marriage. I have other reasons for opposing it as well but for now we will leave it as a religious issue that cannot be resolved because God and the Bible are clear on their position toward gay marriage. However, because the state is involved, I am not opposed to civil unions that are only recognized by the state. This way no one has their 1st amendments rights trampled upon nor can they be forced to partake in a gay marriage.
Illegal Immigration: I am opposed to it. I do not believe in open borders. There are many reasons for this; security being one of the main reasons. I have no problem with legal immigration and it should continue, though the entire immigration system needs reformed. And no, I am not advocating for amnesty, just in case you were going to try to put those words into my mouth.
National Defense: one of the few legitimate functions of government is to protect the borders of the U.S. and its citizens. I believe in a strong national defense and a military capable of deterring attacks on us and our citizens. I do not believe in “cutting and running”, nor am I against unilateral action to protect our interests. On the flip side the military is not to be used as a global police force.
Gays in the Military: Sex has no place in the military. I do not want gays serving openly. But I also do not want heterosexuals openly serving either. Leave your sexuality at home, the military has a job to do. It should determine, based on a system of merit, who advances in the ranks, and who may even join for that matter.
Abortion: We all have rights and responsibilities. An unborn baby has the right to life. Just because it may be inconvenient to a mother who does not want to be pregnant does not warrant it a death sentence. The “choice” for the mother ended when she chose to have sex and take the risk of pregnancy. Her lack of proper decision making for her own life should not cost the unborn child his life. I have no issue with the government protecting the child’s right to life, as that is one of the few basic legitimate functions of government.
Child Porn: libertarians believe in consent. That is ADULT consent. Since child porn and pedophilia do not involve this, the perpetrators are robbing the children of their right to life, liberty, and property. They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
I am sure that not all libertarians agree with me, but may do. Just as many Republicans and conservatives do not always agree. Tagging all libertarians as you have as being leftist is no different that what the Democrats do to African Americans, and we all know what we think about the thought processes of liberal Democrats.
No, the party is a perfect and pure, and true representation of libertarianism.
Do you personally agree with libertarianism fully, evidently not.
You then listed a hodge podge collection of your personal beliefs, at least one was out of place, you described “illegal” immigration, rather than “immigration” which libertarianism has a position on.
You are OK with gays in the military, didn’t address “civil unions” being recognized as the same as marriage in federal law in the military, federal employment and immigration.
You abandon libertarianism and join the conservatives on abortion and national defense.
You describe a libertarian position on child porn that they have not taken yet, and if anything, has been blocked by libertarians, when an attempt was made for them to vote on opposing child porn.
But worth resisting the urge to feed just the same. About all I can do is hope that newbies and lurkers have the same fortitude. Even when I do that, I get accused of stalking. This could have been an interesting thread.
They don’t defend libertarian positions, they only argue that they don’t share them.
Weird.
Another clear moral plus in the libertarian take is that it would necessarily refrain government from undertaking the role of charity, and give it back to a moral populace. Charity is a moral act, voluntarily given as such and received as such by the poor who benefit. When youth groups, service clubs, churches, hospitals, organizations, engage in charity, it is a moral act and received as such.
When government - which the Federal and state governments have done -- presume to take over the role of charity via welfare and special preferences and hand-outs, it becomes an AMORAL act and is received as an entitlement. Forced charity is amoral and nourishes promiscuity and sloth, as we have clearly seen.
That's just one of many of the moral and social malaises created and nourished almost solely by government; take government out of the mix, and we'd still have poverty, but there'd be better morality.
Government is solely a force, that is all government is. It is "a dangerous servant and a fearful master," as GWashington supposedly said. It makes sense to use such a dangerous servant sparingly.
Then again, I used to think that that's what "Republican" was, the quest for smaller government. Now it's a maligned and libeled libertarianism.
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive.
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