Gov. Gary Johnson challenges the two-party system with Libertarian presidential bid

I like Gary Johnson. He's a saner and safer candidate than Ron Paul --with similar views to the good ones (antiwar, anti-drug war). Until we get a viable 3rd and 4th and maybe 5th party that's a legitimate threat to the stranglehold Demoncraps and Repugnantcunts have on US politics, we are doomed to continue to decline into a wasteland of corporate culture and control. Corporatism is the scourge of Democracy and is the biggest threat that has begun destroying this country. Our only hope is for other political parties to become active on a national scale and force a coalition government where the different parties involved can ally themselves on different issues or to prevent the majority party from getting too carried away. If you don't see it, you are obviously too wealthy for your own good. Ask your servants...--jef

Kerri Connolly -- CurrentTV
July 2, 2012

In a presidential campaign with more media coverage than ever before, one of the more surprising stories of this election might be the story no one is telling about Gary Johnson.
Who? Start here: Gary Johnson is running for president.

The usual third parties need not apply here, so throw out your Independents and Greens and get back to basics: liberty.

Thanks to Ron Paul, Libertarian ideals aren’t new to this campaign. But unlike Ron Paul, who touts Libertarian-leaning policies under a Republican flag, Johnson is actually running as a member of the Libertarian Party, which advocates for minimalist government interference and great personal freedoms for citizens. The former two-term governor of New Mexico calls his platform a collection of common-sense policies that appeal to what most Americans believe: a combination of financial frugality and unconstricted civil liberties. Johnson says he is more fiscally conservative than Romney and more socially accepting than Obama.

So where has he been all this time? Well, luck seems to have something to do with it.

Despite the fact that he was the first Republican to announce his intentions to run for presidential office, he’s had a tough time telling anyone about it. An early burn from CNN kept him out of the second Republican debate (Johnson was not invited, though CNN has not made public the reason for the rebuff). After a lackluster fall, in December 2011 he announced he was switching parties and entered the race as the Libertarian candidate (the party designated him its official nominee in May).

In April, he was polling at 6 percent, compared with President Obama’s 47 percent and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s 42 percent.

If elected, Johnson says that he will:

• Recall all troops from abroad. An act that would mean an end to the American presence in Afghanistan, but also in peaceful countries throughout Europe where military bases and resources have been cached.
• Terminate the Department of Education. Johnson says the money currently being given to the Cabinet-level institution would be better spent by the states.
• Abolish the IRS. Johnson aims to do away with the current tax code in favor of a “fair tax” that would be based on consumption rather than income.
• End the so-called war on drugs by legalizing marijuana.
• Support gay rights and pro-choice causes.
• Cut federal spending across the board to the tune of 43 percent.

Governor Johnson’s ideas might sound out there, but he’ll be the first to say that he’s got the record to back it up. He was elected governer of New Mexico as a Republican by an electorate in which registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by roughly 2-to-1. Third party indeed.

Is there even a point to running in a race where he stands almost no chance of winning? Johnson says yes, and that the voice of those supporting the kind of policies he and Ron Paul support will be lost when Romney accepts the official mantle of his party. Johnson says his message deserves to be heard, and he aims to stick with the race till the end.

A symbolic race this might be, but if anyone is tough enough to stick it out, it’s Johnson, whose previous (nonpolitical) conquests include climbing Mount Everest on a broken leg and completing the Ironman race. Five times.

How Libertarian Dogmatists Are Sabotaging Ron Paul’s Campaign

(I'm neither for or against Ron Paul at this point, but this is an interesting article.--jef)

An Opportunity Gone to Waste

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

If Ron Paul’s libertarian handlers and support base could escape their ideology, Ron Paul could be much better positioned to win the Republican nomination.

Here are some suggestions.

Ron Paul should be making the point that Social Security and Medicare are threatened by multi-trillion dollar wars that are funded by debt, by bailouts of a deregulated banking system, and by money creation to keep the banks afloat. Libertarians support deregulation, but their position has always been that deregulated industries must not be bailed out with public subsidies, much less subsidies that are so extensive that they threaten government solvency and the value of the currency.

Instead of hitting hard on the serious threat to Social Security and Medicare posed by Obama and Republican candidates for the nomination, all of whom serve Wall Street, the military/security complex, and the Israel Lobby, Ron Paul has been positioned both by his supporters and his opponents as the danger to Social Security and Medicare. This is an amazing strategic mistake by the Ron Paul campaign.

The mistake is somewhat understandable. Ron Paul’s supporters are mainly among the young. The importance to them of Social Security and Medicare will not register for many years, but for the vast majority of the population Social Security and Medicare are essential for survival. A candidate who is positioned as the destroyer of what scant economic protection the American elderly have is not positioned to win an election for president.

Many libertarians regard Social Security and Medicare as welfare handouts and as Ponzi schemes, when in fact these programs are a form of private property. People pay for these programs all their working lives, just as they pay premiums for private medical policies and make their deposits into private pension plans. Libertarians are great defenders of private property, so why don’t they defend the elderly’s private property rights in Social Security and Medicare benefits? Social Security and Medicare are contracts that government made with citizens. These contracts are as valid and enforceable as any other contracts. If Social Security and Medicare are in dire trouble, why is the government wasting trillions of dollars in behalf of private armaments industries, a neocon ideology, and Israel’s territorial ambitions? Why isn’t this question the most important issue in the campaign?

Instead, in a decade that has seen two massive stock market crashes and an amazing amount of financial fraud, libertarians prattle on about privatizing Social Security and about how much larger the retirement pensions would be. They speak about delaying the Social Security retirement age to 70 without any thought to what a person does who is retired by his employer at 65. People who suggest making Social Security and Medicare off limits until people reach 70 need to have a look at the cost of private medical plans for older people. A group plan with Blue Cross Blue Shield Florida for a 64-year old woman has a $18,000 premium, large deductibles per medical issue, and a 20 per cent co-pay. Even a person with private insurance faces potentially ruinous health care expenses.

Libertarians will not wait to think before they inform me that private savings are funded but Social Security and Medicare are not. They are incorrect on both accounts.

Social Security and Medicare are funded with a payroll tax. It is true that the government has stolen the funds, spent them, and left non-marketable IOU’s in their place. But in our deregulated casino financial system with street registration of “securities,” the same thing happens to private holdings. Where is the money that individuals had in MF Global? What happened to people’s savings invested with Madoff? What happened to Enron’s investors? Can AIG make good on its promises to pay the benefits that people have purchased? Can banks whose balance sheets are loaded with subprime derivatives make good on their depositors’ accounts? US government debt is a component of many private pension plans. How secure are the values of Treasury bonds?

The notion that free unregulated markets are totally trustworthy is the enormous mistake that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made, for which American and European peoples continue to pay. Libertarians endorse this fantastic mistake to the hilt.

This is not meant to be an attack on libertarians. Rather, it is an explanation of some of their mistakes. There is much to admire about libertarians. They believe in civil liberty, that is, in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. They understand that government cannot substitute for the market. I know a lot about libertarians. I was associated with them for years, serving for several years as Distinguished Scholar at the Cato Institute until I was run off for independent thinking.

Libertarians are sectarian, and their tolerance does not extend beyond their ideology.

The biggest mistake that libertarians make is the way they view government and private sectors. Government is the root of all evil, and the private sector is the source of all good. Libertarians have never figured out that people are the same whether in the government or in the private sector. They will abuse their power regardless of where they perch. That is why government needs to be tied down by the Constitution and the private sector by regulation. Yes, regulation can go too far. Certainly, deregulation has gone too far.

The ongoing financial crisis from deregulation and ongoing jobs crisis from offshoring constitute empirical evidence that the belief is false that an unfettered private sector is the source of all good.

Some readers misunderstood the point of my previous column, “America’s Last Chance.” I am endorsing the U.S. Constitution and making the point that Ron Paul is the only candidate for president in either party who is committed to resurrecting the Constitution. Without the Constitution we cease to be American citizens and become subjects of a tyrannical police state. My complaint is that the only candidate who could bring back the Constitution cannot be elected because of the inflexibility and sectarianism of his base. Possibly there are more worthy third party candidates, but they have no prospect of visibility. Ron Paul is visible, and the opportunity is going to waste.

I hope readers will spare me their comments about how important their various single issues are. There are many important things. The question is: what is the over-riding important thing?

Civil Liberty, essentially the accountability of government to law that serves to protect the innocent, is the historic achievement of the English over many centuries from its beginnings with the foundation for common law established by Alfred the Great in the 9th century through Magna Carta in the 13th century to the Glorious Revolution in the 17th century. If this human achievement is lost, it is unlikely to be resurrected. If the Constitution that Bush and Obama have murdered stays in its grave one more presidential term, no one will be able to re-establish the Constitution’s authority.

And please, no prattle from libertarians about “natural rights.” The only rights we have
are rights achieved by centuries of human struggle that we have the wits and strength to retain.

And no prattle from left-wingers who denounce the Constitution for not protecting slaves and native Indians. The Constitution did not establish universal justice. The Constitution protected the people covered by it. Over time rights were extended. During the past decade the Constitution lost its power. Today rights depend on the subjective opinion of the executive branch. This is tyranny. We should be unified in our opposition to tyranny.

Clever Response to the Racist Charge Against Ron Paul

Why the Establishment is Terrified of Ron Paul
by DAVE LINDORFF

It’s fascinating to watch the long knives coming out for Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, now that according to some mainstream polls he has become the front-running candidate in the Jan. 3 GOP caucus race in Iowa, and perhaps also in the first primary campaign in New Hampshire.

Remember, we’re talking about a guy who has been in Congress on and off for 12 terms, dating back to 1976. His views have been pretty consistent, and because he has run for president several times, also pretty well known. A practicing physician who claims to have helped in the births of over 4000 babies in his career, the 76-year-old Paul is a free-market advocate, an abortion opponent, an uncompromising defender of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, an opponent of government regulation, the Federal Reserve and the IRS, and of big government in general–especially big federal government.

What’s interesting is what he’s being attacked for: being a racist, being “anti-Israel” and being an isolationist.

The racist bit is funny. After all, if we’re honest, the whole political infrastructure of the US is riven with racism. Just check out the public schools in any urban area, where you’ll find most of the students are non-white, or check out the schools in rural parts of the southeast in areas where most of the students are black — compare the condition of those schools and the class sizes to schools in the white neighborhoods. Check out the wildly different jobless figures for whites and for blacks. Check out the (very pale) complexion of the student bodies at just about any state university, check out the skin tones of the judges on the US Supreme Court, or for that matter, the whole federal bench. Check out the racial breakdown of the nation’s jails, and especially on the country’s many death rows, where you’ll find a wildly outsized percentage of people with black or brown skin waiting to be killed by the state.

Being a racist is clearly no disqualifier for national political office. It’s just that you are not supposed to say overtly racist things, at least in public.

It’s fine to pass laws and push for enforcement actions and “tough” judges that end up putting most young African-American males in prison at some point in their lives. It’s okay to promote a “War” on drugs that ends up creating a whole new slavery in the form of black men locked up in for-profit prisons. It’s okay to shortchange minority school districts. You just aren’t supposed to say you’re doing these things on purpose.

When it comes to Ron Paul, his problem is that he has allowed his supporters and his newsletters and campaign literature in years past to actually say things in public that other candidates only say, or think, in private, or that are the actual result of legislation that they sponsor or support, though always supposedly without the intent being the racist thing that is a consequence (wink, wink).

Some of those things Paul has said or allowed in his literature, like the line in one of his newsletters that the race riots in Los Angeles only ended when it came time for people to “pick up their welfare checks,” are truly offensive, and if he wants to be a serious contender for office, Paul should publicly and forcefully disavow them and the people who have expressed them in his name or on his behalf, as he should forcefully denounce any white racists and anti-semites who offer him support (his statements to date that he “doesn’t agree” with such people, or “doesn’t like” their support are far too limp). But it’s worth noting that with all the charges floating around that he hangs out with white supremacist types, Nelson Linder, president of the Austin, Texas NAACP, says he has known Ron Paul for 20 years, and reports that he is “not a racist.” Linder notes that Paul has called Martin Luther King a “hero,” and adds that he has condemned the police repression of black communities as well as the mandatory sentencing rules (supported by Democrats and Republicans over the years) that have condemned many blacks to long prison terms for minor offenses–concrete positions that you will not hear coming from either Obama or any of Paul’s competitors for the GOP nomination.

In fact, if we’re talking racist guilt-by-association, then the media’s favorite Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, should be hearing demands that he renounce his Mormon faith, as the Mormon scriptures state that the “seed of Cain” were made black in what amounts to a racist curse by the Mormon god. So should fellow Mormon Jon Huntsman. (Even if the Mormon church “received” blacks in 1978, many of its adherents remain white supremacists, and many of its priests continue to oppose inter-racial marriage.) Rick Perry, meanwhile, should have to sever his ties with white supremacist Christian evangelist David Barton. As for Newt Gingrich condemning Paul for hanging around with racists, talk about your pot calling the kettle racist!

Then there is the foreign policy stuff.

Ron Paul is being called anti-American, both by some of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, and increasingly even by fearful Democrats who are starting to wonder, and apparently worry, about how Paul might fare against Barack Obama in the 2012 general election. The basis for this claim is Paul’s argument that the 9-11 attacks on the US were the predictable result of the history of American imperialist activity in the Middle East, and his claim that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were gleeful after that attacks because it allowed them to go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq.

The thing is, while you aren’t supposed to say it in polite company, Ron Paul is right about that. You don’t have to buy into conspiracy theories claiming that 9-11 was an “inside job” to see that Middle Eastern terror campaigns against the US were the predictable result — blow-back if you will — of a history of US imperialism in the Middle East and elsewhere, or of what Native American activist Ward Churchill rightly referred to as “chickens coming home to roost.” And we have it from a member of Bush’s own cabinet, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, that planning for an invasion and occupation of Iraq was in the works before Bush was even sworn into office in January 2001, while work on the fine print of the so-called USA PATRIOT Act was underway well before the first plane hit the first tower.

Paul is being labeled an “isolationist” (a hoary term that is supposedly a pejorative, dating back to World War I days, but which these days should actually be considered a compliment). The basis for this charge is that he calls for an end to America’s endless wars and to the fraudulent and enormously dangerous and damaging “War” on Terror. He also says he wants to close down the over 800 military bases that the US operates all around the world. Again, what has his establishment critics in high dudgeon is that his perspective is winning over an increasing number of Americans (including Republicans), who are finally waking up to the reality that a country that spends more than half of every tax dollar on its military, its wars, the debt for those wars, and on its secret spying operations, and that has itself on a permanent war footing, cannot prosper or even long endure.

Also making Ron Paul a pariah for the establishment is his position on Israel. He rightly points out and condemns the terrible distortion of US foreign policy that has occurred because of the unseemly power of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., which has most members of Congress in the pocket of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). As he put it in a 2007 interview<> : “The First Amendment grants all citizens the right to petition the U.S. government, and this applies to AIPAC as much as anyone else. However, I oppose certain lobbying groups having more of an undue influence than others, and since one of the main purposes of AIPAC is to lobby for generous taxpayer subsidies to Israel, that portion of their influence would end under my administration.”

But the truth is: What other country can you name which is almost totally dependent upon the US for its military, yet can nonetheless make threats to use its US-supplied weapons to start a potential global war (by invading Iran), with Washington left pleading with it not to take such an action? There is no other such country. Any other country dependent upon the US for its military weapons has to march to US orders or else. While we’re at it, what other lobby can you name that has had spies working for it, including spies in the Pentagon who have gone to jail for disclosing US military secrets, and which nonetheless remains a prime venue for presidential candidates to come and speak? Answer: There is no other such lobby.

Israel can even murder an American citizen, as it did in 2010 in the case of unarmed 19-year-old humanitarian volunteer Furkan Dogan on the Turkish Gaza aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, and there isn’t a peep of protest from Washington (the White House actually tried to bury a report from the Turkish national forensic medicine body declaring that their tests showed Dogan had been executed by IDF bullets fired at his head at close range). Indeed, Israel was able to announce in advance that it planned to have its IDF thugs board ships of a second aid flotilla carrying many unarmed American citizens, and instead of warning Israel not to harm any of those Americans, Washington warned the Americans that they were putting themselves at risk. Our government even gave Israel the go-ahead in advance to have its boarding parties use violence against those US citizens.

What has Paul’s critics, right and left, worried is that a growing number of Americans agree with his view of Israel, seeing support of that increasingly isolated irredentist theocracy with its ongoing illegal occupation and absorption of Palestinian territories, and its official policy of apartheid towards the Arabs within its borders as being inimitable to American interests.

There are plenty of things wrong with Ron Paul, but the charge of racism doesn’t hold up very well, and in any case, it’s a charge that can be leveled equally against most of the rest of the nation’s white political leaders, and is hardly a disqualifier, judging by the people who currently hold high office in Washington, not to mention state governments. As for his anti-Israel stance and his isolationist foreign policy, these are both positives and could end up winning him votes in an honest national presidential race–if we still have such things here in America.

Where I part company with Paul is in the area of economics. His Libertarian philosophy may be right on when it comes to support for individual rights, and to a belief in strict adherence to the Constitution. We desperately need a radical pull-back from the unconstitutional policies of the Bush and Obama administrations, which have made the president into a virtual dictator, relegated Congress to the role of a debating society, gutted at least nine of the 10 articles in the Bill of Rights, and overseen the creation of a police state where it is now possible for American citizens to be captured and hauled away from their homes in secret, to be locked up and held indefinitely without trial on some military base on the basis of unproven rumors and trumped-up charges, with no right to see family members or even a lawyer.

But Libertarianism is not so great when it calls for an end to federal regulation of corporations, however large and powerful, or when it says the federal government should do nothing when the entire planetary biosphere is threatened by rampaging climate change caused by the rapacious and unbridled pursuit of profit and growth by those same corporate interests.

It’s not so great either when it opposes, as Paul does, legislation like the Civil Rights Act on the grounds that private employers and owners of private shops and restaurants should have the right to discriminate on the basis of race if they wish, free of government intervention.

Libertarianism is at its core an ugly anti-social philosophy of selfishness carried to the extreme. It is the antithesis of all that has been good in human social evolution — the creation of philosophies of caring and of societies in which suffering and want are addressed and, where possible, ameliorated.

Interestingly though, Paul is not being pilloried by his establishment critics in the GOP or the Democratic Party, or in the media, for his Libertarian economic theories or even his far-out property-rights theories. These are, after all, also quietly shared by most people in both of the major parties, and of course are wildly popular among the ranks of the corporate elite, who know they can always get all the favors they want or need from politicians by buying them, and who are happy to spout the gospel of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman when it comes to government regulation of their businesses or taxation of their personal hoards. Unfettered capitalism is also an article of faith in the corporate media.

That said, sometimes it all comes down to a couple of big issues, and in the unlikely chance that the election next November were to end up being the choice between Barack Obama and Ron Paul (and assuming no emergence of a viable Third Party progressive candidate like Rocky Anderson and hisJustice Party), while I might have a hard time pulling the lever for Paul unless he can really make it clear he has no truck with White Supremecists and their ilk, it would be easier than pulling a lever for Obama.

Why? Because with President Obama we would get more war, increased military spending, and at the rate he’s been going stripping away our Constitutional rights, there wouldn’t be any of those after another four years. We would also be electing someone who we now know lies through his teeth, who takes money from some of the biggest corporate thieves in human history, and who has appointed some of those very criminals to most or all of the key economic policy positions in his administration.

With Ron Paul as president, at least we’d be done with all the wars, the people of the rest of the world would be finally free of US military interference, including attacks by US drones. The long-suffering Constitution and its Bill of Rights would mean something again. We might even get a Supreme Court justice or two who actually believed that Congress should declare any future wars before we could fight them, and that citizens who were arrested had an absolute right to a speedy trial by a jury of peers. And we’d be electing someone who appears, especially for a politician, to be that rare thing: an honest man who says what he means and means what he says — and who doesn’t seem to be owned by the banksters.

We’d have a hell of a fight on our hands in a Ron Paul presidency, defending Social Security and Medicare, promoting economic equality, fighting climate change and pollution, defending abortion rights and maybe fighting a resurgence of Jim Crow in some parts of the country, but at least we wouldn’t have to worry about being spied upon, beaten and arrested and then perhaps shipped off to Guantanamo for doing it.

In Praise of Ron Paul

August 24, 2011
A Real Maverick

by CLANCY SIGAL

“But (America) goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

– President John Quincy Adams in 1821

Rep. Ron Paul, the Texan doctor running for President as a Republican libertarian, looks like my grandfather, a gambler and small time bookie. Maybe that’s why I want to trust him. Paul is the only candidate of either major party who, over the years and our many imperial adventures, is consistently and fiercely antiwar. I watch this guy on C-Span 2 all the time. Where the left is largely silent about Obama’s wars, Paul bangs away in his slot at the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and at Tea Party rallies and campuses across the country, condemning – for moral, humane as well as fiscal reasons – the Mission Unending.

Ron Paul seems to be at the head of a rising, conservative, populist antiwar movement on the right. He’s also the “unperson” of American politics, shunned by the media, allegedly as unphotogenic, and by most urban liberals who sniff at a country obstetrician with zero charisma.


Paul is also against things I’m for – like emergency care for illegals, and Roe vs. Wade and Social Security and Medicare. But so what? He has a laser-like eye for what’s sick about our economy – for example, the $10 billion monthly we spend in Afghanistan while child poverty at home goes rampant – and our fear-mongering politics – for example, the equally no-end-in-sight “drug war”. A lonely figure in Congress, he voted against the Iraq war and the infamous Patriot Act. On a no-foreign-wars, pro-civil liberties platform he nearly beat Michelle Bachmann’s bought total in the recent Iowa straw poll. The Republican establishment is terrified of him. If this isn’t enough recommendation, Rush Limbaugh loathes Paul who he calls “nuts on parade”.

People who upset the consensus we call crazy.

There IS a Ron Paul problem. He has no jobs program aside from the bee in his bonnet advocating “a truly sound money system” (banishing the Federal Reserve).

But here’s OUR problem: nobody else with a national audience is speaking out against the war(s) and against the whole Bush-Obama apparatus of government surveillance and intimidating whistleblowers.

What used to be the left-progressive antiwar movement is a dead dodo. With rare exceptions we have been hypnotized into paralysis by the very real achievement of getting “our” man into the White House in 2008. [Speak for yourself, Clancy. AC] Then we went home for a deep snooze in the comforting illusion that he was pro-us, pro-labor, antiwar (sort of), just a good all-round person. Very slowly progressives are waking up from their torpor. Even the blindly loyal Democratic Black Caucus is making noises, as per Rep. Maxine Waters’ blunt assessment, “(Obama) doesn’t understand the level of pain out there.”

With agonizing slowness Obama’s “base” may be getting its act together. But I wouldn’t bet on it until we have a Devil’s-spawn Republican in the White House in 2016 – or, at the rate Obama is defeating himself, next year – and we can gather again at the river, the beautiful river of complacent protest.

If you’re against Bush-Obama’s wars, you have to reconcile yourself to the ugly fact that “anti imperialism” today is located more on the rising “isolationist” right than the “internationalist” left. Militarized “humanitarian intervention” is the liberal pretext for establishing our more than 1000 military bases worldwide. The irresistible impulse of paid-up liberals like Hilary Clinton, Samantha Powers and Susan Rice, Obama’s three interventionist advisors, is to go “Hooah!”, Let’s send in the 82d Airborne – or at least fire a few Cruise missiles – to protect (supply name of besieged civilians) to get our booted foot in the door.

Historically, there are times when there’s been little or no practical difference between social progressives and imperial warmakers. In the 19th century, once it became clear after a couple of depressions, in 1873 and 1893, that upthrusting American capitalism depended for survival on expansion and exploiting foreign markets, the flag smartly followed the dollar. The inevitable wars, in Cuba and the Philippines and on into WW1, were protested by lonely contrarians like Mark Twain but also supported and even encouraged by moralizing liberals (and safe noncombatants) like John Dewey, Walter Lippmann and a raft of suffragettes demanding the right to “do our part” in the killing.

Ever since, liberals have suffered from a kind of wartime “dissociative amnesia”, splitting off our progressive consciousness from the consequences of our silence when it comes to shedding other people’s blood on foreign ground.

What to do when a war is made in our name when some of the strongest anti-war voices come from suspect sources?

We’ve had this problem at least since the1930s when the anti-interventionist American First Committee drew reactionary and anti-Semitic “fringe elements” along with socialist Norman Thomas and the young students Gore Vidal and John F. Kennedy. (Disclosure: as a 14-year old protestor I threw bricks into the plate-glass windows of my neighborhood Sears & Roebuck because it was the headquarters of America First’s chairman.)

Ron Paul, despite his healthy war chest and huge following around the country, might never be a “viable” presidential candidate. But his persisting presence in our lives – if we care to watch and listen – creates a real dilemma for us on the so-called left. More than a dilemma, a reality we hate facing. It’s that the Bush-Obama wars, while bankrupting us, are OUR wars too, we own them, by our failure (unlike the Vietnam war) to reach out to serving troops and by trusting a president who has forfeited that trust.

The Tax Question

What's Fair?By ANDREW LEVINE

Who knows what, if anything, congressional Tea Partiers and their fellow travellers had in mind when they signed on to Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge. Those not in the grip of obscure theocratic doctrines probably thought that the pledge is in line with libertarian positions to which they nominally adhere. But this thought is more aspirational than real.

In recent decades, a few economists and philosophers have found ways to refashion long discredited libertarian positions; what they have come up with, though flawed, is at least not obviously untenable. And because libertarianism draws on intuitions that capitalist institutions reinforce, their views can seem appealing to otherwise reasonable people. No doubt, this is why, lately, as a bipartisan war on the remnants of capitalism with a human face has gained momentum, libertarian views have come back into the fold.

But no thought out libertarian position justifies the Norquist pledge. The reason why is plain: most libertarians are not anarchists -- they acknowledge a need for at least a minimal state, one that establishes law and order and national defense. Most libertarians also think that there are at least some goods in addition to security that markets cannot supply and that states can legitimately provide. For states to discharge these functions, they require revenue, most of which they obtain through taxation. How much revenue a state needs depends on particular circumstances; therefore the nature and extent of the tax system thoughtful libertarians would support must be sensitive to prevailing conditions. There is no level that can be identified in general, and therefore no way to justify the precise level that pledge-takers regard implicitly as acceptable.

Unless, miraculously, the Bush-Obama tax structure is just right (or perhaps a tad too high) – perhaps due to the interventions of the God of Republican nomination-seekers -- those who take the Norquist pledge place themselves in the grip of an arbitrary constraint. Why would they do that? Surely, not, as liberal pundits claim, because they are committed to a minimal state; “no new taxes” can only get to that (or any other) result by sheer luck. The conclusion is therefore inescapable: insofar as they are not simply doing the bidding of their paymasters, they must think that there is some electoral advantage – either for themselves or for the Republican party – in assuming a stance that is preposterous on its face. They may present themselves as principled political actors but in fact they are only guileful and opportunistic.

The moralistic babble emanating from Democratic quarters is less noxious, but no less confused. Obama Democrats say that they want sacrifices to be shared because it would be unfair if they are not. That is a fine idea, but what it comes down to in practice is that they will endorse the attrition of New Deal and Great Society programs provided plutocrats (“shrewd businessmen” in Obama speak) and corporations (“people,” in the view of his most likely rival) don’t get off scot-free. This position is not only shamefully tepid; it is myopic.

Lets stipulate that, as philosopher John Rawls famously put it, justice is “the first virtue” of social institutions as truth is to scientific theories; and lets further agree to think of justice as fairness rather than, say, adherence to irrefragable property rights. as some libertarian philosophers insist. Then fairness matters preeminently; and, insofar as there is a problem we collectively confront, it follows that everyone should contribute his or her fair share towards its solution. A general commitment to fairness leaves open what this entails in practice, but let that pass.

Lets also concede that the deficit is a problem of this sort, leaving aside all the ways that Wall Street recklessness created the conditions for it, and how the Obama administration collaborated with the Republican leadership in contriving it. Lets even ignore how eminently fixable the problem is. There is no need for radical solutions: the long term deficit would be even less of a problem than it was a decade ago if we restored the tax structure of the pre-Bush years, cut military and other “national security” spending to pre-9/11 levels and, for good measure, enacted genuine health care reform so that costs come into line with those of other advanced countries.

Finally, lets concede that the long-term deficit problems we confront constitute an immediate “crisis.” This has become conventional wisdom at least since Obama signaled in his 2010 State of the Union address that he’d join Republicans in promoting the idea. It is patently false, but let that pass too.

In other words, contrary to almost all the relevant facts, lets suppose that our deficit problems are like the problems people face in the aftermath of a natural disaster – that they affect us all equally, and that we must resolve them together. Then indeed it would be unfair for the rich – or any other sector of the population -- to shift their fair share of the costs of dealing with the deficit onto others, just as Obama and other leading Democrats proclaim.

To be sure, it isn’t clear what a fair distribution of burdens would look like in this case; the idea floated by Obama – from which, true to form, he is sure to retreat -- that a dollar of taxes should balance a dollar of spending cuts is every bit as arbitrary as acquiescing to the existing tax structure while categorically rejecting any and all “revenue enhancements.” But this too is not the main problem.

The main problem with what the Democrats are promoting is that it is confused: because in ascertaining what fair taxation involves, it is indefensible and misleadingly myopic to focus, as they do, just on taxes themselves. To do so is to fall back into the spontaneous – and indefensible – libertarianism to which Republicans implicitly appeal, according to which justice is not about fairness, but about accommodating to property rights that are somehow given before considerations of fairness kick in. In proper libertarian fashion, Obama’s position regards taxation as a (justifiable but unfortunate) imposition upon a morally defensible economic system constituted by capitalist market relations.

In reality, taxation is only one aspect of a larger economic system in which property rights, public policy, and the means through which the state finances itself are joined together into a seamless whole. It is this entire system, not one of its integral parts taken in isolation, that is the proper unit of analysis in ascertaining the justice (or fairness) of the distribution of burdens and benefits.

What justice requires with respect to economic systems is among the most investigated issues in social philosophy. But because all plausible views appeal to a core notion of fairness, according to which like cases should be treated alike, and because they all adhere to the fundamental conviction, inherent in the idea of morality itself, that, where moral principles obtain, all persons count equally, they all share one very general feature: that there is a presumption for equal treatment and therefore, where the distribution of burdens and benefits is at issue, for equal distributions.

This does not mean that justice requires equal distributions; only that equality is, as it were, the default position from which deviations must be defended. Presumptions can be and typically are overridden.

Needless to say, there is no general consensus on what must be the case for inequalities to be justifiable. But it is extremely unlikely that tax increases for the well-off equaling the dollar amount of cutbacks in services suffered by the poorly off could follow from any defensible view.

Thus there is no conception of equality or theory of justice from which Obama’s position follows. His moralizing is not principled; it is meretricious. It has less to do with just taxation, than with getting the victims of an unjust economic regime to go along with policies that, except for being more flexible, are in line with those Republicans favor.

In the distant pre-Clinton past, when Democrats were more generous in spirit and less philosophically confused, the conventional wisdom was that equality is indeed an estimable value but that “efficiency” – in other words, high levels of productivity -- is too. It was then thought that these ideals are sometimes at odds, presumably because egalitarian social policies give rise to an incentive structure that discourages productive labor. The problem, then, is to strike a balance between two partially conflicting ideals by trading off efficiency for equality and vice versa.

This very salutary and progressive view was not without its problems, in part because efficiency and equality are not as much at odds as is widely supposed. But there is no need to delve into that issue here because it is plain that the principal beneficiaries of today’s tax policies are hardly incentivized to work hard to advance the real economy. In this stage of capitalism, the generation of real wealth has given way increasingly to the remunerative but socially useless and ultimately parasitical task of making money out of money.

Thus if fairness is the issue and if myopia is overcome, what is called for are policies vastly more far-reaching than the Democrats’ starting-point negotiation position, and more far-reaching too than the far saner positions Democrats used to advance. But, of course, anything like that is entirely off the table in Obama’s bipartisan America.

Why the Democratic Party is Corporate Lickspittle

Numbers Racket
By DAVE LINDORFF

A new Gallup Poll conducted for USA Today earlier this week reports that a majority of Americans (52%) say that they would prefer a third party instead of the two parties, Republican and Democrat, that have dominated American politics for nearly centuries.

The poll shows that one third of Democrats say there's a need for a new political party, while 52% of Republicans say the same thing. Meanwhile, 68% of independents say they have no use for either Democrats or Republicans and would prefer another option (no surprise there--that's why they are not registered with either of the two major parties).

Of course, the Third Party envisioned by these various groups is hardly the same. Most of the dissatisfied Democrats are almost certainly in the party's left wing, and are people who would prefer a more left-leaning, socialist party. Most of the reluctant Republicans are probably either libertarians who can't stomach the Republican Party's corporatist stance and its fondness for police state tactics and invasion of personal freedoms, or else they are the rabid right that prefers the kooky conspiracy-driven politics of the Becks, Limbaughs, Bachmans and Palins. As for the independents, there are certainly leftists, rightists, isolationists, globalists, libertarians and kooks among them enough to populate ten new parties.

That's one reason why we still have just two parties winning all the elections. Some of these dissatisfied citizens just hold their noses and vote for the party that is less likely to make them projectile vomit in the voting booth. Others, unable to vote for either major party's candidates without soiling the equipment, just don't vote. And then there are a few stalwarts who insist on doing their civic duty, march in and vote for the Constitution Party or the Libertarians or the Greens or the Socialist Workers, or they write in Mickey Mouse. The rest just don't vote, which is why the US has one of the lowest participation rates in elections of nearly any of the world's nominal democracies.

It's possible that this latest poll could be signaling some kind of tectonic political event ahead. Perhaps the incongruous collection of Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce crowd and the bible thumpers, racists, misogynists and neo-fascists who populate the Republican voter rolls will finally turn on each other and split into two or three smaller units.

But what about the Democrats? What will it take for the 33% of party stalwarts who think the party is the pits to give up hope of reforming it and pulling it to the left? What will it take for the working class that has for generations given its votes to the party's smarmy candidates, hoping against hope for the best, to finally walk away from the stinking corpse that is the Democratic Party and form the base of an American Labor Party?

Maybe a closer look at who's really buying the Democratic Party and its candidates would do the trick.

Year after year, the country's labor unions collect money from their members and give it to candidates for Congress -- candidates who pretend to be the working man's and working woman's friend, but who after election do the bidding of Wall Street and Main Street.

Here's why. Even most of the the most liberal members of the Democratic Congressional delegation get most of their campaign swag not from the unions, but from large corporate interests, and that tidal wave of corporate cash simply washes away any good that the union donations might have done.

Check it out.

Take Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), the ranking minority member and former chair of the House Judiciary Committee. A leading member of the House Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus, and surely one of the most liberal members of Congress, Conyers according to the website OpenSecrets.org, in the latest reporting cycle, didn't list one union among his top five contributors. Instead, occupying those top spots were the National Beer Wholesalers Assn. ($56,000), the Law Offices of Peter G. Angelos ($33,600), the corporate law firm of Akin, Gump ($15,102) and Intellectual Ventures LLC ($12,500) a venture capital firm. Over all, the top five corporate donors to Conyers were: lawyers and law firms ($129,102), the entertainment industry ($84,591), the Computer/Internet industry ($78,283), the Beer, Wine and Liquor industry ($77,699) and various industry lobbyists ($52,680).

Labor's PAC donations to Conyers (a total of $107,520) shrink to almost insignificance compared to the $335,000 donated by various industry PACs, including $140,524 from the Communications industry alone.

Or check out Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), the House minority leader and former Speaker, portrayed as practically a Bolshevik by the country's right-wing punditry. There's only one labor organization in her list of top-10 contributors, and that's the AFL-CIO, which is Number 10 with $10,000, behind Law Offices of Peter Angelos ($43,200), Bryan Cave LLP ($34,950), Johnson & Johnson ($22,200), Gallo Winery ($12,000), Microsoft Corp. ($12,000), Blue Cross/Blue Shield ($11,500), Google ($11,000), and New York Life ($11,000). Unions only represent two of Pelosi's 20 top contributors. Looking at the former Speaker's PAC money by sector or industry, labor and working people only come in at rank number five and nine, with retirees contributing $107,150 and public sector unions donating another $78,500. The other 10 big donating sectors are: Health Professionals ($253,700), Lawyers ($203,600), Lobbyists ($125,350), Securities and Investment Industry ($109,200), Real Estate ($105,800), the Pro-Israel Lobby ($89,700), Pharmaceutical Industry ($86,300) and Hollywood ($76,950). Just focusing on Pelosi's biggest contributors, once again, that's $1,050,000 from big industries and the rich vs. $185,650 from the people -- a ratio of almost 6:1.

But why single out a couple of these supposed people's tribunes? Why not check out the whole Democratic Party? In the 2010 election cycle, OpenSecrets.org reports that the Democrats raised $210 million in funds subject to disclosure, and another $9.2 million, the sources of which it does not have to disclose. The top four PAC donors to this stash were not labor unions. They were the National Assn. of Realtors ($3.8 million), Honeywell International ($3.7 million), the National Beer Wholesalers Assn. ($3.3 million), and AT&T ($3.3 billion). Only at number five do we find a labor union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers ($3.0 million). Rounding out the top 10 PAC donors to the "party of working people," we have the American Bankers Assn. ($2.9 million), the American Trial Lawyers Assn. ($2.8 million), the Operating Engineers Union ($2.8 million), and the National Auto Dealers Assn. ($2.5 million). Unless you count the American Trial Lawyers Assn. as "working people," this means that among their top ten donors, the Dems took in $22.3 million from corporate interests and lawyers, and $5.8 million from workers' unions. So whose interests is a party like that going to be serving.

Not all the members of Congress are on the hook to American corporate interests and the rich. But the number who aren't probably can be counted on one or two hands. People like Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (independent socialist-Vermont) show what true working people's candidates ought to look like. Kucinich's top five contributors are all labor unions, and looking at a breakdown by interest group or industry, the largest contributor is retirees, followed by three labor unions and then by lawyers. Kucinich did take in some money from PACs representing the Finance, Real Estate and Insurance industry ($7000), Healthcare ($3500), lawyers ($7500) and the Transportation industry ($1,000), but their combined contributions are dwarfed by the $114,000 contributed to Kucinich by labor PACs. That's a ratio of 1:5.

Similarly, the socialist Sanders counts three labor unions among his top five contributors, these being the International brotherhood of Electrical Workers ($18,500), the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union ($17,000) and the Communications Workers of America ($16,250). The other two contributors rounding out Sanders' top five list were eScription Inc. ($25,200) and Baron & Budd ($18,500).

Not surprisingly, both Rep. Kucinich and Sen. Sanders have been unwavering backers of the interests of working people and their labor unions.

In what could perhaps be a hopeful sign of the future, the 11th biggest donor to the Democrats, the International Association of Fire Fighters, which last year gave the party $2.4 million through its PAC, announced that it was no longer going to be a campaign contributor to the Democrats, having decided that the Party was not defending the firefighters' interests. Saying that the firefighters and "all public workers" were under attack by "Tea Party politicians," this union, in a public announcement, said, "Too few Democrats are standing up and fighting for us." As a result, it is "turning off the spigot." If other unions, like the two big teachers unions, the AFT and the NEA, would take similar action and pull away their financial support for the Democrats, perhaps we could see a real Labor Party spring up as a political alternative to the two corporate parties. If that ever does happen, we could also see the Democratic whither away and die a deserving and long-overdue death.

Meanwhile we're kind of stuck. Voters will keep telling pollsters they're sick of both parties, and both parties will continue to run the country into the ground in the interests of the rich and powerful.

Ron Paul: ‘Government is in the process of failing’

By Nathan Diebenow RAW Story
Friday, February 11th, 2011
Is he running for US Senate? Is he signaling his bid for US president? Or is he hinting at something deeper within the US political climate?

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) sounded like he was about to hit the campaign trail again during his speech at a right-wing forum Friday, but before he left the podium, he warned Americans that their federal government was in trouble.

"Tragically, you're going to have the opportunity [to not ask the federal government for anything], because government is in the process of failing, and they can't deliver on the goods, just as the Soviets couldn't deliver the goods and maintain their own power," he said during the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Rep. Paul continued, "We will have those same problems domestically. We face serious economic problems as this dollar crisis evolves."

Paul has hinted in recent weeks that he might seek the Senate seat that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison plans to vacate after nearly two decades in Congress. If he should win, he would join his newly-elected son, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

However, Paul, 75, seemed to be cultivating his position in the libertarian wing of the Republican Party.

"I'm glad to see that the revolution is continuing," he said, adding, "We don't need to just change political parties. We need to change our philosophy about what this country is all about."

Paul drew thunderous applause for bashing his favorite targets: the Patriot Act, US aid to foreign nations, and US military bases overseas. After his call for the Federal Reserve banking system to be audited, the crowd chanted, "End the Fed! End the Fed!"

Paul became the chair of the House financial services subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology after Republicans retook the House last fall. He held his first meeting on the Federal Reserve this week.

"The Federal Reserve will end itself," he added. "They have eliminated 98 percent of value of the 1913 dollar, and it's continued erosion."

Paul used the newly-extended Patriot Act as a sign that grassroots activists were pulling the grip on power away from Washington.

"We didn't get a majority vote, but they didn't pass it automatically with a 2/3rds majority vote, sending a message that this country is waking up," he said. "We want to protect our civil liberties as well as our economic liberties."

Paul, who was the only Republican to bring up the situation in Egypt at the conference, blamed US foreign aid to other countries for the instability in the United States, and he warned that the revolutionary spirit against US-backed dictators sweeping the Middle East would soon envelop Saudi Arabia.

"All of the Middle East is unstable because of this [foreign aid]," he said.

Paul continued, "Now it's Tunisia. Next it's Egypt. And it's going to keep going because all the problems are there because the people don't like us propping up their dictators, no more than we would like it if a foreign country came here to prop up a dictator in our country."

The conference was not without its own revolution. On Thursday, Paul's supporters chanted "war criminal" at former Vice President Dick Cheney, who is seen as one of the masterminds behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Defend liberty," Paul closed.

This video was published at YouTube, broadcast Feb. 11, 2011, via RonPaul2008dotcom.

Libertarianism and Its Impersonators

By Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski September 07, 2010

The distortion of reality begins with the distortion of the words used to describe it. That is why, whenever one notices that a word one thinks of positively experiences an upsurge in popularity, one should remain cautious. It is certainly possible that such an occurrence indicates a genuine increase in the appreciation for and understanding of the ideas that the word in question signifies. But it is equally possible that it indicates an attempt on the part of some relatively popular interest group to dress its members’ own ideas in what they take to be an attractive and fresh-looking costume. This, in turn, allows the groups openly hostile to what the original term stands for to launch their polemics against straw-men and caricatures, which allows them to wage the battle of ideas more effectively without displaying any genuine logical superiority over their intellectual opponents. Hence the necessity to keep the terms that constitute any well-established and well-developed intellectual tradition faithful to their original meanings if any sensible and fruitful discussion of them is to remain possible.

Libertarianism – perhaps on account of its principled and clear-cut character – has been a relatively frequent target of such attempts at hostile appropriation by means of semantic distortion. In what follows, I would like to describe a few positions masquerading as the original doctrine under consideration and point to the dangers they pose to the message of liberty. Consequently, my suggestion is that the values it carries can be preserved only by sticking intransigently to its intellectually pure and unadulterated version. Having made the above brief introduction, let me now move to enumerating the aforementioned approaches:

1. Utilitarian or Coasian “libertarianism.” According to this theory, the primary function of property rights is to reduce transaction costs – that is, the costs associated with finding the person with whom we wish to transact, coming to a mutual agreement with her, drawing up a requisite contract, enforcing its terms, etc. And while it is praxeologically true that the recognition of property rights is absolutely indispensable for overcoming some of the fundamental so-defined transaction costs (e.g., the costs stemming from otherwise irresolvable ownership conflicts, the costs associated with the inability to perform economic calculations and thus rationally allocate resources, the costs relating to the absence of the signaling function of prices, etc.), it is not necessarily the case that any given pattern of originally appropriated and contractually acquired property titles is bound to minimize the total amount of more detailed, circumstance-specific transaction costs. Imagine, for instance, that someone owns a parcel of land that constitutes a pass through an otherwise nearly impassable mountain range separating two merchant colonies. It would be highly beneficial for the inhabitants of both of these colonies if a road could be made through this pass, but the original owner refuses to sell his land to any of the road-building companies since it has been in the possession of his family for centuries and it has a sentimental value to him. Obviously enough, making detours around the mountain range is bound to generate significant transaction costs (measured in terms of market revenue, not in terms of psychological utility) as compared to the counterfactual scenario in which the road is built through the pass. In such cases, the recommendation of utilitarian “libertarianism” is to expropriate the recalcitrant owner and then offer him an “adequate” monetary compensation, corresponding to the anticipated market value of the road. But there is clearly nothing even remotely libertarian about such a recommendation – it involves an exercise of coercive force against the life and property of an independent, self-owning individual. It conceives of individual liberty as subordinate to collective money-making efficiency. Thus, even putting aside all the value-free, economic objections to the feasibility of making interpersonal comparisons of utility, the belief in which underlies the approach in question, it fails the essential moral test of paying unconditional respect to private property rights in one’s own body, labor and the fruits thereof.

2. Minarchist or militarist “libertarianism.” These are in fact two conceptually separable positions, but there are good theoretical and empirical grounds for claiming that acknowledging the legitimacy and desirability of the former invariably leads to the deadly excesses of the latter. I think it is fair to characterize the adherents of the approach under consideration as subscribing to the following catchphrase: We hold liberty to be the supreme value, but we realize that in order to secure the maximum feasible amount of liberty, some of it has to be sacrificed to the necessary evil of the monopolistic apparatus of coercion. In other words, unless one consents to the abrogation of some of his private property rights, one will not be able to enjoy any private property rights at all. The literature countering this claim on economic grounds is vast (see, e.g., here), so it would take too much time to even summarize it here. Instead, let me ask in this context just a couple of short, critical questions of mainly moral and psychological nature. Is it reasonable to assume that statist coercion is necessary to enforce contracts, but the alleged “social contract” that is supposed to establish the state needs no meta-state to enforce it, thus effectively becoming a self-enforcing anomaly? Is it prudent to expect that ceding the task of maintaining justice onto an entity that is both monopolistic and coercive will not lead to it continually perverting justice in its favor? Is it sensible to claim that an institution that forcibly imposes its protective services on others, unilaterally determines their price and excludes all competition in this area will not attempt to benefit from initiating conflicts or letting them develop rather them resolving them or preventing their occurrence? If one is ready to answer these questions in the negative, and it seems to me that there exist very good reasons for doing so, then one should not be puzzled by the suggested slippery slope from minarchism to militarism. And one should not be surprised by the contention that neither holds much promise for preserving individual liberty.

3. Anything goes “libertarianism.” This approach suggests that any social, political or economic change that lightens the burden of statism in even the most infinitesimal way should be considered libertarian and those who bring it about should be regarded as libertarian-minded. In other words, if a political party reduces the income tax by one percentage point or repeals one out of a hundred thousand regulations, its members should be thought of as fundamentally decent people and sincere supporters of personal freedom. Such an attitude, of course, trivializes libertarianism and induces its putative followers to rest on their laurels much too easily. If a communist system is replaced with a social democratic one, this is surely a welcome change, but it seems a grave abuse of language to call it libertarian. If a band of local highwaymen decides to lower the tribute it regularly extorts from the other inhabitants of a given area, should it be praised as a group of committed individualists and voluntarists? What use can there be in such semantic equilibristics other than to shift the spectrum of intellectual discourse in the direction opposite from that pointed to by the original and properly radical version of the discussed theory? It does not help a good cause to try to subsume every acceptable development under a program aimed at advancing it. The more inclusive a given position gets, the more it runs the danger of becoming meaningless. In order to avoid that danger, let us bear in mind the crucial difference between the changes that, relatively speaking, move us towards the libertarian vision and the changes that are also consistent with its principles.

4. Countercultural “libertarianism.” This particular doctrine puts paramount emphasis on the necessity of liberating social customs from the shackles of violent paternalism and coercive moralizing. And while this is certainly an effort worthy of support, since the acceptance or rejection of any given set of social customs should be entirely voluntary (here I am obviously, though implicitly, treating the non-aggression principle as something much more than even the most respectable custom or convention), it has to be borne in mind that liberty in matters social and customary is a natural and inevitable consequence of liberty in matters moral and economic, but not necessarily the other way around. Hence, the priorities of countercultural “libertarianism” turn out to be badly misplaced – its adherents strive to secure a single beneficial result, whilst overlooking the need to trigger (or even openly spurning) the only cause capable of bringing it about (together with many other essential human values). That is why it should not be surprising that the original countercultural “libertarianism” of the 1960s was hardly a movement for private property rights and unhampered freedom of economic activity. If any modern form of counterculture is to become a better ally of genuine individualism and voluntarism, it has to reassess its priorities on a fundamental level and put property rights at the very center of its positive program for change.

5. Anti-hierarchical “libertarianism.” As the name suggests, the cornerstone of this position is the rejection of hierarchies, in this context meaning arrangements of people in which they are represented as being “above,” “below,” or “at the same level as” one another according to some specified criterion. Again, this appears to be a reasonable attitude to take insofar as any such criterion is forcibly imposed on a given person, which results in her coercive subordination to the relevant hierarchy. Modern democratic statism, for instance, violently subordinates hundreds of millions of people to the hierarchy of political influence and the accompanying ability to amass and utilize large-scale aggressive force. In sum, anti-hierarchism is perfectly justifiable on libertarian grounds to the extent that it is aimed against coercive hierarchies. However, the doctrine under consideration, especially in its so-called “left-anarchist” incarnation, is aimed against all sorts of hierarchies, including the voluntary ones (existing in, e.g., firms, clubs, churches, scholarly associations, etc.), thus effectively contravening the basic libertarian principle of unhampered freedom of association. Insofar as left-anarchism regards a hierarchy stretching from the owner of a non-state-subsidized company to its lowest paid employee as inherently oppressive and hence suitable for forcible liquidation, its followers are indistinguishable from ordinary statists, whose final argument is always the use of their truncheon. In conclusion, it is very difficult to conceive of these outright opponents of private property rights and natural inequalities as reliable advocates for liberty.

As was perceptively noted by Murray Rothbard, human rights are property rights – either to one’s body, one’s mind, one’s labor, or the fruits thereof. Thus, libertarianism can convincingly lay claim to being the only position that genuinely champions human rights. The same does not apply, however, to all the doctrines that try to capitalize on libertarianism’s good name while leaving out its most important element – an unflinching and unconditional endorsement of private property rights. Let us never forget that fact whilst seeing the word libertarianism passed around more and more generously.