Comments Elsewhere

FreedomsAdvocate: Right this instant, we have an opportunity to grab a good portion of the small-government portion of the republican party.

Pull the other one. The Libertarian Party’s primary outreach for more than a decade has been directed at “small government conservative” types, particularly through targeting AM talk-radio audiences, readers of right-wing publications, and supporters of right-wing “free market” think tanks. This strategy was especially promoted by Harry Browne and his coterie from the mid-1990s until 2001 (cf. Operation Drumbeat, Project Archimedes, etc.), and continues to influence the LP’s outreach efforts in a lot of ways. Given how gleefully this constituency has alwaysdefected to march in formation with the G.O.P. in every election cycle, I can’t say that this strikes me as a strategy well-justified by its success.

FreedomsAdvocate: I am about a noninterventionist as you can get. But I also realize that sometimes the best defense it a good offense. Sometimes war is necessary to avoid worse possibilities. In WW2 we intervened. Was that wrong?

Yes, it was.

I say this not because I think the world would have been more free or less free as a result of U.S. neutrality (how would I know?) but rather because the U.S. government’s involvement in the war committed it to doing things that were absolutely immoral, including a gargantuan increase in the size and invasiveness of the State domestically, the summary imprisonment of political dissidents, the confinement of innocent Japanese-Americans to internment camps, the creation of a slave army through massive conscription, a policy of total warfare throughout Continental Europe and the Pacific, and terror-bombing using incendiary weapons and, for the first time in history, nuclear weapons.

Look, if you want to argue that war is sometimes necessary or justified, then you should feel free to make that argument. But you can’t sensibly call yourself “about [as] noninterventionist as you can get” while also endorsing the U.S.’s involvement in the biggest and most destructive military intervention in the history of the world. To be “as noninterventionist as you can get” means being an absolute pacifist. I am not an absolute pacifist, but I (and a number of other libertarians) are substantially closer to the position than you are; thus you are substantially more interventionist than we are. You can make whatever arguments you want on behalf of your interventionist position, but it serves no-one to pretend that your position is something other than what it is.