... 1. Whether this is true or not, the point is that this survey design is not a good way of measuring that. Rather, it is rigged to produce a predetermined

Personally, I was thinking of Diane Nash, the NSM, SNCC, and the lunch-counter sit-ins. And getting progressively more angry (at both Maddow and Paul) every time she brought them up, and he meandered about a stupid gun rights case rather than pointing out that the lunch-counter sit-ins are a perfect example of non-governmental, grassroots victories against segregation in private businesses. The first big wave of sit-ins started in 1960 and the students repeatedly won the campaigns years before federal intervention was even legally possible. Greensboro’s Woolworth’s was desegregated in July 1960; the Nashville students had already gotten all the downtown merchants in the city to desegregate in May. Because the sit-ins demonstrated, without the help of Federal antidiscrimination bureaucrats, that segregation was immoral and socially unsustainable.

If they sat around waiting for Title II to come along, they would have been waiting 4 more years. Actually, they would have been waiting a lot longer than that, because a greasy racist fuck like LBJ never would have gone for anything like the Civil Rights Act, except for the fact that the cresting social movement, of which the sit-ins were one of the most effective examples, politically cornered him into doing so.

If Rand Paul were capable of answering a question honestly and forthrightly, it would be easy to point out that the sit-ins are a perfect example of what anti-racist libertarians ought to be for; and that invoking the sit-in movement while taking credit away from them and pretending like the federal government somehow gave them the Civil Rights that they bled and died to take for themselves, is an insult to the sit-in movement.

Of course, Rand Paul’s not capable of answering a question honestly and forthrightly; as a political candidate, he answers questions politically.

I can’t speak for Rand Paul. I know that he believes in many things I consider to be stupid and immoral. But I think I can claim to have some passing familiarity with the libertarian philosophy.

Paul’s worldview — the libertarian, anti-government worldview — is that government can never be the solution. That government action is — always — the problem. That the wisdom of the market cures all.

That last bit about “the wisdom of the market cures all” sounds a lot more like what you’d like to argue against than what libertarians endorse. I know many libertarians who have overly rosy views of markets, and especially of business. But I don’t know of any libertarians who believe that individual freedom and market processes are some kind of automatic cure for all social ills. Certainly that doesn’t follow from the claims that came before it — opposition to governmental “solutions” to social problems is not the same thing as denying that social problems exist outside of government, or that anything done outside of government is, therefore, automatically OK.

It is perfectly possible to believe that government is always a problem without believing that it is always “the” problem — There’s no reason why a libertarian has to believe that every social evil derives from statism; the issue isn’t whether all evils come from government, but whether or not government is the right response. When you have a social evil, like (say) whitespread white supremacy in civil society, business and social institutions, etc., even outside of the scope of formal segregation laws, even when those evils don’t come from government, it may turn out that it’s still better to rely on non-governmental forms of social organization in order to undermine or dismantle them, rather than trying to address it through lobbying and electoral politics.

If you want evidence of why someone would believe that, well, there are many reasons, but the history of the Freedom Movement in the South is actually one of the best examples. Opponents of Jim Crow were continuously trying to get antidiscrimination acts through the legislature and to challenge segregation laws in court from 1875 until well into the 1970s (my high school wasn’t successfully integrated until 1973). These efforts at reform through governmental politics failed over and over again right up until the mid-1950s — when they were accompanied by a grassroots social movement that achieved its immediate goals by making repeated and heavy use of community organizing, social and economic pressure campaigns (marches, boycotts, strikes, mutual aid, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, etc.). What I’d argue is that the federal government’s (extremely tardy and extremely reluctant) embrace of desegregation was something forced on it by the struggles and victories of the social movement and the changes in public opinion that those struggles and victories made. Without the federal government there to stand around and take the credit, Jim Crow still could and would have been brought to its knees. By the people who did all the work and put their lives on the line to bring it to its knees — from the MIA and SCLC to CORE to SNCC to the countless local activists and organizers who risked and lost their lives in town after town all across the South. While white politicians like Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Banes Johnson, et al. repeatedly tried to tell them to stop marching, to call off public protests,to dial down local organizing and generally to stop making waves and acting like free people.

He’s perfectly okay with making life hard for those who aren’t white — as long as it’s only business, not government, making the difficulties.

I don’t know what Rand Paul thinks about that, but if this is intended as a general statement about what libertarians believe, it’s both wildly uncharitable and completely wrong.

Believing that government shouldn’t enforce a legal prohibition against segregation is not the same thing as being “perfectly okay” with segregation, any more than believing that fascists shouldn’t be imprisoned or tortured for their political beliefs is the same thing as being “perfectly okay” with fascist political beliefs. The issue isn’t whether or not segregation is morally “okay;” it’s what sort of means you ought to adopt in order to fight such a moral evil — in particular, whether those means should be coercive or consensual, and whether they should depend on politicians, judges and politically-appointed regulators, or whether they should be in the hands of communities and grassroots organization.

But the brave men and women who staged sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters weren’t just doing so to end government-led discrimination.

They weren’t doing it for the EEOC, either. I’m glad you appreciate the bravery of SNCC and other lunch-counter sit-in movements, but you do realize, don’t you, that libertarians have no problem with using exactly that kind of grassroots social pressure and direct action tactics in order to convince business owners that white supremacist policies are both wrong, and ultimately unsustainable? You do realize, don’t you, that many libertarians believe that it’s precisely because of these kind of tactics that the Civil Rights Movement had the revolutionary effects that it had, and that what’s needful is a great deal more emphasis on that kind of social activism, as a better alternative to governmental solutions?

When I look for the heroes of the Civil Rights movement, I certainly don’t see a bunch of grandstanding, Vietnam-bombing white politicians; I see the ordinary people who organized, boycotted, organized car pools to undercut segregated busses, marched in the streets, sang freedom songs, faced down government police dogs and firehouses, organized mass meetings, stood watch and faced down the night-riders in their neighborhoods, spoke out, sat in. I’ll be damned if I give Lyndon Banes Johnson credit for the “solutions” that they fought and died for.

Libertarians don’t hold that without government, markets or civil society would automatically “cure” everything, just by leaving it be. What we do hold is that if there is a problem with civil society, the thing to do is to change civil society, and that kind of change really only comes when it comes from within a culture. The right tools for that aren’t government laws and governmental force; they’re grassroots activism, community organizing, and building a culture of solidarity and disobedience.

... Criminy. Did you just get here or something? It's Karaoke night on LeftLibertarian2. Everybody sing along: o/~ ... -C

... Well, in any case econometric studies of minimum wage laws have the basic problem that the claim about the effects of minimum wages *isn't* that a minimum

... Nobody in this discussion has endorsed a mandatory minimum wage law. -C

... Well, the effect of employment *in the fast food industry* may be negligible, if demand for fast-food is price inelastic. [^1] But, supposing that it is

Like Alex, I’d find it rather odd to start describing a bunch of people who quite often spend all their time talking about Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner and Voltairine de Cleyre, or what Proudhon meant by “capitalisme” in 1860, or Nock’s approach in OUR ENEMY THE STATE or what Rothbard and Hess were writing in 1968 as “neolibertarians.” If these ideas are “neo,” how far back do we need to go to get to the old libertarianism? The Levelers? Lao Tze?

“Neotraditionalist libertarians” might be more appropriate. Also funnier.

Kinsella: Hoppe’s comments here were not as clearly written as normal, but if you read what he said closely and with charity, and keeping in mind his anarchism, …

His anarchism has nothing to do with it. I didn’t say that he was advocating the use of state violence against pagans or gay people or “ethno-cultural strangers.” [^1] What I said is that he advocated non-governmental forms of discrimination, segregation and intolerance, acted out through contracts and civil society. Which is, remember, precisely what Alex was worried about.

Kinsella: He never spoke of boycotting religious minorities or gays. He specifically talked about the *advocates* of certain practices or views

Don’t be disingenuous. You’ve been beating that horse for a long time, but this it’s obvious pettifogging. Hoppe himself is perfectly happy to say he wants people to discriminate against homosexuals as such, not against “advocates of homosexuality” (whatever that means). Here is what Hoppe actually wrote in the essay he prepared in his own defense, allegedly to clarify what he was really saying in the controversial passage from DTGTF and correct common misunderstandings: “In my book Democracy, The God That Failed I not only defend the right to discrimination as implied in the right to private property, but I also emphasize the necessity of discrimination in maintaining a free society and explain its importance as a civilizing factor. In particular, the book also contains a few sentences about the importance, under clearly stated circumstances, of discriminating against communists, democrats, and habitual advocates of alternative, non-family centered lifestyles, including homosexuals.” (Boldface mine.) Note that he writes including homosexuals, not “including homosexuality”; the “including” refers to “advocates,” not to “lifestyles.” The clear meaning of the sentence is exactly what critics of Hoppe have been taking as his obvious meaning — that Hoppe is identifying homosexuals per se as “habitual advocates of alternative, non-family centered lifestyles.” There is no separate class of non-”advocate” homosexuals that Hoppe is contemplating here.

Kinsella: I think he in no way meant to imply that gays themselves ought to be discriminated against

It’s not a matter of “implication.” He directly said that discrimination is necessary to maintain a free society. The bases for discrimination that he offers are (1) political advocacy, (2) religious evangelism (by pagans), and (3) sexuality. Here he explicitly states, quite in spite of your attempts to defend him from himself, that the mere fact of being a “homosexual” is enough to count you in his book as a “habitual advocate [etc.]” and therefore a target for discrimination, ostracism and expulsion.

Kinsella: one who is hostile to this order is a different story

Don’t be disingenuous. Hoppe doesn’t say “including homosexuals hostile to heterosexual family life.” He says “including homosexuals.”

[^1]: He does actually advocate the use of state violence against “ethno-cultural strangers,” in the name of government border laws, quote “as long as the democratic central state is still in place and successfully arrogates the power to determine a uniform national immigration policy,” unquote — that is, as long as it does that, he wants it to assault, imprison and deport completely innocent people. But that’s not my point here. My point is about his other comments, on cultural discrimination.

Kinsella: To be clear: I was talking about the Left, not about left-libertarians.

I consider left-libertarians to be a part (the most radical and consistent part) of the Left, properly understood. (Of course, a lot of important work is going on in that “properly understood.”)

I think that most left-libertarians hold a similar position. It’s not like we just picked the word “left” at random, or as a reference to being left-handed or something.

Kinsella: If you don’t regard the left as evil, then we must have a different definition in mind.

I’m pretty sure we do. In fact, I already knew that we do, and told you so.

Kinsella: ’m thinking of the left as so-identified over the last 50 or so years.

But Stephan, there isn’t any one obvious monolithic group that you can identify as “the Left” from 1960-2010. There are lots of groups taking up that banner, many of them with obviously mutually exclusive aims and a lot of bad blood between them (from “corporate liberals” like Galbraith or LBJ, to Trotskyists, to SNCC, to the Black Panthers, to Maoists, SDS, and, of course, the Anarchists — among them individualist Anarchists like Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess). Of course, the number of different groups claiming to represent the Left doesn’t mean it’s just all up in the air — any more than the fact that lots of radically different factions have been competing for recognition as the representatives of “libertarian.” As it happens, I think that some factions are definitely right and others are definitely wrong. The details of the reasons for that are beyond the scope of this comment, but looking at some of these folks — SNCC, SDS, Clamshell Alliance, Love & Rage, Murray Bookchin, Karl Hess, War Resisters’ League, CopWatch, Food Not Bombs, or even folks like, say, the Panthers, it strikes me as just obviously wrong to claim that there is some simple equation between being on the Left and being primarily concerned with “greater state control over life, welfarism, extremely high taxation, state ownership or heavy control of the means of production.” Some Leftists (establishment liberals, state Communists) think that. Others don’t, and I think there’s a good argument to be made that those others have the better understanding.

Kinsella: This is part of the problem of your side trying to wedge in idiosyncratic usages of terms

Man, again with the non-responsive repetition, and the unsourced assertions that We All Know what these terms are supposed to mean, , which apparently is more or less congruent with the picture of the ideals and composition of the Left that you got from Rush Limbaugh some time around 1993. We keep telling you that it’s more complicated than that, and, while telling you, offering into evidence specific sources for our usages and historical examples of (in this case) well-recognized Leftists who don’t use the word “Left” the way you are sure Everyone Else uses it. You don’t respond to these precedents or examples, no matter how many are provided, or how often. You just keep repeating the same evidence-free assertions over and over again about “idiosyncratic” usage and “changing” terms. Horsefeathers, sir. Come back to the topic when you have something to say about Proudhon’s understanding of “the Left,” or Bastiat’s, or Bookchin’s, or Rothbard’s, or Hess’s, or much of anything else that we’ve mentioned, or with any of the actual arguments which we have given every damned time we’ve written about this subject, and which you have steadfastly ignored or breezily waved off as just so much “semantics” and “idiosyncrasy.”

Kinsella: Maybe in some very isolated corners of your intellectual world leftism does not mean what it means to [N. Stephan Kinsella]. Is there a dictionary you can point me to that I can consult when discoursing with you guys?

Start here.

But, seriously, don’t be obtuse. Every damn time we talk about this we keep telling you exactly what we mean by “Left” and why we mean that and what our historical and political reasons are for that and we list example after example. Then you turn around and act like we’re just saying “BUGGA BUGGA BUGGA!” in some crazy moon-speak and expecting you to follow along somehow.

In fact, we’ve repeatedly made every effort to communicate precisely what we mean by the terms we’re using, to explain why we use them that way, to point out how this usage reflects the way that many other self-identified “Leftists” have understood themselves, and to show how it gives a better accounting of some interesting and important features of American politics. You’ve consistently met these efforts with blank stares, handwaving about “semantics,” or, what’s most common, simply ignoring what we’ve said over and over again and proceeding to interpret what we say as if nobody had ever explained to you that perhaps what they mean by “Left” is not the same as what you mean by it.