I’d send my famous Food Not Bombs banana bread but I don’t think it would keep in the mail.

I’m honored to be a part of Team George, but since I consider the Constitution a covenant with Death and an agreement with Hell, instead of Team First Amendment, can I be on Team No Union With Slaveholders instead?

~C

Little Alex: I won’t speak for others, but I don’t associate the left portion of the libertarian spectrum as proposing violating the NAP, but understanding that ‘as long as its voluntary’ is a near-sighted view of situations, gauging the liberty of individuals.

I think the important point to make here is just that “As long as it’s voluntary” is not a complete sentence. “As long as it’s voluntary” … what?

If it’s supposed to be, “as long as it’s voluntary, don’t beat on their heads for it,” well, obviously. That’s basic civilized conduct, and I happen to take one of the more absolutist interpretations of the NAP.

If it’s supposed to be, “as long as it’s voluntary, you shouldn’t do anything to try and stop it,” then that’s a stupid claim, and doesn’t follow from anything in libertarian principle or its application. There are lots of things which are worth nonviolently criticizing or acting against (by means of social protest and boycott, culture jamming, free-market competition, etc.), even though they are strictly voluntary, because they are obnoxious, foolish, wasteful, narrow-minded, mean, or otherwise rotten things to do.

Kinsella: I can’t tell what you are trying to say. No regular [sic] libertarian is going to be in favor of or even ambivalent about a bigoted, mean, nasty, but “libertarian” society–none I know of.

Oh, come on Stephan, don’t be obtuse. I can name some specific libertarians you know of who have argued in favor of “ethno-cultural” segregation and
“the necessity of discrimination in maintaining a free society” and “its importance as a civilizing factor” (including specifically intolerance, segregation, and social boycotts against religious minorities and gay people). Maybe you don’t think such practices would qualify as “bigoted,” “mean,” or “nasty,” but returning for a moment to a more strictly descriptive level, I’m pretty sure it’s exactly the kind of discrimination, segregation and intolerance that Little Alex is concerned about.

Kinsella: Anyway I’m not Rothbard (to say the least), and I don’t think of Cato as left-lib.

That’s fine. I’m just supplying details on the usage that Roderick was referring to above.

Kinsella: The Huebert post–good point. But I know for a fact Huebert has backed off of such charges.

I think I might not have been clear about my point. My point wasn’t that Huebert (or Hoppe or Epstein or De Coster) was “charging” ALL-style left-libertarians with anything. As far as I know, he wasn’t talking about ALL-style left-libertarians at all (the post I quoted from is from 2002). My point is simply that he was using the words “left-libertarian” in order to refer to a different position and a different group of people — which is the kind of usage that Roderick was referring to when he said that “people who are fairly uncontroversially right-libertarians often apply the left-libertarian tag to, say, folks at Cato … who look like right-libertarians or at least mushy moderates to us.”

Kinsella:

Kinsella: As a factual matter–I am not aware that Cato is often accused of being left-lib, more than sell-out or unprincipled or moderate/minarchist (if that).

Rothbard routinely used just those words late in his life, when he had both split from Cato and turned to the pseudopopulist Right. Here’s a couple of examples:

“David Boaz, a leader in the most prominent left-libertarian think-tank, Cato, wrote an astonishing op-ed piece [on gay rights] in the New York Times …”

“On December 16, [Bill Kristol] headed a panel of Official Con/Left Libertarian think-tankers on “What to Kill First: Agencies to Dismantle, Programs to Eliminate, and Regulations to Stop.” Despite previous bold talk by Kristol and the others about “principle” and rolling back the welfare state, left Libertarian think-tankers, under King William’s watchful guidance, decided to suddenly “mature,” to “grow in stature,” to “accept the responsibilities of power,” as the liberal media always like to dub sellouts to statism….”

Rothbard’s usage has often been followed in forums like LRC, although this is dropping off now that people who actually call themselves “left-libertarians” are becoming more prominent in the debates. But, for example, here’s:

Marcus Epstein: It is well known that left libertarians often look towards the benevolent and freedom-loving federal government to destroy the “grassroots tyranny” of state and local governments. Usually they have the decency to admit that they support centralization. Cato Institute fellow, Alan Reynolds, takes a novel approach to the issue in the Washington Times claiming that he supports decentralization and federalism, but opposes the concept of States Rights … [1]

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Let me begin with a proposal made by the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute, and various left-libertarian writers of an “open” or “no” border policy – not because this proposal has any merit … [2]

J.H. Huebert: More Lies From the Libertarian Left: … Some of the Institute’s other “libertarian” detractors – particularly those who make their living in the nation’s capital – are apparently so used to inside-the-beltway tactics that they don’t attempt anything even superficially resembling rationally reasoned discourse when attacking the anti-political Mises Institute. [3] (in the LRC archives, this article is listed as “Never Trust a Left-Libertarian”).

Karen De Coster: However, many readers got the notion from LRC’ers that agnostics/atheists are a disease on the movement, and quite often, they feel that here they are, eschewing the Beltway-Libertine-Left libertarianism and Convenience Statism madness that prevails at think tanks, in the Beltway, and in the blogosphere, but then they feel they are assaulted quite unfairly by Christian paleolibertarians. [4]

I notice that a few years ago Lew Rockwell also titled an article written by one N. Stephan Kinsella “Left-Libertarian Lincolnites: Freedom-lovers who love federal coercion.” The story is a response to some stupid pro-Federali nonsense penned by Cato Institute Adjunct Scholar Timothy Sandefur. Of course, you may not have personally chosen that title for the front page. But it’s certainly part of a broader pattern of use.

Kinsella:

I don’t want to be called left or right because I despise both. I’m a libertarian because I despise left and right.

You know, part of the problem with being so hostile or dismissive towards “semantic” questions is that you often end up just being repetitive and dogmatically non-responsive instead. When I see two people using a word (“libertarian,” say, or “Left”) in ways that are obviously mutually exclusive, my first thought is to find out whether they are really using the word to mean the same thing, and if not, to see what I can do to alert them to that fact and to bridge the communication gap for the sake of the conversation. But here, again, Stephan, you seem to be content to bull ahead and pretend that whatever you mean by “right” and “left” is obviously the same as what your conversation partner meant by them when she used those words. (Even though you already know — because we’ve already told you — that we mean something different by these terms than what you mean by them — that when left-libertarians identify as Left, and critically describe other libertarians as Right, we’re not talking about factions in partisan politics or about some idiotic continuum from mostly-welfare-statists to mostly-warfare-statists. We’re talking about something else — something more like what, say, Rothbard was talking about in “Left and Right.”) But maybe if you just repeat that you “despise left and right” a few more times your audience will somehow forget the prior explanation, and hence fail to notice all the straw stuffed into your opponent.

Maybe you think that this tactic is convincing to someone. If it is, I feel sorry for the people who are convinced by it, because what it actually is is just belligerent confusion.

Kevin,

But that’s just a heuristic for finding the right questions, no?

That’s right. (The remarks are all based on something I had to say in a live gathering within the space of 15 minutes, and I was already running well over that by that point in the talk, so unfortunately I didn’t have space there to offer anything more than a heuristic.)

But I’d say that the actual specification of the right questions to ask is just something that happens in the left-libertarian literature itself. For a few quick examples of how left-libertarians argue that this different orientation allows us to ask questions that non-lefties often fail to ask, you might look to:

(1) The recurring “vulgar libertarianism”/conflation debate (e.g. Carson 2005, Long 2008, etc.);

(2) The common argument that libertarians should focus strategically on corporate welfare and the military-industrial complex rather than on so-called “social welfare” and “progressive” labor legislation; and also the arguments that when we go after “social welfare” and labor legislation we can and ought to attack it from the Left — by pointing out how much these serve to control their nominal “beneficiaries” and how they act to supplant grassroots, mutualistic forms of organization with top-down political institutions. (For a debate over the finer details of that claim amongst LLs, see Tom Knapp 2008, Kevin Carson 2008, and my On Crutches and Crowbars);

(3) There’s also the special left-libertarian emphasis on government assaults on poor people’s property rights and how government intervention is so often directed by “respectable citizens” against peaceful ways of life that are seen as “trashy” or just aren’t conventionally capitalistic enough to please the Chamber of Commerce and the Property Values mafia; in a historical context, you might look at the Enclosure movement, or local and federal government’s war against the Wobblies in the 1900s and 1910s; in the present context, you might look at the kind of analysis offered in, e.g., “Scratching By.” It’s not unheard-of for non-LLs to take on these kind of causes of their own volition (the Institute for Justice does very good work in this area), but it’s comparatively very rare, and there are reasons why it’s rare.

(4) Also reasons why a lot of the non-LL activism around these issues tends to fall into half-hearted reforms and compromises with socioeconomic respectability. (E.G.: Insisting on government-regulated “legalization” schemes that aim to force black markets open to government scrutiny; fighting for government-subsidized “private” schools, rather than abolishing educational conscription entirely; fighting for government-controlled Yet Another Damn Account plans rather than encouraging people to resist and evade Social Security taxes; making excuses or even over-the-top praise for insane screwjob corporate privateering schemes, rather than genuine property-to-the-people homsteading; etc.) None of these issues are really strictly determined by the left-right debate (they are also importantly connected with the radical-reformist debate, which has connections with, but is separable from, the left-right stuff). But they all tend to be influenced by it, and I think it’s no coincidence the forms that the “reform” side of the debate tend to favor are so recognizably conservative.

(5) And I’d argue that one of the reasons for that is also connected with a strategic question about who our natural allies are and who our natural enemies are. This comment is already running long, but I would like to suggest that the free market anti-capitalist orientation tends, for one thing, to produce some very different attitudes about who our natural allies are, who our natural enemies are, where the best working relationships are likely to be, etc. This has some important effects on how market Anarchists might relate to other Anarchists, and helps expose what kind of deep differences we may have, in the end, with “smaller-government” conservatives and other limited-statists. (If many non-Left libertarians have nothing better to offer than corporate privateering and legalization schemes, that’s partly because there’s been so little emphasis, except from overt left-libertarians, on traditional Anarchist alternatives to legislative reformism, like Direct Action, Counter-institutions, grassroots reclamation, etc. And that’s partly because even the Anarchists among the non-LLs spend all their fucking time talking to minarchists and Constitutionalists and conservatives, rather than with other Anarchists, so the crappy governmental-reformist ideas tend to persist by default. For more on all of which, cf. Take the A-Train, etc.)

Hope this helps. Obviously, it isn’t anything like a complete or exhaustive listing, even taken with all the linked material. But I hope it might give you a start on where some of this goes. Anyway, if not, your response or worries might give me a better idea of what you think is lacking.

Kinsella: Am I right simply because I think a contract between a landowner (say, a landlord or employer) and others (say, tenants or employees) ought to be enforceable?

No. Lots of explicit left-libertarians believe that. The question of whether a form of contract ought to be enforceable or not is distinct from the question of whether it’s desirable, or the question of whether it’s likely to be common in a free society.

Kinsella: Are all Lockeans now right-libertarians?

No, lots of explicit left-libertarians (including Roderick) are also explicit (no-proviso!) Lockeans.

Kinsella: Nonsense.

I agree that those claims would be nonsense.

Who’s making them?

Gene: Took a look at the first paper.

Maybe you should have read it while you were there.

Gene: IF one buys into the libertarian system of property rights, THEN libertarianism only practices defensive aggression.

1. Was “defensive aggression” a typo on your part?

2. Presuming that you mean something like “non-aggression” or “defensive force,” that’s not the argument of the article, anyway. The first section has nothing in particular to do with property rights; it has to do with showing that a common approach to welfare liberalism makes rights-claims which aren’t compossible. The second section, which does discuss property rights, doesn’t assume the correctness of a libertarian property theory for the sake of argument. If you get past the three paragraphs of that section that you seem to have read, you’ll see that most of that section (pp. 9-11) is devoted to giving a series of arguments in favor of the libertarian theory and against the welfare-liberal theory.

Gene: The real argument is NOT about non-aggression — it’s about property rights (and obligations).

That’s one real argument. It’s not the only argument on offer, though. Maybe it’s the argument that you’d rather be having, but the arguments that Roderick is responding to in the first section of the paper (which are about non-aggression) are real arguments too, and rather more common in the literature.

Thanks to a Straussian reading of this photograph, I have discovered that Steve Horwitz’s remarks, which were read from the center of the table, were the most important remarks in the panel.

John: The constitution served a purpose, the it served it as best it could, and still failed miserably.

Well, if you imagine that the purpose it served was to limit the power of government, it clearly failed at that. But that seems more like the purpose that latter-day libertarians wish the Constitution was designed to serve, rather than the purposes it was actually designed to serve. It was, after all, adopted as an alternative to a preexisting constitution (the Articles of Confederation), and the main differences that were supposed to recommend the new U.S. Constitution were: (1) that it provided for a stronger central government, which would be able to (2) extract taxes and pay interest on war bonds, (3) pass fugitive slave laws and crush slave uprisings in the South, and (4) organize and facilitate government land-grants to politically-connected speculators in the Western territories. Did a pretty solid job at all of those things, far as I can see. Certainly, with the exception of the course-reversal on slavery (after decades of successfully upholding the slave system in spite of growing opposition), their posterity still enjoys all the blessings of a strong central government, a permanent tax apparatus, and effective government control over the allocation of land.

It’s not just a matter of what the Constitution ended up allowing; it’s what it was designed to do from the get-go.