Micha: I fail to see how the issue of immigration could be seen as complex, rather than for what it is ….

I think the short answer is this: calling border laws and internal immigration policing a complex issue for libertarians primarily serves a social function, not an intellectual one, in the Mises Institute / LewRockwell.com circle.

The issue is actually, obviously, extremely simple, and Hoppe’s and Ron Paul’s positions are actually, obviously, completely wrong. I suspect that most of those who criticize their positions but pass off the issue as a complex one realize this, but also reckon that it wouldn’t go over well in mixed company to say so in as many words.

JOR,

The same. The original essay is available online; cf. also GT 2003-09-30: Why There Are No Arguments for Terrorism for my responding to Honderich with a certain gesture of the hands.

Micha,

Oh come on.

Isn’t it obvious?

Tracy,

Well, then it definitely sounds like electoral mission creep to me. “Well, we got in here to do A, but that failed, so let’s stay in here and do B instead.” Again, perhaps it’s time to cut your losses and find a better strategy, rather than just keeping in electoral politics because that’s where you started out?

Anthony,

I’m glad that Ron Paul and his boosters have gotten people excited about libertarian ideas. I wish that there had been more thought (especially by the boosters, since I take it that Ron Paul was busy doing other things) put into what to do with all these excited, activated people after the close of the campaign. I don’t think there has been much thought about that, and to the extent that there hasn’t been, that means that a lot of time and energy and tens of millions of dollars are going to go straight down the toilet, as the Paulitarians either burn out and wander away, what with the end of their groups’ raison d’etre, or else pitch themselves into the next “educational” failing electoral campaign, either as marginalized Republicans or as members of the LP. A project like “transforming the Republican Party” is more or less guaranteed to be a tar-baby for this putative “Revolution.”

I predict that, unless something quite unusual happens over the next couple of months, in the direction of redirecting former Paulitarians toward some other concrete project outside of electoral politics, then, four years from today, Ron Paul’s campaign will have made no more difference to the political consensus than Howard Dean’s in 2004, or Pat Buchanan’s in 1992.

The Ron Paul Revolution of transforming the Republican Party won’t end with Dr Paul.

Is that the “Revolution’s” goal now?

I thought the goal was to elect Ron Paul President of the United States, or at least get him the Republican nomination for President. But I guess if at first you don’t succeed, you can always move the goalposts.

This sounds like electioneering mission creep to me. In order to do A (get libertarian, anti-war policies) you decided to do B (get Ron Paul elected). To do B you’d have to do C and D (raise money and convince Republican primary/caucus voters). To do D you found out you’d have to do E (either recruit and register new Republicans or convince enough influentials within the Republican party and the media to get your message to the existing Republicans). But now you’ve found out that to do E effectively you have to do F (“transform the Republican Party” (!)). To do F, you’re planning to do G (run a bunch of Pauliticians in other, lower-level Republican primary races). But to do G, you’ve got to go back to C and D. And around and around we go.

Maybe it’s just time to cut your losses and look for other ways to do A without getting sucked even further into the quagmire of electoral politics.

I’m not sure that Ron Paul supporters ever believed Paul was the Messiah.

Maybe not. But at least one does think he’s “The Greatest American ever” Another thinks that he’s a light that shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended him not.

Have I been inducted into the Beltwaytarian Illuminati without having heard about it? If so, I eagerly await my imminent influx of cocktail party invites and Kochtopus cash.

ThorsMitersaw,

The declarations of states are not reflective of their citizens …

No, but they are reflective of the opinions of the state governments at the time that those state governments determined to secede.

Of course, many if not most people in many southern states at the time felt differently. For starters, many if not most people in many southern states at the time were black slaves.

The white southerners who fought as common soldiers often had very different views of the import and justification for the war than those held by their governments. But of course it was their governments, and not they, who made the political and military decisions that we’re discussing here.

Charles H.,

I agree with you that any honest review of what the secessionists said (especially what they said at the time of the secession debate, rather than when they wrote their memoirs in the 1870s) would very quickly reveal that the perpetuation and expansion of race slavery was absolutely central to the Confederate cause. However, it would be an ignoratio elenchi to follow that evidence with the conclusion that ending or limiting race slavery must have been absolutely essential to the Union cause.

When people claim that the Southern states had the “right” to secede, what they mean is that a minority– adult white male landowners– had the right to decide for everyone else what form of government they would live under, and whether their basic human rights would be recognized.

I’m sure that when many people claim that, that is indeed what they mean, but I don’t think it’s at all fair to impute that meaning to most of the writers at LewRockwell.com or the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Whatever faults they may have (and some of them have a lot), most of the people in question are anarchists, who believe that no government whatever, state, federal, or other, has any legitimate right to compel anyone’s allegiance. Their point about the right of secession is that adult white male Southern landowners had a right to determine for themselves (and themselves alone) what form of government, if any, they should live under, a right which any principled and honest believer in the principle of government by consent would have to concede they do have. The obvious and hideous atrocity of southern race slavery hardly justifies military invasion and bayonet-point Unionism; what it justifies is the (Garrisonian) strategy of embracing peaceful disunion, and then supporting southern slaves in their efforts to secede from the from the illegitimate government created by their quasi-secessionist slave-drivers.

If you’re not already familiar with it, I’d like to recommend J.R. Hummel’s excellent book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, which ably defends the Garrisonian-disunionist position and presents a much more accurate and sophisticated libertarian analysis of the war than the stuff churned out by, for example, Tom DiLorenzo or Tom Woods.

PhysicistDave,

I think the issues at hand are a bit more complex than cultural affinities. When I see Yankees like Tom DiLorenzo running around affecting a fondness for the ol’ Moonlight-and-Magnolias, I just find it ridiculous. But when I see them actively distorting history for polemical purposes, in order to whitewash rabid slave-driving statists like John C. Calhoun, Robert E. Lee, or Jefferson Davis (cf. for example 1, 2, 2, 3, etc., not to mention DiLorenzo’s periodic attempts to portray Lysander Spooner, the author of the Plan for the Abolition of Slavery and a conspirator in an abortive attempt to rescue John Brown from the gallows, as an advocate for “peaceful” gradualist emancipation, I think there is something deeper and nastier at work that needs to be exposed and confronted.

Of course, those people who, in the name of “moderation” or “compromise” or politesse, attempt to water down or dissemble about libertarian principles on hard cases, or who try to marginalize radical libertarians for simply for making uncomfortably libertarian points — a group that intersects with, but certainly does not exhaust and certainly is not limited to — the staff at Cato and Reason deserves nothing but contempt for that kind of hand-wringing opportunism. But I don’t think it’s true that that’s the only reason that the Paulitarians and the VMI/LRC crew draw the kind of flak that they draw from within libertarian circles, or even from the Cato and Reason crowds specifically.

At the end of the article, Franks does express some “regret” that “we really couldn’t honestly find enough reasonable doubt to acquit Mr. Rhett.” Not because he feels bad about abducting harmless people and locking them in a cage for 10 years, of course, but rather because he would have rather reserved that treatment for some other innocent person higher up in the import-export business. But Rhett didn’t snitch, and “he was the one that got caught,” so ten years of his one-and-only life is close enough for government work.

Anon78,

I am skeptical of professionalized policing and uniformed “security” forces, even in the context of competitive free market agencies under anarchy. I think that while they may offer useful services to some private property owners, they also pose substantial dangers, which, even if the benefits outweigh the dangers in a given case, need to be countered, and probably not only by competing but basically similar firms, but also by assertive individual actors and by countervailing grassroots groups (on the model of CopWatch, but without laboring under the heavy burdens that State privilege for police currently forces them to labor under). I also think that in most cases the benefits are probably not worth the accompanying costs, and informal and decentralized solutions to security problems are usually going to be better than formal professional goon squads.

However, you asked a comparative question about competing private defense associations as vs. the current situation, so my answer mainly focused on comparing the two. I do think the former would be substantially better than the latter, for the reasons I explain, although I also think that a third solution will often be better than either.

As for your two objections, (1) it may very well be the case that individual people will prefer to back down when confronted by roving marauder gangs, and will ransom their safety rather than paying in the money and personal risk that it would take to defend themselves. It’s an interesting question why, historically, the technology and tactics of extortion and repression have tended to outrun the technology and tactics of evasion and resistance, and whether this would still be true under anarchy in a modern industrialized society (I’m not convinced that it would), and if it would be, whether anything can be done to reverse that trend (I suspect that it can).

I’m not especially convinced by your appeal to popular reluctance to use violence in self-defense or lack of training in it, because (1) presumably in anarchy, if people rely on themselves and their neighbors rather than professionalized security forces for their self-defense, more people will see it as in their interest to acquire some minimal training; (2) it doesn’t need everyone or even most people being willing to forcibly defend themselves, but rather just enough that it’s no longer profitable for the marauders to write off marauding in that neighborhood as too risky to be profitable; and (3) perhaps most importantly, there are lots of ways for people. individually or cooperatively, to effectively respond to violence other than by meeting it with defensive violence. There’s obstruction and fortification, stealth, evasion, and a whole host of tactics for passive resistance. All of which are increasingly accessible to the knowledge and resources of educated people in modern industrial societies.

But whatever the case may be, if anarchy does mean that many people will have to ransom their safety from marauder gangs every so often, which take the money and then leave, it’s hard to see how that’s worse than the present situation, in which a permanent marauder gang occupies their territory and micromanages the most intimate aspects of their everyday lives.

As for (2), I don’t really think it’s the case that feuds and civil wars between competing armed factions, such as those now common in central Africa or those that were common a few decades ago in southern Africa, are really a basic part of how trained fighters will always behave. Surely in those specific cases it has much more to do with the ideological and material allure of a particular prize (state power, or, failing that, local warlordism, with heavy, pervasive, and constant intervention by neighboring states, former colonial powers, world superpowers, and the bureaucratic “foreign aid” kleptocracy) which the victor in the civil war will ultimately be able to claim. But if it’s the prize that’s driving the fighting, then a political condition of anarchy, and a widespread cultural and institutional shift towards anarchistic principles and the industrial mode, which would tend to undermine or eradicate completely, makes it correspondingly less of a worry.

Anon78:

I take it private police of competing defense associations won’t “be mean” to people and mistreat them…? I would be curious to know if Radgeek agrees with you on this.

Lots of people are mean, and sometimes people who have a little bit power over other people will use it to act like petty tyrants. I think this is part of the human condition and I doubt that it will change in anarchy. However, there is a question as to what recourse you have when someone is mean or abusive or throws you in jail for nothing. When it’s a state police force, you have no recourse, because (1) government cops can never lose their “customers” and have little or no material interest in keeping them satisfied; (2) government cops enjoy special privileges and immunities that nobody else enjoys, in virtue of government laws that allow them to ticket, hurt, or arrest people simply for not “complying” with their arbitrary orders; and (3) the only people who have any power to address abuses by government cops are other government cops, meaning that as long as other cops in the same police department are willing to excuse or ignore an abuse, the victim has absolutely no recourse, and in the few cases where the other cops are pressured into taking some action against their colleagues, it almost never rises beyond administrative disciplinary proceedings. Meanwhile, any restitution that goes to the victims comes out of taxpayers’ pockets, not from the people who actually committed the crime or the administration that allowed it to occur.

In anarchy, all three conditions would be reversed. (1) Any security firms that wanted to make it in the market would have to compete with other security firms, as well as alternative set-ups like neighborhood watches and informal community defense, in order to stay in business. That makes for an external constraint on private cops’ actions with respect to their customers. (2) Without State-fabricated privileges, private cops wouldn’t be held to a special standard of conduct, and wouldn’t have special privileges to order people around or hurt those who disobey. (3) State cops and their employers would also be directly liable for any abuses they commit, and competing firms or associations would be free to intervene against them when they go off the handle, meaning that rogue cops can and would be arrested, tried, forced to pay restitution to their victims, and possibly jailed (if there’s reason to believe that they pose an ongoing threat). In anarchy, if there are persistent problems with abusive cops from one particular firm or association, then there’s a corresponding opportunity for an outside firm or grassroots association to take care of the problem by investigating and busting the bad cops. So, again, whereas statism allows the police to police themselves (fat chance), anarchy allows for other, competing groups to act as an external constraint on any one group of police. That makes for an external constraint on cops with respect to the people who the cops deal with, even if they are not customers of that security firm.

What I’ve repeatedly argued about government policing is that all these so-called “abuses” are the direct result of a system which requires no real accountability for thuggish cops and which offers no real recourse for their victims (cf. Law and Orders #5, Rapists on Patrol, Oops. Our Bad., etc.). To the extent that anarchy would create alternative venues for victims of thuggish cops to get protection before-the-fact or restitution after-the-fact, for cops to be held personally accountable for their actions, and for organizations that aid and abet abuse by their hired thugs to be forced to take responsibility for the consequences of their policies, you can expect that to that extent you will see far fewer abusive cops (security guards, whatever), and, of those who remain, you can expect that they’ll be able to get away with far less, and to get away with it far less reliably than they now can.

Joel,

Oy. I’m afraid you’ve hit on one of my linguistic pet peeves.

An argumentum ad hominem is the fallacy of evaluating an argument based on features of the person advancing it, rather than on its own merits.

If somebody were saying, “Ron Paul is a nasty racist. Therefore, his argument for the gold standard must be bogus,” then that would be an argumentum ad hominem.

On the other hand, if somebody says, “Ron Paul is a nasty racist. Therefore you shouldn’t vote for him for President,” then that’s not an argumentum ad hominem. The issue here isn’t an argument, but rather whether somebody personally ought to occupy a particular political position. Details about the history, personality, and character of a candidate for political office are certainly salient to whether or not you should vote for them, since presumably when you vote for someone you are (inter alia) relying on them to do at least some of what you want them to do while in office, and whether that trust is well-founded depends in part on what sort of person they are.

So while the allegations that have been made against Ron Paul are certainly personal attacks, they are not “ad hominem attacks.” Ad hominem arguments are never cogent. But personal attacks may be uncalled-for or called-for, as the case may be, depending on whether the allegations made in the course of the attack are well or ill-founded.

As far as the allegations that have been made against Ron Paul’s history and character go, I think they’re a pretty mixed bag, but certainly the video doesn’t respond to any of them. Plenty of cornfed military veterans and doctors from Texas have been nasty racists, too. If it’s supposed to be showing that he’s not an ogre, then it seems to me that it’s just evading the issues that have been raised in favor of talking about something else, and then capping it off with a note of adulation that borders on the surreal.

I will say that I have played the video several times nevertheless because I like the old-timey music in the background.