Posts tagged Individualist anarchism

Re: Ron Paul’s Fair Weather Friends

Obviously his partnership with the anti-war extreme left places him in a natural position of suspicion, but since he doesn’t write on a broad range of topics it’s hard to tell if he partakes fully of the social-anarchist philosophy of just picks and chooses.

Justin Raimondo has been a libertarian activist for at least two and a half decades now and, while he has been focusing very heavily on anti-war activism for the last ten or so, his positions on a lot of issues aren’t hard to find if you go looking for them. It is not that he is “picking and choosing” elements of social anarchism to follow. It’s just that he believes in a different political theory, specifically anarcho-capitalism in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, in its paleolibertarian form. Anarcho-capitalists are all pro-private property — indeed private property rights are the basis of their entire social philosophy — and paleolibertarians, like paleoconservatives, generally tend to believe in some fairly strong form of cultural nationalism.

Anarcho-capitalism has some important similarities with what is usually called social anarchism (hence the “anarcho”) and also some important differences (mainly having to do with private property rights, natch); it has even more similarities with individualist anarchism. But it is its own thing, and Raimondo is fairly closely identified with it, unless something changed while I wasn’t looking.