On majorities and moving forward:

1. I agree that anti-statists are in the minority. But, perhaps unlike you, my primary goal isn’t to convince a majority of people to believe something like what I believe. Of course, it’d be nice if more people believed in some form of antistatism, but achieving anarchistic goals is not generally a matter of winning an election, and so does not necessarily depend on winning majority support.

2. What I am interested in doing is radicalizing and working together with a smaller, somewhat self-selected group of people and encouraging them to act on the beliefs that they mostly already have. As a matter of strategy, I am interested in equipping and organizing the minority so that we will become ungovernable by the majority, not in convincing the majority to stop supporting government. But in order to radicalize you need to be radical and consistent; dropping out the critique of monopoly policing or government war or government borders just as such, and redirecting my outreach towards praising smaller-government candidates, or talking about only the subset of issues where I can agree with an LP voter or an Oath Keeper or Ron Paul’s presidential platform, hobbles my ability to actually communicate what I’m trying to communicate to the folks I’m trying to communicate it to.

3. As a teacher, setting aside questions of political strategy, I would of course like to educate more people about the right views. But to the extent that I’m not talking about strategy anymore, and just talking about education, I think that the core principles are the most important for people to learn, and I’d rather someone who really understands what freedom is and rejects it, than have someone who thinks they believe in freedom, but only because they continue to be confused about what it entails, and to believe in myths like “limited government,” or to believe that police and taxation are compatible with individual liberty. My goal here is not to jump into the debate just as it is and try and nudge them towards some confused approximation of libertarian ideals; rather, it’s to change the terms of the debate, and reorient it towards the fundamental issues at stake.

Quoting Scott Sumner:

It doesn’t matter whether Chile grew faster or slower after 1973, what matters is that after 1973 Chile became the most successful economy in Latin America.

…

I’m sure that economy was successful for somebody. For example, there was tremendous growth in the electrical services sector.

John V:

You can’t possibly agree with part of what Pinochet did without the other parts!

Sumner wasn’t talking about “part of what Pinochet did.” He made a global statement about the Chilean economy as a whole.

I think that if it were prominent industrialists who were being left in ditches with their faces hacked off, instead of unionists, Sumner might be more hesitant to call that a “successful economy,” or to treat what happened as progress in the direction of economic liberalism. Comparative GDP figures notwithstanding.

Will:

That a wide variety of governments under a wide variety of political circumstances all implemented similar pro-market reforms in the last few decades of the 20th century is a point that is relentlessly ignored by those … who want to say these reforms were everywhere put in place in defiance of popular opinion.

That, or they believe in a theory of politics which holds that decision-makers in a wide variety of governments in a wide variety of political circumstances are operating within an incentive structure which isn’t always closely aligned with enacting policies that reflect “popular opinion.”

Which may be a good thing or a bad thing, in any particular case. Popular opinion is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. But I do think that public choice economics has something to say about arguments which make a naive inference from the behavior of governments to conclusions about the majority opinion of their alleged constituents.

Tom: It also demonstrates why people who claim to be libertarians, but do not take the concerns of the black civil rights movement seriously, aren’t really libertarians at all. A policy that allows police to arrest a black man on his own property for verbally asserting his rights is not a libertarian policy; it is a radically authoritarian policy, one that would be more at home in a police state than in a liberal democracy. If the black civil rights movement is concerned about this sort of thing, while the mainstream libertarian movement is not, then it’s reasonable to ask who the real libertarians are in this country.

Hey, man, I agree with you about all that, but what makes you think that the antecedent of that last if-then statement is true? What libertarians do you have in mind who are ignoring this?

Radley Balko posted about the Gates arrest repeatedly (1, 2, 3), Randall McElroy posted about it on the same day as Balko’s first post (4), Lila Ravija posted about it on the same day (5), Sheldon Richman wrote about it yesterday (6), as did Gary Chartier (7). I posted about it just today. Of course, I’m not a “mainstream” libertarian (or much of anything else); and you couldn’t be expected to know about posts that went up Friday or today when you were posting on Thursday. But I have read plenty of libertarian commentary about this story, and just about all of it has been intensely critical of the police; moreover, I’ve read a lot of libertarian commentary on policing generally (some of which, e.g. Balko’s stuff, is incontestably part of the libertarian “mainstream,” if any such thing exists), and I can’t think of anything written in the last, say, 15 years or so, that would lead me to any kind of general conclusion that libertarians typically aren’t concerned with this sort of thing, or that they wouldn’t typically side with Gates on this issue. The libertarians I hang out with certainly are, and certainly would, and I think most recent libertarian writing on policing reflects the same trend.

Amp:

Thanks for the link, and for the kind words.

I also think that Bartlett’s case about CATO is fair. Since CATO and the Libertarian Party are hardly small and irrelevant parts of American libertarianism, I don’t think it’s true that Bartlett’s argument is, as Rad Geek says, a “ridiculous strawman.”

Well, I don’t dispute that CATO and the LP are significant parts of American libertarianism. But you don’t have to find some crazy-ass Red-card-carrying left-mutualist anarcha-Dworkinist like me to find self-identified libertarians who speak out vocally and repeatedly on the specific political issues that Bartlett claims libertarians aren’t speaking out about. You can find that standpoint among many people in the LP (including pretty much all LP presidential candidates prior to Bob Barr), or in any issue of Reason, which is not even remotely a radical publication, which you can find on the newsstand at any Barnes and Noble, and which is, as far as I know, the highest-circulation libertarian publication in the United States. These aren’t small or irrelevant parts of American libertarianism either, and if Bartlett can’t find the kind of libertarians that he’s looking for, then my suspicion is that he’s not looking very hard.

The claim that libertarians don’t speak out often enough about the War on Drugs, of all things, strikes me as particularly loopy and ill-founded.