Constant: I have never said, “if you want to know what a libertarian is, look at Ron Paul”. Do people do that? I guess if people do that, then that’s probably a mistake if they don’t agree with his whole platform. But do people really do that?

I don’t know whether anyone’s done that, but a lot of people have given money to the campaign, or put up signs and banners (“Ron Paul 2008,” “Ron Paul Revolution,” “Google Ron Paul,” etc.), or made personal endorsements of Ron Paul’s campaign, all of which they’ve justified on the grounds that Ron Paul’s campaign literature, debate answers, etc. promote libertarian ideals, and so getting more attention for his campaign will, in turn, educate more people about libertarianism and perhaps persuade more people to embrace it.

Presumably that’s only a good argument to the extent that Paul’s campaign actually is promoting libertarian ideals. If the money, for example, goes to produce nasty nativist-statist propaganda rather than propaganda that actually promotes libertarianism, then the money may be going towards promoting Ron Paul, but it’s not going towards promoting, or educating people about, libertarianism.

Ah, I see. Well, I applaud your endurance, if you managed to scroll through the whole thing. When I started the blog almost seven years ago, I was not yet an anarchist, although I was interested in and occasionally sympathetic to libertarian and anarchist ideas. So there certainly are some posts in the older parts of the blog that I would not be willing to stand by today. I now believe that Leftist goals can be attained entirely through the abolition of coercive laws and through free association, and in fact will be attained more fully and more reliably through those means; and also that, even if they could not be so achieved, they would not be worth achieving at the cost of violating even one innocent person’s individual liberty. So I hope that what you had in mind can be chalked up to changing views over the years rather than to inconsistency.

On the other hand, there are many more recent cases in which I expressed a desire for a given piece of legislation to pass or to fail to pass, but I don’t see that as necessarily inconsistent with anarchism. Some legislation violates the rights of peaceful people and some respects those rights; some legislation makes government extremely dangerous and some legislation — e.g. bills to repeal the dangerous legislation — helps curb or ameliorate the danger. What I would repudiate from my days as a state Leftist is not concern with legislation per se, but rather the particular pieces of statist coercion that I was willing to support or excuse. As a practical matter, I have become pretty thoroughly disenchanted with the prospects for any meaningful progress through legislation or electoral politics, but I think the issue at stake is one of strategy, not one of anarchist principle.

Anyway, thank you again for the kind words; I’m glad you enjoy the blog. If I’ve managed to be provoke some interesting thoughts then that’s as much as I’ve ever hoped for.