Category: Philosophy

Purity spirals

by Darien Sumner

Walter Block has posted a piece of correspondence he recently received on the topic of saving the world, libertarianism, and making fools of ourselves. It’s a topic we’ve addressed before — a few times, actually — but it continues to have legs. The question, in brief, is: would you steal a penny from someone to save the world?

Obviously, the heart of the question is this: how seriously do you take the non-aggression principle? Are you so committed to it that you would never engage in even the smallest violation of it under any circumstances, or do you accept that there are some situations in which the NAP isn’t the only consideration? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it remains popular among internet libertarians to claim the former.

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There is a huge contradiction in the witness' testimony!

The Myth of Tremendous Government

by Darien Sumner

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that you really like these Objection! columns, but you wish they were 9216 words long and came with a bibliography. Well guess whose prayers have just been answered? If you happen to be Mark Christensen, then not yours, but pretty much everybody else is golden, since I’ve written a long, detailed rebuttal of his piece calling for conservative-scented big government. An exerpt:

Christensen assumes a set of criteria for determining whether or not a government is "good", which I will grant for the purposes of this rebuttal. He then asks whether big or small government is most likely to be "good". Granted, his very next sentence—"[o]f course, the question is ridiculous"—almost throws the entire thing away; not only is that question not ridiculous, it is the entire core of the argument! If big government does not do a better job of being "good", then what on earth would be its purpose? Surely a smaller, less expensive government capable of achieving the same or a greater level of "goodness" would be preferable; why would one not choose the less expensive means of identically achieving one’s ends?

Having thus thrown away most of his cards, Christensen is left in the unenviable position of having to argue that, while big government may not be more "good" in general, it is obviously more "good" in certain specific circumstances…

Yeah. It’s a pretty thorough shredding of the argument for big government. I go all the way back to the French Revolution to deliver ye olde smack. You can read the full piece on The Zeroth Position; just be aware that, as befits the nature of the publication, it’s less flippant and jokey than you’ve come to expect. No less devastating, though.

There is a huge contradiction in the witness' testimony!

And now: Libertommunists!

by Darien Sumner

I trust you’ve heard about the new "GDPR" edict recently pronounced by the savages in Brussels. In case you haven’t, here’s the skinny: it stands for "General Data Protection Regulation," which means that it’s exactly as communist as the acronym "GDPR" makes you think it is. The long and short is that the European Union — read: a bunch of feckless bureaucrats in Brussels — now asserts that it has the authority to control exactly what data literally every entity in the world collects and what is done with it. Because, you know, safety and that.

Apparently, the level of monstrous totalitarianism on display here just isn’t sufficiently obvious to disabuse fashionable libertarians of the notion that arrogating huge amounts of power to a tiny cabal of criminals will be just aces for freedom and liberty.

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Wasted Time

by Darien Sumner

As libertarians, we’re used to a sort of goofy sectional squabbling between self-styled "purists" and "realists," which often manifests itself as an argument about whether to pursue attainable changes now, or to deride that as "selling out" and remain focused on the long-run goal. Murray Rothbard pretty much had this one dead to rights years ago: the libertarian can, in good conscience, support anything that advances the libertarian cause without deviating even one iota from libertarian principle. So it’s fine for libertarians to go to bat for tax cuts or regulatory relief, so long as they aren’t packaged with something evil also.

So there’s lovely. That’s not really what we’re here to talk about today. I’m here to consider whether or not libertarian involvement in politics has been a fool’s game from the get-go; whether or not it’s all been a massive redirection of energy into a solidly negative direction. To put it as provocatively as possible: was Ron Paul a net negative for the liberty movement?

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In Extremis

by Darien Sumner

That nutty old Dr. Walter Block is at it again, being a principled libertarian and rationally evaluating even difficult situations. This time around, his interlocutor has cut right to the chase, and set up an extremely blunt limit situation to challenge him with:

Should the following situations be considered evil?:
– A man who steals food because he has no money to feed his family, assuming that in the place where he lives there is no charitable entity that can provide free food.
– A man who is forced to kill an innocent person because the survival of the entire human species depends on it.
On the other hand, certainly, these are violations of the Non-Aggression Principle, which any libertarian would condemn, but could not previous cases constitute exceptions?

The question of evil is always a vexing one. Dr. Block, rather sensibly, begs off from professing to be some universal moral authority, and evaluates the situations in his capacity as a libertarian theorist, as we’ll see.

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The Triumph of Unreason

by Darien Sumner

I’ll be honest with you: I haven’t read Reason since Radley Balko left. Does anybody still bother with that dilapidated old libertarish rag? Why? Is it for sterling insights like this one?

[T]he courage of [Judge Roy] Moore’s convictions frequently clash with both the plain language and contemporary interpretation of the Constitution. Such as that time, oh, LAST WEEK when Moore suggested that kneeling during the National Anthem is "against the law" (it’s not, and if such a law were passed, it would surely be declared unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds).

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There is a huge contradiction in the witness' testimony!

False Dichotomies

by Darien Sumner

ZeroHedge is an occasionally-reliable, often-interesting source for news from a vaguely libertarian perspective, in addition to financial news from a vaguely Austrian perspective and breathless reportage that, any day now, the stock market is going to go either down or up unless of course it stays the same, so you should probably buy futures contracts, gold, and bitcoin all at the same time.

Hey, things could be worse. They could start running openly communist claptrap about how capitalism has failed and needs to be replaced with something more "fair."

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Danger! Danger!

by Darien Sumner

It looks like Anthony Weiner — otherwise known as Carlos Danger, and otherwise otherwise known as Hillary Clinton scapegoat #347 — is actually going to do time for having cybersex with a fifteen-year-old girl [n.b.: link is saucy]. Granted, Weiner’s only looking at two years in prison whereas you or I would be locked up forever and a day, but that’s neither here nor there.

That’s not what I came to talk about today anyhow. What I want to talk about is this part here:

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The Rule of Men

by Darien Sumner

Don’t worry; the Trump administration is hard at work protecting America from the truth. By which I mean: they’ve apparently concocted an ambitious network of excuses to kidnap and torture dispense summary justice upon deliver a charming Uncle-Sam-o-gram to Wikileaks editor Julian Assange, who has, as of the time of this writing, been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for seven years. Of course, the Official Media Gatekeepers — by which I obviously mean: fake news — are only too happy to help sell this atrocity to the American people.

The US view of WikiLeaks and Assange began to change after investigators found what they believe was proof that WikiLeaks played an active role in helping Edward Snowden, a former NSA analyst, disclose a massive cache of classified documents.

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Time

by Darien Sumner

This past week saw the death of one of my great comedy heroes, Don Rickles, along with one of my great libertarian heroes, William N. Grigg. As a libertarian humorist, that’s kind of a tough week!

Will Grigg was the great libertarian thinker and writer who is responsible more than anyone else (with the possible exception of Radley Balko) for shedding light on the atrocities committed by the modern American police state. Over the past ten years, Grigg wrote hundreds of articles at his own blog, Pro Libertate, most of them dealing with the American criminal justice system and the wreckage it leaves in its wake. Will Grigg also wrote countless articles and blog posts for lewrockwell.com, and was one of the founding members of the Libertarian Institute. I cannot (and do not) claim to be one of the many people Will Grigg’s work helped to get free from the clutches of the "punitive priesthood," as he called it; I am merely someone who learned from Will Grigg, but that, to my mind, is high praise as it stands.

Don Rickles, of course, scarcely needs an introduction. He was the legendary insult comic dubbed "Mr. Warmth," and was possessed of an inimitable ability to command a stage with his rapid-fire, ceaseless wit. No subject was off limits for Don Rickles, very much including the sacred shibboleths of modern America: race, sex, and handicaps. Rickles had a joke for any occasion, and usually a flood of them; he was callous, he was politicially incorrect, and he was a member of the old school of Jewish comedians who would spontaneously shift into Yiddish just to annoy the audience. He was, in short, the best.

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