official state media for a secessionist republic of one
Ron Paul
This ad is nothing more than a series of strawmen. Still, it may be the most exciting race to watch in this campaign season. In any case a lot more turns on it than whether or not I personally choose to vote for Ron Paul.
(Via Majikthise 2007-12-10.)
In his Open Letter to Libertarians on Ron Paul, featured on anti-state,
anti-war, pro-market
LewRockwell.com, anarchist David Gordon made the
following objection to Steven Horwitz’s pro-choice libertarian objections to
Paul’s position on abortion:
No power to regulate abortion is granted to the federal government. Some of course claim that the Fourteenth Amendment changes matters, but it requires very strained interpretation to conjure a right to abortion out of the text of this Amendment. One critic of Ron Paul has admitted that Roe v. Wade is bad law but thinks we should somehow get to the
correctpro-abortion view. Is this not to surrender the possibility of constitutional limits on the federal government?
To which I replied:
Yes. So what?
Anarchists don’t believe in constitutional government.
In his recent rejoinder, Gordon responded:
Anarchists oppose a monopoly state, but it hardly follows from this that if there is a government, anarchists shouldn’t be concerned with restraining it.
But I do not claim that anarchists shouldn’t be concerned with restraining actually existing governments. What I claim is that anarchists do not recognize the legitimacy of constitutional governments any more than they recognize the legitimacy unconstitutional governments, since any government, no matter how restrained by a written constitution, must necessarily violate the rights of innocent individual people in order to remain a government. But if constitutional government has no special claim on our allegiance with respect to its legitimacy, then restraining government through the instrument of a written constitution is, at the most, a pragmatic strategy which should be pursued or abandoned in any given case according to its likelihood of success. If it turns out to be a foolish strategy, then abandoning it is no great loss for libertarians.
But if the question is one of practical prospects, then the strategy of trying
to restrain the federal government through the instrument of the United States
Constitution has already been empirically tested, and it has already failed. As
Lysander Spooner wrote, But whether the Constitution really be one
thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a
government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case,
it is unfit to exist.
Thus I would argue that anarchists should be intensely
concerned with the problem of restraining actually existing governments. What I
deny is that there is either any moral or any strategic reason to try to do so
through the instrument of paper constitutions.
Concerning Roe, I will pause to say that,
unlike Steven Horwitz, I don’t regard the majority decision as bad
constitutional law. Since I am an anarchist, I regard the U.S. constitution as
having no color of legal authority, so I don’t much think that there is a
right way
or a wrong way
to read the Constitution in legal
contexts, and I don’t think that the failure of a ruling to line up with a
restrictive reading of the ipsissima verba of the Constitution is any more of a
vice in the ruling than its failure to line up with a traditionalist reading of
shariah. If such rulings can be evaluated as good or bad law at all, it must be
on the basis of other standards — such as how far they serve to restrain or to
promote actual state aggression. To the extent abortion laws are invasions
against the liberty of pregnant women to dispose of their own bodies as they see
fit, a ruling that repeals those laws is a good ruling, even if it doesn’t line
up with a literalist reading of the Constitution. To the extent that eminent
domain laws are invasions against the liberty of homeowners to keep their own
homes, Kelo was a bad ruling, even if it does line up with some
literalist readings of the Constitution.
On Ron Paul’s support for a federal police state to enforce international apartheid, Gordon wrote:
Some object to Ron Paul because he does not support an
open bordersimmigration policy. But why should one take this position to be essential to libertarianism? Hans Hoppe has raised strong objections to open borders; and Murray Rothbard, in his last years, abandoned the view. Free immigration combined with a welfare state is a dangerous brew: does it make sense to reject Ron Paul because he cannot accept it?
Yes.
Anarchists don’t believe in national borders and they don’t believe in a federal police state to enforce them.
On immigration, Johnson says that anarchists should ignore national boundaries. Why? Once more, anarchism is a view about the justification of government. It is opposed to states, not nations.
But I did not say that anarchism per se is opposed to nations.
I said
that anarchists don’t believe in national borders.
In anarchy there are
no national borders, only the boundaries of individual or common property.
Nobody has any just claim to enforce restrictions on any borders other than
these. But the continent-spanning territory of the United States of America is
not the common property of the American nation, let alone the proprietary
domain of the United States government. Thus there is no entity that has any
just claim to set collective terms for immigration that can be imposed upon the
entire nation. Anarchism rejects all forms of coercion against peaceful people,
including the coercion that must necessarily be committed against landlords,
employers, and migrant workers in order for the federal government to exile
workers from private property onto which they have been invited, or to stop them
from doing jobs for willing employers. That includes not only existing federal
immigration laws, but also the (more aggressive) federal immigration laws that
Ron Paul supports, and the federal immigration laws that Hans-Hermann Hoppe has
deluded himself into thinking that an anarchist can consistently support.
Anarchists should take no notice whatsoever of government-enforced national
boundaries, except to trample them underfoot as an usurpation.
In response to my complaints against a particular pseudo-libertarian argument in favor of immigration laws, Gordon adds:
He points out that some efforts to restrict immigration use violence against people; and he is right that here lies danger. Libertarians who favor immigration restrictions need to specify exactly what measures they think permissible. Ron Paul doesn’t favor beating and jailing people.
I have no idea why Gordon would say this. Of course Ron Paul does favor
beating and jailing people in the name of his immigration control policy. He
favors the creation and enforcement of federal immigration laws, including a
paramilitary lock-down of the land borders, aggressive enforcement of the
existing visa system, and the continued criminalization (no amnesty
) of
currently undocumented immigrants. He also favors the necessary means to these
ends: border walls, paramilitary border patrols, government immigration dossiers
and employment papers, internal immigration cops, detention centers, and all the
other necessary means to interdicting, discovering, arresting, jailing, and
deporting people who try to live and work peacefully in the United States
without a federal permission slip for their existence. If you don’t believe that
this process necessarily involves violent means, then just try to cross the
border without government papers and see what happens to you.
For what it’s worth, I don’t claim that anyone who favors immigration laws is (ipso facto) no longer a True Libertarian. But I do claim that libertarians cannot hold the position consistently, and that attempting to hold the position while also holding a libertarian theory of individual rights necessarily involves grave cognitive vices, and probably grave moral vices, too. In any case support for coercive immigration laws is a good reason for libertarians to refuse their support to a candidate for political office.
On the relationship between libertarianism and leftist or feminist cultural projects, Gordon clarifies that he was not referring to the argument that Roderick Long and I advance in our essay on libertarian feminism, but rather to a different argument by a different writer. He has also stressed elsewhere that his argument is only intended to recommend Ron Paul as a candidate, not to claim that libertarians have some kind of moral obligation to support Ron Paul (or any other candidate in government elections). Fair enough. I’ll let those to whom his letter did refer speak for themselves, as far as the charge of subordinating libertarianism to leftist concerns goes. And for what it’s worth, my intention here is not to claim that libertarians have an obligation not to vote for Ron Paul, or even to make any recommendation for or against voting for Ron Paul. It is merely to take issue with the logic of certain arguments that have been used against libertarian critics of Paul’s campaign. In that vein, I don’t buy the argument that follows:
Johnson correctly claims that the concept of libertarianism doesn’t imply political support for libertarians in elections. I think, though, that if someone who defends political action refuses to support Ron Paul just because he is not a left libertarian, then he is subordinating libertarianism to leftist views.
When Gordon speaks of subordinating libertarianism to leftist views,
he
does not make it clear whether he means subordinating the left-libertarian’s
libertarianism of as a political principle, or whether he means
subordinating the candidate’s libertarianism as a criterion for
supporting a that candidate in government elections. If the former, then
Gordon’s conditional is obviously false. There are lots of practical considerations
that affect whether or not one should support a particular candidate in government
elections, and declining to support a particularly libertarian candidate for
reasons other than her own level of libertarianism is not equivalent to
subordinating your own libertarian principles to those other concerns. (I
wouldn’t support voting for Murray Rothbard for President, either, even though
he would be a much more libertarian candidate than Ron Paul. Since he’s dead,
and therefore ineligible to run, such a campaign would be foolish. But this
decision doesn’t mean that I subordinate libertarian principles to expediency.)
If, on the other hand, he means that such a choice reflects a subordination of criteria based on the candidate’s level of libertarianism to criteria that are based on other considerations, the conditional is still false, although less obviously so. If I reject X for lacking feature A, while X does have feature B, you cannot reliably infer from my choice that I subordinate preferences for B to preferences for A. It may very well be that B and A are valued equally and indepdently of one another, and that lacking either is considered a sufficient condition for rejecting an alternative.
But more to the point, even if Gordon’s conditional were true on this understanding, it is not clear why that would be objectionable. There is no reason for principled libertarians to treat a candidate’s overall level of libertarianism as the sole or the decisive or even the most important criterion in choosing whether to vote for that candidate, or someone else, or nobody at all. Insofar as voting has any worth at all for anarchists, it is only instrumentally, as a means of defense against government invasions of your own or the liberty of other people you are concerned for. But there’s no guarantee that that end will always be best served by adopting the candidate’s overall level of libertarianism as the sole or the decisive criterion for supporting that candidate. They may be or they may not be, depending on the breaks.
In either case, it is, once more, a serious mistake for libertarians of any stripe, and especially anarchists, to treat government elections as the be-all and end-all of libertarianism.
Gordon closes his rejoinder by saying:
Johnson apparently accepts this as a good argument:
Johnson believes p; therefore, anarchists believe p.His post is unfortunately a prime example of the libertarian dogmatism I was most concerned with in my Open Letter.
Hardly. All that I claim is that a couple of propositions — in particular, rejecting the legitimacy of constitutional governments, and rejecting the legitimacy of enforcing restrictions on government-defined national borders, are well-established, core doctrines of anarchism as such.
Core, not essential; anarchism is a family resemblance concept, and some anarchists may deviate from some core anarchist beliefs without ceasing to count as anarchists. But certainly a letter which is written by an anarchist for an audience which includes many other anarchists ought to take such core beliefs seriously, and to recognize that arguments that either tacitly or explicitly presume the falsity of those core doctrines will fail to be persuasive to those who follow the plumb-line.
If this be dogmatism, let us make the most of it.
You Will Be AssimilatedEdition
Archin
Anarchyand comments thereon
Roderick has a good post up called A Question for Critics of Ron Paul’s Critics, which does an excellent job of deflating one of the common rejoinders that Ron Paul boosters make to Ron Paul’s libertarian critics–specifically to those, like me, who consider Paul’s anti-libertarian position on abortion or immigration to be a poison pill. It’s well worth reading the whole thing.
There’s a lot of interesting exchange going on in the comments. Here are excerpts from five different comments that oppose treating Ron Paul’s support for forced pregnancy as a poison pill:
Given the complexities of NAFTA (and the same is true of immigration and abortion), it does seem to me rather silly to use this as a litmus test, ….
Immigration, free trade, abortion, and cosmopolitanism don't really mean anything if any of the other candidates get elected and throw us into World War Five.
If I have to tolerate Kansas outlawing abortion in order for Kansas to tolerate New Hampshire legalizing drugs, then I think it a good trade.
To me, personally, it seems clear that federalism and opposing the war are much more important libertarian issues than immigration and abortion.
To those who support Paul but voice their criticisms of his positions on immigration, abortion, whatever... Hurrah! To those who don't support Paul, for whatever reason, I have only one question:
What is your plan for stopping the killing?
Perhaps it is rude to point this out; perhaps it is even dirty pool. Certainly it is not a demonstration that their reasoning is flawed. Nevertheless, can you guess what all five of these commenters have in common when it comes to abortion?
If you’re baffled, try reading the first block quotation in Roe v. Wade Day #34.
David Gordon — a Rothbardian anarchist and frequent contributor to anti-state, anti-war, pro-market
LewRockwell.com — wrote an Open Letter To Libertarians on Ron Paul in which he denounces the running-dog radical libertarians who oppose Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution. Here’s what he has to say about opposition to Chairman Ron’s position on abortion:
No power to regulate abortion is granted to the federal government. Some of course claim that the Fourteenth Amendment changes matters, but it requires very strained interpretation to conjure a right to abortion out of the text of this Amendment. One critic of Ron Paul has admitted that Roe v. Wade is bad law but thinks we should somehow get to the
correctpro-abortion view. Is this not to surrender the possibility of constitutional limits on the federal government?
Yes. So what?
Anarchists don’t believe in constitutional government.
On Ron Paul’s support for an even more aggressive police state to enforce international apartheid:
Some object to Ron Paul because he does not support an
open bordersimmigration policy. But why should one take this position to be essential to libertarianism? Hans Hoppe has raised strong objections to open borders; and Murray Rothbard, in his last years, abandoned the view. Free immigration combined with a welfare state is a dangerous brew: does it make sense to reject Ron Paul because he cannot accept it?
Yes.
Anarchists don’t believe in national borders and they don’t believe in a federal police state to enforce them.
It may be true that when you combine something fundamentally moral — free immigration — with something completely immoral — a coercive welfare state funded by expropriated tax funds — you’ll get bad consequences from the combination. But that’s a good reason to try to limit or eliminate the immoral part of the combination, by undermining or dismantling the apparatus of taxation and government welfare. It’s certainly not a good reason to try to limit or eliminate the moral part of the combination by escalating the federal government’s surveillance, recording, searching, beating, jailing, and exiling innocent people. Anarchists have no reason to accept the latter, either as a policy position, or even as a matter about which reasonable libertarians can agree to disagree.
Oddly, some of the same people who condemn Ron Paul for apostasy are themselves so devoted to
left libertarianismthat they subordinate libertarian principles to certain cultural values. They favor gender equality and are concerned lest we think ill of certain preferred minority groups. Libertarianism, they think, will best promote these values, and this fact is for them a chief reason to support libertarianism.
Since Gordon refuses to identify any individuals whose specific positions he is criticizing, it’s hard to tell whether he’s referring to the essay on libertarian feminism that Roderick Long and I co-authored, or whether he means to refer to somebody else. (If so, whom?) So it’s hard to know whom he expects to answer him when he asks:
Does not the question then arise, should libertarianism be subordinated to these values?
If he does intend to refer to my position, then he’s made two serious mistakes.
First, I don’t think that libertarianism should be subordinated to certain cultural values
such as radical feminism. I believe that libertarianism, rightly understood, is both compatible with and mutually reinforcing with the cultural values of radical feminism, rightly understood. (For a more detailed explanation of the different kinds of links that there may be between libertarianism and radical feminism, see my reply to Jan Narveson on thick
libertarianism.) The independent merit of radical feminism is one reason to support libertarianism as a political project (because opposing the patriarchal State is of value on feminist grounds), but that’s never been the sole reason or the primary reason I have suggested for being a libertarian. The primary reason to be a libertarian is that the libertarian theory of individual rights is true. From the standpoint of justice, the benefits that a stateless society offers for radical feminism are gravy. If there were some kind of proposal on the table to advance radical feminist goals by statist means, then I would reject the proposal, in favor of proposals that advance radical feminist goals by anti-statist means.
Second, libertarianism
is not conceptually equivalent to actively supporting the most libertarian candidate in a government election.
Libertarianism is a theory of political justice, not a particular political party or candidate. If one invokes feminist, anti-racist, or any other reasons not to actively support Ron Paul’s candidacy, those reasons may be good reasons or they may be bad reasons. But they are reasons for subordinating one particular strategy for libertarian outreach and activism — a strategy which, by the way, has basically zero empirical evidence whatever in favor of its effectiveness — to other concerns. But so what? There’s no reason for libertarians, and especially not for anarchists, to treat government elections as the be-all and end-all of libertarian principle.
For those who may be curious, here’s my attitude towards the Ron Paul primary campaign. I would not vote for Ron Paul, even though I don’t have any in-principle objection to voting defensively in government elections. The short explanation is that I don’t vote for anti-abortion candidates, and I don’t vote for candidates who are significantly worse than the status quo on immigration. Unfortunately, whatever it’s other merits, Ron Paul’s campaign features both of these poison pills. On the other hand, currently he is running in a primary, and so to some extent I wish, without much hope, that he might somehow manage to defeat his current opponents, i.e., the other Republicans, i.e., that bunch of howling bare-fanged war-fascists.
But that’s about all the enthusiasm I’ve got. Many anti-war types and many libertarians are getting positively gleeful about the campaign, claiming that even if Ron Paul has little real hope for electoral victories, the campaign will at least provide a platform for outreach and education about libertarian and non-interventionist ideas, both through media notoriety and also through attracting an obviously enthusiastic and organizationally clever following of base supporters. For my part, I certainly hope that the Paulians learn something in the process, but the first problem is that Ron Paul’s positions, however preferable a select set of them may be to the positions espoused by the rest of the pack, are not libertarian; they’re Constitutionalist, which is something different. He can’t even always be counted on to mount principled, non-legalistic arguments against the war, and that issue’s the centerpiece of his campaign.
The second problem, even setting aside the ideological differences, is that the usual dynamics of electoral horse-racing, and the sometimes ridiculous tone of uncritical personal adulation toward Ron Paul’s personal virtues and the shining radiance of Ron Paul Thought, give me a lot of reason to fear that whatever lessons are drawn may very well be the wrong lessons, and that in any case the enthusiasm and activity around his campaign is likely to collapse into frustrated torpor more or less immediately after their sole vehicle for activism, the Ron Paul political machine, closes down for the season, and stays shuttered for the rest of a multiyear election cycle. Unless something changes, but soon, I see no reason to believe that the flurry of activity, as exciting as it may seem, is going to survive the end of this one maverick candidate’s personal electoral prospects.
Micha Ghertner recently posted a good article at The Distributed Republic, which touches on some similar themes and makes a number of other good points besides, focusing on the way in which the choice of electoral politics as a vehicle seriously hobbles the prospects for accomplishing much in the way of successful education about freedom or anti-imperialism through the Ron Paul machine. Thus:
But it is unreasonable to expect most of the target audience, having been successfully persuaded that Ron Paul is the candidate to support, to then go through the trouble of seperating the wheat from the chaff and come to the self-realization that implicit in Paul’s message of liberty is the notion that our focus should not be on selecting a candidate with admirable qualities such as honesty, integrity, and devotion to constitutional limits on government, but instead our focus should be on the inherent threat to liberty of the system itself, regardless of who happens to be temporarily at its helm. Bundling these two things together involves a self-contradiction between the medium and its message. Expecting people to ignore that contradiction, expecting people to hear the message we actually intend to send while rejecting the message of the medium itself, is expecting too much.
Meanwhile, in the comments section, in order to prove that Ron Paul’s supporters really are approaching this from the standpoint of fair-minded principle, really are making the necessary careful distinctions, and really are putting principled concern for liberty over electoral politicking and partisan cheerleading, an anonymous paleo comes along in the comments to reply that You beltway libertarians are morons
and that Micha’s remarks sound like the uninformed commentary of Hillary Clinton pollster.
Well, I guess it’s a fair cop. What could be more inside-the-Beltway than considered opposition to making an incumbent Congressman’s candidacy for the Presidency of the United States the main vehicle for your social and political vision, or encouraging means of activism, education, and resistance that bypass the machinery of the federal government?