This one made quite a splash in the liberty-sphere, it seems.
I absolutely freaking loved it. Of course, the “libertine libertarians” hated it.
Gender differences?! Bashing popular culture?! Bashing free sex?! Bashing free contraceptions and free abortion?!?!? Whaaaaat?!
Or so cried the egalitarian “libertarians” who worship equality beyond liberty. Tom Woods has a nice roundup of the whole nonsense. Its about time that the libertarians of today re-read “Why Paleo” by Murray Rothbard.
Also, the whole debate led me over the the BleedingHeartLibertarians, which is a pseudo-libertarian/liberal outfit that likes to criticize things that are too “right-wing”, and I picked up this ridiculous quote. Clearly whoever wrote this is completely unaware of the structure of reality :
Anyone who cares about freedom should oppose both public and private forms of oppression. This is why libertarians should be feminists and why feminists should be libertarians.
If you cannot understand the difference between “public oppression” (government backed violence or threats of violence) and “private oppressions” (opinions and discrimination by private individuals) then you seriously have your head up your butt. Trying to build bridges between feminism and libertarianism is so stupid I cannot even find a word for it. Then again Murray had this one covered a long time ago, like I previously noted.
The girl has got good sense. And I agree with you on your assesment. I am a conservative libertarian. I don’t wan’t the government to enforce my world view, but I also think that in a truely libertarian society individuals will trend towards conservatism anyways. Our cultures and customs aren’t same made up rules by our forefathers for the hell of it, but the collective wisdom of a thousand generations.
Agreed. And in addition to that, if we ever had a libertarian society, it would take overwhelmingly conservative forces to keep it from again falling into the hands of statists. Furthermore, conservatism is where you arrive if you have low time-preferences, which is the result of being civilized. Thus, NOT being conservative means that you don’t care much about liberty – so I don’t see what good that kind of libertarianism would do. After all, if all you want to do is smoke dope and get prostitutes, you really don’t need libertarianism, all you need is a society with a police force that is busy with other things.
You are right that libertarianism is not leftism but that does not mean it should be combined with something so statist and collectivist as conservatism. No, kt should stay in the footsteps of classical liberalism as beautifulky outlined in Mises Liberalism as well as Rothbards ” for a new liberty”, be based ultimately on reason and science, not conservatist or leftist mysticism. If your loyalty is not with this but istead conservatism or socialism, your libertarian ideals will inevitably be corrupted.
I guess we see things differently there – I do not believe that conservatism is inherently statist. Admittedly, the main thing conservatives do wrong, just like the left, is trying to get the State to legislate according to their bidding.
I don’t see a clash between being a social conservative and a libertarian. In fact, I hold it to be the only reasonable thing. There are a lot of great things in the essay collection “Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature”. In addition to that, the famous article “Why paleo?” quite distinctly spells out why there is a reason to consider social conservatism as a cultural pre-requisite to a libertarian movement.
I differ with your interpretation of Rothbard. The essays in “egaliterianism…” Are not conservative in my view. They do defend, in different contexts, the idea that people are uneuqual in abilities, aptitudes etc but if believing that is all you need to be a social conservative then the notion of social conservatism is weak.. Rothbard does not as such defend traditional families, he defends people wanting to form traditional families b governmental oppression due to ideology.
The paleo text is written to appeal to conservatives of a certain variety who rothbard erronously considered possible allies in the struggle for liberty at a very specific point in time. It is not that easy to know to what extent it marks Rothbard actually getting more conservative, I for my part think that it is the same as his period allying with the new left earlier. Very big change in rethoric, during the period, little change in his actual libertarian beliefs as expressed in his more foundational works. It is of course hard to know for sure if he really got more conservative in the last years, especially since many of his present followers like Hoppe and Rockwell really are conservatives and want to push that picture of Rothbard.
What we do know for sure is that the core of Rothbards work and all his major works are squarely pure libertarianism in the proud line of classical liberalism and Mises. And that is not changed by some of the bad stuff he wrote in RRR or Left & Right.
I will actually agree – I don’t think Rothbard became a conservative – he was strictly a libertarian. However, with “Egalitarianism….” as well as writings like “Why paleo” he did indeed show that certain parts of conservatism (paleo-conservatism) are in fact compatible with libertarianism, as long as this type of conservatism agrees with a libertarian theory of law. I hasten to add that the american “Old Right” would likely have been considered grossly conservative by todays standards, yet they were the beginning of the US libertarian movement.
The fact that the alliance with Buchanan didn’t turn out that well (because ol’ Pat was and is too much of a statist) is sad of course, especially since the best slogan ever was coined as part of it “Let’s roll back the 20th century”. Something I do believe that Rothbard would still stand for.
Finally as for moral visions – in my view it is quite obvious that a libertarian society could never arise from an egalitarian political movement, but it could do so from a conservative movement that had learn to accept and appreciate libertarian law theory – simply because an egalitarian society is a society of people with high time preferences, and thus a striving backwards on the civilizational scale.
Interesting discussion this. Always good to meet some resistance
I agree that a radical egalitarianism would not support a liberal or libertarian society simply since is is false and it would not accept the outcomes that would be based on the fact that humans are different. And in difference to the radical egalitarians i see these differences as something to celebrate and something that makes life interesting. It could be that a socially conservative society have a longer time preference but this I think would be better to achieve by a basis in reason, science and a good rational ethic. Even though I think some “conservative” values are good, like work ethics and importance of family, I think the social convservative package comes with a lot of evils like bad ways to raise children, wicked collectivist views on sex roles, unreasonable hierarchies and many moral views that conservatives has historically wanted to enforce with violence and coercion. So I would support a basis in reason instead, evaluating beliefs/values in that way rather than if they are right or left. I think this has been the essential liberal approach from the enlightenment to modern day libertarians like Rothbard (and in a partly failed but still very wortwhile way by Rand and even more so by here follower George Reisman). This is truly progressive which is not the case for most so called progressives.
And to be clear. As long as the libertarian principle comes first,, i have no major issue with libertarian people being conservative, progressive or whatever. The thing I am afraid of is that these collectivist forms of thought have a tendency to undermine the libertarian principle. Also I dislike when people like Long or Hoppe try to claim that libertarianism only supports their particular ( and in this case completely different) moral visions. It supports neither.
I’m really a fan of that girl. She’s great. I’m very pro-choice but I’m very impressed with her and her videos.
I find the distinction “pro-choice” quite interesting. When an unborn child is able to survive outside the womb, abortion is murder (the child didn’t ask to be put in there). When it cannot, a women should have the right to perform an abortion, but it’s definitely something I am strongly against.
So while we should have the right to make bad choices, I don’t think we should encourage them. And in 99 cases out of 100, it wasn’t that hard to avoid the situation.
Having an abortion that isn’t necessary is in my view similar to having a child which you choose not to care for, which interestingly enough no one ever speaks out in favor for.
Why should women have the right to terminate a pregnancy and kill a growing baby when it was their action that brought it’s existence about to begin with? Babies don’t create themselves. If women don’t want to have children they should see to it that they don’t get pregnant. There is a myriad of methods to prevent this without necessarily having to abstain from sex so there’s no excuse for creating a life and then destroying it and killing something that’s at least partially a human if not a full fledged human being.
I’m a HUGE fan of the war on women!
Hmh. I’m a big fan of women myself. Except feminists of course, but they aren’t really women in any proper sense. Wouldnt want to wage war on the fairer sex, doesnt seem quite right.
More a play on the Democrat stance, where expecting women to pay for their own stuff, i.e. responsibility, is considered a ‘war’ on them.
LOL. I guess it shows that I’m not an american sometimes. Totally missed that one.
But why is her tongue blue?
To be honest, I have not freaking clue. I was sort of wondering that myself. Dramatic effect?
I call it ‘having a sense of humour’.
And almost 60 million babies, oh sorry, fetuses later and we want to start pandering to women as a ‘conservative’ movement? Why?!
Not that I’m that much into the whole “movement” thing, but clearly women are the greatest threat to liberty under a democracy – at least as they are currently massively in favour for progressive liberalism and the welfare state. Thus, if one still believes in the democratic system it might make sense to focus efforts on women, not men.
Men seem to have an instinctive understanding of independence and liberty. Women seem to worship the herd at all costs. There is no such ‘democracy’ when, for lack of a better term, ‘herd thought’ and acceptability to the herd are the only things which matter. As time goes on women on a whole, certainly not Julie though, seem incapable of taking on the mantle of responsibility and thus should not really be pandered to in any shape or form.
I’ve said this before, but this is why I don’t call myself a libertarian no matter how sympathetic I am to people like Bob Murphy, Tom Woods, Robert Higgs, etc.. The movement has become infected with humorless snobs with left wing sympathies that are only dividing up the movement further. I saw nothing wrong with the video and I thought Julie hit the nail on the head with the argument against feminism. Here’s what I wrote on Aurini’s latest YouTube video:
“You’ve pointed out exactly the type of problems I have with the libertarian community. They are heavily divided and love to classify themselves into bullshit like “left-libertarianism,” “right-libertarianism,” “bleeding heart libertarian,” etc. It’s hard to tell which is which and a lot of the ones I’ve seen on the Internet argue about stupid bullshit like whether you’re engaging in conflationism or if you’re a “vulgar” libertarian. It’s fucking ridiculous.”
Literally anyone can be considered a “libertarian” now, even guys like Bill Maher and Noam Chomsky! The term has become so watered down and generic that I just call myself an independent with classical liberal and traditional conservative tendencies. If you’re on Twitter, you should check out an account called Taking Hayek Seriously (@FriedrichHayek). He’s been heavily criticizing Scott Sumner for misrepresenting Hayek and Austrian viewpoints with his articles. He at least voted for Gary Johnson, but still.
Well, I’m sort of with you on this point. I have an article coming out on the Swedish Mises Institute (write for them occasionally) arguing a somewhat similar point.
The thing is, just like some say we should give up the term “capitalism” because it has a bad ring, I see similar arguments for libertarianism. Libertarianism, at its core, is simply a political philosophy and a political system, which have no cultural values.
I’ll satisfy to be called a paleo-libertarian – “left libertarians” and “bleeding heart libertarians” aren’t libertarians at all, because they are not interested in taking things to their ultimate consequences. Murray Rothbard wrote an excellent article “Why Paleo” in the early nineties, when he and Rockwell decided to distance the movement from all the silly, juvenile notions of what libertarians are. In my view, they did so rightly and even if this is not that big an issue any longer (LRC and the Mises Institute are the DE FACTO sources for libertarianism, no matter how much Reason, Cato and other institutes try to claim otherwise), they did make quite a few points that are still valid. “Left-libertarianism” is an attempt to argue that you can have liberty under a system whose cultural beliefs does not care for liberty. It is simply ridiculous.
Thus, I care little for “pretend libertarians” trying to steal the brandname.
Well said. I don’t understand why people are trying to pander to lefties on anything. In my eyes, they have already proven themselves to be the most intellectually bankrupt, anti-liberty, pro social democracy and welfare state people I’ve seen anywhere.
Mises Institute has gotten a lot of flack on the Internet for their positions and I think the people who really have a problem with them are either reacting by making websites like Bleeding Heart Libertarians or they go towards more of a Milton Friedman route. Scott Sumner considers himself to be a libertarian and a pragmatist. Greatest thing about LVMI, despite what people think of them or whether the institute seems “cultish” to them is that they’ve never sold themselves out to people like the Koch Brothers. I’ve especially seen this on Tumblr and the kinds of libertarians I’ve been looking at there who have rejected Austrian economics for stuff like market monetarism.
Here’s a tip. Look up Sarah Skwire’s website which you can find on the BHL website. Guess what she majored in?
Honors in English from Wesleyan University with an MA and PhD in English from the University of Chicago!
Jessica Flanigan, the woman who wrote this ridiculous article about Julie’s video has aPhD from the Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton University and earned an MA in political science from Washington University in St. Louis. Her BA is from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with highest honors in Political Science and Philosophy.
Look at the degrees for many of the other writers for the website and you’ll see a similar pattern that liberals who majored in economically worthless stuff majored in. The most notable people who write for the website that I like are Roderick Long and Steve Horwitz, so I’m not going to attack them or anything, but based on the degrees many of these people earned, you can pretty much tell that they were probably much more left wing and are just using libertarianism as a crusade.
I think Julie Borowski herself majored in economics, political science and international studies, but always had social conservative leanings and turned out to be much smarter than the dummy who wrote this article. Interesting.