Great Libertarian Quotes

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.

When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist. Dom Helder Camara – one of the great prophets of Christian "Liberation theology".

I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands.

I found most of my friends quite content to be used as tax-material, even though the sums of money taken from them were employed against their own beliefs and interests. They had lived so long under the system of using others, and then in their turn being used by them, that they were like hypnotized subjects, and looked on this subjecting and using of each other as a part of the necessary and even Providential order of things. The great machine had taken possession of their souls.

The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.

Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.

I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity.

The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great skepticism - which foretells a coming change. As soon as skepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except increasing its power, and so can only survive on propaganda, which relies on unquestioning faith.

I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left.

If almost everyone is in favor of feeding the hungry, the politician may find it in his interest to do so. But, under those circumstances, the politician is unnecessary: some kind soul will give the hungry man a meal anyway. If the great majority is against the hungry man, some kind soul among the minority still may feed him—the politician will not.

The problems in every country are the same. Bureaucracy is strangling innovation. Overgrown political sectors are sucking away resources that could otherwise lead to growth. Regulations and taxes are punishing innovation. Public sector services are breaking down and no longer serving people's needs. Laws and prevailing legislation control a world that no longer exists. People who go into politics to change the system end up getting co-opted by it. Workers feel trapped and fear a lack out options outside the status quo. In every case, it comes down to the great evil of our time and all times: government itself. There is no place on earth in which more liberty and less or no government would not be welcome and bring about real progress.

Recall the confirmation fallacy: governments are great at telling you what they did, but not what they did not do. In fact, they engage in what could be labeled as phony “philanthropy,” the activity of helping people in a visible and sensational way without taking into account the unseen cemetery of invisible consequences. Bastiat inspired libertarians by attacking the usual arguments that showed the benefits of governments. But his ideas can be generalized to apply to both the Right and the Left.

(P58) It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on “great leaders,” Churchill’s worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.

Communism worked great, up to maybe four dozen people. Libertarianism was a bit better and could handle thousands before it started to fall apart. Capitalism worked best on scale, but it too began to implode once you moved close to the billion mark or so and began to factor in multiple local governments. Socialism always sucked and tended to work like a glacier moving uphill, but it worked at pretty much every scale in the same way. It was reliable, even if you could only rely on it to piss you off and barely get anything done.

A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even neg- ative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs). This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians.

Our time prides itself on having finally achieved the freedom from censorship for which libertarians in all ages have struggled...The credit for these great achievements is claimed by the new spirit of rationalism, a rationalism that, it is argued, has finally been able to tear from man's eyes the shrouds imposed by mystical thought, religion, and such powerful illusions as freedom and dignity. Science has given us this great victory over ignorance. But, on closer examination, this victory too can be seen as an Orwellian triumph of an even higher ignorance: what we have gained is a new conformism, which permits us to say anything that can be said in the functional languages of instrumental reason, but forbids us to allude to...the living truth...so we may discuss the very manufacture of life and its 'objective' manipulations, but we may not mention God, grace, or morality.

Are you for peace? The great test of your devotion to peace is not how many words you utter on its behalf. It’s not even how you propose to deal with people of other countries, though that certainly tells us something. To fully measure your “peacefulness” requires that we examine how you propose to treat people in your own backyard. Do you demand more of what doesn’t belong to you? Do you endorse the use of force to punish people for victimless “crimes”? Do you support politicians who promise to seize the earnings of others to pay for your bailout, your subsidy, your student loan, your child’s education or whatever pet cause or project you think is more important than what your fellow citizens might personally prefer to spend their own money on? Do you believe theft is OK if it’s for a good cause or endorsed by a majority? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then have the courage to admit that peace is not your priority. How can I trust your foreign policy if your domestic policy requires so much to be done at gunpoint?

Faith and freedom is great, but it gets nowhere without faith in freedom.

361I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

Libertarians: Never got over the fact they weren’t the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it. Unusually smug for a political philosophy that’s never gotten anyone elected for anything above the local water board. All for legalized drugs and prostitution but probably wouldn’t want their kids blowing strangers for crack; all for slashing taxes for nearly every social service but don’t seem to understand why most people aren’t at all keen to trade in even the minimal safety net the US provides for 55-gallon barrels of beans and rice, a crossbow and a first-aid kit in the basement. Blissfully clueless that Libertarianism is just great as long as it doesn’t actually involve real live humans. Libertarians

Meanwhile, two other great currents in political thought, had a decisive significance on the development of socialist ideas: Liberalism, which had powerfully stimulated advanced minds in the Anglo-Saxon countries, Holland and Spain in particular, and Democracy in the sense. to which Rousseau gave expression in his Social Contract, and which found its most influential representatives in the leaders of French Jacobinism. While Liberalism in its social theories started off from the individual and wished to limit the state's activities to a minimum, Democracy took its stand on an abstract collective concept, Rousseau's general will, which it sought to fix in the national state. Liberalism and Democracy were pre-eminently political concepts, and since most of the original adherents of both did scarcely consider the economic conditions of society, the further development of these conditions could not be practically reconciled with the original principles of Democracy, and still less with those of Liberalism. Democracy with its motto of equality of all citizens before the law, and Liberalism with its right of man over his own person, both were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy. As long as millions of human beings in every country have to sell their labour to a small minority of owners, and sink into the most wretched misery if they can find no buyers, the so-called equality before the law remains merely a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can be no talk of a right over one's own person, for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if one does not want to starve.

To be attacked by a Gore Vidal, or an H.L. Mencken, one of the great wordsmiths of American criticism, while surely unpleasant, must have been oddly exhilarating for the poor souls on the receiving end. I, on the other hand, have the more dubious and prosaic distinction of being a regular target of Ian Millhiser.

As the great nineteenth-century abolitionist and libertarian Lysander Spooner pointed out, the primary motive of Lincoln and the war party was to preserve and consolidate Northern control of the Southern economy. The Southern states could not be allowed to evade the tariff, a key element of the mercantilist American system that Lincoln favored.

There can be no question but that the great principles of freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, and voluntarism in religion, so basic in American Protestantism and so essential to democracy, ultimately are derived from the Anabaptists of the Reformation period, who for the first time clearly enunciated them and challenged the Christian world to follow them in practice.

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)

Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, bunglingly, at greater cost, and with less fruit than spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it deems its prerogative, or through the overwhelming competition which it exercises, it kills or paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, atropic or abortive, are lost to the great social body.

This is in response to Thatcher’s statement that “there’s no such thing as society.” So these progressives are going to show her! Naturally, they interpret her perfectly defensible statement in the most inane and uncharitable way possible. Why, we’ll show her there really is society, by helping our fellow man! But that was exactly her point. There is no such thing as an abstract, disembodied blob called “society.” All that exists are individuals, and it is up to those individuals – not “society” – to perform the great works of charity and civilization.

I come from a loving family. We may not have always liked each other but we always loved each other. We hug and kiss and wrestle and fight. We don't hold a grudge. I come from a long line of rule breakers, outlaw libertarians who vote red down the line because they believe it'll keep pure outlaws from trespassing on their territory. I come from a family of disciplinarians where you better follow the rules until you're man enough to break them, where you did what mom and dad said ‘because I said so,’ and if you didn't, you didn't get grounded, you got the belt or a backhand because it gets your attention quicker and doesn't take away your most precious resource: time. I come from a family who took you across town to your favorite cheeseburger and milkshake joint to celebrate your lesson learned immediately following your corporal correction.I come from a family that might penalize you for breaking the rules but definitely punish you for getting caught. We know that what tickles us often bruises others because we deal or deny it. We're the last to cry uncle to bad luck. It's a philosophy that has made me a hustler in both senses of the word. I work hard and I like to grift. It's a philosophy that's also led to some great stories.

So, Silicon Valley has always been equal parts egghead libertarianism and acid-tinged hippie romanticism. Both of these worldviews mesh quite well actually when it comes to believing that technology can be used to better mankind and free it from all manner of oppression, repression and just everyday drudgery. The Internet was another in a long line of technological miracles that many believed would elevate minds and free souls from all sorts of impediments. For the libertarians the Internet was great because it had few rules and no governance. For the hippies, the Internet promised free expression and a democratization of ideas.

Compared to the despotic societies that were the norm in Europe and Asia, Haudenosaunee was a libertarian dream. In the same sense, it was also a feminist dream: the Five Nations were largely governed internally by the female clan heads, and the Great Law explicitly ordered council members to heed “the warnings of your women relatives.” Failure to do so would lead to their removal. The equality granted to women was not the kind envisioned by contemporary Western feminists—men and women were not treated as equivalent. Rather, the sexes were assigned to two separate social domains, neither subordinate to the other. No woman could be a war chief; no man could lead a clan.

The economy has ceased hiding itself behind mystifying words like God, devil, fatality, grace, damnation, nature, progress, duty, and necessity, with which, over the years, it gave itself an inescapable credibility. It no longer troubles itself with the frilly liberals, it is no longer bothered by the leninists in blue jeans — it laughs at the idea of taking any great leaps while wearing fascist jackboots or socialist bootees. It’s so simple and obvious it stands naked, and its omnipresence makes it familiar and familial. Reduced to the final necessity of survival, the economy brings together all its past lies; the lie that there is no hope for humanity’s survival outside of the economy.

Of all the misapplications of the word “conservative” in recent memory, Nisbet wrote in the 1980s, the “most amusing, in an historical light, is surely the application of ‘conservative’ to…great increases in military expenditures.… For in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and of an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two World Wars, in Korea, and in Viet Nam, the leaders of American entry into war were such renowned liberal-progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention; were isolationists indeed.

Representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain, would be criticized by an anarchist of this school on two grounds. First of all because there is a monopoly of power centralized in the State, and secondly and critically—because representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere. Anarchists of this tradition have always held that democratic control of one's productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.

Broadly speaking, there are two divergent strains of American secular thought. One can be traced to the radical humanism of Tom Paine, who saw the separation of church and state not only as the guarantor of personal freedom of conscience but also as the foundation of a world in which inherited status and wealth would be replaced by merit and intellect as the dominant forces in the lives of individuals. Recognition of a common humanity, not tooth-and-claw competition, would create social progress. The other distinct current of American secularism begins with the social Darwinists of the nineteenth century and continues through the “objectivism” and exaltation of the Übermensch preached by the twentieth-century atheist and unregulated market idolator Ayn Rand. These diverging currents can also be found within the “new atheist” movement today, in which people often make a point of labeling themselves as either secular humanists, who are usually liberals, or skeptics, who are generally libertarian conservatives.

Less extreme leftists have been no less enthusiastic for war’s potential to transform the home front, Nisbet added. Leftist intellectuals were practically unanimous in favoring U.S. entry into World War I since they understood the opportunity it presented for institutional change at home. Wartime economic planning, they were convinced, would help to erode Americans’ conservative beliefs in the limits of government and the inviolability of private property. The experience of wartime planning never entirely faded from the national consciousness, and certainly not from that of the Left. When the Depression came, the Left jumped at the chance to revive the spirit of government planning it had so assiduously cultivated during the Great War. The rallying cry was “We planned in war”; now, therefore, we shall plan in peace. War symbolism was ubiquitous in the imagery adopted by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “In terms of frequency of use of such symbols by the national government,” wrote Nisbet, “not even Hitler’s Germany outdid our propagandists.

There is an excellent short book (126 pages) by Faustino Ballvè, Essentials of Economics (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education), which briefly summarizes principles and policies. A book that does that at somewhat greater length (327 pages) is Understanding the Dollar Crisis by Percy L. Greaves (Belmont, Mass.: Western Islands, 1973). Bettina Bien Greaves has assembled two volumes of readings on Free Market Economics (Foundation for Economic Education). The reader who aims at a thorough understanding, and feels prepared for it, should next read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1949, 1966, 907 pages). This book extended the logical unity and precision of economics beyond that of any previous work. A two-volume work written thirteen years after Human Action by a student of Mises is Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (Mission, Kan.: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1962, 987 pages). This contains much original and penetrating material; its exposition is admirably lucid; and its arrangement makes it in some respects more suitable for textbook use than Mises’ great work. Short books that discuss special economic subjects in a simple way are Planning for Freedom by Ludwig von Mises (South Holland, 111.: Libertarian Press, 1952), and Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). There is an excellent pamphlet by Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? (Santa Ana, Calif.: Rampart College, 1964, 1974, 62 pages). On the urgent subject of inflation, a book by the present author has recently been published, The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978). Among recent works which discuss current ideologies and developments from a point of view similar to that of this volume are the present author’s The Failure of the “New Economics”: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies (Arlington House, 1959); F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1945) and the same author’s monumental Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936, 1969) is the most thorough and devastating critique of collectivistic doctrines ever written. The reader should not overlook, of course, Frederic Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms (ca. 1844), and particularly his essay on “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Those who are interested in working through the economic classics might find it most profitable to do this in the reverse of their historical order. Presented in this order, the chief works to be consulted, with the dates of their first editions, are: Philip Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy, 1911; John Bates Clark, The Distribution of Wealth, 1899; Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, The Positive Theory of Capital, 1888; Karl Menger, Principles of Economics, 1871; W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 1871; John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848; David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817; and Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776.

Transgression has been embraced as a virtue within Western social liberalism ever since the 60s, typically applied today as it is in bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress. So elevated has the virtue of transgression become in the criticism of art, argued Kieran Cashell, that contemporary art critics have been faced with a challenge: ‘either support transgression unconditionally or condemn the tendency and risk obsolescence amid suspicions of critical conservatism’ as the great art critic Robert Hughes often was. But, Cashell wrote, on the value placed upon transgression in contemporary art: ‘In the pursuit of the irrational, art has become negative, nasty and nihilistic.’ Literary critic Anthony Julius has also noted the resulting ‘unreflective contemporary endorsement of the transgressive’. Those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention or differentiation, are wrong. Although it is constantly changing, in this important early stage of its appeal, its ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture, transgression and nonconformity tells us many things about the nature of its appeal and about the liberal establishment it defines itself against. It has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan ‘It is forbidden to forbid!’ than it does with anything most recognize as part of any traditionalist right. Instead of interpreting it as part of other right-wing movements, conservative or libertarian, I would argue that the style being channelled by the Pepe meme-posting trolls and online transgressives follows a tradition that can be traced from the eighteenth-century writings of the Marquis de Sade, surviving through to the nineteenth-century Parisian avant-garde, the Surrealists, the rebel rejection of feminized conformity of post-war America and then to what film critics called 1990s ‘male rampage films’ like American Psycho and Fight Club.

This and Rothbard’s own life-long cultural conservatism notwithstanding, however, from its beginnings in the late 1960s and the founding of a libertarian party in 1971, the libertarian movement had great appeal to many of the counter-cultural left that had then grown up in the U.S. in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Did not the illegitimacy of the state and the non-aggression axiom imply that everyone was at liberty to choose his very own non-aggressive lifestyle, no matter what it was? Much of Rothbard’s later writings, with their increased emphasis on cultural matters, were designed to correct this development and to explain the error in the idea of a leftist multi-counter-cultural libertarianism, of libertarianism as a variant of libertinism. It was false—empirically as well as normatively—that libertarianism could or should be combined with egalitarian multiculturalism. Both were in fact sociologically incompatible, and libertarianism could and should be combined exclusively with traditional Western bourgeois culture; that is, the old-fashioned ideal of a family-based and hierarchically structured society of voluntarily acknowledged rank orders of social authority. Empirically, Rothbard did not tire to explain, the left-libertarians failed to recognize that the restoration of private-property rights and laissez-faire economics implied a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination.” Private property means the right to exclude. The modern social-democratic welfare state has increasingly stripped private-property owners of their right to exclude. In distinct contrast, a libertarian society where the right to exclude was fully restored to owners of private property would be profoundly unegalitarian. To be sure, private property also implies the owner’s right to include and to open and facilitate access to one’s property, and every private-property owner also faces an economic incentive of including (rather than excluding) so long as he expects this to increase the value of his property.

Well, let me just end with one last point to do with your question. One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there's been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost―and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about "The End of Socialism," and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, "Yes, it's true, socialism has lost because Russia failed." I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you're not supposed to do in our culture, but let's try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that "socialism" failed, why don't they say that "democracy" failed?―and the proof that "democracy" failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves "democratic"―in fact, they called themselves "People's Democracies," real advanced forms of democracy. So why don't we conclude that "democracy" failed, not just that "socialism" failed? Well, I haven't seen any articles anywhere saying, "Look, democracy failed, let's forget about democracy." And it's obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn't mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right? Okay, then in what sense did socialism fail? I mean, it's true that the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe called themselves "socialist" ―but they also called themselves "democratic." Were they socialist? Well, you can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are sort of at the core of it, like workers' control over production, elimination of wage labor, things like that. Did those countries have any of those things? They weren't even a thought there. Again, in the pre-Bolshevik part of the Russian Revolution, there were socialist initiatives―but they were crushed instantly after the Bolsheviks took power, like within months. In fact, just as the moves towards democracy in Russia were instantly destroyed, the moves towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeover was a coup―and that was perfectly well understood at the time, in fact. So if you look in the mainstream of the Marxist movement, Lenin's takeover was regarded as counter-revolutionary; if you look at independent leftists like Bertrand Russell, it was instantly obvious to them; to the libertarian left, it was a truism. But that truism has been driven out of people's heads over the years, as part of a whole prolonged effort to discredit the very idea of socialism by associating it with Soviet totalitarianism. And obviously that effort has been extremely successful―that's why people can tell themselves that socialism failed when they look at what happened to the Soviet Union, and not even see the slightest thing odd about it. And that's been a very valuable propaganda triumph for elites in the West―because it's made it very easy to undercut moves towards real changes in the social system here by saying, "Well, that's socialism―and look what it leads to." Okay, hopefully with the fall of the Soviet Union we can at least begin to get past that barrier, and start recovering an understanding of what socialism could really stand for.

That winter remains in my mind as one great blizzard of verbiage. It started with the insolvency of the Employment and Workforce Commission. The Commission had been running through funds budgeted for unemployment benefits at an alarming rate, and nobody had noticed that it was about to run out completely. The Commission blamed the legislature, the legislature blamed the Commission, and the governor blamed the legislature and the Commission, but especially the Commission. The Commission, it turned out, would have to apply for federal money to avoid a shortfall, and for the application to be legal the governor would have to sign it. It was a perfect set-up for him. He refused to sign the application unless the Commission agreed to his demands, one of which was an independent audit. The Commission delayed. The deadline approached; if it were to pass, the Commission would be unable to issue unemployment checks. There was great outrage from the people known for great outrage. Everybody (well, everybody in the state’s media—but it felt like everybody everywhere) was talking about “playing chicken.” The governor was “playing chicken” with the Employment and Workforce Commission; there was a “game of chicken” going on between the state’s chief executive and its workforce agency. The governor was also said to be “holding the unemployed hostage” in his vainglorious attempt to get what he wanted from a government agency; sometimes he was said to be “holding the unemployed hostage to his libertarian ideology” or “holding a state agency hostage for political gain.” The State actually combined these two images in one of its editorials: “You do not play chicken with the lives of 77,000 laid-off citizens, holding them hostage for your own political purposes.” No, I supposed, you do not.

The great division in modern politics, argued Russell Kirk in The Politics of Prudence, “is not between totalitarians on the one hand and liberals (or libertarians) on the other; instead, it lies between all those who believe in a transcendent moral order, on the one side, and on the other side all those who mistake our ephemeral existence as individuals for the be-all and end-all.

That in America the friends of liberty are called “conservatives” and the centralizing authoritarians are referred to as “liberals” is one of the great semantic jokes of history.

The Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.

See, I’m a great believer in the power of negative thought. And in an age of affirmation, of self-help and self-love, of the rebirth of wide-eyed idealism and the power of positive thinking — I’m happy to be a champion of skepticism and doubt. That night, I rediscovered my role, my reason, and my rage.

when growth, potency, happiness, pressure to be in a good mood, to “have a nice day,” to be “high” are hopelessly intertwined with consumer goodies, not having them means a drop into shame, depression, and victimization. In the real world of limited resources, growth is a Ponzi scheme in which our great-grandchildren subsidize our innocent and narcissistic fantasies.

Keep in mind that virtually all the leading figures in this great debate were libertarians by today’s standards. They believed in liberty and limited government. Even the least libertarian among them would be horrified if he could see how later generations have ballooned the size and intrusiveness of the federal establishment. It never occurred to the most ardent Federalist that government should rob Peter to pay Paul for his health care, art work, alternative energy, prescription drugs, hurricane relief, or his notions of regime change in Somalia.

Proudhon was a great communication analyst, bom 100 years too soon to be understood. His system of voluntary association (anarchy) is based on the simple communication principles that an authoritarian system means one-way communication, or stupidity, and a libertarian system means two-way communication, or rationality.

For centuries, women have struggled against tremendous odds to have their contracts taken seriously. At great personal expense, they stood up and demanded the right to own land, to control their own wages, to retain custody of their children-in other words, to become legally responsible for themselves and for their property. A woman's consent must never again become legally irrelevant.

the masters of mankind,” the merchants and manufacturers of England, pursue their “vile maxim: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.” Smith’s vile maxim should be familiar to us. It has considerable resonance today. We’ll look into its theoretical background next week. But as you should be aware, the vile maxim has become a leading idea of what’s called “libertarianism” in the United States. It was popularized by Ayn Rand. Greed is great, all for ourselves, nothing for anyone else. She was the guru of prominent figures, among them Alan Greenspan, the much-admired chair of the Federal Reserve for many years. Another acolyte is Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House, the main intellectual architect of the domestic programs of the Trump administration—which are, in fact, motivated by the vile maxim.

Some schools of philosophical thought, like libertarianism (for which individual freedom matters the most) and utilitarianism (for which the pursuit of the best outcome for the greatest number makes more sense) may even dispute that the common good is a cause worth pursuing, but can conflicts between competing moral theories be resolved? The pandemic brought them to a boil, with furious arguments between opposing camps. Many decisions framed as “cold” and rational, driven exclusively by economic, political and social considerations, are in fact deeply influenced by moral philosophy – the endeavour to find a theory that is capable of explaining what we should do.

If we go back to the classics, or at least what I regard as the classics, say for example, Humboldt's "Limits of State Action" which inspired Mill and is a true libertarian-liberal classic. The world that Humboldt was considering, which was partially an imaginary world. But the world for which he was developing this political philosophy was a post-feudal but pre-capitalist world. It was a world in which there is no great divergence among individuals in the kind of power that they have and what they command, let's say. But there was a tremendous disparity between individuals on the one hand and the state on the other. Consequently, it was the task of a liberalism that was concerned with human rights and equality of individuals and so on. It was the task of that liberalism to dissolve the enormous power of the state which was such an authoritarian threat to individual liberties. And from that, you develop a classical liberal theory in, say, Humboldt's or Mill's sense. Well, of course, that is pre-capitalist. He couldn't conceive of an era in which a corporation would be regarded as an individual, let's say, or in which such enormous disparities and control over resources and production would distinguish between individuals in a massive fashion. Now, in that kind of a society, to take the Humboldtian view is a very superficial liberalism. Because while opposition to state power in an era of such divergence conforms to Humboldt's conclusions, it doesn't do so for his reasons. That is, his reasons lead to very different conclusions in that case. Namely, I think his reasons lead to the conclusion that we must dissolve the authoritarian control over production and resources which leads to such divergences among individuals. In fact, I think one might draw a direct line between classical liberalism and a kind of libertarian socialism, which I think can be regarded as a kind of an adapting of the basic reasoning of classical liberalism to a very different social era. So, my own feeling has always been that to achieve the classical liberal ideals, for the reasons that led to them being put forth in a society so different, we must be led in a very different direction. It's superficial and erroneous to accept the conclusions which were reached for a different society and not to consider the reasoning that led to those conclusions. The reasoning, I think, is very substantial. I'm a classical liberal in this sense, but I think it leads me to be a kind of an anarchist, you know, an anarchist socialist.

To do this, Koch employed a tactic known as the “echo chamber,” of which it had become a master. The echo chamber allowed Koch to amplify its message while hiding its hand. The strategy originated from the network of think tanks and academic programs that Charles Koch had been building for almost forty years. In 1974, when Charles Koch laid out his strategy for launching a libertarian revolution in the United States, he listed education as the first of four pillars in his strategy.III He had pursued this strategy with great success, building the Cato Institute think tank and academic centers like the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. These efforts had a philosophical, almost noble, feel to them. The stated goal was to fund scholars and big ideas that would slowly move society toward an understanding of Charles Koch’s political vision. By 2009, the educational enterprise had become a network of shell enterprises and hidden funding streams that gave immediate tactical support to Koch Industries’ lobbying goals. Ideas are the raw material of all legislation. In Washington, DC, there is a surprisingly small congregation of think tanks, policy shops, media outlets, and academic institutions that shape the daily political conversation. Over the decades, Koch Industries became adept at seeding this territory with its own ideas, and its own thinkers, in a way that hid its influence. The echo chamber tactic began when Koch’s lobbyists would commission and pay for an academic study, without claiming credit for it. That study, seemingly independent of Koch, was then fed into a series of think tanks and foundations that Koch controlled. Finally, the work of those think tanks was weaponized into the raw ammunition of political campaigns. Taken together, it had the effect of making the message from Koch Industries’ lobbying shop seem far louder, and far more popular, than it really was. This, in turn, had a surprisingly strong effect on senators and other lawmakers, who paid close attention to public sentiment.

Question: It's a great book and its obvious that Guerin was very keen to blend what he felt were the best aspects of anarchism and the best aspects of socialism into this Libertarian Socialism. Do you think that those two terms Libertarian Socialism and Anarchism—are synonymous or do you think there are real differences between the two? Well, I don't think we can really say, because the terms of political discourse aren't well defined. Capitalism, trade, the state, pick any one... they are pretty loose terms. Which is okay, but it doesn't make sense to try to define these terms carefully when you don't have an explanatory theory to embed them in. But the fact is we can't really answer the question, anarchism covers too many things, libertarian socialism covers too many things. But I sympathize with what he's trying to do. I think it's the right thing. If you look carefully they are really close, there are similarities and relationships. The more anti-statist, antivanguardist left elements of the socialist movement, Marxist movement in fact—folks like Anton Pannekoek and others—there are close similarities between them and some of the wings of the anarchist movement, like the anarcho-syndicalists. It's pretty hard to make much of a distinction between, say, Pannekoek's workers' councils and anarcho-syndicalist conceptions of how to organize society. There are some differences, but they are the kind of differences that ought to exist when people are working together in comradely relationships. So, yes, that's a sensible blend in my view. The much sharper distinction is between all these movements and the various forms of totalitarianism like Bolshevism, corporate capitalism and so on. There you have a real break. Totalitarian structures on the one hand and free societies on the other. In fact, 1 think there are significant similarities between libertarian socialism and anarchism, this blend, and even very mainstream thinkers like John Dewey—there are striking similarities.

It continues to startle me, the range of political ideologies that are compatible with enthusiasm for spaceflight. Tax-and-spend liberals of the Great Society stripe, obviously—but also spending-slashing Tea Partiers, hippie peaceniks, fierce libertarians, military loyalists, and apathetics of every shade. So very many of us seem to feel that a love of human spaceflight is reconcilable with our beliefs, and we can all explain why.

Americans for Prosperity annoyed some of the Tea Partiers,” recalls the libertarian blogger Ralph Benko. “These people drove up, opened the door, put T-shirts on them, then took pictures and sent them to Charles [Koch] saying, ‘See? We’re doing great things with your money.

He did have some small advantage, though. He knew the truth about surveillance. Ever since the dawn of GWOT the nations of the West – apart from the United States, where civil libertarians tended to carry rifles and use them on closed-circuit cameras as an expression of their freedoms – had put their faith in creating a paranoid state, one where every move of every citizen was recorded and logged and filmed and fuck you, if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about. Whether this had had any great influence in the course of GWOT was a moot point, but there was one thing not generally appreciated about the paranoid state. It was incredibly labour-intensive. There were simply not enough people to monitor all the cameras. Every shop had one, every bus and train and theatre and public convenience, every street and road and alleyway. Computers with facial recognition and gait recognition and body language recognition could do some of the job, but they were relatively simple to fool, expensive, and times had been hard for decades. It was cheaper to get people to watch the screens. But no nation on Earth had a security service large enough, a police force big enough, to keep an eye on all those live feeds. So it was contracted out. To private security firms all trying to undercut each other. The big stores had their own security men, but they were only interested in people going in and out of the store, not someone just passing by. So instead of a single all-seeing eye London’s seemingly-impregnable surveillance map was actually a patchwork of little territories and jurisdictions, and while they all had, by law, to make their footage available to the forces of law and order, many of the control rooms were actually manned by bored, underpaid, undertrained and badly-motivated immigrants.

Modem Socialism developed when profound observers of social life came to see more and more clearly that political constitutions and changes in the form of government could never get to the bottom of that great problem that we call "the social question." Its supporters recognized that a social equalizing of human beings, despite the loveliest of theoretical assumptions, is not possible so long as people are separated into classes on the basis of their owning or not owning property, classes whose mere existence excludes in advance any thought of a genuine community. And so there developed the recognition that only by elimination of economic monopolies and common ownership of the means of production, in a word, by a complete transformation of all economic conditions and social institutions associated with them, does a condition of social justice become thinkable, a status in which society shall become a genuine community, and human labour shall no longer serve the ends of exploitation, but shall serve to assure abundance to everyone.

Physical Invasion The normative principle I am suggesting for the law is simply this: No action should be considered illicit or illegal unless it invades, or aggresses against, the person or just property of another. Only invasive actions should be declared illegal, and combated with the full power of the law. The invasion must be concrete and physical. There are degrees of seriousness of such invasion, and hence, different proper degrees of restitution or punishment. "Burglary," simple invasion of property for purposes of theft, is less serious than "robbery," where armed force is likely to be used against the victim. Here, however, we are not concerned with the questions of degrees of invasion or punishment, but simply with invasion per se. If no man may invade another person's "just" property, what is our criterion of justice to be? There is no space here to elaborate on a theory of justice in property titles. Suffice it to say that the basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a selfowner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another's person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or "mixes his labor with." From these twin axioms — self-ownership and "homesteading" — stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society. This system establishes the right of every man to his own person, the right of donation, of bequest (and, concomitantly, the right to receive the bequest or inheritance), and the right of contractual exchange of property titles. Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it. The vague concept of "harm" is substituted for the precise one of physical violence. Consider the following two examples. Jim is courting Susan and is just about to win her hand in marriage, when suddenly Bob appears on the scene and wins her away. Surely Bob has done great "harm" to Jim. Once a nonphysical-invasion sense of harm is adopted, almost any outlaw act might be justified. Should Jim be able to "enjoin" Bob's very existence? Similarly, A is a successful seller of razor blades. But then B comes along and sells a better blade, teflon-coated to prevent shaving cuts. The value of A's property is greatly affected. Should he be able to collect damages from B, or, better yet, to enjoin B's sale of a better blade? The correct answer is not that consumers would be hurt if they were forced to buy the inferior blade, although that is surely the case. Rather, no one has the right to legally prevent or retaliate against "harms" to his property unless it is an act of physical invasion. Everyone has the right to have the physical integrity of his property inviolate; no one has the right to protect the value of his property, for that value is purely the reflection of what people are willing to pay for it. That willingness solely depends on how they decide to use their money. No one can have a right to someone else's money, unless that other person had previously contracted to transfer it to him. "Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it.

The normative principle I am suggesting for the law is simply this: No action should be considered illicit or illegal unless it invades, or aggresses against, the person or just property of another. Only invasive actions should be declared illegal, and combated with the full power of the law. The invasion must be concrete and physical. There are degrees of seriousness of such invasion, and hence, different proper degrees of restitution or punishment. "Burglary," simple invasion of property for purposes of theft, is less serious than "robbery," where armed force is likely to be used against the victim. Here, however, we are not concerned with the questions of degrees of invasion or punishment, but simply with invasion per se. If no man may invade another person's "just" property, what is our criterion of justice to be? There is no space here to elaborate on a theory of justice in property titles. Suffice it to say that the basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a selfowner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another's person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or "mixes his labor with." From these twin axioms — self-ownership and "homesteading" — stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society. This system establishes the right of every man to his own person, the right of donation, of bequest (and, concomitantly, the right to receive the bequest or inheritance), and the right of contractual exchange of property titles. Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it. The vague concept of "harm" is substituted for the precise one of physical violence. Consider the following two examples. Jim is courting Susan and is just about to win her hand in marriage, when suddenly Bob appears on the scene and wins her away. Surely Bob has done great "harm" to Jim. Once a nonphysical-invasion sense of harm is adopted, almost any outlaw act might be justified. Should Jim be able to "enjoin" Bob's very existence? Similarly, A is a successful seller of razor blades. But then B comes along and sells a better blade, teflon-coated to prevent shaving cuts. The value of A's property is greatly affected. Should he be able to collect damages from B, or, better yet, to enjoin B's sale of a better blade? The correct answer is not that consumers would be hurt if they were forced to buy the inferior blade, although that is surely the case. Rather, no one has the right to legally prevent or retaliate against "harms" to his property unless it is an act of physical invasion. Everyone has the right to have the physical integrity of his property inviolate; no one has the right to protect the value of his property, for that value is purely the reflection of what people are willing to pay for it. That willingness solely depends on how they decide to use their money. No one can have a right to someone else's money, unless that other person had previously contracted to transfer it to him. Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it. (1/2)

The first is that seemingly small features of social situations can have massive effects on people’s behavior; nudges are everywhere, even if we do not see them. Choice architecture, both good and bad, is pervasive and unavoidable, and it greatly affects our decisions. The second claim is that libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron. Choice architects can preserve freedom of choice while also nudging people in directions that will improve their lives.

Based on an ‘agonal’ conception of action, Arendt’s republicanism shows a great distrust of any kind of political representation, thus accentuating the libertarian dimension of her thought while distancing it from partisan commitment. The commodity reification of the public sphere and the decline in the legislative power – in a world where information belongs to the great communications monopolies and where parliaments simply ratify laws elaborated by the executive power, giving rise to a kind of permanent state of exception – give Arendt’s political theory anti-conformist or even subversive features.

and prominent intellectual and political elites leaves the playing field open for others to step in and present themselves as advocates for the entire working or middle class or other distinct underrepresented groups. Indeed, politics since 2000 has been marked by the rise of populists—politicians who spurn “out-of-touch experts” and who claim to speak on behalf of millions of people with whom they in fact have no authentic connection, and in whom they have no genuine interest beyond securing votes to support their own often very personal agendas. In America, the first sign of things to come was during the Great Recession, with the emergence of the Tea Party movement in the Republican Party, inside and outside Congress. The movement formed in reaction to the efforts by the administration of Barack Obama to bail out the U.S. financial sector in the midst of the economic crisis. Its members initially presented themselves as fiscal conservatives, calling for the kind of lower taxes and limited government spending espoused by Ronald Reagan. They quickly moved on to oppose the administration’s promotion of universal health care and other social policies, and soon morphed into an activist protest movement supporting new candidates for office with a mixture of conservative, libertarian, and right-wing populist credentials. Many of these Tea Party candidates would later support Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

The great thing about libertarianism is that it is a political superstructure in which most other political philosophies can operate. No other political philosophy features such built-in, full-fledged pluralism. The other basic political philosophies have built-in asymmetries. Progressivism does not tolerate libertarians living as they wish, but libertarianism tolerates progressives living as they wish (with all the caveats about voluntary participation.) And as Hayek said about the conservative: “Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.

Sixth, show a deep acquaintance with the same books, magazines, blogs, movies, and plays — as well as the daily life experiences — that your audience knows. Mention them and interpret them in light of Scripture. But be sure to read and experience urban life across a spectrum of opinion. There is nothing more truly urban than showing you know, appreciate, and digest a great diversity of human opinion. During my first years in New York, I regularly read The New Yorker (sophisticated secular), The Atlantic (eclectic), The Nation (older, left-wing secular), The Weekly Standard (conservative but erudite), The New Republic (eclectic and erudite), Utne Reader (New Age alternative), Wired (Silicon Valley libertarian), First Things (conservative Catholic). As I read, I imagine dialogues about Christianity with the writers. I almost never read a magazine without getting a scrap of a preaching idea.

Libertarians are not supposed to be egalitarians… And yet there it is: egalitarianism has become the unspoken but very real driving force in the current Official movement. Once group egalitarianism becomes the norm, other groups than blacks will clamor for the privileges of ‘victim status.’ Sure enough, that jostling for victim privilege is now the major hallmark of American politics. The Official libertarians have so far not displayed enormous affinity for Latino or disabled ‘rights,’ but they are highly enthusiastic about the ‘rights’ of women and feminism generally. And in particular, libertarians have displayed great fervor for gay ‘rights’ and stress the evils of ‘discrimination’ against gays. So ardently are libertarians devoted to gay rights that the word ‘libertarian’ in the public press has now become almost a code word for champion of gay rights. Only his pro-gay agenda accounts for the ardor of Republican libertarians toward Massachusetts Governor Weld, whom they embrace as, in the current slogan, ‘fiscally conservative but socially tolerant.’ (The ‘fiscally conservative’ refers to a one-time budget cut followed, the next time around, by a compensatory budget increase.) ’Socially tolerant,’ in the current atmosphere, means a devotion to the entire Left cultural agenda, from gay rights to compulsory multicultural propaganda and condomization in the public schools.

The first is that seemingly small features of social situations can have massive effects on people’s behavior; nudges are everywhere, even if we do not see them. Choice architecture, both good and bad, is pervasive and unavoidable, and it greatly affects our decisions. The second claim is that libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron. Choice architects can preserve freedom of choice while also nudging people in directions that will improve their lives. We have covered a great deal of territory, including savings, Social

People employ what economists call “rational ignorance.” That is, we all spend our time learning about things we can actually do something about, not political issues that we can’t really affect. That’s why most of us can’t name our representative in Congress. And why most of us have no clue about how much of the federal budget goes to Medicare, foreign aid, or any other program. As an Alabama businessman told a Washington Post pollster, “Politics doesn’t interest me. I don’t follow it. … Always had to make a living.” Ellen Goodman, a sensitive, good-government liberal columnist, complained about a friend who had spent months researching new cars, and of her own efforts study the sugar, fiber, fat, and price of various cereals. “Would my car-buying friend use the hours he spent comparing fuel-injection systems to compare national health plans?” Goodman asked. “Maybe not. Will the moments I spend studying cereals be devoted to studying the greenhouse effect on grain? Maybe not.” Certainly not —and why should they? Goodman and her friend will get the cars and the cereal they want, but what good would it do to study national health plans? After a great deal of research on medicine, economics, and bureaucracy, her friend may decide which health-care plan he prefers. He then turns to studying the presidential candidates, only to discover that they offer only vague indications of which health-care plan they would implement. But after diligent investigation, our well-informed voter chooses a candidate. Unfortunately, the voter doesn’t like that candidate’s stand on anything else — the package-deal problem — but he decides to vote on the issue of health care. He has a one-in-a-hundred-million chance of influencing the outcome of the presidential election, after which, if his candidate is successful, he faces a Congress with different ideas, and in any case, it turns out the candidate was dissembling in the first place. Instinctively realizing all this, most voters don’t spend much time studying public policy. Give that same man three health insurance plans that he can choose from, though, and chances are that he will spend time studying them. Finally, as noted above, the candidates are likely to be kidding themselves or the voters anyway. One could argue that in most of the presidential elections since 1968, the American people have tried to vote for smaller government, but in that time the federal budget has risen from $178 billion to $4 trillion.

When it (Self-management in revolutionary Spain) was not sabotaged by its enemies or hindered by the war, agricultural self-management was an unquestionable success. The land was united into one holding and cultivated over great expanses according to a general plan and the directives of agronomists. Small landowners integrated their plots with those of the community. Socialization demonstrated its superiority both over large absentee landholdings, which left a part of the land unplanted, and over smallholdings, cultivated with the use of rudimentary techniques, inadequate seeding, and without fertilizer. Production increased by 30—50 percent. The amount of cultivated land increased, working methods were improved, and human, animal, and mechanical energy used more rationally. Farming was diversified, irrigation developed, the countryside partially reforested, nurseries opened, pigsties constructed, rural technical schools created, Pilot farms set up, livestock selected and increased, and auxiliary industries set in motion, etc.

A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs). This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses.

A case could be made that the great historical difference between what we call the Left and the Right largely turns on the relation between “value” and “values.” The Left has always been about trying to collapse the gulf between the domain dominated by pure self-interest and the domain traditionally dominated by high-minded principles; the Right has always been about prising them even farther apart, and then claiming ownership of both. They stand for both greed and charity. Hence, the otherwise inexplicable alliance in the Republican Party between the free market libertarians and the “values voters” of the Christian Right. What this comes down to in practice has usually been the political equivalent of a strategy of good-cop-bad-cop: first unleash the chaos of the market to destabilize lives and all existing verities alike; then, offer yourself up as the last bastion of the authority of church and fatherhood against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed.

The Civil War The American psyche is entirely shaped by the Civil War. All right wingers are Confederates going by other names. They are racists, bigots, supremacists, conservatives, haters of Federal Government, haters of the Big State, haters of any government that dares to act (especially to the extent of waging war against despicable and unacceptable parts of the nation, e.g. supporters of slavery). They are libertarians and predatory free market capitalists. They revere the “natural” law of God, and despise human rights and human-made laws. Liberals and leftists all take the side of the Union. Abraham Lincoln was entirely correct to wage a Just War against the Confederacy. A new Just War should be waged against the modern Confederacy – the continuation of the other Confederacy by other means – i.e. the Republican Party, the Tea Party, the Libertarian Party, the Alt-Right, and the super rich. America will never be great again until the Confederacy and everything it stands for is destroyed once and for all. Confederate ideology mutated into right wing ideology in general. The Alt-Right is nothing but the Rebirth of the Confederacy. The minds of conservatives and libertarians are locked in the nineteenth century.

The gating resource here was not capital,” Thiel said. “The gating resource was the ideas and the people and executing it well. It’s not like lawsuits haven’t been brought in the past. It’s something that’s been done, so we were required to think very creatively about this space, what kind of lawsuit to bring.” Most of the ideas do not stand up to scrutiny, or to Thiel’s ambitions. A slap on the wrist from the FCC about affiliate commissions will accomplish little. Exploiting the financial misdeeds of the company would likely require an inside man, and this would be nasty, deceitful business. It wasn’t just a question of which strategy might actually win, it was also figuring out which one could actually do real damage. “It was important for us to win cases,” Thiel said. “We had to win. We had to get a large judgment. We did not want to bring meritless cases. We wanted to bring cases that were very strong. It was a very narrow set of context in which you could do that. You did not want to involve political speech, you did not want to involve anything that had anything remotely connected to the public interest. Ideally, our cases would not even involve the First Amendment at all.” The First Amendment was unappealing not because Thiel is a libertarian, though he is, but because as a strategist he understood that it was Gawker’s strongest and most entrenched position: we’re allowed to say anything we want. It challenges the legal system and conventional wisdom where they are the most clearly established. Forget the blocking and tackling of proof and precedent. At an almost philosophical level, the right to free speech is virtually absolute. But as Denton would himself admit to me later, free speech is sort of a Maginot Line. “It looks formidable,” he said, “it gives false confidence to defenders, but there are plenty of ways around if you’re nimble and ruthless enough.” That’s what Thiel was doing now, that’s what he was paying Charles Harder to find. Someone from Gawker would observe with some satisfaction to me, many years away from this period of preliminary strategizing from Thiel, that if Thiel had tried to go after Gawker in court for what it had written about him, litigating damages and distress from being outed, for example, he certainly would have lost. This was said as a sort of condemnation of the direction that Thiel ultimately did attack Gawker from. Which is strange because that was the point. The great strategist B. H. Liddell Hart would say that all great victories come along “the line of least resistance and the line of least expectation.” John Boyd, a fighter pilot before he was a strategist, would say that a good pilot never goes through the front door. He wins by coming through the back. And first, that door has to be located.