10 ms·

Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal (1968)

98 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

irixusr 11y ago
I owe a great debt of gratitude to Rothbard. The excerpts from his book on American history are gut wrenching as they are eye openers.
em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
Rothbard's writings have had a great influence on me.
WBrentWilliams 11y ago
Interesting reading. I think the intellectual mistake the author made is in thinking that one's political dogma (and therefore party affiliation) should not change over time because the party does not change over time. That is, the idea that a political party is the manifestation of an unchanging view. The fun revelation is that business dresses itself up as conservative, then pursues its own ends of profit. That's the entire definition of bourgeois. It is worth highlighting as in many ways, the free software movement is a very conservative one, from the point of view of the way code was shared in the beginning of its history: That is, you asked the programmer who wrote the code you were interested in for a copy and usually got it gratis as the money was made in selling the equipment. The change of label to liberal-radical came later when business started to realize that software, itself, was a sell-able product. The point I'm making is that choosing a side in any two party system is always artificial. Any party affiliation should be viewed as one of convenience. This explains why Bernie Sanders caucuses with the Democratic Party and why both Paul politicians aligned with the GOP. From my standpoint, the only winning play for the individual is to decide what is important to yourself, acknowledge that it will change over time, and remember not to get caught up in the game being played. Your "side", or party affiliation, in fact, should change as your interests change. In other words, don't be proud of your party, and don't overly-identify with said party.
- bmelton 11y ago
  > In other words, don't be proud of your party, and don't overly-identify with said party. Amen. While I'm inclined to believe that an adversarial Congress is beneficial to the nation on the whole, the zeal with which most Americans seek to categorize themselves into "in-group" and "out-group" members is discomforting. Scarier though, in my opinion, is how quickly the politicians are to capitalize on that polarization, which offers instant and immediate demonification of whomever takes the opposite view; and so long as the parties work like this, nobody notices that so much of the parties' political platforms are not internally consistent, or are even highly hypocritical. Having been swayed by good arguments enough that I felt the need to make sense of it, I was able to divine a set of 'first principles' that I endorse, and policy choices that align with those principles tend to be ones that I approve of, no matter who, or from which party it originates. Of course, being a political chimera makes for often difficult discussions.
  - WBrentWilliams 11y ago
    I go a step farther. In my state, there is no requirement to join a party to vote in the primaries. Instead, you simply pick a party for which to vote. I believe the only rational choice is to say "Give me one ballot for each party," which gives close-to-stacked-rank voting for the primary. I still show up for the primaries, as I want the chance to choose who I vote for when I get to the general election. However, such a system makes it impossible for me to consider political office (beyond school board) as my primary declaration is a matter of public record, meaning that I would not pass any test of party purity. What I really want is stacked-rank voting in the primaries and in the general election. I think it would be interesting to see how the general public, used to a Coke vs Pepsi choice, handle a spectrum of choices where you don't have to Pick Only One.
    - bmelton 11y ago
      Agreed again. I'm still dazzled that after all the fanfare and hoopla over instant runoff voting in the early 2000s that nothing changed. Note, dazzled !== surprised, but still. As for parties, I change parties multiple times a year to get the best possible vote I can. Sometimes that means I'm voting for a particular candidate, or set of policies, but sometimes also simply against... and yes, it would completely disqualify us for any public position that couldn't be voted into as an Independent. I wonder what it would take for the issue to get real traction though, as the more and more polarized American society becomes, the more entrenched the two party system feels. Any fracturing of the system is certain to benefit somebody disproportionally at first, and it seems like the timetable for actually making a real push towards it would take longer than the state of public opinion, so nobody moves towards it because nobody knows who will get the advantage by the time it happens. If we accept that the two party system wishes to perpetuate itself, second only to a more monolithic one-party system, then the conclusion seems foregone, but perhaps I'm just being pessimistic. Either way, the parties themselves have shown resistance to warring factions within the party, despite how much they both claim to prefer a competition of ideas.
afsina 11y ago
Rothbard's view on the the issues like state, liberty and war altered my perspective a great deal. Also, this video titled "How Murray Rothbard Changed my Mind on War" may be worth watching to see his influence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBCiMxuX9_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBCiMxuX9_g
- ninerdelta 11y ago
  Wow this is excellent, thanks for posting.
randomname2 11y ago
Good read. It's scary how relevant this still is, 58 years later.
pinaceae 11y ago
so, against the government and against big business? what's left then? and, awesome how his stance is ultimately self-defeating as any other political direction/movement will embrace the organisation of a big construct. libertarians and anarchists are adorable.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  against the government and against big business? what's left then? You ask that as if you're referring to two different things.
  - Frondo 11y ago
    They are two different things. The government is theoretically accountable to all citizens, and conducts orderly and regularly scheduled changes of power. Big businesses are theoretically accountable to their owners and no one else.
    - mfringel 11y ago
      More specifically, large businesses are accountable to owners with sufficiently large stakes. It's harder to buy votes in government.
    - adventured 11y ago
      Big businesses are also accountable to the jurisdiction and laws of the nation they operate under. In the US, the federal government has universal power over corporations due to thousands of economic regulations, to go with even more powerful national powers related to the IRS, DHS, national security and justice department. To the extent a corporation's home nation has enforced laws and regulations, the corporation must operate within that framework. Try being Microsoft, raise a heavily armed militia in the US and start storming people's homes and threatening politicians, and see what happens to you. The US Government can easily destroy any big business they choose to. They can attack it from dozens of angles. They can compel compliance to programs the corporations do not agree with, which has occurred to eg Yahoo and others with NSA spying. There is still no such thing as a a big non-based corporation, one without an actual home country. There isn't a single actual example of it today.
wes-exp 11y ago
> And this meant that the great danger to the peace and freedom of the world came not from Moscow or "international communism," but from the U.S. and its Empire stretching across and dominating the world. Can anyone explain how this statement makes any sense for a supposed libertarian at that time? Any way you look at it, the Soviet Union 1) suppressed freedom and 2) espoused militarism. I'm puzzled why it seems to get a free pass here.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  USSR did suppress freedom. It was a state after all; that is the purpose. USSR had a military, but it never received more than a tiny fraction of the resources that USA military received. The CIA and other liars continually exaggerated the strength of USSR military in order to inspire paranoia in the political and media elite, and to keep the world divided in ways that were good for business. Their military still might have been a match for USA military, because keeping armaments manufacturers wealthy was never their purpose in the way it was in USA. Fortunately that test never came, perhaps because USSR believed much of the same hype we believed in USA. The Soviets were constantly afraid of what USA might do, and nearly every action they made was a response to that fear. Thus it was the actions of USA that drove the cold war. The phrase I'd like to examine is "free pass". What constitutes a "free pass"? Would we consider allowing people on the other side of the earth to live as they will to be a "free pass"? How about not attacking those who have never attacked us? Would not spending more than the rest of the world combined on our military deserve the classification of "free pass"? We anarchists are so stupid, please explain it to us.
  - plonh 11y ago
    The USSR, by definition, was a collection of countries conquered by Russia. They certainly were rather effective at conquering.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      This map [0] seems to indicate that Russia's maximum extent predated USSR. They only lost territory after that. Of course, they did hold power over most of Eastern Europe for decades, but since that was a result of WWII it is also a fact that predates the period under discussion. [0] http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/map-russian-empire-1914 http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/map-russian-empire-1...
kardashev 11y ago
If only more people read Bastiat... http://fee.org/resources/economic-sophisms/ http://fee.org/resources/economic-sophisms/ http://fee.org/files/doclib/20121116_thelaw.pdf http://fee.org/files/doclib/20121116_thelaw.pdf

98 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Rothbard. The excerpts from his book on American history are gut wrenching as they are eye openers.

em3rgent0rdr 11y ago

Rothbard's writings have had a great influence on me.

WBrentWilliams 11y ago

Interesting reading. I think the intellectual mistake the author made is in thinking that one's political dogma (and therefore party affiliation) should not change over time because the party does not change over time. That is, the idea that a political party is the manifestation of an unchanging view. The fun revelation is that business dresses itself up as conservative, then pursues its own ends of profit. That's the entire definition of bourgeois. It is worth highlighting as in many ways, the free software movement is a very conservative one, from the point of view of the way code was shared in the beginning of its history: That is, you asked the programmer who wrote the code you were interested in for a copy and usually got it gratis as the money was made in selling the equipment. The change of label to liberal-radical came later when business started to realize that software, itself, was a sell-able product. The point I'm making is that choosing a side in any two party system is always artificial. Any party affiliation should be viewed as one of convenience. This explains why Bernie Sanders caucuses with the Democratic Party and why both Paul politicians aligned with the GOP. From my standpoint, the only winning play for the individual is to decide what is important to yourself, acknowledge that it will change over time, and remember not to get caught up in the game being played. Your "side", or party affiliation, in fact, should change as your interests change. In other words, don't be proud of your party, and don't overly-identify with said party.

bmelton 11y ago
> In other words, don't be proud of your party, and don't overly-identify with said party. Amen. While I'm inclined to believe that an adversarial Congress is beneficial to the nation on the whole, the zeal with which most Americans seek to categorize themselves into "in-group" and "out-group" members is discomforting. Scarier though, in my opinion, is how quickly the politicians are to capitalize on that polarization, which offers instant and immediate demonification of whomever takes the opposite view; and so long as the parties work like this, nobody notices that so much of the parties' political platforms are not internally consistent, or are even highly hypocritical. Having been swayed by good arguments enough that I felt the need to make sense of it, I was able to divine a set of 'first principles' that I endorse, and policy choices that align with those principles tend to be ones that I approve of, no matter who, or from which party it originates. Of course, being a political chimera makes for often difficult discussions.
- WBrentWilliams 11y ago
  I go a step farther. In my state, there is no requirement to join a party to vote in the primaries. Instead, you simply pick a party for which to vote. I believe the only rational choice is to say "Give me one ballot for each party," which gives close-to-stacked-rank voting for the primary. I still show up for the primaries, as I want the chance to choose who I vote for when I get to the general election. However, such a system makes it impossible for me to consider political office (beyond school board) as my primary declaration is a matter of public record, meaning that I would not pass any test of party purity. What I really want is stacked-rank voting in the primaries and in the general election. I think it would be interesting to see how the general public, used to a Coke vs Pepsi choice, handle a spectrum of choices where you don't have to Pick Only One.
  - bmelton 11y ago
    Agreed again. I'm still dazzled that after all the fanfare and hoopla over instant runoff voting in the early 2000s that nothing changed. Note, dazzled !== surprised, but still. As for parties, I change parties multiple times a year to get the best possible vote I can. Sometimes that means I'm voting for a particular candidate, or set of policies, but sometimes also simply against... and yes, it would completely disqualify us for any public position that couldn't be voted into as an Independent. I wonder what it would take for the issue to get real traction though, as the more and more polarized American society becomes, the more entrenched the two party system feels. Any fracturing of the system is certain to benefit somebody disproportionally at first, and it seems like the timetable for actually making a real push towards it would take longer than the state of public opinion, so nobody moves towards it because nobody knows who will get the advantage by the time it happens. If we accept that the two party system wishes to perpetuate itself, second only to a more monolithic one-party system, then the conclusion seems foregone, but perhaps I'm just being pessimistic. Either way, the parties themselves have shown resistance to warring factions within the party, despite how much they both claim to prefer a competition of ideas.

afsina 11y ago

Rothbard's view on the the issues like state, liberty and war altered my perspective a great deal. Also, this video titled "How Murray Rothbard Changed my Mind on War" may be worth watching to see his influence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBCiMxuX9_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBCiMxuX9_g

ninerdelta 11y ago
Wow this is excellent, thanks for posting.

randomname2 11y ago

Good read. It's scary how relevant this still is, 58 years later.

pinaceae 11y ago

so, against the government and against big business? what's left then? and, awesome how his stance is ultimately self-defeating as any other political direction/movement will embrace the organisation of a big construct. libertarians and anarchists are adorable.

jessaustin 11y ago
against the government and against big business? what's left then? You ask that as if you're referring to two different things.
- Frondo 11y ago
  They are two different things. The government is theoretically accountable to all citizens, and conducts orderly and regularly scheduled changes of power. Big businesses are theoretically accountable to their owners and no one else.
  - mfringel 11y ago
    More specifically, large businesses are accountable to owners with sufficiently large stakes. It's harder to buy votes in government.
  - adventured 11y ago
    Big businesses are also accountable to the jurisdiction and laws of the nation they operate under. In the US, the federal government has universal power over corporations due to thousands of economic regulations, to go with even more powerful national powers related to the IRS, DHS, national security and justice department. To the extent a corporation's home nation has enforced laws and regulations, the corporation must operate within that framework. Try being Microsoft, raise a heavily armed militia in the US and start storming people's homes and threatening politicians, and see what happens to you. The US Government can easily destroy any big business they choose to. They can attack it from dozens of angles. They can compel compliance to programs the corporations do not agree with, which has occurred to eg Yahoo and others with NSA spying. There is still no such thing as a a big non-based corporation, one without an actual home country. There isn't a single actual example of it today.

wes-exp 11y ago

> And this meant that the great danger to the peace and freedom of the world came not from Moscow or "international communism," but from the U.S. and its Empire stretching across and dominating the world. Can anyone explain how this statement makes any sense for a supposed libertarian at that time? Any way you look at it, the Soviet Union 1) suppressed freedom and 2) espoused militarism. I'm puzzled why it seems to get a free pass here.

jessaustin 11y ago
USSR did suppress freedom. It was a state after all; that is the purpose. USSR had a military, but it never received more than a tiny fraction of the resources that USA military received. The CIA and other liars continually exaggerated the strength of USSR military in order to inspire paranoia in the political and media elite, and to keep the world divided in ways that were good for business. Their military still might have been a match for USA military, because keeping armaments manufacturers wealthy was never their purpose in the way it was in USA. Fortunately that test never came, perhaps because USSR believed much of the same hype we believed in USA. The Soviets were constantly afraid of what USA might do, and nearly every action they made was a response to that fear. Thus it was the actions of USA that drove the cold war. The phrase I'd like to examine is "free pass". What constitutes a "free pass"? Would we consider allowing people on the other side of the earth to live as they will to be a "free pass"? How about not attacking those who have never attacked us? Would not spending more than the rest of the world combined on our military deserve the classification of "free pass"? We anarchists are so stupid, please explain it to us.
- plonh 11y ago
  The USSR, by definition, was a collection of countries conquered by Russia. They certainly were rather effective at conquering.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    This map [0] seems to indicate that Russia's maximum extent predated USSR. They only lost territory after that. Of course, they did hold power over most of Eastern Europe for decades, but since that was a result of WWII it is also a fact that predates the period under discussion. [0] http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/map-russian-empire-1914 http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/map-russian-empire-1...

kardashev 11y ago

If only more people read Bastiat... http://fee.org/resources/economic-sophisms/ http://fee.org/resources/economic-sophisms/ http://fee.org/files/doclib/20121116_thelaw.pdf http://fee.org/files/doclib/20121116_thelaw.pdf