Free The Animal

I really had only a raw sense of my view of the Ron Paul vs. Some Libertarians (note: I am never referring to the LP, unless I write ‘LP’ or ‘Party’) over racists and other bigoted remarks in newsletters published under his name when I wrote this. Karen De Coster does a far more thorough job of it, touches on other idiosyncrasies concerning the libertarian movement, and hashes out some good background. This is an interesting connection I’d never really thought about. One thing rampant among libertarians is their lack of the ambition gene outside of libertarianism and the web. So many of these people have no real job, no career, and in fact, if they can’t align themselves with some small-time, paid position at some libertarian outfit, they remain unemployed. As such, they will do anything to not make enemies in the movement, and in fact they must win friends in order to write columns and hope for paid gigs. They are low-paid and no-paid libertarians. Their perspective on the real world is warped because they sell their principles for a paycheck or a job. I’d always had a sense about that. I think it was Greg Swann who…

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As an opponent of the state on general principle, I often find myself in opposition to other opponents of the state whose principles don’t encompass as wide of a context, or those whose opposition is principally unprincipled, i.e., “practical,” which is to say: pragmatic. Let me be frank: I find it increasingly difficult to draw many distinctions between various forms of state that have existed in history that amount to a damn, and that includes the state of those United. This article illustrates why pretty clearly. That’s George Monboit in the UK Guardian (via Balko) and it’s about the propensity of the British to forget “their own” atrocities vis-á-vis something going on in Turkey, currently. There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain “promotes one key concept that underpins everything else – the idea of Britain’s basic benevolence … Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show ‘exceptions’ to, or ‘mistakes’ in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence”. This idea, I fear, is the true “sense of British cultural identity” whose…

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Whenever it happens that I get into a conversation about public policy, the law, enforcement, and the State in general, It’s quite the norm that in one form or another, I’m told that we need these various laws in order to prevent the various predations that go on round and about. My first query is usually to ask what laws are preventing them from being a bad person. Who would they victimize, in what way, and what would they steal if there were no laws? And most people immediately see where that’s going, but the point, of course, it to draw the distinction that when people talk about the necessity of law and enforcement, they’re always talking about the “need” to rein in other people, not themselves. I have an answer for that, too, and it’s a simple one: I’m willing to take my chances. That’s it. You see, I’m not denying at all that there exists risk from predators, but the real problem with the standard argument for the State as concerns various law enforcement is that it begs the question. That is, it assumes a general effectiveness that’s really not in evidence. Simply: we have plenty of predation…

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