"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose" -Janis Joplin
Americans love freedom. We cherish liberty. We cheer capitalism. We advocate free markets. We place a high value on individualism. We buy flags, applaud loudly after the National Anthem, chant "USA, USA" and more and more we are attending rallies, expressing our frustration and rushing headlong into.....what?
RON PAUL REVOLUTION: OP-ED PIECES AND TEA PARTY POLITICS:
Left-libertarians tend to eschew electoral politics, having little confidence in strategies that work through the government. They prefer to develop alternative institutions and methods of working around the state. The Alliance of the Libertarian Left encourages the formation of local activist and mutual-aid organizations, while its website promotes kindred groups and posts articles elaborating its philosophy. The new Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) encourages left-libertarians to bring their analysis of current events to the general public through op-eds.
GOVERNMENT IS GREEDY:
The twilight of feudalism and the dawn of capitalism did not find everyone poised at the starting line as equals—far from it. As the pro-market sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who developed the conquest theory of the state, wrote in his book The State, it was not superior talent, ambition, thrift, or even luck that separated the property-holding minority from the propertyless proletarian majority—but legal plunder, to borrow Bastiat’s famous phrase.
Here is something Marx got right. Indeed, Kevin Carson seconds Marx’s “eloquent passage”: “these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” This system of privilege and exploitation has had long-distorting effects that continue to afflict most people to this day, while benefiting the ruling elite;
The “free-market anti-capitalism” of left-libertarianism is no contradiction, nor is it a recent development. It permeated Tucker’s Liberty, and the identification of worker exploitation harked back at least to Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), a free-market radical who was one of the first to apply the term “capitalist” disparagingly to the beneficiaries of government favors bestowed on capital at the expense of labor.
NON INTERVENTIONISM:
These days left-libertarians feel vindicated. American foreign policy has embroiled the country in endless overt and covert wars, with their high cost in blood and treasure, in the resource-rich Middle East and Central Asia—with torture, indefinite detention, and surveillance among other assaults on domestic civil liberties thrown in for good measure. Meanwhile, the historical Washington-Wall Street alliance—in which recklessness with other people’s money, fostered by guarantees, bailouts, and Federal Reserve liquidity masquerades as deregulation—has brought yet another financial crisis with its heavy toll for average Americans, additional job insecurity, and magnified Wall Street influence.
LEFT vs RIGHT - WHICH IS WHICH?
“Capitalism, arising as a new class society directly from the old class society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the land. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege without which its survival is unimaginable.” And this: “build worker solidarity. On the one hand, this means formal organisation, including unionization—but I’m not talking about the prevailing model of ‘business unions’ … but real unions, the old-fashioned kind, committed to the working class and not just union members, and interested in worker autonomy, not government patronage.” These passages—the first by independent scholar Kevin Carson, the second by Auburn University philosophy professor Roderick Long—read as though they come not from libertarians but from radical leftists, even Marxists. That conclusion would be only half wrong: these words were written by pro-free-market left-libertarians. (above passages from American Conservative)
WHY NOT BECOME A DEMOCRAT?
When deciding between the Republicans and the Democrats, why have the liberty-loving libertarians decided to side with the party that opposes most of their goals of greater social freedom and that created many of the economic trends they rage against?
While many of Ron Paul’s supporters may find the suggestion blasphemous, Paul and libertarians like him have a much better chance at enacting the type of changes they want by working within the Democratic Party than they do in the GOP.
Not only are Democrats more open to libertarian social ideals, they are also more closely aligned with the libertarian reductionist views on military spending and foreign wars. Obama has ended the war in Iraq and is scaling down the effort in Afghanistan, objectives libertarians will not see in the current Republican Party.
While the Democratic Party may not match up with the libertarian views on economic issues the Republicans can hardly claim a better track record, leaving the Democrats more closely aligned with the libertarians overall. [USA Today]
Stop and think. Like it is with things like FACEBOOK, when what you are receiving is free, you are not the customer, you are the product. Think, read, research before you join anything these days.
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