Yesterday I attended a debate hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and the America’s Future Foundation with the timely named motion, “Are Libertarians Part of the Conservative Movement?” Speaking for the case that libertarianism is a distinct political philosophy from conservatism was Matt Welch, editor in chief at Reason. Speaking for the case that libertarians are part of the conservative movement was Jonah Goldberg, author of the New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism and columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Before the debate started I suspected that I would be more sympathetic with Matt Welch’s view. While the two groups are in broad agreement on economics, there are important differences on a number of social issues. As well as pointing out the differences between the two philosophies Welch made the important point that the number of people labeling themselves as Independents is rising, and that this rise is not only an indication of the level of dissatisfaction with the two major political parties, but a reflection of how more inclusive both Democrats and Republicans will have to be in order to achieve electoral seats. Welch jokingly said that the title of the debate could well have been “Are conservatives part of the libertarian movement?”, as the conservative movement began as one which sought to preserve liberty and individual rights, two of the foundations of the modern libertarian movement.

Although Welch mentioned the alternate title of the debate, Goldberg took it further and shifted the debate in an interesting direction. Goldberg said that Welch was right, and that conservatives could be viewed as part of a wider libertarian movement. After all, classical liberalism predates conservatism by centuries and defended principles that the Republican Party, and conservatives more generally, have adopted. As well as the historical and philosophical ties between the two movements Goldberg argued that there were two other areas where there is a huge amount of overlap between the two movements; practical and political.

Practically, Goldberg argued, conservatives already adopt many libertarian economic arguments. Major conservative think tanks and policy groups employ libertarian economists, and it is through groups like these that libertarian economic arguments can reach the widest audience.

Politically there is a good case for libertarians belonging to the conservative family. Ron Paul, the most libertarian GOP candidate in the nomination race, is comfortable to speak about the abolition of the Federal Reserve and the privatization of social security, something that could never be done in a Democratic primary.

What both Welch and Goldberg agreed on was that the level of government spending is the most important contemporary political issue. The country is bankrupt and social security is on track to dominate the federal budget. While this remains the case, it makes as much sense for libertarians to work their way into the conservative movement as it does for conservatives to accept them. Once spending is under control we can argue over whether to legalize meth and prostitution.

Images: shutterstock/ Mark Pockrocki

Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren — the standard-bearer for a combative new progressivism — made the case to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell last night that members of the Senate shouldn’t own stock.

“I realize there are some wealthy individuals – I’m not one of them, but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios” she told him.

Hard to see how Warren wouldn’t be, by most standards, wealthy, according to the Personal Financial Disclosure form she filed to run for Senate shows that she’s worth as much as $14.5 million. She earned more than $429,000 from Harvard last year alone for a total of about $700,000, and lives in a house worth $5 million. [emphasis added]

Warren isn’t calling herself poor, but is saying that she doesn’t own a lot of stock. Buzzfeed put a clarifying update at the bottom of the post, but it requires wading through literally dozens of words to read.

Of polled Republicans, 20% identified themselves as “Very conservative,” 51% as “Conservative,” and 23% as “Moderate.” Amongst independents, 36% identified themselves as “Very conservative” or “Conservative.” A few years ago, findings like these would have been very welcome to the GOP. Conservatism is the dominant political ideology, the incumbent liberal President’s popularity has not topped 47% in the last six months, and the economy is struggling. It sounds like a great recipe for conservative success. Yet somehow conservatives have ended up with a moderate as the front runner.

It is no secret that many Republicans are disappointed with Romney as front runner. Conservative voters in 2012 seem to be sacrificing conservative principles for electability in order to beat Obama, a confusing ranking of priorities considering the similarities between Romney and the President. If we assume that Romney does win the nomination, he is too moderate for some very important parts of the Republican party, such as libertarians and the evangelical right, and will struggle in a general election contest. In order to appeal to those who describe themselves as “Very conservative” or even those who describe themselves as “Conservative,” Romney will need to begin appealing to those more likely to vote for the likes of Santorum or Paul. But it is too late for that.

It seems to me that we both agree on the need for those of us who want to reduce the role of government in the economic and social spheres — and who take action to achieve that goal — to apply the same libertarian principles when dealing with government political-military intervention abroad. But we may be addressing different target audiences.

One problem in any discussion about “libertarians” is coming up with a definition of who these guys are anyway. Free-market conservatives? Republican free marketers? Anarchists on the political right and left? Civil libertarians? Members of the libertarian parties? Social-cultural liberals? Randians?  And the list can go on and on.

I admit that my focus has been on what could be referred to as Washington-centric libertarians, those  politicians, officials, activists, pundits, journalists, academics, think tankers, etc. who proclaim their commitment to free-market principles and are trying to influence the policies that are being made in Washington and those who make them.

In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to argue that decisions on foreign policy/national security are made by small political and policy elite in Washington, unlike, say, education and the environmental policies that are affected by a wider public debate. That explains why a small group of neoconservative intellectuals and operators could play such a critical role in forcing the U.S. into a long and costly military intervention in the Middle East.

And my arguments is that for many reasons Washington-centric libertarians have not played a role as countervailing non-interventionist force in this debate. Or worst, some of them have been applying their libertarian principles to help mobilize support for U.S. political-military interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Policy oriented libertarians have been quite successful in shaping some aspects of U.S. regulatory, tax, environmental, and immigration policies — as practitioners in government agencies and Congressional staffs or as analysts, columnists and television pundits. But they have been missing in action when it comes to the foreign policy and national security arenas. So when Republican officials and lawmakers searhc for foreign policy experts or when the media search for foreign policy pundits they take a look at a list that includes neo-conservatives of various persuasions.

Like Justin Raimondo I hope that Dr. Ron Paul becomes the next U.S.president and that more libertarians get elected to public office and I applaud all those who are trying to make that possible. But until that happens there is no reason why libertarians should not form alliances with other policy oriented types or infiltrate congressional staffs as part of an effort to try to influence the foreign policy debate in Washington instead of agreeing to the current informal division of labor under which they are being tasked to do economic and trade policies and the neo-conservatives are in charge of foreign policy/national security.

Oglesby rejected the “socialist radical, the corporatist conservative, and the welfare-state liberal” and challenged the New Left to embrace “American democratic populism” and “the American libertarian right.”

Invoking Senator Taft, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Congressman Buffett, and Saturday Evening Post writer Garet Garrett, among other stalwarts of the Old Right, he asked, “Why have the traditional opponents of big, militarized, central authoritarian government now joined forces with such a government’s boldest advocates?” What in the name of Thomas Jefferson were conservatives doing holding the bag for Robert Strange McNamara?

Antiwar.com’s Eric Garris further highlights the libertarian side of Oglesby here.

Rand devotees have long drawn sustenance from the contempt that both she and her “Objectivist” philosophy are held in the academy and the press. If she is sneered at by the leftist cultural elite, she must be getting something very right indeed. It would seem, therefore, that few Objectivist collars would have cause to be ruffled by the derision that met Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, released in late April and promptly removed from screens in the weeks after. Rogert Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times declared it to be “the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault.”

But libertarians found themselves miraculously in agreement: the film really is awful. At the Liberty Alliance blog, James Kirkpatrick wrote:

The message of Atlas Shrugged was turned into something [...] clichéd and predictable. It has been scrubbed, sanitized, and made ready for your next “Students for Liberty” meeting so you can encourage more people to vote for the likes of Gary Johnson.

Yet, at the very least, Rand fans thought, the buzz surrounding even a lackluster Rand movie would force her controversial ideas back under mainstream consideration, and popularize her books further, giving birth to a new generation of impassioned Objectivist teenagers ready to dismantle the state and enshrine pure capitalism. But so scant an impression did the movie make, few got wind of its existence, and Atlas Shrugged books sales failed to make their mammoth leap.

What with the spike in sales that did happen in the wake of the financial crash in 2008, when capitalism underwent (and survived) an existential crisis, and a limited but fervent fan base that would leave their apartments to see anything Rand related, an Atlas Shrugged movie must have seemed a sure bet. At the very least it might have attracted funding from some of the many Rand evangelists in America’s business and financial community.

But owing to various snubs from within the Hollywood liberal establishment, the production managed a measly total budget of $15 million, a cast of unknown actors, and a highly limited advertising budget – although it’s cause was taken up by the Tea Party movement and associated organizations such as FreedomWorks, which campaigned for the film to open in more theaters.

Opening on 299 screens in the United States, Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 grossed $4,563,873. To lend this lilliputian performance some scale, consider that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 opened on 4,375 U.S. screens and grossed $273,539,281 and counting. Even with DVD and rental sales, Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 is unlikely to make its money back, rendering a future Rand movie (and an accompanying Objectivist renaissance in popular culture) a dim possibility.

Although Part II and Part III remain slated for release on April 15 in 2012 and 2013 respectively, producer John Aglialoro has recently cast doubt on whether production will even begin. In an interview with the Boston Globe he said:

I learned something long ago playing poker. If you think you’re beat, don’t go all in. If Part 1 makes [enough of] a return to support Part 2, I’ll do it. Other than that, I’ll throw the hand in.

Alright, you might be saying, so he’s a libertarian. So are thousands of Ayn Rand-reading students around the world. No one holding these views ever gets elected to anything important.

That’s where you’d be wrong. Gary Johnson was elected on precisely such a manifesto in the swing state of New Mexico, and promptly set about putting his beliefs into practice. He took the view that there should be as few laws as possible, and vetoed more legislation during his term than the other 49 state governors put together. He cut taxes 14 times and never raised them once. Result? A budget surplus and an economic boom. During Gary Johnson’s gubernatorial term, 1,200 state jobs were axed, but 20,000 private sector jobs were created. And here’s the best bit: he was handsomely re-elected, despite a two-to-one Democrat majority.

At this point, Johnson will need any support he can get. In Gallup’s most recent Republican Presidential Ratings Summary—a measurement of Republican nominees’ recognition and favorability ratings by Republicans and Republican-leaning independents—Gallup didn’t even bother publishing Johnson’s statistics. One might assume that they were too low to warrant publication.

Like many American teenage boys, I grew up listening to heavy metal music. In 1989, a favorite album was “Kill’em All” by Metallica and my favorite song on that album was “Am I Evil?” (a cover of a song by the British metal act Diamondhead). Metallica pondered in the chorus: “Am I evil? Yes, I am. Am I evil? I am man, yes, I am.”

True to metal form, the rest of the lyrics were pretty dumb. Yet, however accidentally, the chorus did hint at the Christian view that man is fallen. Not exactly a theologian at fifteen, to my immature mind the song was good simply because it sounded “evil.” If Elvis Presley scared parents in the 1950s and the Beatles did it in the ’60s, by the ’70s and ’80s predictably rebellious teenagers desired a more extreme music to pacify their usual, rite-of-passage adolescent silliness. For many, heavy metal was it—and the more “evil” the better.

As part of a panel for The American Conservative at this year’s Freedom Fest conference in Las Vegas, speakers Daniel McCarthy, Jon Basil Utley and I discussed the possibilities of the Tea Party and conservatives in general redefining the Right’s foreign policy post-Bush. We each made the case that conservatives should return to a more prudent and constrained foreign policy, based on actual defense and tangible national interests, as opposed to Bush-era nation-building and “spreading democracy” around the globe. One attendee, who seemed to think George W. Bush had already defined the Right’s foreign policy just fine, asked in anger: What “good” was America if we didn’t “fight evil?” McCarthy asked where we might find “fighting evil” in the Constitution. The gentleman walked out.

Like the Metallica song, the man’s comments might have contained a morsel of truth about traditional American character or foreign policy, true or perceived. But the inherent vagueness of his statement more closely resembled my juvenile attraction to the heavy metal concept of “evil.” Both concepts are exciting precisely to the degree that they are void of any tangible meaning. To flesh out either, from mere theory to actuality, not only immediately diminishes their attractiveness but makes them morally repulsive. For metal fans who would champion “evil” or Republican hawks who would fight it—the devil becomes apparent by insisting on details.

“Evil” to American heavy metal fans is mostly symbolic and comedic nonsense. If at fifteen I was intrigued by Metallica, at 36 I was nostalgic for an even more “evil” band of my youth, the legendary “death metal” act Slayer. Attending a Slayer concert in Atlanta last fall, I watched men roughly my age taking their adolescent sons to see this ghoulish group—who sang about death, mayhem, and, of course, the devil. The most charming moments were when Slayer gave friendly acknowledgment to a wheelchair-bound man who was gently hoisted into the air by the audience so that he could get a better view of his favorite band. There was also a young boy sitting next to me, probably about ten, who knew most of the lyrics and when it was appropriate to “bang his head” in sync with the music, with his father helping him along. In fact, the audience was filled with fathers and sons (heavy metal simply isn’t most girls’ thing, young or old) bonding in a similar manner.

Now what would any of these concert attendees—fathers, sons, conservative columnists, the band itself—actually do if confronted in real life by the grisly musical subject matter? Certainly not cheer. Most would probably start praying or even take up arms to defeat the injustice before them. Slayer was once asked where they got their inspiration. They said mostly television.

TV is likely also a primary inspiration for many war hawks. Does the man who insisted it is America’s mission to “fight evil” think we should have US troops in the Darfur region of Sudan? Many American liberals believe we should, yet few if any conservatives think the US has any business there—even to fight mass genocide. Is it America’s role to oust evil dictator Muammar Gaddafi in Libya? Most conservatives now say no, while neoconservatives and Obama loyalists say yes. Should we fight the obviously evil regime in China—or continue borrowing money from them? Parade magazine’s annual list of the world’s worst dictators often includes nations like Saudi Arabia—which is not only an ally but has been regularly ranked worse on human rights abuses than Saddam Hussein or the current Iranian regime. Most Americans would defend their country against any imminent threat—but would most send their sons or daughters off to fight an abstract “evil” of no particular concern to the US?

Many in this country would likely consider their government evil if it sacrificed American lives needlessly in Darfur. How does one quantify evil in Libya—where the resistance to Gaddafi reportedly includes the same radical jihadists American soldiers now fight in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is China not really evil simply because they’re our friend? Is the same true of Saudi Arabia? Anyone would want to “fight evil” in the abstract but the concrete details tend to complicate such arguments.

Christianity (and occasionally Metallica) teaches that all men have the capacity for evil to the extent that they are men. Jesus came to earth precisely to save us from our inherent sin. Today, America remains a good nation to the extent that it retains its historic Christian character—but it becomes prideful and foolish to the extent that it considers itself uniquely suited for a job that, to date in human history, only Jesus Christ has claimed the ability to accomplish.

The armchair generals, Republican and Democrat, Bush and Obama supporters, who would send American soldiers virtually anywhere to “fight evil” are as unthinking and abstract in their foreign policy as they are in defining what that evil is. What I considered “evil” as a teenager was just as abstract—my generation’s version of mindless musical rebellion and a search for identity. Most older metal fans recognize this now; especially as we watch younger generations, often our own children, make the same journey.

But perpetual adolescence is not suitable for practical foreign policy—and those who truly think it is America’s purpose or mission to “fight evil” need to grow up.

Anthony and I both wrote reviews of  Thaddeus Russell’s recent book, A Renegade History of the United States–mine for this very publication–and we spend the bulk of the podcast exploring some of our favorite parts of that extremely entertaining and informative work. We also talk about Anthony’s forthcoming book on habeas corpus, which Anthony argues is something of a double-edged sword. Although habeas corpus often protects individuals from unlawful detention by the state, Anthony describes how it has also been used by people in power to restrict freedom, such as when slaveholders used it to retrieve escaped slaves. The interview is a relatively brief 16 minutes, but I believe you will find each one highly informative.

Paul’s Congressional career, which began in 1976 and spanned 12 terms, is thus drawing to a close. David Weigel provides a retrospective on his years in the House:

Paul will leave Congress next year as arguably the most intellectually influential member of the House of Representatives in a generation. (I write “arguably” even though trying to think of a runner-up is a deeply depressing task.) He was not necessarily a successful legislator. But his career has been remarkable for its consistency.

Starting with an uphill campaign for Congress in 1974, through a wilderness period where he won the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, and continuing with a 1996 comeback that the mainstream GOP opposed, Paul advocated the same economic and foreign policies for 37 years. A call to abolish the Federal Reserve, a campaign to return to the gold standard, a belief that America’s foreign interventionism was illegal and unsustainable: Some of his positions remain on the fringe of politics, but others have proved remarkably popular in America’s center-right party.

…

When he ran four years ago, however, Paul didn’t have any ideological competition. He was solo and sui generis. It was part of his quirky appeal. Now, there are plenty of Republicans who can call themselves his successors, and as long as Barack Obama is president, Paul’s ideas are rolled into the GOP’s double helix. Ron Paul used to be alone in saying no to everything, doubting that the elites were telling the truth. Now, there are plenty of other Republicans who think that way. …

So why did he decide to retire from Congress? The Week has compiled a roundup of opinion on the subject, falling into four categories: “He’s passing the torch to a new generation,” “He hates his job,” “His Congressional district was just eliminated,” and “Paul is going all-in to win the White House.”

TAC contributor Jim Antle offers his take: “By abandoning his House seat, Paul hopes to put all his money, attention, and personnel into the presidential race. That frees up time, resources, and staff for campaigning.” Paul thus has an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of his 2008 campaign and deliver his message through a more focused and professional organization.

Paul campaign insiders believe they have an opportunity to make a statement in the 2012 presidential race. The issues environment, with its focus on debt and government growth rather than war and peace, is more favorable. The field is weaker. Paul’s son Rand recently demonstrated that Paulite arguments can be framed in a way that appeals to a broader range of Republicans.

Whatever the outcome of his presidential campaign, Paul’s influence will continue to be felt in the Tea Party that he helped to inspire, among a cadre of youthful activists, and within a Republican party that is newly receptive to his ideas on spending, war, and constitutionalism—an impressive legacy for a “fringe” politician.

And that undermines Metcalf’s rationale for the original article, which he now explains:

…[I]magine the country had swung to the left over the past 30 years, as far as it has now swung to the right. An entire news network devotes itself around the clock to keeping the left’s Communist fringe in a state of permanent arousal. Its talking heads nightly pound their respective tables with copies of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; its anchors routinely quote St. Simone and Fourier. The message is unrelenting: A libertarian menace awaits us—a world of vast inequalities, poor health care, and slow, chronically delayed passenger trains—should we lower taxes even a fraction…

Reversing ideological polarities, I hope, better measures the extent to which a climate of extremism has become our new normal, while pointing up how willfully distractive, not to say silly, many responses to my piece have been. My interest in Nozick is not pedantic; it is informed by a general reality that I find, to put it mildly, alarming.

Metcalf is correct that libertarianism is growing in political influence, but this idea that we now live in a land ruled by the philosophy of Robert Nozick is just silly. Fox News may be on the right (I know there are people who would contend that point), but with few exceptions, they are not libertarians. They have adopted more libertarian rhetoric as of late, but that’s only because libertarianism is friend only to the party out of power.

Moreover, if libertarianism is such a powerful force in American politics these days, why is it that federal spending as a percentage of GDP has risen from a bit over 18% of GDP in 2001 to 24% this year and is set to climb to nearly 34% by 2035? Why is any attempt at meaningful entitlement reform equated with throwing old, wheelchair-bound women off a cliff? Why hasn’t the defense budget been cut? Why are there still agricultural subsidies? I could go on forever, but it’s clear that government policy is not moving in a libertarian direction–quite the opposite.  The fact that Stephen Metcalf looks around and sees the sinister influence everywhere in contemporary American politics says far more about him than any potential dangers of libertarian philosophy.

Today’s entry is this deeply confused article on the supposedly baleful influence of philosopher Robert Nozick and his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The only proper response to a piece this nonsensical is something like this:

Nonetheless, I am going to attempt to correct some of author Stephen Metcalf’s more glaring errors.

First, the central conceit of the article–or at least the subtitle–is flat out wrong. Nozick did write that “The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate.” Metcalf assumes that this statement is a renunciation of libertarianism, but that’s not what Nozick meant, as Nozick himself explained in an interview shortly before his death:

What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated. I think this book makes clear the extent to which I still am within the general framework of libertarianism, especially the ethics chapter and its section on the “Core Principle of Ethics.”

Sadly, it doesn’t get any better from there. Metcalf quotes Keynes as highly critical of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, claiming that Keynes scribbled in the margins of his copy, “An extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam.” Again, Keynes did write that and about Hayek no less, but the line appeared in his review of the dense economic tome Prices and Production. Liberal economist Brad Delong first blogged this error and goes on to note that Keynes was actually quite found of The Road to Serfdom, calling it ” a grand book….Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.”

Even more importantly, Metcalf drastically overstates Nozick’s importance:

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in ’75, the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

Metcalf may like to think that, but that doesn’t make it true. Don’t get me wrong–Nozick was one of the intellectual giants of libertarianism and made the philosophy a somewhat respectable position among academic philosophers. That’s a very insular group, however, and Metcalf presents no evidence that it was Nozick’s popularity that propelled Hayek and Friedman to their Nobel Prizes. Probably because that evidence doesn’t exist.

A more plausible explanation for the Sveriges Riksbank’s recognition of Hayek and Friedman is that the Keynesian consensus was collapsing in the mid-1970s, and Hayek and Friedman offered alternative theories. The combination of slow economic growth and high inflation known as stagflation is essentially impossible under classic Keynesian models, but both the British and American economies seemed cursed with it in the 1970s. Contrary to Metcalf’s nostalgia, the 1970s were a terrible decade economically, and Keynesian economics proved inadequate to address the problems we faced. I don’t deny that Nozick was a powerful advocate for libertarianism, but the economic crisis did more to shift people’s views on economic policy in a more market oriented direction than any single thinker.

Furthermore, although Nozick played an important role in the history of libertarian ideas, I believe he has been less influential than any of the other big names, by which I mean Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. I’ve been active in libertarian circles for nearly a decade now. I work for a free market think tank. I probably know around 1,000 libertarians personally. Yet I have not heard even a single person credit Robert Nozick for making them a libertarian. I’ve heard all the others–more times than I can count–but Nozick comes up only occasionally as an influence and never as the decisive one. I readily concede that this is not a scientific measure of Nozick’s influence among libertarians, but this is not a huge movement, and after working within it for this long, I think I have a pretty good sense of who the big influences are…or at least a better sense than Stephen Metcalf.

All this might be forgivable if Metcalf’s assault on Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment–which occupies a huge chunk of the article–was accurate and interesting. Unfortunately, Metcalf only engages with a strawman version of Nozick’s argument. Metcalf seems to think that Nozick intended for the Wilt Chamberlain example to be some kind of allegory for the economy as a whole. Instead, Nozick was simply showing why a specific pattern of wealth distribution is impossible to maintain without constant government intervention. As Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long explained in a 2002 article commemorating Nozick’s life and work:

ASU‘s most famous argument–the “Wilt Chamberlain example”–is also its most misunderstood. Criticizing “patterned” theories of justice–that is, those that regard the distribution of resources in society as just only if it fits some preconceived pattern (say, equality)–Nozick asked us to imagine a society that in fact realizes the desired pattern. He pointed out that if people are free to transfer their resources as they wish, the society will quickly deviate from the established pattern, as some individuals, like basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, become wealthy as a result of the voluntary decisions of other members of society who are willing to purchase the exercise of their talents.

If the original pattern is to be maintained at all costs, then the government must “continually interfere to stop people from transferring resources as they wish”; hence no patterned theory of justice can be implemented without “continuous interference in people’s lives” (p. 163). Nozick thus rejected patterned theories in favor of a “historical” theory, according to which a given distribution of resources, regardless of what pattern it fits, is legitimate so long as it arose through a process involving no violations of anybody’s rights.

Metcalf’s abuse of the facts are by no means limited to those detailed here, but going through all of them would require an article far longer than his original. In fact, if Slate removed everything that is incorrect or misleading in the article, they’d soon be left with nothing but prepositions. For that reason, I believe Slate’s editors should retract this piece. Not because I disagree with many of Metcalf’s philosophical principles, although that does appear to be the case, but because even with heavy editing and correction, this article is so fallacious that it detracts from public discourse.

This city is one of the epicenters of the Free State Project, the decade-old effort to build a libertarian beachhead of 20,000 like-minded souls in New Hampshire. So far, 909 people have fulfilled the pledge and moved to the state, and around 50—Freeman thinks—currently live in Keene.

That number undersells the impact this city and these activists have on their movement. Freeman’s FreeKeene.com is a catalog of arrests, protests, and inspiring interviews, most of them in Keene. This is where one activist, Pete Eyre, spent days in jail for wearing a hat in a public hearing, and another activist, Heika Courser, was arrested for displaying her breasts after an artist painted them.

Some more background comes from the New Hampshire Union Leader:

People from the Free Keene and Free State movements have met daily in Central Square since last summer, generally to publicly smoke marijuana. In recent months, the Free Keene group has instituted “Topless Tuesdays” which also takes place in the Square, across the street from Keene Middle School and city hall. …

Dodson said Sunday’s gathering was part of a new event called “night cap,” with people gathering in Central Square at 11 p.m. every night to drink openly in protest of laws prohibiting open containers of alcohol. … The night cap is an offshoot of the daily 4:20 p.m. rallies held to smoke marijuana in protest of state and federal drug laws.

These sorts of hijinks certainly aren’t representative of libertarians in general, or even of the Free State Project itself: as Weigel notes, the Keene wing of that movement is particularly prone to confrontational acts of civil disobedience.

It’s not easy to see what the Keene activists hope to accomplish with these stunts. One of the aims of the libertarian movement is surely to convince others that people can live together peacefully and responsibly without criminal laws forcing them to do so. Holding “Topless Tuesdays” and pot-smoking rallies next to a middle school might not be the best way to achieve this. These sorts of hijinks only make sense if their aim is to persuade all the non-libertarians to move away.

Ron Paul won the debate. Not necessarily the presidential debate that took place this week—but the most important debates now taking place in the Republican Party. Monday night’s event was but the latest example.

Observers who now give former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann high marks for their debate performances are not wrong. Both candidates exhibited well that presidential “style” of so much worth to pundits and voters.

But what about substance? Who best represents the GOP’s current philosophy?

At the second debate of the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, FOX News’ Carl Cameron posed the following question to candidate Paul: “Congressman Paul, yet another question about electability: Do you have any?” The audience laughed as did the other candidates. But Cameron’s condescending question did contain a valid point: What place was there in the 2008 GOP for a limited government, antiwar Republican?

Fast forward: How much room is there in today’s GOP for the Republican model circa 2008? Early 2008 presumed frontrunner Rudy Giuliani garnered much popularity due almost entirely to his aggressive foreign policy. This was true even amongst religious conservatives despite his socially liberal views. Rudy might not have been a constitutionalist, pro-life or pro-gun; but he was pro-war. That was good enough for many conservatives in 2008.

Eventual nominee John McCain had many problems with the conservative base in the last election—not the least of which was his big government record. In McCain’s defense, the Senator’s routine statism wasn’t that much different or offensive than that of President Bush. Luckily for McCain the party agreed and rallied around his “Country First” platform of “100 years” in Iraq and certain war with Iran. Of course, the economic downturn would interrupt McCain’s preferred foreign policy election narrative and America chose a Democrat who promised more jobs and less war.

Try to imagine McCain—whose current passion seems to be cheerleading for Obama’s war in Libya—on this year’s debate stage. It’s now become a conservative consensus that the US intervention in Libya is a bad idea. Candidate Newt Gingrich—a Bush Republican at heart yet deft enough to adapt—was for the Libyan war before he was against it. Populist candidate Herman Cain gave a list of reasons Libya was wrongheaded. Bachmann proudly proclaimed her opposition to the Libyan intervention. Perhaps most amusing was Romney, who said that the US military should not be used to fight for the independence of other nations. This was a complete reversal of his 2008 position when Romney thought that the primary purpose of the US military was to fight for the independence of other nations via his “No Apology” support for the Iraq War.

If the 2008 Republican primaries were based heavily on foreign policy, Monday night’s event did not even broach the subject until 90 minutes into the two hour debate—and there were only two questions from the audience about it. The first was from a Navy veteran with three sons currently serving overseas. The concerned father wanted to know, with Osama Bin Laden now dead, when we would be leaving Afghanistan. The other audience question came from a man who wanted to know how America could afford to have hundreds of bases all over the world considering our debt crisis.

How many 2008 GOP voters were asking when we might be bringing the troops home? How many would have even thought to question America’s global military footprint and tie it to spending? If Bush had intervened in Libya, would these Republican candidates have supported it? In the last election, would Romney have felt compelled to say that our military should be used more cautiously?

The reason foreign policy wasn’t discussed for most of the debate is because the 2012 GOP’s first concern—like much of the country—is the economy. But in 2008, Paul was already warning of the current economic crisis. In fact, Paul’s argument has always been that America is going bankrupt due in large part to an expensive and detrimental foreign policy. The questions related to foreign policy asked Monday were far more sympathetic to Paul’s long held views than that of any other Republican candidate in 2008. The fiscal concerns discussed were a lot closer to what Paul has been talking about for three decades as his fellow and supposedly more “electable” Republicans laughed at such warnings.

Like Bob Dole in 1996, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004 and McCain in 2008, most candidates are quickly forgotten not simply because they lost—but because they weren’t philosophers. Their opinions change with the political wind, as evidenced by many of the candidates Monday night.

But who influences which way those winds might blow? The last real philosopher candidates to get the Republicans’ nod—Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan—had to change their party’s philosophy before winning any nominations or presidencies. This is instructive because it reminds us that changing hearts and minds is just as important—if not more important—than merely winning the next election.

Whether Ron Paul gets the nomination or wins any future debates remains to be seen. Whether he is winning the debate does not.

We’ve seen this type of thing before, but this farce of an investigation from Seattle really takes the cake. The Seattle Police Department in conjunction with the FBI sent an undercover agent, Bryan Van Brunt, to surveil a local after hours party hot-spot and its participants for the better part of two years. The police believed they could use the party scene to infiltrate the eco-terrorist group Earth Liberation Front, expose corrupt local politicians, and bust high level drug traffickers. Through sheer dumb luck, investigators managed to pop a few Honduran cocaine dealers, but they never get any crooked pols, let alone terrorists. But because they need to pin some scalps to the wall, the SPD arrest a few amateur poker players and the unfortunate Rick Wilson on unrelated gun charges. The article is long and well worth the read, but if you refuse to devote the time to this tragi-comic story, here is a key excerpt:

“The degree of surveillance and monitoring has been extremely expensive,” the officer tells Rick, sounding equal parts intimidating and frustrated. “When you’ve gone to the QFC and Corsair and Tubs. Think over the last two years—everything you’ve done in private and on the streets, people you’ve talked to, what you’ve had in your possession, conversations, intentions, plans… I have to emphasize the level of surveillance we’ve run over the last two years. Tell us about all the drug deals in The Yard. You want me to tell you about the red cabinet where you keep the drugs? The cocaine? We have hundreds of hours of surveillance, wire, video…”

“That would seem to be an absurd waste of state financing and funding,” Rick says. “And that actually scares me more than the charges… You guys aren’t after anything bigger than this? This is it?”

Later, Rick asks them pointedly: “Didn’t it, at some point in this investigation, get frustrating to discover that there’s nothing?”

“We have enough to charge you with multiple crimes that could put you away for 30 to 40 years,” the officer snaps back. Later, FBI agent Simmons says, “I hate to keep beating a dead horse, man, but we’ve been looking at you for a year at least.”

“Well,” Rick replies, “that must have been pretty unsatisfying for you.”

The FBI agent doesn’t answer.

The Seattle police seem to think that Rick’s guns point toward some kind of guilt.

“Why the need to have so many weapons on the premises?” one of the officers asks.

“My home?” Rick asks, sounding flabbergasted. “That’s my home. I own a small amount of firearms legally, most of which are locked in an extremely secure gun safe in an unloaded manner. I’m a man from Oklahoma,” he continues, “and there’s no such thing as a man from Oklahoma who doesn’t own a firearm or two. Even the hippies own guns.”

The agents sit silent, seemingly flummoxed. They’ve pursued this target for years, luring him into a bust that they hoped would scare him into giving up some valuable intelligence about domestic terrorists, or city politicians, or at least some drug dealers. But they’ve fundamentally misunderstood their own investigation.

This story fits into a national pattern of law enforcement going to great lengths to prosecute people who are perceived as serious threats to national security, but who are (for the most part) just people with big mouths and weird lifestyles.

Former Chicago Tribune reporter Will Potter, author of Green Is the New Red (just published by City Lights), says that after years of looking into these kinds of cases, he’s never figured out exactly why the FBI is doing this: “The best explanation I ever heard was from a former FBI agent. She said: ‘In the 1980s, it was drugs; in the ’90s, it was gangs; and post-9/11, the institutional focus of law enforcement is terrorism.’”

Potter says, “This case you’re looking into sounds like one of the extremes among the extremes.” The Bryan/Rick investigation isn’t an anomaly—not just a couple of crazy cops on a tear—and Seattle isn’t the only community where the FBI and local law enforcement have teamed up to investigate people for what DK Pan’s attorney David Whedbee calls “their beliefs and expressive conduct.”

“This has happened quite a bit,” Potter says. “I don’t mean to be too glib, but if it can’t find people committing so-called ecoterrorism, the FBI seems willing to create ecoterrorism and then arrest people for it. It sucks to put it in those terms because it sounds so conspiracy theorist, and I don’t want it to sound that way. It’s not the norm but it’s increasing that the FBI is clamoring for these arrests and is willing to break the law in the process.”

Not only did this extremely expensive investigation fail to find anything remotely close to what the police were looking for, it appears that Bryan Van Brunt was actually encouraging criminal activity to justify his job:

A Cafe Corsair regular remembers Bryan asking him one night if a certain security guy was armed. “I said yes. He said, ‘Good, we should encourage that,’” the regular remembers. “Now you have this cop who built this place, condoning and encouraging sales of drugs to an uncontrolled demographic of people and that they be policed with guns.”

The whole investigation was clearly a fishing expedition designed to ensnare people whose politics run counter to those of the Seattle Police Department. The surveillance expanded to such a scope that the author of the article discovers that investigators kept information on him because of his coverage of the 2008 Republican National Convention. Such political persecution should never happen in a free society, but we have unfortunately allowed the government to control so many facets of our lives that law enforcement can find legal justification for even the most far-fetched witch hunts.

Link via Jesse Walker at Hit and Run.