I’m closer to the Front Porchers, for their decentralism and because they make the more penetrating critique of state and society, though if I had to choose a neoteric faction to align with I’d go with the “left-conservatives,” since I would take Dwight Macdonald or Gore Vidal over Wendell Berry. The greatest doubt I harbor about the Front Porchers is whether local communities (as if they can all be described at once) are as really virtuous as the Front Porch Republicans wish them to be. Most of the evils of the world exist on the local level, too — they’re just proportionally smaller. That’s good, but it’s not a panacea.

Consider economics. Ever wonder why Wal-Mart, the bete noire of agrarian localists, grew out of little old Bentonville, Arkansas? It wasn’t an accident. Up to the early 1980s, when I was a kid, the Midwest had a lot of small and mid-sized towns that were commercially underserved — if you wanted to buy a washing machine in, say, Knob Noster, Missouri, you had to drive to a city or big town to buy one. Opening a specialty store to sell appliances was a risky proposition: you couldn’t sell many appliances because there weren’t many potential customers, so making money on volume was out of the question. But charging a high mark up on goods was out of the question, too, because what customer base did exist was not affluent. Wal-Mart grew to colossal proportions because it solved this problem: as a chain, it could make money on volume even in rather small towns. (Though admittedly, not as small as Knob Noster. What happened was that small-ish towns with Wal-Marts took the place of cities like Kansas City as retail destinations.)

Once Wal-Mart conquered the Midwest, it had the means to outcompete East Coast department stores and chains on their own turf. I suspect that a fair bit of anti-Wal-Mart animus began as outraged snobbery from urban and East Coast retailers who couldn’t stomach being clobbered by hicks from Arkansas. (Notably, the stores that Wal-Mart displaced in my home town in the 1980s were not local mom-and-pops, they were Sears and Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney. Those had long before killed off downtown. Later, as Wal-Mart moved into groceries, it did uproot local and regional-chain supermarkets.)

Bentonville triumphed over Chicago and New York. In the process, of course, Bentonville ceased to be what it was, as did many other Midwestern towns, and later town across America. Some places were destroyed outright, booming so long as they had a Wal-Mart, then collapsing when the old Discount City closed its doors and a Sam’s Club or Super Wal-Mart opened two towns over. There’s a lot not to like about the homogenization the retailer wrought. I’m not a fan.

But Wal-Mart was not created by outside forces, by national politicians or big-city bankers. To be sure, the federal highway system facilitated its emergence. But it took the native genius of a small-town businessman to create the monster. (I should note in passing, by the way, that as much as I dislike the federal highways, my own home town is a product of earlier “internal improvements” — it was the terminus of an interstate railway before the Civil War, and is sustained today in part by two U.S. highways and a nearby military base. Just as the local can beget the national, the national can beget the local.)

Many a Rome, New York dreams of becoming Rome, Italy, which itself began circa 753 B.C. as a backwater. Ironically, some of the policies favored by the Front Porchers make imperial outcomes all the more likely — I had a discussion with a Front Porch Republican once about the idea that small towns should pay talented college graduates to return home, on the theory that this would prevent a brain drain from towns in need of intellectual capital. Consider again Sam Walton — the best thing, from an anti-growth perspective, that might have happened after Walton graduated from the University of Missouri would have been for him to leave the Midwest altogether and seek his fortune on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. Instead, the Oklahoma boy stuck to Missouri, Iowa, and Arkansas, and made a revolution.

This flags up one other difference I have with the Front Porch: I have much less faith in what for lack of a better word can only be called social engineering. My faith is in the (mostly) unguided social order. I’m aghast at the ease with which some Front Porch Republicans have embraced Ross Douthat, a self-described Sam’s Club Republican (what could be less localist?) who harbors ambitions of building an information superhighway on the scale of “Lincoln’s transcontinental railroad or FDR’s rural electrification program.” But, hey, he wants to subsidize teenagers who work at Blockbuster video — a putatively pro-family measure.

I don’t buy it. To the extent that I believe any improvements in our world are possible, I think they will almost always be incremental and non-systemic, precisely because the fund of human virtue, even in the smallest, purest places, runs nearly dry.

(All of this is meant in a spirit of friendly criticism. I consider myself about 70 percent Front Porch-y — perhaps 90 percent if Bill Kauffman is the archetype.)

I’ll be watching Bob Barr react in real time to the candidates’ clash (again, assuming it happens) at Reason‘s debate-watch party.

Tuccille is getting modal in his old age, but his youthful memoir, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, is still a classic.

A few thoughts on Tuccille’s complaints against Rothbard: although you could conceivably have several kinds of legal systems develop in a free market for justice, I think a functioning Rothbardian system would include a “loser pays” rule that would mitigate Donald Trump’s advantage in lawsuits. High-power legal firms could offer to represent a plaintiff in a suit against Trump in the hope of getting a big payout if they win the case. The willingness of such a firm to take on the suit would, of course, depend on how strong they thought they suit was. There is a natural balance here: where Trump is plainly guilty or probably guilty of a violation, a firm would be eager to take the plaintiff’s case. Where the suit was frivolous or weak, they would be much less inclined to accept it. Trump would enjoy fewer advantages against poor plaintiffs in this system than he does under the current system — surely Tuccille is well aware that the rich already enjoy the kind of advantages he says they would have under Rothbardian justice.

These matters can’t really be discussed in brief, and I don’t have time to write up a full-scale defense of Rothbardian justice. So, for the time being, I’ll leave my remarks about the judicial system at that. As for “libertarian slavery,” this is a question on which Rothbardians differ, but again keep the parallels to the status quo in mind. Is it really worse to insist that a thief work to pay for his crime (he need not be a “slave” — garnishing his wages may be sufficient) than to throw him into prison for years, where instead of providing restitution to his victim the thief instead becomes a burden upon taxpayers? That’s a poor system for criminal and victim alike. White collar criminals who commit fraud presently go to jail; would it be better or worse if they had to provide restitution for their actions? Or does Tuccille propose something else entirely? And just as there are (officially) no debtors’ prisons today, why assume that debtors will be subjected to harsher penalties in a Rothbardian world? I suppose the claim might be made that we have benevolent government to thank for the abolition of debtors’ prisons, and that without such state benevolence we would go straight back to savagery. I don’t believe it.

Update: David Gordon takes down Tuccille here.

There’s a campaign afoot to save the eXile, as an online zine if not a print publication, but as I typed this post, the eXile website went down, with Verizon kindly informing me, “Sorry, ‘www.exile.ru’ does not exist or is not available.”

An irony here is that Ames has always been even harder on the servile Western media than on the Russian government. For all their talk about human rights and democracy, the Western media loves nothing more than currying favor in Washington by stoking fear about the Great Russian Bear. And now Kremlin bureaucrats have handed their enemies in the Western press a useful bit of ammunition — though as the Nation notes in its current issue, media here in the Free World have been very slow to notice what’s happening to the eXile, obviously enough because the eXile has been a thorn in the respectable media’s flank.

Long-time eXile contributor Gary Brecher, aka the War Nerd, is also an occasional TAC contributor. I’ll blog about the whole story for TAC tomorrow.

As a sign that the “liberty” message, aided by web-savvy grassroots supporters, can compete with the establishment Republican platform, the Paulites’ Internet presence now rivals the GOP online outpost, Red State, which once kicked them off of its site. “We want to infiltrate the GOP and take it over,” says Nathan. To Jeff Frazee, an official Paul organizer, Estey’s Cat Herder is the type of project that will be essential after the Paul campaign officially ends. If the “revolution” is going to influence the GOP to the degree that Paulites hope for, it will be by using tools like this one as well as communication on blogs and forums. These strategies may be catching on because of, not despite, the freewheeling, anti-authoritarian attitude that distinguishes Libertarians from other conservative groups, who have not yet taken to netroots type organizing.

The piece is titled “Is Ron Paul’s Revolution Just Beginning?“

I’m reading Bill Buckley’s posthumous Goldwater memoir, Flying High, right now. Here’s one striking anecdote I hadn’t heard before:

… at this dinner [for the 1950s Freeman], Rand contradicted Mises on some doctrinal point, causing the eminent professor to stop eating and mobilize his scorn and fury on her. Ayn Rand thereupon burst into tears and exclaimed, “You are treating me like an ignorant little Jewish girl!”

Mises jumped up from his chair with joy. “That is exactly what you are! An ignorant little Jewish girl!”

Rand was not one to be crossed lightly. But even she might have known better than to gainsay Ludwig von Mises.

And if you’re in the D.C. area, don’t forget to come to Bill Kauffman’s event at the Cato Institute tomorrow. I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.

While I’m at work on other things, however, I thought I’d throw out a question for anyone out there with technical expertise: is there a particularly good hosting service I should use if I move the Tory Anarchist over to another server? 1and1.com looks inexpensive. I hear BlueHost.com is very user-friendly (especially for WordPress). If there are better services out there, let me know.