If only these older-but-supposedly-wiser geniuses would spare us the dubious benefit of their hard-won “wisdom,” we might find a solution to global warming – just think how much noxious gas would no longer be polluting the atmosphere. ~Justin Raimondo

Mr. Raimondo is skewering Tyler Cowen, Brink Lindsey and the other collaborationists advocates of a new “libertarianism,” who are busily trying to find a modus vivendi with implacable statist forces of one kind or another.  If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?  Raimondo’s impatience with such people, who have suddenly learned to stop worrying and love “positive liberty” (translation into English: trading your birthright for a mess a pottage), mirrors my irritation with such “conservative” luminaries as Sullivan, Brooks and Sager, who are all busily diagnosing where conservatism has gone awry and proceed to tell us that conservatism can only be saved by chucking or repudiating some huge part of what political conservatism has involved for decades.  These new “insights” usually appear right around the time the wise men have books to sell.  Incidentally, this new vogue of libertarians selling out to Leviathan is a strange thing to behold, since it usually means that I, arch anti-libertarian, find myself holding far more libertarian-like positions than many of the perfumed professionals at Cato.  Then again, I support Ron Paul, while these folks probably wouldn’t dream of “wasting” their votes on him.  I don’t know who the candidate of “positive liberty” would be, since I am not fluent in Newspeak and wouldn’t be able to tell you what people mean when they say “positive liberty” anyway.

In Sullivan’s case, there is a lot of whining about abusive, big government, but in the end he can’t actually think of anything on a major policy level that the government should stop doing (and he thinks it should start doing a few other things that it isn’t doing); he also doesn’t like traditional Christians and their dread influence.  Sager joins him in pinning big-government excesses on the Christians, thus making his “libertarian” project and the repudiation of social conservatism the supposed electoral panacea of the GOP (which, besides being exactly the opposite of political reality in this country, doesn’t seem to involve doing anything to reduce the size and scope of government in any way).  Brooks, who has never been on record as wanting to reduce the size of government, at least has a certain honesty in consistently and straightforwardly defending bad positions.  

Mr. Raimondo also notes the bizarre fixation on one element of domestic policy reform as the guiding star of libertarian fortunes in America, namely partial privatisation of Social Security:

These guys are perhaps to be forgiven for overemphasizing the importance of what was, after all, the Cato Institute’s major policy initiative – the partial privatization of Social Security – but was this failure really the major setback for the cause of liberty in the beginning of the new millennium? Doherty, too, seems to fall for this hooey. He opens his book with the news of this supposedly world-historic defeat, a tic he shares with his reviewers, perhaps because all of them at one time or another have worked for Cato. Yet this is more than just institutional bias. It represents a failure to understand both libertarianism and the current crisis of our nation.

This is not really all that surprising, since the collaborationists advocates of a new libertarianism, especially Brink Lindsey, are known to be Iraq war hawks (the Iraq war perhaps being another example of “positive liberty” being wrought on a grateful people).  They would be unwilling to see their embrace of hegemonism as being in any way in conflict with their libertarianism.  Perhaps they subscribe to the Zorg philosophy of life:

[Liberty], which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos!

Bizarrely, many libertarians, whose greatest political asset today should be the traditional libertarian principled opposition to aggression, war and activist foreign policy, have become so intimidated by the pro-war sentiment on the right (or have bought into it themselves) that they have turned most of their attention to domestic policy questions…and consequently discovered that their solutions on domestic policy are horribly unpopular.  Meanwhile, the peace and non-interventionist position that ought to be the universal libertarian foreign policy position would probably be wildly popular with the left and center that some of them are trying to make a deal with, but they actively ignore it and pretend that it isn’t even relevant to the discussion.