Taking Liberties

I have noticed that a number of people have been directed to my blog the last couple of days via a website monikered Kent for Liberty, and I want to welcome all my new readers of the Randroidal Mean White Muscular Baby Jesus Teabag persuasion to my wingnut chestnuts anthology Dispatches from Libertopia. May you all become regulars here!

Kent, the one who is "for liberty" you may remember, is a self-described "hooligan libertarian" with a big battered hat and a big battered beard to prove it. He is the creator of a variation of the "Don't Tread on Me" flag in which the snake in question has raised and opened its fanged head and which is now captioned "Time's Up!" -- and I daresay all you hippy homogay wanton women uppity negro islamofascists know what that means...

When they are not being corralled over to Amor Mundi, his blogroll recommends to his readers' attention the ministrations of "Crazy for Liberty," "Calling John Galt" and "Ammo.net" ("Time's Up!" indeed). So, it is hard to imagine a more sympathetic group of folks to be reading the off-the-cuff commentaries of a nonviolence-trained vegetarian queergeek democratic eco-socialist aesthete academic like me, I must say.

Of my various "Dispatches from Libertopia," Kent declares: "It would be simple, though time-consuming, to answer each of the 46 (Roman-numbered) points and utterly destroy them." Alas, though, "they aren't even worth the effort," only the effort required to let everybody know how simple their utter destruction would be is worth it. And I did so want to know what such "utter destruction" would look and feel like, especially italicized like that and all.

Kent does go on to say of the slogans and formulations of my anthology that they are "stunn[ing]" and "sadden[ing]" and "willfully stupid" and "pathetic" and "stink-nuggets," so perhaps that litany provides a glimpse of what the utter destroy[ing] of my observations might be all about were it worth the effort. I leave as an exercise for the reader whether an extended refutation in that manner would be worth their own time and effort. My favorite comment to his post may provide some further glimpse of what such utter destruction might consist: "OMG! 'Just - WOW!' is right. I couldn't even get through all of them. What planet is this guy from? It is simply amazing, the level of ignorance AND stupidity displayed by some. And to think, he's 'taught' others at Berkley [sic]. Sigh---"

Of course, my "Dispatches from Libertopia" are not intended as fully elaborated arguments, but as slogans, comebacks, condensed summaries, dot-connections mostly provided for those already convinced or at any rate those already sympathetic to politics located in the social democratic to democratic socialist spectrum which is the street where I live myself. It is hard to imagine many arriving from precincts so far rightward as Kent's who would be open to such unqualified and impatient declarations. But I would like to think that some of the zingers at least might nonetheless sting a little, might suggest unfamiliar concerns or provide unexpected connections that might make the more occasionally or accidentally thoughtful libertopian pause in his tracks and entertain a more capacious politics.

Kent is especially contemptuous about my apparent confusion or conflation of his brand of anarcho-capitalist "libertarianism" and Republican Party conservatism, but of course I'm not so much confused about this but simply disagree with him on this question. I am, as it happens, painfully aware that market libertarian ideologues as well as pampered not-particularly-thoughtful "cultural" libertarians are often eager to declare their never to be realized fancies about "spontaneous order" and magical thinking market-fairy pseudo-economics and reductive models of "rationally self-interested" marauding human behavior as profoundly distinct from the conventional conservative Republican politics that pays endless homage to so many of these death-dealing platitudes.

Indeed, libertopians, I find, are quick to distance themselves from any ill-effects arising in the real world of any kind from the sorts of arguments they make in public places or which find partial realization in actual policies in any measure, always insisting on the logical chasm that separates their abstract edifices from ugly realities -- usually as a prelude to insisting that the catastrophes inevitably resulting from their ugly and idiot ideas demand next time around that we implement the ugly idiocy even more earnestly, devotedly, intensely, uncompromisingly, whereupon, this time, this time surely, it will be heaven and not hell that bulldozes bloodily forth in Libertopia at last.

As I say, it is not that I am confused as to Kent's viewpoint, so much as that I remain absolutely unpersuaded by it, and for reasons I have not exactly made a secret of. They need not take it from me, just read a little Keynes (Essays in Persuasion are readily digestable), Polanyi (The Great Transformation is indispensable), Galbraith (American Capitalism, The Great Crash, The Affluent Society, any will do, and his son is not bad either, I must say), Krugman (the later, the better, heck just read his blog and column for free), and Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. These are not only right on the money, as it were, but quite as popular and polemical as the countervailing libertopian "essential reads" tend to be, and whether or not they convince you they certainly should give you pause. Like them tho' I do, I'll admit my own readings take me to more radical eco-socialist and basic guaranteed income sorts of places, but I won't expect miracles from people who think of the terminally awful Ayn Rand as some kind of eminence grise.

Kent and his compatriots might be stunned for all that to know that I have actually read Adam Smith (both volumes of Wealth of Nations, not to mention books of his they haven't even heard about I daresay), Ricardo, Bastiat, Hayek, Mises, Hazlitt, La Rand, the Friedmans pere et fils, and have even taught their works as rhetorical efforts at Berkeley (yes, it is spelled "Berkeley"), and that I for one try to understand the views with which I disagree on terms that would grasp their appeal to others the better to understand and combat their force. No doubt, this provides further evidence of my sad stubborn stupidity, don'cha know.

As I mentioned already, my "Dispatches from Libertopia" aren't exactly arguments that reflect those patient attentive engagements so much as the strength of the convictions that arose from them and the urgent effort to combat against what I have come to regard as dangerous and deranging in them for those who already mostly share my convictions in these matters. But, be all that as it may, again, all are welcome here, enjoy as you will your contact with my alien perspective, and know that I wish you all the best (except for hoping, you know, you totally lose and stuff).