For the sake of opposition to statism

and, therefore, for the sake of America, I truly hope the media/political onslaught against Ron Paul is answered by public resistance to media's attempt to silence libertarianism. In a libertarian world, present media wouldn't fair too well, because no one would buy what they're peddling.

Make no mistake, media attacks on Paul are attacks on classical liberal ideas. Nothing scares the statist machine like libertarianism. There's a panicked approach to Paul demonization, because this is the first time since the Old Right made a viable stand in the early and mid 20th century that libertarian ideas have caught hold with the public -- maybe during the Reagan years, but that wasn't really libertarian-influenced. Fear of FDR's dictatorial presidency motivated Old Right/classical liberal popularity. Today, classical liberal ideas are catching hold because the Information Age has exposed Americans to an alternative, a true opposition to statism. Between Bush and Obama and the current congress, Americans realize we need systemic changes, and the Republican Party can no longer present itself as an opposition party without proving it will limit government power. Paul is the only candidate for President determined to limit government power, while congress contains a sizeable group of representatives who are working for systemic changes.

This morning on a MSNBC panel discussion regarding Paul, they were merciless in their attacks, and several stated that Paul represents what's wrong with upholding principles consistently. I suppose this means that consistent application of principles upsets a statist system which values ad hoc expediency. This adhocracy, as William Voegeli calls it, has bogged us down in statist failures which threaten to collapse our economy. Statists are concerned with protecting State power, while our country sinks in debt, economic stagnation and slogs of foreign entanglements.

Yes, Americans need to stand against media and the political class and return to economic means and non-intervention overseas. We've been suppressed by political means and State expansion of power. We can no longer afford to vote for weak alternatives who do nothing to change the system.

The need for a new Old Right

The Old Right of Jay Albert Nock, Murray Rothbard, Frank Chodorov and Roy Childs stood in opposition to the statist transition of the time. Many classical liberals during this period were coaxed into a modern liberal movement influenced by socialism's popularity and the belief that a free market was too disruptive and it restricted America from becoming a Great State which could do good in the world.

In recent times, the Right has been dominated by conservatives who challenge modern liberals for control of a powerful State. Modern liberals have won the war, so far, despite the temporary and incomplete challenge during the Reagan era. Eight years of Bush represented the Right's complete shift to statism. Between the two establishment political parties we witness a battle for power, coercive power through the State. Both are two heads of a basically conservative coin which attempt to maintain a statist, status quo, each with their vision how State power should be managed. There has been criticism during the last couple of decades that the two parties are more alike than different despite the rhetoric during campaigns -- this criticism is mostly true.

The Old Right sought a different kind of power, and there's evidence a new Old Right is emerging, represented by Ron Paul, his son Rand, Gary Johnson and some of the Tea Party conservatives who seek this same kind of power. The Old Right, and I hope it's true of the new Old Right, sought the power of productivity, innovation, liberty, individuality, cooperative/competitive private sector enterprise, artistic expression, a free market of ideas, peaceful trade with other nations, limited government, charity, science, technology and reason. The Old Right fought expansion of State power and railed against interventions overseas which used young men and women as fodder for political ambitions. The Old Right sought the power of creative interaction and free choice in a private realm where individual rights are protected through government limited by the people it represents.

This next year of campaigning will reflect how much influence the new Old Right has in the political realm -- a realm still under the control, however tenuous, of powerful groups bent on central planning and social engineering. It's up to the American people, because the new Old Right should not be an effort to simply put a new face on the tired old mug of statist power -- the new Old Right should arise to empower the private sector and once again focus on nation, country, people and their rights. The new Old Right can perhaps end the deification of State power and start a new chapter in human development, less war and grand designs of power, and more cooperative and productive action in a growing global economy. America is an idea of liberty and rights, not a State, it's interventionist government and a muscle-bound army spread across the globe.

The Centrist movement which basically desires to save the status quo is not what it's billed to be. We don't need cooperation within government between parties to compromise and expand the State's ability to manage our economy and the power structure of the world. We need true opposition to this State management and control in order to find cooperation and compromise and free choice management in the private realm which has been splintered by politics. Harmony and no-labels among State actors is an attempt to marginalize opposition to expansion of State power, so let there be tension and discord in government, and let opposition work to limit coercive State power and to free the private sector. It's our only way out. 

Neo-con infection on the Right

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/09/frum.pakistan.trap/

The influence of neo-cons like Frum crippled the Right and eliminated any bonds to the Old, laissez-faire, non-interventionist Right. Frum represents the sickness of statism as it advances in a powerful country like the US. The hunger for power and domination is voracious and insatiable -- the pride is deadly.

It's this kind of thinking that gets us bogged down and perpetuates never-ending war.

Radical Right

I started this off a few days ago writing about the Old Right which was mostly libertarian. The Old Right came about from around 1920 to 1950 and was mostly an opposition movement fighting against American intervention in Europe, then opposition to the growing statism which culminated in the New Deal. Albert Jay Nock was probably considered the father of the Old Right, although at first Nock was considered on the Left, before the Left embraced the State and war as the progressive routes to equality and social justice, and as a reaction to the Depression which was erroneously blamed on a non-existent free market.

I said in the first post that we need radicals for freedom. The current political fashion is to dull differences and pretend that we're not that far off in our political beliefs, and that compromise and unity can create the world the technocrats intended. The far Left understands the differences between their agenda and the agenda of proponents for limited government and a free market, but the liberals on the Left are pushing for compromise now that statism has shown the serious flaws of which many of us have warned. The far Left honestly wants to destroy capitalism and redistribute the wealth in an American-style statist system.  The liberals cannot let go of their worldview built on the platform of the Democrat Party, but they realize that the libertarian Right has been correct about many economic matters. So, now, revisionists are busy at work blaming the extremes for upsetting the modern liberal vision of technocratic, genteel, polite management from smart, progressive and compassionate leaders. 

Liberals and moderates are still convinced that the technocrats can do it right if the extremes don't pressure their representatives into battles and stand-offs. This is basically what the Old Right fought against to start with when the Left and many who before fought against State power then capitulated after WWI when the vision of Great Accomplishments in social engineering and central planning got their attention. They knew that Hitler and Stalin were extremists and did it all wrong, but they embraced the idea of central control and social engineering done with American style intelligence and compassion.

The fascist ideas were especially pushed behind the scenes by Big Business, because industry captains knew the value of protection from competition. It was the intellectuals, though, who made fascism respectable by giving it another name and claiming grand societal benefits. Almost everyone who realized the benefits of using State power for influence, prestige and protection jumped on board, and, of course, they all had virtuous reasons for doing so.

Many of the liberals going forward were successful upper middle class whites who sincerely saw social engineering and central planning as a way to attain social justice and help those blocked from opportunity. What the liberals didn't realize is it was statism that blocked opportunity, and that statism had been creeping forward since the beginning of America. However, the political class succeeded in framing capitalism as the culprit for inequality and injustice. During the early American years of capital formation, there were many problems in the market, and most of these problems were worsened by government intervention, yet a "free" market received the blame. This path led to the idea of a mixed economy and everyone accepted it as the normal progression of a civilized society -- Europe told them so.

It has only been the Old Right, the libertarians, and limited government conservatives today who've consistently pushed for a limited government and a truly free market. It's been libertarians fighting against overseas interventions, the Fed, monster creations like Fannie and Freddie, regulations which cripple small and medium size businesses while protecting the corporate behemoths like GE and GM.

We don't need luke-warm compromisers and another round of libertarian capitulation, as the liberals want in order to cover up the damage -- no, we need radicals for limited government and a free market. We need to make whatever changes are necessary to destroy statism once and for all, because all that's left is power protection, and efforts to maintain State power are savaging this country's economy and spirit.

Liberals have to return to their roots in classical liberalism and realize they've been mistaken. Many liberals claim we've come too far with statist practices to turn back time, so we have to make small, incremental changes and tweak the system through smart compromises. Even if this is a sincere position, it's impossible, because it's been tried over and over, and all that happens is that the State grows in power, the private sector becomes weaker, and the un-connected lose more freedom.

Whether the libertarian Right loses or not, there should be an opposition, and it should not waver on principles.

More later

Fundamentals of the Right

What are the fundamental characteristics of the Right? Between conservatives, Big Government/statist Republicans and the libertarian Right, it can get confusing, and there's the tendency to throw all factions under the label of rightwing, but each faction can promote very dissimilar political ideas. Conservatives have been divided into social conservatives and fiscal conservatives and limited government conservatives, and then there is overlap between all these. A conservative might be a social conservative who promotes limited government and fiscal responsibility, but herein lies the problem. Many social conservatives who give lip service to limited government actually mean certain limits on government power but not on government power which coerces moral restrictions on behavior. The social conservative will likely oppose regulations which block oil drilling, yet promote regulations which prohibit nude dancing in a city.

The libertarian Rightist will say the government should be limited to protecting individual rights, and that moral issues should be dealt with in the marketplace of ideas,  that government shouldn't have the power to coerce a moral code on free people. The Big Government Republican will support whatever helps the party maintain power. There are some conservatives who now lean toward the libertarian view promoting an avoidance of social issues, and they've received flack from social conservatives. So there are questions regarding the fundamental definition in political terms of what makes the Right the Right. Perhaps the religious/moral faction should be identified more distinctively as a separate group, because the fundamental difference, to me, is between statism and anti-statism.

The history of the Right in Europe is of no help, since the original meaning of protecting the ancien regime and monarchy is meaningless, and when we talk about center-right and far-right and libertarian-right, the differences are so great that the commonality of "right" is lost. What is considered the far, religious Right is different from moderate positions, and libertarian ideas are so different from either that considering them all a part of the Right becomes ridiculous.

The Old Right I've discussed in previous posts was actually libertarianism, but libertarians, although first associated with the Left, were forced into an association with the conservative Right when the Left became statists and war supporters during the New Deal. Anyone who disagreed with the New Deal was automatically labeled a "right-wing" reactionary. Well, if being against the New Deal and world wars was right-wing, then so be it, and libertarians allied with conservatives to fight the statist onslaught of FDR. Since that time, the Right has become more difficult to identify, even identified as war-mongers. Many on the Right are just as statist as those on the Left, they only want State coercion to accomplish different goals. But what about those who want a strictly limited government and a free market? They are still called rightwing fanatics, and they aren't all pure libertarians.

Perhaps Leonard Read was correct, and Left and Right are status quo inventions and "authoritarian" constructs. But distinctions are useful and needed, despite the current obscurantist call for "unity" and no labels. What should be avoided, in my opinion, is a political grouping which restricts freedom. If conservative is to have any meaning in America, it has to mean conserving the original values of market freedom and limited government and non-intervention in international affairs. But if conservative means conserving a strong State that uses coercion to establish a strict moral code and some regulations to assure orderliness in the economy, and military intervention to establish American dominance in international affairs, then there can be no alliance between libertarians and conservatives, just as there can be no alliance between libertarians and the Left, as long as the Left embraces statism and socialist policies.

The only division of Left and Right that makes any sense is in terms of statism/socialism vs a free market and limited government which entails a foreign policy of non-intervention. Social issues are individual and have to be worked out through social means, not political means. There should be an identifiable resistanced movement to statism, and this can be the Right, but if the definition of Right is watered down in conflicting factions, some which are statist in nature, then I suppose libertarians have to go it alone.

More later.