21 thoughts on “Paleoconservatives Should Vote Libertarian”

  1. But metaphysics matters
    I just don’t think you can separate the political and moral orders the way libertarians try to in their platform. Here are some of my reasons. The planks on victimless crimes, sexual rights, immigration and abortion, for example, don’t seem at all sensible to me.

    If you’re casting your vote as a statement of principle, why vote for principles that you think are fundamentally wrong because their practical effect as to most of what the government does would be the same? Why not vote your actual principles?

    Rem tene, verba sequentur.

    • Perfection
      I stated my question in such a way as to overcome the bifucated position that most paleo’s find themselves in. The choice must be an imperfect one given the current allocation and distribution of power.
      However, voting Libertarian might be a step in the right direction

      • The Libertarians have too much bad mixed with their good.
        Libertarians would whittle Leviathan down to size, undertake fundamental tax-code reform, and a few other good things. But we’d have legalized opium dens all over the place, hookah-pipe hashish parlors three-to-a-city-block, the triumph of an anything-goes homosexualist agenda together with all sorts of other intolerable sexual perversion and indecency such as legalization of child porn and sex between adults and children and of incest, and of course we’d have totally unfettered abortion from conception to term. Libertarians reject any public (or, still less, governmental) recognition of the existence of morality. They are NOT the wave of the future.

        • Liberty, Libertarianism, Choice, Tradition.
          We must not think in absolutes; the political structure advocated by Libertarians would place the allocation of central power back to a pre-1861 scenario. In regard to political power and morality; this dialog would be back where it should have remained, in the states’.
          At best this would be determined by individuals,communities, and in some states the legislature, depending on the moral/legal tradition in that state.Libertarian conception of Federal Power is essentially the same as Paleo’s.

          • pre-’61?
            For one thing, the only benefit of a libertarian regime that you bring up is a smaller federal government. In regard to moral decisions being made closer to home, NO sincere libertarian would stand for even local laws/measures against porn, abortion, illicit drugs, sodomy nightclubs, and so forth. In fact, in the antebellum years (and long thereafter) state/local laws against such moral filth were in existence.
            I would think that a ‘traditionalist’ conservative would be naturally inclined to ‘absolutist’ thinking (religion, metaphysics, morality), even though realizing that reality can come up far short.

      • Not to mention that on immigration the Libertarians are abysmal.
        Oh, and I forgot excessive incompatible immigration. As regards forced race-replacement, the libertarians would make George Bush, Karl Rove, David Frum, and Ben Wattenberg look like rank amateurs. (The difference between Bush and Frum is the Tranzi George Bush wants forced race-replacement done to every white country in the world so he can make more money from the stock market, while Jewish neocon David Frum wants it done to every white country in the world except Israel so diaspora Jews won’t feel “threatened” by white Christians.) The plan of these race-replacers who are currently in power calls for us to be changed entirely into a mixture of Mexican, Chinese, and Somali Bantu within thirty more years, while the Libertarians would have that same transformation completed in half the time.

        • races replacement
          somalis are no bantus,to considers them as same ethnical group is similar to consider polish-germans-jews converted to catholicism,as similar to many more inteligent,decent and really christian original evangelical white population from usa.Stop race replacement,forced transfer from catholics back to corrupted europe now!.

    • Agreeing to disagree
      “The planks on victimless crimes, sexual rights, immigration and abortion, for example, don’t seem at all sensible to me.”

      Except for the abortion plank, these all seem very sensible to me. I’ll be voting Libertarian this fall.

      Re abortion, I believe that personhood begins at conception and that abortion is therefore murder. See http://www.l4l.org/ for a more detailed explanation of a libertarian anti-abortion position which I find congenial.

      I also believe that Mr Scrooby’s dire predictions about the consequences of a Libertarian administration are overwrought. I see no reason to dignify them with a direct rebuttal. I will only say that he sees conspiracy and ill intent where there is none.

      One more day until the most libertarian of our national holidays! I wonder, however, would the regulars on this site have been on the side of the revolution, or would they have sided with the king? On what grounds?

      • 1776 and all that
        I haven’t studied the history of the time and thought about it closely enough to be sure where I would have come out in 1776, assuming questions about the trajectory of one’s opinions across the ages make sense. Here are a couple of considerations that come to mind:

        1. England had already had its own 1776 and Declaration of Independence, in the form of the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533). So I’m not sure there was any transcendent principle they could point to that justified overriding loyalty.

        2. If that’s so, we seem to be left with questions of substance, whether the American colonies had grown into substantially different societies worthy of a loyalty prior to that owed the royal government in England. If they hadn’t by 1776 it seems likely they would have at some point not too long after that.

        3. It’s worth noting that the inventor of European traditionalist conservatism was somewhat a partisan of the Americans.

        Rem tene, verba sequentur.

        • What about other colonies?
          2….whether the American colonies had grown into substantially different societies worthy of a loyalty prior to that owed the royal government in England. If they hadn’t by 1776 it seems likely they would have at some point not too long after that.

          Why did Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc. never develop into different societies worthy of independence? Why is there no expectation for these places to develop into their own and different societies?

          • Interesting question
            but (due to lack of knowledge) not one to which I have a solid answer. A couple of considerations:

            • They were settled later with smaller populations, so their practical connection to British law, government and policy was much closer and steadier.
            • They’ve all been independent for quite some time, so the real question is why there was a war of independence in America but not those other places. No doubt differences in British policy were part of that.

            Rem tene, verba sequentur.

      • Do I see “conspiracy and ill intent”? DAMN RIGHT I DO.
        (The following, which responds to something in Cato’s comment, isn’t intended for those who view “race, nation, and nation-state” as “dubious concepts.” Discussing these things with those who doubt they exist is a fool’s errand.)

        Joe Sobran sometimes asks (rhetorically of course, since he knows the answer through bitter lifelong observation and experience, as do the rest of us who have asked ourselves the question) whether or not left-liberals can cite a percentage above which government no longer has a right to take away our income in taxes, the remaining portion of income being safe from confiscation: is it fifty percent? seventy-five percent? a hundred percent? What is the percentage of income which we know the government cannot take? He goes on to explain that the left can’t give such a percentage, because in their eyes government has the right to take away all our income. They see it as all theoretically belonging to the government, which can therefore set the proportion it confiscates as high as it wants.

        Looking at incompatible immigration in this way, can’t we ask whether or not the incompatible-immigration enthusiasts are able to cite a level of incompatible immigration above which we dare not go lest the traditional predominantly white population of this country be changed into predominantly something else? After all, there’s no lack of people of other races who want to come: there are a billion each of Hindus and Chinamen who want to come here, not to mention most of Southeast Asia, most of the continents of Africa and South America, and so on. So without limits, we could be changed overnight. If the government can’t cite a figure beyond which it says, “OK, that’s enough—we’re putting a moratorium in place lest immigration change our own population into a non-white one”—if government can’t cite such a figure, even an approximate figure, then, since all this stuff is obvious to any ten-year-old, the government is replacing the race here deliberately: analagously with the case of income, government deems us to have no right to preserve intact any portion of our racial patrimony. (Neither does the Catholic Church, as far as I am aware.)

        Cato writes,

        “[Mr. Scrooby] sees conspiracy and ill intent where there is none.”

        To take the individuals I named in my other post (one could have named many more of them, obviously), Bush, Rove, Frum, and Wattenberg—they all can do fourth-grade arithmetic, right? Right. Therefore they must be forcing race-replacement down our throats (or, for those of them not actually pulling the levers of power in D.C., fanatically supporting such a policy at least) deliberately. They know exactly what lies in store should immigration continue as at present.

        Yes, I see conspiracy and ill intent. Indeed I do, not being blind. Damn right I do.

  2. Libertarians are Globalists
    Libertarians are Globalists; who want “One World” without borders to stop people and trade from freely moving around the world. On this they are no better than the GOPers or the demorats. Basicly they want one world government and are pro-NWO!

    Fred Scrooby is Right!

    “Not to mention that on immigration the Libertarians are abysmal. Oh, and I forgot excessive incompatible immigration. As regards forced race-replacement, the libertarians would make George Bush, Karl Rove, David Frum, and Ben Wattenberg look like rank amateurs.”

    “Libertarians reject any public recognition of the existence of morality.”

    • Libertarians and a shared moral order
      “Libertarians reject any public recognition of the existence of morality.”

      Well, some do. Then there is Charles Murray, who is more realistic on this matter, as it seems to me.

      But there is a not inconsiderable percentage of libertarians who see libertarianism as a kind of ideology. They are the cranks, and they are tiresome.

  3. Libertarians
    Whoever controls the definitions wins here, I guess. What I say could be handles with the rebuttal that I have proven myself not to be a “true” paleoconservative.

    But in a sense the libertarian and the traditional conservative start from positions as opposite as can be imagined. The libertarian starts from some postulated set of abstract individual rights and reasons up; if this leads to some conclusion that would in practice destroy the society we know, such as open borders, then so be it. The traditional conservative starts with some understanding of the good society, and the human good, and reasons down, through the state’s legitimate powers, to the place of the individual.

    For many, this conservative “understanding” is inchoate, which is natural since one of the attributes of a good society is that it leads the ordinary person, who does not think much about these issues, into habits, lifestyles and frames of mind that are suitable to mankind, without having to think about it.

    That is not to say that libertarians and libertarianism are not in some ways congenial to the traditional conservative; I confess to having voted Libertarian once as a protest. The affinity with them owes to two things, I think : 1) conservatives and libertarians are both outsiders, ‘marginalized’, as the buzzword has it, by progressive liberal hegemony; 2) conservatives and libertarians both take these questions seriously, as few others do.

    • Paleolibertarianism
      The intersection of libertarianism and paleoconservatism is exactly what I call, colloquially, “wimp conservatism”. Indeed, it is the opportunist and pragmatic nature of wimp conservatism that make so many of you antithetical to George W. Bush’s Republicanism. In short, “paleolibertarianism” is the Future that Doesn’t Work.

      As I bleed with the neoconservatives, once again surrounded by foes on Buchanan’s drawbridge, I can come to this place, and once again draw hope. Living the nightmare of the New World Order isn’t so bad, after all….

  4. Why the LP?
    I generally consider myself to be a paleolibertarian. In times gone by (and largely forgotten, I fear) I would have aligned myself more closely with anti-Federalists like Geo. Mason than the Federalists. While I appreciate the Libertarian Party (LP) in many regards, I find the non-stance of most LP candidates on abortion unconscionable. I would tend to think that a paleoconservative, for this and other reasons, would be more at home in the Constitution Party than the LP. I, for one, will be voting for Mr. Peroutka in ’04.

  5. Paleos and libertarians
    I have been going to some monthly libertarian party meetings. A libertarian regime would clearly be preferable to what we have now. But I have to wonder if it is even theoretically possible for libertarians to cooperate in anything as serious as electing candidates. Maybe it’s because the party is so small, but the percentage of cranks and flakes among the libertarians seems high to me. Lew Rockwell has for some time recommended not voting at all as the most logical option for lovers of liberty. To vote in a rigged election props up the whole process and lends a patina of legitimacy to the whole charade. He may be right, I don’t know.

    • Libertarians
      Mr. Williamson is correct about the unfortunate number of cranks and druggies hanging out in Libertarian land. They (and the Constitution Party) need to concentrate on builing grass-roots organization and upon getting people elected to legislatures, along with a strategy of playing off Dhimmicrats and Republicans against each other.

      How bad can they get? Well, in 2002 there was a Libertarian candidare for US Senate in a Western state who regularly ingested quantities of Silver nitrate (a toxin), which resulted in white hair and blue skin – the smurf candidate. If half the party caucus is high as a kite, this is what you get for a candidate!

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