Rothbard's "Left and Right," 40 years and a couple of weeks later

After a stellar career as a student, I have become an anti-scholar over the years. I'm big on ideas but short on where they came from - remember I confessed I didn't know who George Mason was a couple of weeks ago. You can get me to read an occasional scholarly article, but don't ask me to engage in in-depth research or spend too much time splitting philosophical hairs.

I say that by way of saying I've been an idiot. Maybe if I paid attention to this stuff, I wouldn't have wasted so much of my life believing Republicans were any better than Democrats and dismissing one form of statism over another.

By "this stuff," I mean stuff like Roderick Long's brilliant lecture, "Rothbard's 'Right and Left': Forty Years Later," which is as solid an hour of listening as I've had in a long time. You can hear it or read it depending on your preference; my commute to the wage-slave job is about an hour so I had an enthralling ride home this evening.

I don't spend much time trying to split hairs between left and right, because I think the real divide is between statist and individualist, but Long does a nice job of deconstructing all the ways that the left is the right is not the left is not the right and how they got all jumbled and confused.

My epiphany in listening was when Long led me to conclude that it makes little sense for individualists to attempt to use the power of the state as a means to an end. I mean, what can you do besides repeal everything - how do you pass laws requiring people to take responsibility for their own lives? and once you require anything of people, haven't you just become a good little statist?

But then Long moved me in this direction ...

"To wield political power, admittedly, is to run the risk of being corrupted; but is such corruption inevitable? It seems like a sizeable bloc of Ron Paul clones in Congress could be pretty effective in scaling back the state without sacrificing any libertarian principle ...

"Perhaps more importantly, however, the assumption that the only alternatives to traditional politics are violent revolution on the one hand and resignation on the other is valid only for non-libertarian political programs. If the realization of your agenda requires the command of state power, then the only alternatives to working within the system are seizing control of government in a coup d'état, and giving up on your political goals entirely. But for a libertarian, political success is less of matter of directing the state toward certain favored ends and more a matter of blocking it from wreaking more evil. Hence while withdrawal from engagement with the state would count as defeatism for statist ideologies, it need not be so for libertarians. Hence Rothbard's enthusiasm for the sorts of strategy he saw himself as sharing with the New Left: education, building alternative institutions, and 'mass civil disobedience.'

"The point is not to scribble libertarian amendments into the Constitution but to make un-libertarian laws unenforceable, to make civil society ungovernable."

If freedom is best defined as an absence of government or authoritarian control, then this approach makes sense: Don't work to pass new laws, just convince folks not to cooperate with bad laws. If you're trying to bring down Wal-Mart, don't agitate to make Wal-Mart illegal, just convince folks not to shop there. Simple, elegant, non-violent and non-statist. I love it.

Now, if I was a scholar, I'd spend weeks working on making the above stream of consciousness flow into coherent patterns. But I'm just going to toss it all out there for now and hope it makes some small semblance of sense. Oh yeah, and if you haven't exposed yourself to Long's lecture, go do that now.