Well, it appears that Mises Institute Chairman Lew Rockwell will publish a new book that he describes in his article this week, Against the Left.
I think it’s a good thing to expose and critique those on the Left for their hypocrisy and ignorance, and their favoring violence over peace, and their favoring State control over freedom.
But sometimes, especially in my reading LewRockwell.com every day for years now, it seems that recently perhaps Lew has become more “Against the Left” than he is “Against the State.” It’s just my own perception, but that’s how it seems, especially with the immigration issue.
So, I’ll get my more critical points out of the way at the beginning here.
As Jacob Hornberger has pointed out many times, most recently here, the closed-border “libertarians” seem to endorse the police state on the border when it comes to immigration. What happened to free-market capitalism? And private property rights, in which a private property owner has the freedom to invite whomever he wishes onto his own private property?
And what happened to the principle of individualism? If this individual over here is not suspected of having violated the person or property of another, then you leave him alone. Period. Wha happen? Now, immigration “invasions” seem to be turning people into collectivists. (Maybe Lew has been listening to too much ditto-head talk radio?)
The closed-border libertarians don’t seem to want to bring up the reasons why there are caravans from Central America going to the southern U.S. border, which include mainly the U.S. government’s evil “War on Drugs” and the U.S. government’s aid to Central American governments who have been tyrannizing innocents in those parts.
Yes, LewRockwell.com and Lew’s own LRC blog and “Political Theatre” have had plenty of articles on the U.S. government’s prohibition of drugs and the police state that goes with it, but they seem to not make a linkage between the immigration problem and those statist policies.
And by the way, Rebecca Gordon has written on Tom Dispatch a somewhat decent article on those main causes of people fleeing those Central American countries. But an extra, made-up cause she wants to throw in there, to completely ruin her article, is “climate change.” Yes, besides the “War on Drugs” and U.S. government aid to tyrants, climate change is making people flee Central America and want to come to the U.S. And Gordon throws in this lie, citing the New York Times, that the U.S. is the “biggest carbon polluter in history,” when we know that the U.S. has become one of the least of the polluters (with a few specific exceptions like Los Angeles), certainly not as bad as China and India. But I digress.
It’s too bad the people on the Left can be very good in their anti-drug war, pro-civil liberties, anti-war views, yet still cling to propaganda when it comes to their anti-capitalism, anti-progress agenda. And that’s all the “climate change” fanaticism is all about: envy, and using the powers of government to steal even more from the workers and producers of society.
So, there definitely are still some things I agree with, in Lew Rockwell’s critiques of the Left. But he doesn’t define what “the Left” actually is. I’m sure he does this in his new book that is yet to be published.
And what actually is “the Left”? And what is the “right”? I used to see it as collectivism versus individualism. But many people on the “right” today are against individualism, against the free market, and against private property. They endorse the statist drug war and its police state, the war on immigration and its police state, they love and worship government police and military (which are products of socialism, not capitalism, by the way), and they also endorse and love huge socialist government programs, such as Social Security and Medicare.
In his article, regarding education Lew Rockwell mentions that the “young people are not taught about the evils of the Left, only its myths. They do not believe there were gigantic atrocities in the Lenin-Stalin Soviet Union, nor Mao’s China. Socialism is good!…”
I think he means that the young people are not taught about the evils of socialism or communism, i.e. the State. (Maybe “the Left” = socialism?) And on LRC he posted a link to an article by Lawrence Ludlow on how much worse the government schools are now than they were 30 years ago. The emphasis is now on grade curving regardless of performance.
Education being centralized, bureaucratized and run by the government are why we have so many dumb and ignorant students being graduated from the government schools, and why so many government teachers are also dumb and ignorant. In that article, Ludlow didn’t mention affirmative action or higher education, but we see just how bad affirmative action is when a con artist like Elizabeth Warren — white as a ghost — can scam Harvard University Law School into hiring her as a professor based on her checking the “minority” box and claiming to be Native American. She should have been criminally charged with fraud.
And Ludlow did mention the transgender phenomenon. In schools, the teachers and students are encouraged or even required to use plural pronouns such as “they” instead of “he,” “him,” “her” and “she.” But this is incorrect grammar. These are schools?
No, the schools are leftist cult indoctrination centers. The evil leftists, or “cultural Marxists,” are using very personal and private sexual matters to manipulate and twist the very young people’s sense of self worth and individual identity, as well as destroy their critical thinking skills and keep them ignorant of facts, truth, knowledge and history, and attempting to prevent the young people from going on to live a healthy, functional life.
And back to Lew Rockwell. And this is probably just a minor issue, really, with Lew. In this recent interview with Mises Institute President Jeff Deist, Rockwell said, regarding Supreme Bureaucrat Brett Kavanaugh and his recent confirmation battle, “And also it’s important to see the feminists defeated. So, I’m glad he was confirmed…”
Well, Kavanaugh may have won the seat on the Supremes, and defeated the feminazis who made things up to falsely accuse him of sexual assaults, but he is NOT anti-feminist, or anti-SJW. He is one of them. As I wrote here, Kavanaugh had stated at the beginning of his confirmation hearings, “Title IX helped make girls’ and women’s sports equal. And I see that law’s legacy every night when I walk into my house, as my daughters are getting back from lacrosse or basketball or hockey practice.”
What? That’s how Kavanaugh sees the “legacy” of Title IX? Are you kidding me? The true legacy of Title IX is many false accusations against innocent men at universities and colleges, professors being demoted or fired, employees being harassed or fired at workplaces…And Kavanaugh has NO idea of all this, because he spends too much time at his Washington cocktail parties, the bubble baths, and he himself has now been a VICTIM last Fall of the “legacy of Title IX”!
So, sometimes I wonder if Lew is more anti-Left than he is anti-State. He is glad that Kavanaugh was confirmed even though Kavanaugh is himself a leftist, a Big Government police statist combined with being an SJW. The worst of the worst.
Someone who is more anti-State than anti-Left would hope for Kavanaugh to be defeated, regardless of the false accusations against him.
In my view, if we had to choose between the Left or the State, I would say that we don’t need the State, and in fact we need to get rid of it, or at least the centralized State especially the U.S. government in Washington.
We need to persuade people to see the Leviathan in Washington for what it is. Even letting the fifty states have their sovereignty and independence as nation states, by way of peaceful, voluntary decentralization, would be a MUCH better start than the tyranny of enslavement we live in now.
And without the Regime in Washington, the Left would not have any power. So, we can live with a “Left” in our society, especially when those people have no power structure to grab onto and to use as an implement of totalitarian power and control over the rest of us.
And speaking of that, I also wanted to address some things in this other recent interview of Lew Rockwell by Atilla Mert Sulker. Lew says he’s “pro-nationalism.” And he says, “It’s only recently that you’re supposed to hate your homeland, and turn it over to whoever wants to come in on welfare.”
Well, I think he’s distorting things. Personally, I don’t “hate” my homeland, USA. I’m indifferent, because this “homeland” country is too big. I have no feelings toward most people in California, for example, me being from New England. (But I DO hate Connecticut, not the people, but the state in which I grew up. Now it is a communist, tax-thieving torture chamber. Who in his right mind would live there? Should I consider that my “homeland”? And love it?)
But the centralized “homeland” USA needs to be decentralized, in my view. And turning our society over “to whoever wants to come in on welfare”? This is a case against the welfare state, not against freedom of movement and people finding a better life. With no welfare state (and no income tax thefts, etc.), there would be no incentive for any would-be layabout parasites to come here.
But Rockwell also says, “And also, I notice that all the bad people in society hate nationalism, and are always denouncing it, whether it’s the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or academics, or left wingers…”
Excuse me, I am not a nationalist, and I am constantly criticizing the idea of nationalism, which is a form of authoritarian collectivism, by the way. Does that mean I’m “bad”? But I’m peaceful, a voluntaryist. I’m in my mid-50s and have never committed any criminal or violent acts against others. I’m not exactly a “left-winger” in my support of voluntary exchange, private property rights, and ending government schools.
And I do agree with Lew in that interview regarding the Libertarian Party, which has gone down hill since the days of Ron Paul and Harry Browne. Lew said, “But I must say that I don’t think the L.P.’s strategy of reaching out to the far left- you have to, for example, be a feminist, to be a libertarian, or all these other things. That’s just ridiculous. But they’re much more concerned with leftism, than they are with freedom.”
Sadly, the Libertarian Partly has become the party of “social justice warriors” in which just about everything is “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” etc. So it’s “Racist, racist, racist!” (and “Russia, Russia, Russia!” too, now) with many of those brainwashed, government school-“educated” sheeple. Just like the progressives and Democrats. The Libertarian Party needs to become the party of freedom once again, not just another party of the Left, like the Democrats, Republicans, Greens and Socialists. And that means being 100% against foreign interventionism, income taxation-theft or wealth taxation-theft, and being 100% supportive of private property rights, voluntary and free exchange, voluntary contracts, and the idea of self-ownership and the non-aggression principle.
Anyway, the Left is very bad. But the State is worse. And the Left could not do nearly as much damage to us were it not for the unnecessary existence of the State, especially the evil centralized State in Washington. But a book titled Against the Left by Lew Rockwell is probably something to look forward to reading.
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