To be fair, communities of thinkers create journals and they have to fill the pages of these journals with something. I guess.
For the record, I want a government job where I am allowed unprecedented access to “penetrate” biological processes.
In his 1987 manifesto “Freedom Under Siege: The U.S. Constitution after 200-Plus Years,” Paul wrote that AIDS patients were victims of their own lifestyle, questioned the rights of minorities and argued that people who are sexually harassed at work should quit their jobs.
The slim, 157-page volume was published ahead of Paul’s 1988 Libertarian Party presidential bid and touches on many of the themes he continues to hammer on the stump.
Returning again and again to the of concept of “liberty,” he hails the virtues of the gold standard, attacks the Federal Reserve and defends the rights of gun-owners.
But the book, re-issued in 2007 during Paul’s last presidential bid with a cover photograph of an ominous SWAT Team, has so far escaped scrutiny amid the latest furor over his newsletters.
”In early book, Rep. Ron Paul criticized AIDS patients, minority rights and sexual harassment victims (via ryking)
This is the book I read and criticized the other day, here’s a gem,
Victims of the disease AIDS argue, with no qualms of inconsistency about rights, for crash research programs (to be paid for by people who Chapter 1 - Individual Rights 23 don’t have AIDS), demanding a cure. And it’s done in the name of rights. Victims demand health care as well and scream “discrimination” if insurance companies claim they have a right to refuse to issue a policy to someone already infected with the AIDS virus. The rights of the insurance company owners are not considered, while legislation is passed forcing insurance companies to provide the insurance demanded by the victims. The individual suffering from AIDS certainly a is victim — frequently a victim of his own lifestyle — but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care. Crash research programs are hardly something, I believe, the Found Fathers intended when they talked about equal rights.
What kind of freedom lover makes an honest living attacking AIDS victims and AIDS research? It’s ludicrous even at a superficial level. I began to read the book after in order to clarify a puzzling inclusion into Buzzfeed’s 22 Reasons Ron Paul is Not a Racist.
Thanks to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the book is available for everyone to read here.
I am, within the confines of reason, elated to announce to you that Libertarianism: A Novel has finally been completed and may be found at the above link. This long-awaited aesthetic treatise on the philosophy of FREEDOM and LIBERTY, with a special introduction by none other than Ludwig von Mises, should serve to clarify the various misgivings of those who would seek to castigate individual self-determination and the glory of the free market. Consider this as a warning: to approach this text as anything other than a TRUE INDIVIDUAL one must be willing to risk all of one’s systems and values. The truth is not political, it is just correct.
Special thanks to Sam Stein for cover design/layout, and to Evelyn Pappas for putting me in touch with Ludwig von Mises.
Sharing of the text is encouraged and indeed almost obligatory, though not without the proper adjustments to allow for perpetuation of the free markets whose praises every word contained herein can be said to sing.
For my libertarian lurkers, Happy Holidays!
I am, within the confines of reason, elated to announce to you that Libertarianism: A Novel has finally been completed and may be found at the above link. This long-awaited aesthetic treatise on the philosophy of FREEDOM and LIBERTY, with a special introduction by none other than Ludwig von Mises, should serve to clarify the various misgivings of those who would seek to castigate individual self-determination and the glory of the free market. Consider this as a warning: to approach this text as anything other than a TRUE INDIVIDUAL one must be willing to risk all of one’s systems and values. The truth is not political, it is just correct.
Special thanks to Sam Stein for cover design/layout, and to Evelyn Pappas for putting me in touch with Ludwig von Mises.
Sharing of the text is encouraged and indeed almost obligatory, though not without the proper adjustments to allow for perpetuation of the free markets whose praises every word contained herein can be said to sing.
This is probably the funniest and best greatest thing on the internet today ever.
Your gimmick blog, the one you’re still vainly hoping gets picked up as a book to be made available at Urban Outfitters, will never be as incredible as this. Stop. Trying.
Remember, give me Liberty™ or give me Death™. ©
Having denounced liberals as crypto-communists for half a century during the Cold War, the American right now routinely accuses the center-left of being fascist. This libel was given currency in Jonah Goldberg’s 2009 book “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.” From the support of a few progressives a century ago for eugenics, and expressions of admiration by a few 1920s liberals for Mussolini’s ability to make the trains run on time, Goldberg and others on the right have crafted the latest in a series of right-wing conspiracy theories about American history, this one claiming that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt deliberately set the U.S. on the road to an American version of Mussolini’s corporate state.
Given their professed interest in admirers of Mussolini, it is curious that American conservatives and libertarians have not seen fit to discuss the view of fascism held by one of the heroes of modern American libertarianism, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. In his book “Liberalism,” published in 1927 after Mussolini had seized power in Italy, Mises wrote:
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.
Friedrich von Hayek, who was, along with von Mises, one of the patron saints of modern libertarianism, was as infatuated with the Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet as von Mises was with Mussolini, according to Greg Grandin:
Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian émigré and University of Chicago professor whose 1944 Road to Serfdom dared to suggest that state planning would produce not “freedom and prosperity” but “bondage and misery,” visited Pinochet’s Chile a number of times. He was so impressed that he held a meeting of his famed Société Mont Pélérin there. He even recommended Chile to Thatcher as a model to complete her free-market revolution. The Prime Minister, at the nadir of Chile’s 1982 financial collapse, agreed that Chile represented a “remarkable success” but believed that Britain’s “democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent” make “some of the measures” taken by Pinochet “quite unacceptable.”
Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a “transitional period,” only as long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. “My personal preference,” he told a Chilean interviewer, “leans toward a liberal [i.e. libertarian] dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.” In a letter to the London Times he defended the junta, reporting that he had “not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.” Of course, the thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet’s regime weren’t talking.
The Pinochet dictatorship was admired by the right in the U.S. and Britain for turning Chile’s economic policy over to disciples of Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago, who inflicted disastrous social experiments like the privatization of social security on Chile’s repressed population. Following the libertarian reforms, the Chilean economy collapsed in 1982, forcing the nationalization of the banking system and government intervention in industry. According to Grandin:
While he was in Chile Friedman gave a speech titled “The Fragility of Freedom” where he described the “role in the destruction of a free society that was played by the emergence of the welfare state.” Chile’s present difficulties, he argued, “were due almost entirely to the forty-year trend toward collectivism, socialism and the welfare state … a course that would lead to coercion rather than freedom.”
Friedman politely neglected to mention the lack of political and civil liberty under the Pinochet regime. Many of its victims were drugged and taken in military airplanes to be dropped over the South Atlantic, with their bellies slit open while they were still alive so that their bodies would not float and be discovered.
I think it bears mention that this is less about the actual merits of Austrian economics and more about a complete failure of due diligence on the part of a professed intellectual. Murphy was admittedly responding to an argument that Graeber wasn’t making. The question of whether Murphy’s response is coherent in light of the argument he was responding to is a different question entirely from whether his response to Graeber was misinformed with respect opinions Graeber actually holds.
Well you make a good point, one that I believe Dave addresses in some detail, however his reply to Murphy ends with the following,
At this point, it’s easier to understand why economists feel so defensive about challenges to the Myth of Barter, and why they keep telling the same old story even though most of them know it isn’t true. If what they are really describing is not how we ‘naturally’ behave but rather how we are taught to behave by the market—well who, nowadays, is doing most of the actual teaching? Primarily, economists. The question of barter cuts to the heart of not only what an economy is—most economists still insist that an economy is essentially a vast barter system, with money a mere tool (a position all the more peculiar now that the majority of economic transactions in the world have come to consist of playing around with money in one form or another) [10]—but also, the very status of economics: is it a science that describes of how humans actually behave, or prescriptive, a way of informing them how they should? (Remember, sciences generate hypothesis about the world that can be tested against the evidence and changed or abandoned if they don’t prove to predict what’s empirically there.)
Or is economics instead a technique of operating within a world that economists themselves have largely created? Or is it, as it appears for so many of the Austrians, a kind of faith, a revealed Truth embodied in the words of great prophets (such as Von Mises) who must, by definition be correct, and whose theories must be defended whatever empirical reality throws at them—even to the extent of generating imaginary unknown periods of history where something like what was originally described ‘must have’ taken place?
The emphasis is mine.
Edit: In my experience, Murphy’s lack of due dilligence is quite common at Mises (with a steady stream of people ready to parrot and discredit an entire person’s work because of slander or imaginary arguments made in one post.)
