Thornton said,

There are some reforms that we obviously do not want and that will not work. For example, we don’t want the supply-sider solution of the Federal Reserve targeting the price of gold—that would be very dangerous. We clearly do not want a “new Bretton Woods System,” whatever that would amount to….

We also do not want to return to a gold-exchange standard where governments are in charge of most of the gold and emit paper notes for people to use. This approach is unnecessary and inevitably harmful when too many notes are issued not matched with a corresponding amount of gold.

We actually do not even want to return to a gold standard system which still leaves government too much room for manipulation. In fact, we want no standard at all. “Standards” in money imply government regulation. Such a regulatory role resulted in the problems of bimetallism where government establishes a fixed ratio of gold to silver. As soon as reality deviates from the plans of government bureaucrats, either gold or silver money virtually disappears from circulation.

That’s the problem with libertarianish political campaigns like Ron Paul’s: as pro-liberty and anti-State as they were, his solutions had to be framed mostly within the context of the State, its Constitution, and what (some) people find acceptable. (Obviously most people in the world found Ron Paul’s ideas not merely unacceptable but downright horrific.) But his solutions were still somewhat Statist and too often based on “Constitutionality.” Ron Paul proposed, and has long advocated, abolishing the Federal Reserve and replacing it with nothing. This is good; it is very pro-liberty and pro–free market. However, he promoted, and has long advocated, returning the U.S. dollar to the gold standard. A truly free society has no currency/commodity “standard,” at least not one imposed by a monopolistic authority; any such standard would be mandated by the matrix of billions of free-market decisions that occur every day.

I think Ron Paul knows that true individual liberty, true free markets, and true Austrian economics demand that no gold standard or silver standard or any other standard be applied to our currency from on high. But he can’t propose that because it is too anarchist for mainstream tastes. Again, he isn’t mainstream, but there is a limit to the extremity of libertarianism that he can propose, framed by our Constitutionalist/democratic-Statist mindset.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Sunday that she and running mate John McCain lost because the Republican ticket “represented too much of the status quo.”
[...]
“I think the Republican ticket represented too much of the status quo, too much of what had gone on in these last eight years, that Americans were kind of shaking their heads like going, wait a minute, how did we run up a $10 trillion debt in a Republican administration? How have there been blunders with war strategy under a Republican administration?” Palin said.

“If we’re talking change, we want to get far away from what it was that the present administration represented, and that is to a great degree what the Republican Party at the time had been representing. So people desiring change, I think, went as far from the administration that is presently seated as they could. It’s amazing that we did as well as we did.”

The way I see it, and the way most people whose opinions I value see it, the Obama regime with a Democrat-controlled Congress will most certainly not give us any substantive change. There will still be high taxes (probably higher), bad inflation (probably worse), corporate favors and bailouts (probably more), destructive military interventions (possibly more), civil liberties violations (surely more), and restrictions on all kinds of social and economic freedoms (most definitely more). On the very issues for which the left-liberals hate the neocons the most—war, corporate favoritism, and civil liberties violations—Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel have not only explicitly stated that they concur with the neocons, they have not only stated they plan to continue neocon crimes, but they have actually acted in support of neocon crimes by voting for them and associating themselves with others who also actively support them. They are lying, manipulative, opportunistic charlatans of the worst kind. They are war criminals who belong in prison, and at the least they should have been impeached for violating their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution. As flawed as the Constitution is, if they can’t even be held to the standards of their own office in their own government, then there are apparently no standards to hold their conduct to.

The fact that they dress up their criminal complicity in heinous war crimes and civil liberties violations with fancy rhetoric, awe-inspiring optimism, and lofty promises makes them even worse than anti-intellectuals like Sarah Palin, who does not speak in Washington-speak and does not rely on chicanery to win gullible voters.

As flawed as he is and as flawed as it makes me, I, of course, supported the only politician in either major party who proposed real change, Ron Paul. (I’d say Ralph Nader probably supported some pretty substantial changes, many of which I would abhor; Justin Raimondo would disagree. Some contestants for the Libertarian Party nomination, most interestingly Mary Ruwart, also stood for real change, as did Harry Browne, but with even less exposure and less of a chance than Nader or Paul.)

Luckily for my libertarian conscience but unluckily for the real world we all live in, Ron Paul never came close to any office higher than the House of Representatives; for if he had been the GOP nominee, I would have been tempted to vote for him, as a positive protest-vote against the last 8 years of neocon rule. A protest-vote for the other Republocrat or for the Libertarian is one thing, but when your own party’s candidate leads a rebellion against your monstrous regime!… But the rest of the country didn’t want real change, or was fooled into believing an increase in the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, a continuation of the PATRIOT Act, the 2008 FISA Amendment, a monstrously relentless drug war, and Krugmanesque economic ignorance was substantially different from continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, continuing the PATRIOT Act, worsening the already-terrible FISA law, a monstrous drug war, and Krugmanesque economic ignorance.

If the rest of the country had wanted real change, Ron Paul or someone similar would have gotten the Republican nomination and I probably would have been one fifty-millionth responsible for whatever he did as president, if he had won. But, alas, if a large proportion of the population were pro-freedom and anti-State enough to support semi-libertarians for president, then voting for them wouldn’t even be necessary and my innocence could be saved, for peaceful secession and true agorism could be within our reach.

This desire, delusion, fantasy, whatever you want to call it, that registering a protest-vote for a third-party or other alternative candidate actually does any good was almost vindicated yesterday. Ryan McMaken wrote that with 50% of Montana precincts reporting, Ron Paul appeared to have cost McCain that state (assuming all those Paul voters would have or could have been potential McCain voters). This is because at that time, the number of votes for Ron Paul was greater than the difference between Obama votes and McCain votes, so if all those Paul votes had gone to McCain, McCain would have passed Obama.

As it turns out, after all the precincts reported their numbers, McCain won Montana anyway. But it was kind of interesting to think what kind of message that state could have sent the GOP and the nation: one big reason McCain would have lost Montana would have been glaring at them loud and clear and quantifiable—those 10,000 or so Paul votes from disgruntled conservatives. It would send a much stronger message than if all those people had stayed at home, in which case the idiots in the media and the government would report, “Voter apathy among Montana’s conservative base cost McCain the traditionally red state…” Ahh, well, ’twasn’t meant to be. It seems like it never is.

There was a time, I vaguely recall, when Digg was a must read. Nearly every item unearthed some smart, interesting bit of inside knowledge, tech news before it became mainstream, fascinating observations that you would otherwise miss. Back then, the algorithms determining what got on the front page were susceptible to what people later called “gaming,” which meant that groups of people with special interest would work together to drive things to the front page.

I haven’t followed this very closely, but I gather than sometime within the last year, there was an effort to democratize the process, and the algorithms were changed. Now diggs from similar IPs that mutually dugg some previous item are discounted as a possible sign of gaming. What this new system did was disempower the micro-oligarchies that had previous arisen to promote obscure stories that should be of general interest.

Now, the stories that hit the front page are truly more “democratic,” and read like it. Specialization and sector-specific knowledge is discounted. You hardly ever discover things for which you are grateful. It is more like the mainstream news, like an electronic version of stuff you see at the checkout counter at the grocery store. Right now, for example, I see items like “The 15 nuttiest celebrity stalkers” and “15 Futuristic Green Housing Innovations.” Yuk. The promoted stories are those that are dugg by the most diverse groups of people, which is to say that we end up being alerted to what people already know.

Another user-submission-driven “news” site is Fark.com. I have written about why I abandoned Fark.com about a year and a half ago: the idiocy, hatred, and ridiculous bias (basically: Statolatry) exhibited by its users in the discussion threads drove me to anger and sadness far too often. Farkers are, by and large, hateful and intolerant people.

When I’m really bored at work or want to put off going to bed for another ten or fifteen minutes, I might visit Fark. I have done it probably five or six times this year. One of those came last night. I eventually came across this discussion thread started by Drew Curtis himself, the proprietor of Fark.com (who, as far as I can tell, is a fantastic and down-to-earth guy). His post was about the way they moderate the forums—mainly, how they determine what level of trolling or douchebaggery has gone too far and deserves temporary or permanent bannination.

In discussing the nature of the Fark community and how it differs from other news/politics/discussion communities, Drew wrote this:

A lot of other communities, mainly news aggregators, try to adopt the democratic model of posting stories and links. This works great until you factor spammers into the equation, then everything goes to hell. You also run into issues with something I like to call “tyranny by well-organized minorities”. Note how Ron Paul supporters were able to effectively dominate social news websites during the primary election season.

Well, putting aside the differences in semantics—Jeffrey Tucker differentiates between “micro-oligarchical” link submission and “democratic” link submission, whereas Drew seems to say “democratic” link submission and “tyranny by well-organized minorities” are in the same category—there is an interesting point in there.

First, for those who don’t know much about Fark.com: Fark has always been driven by users’ link submissions, which are either “green-lighted” or “red-lighted” by Drew and other moderators; they decide what is worthy of their website and what isn’t. If they don’t think it’s all that interesting, or funny, or unique, or capable of generating some kind of good discussion, or if someone already submitted the same story with a different URL, it gets dumped. Or, if it’s mid-day in the U.S. and the moderators have a lot to do, they’ll just purge the entire list of un-moderated links and start green-lighting and red-lighting them when submissions die down. The number of times a URL is submitted has nothing to do with where it is on the page or whether it gets seen by Farkers; green-lighted links appear in reverse-chronological order and can only be submitted once, ever; any time a user attempts to submit a URL for a second (or third, or millionth) time, it doesn’t get submitted because it was already either green-lighted or rejected. So volume of (attempted) submissions is irrelevant.

So Fark’s status as a both-user-and-moderator-driven site basically makes the whole democratic link-submission vs. well-organized-minority link-submission thing irrelevant for Fark. Still, I detect no small amount of disapproval of the democratic and oligarchic link-submission algorithms of other sites in Drew’s post. He thinks well-organized minorities detract from the quality a website by propping up their pet stories or their pet issues to the top of the page.

It’s too bad I saw Drew’s post a day and a half after it was posted; if I had seen it shortly after it was posted, I would have commented that a “democratic” and an “oligarchic” link-posting algorithm are actually pretty different (though still unlike anything Fark.com has ever done), and the former is of almost no value to anybody. I would have echoed Jeffrey Tucker’s comments, which happened to be posted on the same day as Drew’s post and which I had already read. If you want a news source that doesn’t have artificially-propped-up stories about Ron Paul and Ralph Nader, you can try any of the following venues:
abcnews.com
cbsnews.com
msnbc.com
cnn.com
cnbc.com
news.yahoo.com
news.bbc.co.uk
msn.com
aol.com
foxnews.com
news.google.com
ABC World News
CBS Evening News
CNN
Fox News Channel
MSNBC
CNBC
CNN Headline News
Newsweek
Time
U.S. News & World Report
Forbes Magazine
Financial Times
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Los Angeles Times
Chicago Sun-Times
local newscasts and every other newspaper on the planet

There is a reason every major media outlet ignores people like Ron Paul and Ralph Nader: they’re giving their customers what they want. But there’s a good reason the customers don’t want stories about Ron Paul and Ralph Nader: the media don’t cover them very much, at least not compared to more mainstream candidates. (Though, as Gene Callahan pointed out in a blag post I cannot find, there were a pretty fair number MSM articles and stories about Ron Paul during the primary season. Okay. But not nearly as many as the more palatable candidates, which is, again, understandable but still biased.)

My point: if you want a news site that is indistinguishable from all the rest and tells everyone what they already know (or gives them useless claptrap), “democratic” link-submission is the fastest route there. “Tyranny by well-organized minorities” at least separates your site from the crowd. Oh, wait, that’s the same thing Jeffrey Tucker wrote. Well, I put mine in the context of Drew Curtis’s blag post…

Perhaps you’ve encountered this analogy, which does not violate Godwin’s Rule. In Nazi Germany, Jews were kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, and murdered solely because of their religion. Determining that some people are evil and need to be punished unmercifully and then exterminated simply because of the religious community they were born into is a monstrously evil way to decide anything. Therefore, if you objected to being kidnapped and murdered, because you were not a Jew but a Christian, you have used their criterion (religion) to avoid punishment, which means you have consented to their method of deciding who should be kidnapped and murdered. The only moral way to object to their decision to send you to a concentration camp would be to persuade them that you have harmed no one and their actions are wrong, and not mention religion at all. Right?

The point is that if you’re forced into an objectionable situation, playing by your captors’ rules and trying to improve your situation and that of others by allowable means is not necessarily evil. That alone doesn’t make voting in any and all democratic elections moral, but it makes it understandable. The problem is that voting in democratic elections, even for candidates who are (practically) anarchist and who have no chance of gaining control of the State, doesn’t tend to improve anyone’s lot; furthermore, it’s possible that increasing voter turnout by our participation in election day can actually harm others (or everyone), and improving your lot by doing harm to others is not permitted under libertarian morality.

It is argued that high voter turnout harms everyone because it strengthens the notion of the legitimacy of democratic elections in the public’s minds. This reminds me of what Herbert Spencer said. The Statists will use any excuse they can muster to maintain and expand their power over us, and will misconstrue any action on our part as representing our consent to their rule. If we vote, even for an anti-establishment and anti-State candidate, then they misconstrue that as our agreement that the election was the right way to choose our masters and therefore we must agree to live under the rulers chosen by that method. If we don’t vote, they take our apathy as a lack of objection to the democratic system, so we have no right to complain about the result the mob forces on us.

I’m not sure that high voter turnout increases the legitimacy of democratic elections in the minds of the public or in the minds of the professional criminal class; I’m pretty positive low voter turnout doesn’t decrease the feeling of moral superiority and legitimacy that our masters in the State feel. They are so consumed by moral indignation and elitism that they would hardly be humbled by being empowered by only 10% of the populace as opposed to 50%. How many people freely voted for Josef Stalin, Kim Jong Il, or Saddam Hussein, over numerous alternatives? I am skeptical of the libertarian claim that if voter turnout decreases to an embarrassingly low level, politicians will interpret that as a rejection not only of their platform but of the entire mob-rule system, and work to reform their ways so as to allow humans to govern themselves.

I guess it’s possible that if voter turnout decreased to 10% or 20% in a presidential election year, a major outcry from the media and politicians and activists would lead to discussions and analyses of the disillusionment that led to such low turnout, and a few libertarian perspectives might be discussed, so this would provide an opportunity to popularize the libertarian message. Especially with the internet. Not so much the mainstream media.

But the goal of the agorist movement is not to get a majority of people to vote for Harry Browne and Ron Paul, and continue voting in libertarians who will decrease the size of government gradually until our government is so minarchist that anarchism seems feasible, desirable, and obvious. The real agorist ideal, which all libertarians should subscribe to, is to live and work outside and above and around the State to such a great extent, and augment the black and gray markets to such a great extent, that large numbers of people become impractical for the State to govern and individual secession becomes feasible.

I’m not sure which route to freedom is faster or easier, but there don’t seem to be many reasons to keep our hopes resting on the first one.

The best reasons I’ve heard for libertarians to vote are, first, as an active protestation against the corrupt and immoral government that insists on deciding things by mob-rule. (This is as opposed to the passive protest of non-participation.) I suppose the only ways to claim moral superiority in this case would be to vote for someone who obviously has no chance of winning, who wasn’t expected to win by his supporters, and who only represents a protest-vote, an anti-vote; or, to vote for someone who opposes aggressive force of all kinds and therefore endorses the elimination of the State altogether, both in his jurisdiction and across the world. (Note that this second type of candidate is, in reality, automatically also the first type of candidate.)

I don’t buy the argument that the anti-establishment candidate and the protest-vote constitute an endorsement of the mob-rule system, just as I reject the idea that avoiding the Nazi concentration camp based on your religion is an endorsement of the religious-discrimination system of Nazi Germany. The problem is that our masters in the government and their myrmidons in the public take voting as implied consent to the mob-rule system. Not that they need our consent to see it as legitimate, seeing as how our philosophy of peace, liberty, and individual sovereignty are so far off their radar that they would take our opposition to mob-rule as evidence of its correctness.

Another understandable reason, in my mind, is to vote for publicity. Vote to increase the visibility of the general libertarian (even if it isn’t real libertarian) message. There are good points in opposition to and in support of this. In opposition to it is what I talked about above: increasing voter turnout, even if it’s for anti-Republocrat, anti-establishment, anti-State candidates, might increase the general air of legitimacy that the professional criminal class and, especially, the dumb masses assign to the democratic process. They won’t see this protest-vote as an actual protest-vote, unless they pay close attention to the actual issues, and they’ll just see the large number of votes for “alternative” candidates as proof that their beloved, rigged, two-party system does still allow for non-mainstream possibilities. Interestingly, however, the public’s widespread approval of mob-rule provides a particular argument in favor of promoting anti-State candidates. The public at large does not pay attention to, and in fact hasn’t the slightest cognizance of or interest in, libertarian philosophers or economists. They think that monster Hillary Clinton and that charlatan Barack Obama had significant differences in policy positions. They think those two dolts Hannity and Colmes represent the opposite ends of the political spectrum. They pay attention to electoral politics and presidential candidates! Introducing people to the libertarian philosophy in a very non-pushy way, a way that they see as more normal and acceptable—via support of or at least partial agreement with minarchist political candidates—is, I think, a good way to spread the message and increase the effectiveness of libertarian education. Better than sending your friends links to LRC columns or Proudhon essays, or getting into deep economic/philosophical discussions with them. Save that for later.

As an example of the potential effectiveness of spreading the libertarian message through semi-libertarian political candidates, ask yourself how many average but freedom-minded Americans had gotten up in arms about the Federal Reserve, one of the most insidious and destructive institutions of our corporate-state socialist system, before Ron Paul’s anti-presidential run? Compare that to how many average voters were converted to an anti-Fed, free-market-currency philosophy by Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard. I’d guess not nearly as many, since we’re counting average American voters, not hardcore libertarian blaggers like you and me. I know two hardcore liberal Republocrats who took note of that issue and agreed with Ron Paul about it. It isn’t much, but I’d argue that his candidacy did a lot of good to introduce people to some issues they wouldn’t otherwise pay attention to.

Maybe I’m letting my fairly enthusiastic support of Ron Paul, driven largely by the LRC machine, bias my thoughts and excuse what doesn’t deserve excusing. I wanted more people to know that small government doesn’t have anything to do with the Republican Party, that the real anti-Republican in this presidential race was Ron Paul, not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, and that if more people were exposed to a fairly popular and somewhat-almost-mainstream presidential candidate, then a few more people would learn something about the smaller-government movement in the United States.

For some reason, the LRC blag no longer has a blagroll, but back when it did, consider how easy it was for an uninformed conservative/undecided potential voter to search for Ron Paul and reach an anarchist left-libertarian web page. Someone hears how many young activists are supporting Ron Paul at rallies and on the internet, and they see that he’s around Rudy Giuliani’s or Mike Huckabee’s numbers in some primaries, and they notice the curiosity that he seems to be a “conservative” Republican who is staunchly anti-war, and so they search for Ron Paul news and commentary. They come to the LewRockwell.com blag, click on Roderick Long’s link in the blagroll, and after one search and two clicks they find themselves at the web page of a hardcore left-libertarian philosopher. One more click and they’re at either Charles Johnson, Kevin Carson, David Friedman, Gene Callahan/Bob Murphy, Arthur Silber, Sheldon Richman, Stefan Molyneux, or Agorism.info, the Center for a Stateless Society, or the Ludwig von Mises Institute. All anarchist libertarian sites. They might also click from Dr. Long’s blag to Reason’s Hit & Run, not real libertarianism but perhaps somewhat unfamiliar minarchist-civil-libertarianism.

So using the democratic-election machine to promote directly anti-democratic and in fact entirely anti-State ideals works some of the time. Maybe the bad offsets the good, though. Still, playing the Statists’ game and using their system against them is not wrong. People believe in the State and they pay attention to candidates and elections. If Ron Paul and Harry Browne popularized a watered-down version of libertarianism, and stimulated people to research, read, and learn about real libertarianism—which they did—then publicity for some broadly libertarianish platform is a perfectly just goal to shoot for. It is not saying the ends justify the means, and it is not saying if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Libertarians around the internet, especially those who strongly advocate implementing agorism in practice, talk a lot about how this isn’t practical yet and we should still focus on the education phase of agorist libertarianism, to convert more people to the philosophy of freedom and increase the number of people we can trust and freely trade with, and increase the impracticability of being governed by the Leviathan State. So promoting and talking about, and sometimes actually voting for, mostly-libertarian political candidates is something I support and engage in for publicity and education purposes.

I think the best argument against libertarians voting for other libertarians is that it doesn’t result in any shrinkage of the State and only ends up watering down parties and candidates that had a chance to be truly libertarian (like the LP), and so gradually seceding and becoming ungovernable by the State will be more effective at achieving freedom than voting for less and less government until it is voted away. And that promoting the message of semi-libertarian candidates for educational and proselytization purposes in the meantime is unacceptable for other reasons. If you agree with my assertion that promoting semi-libertarian candidates (or even pure libertarian candidates like Mary Ruwart, as Roderick Long did) is an acceptable and effective way to spread the libertarian message to people who don’t want to hear about Rothbard or Tucker or your philosophy of the nature of human beings’ relationship with one another, then you can see why I excuse libertarians who endorse and even vote for minarchist candidates.

Call it my Statist indoctrination, but I am actually kind of disappointed there are no libertarian presidential candidates to vote for. If I learn that there are propositions in my state or district that I want to vote for or against (all to decrease the size and scope of government, of course), then I will probably write in my own name in the president section. No one is fit to govern me except myself.

This probably rankles many libertarians, but, I figure it’s good to be rankled every once in a while, especially by your philosophical allies. Maybe I should give myself agorist demerits à la Roderick Long.

Now, I find myself strikingly in accord with Roderick Long, who embraces both camps and takes nearly everyone as an ally as long as they are principled in their demand for non-coercive governance. When I first read them, I didn’t find anything I majorly disagreed with in the following blag posts, and I doubt I would today if I scrutinized them:
If you vote, vote for Ruwart
A crossroads in Denver
Agorist education versus partyarchist education

I’ll write more about why I don’t have much problem with the Libertarian Party or Libertarians but why I do have a problem with Bob Barr, in a few days. Right now I want to quote some astute passages from Francois:

No political means have ever produced lasting freedom. Political means can engender nothing but the sustenance of political means. Only disengagement and principled resistance can produce lasting freedom.

With very few and very temporary exceptions, no government has ever been made smaller by political means. No successful movement for freedom in history has ever been guided by any other principle but disengagement and principled resistance.

From Étienne de la Boétie, 16th century precursor of the modern Anarchist movements, to Murray Rothbard, founder of the modern Market Anarchist movement, all are in agreement: disengagement is the best way to oppose the ever-growing State.
[...]
You believe in smaller government. We are on your side. But libertarianism cannot be fulfilled by political means, and it cannot be fulfilled by violent revolution. The only way through which libertarianism can be fulfilled is disengagement. This is the method that Market Anarchists have always preached and followed.

How can disengagement succeed where political means and violent revolutions fail? Because the State can only survive when we, the people, believe in its legitimacy and treat State law, State “justice,” war, taxation and democracy as “necessary evils.” If a mere 10% of the people in any society refuse to vote, refuse to pay their taxes, refuse to recognize the legitimacy of State courts and the State police, establish their own voluntary courts and security, and promote a peaceful, voluntary way of life to the majority, then the State will be exposed as the criminal gang that it is.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, ‘But what shall I do?’ my answer is, ‘If you really wish to do any thing, resign your office.’ When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.

Henry David Thoreau

But most of you do not want Anarchy. This is well understood. However, some Market Anarchies in the past have had a legislative or law enforcement structure (e.g. the well-documented example of Iceland). I would like to submit to you that the establishment of such a structure is far more likely than any Libertarian political victory. Once the State is dissolved, I believe that most people will readily join the principles of freedom that you espouse: “as long as you don’t harm me, I won’t harm you.”

Ron Paul had a lot of good ideas, but he was wrong about one thing. He believed that the “role of government” was to protect and serve us. No government in history has ever done this. The role of government is to cheat, steal, and kill, for the profit of its members. We constantly observe this to be a fact in all its actions.

Hitch your wagon to ours. We have the ideals, the arguments, and the methods to change society forever. With your help, we cannot fail.

Who said the following:

Here’s the truth: the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn’t have a single one. But when the world was on the brink of nuclear holocaust, Kennedy talked to Khrushchev and he got those missiles out of Cuba. Why shouldn’t we have the same courage and the confidence to talk to our enemies? That’s what strong countries do, that’s what strong presidents do, that’s what I’ll do when I’m president of the United States of America.

If you guessed Ron Paul you would be wrong.

The correct answer is Obama. Despite the fact that strict non-interventionists like Paul have stated similar statements over the past several months (decades even), it is not until the “credible” frontrunner says it that it becomes a widely-cited talking point. [emphasis added]

A quick Google search finds that Paul stated something very similar more than 6 years ago:

Even at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union had missiles pointed at us from 90 miles away in Cuba, we solved the dispute through dialogue and diplomacy. Why is it, in this post Cold War era, that the United States seems to turn first to the military to solve its foreign policy problems? Is diplomacy dead?

In fact, Ron Paul has said similar statements many times. Back on November 11, 2007 Paul was interviewed on Face the Nation and he said:

I fear our policy towards Iran is a threat. [...] We [should] have a more sensible policy, we talk to them and trade with them. We remove the sanctions. I mean, the Soviets had 40,000 of them. I was called up for military duty in 1962 during the Cuban crisis. The height of the Cold War and we won the Cold War, we didn’t have to go a nuclear war. We won that by being strong by talking to the Soviets, we talked to Khrushchev. We have a lot more than Iran, Iran has none.

Tim Swanson goes on to cite example after example of Ron Paul saying similar things, recently, on nationally broadcast programs, about Iran’s and the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities.

COVER THE PEOPLE WITH IDEAS THAT MATTER, WITH A MOVEMENT THAT REPRESENTS AND STIMULATES REAL CHANGE, INSTEAD OF WORSHIPING AND DROOLING OVER MEGALOMANIACAL, FREEDOM-HATING, ESTABLISHMENT STATOLATRISTS WHO ARE LIKE YOU!

Young people are tired of hearing about Iraq, and they gave up getting angry about its steep death toll and mounting costs a long time ago.
[...]
Sad as all this is, it’s tough to blame anybody my age for this indifference. Why should we worry when we have no personal stake in the conflict?

I can’t help but imagine that the tone in high school was different in 1970, as the Vietnam War raged and 18-year-olds were sent into its deadly grinder. There must have been anger and no small amount of fear. The idea of a draft is almost laughable today. So we don’t worry. We live our lives.

With a few notable exceptions, the public has shown a remarkable placidity about the war in Iraq, an indifference that must be attributable in part to the absence of a draft. Students, the usual anti-war activists, have been largely silent. We don’t support the conflict, as polls show. Even so, we have done little to make our government uncomfortable, little to demonstrate our disapproval. Perhaps, as a nation, we have outgrown the antics of the Vietnam anti-war movement.
[...]
American students have an obligation to be outraged about the war in Iraq — not just disapproving of it. We need to make this administration and the remaining pro-war lawmakers start to worry.
[...]
[I]t’s difficult to summon outrage because we have not been asked to sacrifice anything. Is it possible to summon deep-rooted anger for a war for which we were never asked to sacrifice anything?

First of all, the idea of military slavery is not almost laughable today. As long as there is the distinct possibility that a maniac like John McCain or a psychopath like Hillary Clinton could be the most powerful person in the world, or that someone equally bad could take power in the near future, there is always the improbable but significant possibility that military slavery will return to America.

I make my prediction here and now that during my lifetime, there will be substantial talk and considerable fear of military conscription of United States citizens. I will not go so far as to predict it will happen (yet), but I think there will be a much greater danger of it. You can chastise me for making such a non-qualitative and therefore rather subjective prediction, but, fine, I still think we’ll hear talk about it sooner rather than later, from elected criminals. Furthermore, I predict that those politicians will be on record as opposing the draft before they made the suggestion that we reinstate it. (I’m aware of Sen. Charles Schumer’s suggestion that we enslave young adults in the Army in order to dissuade the neocons from continuing their aggressive foreign policy or expanding their wars of aggression.)

Outside of military slavery, how else do the absurd domestic and foreign policies of the Republocrats impact us directly? Why does this kid think “we have no personal stake in the conflict” and “we have not been asked to sacrifice anything”?

Perhaps he hasn’t heard of the Patriot Act, President Bush’s wiretapping executive order, his martial law executive order, the increasing militarization of police departments across the United States, the record incarceration rate of American citizens, the violent America-hatred the Republocrats have inspired abroad, the inefficiency and harassment we are subjected to by the TSA, the national ID card (Real ID) that will be forced upon us in a few years, the incredibly bloated budget the Republocrats justify by citing and distracting us with the War on Terrorism, or the fact that we have devolved so far as to debate whether the Supreme Court should hear a case on whether the Second Amendment applies to individuals. I seriously doubt this green and idealistic kid is aware of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, libertarians’ searing criticisms of the very existence of the Federal Reserve, or the arguments by a presidential candidate in favor of returning the dollar to a gold standard and abolishing the Fed. All these State-caused factors reduce our quality of life in important social, cultural, and economic ways.

All of these are direct or indirect results of the Imperial Federal Government’s aggressive foreign policy, its War on Terrorism, and its homeland security obsession.

The out-of control spending, inflation, and the State’s efforts to fix the economic problems it caused are the worst, and these are all facilitated by the existence of a war because domestic spending and intervention always increase in wartime, as the professional criminal class (and most of the public) are more prone to support governmental expenditures and interventions if “national security” (!) is at stake. The economic consequences of the last several decades and the Bush regime in particular should not be overlooked, especially by young people who are going to be left with these burdens by the Worst Generation. As Lew Rockwell said, “Crush an economy and you crush civilization.”

However, Peter Fulham makes some good points and I’m glad I read his column. Young people don’t do enough to show their anger, loudly and publicly, about the Imperial Federal Government’s foreign policy, specifically its wars of aggression and further incitement of terrorism. And our professional criminal class isn’t scared enough of the ire they raise among young voters, or old ones, for that matter. The government doesn’t fear the people; the people fear the government, and that is why there is tyranny.

I wonder if part of the insufficient-anger problem can be explained by a lack of strong, well-defined moral-political principles among young Americans. Now, it could be that I’m biased and I think anyone who doesn’t espouse moral principles based on self-ownership and private property rights doesn’t have really strong political principles. However, as I’ve written before and will write many times again, most liberals and conservatives seem to arrive at their political beliefs by envisioning how they want the world to be or what they want fixed, and then supporting political candidates who promise to use the coercive power of the State to achieve those ends. This is not morally principled. This is saying the ends justify the means, and the ends are good so the means must be.

Libertarians, on the other hand, have a very strong conviction that the State is evil always and everywhere, and its very existence should be fiercely opposed, and so we oppose its military adventures as a corollary to that. Our principle is that people have the innate right to do what they want with their lives, liberty, and property, and that this right applies equally to everyone at all times; and the form this takes regarding politics is that taxation and other activities of monopolistic states are evil and immoral.

Perhaps a lack of such clear, absolute, logical, and well-defined morals makes young Americans oppose Bush’s foreign wars specifically and not American foreign policy in general. How many young people spoke out in anger against Bill Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia and bombings of Iraq? How much principled opposition was there among youths to Madeleine Albright’s monstrous assertion that, even though the embargo on Iraq weakened Saddam Hussein very little and caused the starvation of millions of Iraqis, “the price is worth it”? How many young liberals who oppose the Imperial Federal Government’s pro-Israel policies would oppose a more pro-Palestine foreign policy equally as vehemently? How many young liberals who opposed the Bush regime’s invasion of Iraq would, equally as strongly, oppose an Obama administration’s intervention in Sudan’s civil war? How many young liberals who didn’t like the first president Bush’s “Blackhawk Down” fiasco in Somalia also think the United States should end all other murderous, militant intervention in Somalia?

My answer to all of these is that young “anti-war” Americans don’t take a very principled stand on American foreign policy; they just oppose certain activities by certain people, viz., Republicans. This isn’t to take away from the principled liberals and conservatives who have well-defined and well-understood reasons that this or that policy is harmful, or from those who have come to espouse a principled foreign policy based on their bad experience with the Bush regime.

I wonder what your take is on this, as a libertarian or non-libertarian reader. Am I way off base accusing a lot of young liberals of not having as strong and well-defined moral-political principles as libertarians? Am I misled about their level of opposition to those other foreign-policy fiascoes of the Clinton and pre-Clinton years (I really don’t think so)?

Lastly, Mr. Fulham didn’t mention any politicians by name, so I can’t chide him too much for failing to mention Ron Paul and his multitude of principled, enthusiastic, and self-organized supporters, but I will remind people of the popularity Dr. Paul enjoyed among young Americans, on the internet, on college campuses, at rallies, and even (to some, lamentably small, extent) at the ballot box.