Billy Beck is right
I have to distinguish between Beck's anarcho-capitalist tenets and his passionate defense of American, and human, freedom. I don't agree with the former, but I readily understand the latter. To the extent that he thinks the two are inseparable is the extent to which we disagree.
But right here, in this post to his friend and gentleman scholar Bruce McQuain, Beck makes the case in irrefutable terms that the American system of governance -- federal, state, local -- has lost any sight of its moorings in freedom and that about as close as it gets to freedom at this point is a free floating drift toward technocratic oblivion if not stampeding socialism. The one-step ahead, two-steps back efforts of conservatives since Reagan (inclusive of their libertarian instincts) to bring it under control have failed. The extent to which conservatives have had to adopt the practices of liberals in the effort to defeat them has in itself been a defeat for conservatives.
I have noted that the best that can be claimed for it is that it has been a holding action against a historical tide, and that if the levee holds there might be a path back. But from an immediate objective viewing, that is not a good prospect.
Conservatives are not only about economics, just as America is not only about economics. But when it comes to property and wealth and the way it's treated by the various governments (it's theirs, not yours), there can be no mistaking that Beck is right. That's the main reason that I consult his blog every day: he has a clear conscience about what they are doing to America. On other points we don't agree. But on the question of owning what one owns and what one produces, Beck is saying that tolerating a lifetime of government taking as it pleases is too long. Just as John Brown looked around and saw that it was intolerable to him that men should be owned as slaves for another day, let alone their whole lives, until the "process of law" discovered that they were free.
I'm not taking sides in the usual libertarian schismatic troubles. I'm not a libertarian because I don't believe that liberty survives as liberty when it is framed as an ideology. But the truth is the truth, and Beck is telling the truth about what has happened to freedom in the United States. Measure it by Europe or China and say it is still the best in the world if you like, but in its own terms it has been in the red zone of disaster at least since the 1970s and the best efforts of sincere men to compromise on a road out of the red zone of disaster have been inadequate, to put it mildly.
But right here, in this post to his friend and gentleman scholar Bruce McQuain, Beck makes the case in irrefutable terms that the American system of governance -- federal, state, local -- has lost any sight of its moorings in freedom and that about as close as it gets to freedom at this point is a free floating drift toward technocratic oblivion if not stampeding socialism. The one-step ahead, two-steps back efforts of conservatives since Reagan (inclusive of their libertarian instincts) to bring it under control have failed. The extent to which conservatives have had to adopt the practices of liberals in the effort to defeat them has in itself been a defeat for conservatives.
I have noted that the best that can be claimed for it is that it has been a holding action against a historical tide, and that if the levee holds there might be a path back. But from an immediate objective viewing, that is not a good prospect.
Conservatives are not only about economics, just as America is not only about economics. But when it comes to property and wealth and the way it's treated by the various governments (it's theirs, not yours), there can be no mistaking that Beck is right. That's the main reason that I consult his blog every day: he has a clear conscience about what they are doing to America. On other points we don't agree. But on the question of owning what one owns and what one produces, Beck is saying that tolerating a lifetime of government taking as it pleases is too long. Just as John Brown looked around and saw that it was intolerable to him that men should be owned as slaves for another day, let alone their whole lives, until the "process of law" discovered that they were free.
I'm not taking sides in the usual libertarian schismatic troubles. I'm not a libertarian because I don't believe that liberty survives as liberty when it is framed as an ideology. But the truth is the truth, and Beck is telling the truth about what has happened to freedom in the United States. Measure it by Europe or China and say it is still the best in the world if you like, but in its own terms it has been in the red zone of disaster at least since the 1970s and the best efforts of sincere men to compromise on a road out of the red zone of disaster have been inadequate, to put it mildly.
Comments
Where is the principle in not fighting for what one believes, and instead sitting on the sidelines, bicthing?
That's a comforting sentiment, but it's not true. Passion and the fight are not the issue. This thing has historical roots that re-contextualized the American identity. It's called Fabian socialism. Reagan was still a Democrat when Eisenhower abandoned, on behalf of Republicans, the fight against Social Security. Eisenhower was a great man, but he had a lifetime in the military that built his perspective on society. Richard Nixon, who had faced the Left in all of its insidious hatred in the late 1940s, was a liberal by the time he became president. Barry Goldwater, as he approached senility, threw in the towel on culture. He didn't understand that socialism had subverted that as well as economic freedom. Goldwater didn't even recognize the culture war as another front in the battle. Reagan took the body internationally, bought some time domestically. All of the passionate thinkers and legislators who surrounded these efforts are routinely drowned out by the firmly established context of Fabian socialism. That has never been breached.
Relatively few people even understand what the stakes are, including libertarians. They get very gauzy out on the edges of things and mistake plainly radical formulas as consistency. Their insanity on the question of open borders, for instance. They refuse to recognize that as the elimination of a country's time and place, destroying the very difference that makes this country itself as opposed to somewhere else.
But to the core issue of how far advanced the stranglehold that government has on individuals and their property in this country, Beck is exactly right. He is painfully right.
I hold... as I have for some years that those as you've listed (exception of Goldwater) were forced into those positions because of the overwhelming weight of public opinion (And hterefore voting potential) on those topics.
Nixon's anti-communism, his supposed conservatism, was his calling card. Even if it hadn't been for Watergate he wasn't going to go with American principles: what he really wanted was for his enemies to love him, foreign and domestic.
Reagan was the only one to have a hard idea and the guts to follow through on it, but by that time he was only fixing marginal tax rates and an insane capitulative foreign policy. The best he could do with Social Security was "fix" it. That can got kicked down the road, and now Bush has taken it up with a potholder, as if you could lift a burning house with a potholder.
The conservatives should have had an alternative to Social Security. A voluntary, non-Ponzi scheme, retirement plan that it would have insured *as* an insurer, not as a wealth transferer -- something that could just as easily made its way entirely into the public sector. The same with Medicare.
Instead, it has crap on the table. Meanwhile, things have gotten even worse at the state and local level. So the vaunted federalism has been a disaster as well.
This is no more than the classic cycle of democracy and decline: the distribution of advantages to the greatest number of people to the disadvantage of all.
The one hope for this country is an outside the box tax revolt that spreads like wildfire at every level. Such that you would have to put half the country in jail as opposed to them paying to stay out of it.
You've identified the "one hope for this country", but have not thought it through any further than that?
Is thinking through this one hope going to become a central concern of your writing? It sounds important.
And how can VDH be the most important writer in America if he's not even aware of the country's only hope?
Now, as to you. This is the last exchange in this thread. Get it? If you respond again, I'll shit-can it. Then you'll be shit-canned thereafter. If you want to comment here, you won't start playing "why is the sky blue, daddy" with me.
Your choice.