Back Away From the Label

Rand Paul, asked directly whether he is a libertarian, couldn't bring himself to say a simnple "yes."

Instead, he is a "constitutional conservative," which is different from being a "conservative" without adjective -- and different in a libertarian direction.

David Boaz, who is a libertarian without ifs, ands, or buts, and who might be expected to be ticked off at this, is understanding.

"But if you can call yourself a conservative without necessarily endorsing everything that William F. Buckley Jr. and the Heritage Foundation — or Jerry Falwell and Mike Huckabee — believe, then a politician should be able to be a moderate libertarian or a libertarian-leaning candidate."

I don't know what to think of this, but in the event some of you found it here first: try reading Andrew Sullivan's blog more often.

An exchange on a libertarian listserve

On September 12, 2004, a poster calling himself FondueUSA asked some questions of his fellow libertarians, here.

"What about the issue of cosmetic testing, endangered species, and hunting seasons? Should the goverment oversea those subjects? I would like to know what other libertarians think about what role should goverment should have with animals, or that there is no role at all. Thanks for your input."

That has the casualness in terms of spelling, etc., typical of the format. Fondue presumably meant whether the government should "oversee" various subjects concerning animals and nature, not whether it should do something "overseas" about them.

The discussion that followed is intriguing in its way, but I doubt that Fondue was entirely satisfied by any of it.

I suspect what Fondue was looking for was a distinction among animals. Which ones "count" morally and which ones don't? In my experience, most people are more shocked by dog fighting than by cock fighting, though both are criminal activities. Further, I suspect that if Michael Vick had onlybeen convicted of the latter, he would not have done time. Thus, there is some rough-and-ready distinction drawn along the "great chain of being" between cocks and dogs. Is that between birds and mammals?

I will take refuge in the wisdom of The Onion.

"Gotcha!" says NYTBR

Brian Doherty, a senior editor at Reason magazine, has written what he calls a "freewheeling history" of the modern libertarian movement, centered on five figures of enormous importance: von Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard, and Milton Friedman.

The New York Times has run a rather mean-spirited review of the book, in which critic Leonhardt plays trivia games of "gotcha."

Here's a sample from the review, "In a single chapter, Milton Friedman is described both as an active writer at Stanford University and, accurately, as deceased."

Well, yes. That kind of thing can happen when one of the crucial figures upon whom a book is based happens to die while the book is in page proofs. Leonhardt doesn't seem very lion-hearted here, more like a jackal.

Another example of this critic's oh-so-substantive contribution to the conversation about serious ideas, about liberty and sovereignty and such, is this gem: "And almost everything about 'Radicals for Capitalism' is too long: the terms ('Popperian falsificationist'), the sentences that sometimes run more than 100 words, and the book itself, at more than 700 pages."

That seems a remarkable expression of anti-intellectual bias. "Why shucks, I can't handle dem big words, Brian. That's why I write book reviews for this down-home cornpone type publicashun." If you aren't interested in the intellectual history of recent political and economic ideas, you won't read the Doherty book at all. If you are interested enough to read the book, you'll probably already know that there's been a lot of debate over whether such ideas can be considered "scientific," what is the demarcation of science, and so forth. You'll be ready for the term "falsificationism," modified by the name of its best known advocate.

The whole Leonhardt review reads like a sad failed effort at a fisking.