From Joel Schlosberg:

Recently, there have been a number of news stories, such as this one, reporting that Serena and Venus Williams are not voting in the upcoming presidential election due to being Jehovah's Witnesses, which prohibits voting among its adherents (I definitely didn't know that beforehand!)

This is confirmed by Wikipedia, which additionally points out that other political acts eschewed by Jehovah's Witnesses include saluting flags, singing nationalistic songs, and serving in the military, but on the other hand, they're supposed to obey laws and pay taxes.

Joel

I was recently forwarded this 2-year-old Non Sequitur as part of an email "memorial chain" for the victims of the Holocaust. My suspicion is that this is an exercise in preaching to the choir: the recipients of this email memorial will probably say "Amen," but think nothing new and do nothing new because of it.

Maybe this blog is a similar exercise in choir preaching, but it continues to bother me that history's atrocities are blamed on "extremists."

Extremism is just a dirty word for logical consistency. Don't blame Nazism on logical consistency. Blame it on the root philosophy — a philosophy of government and economy that very few in the choir understand beyond the central emphasis that the Nazis hated Jews and murdered millions.

Here's what I wrote about all this 2 years ago:

I, extremist

Today's Non-Sequitur is upsetting on several levels.

Seeing Danae in a concentration camp had the effect on me I'm sure Wiley sought. And I'm the last person to claim that there's anything inherently wrong with references to Hitler or the Holocaust (see "In Defense of Referencing Hitler") but when you make such comparisons, you'd better be clear on the parallel, and you'd better be right.

Having learned where and why the old man involuntarily received his numerical tattoo, Danae wonders why he hasn't had it removed...

I don't know whether Wiley meant to be targeting neocon war hawks, the Religious Right, the Bush administration, or extremists in general, but the words he chose explicitly target all political extremists, which would include me.

As Karl Hess wrote for Barry Goldwater,

...extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Every attack on political extremism is an attack on principle. The consistent application of principle is by definition extremist (so long as we're actually defining terms and using them consistently, rather than appealing always and only to emotional reflexes). It should be clear to anyone who can keep his knee from jerking for 30 seconds, that the problem isn't extremism per se, but rather which ideology is being applied in the extreme. Extreme pacifists will tend to behave quite differently from extreme nationalists. Extreme libertarians (i.e., liberal anarchists) will not lock people up just because of their background, whereas extreme egalitarians already have.

The standard attack on extremism is not an appeal to reason, but its opposite: the conflation of ideologies and the decrying of principle.

So according to Wiley, extremism in the defense of liberty can lead to another Holocaust. Try to figure that one out!

The problem isn't only with confusion on the words principle and extremism; there's also the standard problem that comes from the leftist map of politics. The Left and Right dichotomy may have started with 18th and 19th-century French republicans, but it has been applied throughout the world (especially the West) by 20th-century socialists.

First the Left is defined as progress, as it was for the French (and for classical liberals in general, back when progressives were the people who opposed the Ancien Regime). But now "progress" is linked to the State as egalitarian regulator, social safety net, etc. Thus "Progressives" are always calling for bigger and ever more pervasive government.

The Right, in contrast, is anyone opposed to the Left, anyone opposed to their vision of progress. We are the reactionaries, again by definition. For the socialists who controlled and continue to control the political language of Establishment intellectuals, all opponents of socialism are rightwing -- to varying degrees. So the classical liberals were rightwing, but then so were the fascists.

You might object, isn't fascism just nationalist socialism? Didn't the national socialists oppose liberal capitalism just as much as they opposed illiberal Communism? Sure, but to the left-socialists, any non-egalitarian socialists weren't real socialists. Since the fascists claimed to be defending the bourgeoisie and were, in fact, the dominant opposition to the Communists in many parts of the world, they were really the Right. Maybe these rightwingers said they opposed free-market capitalism, but any good socialist could see right through that: fascism was clearly the epitome of capitalism! (I'm not making this up.)

It didn't matter that classical liberalism and fascism are completely at odds, ideologically -- that one is based on individualism and laissez-faire, while the other is based on national collectivism and economic corpratism -- the Left just asserted that one led inexorably to the other, and we've been lumped together as rightwing extremists ever since.

I have no emotional attachment to the word extremist. I'm not trying to hold onto it the way I'm trying to hold on to the word liberal. I just don't like it when people throw more mud into already muddy waters.

• See Rothbard on moderation.
• See BK on moderation.
• See BlackCrayon.com on centrism.

Postscript to anyone who says that this is "just semantics": if you care about justice, if you care about meaning, then a just semantics is exactly what you care about.

PPS: If the leftwing scare-tactic smear term is "extremist" then the rightwing scare-tactic smear term is "radical". They're not equivalent terms, since radicalism is about perceiving both the problem and the solution as being at the "root" or foundation of the status quo, whereas extremism can designate any position, pro- or anti-radical, taken to the extreme. I am a radical extremist in the Rothbardian tradition, which is neither violent nor revolutionary. (Unfortunately, Murray Rothbard himself was responsible for some confusion on this point back in the 1960s.) Not all extremism is violent, just as not all radicalism is red.

Ludwig von Mises wrote,

The system of free enterprise has been dubbed capitalism in order to deprecate and to smear it. However, this term can be considered very pertinent. It refers to the most characteristic feature of the system, its main eminence, viz., the role the notion of capital plays in its conduct.

That's from chapter 13 of Human Action.

I think Robert Murphy's summary is even better:

Capitalism was originally a smear term for the system of free enterprise, meant to imply that this system only serves the narrow interests of the capitalists. However, the term is a good one, for the very notion of capital — of summing the market prices of the resources available for a project — is inextricably linked to monetary calculation, which itself can only occur in a capitalist society.

I was a free-market advocate before I became an advocate of capitalism. The free market is an ethical concept, not an economic one; it is merely the recognition that nonaggression needs to apply to exchange as much as it applies to anything else. (Robert Nozick summarized this idea as "capitalist acts between consenting adults.")

Capitalism is a separate issue and a separate agenda — a positive agenda, in contradistinction to the negative agenda of nonaggression, a utilitarian concept rather than an ethical one — but the more I learned of economics, capital theory, and economic history, the less I could understand the left-libertarian position of embracing the free market while rejecting capitalism.

The free-market anticapitalists define capitalism as any system of political privilege for current capitalists, especially as it suppresses bottom-up competition, entry-level entrepreneurship, and the rights of labor. But we already have plenty of other terms to cover that idea — mercantilism, corporatism, even fascism — but what alternative is there to indicate the universal benefits of capital accumulation, capital structure, and capital calculation — all of which result from the private ownership of the means of production?

In fact, private ownership of the means of production (that is, of capital) was the technical definition of capitalism, even among the anticapitalists who coined the term! The idea of political privilege for capital owners was just an assumed consequence, a conflation of definition and theory.

The only advantage I see to accepting this linguistic conflation is to conciliate the heirs of the New Left, to tease out of them a more consistent individualism without tripping their anticommercial reflexes. But aside from what I consider its intellectual dishonesty, this strategy, it seems to me, does more than postpone anti-economic prejudices; it implicitly promotes them.

Faced with these same prejudices, many anti-anti-capitalists adopted the label of "free enterprise," but that term, taken literally, tells us nothing more than "free market" does. It certainly indicates nothing about the structure of ownership or of the means of production.

Until a free-market anticapitalist can offer me a useful alternative label for the utilitarian economic concept Mises called "capitalism," I'll stick with his reclaimed word.

Not only is my article featured at Mises.org today, but it's one of the first daily articles to be made into an audio article:

Senator Joe McCarthy, covering the microphones as he listens to his aid Roy Cohen in 1954

While his claim of ideological steadfastness on his "basic political views" may have been correct, Rothbard did change his mind on questions of strategy and alliance, most significantly on the question of "McCarthyism" and the broader anti-Communist movement of the American Right, which he eventually rejected in favor of a more nuanced (and largely misunderstood) anti-anti-Communism.

FULL ARTICLE

An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Dr. Floy Lilley, is available for download, or you can listen to it within this page:

"Moral courage is the rarest of all the rare things of this earth. The war has shown that millions have physical courage. Millions were willing to face rifle and cannon, bombardment, poison gas, liquid fire, and the bayonet; to trust themselves to flying machines thousands of feet in air, under the fire of anti-aircraft guns of enemy planes; to go into submarines, perhaps to meet a horrible death. But how many had the courage merely to make themselves unpopular? The bitter truth must be told: the many enlisted or submitted to the draft on both sides of the conflict not because they were convinced that they were helping to save the world, not because they had any real hatred for the enemy, not to uphold the right, but simply that they hadn't the moral courage to face the stigma of "slacker" or "conscientious objector." ... Fear of death? No; the soldiers faced death bravely. But they feared unpopularity. They dreaded the suspicion of their fellows. What was needed in war is needed no less urgently in peace. How many persons in public or even in private life have the courage to say the thing that people do not like to hear?" – Henry Hazlitt, The Way to Willpower (via blog.Mises)

I think Lew Rockwell's editorial this morning is critically important. Only libertarians have held onto the classical-liberal insight that so-called "class interests" are only in conflict in the context of coercion. Civil society (i.e., voluntary cooperation, e.g., the free market) will harmonize all peaceful interests — race, sex, language, religion, wealth, etc.:

If the political prediction markets are right, we are going to end up with a presidential contest between two people who agree on the pressing need to expand the entire welfare-warfare state.

They can argue about priorities, but they agree on the overall goal.

With the campaign lacking serious issues, something tells me that the great American obsession over race is going to play a major role, which is gravely unfortunate since the discussion is unlikely to be enlightening. But it does raise important questions: what is racism and how can we tell if it exists? FULL ARTICLE

[Update: See Anthony Gregory's note to Lew on racism and liberalism.]

See also: "Triumph of the Red-State Fascists":

Every Republican I've spoken to is mystified that John McCain has sewn up the Republican nomination. Of course I'm not talking to the run-of-the-mill Republican. There are vast hordes of these people who have never read a book and vote only by the most sordid political instinct known to man. McCain is their candidate. FULL ARTICLE

Just announced by the Mises Institute:

Let's Abolish Government

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) is the American individualist anarchist and legal theorist, known mainly for setting up a commercial post office in competition with the government and thereby being shut down. But he was also the author of some of the most radical political and economic writings of the 19th century, and continues to have a huge influence on libertarian thinkers today. He was both a dedicated opponent of slavery in all its form, even going so far as to advocate guerrilla war to stop it, but also a dedicated opponent of the federal invasion of the South and its postwar reconstruction.

This collection was selected personally by Murray Rothbard as his best work. It includes "Trial by Jury," which argues for the idea of jury nullification, that is, the right of the jury to reject the law under which a defendant is tried. It also includes his "Letter to Grover Cleveland," which remains one of the most rigorous pieces of political argument ever penned. Finally, it includes his classic work "No Treason," which argues that the US Constitution is not a social contract at all and that it cannot bind the current generation.

Spooner was obviously a great dissident -- and one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 19th century and an American original. His influence has been quiet but very long and pervasive.

The title here is of Rothbard's own choosing, but it sums up the theme of his best work.

419 pages, paperback, 2008