Category: LGBT

Airing the dirty laundry of the libertarian movement, part 3: the aftermath of the LP convention

Posted on by Scott Halleck

Part 3 of an ongoing series of inside baseball stuff about the Libertarian Party.  I’m not happy about things.  See part 1 and part 2.

So. 

After much gnashing of teeth, accusations and counter accusations, (see, for example, here and here), and long trips to Reno for many people, it’s over.  The Libertarian Party Mises Caucus made essentially a clean sweep of party officers and platform revisions.  What all happened?

Well, simply put, they had the numbers.  Thomas Knapp alleges parliamentary shenanigans and an illegitimate convention; he’s got a lot more credibility as a longtime member of national committees to comment on such things.  From my perspective it is a fiat acompli, and so the question then becomes what does this all mean for the future of the LP? 

Here is a pdf of the MC’s action plan, which seems to have been followed almost to the letter.

Honestly…most of the proposed changes either were good, or not terrible, with a few exceptions.  Most of the parliamentary reforms proposed were fine, and LP conventions are legendary for their inefficiency, so making them go faster is not a bad goal in and of itself.  I do take issue with raising the delegate count for presidential and vice presidential nominees; it seems to be targeted directly at people like Vermin Supreme, and quite frankly reeks of the kind of exclusionary ballot access restrictions we’re perpetually railing against.  Yes, we have some oddball candidates, but part of what makes us special as a party is allowing for a lot of different voices.  To say nothing of the fact that you never know where the next Spike Cohen is going to come from-the joke candidate that quickly became the best serious public speaker the libertarian movement has had in decades.

Now…on to the platform change recommendations.  The good?  Aggression, foreign policy, migration, free movement of goods, firearms accessories, electoral reform, “if you’re the age of majority you get all your rights”, etc.  I’ll gladly admit that a lot of the language is better, and makes for nice updates.  I do, however, take significant issue with three recommendations:

  • Deleting the abortion plank:  yes, abortion is absolutely a contentious as hell issue among libertarians.  But you know what?  It’s an issue that matters to a lot of people, including libertarians, and new voters will absolutely be looking for some kind of official statement on the matter.  And the old language as written represented probably the best, and maybe even only possible compromise on the issue.  While some commentators have pointed to 4.0, “Our silence about any other particular government law, regulation, ordinance, directive, edict, control, regulatory agency, activity, or machination, should not be construed to imply approval” or the plank on medical freedom as still covering things, it’s still weak tea on a subject that should be addressed by a national political party.
  • Deletion of “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant”.  Yeah…the stated rationale for this, “One of the major goals of the Mises Caucus is to make the LP appealing to the wider liberty movement that is largely not currently here with us. That movement strongly rejects wokism and the word games associated with it. This along with the deletion of the abortion plank will display that there are serious cultural changes in the party that are more representative of that movement” is gross, and flat out ignorant.  MC people, along with conservatives generally (who are not libertarians!), are so suspicious of anything “woke” that a)it regularly blinds them to wisdom from any camp other than their own (maybe read this, or my takes on similar ideas?), and b)it blinds them to terrible behavior in their own camp.  To elaborate a bit from my twitter post, we can defend someone’s right to hold & express horrible, idiotic, repugnant views while still choosing to condemn those views as horrible, idiotic, & repugnant, & refusing to have anything to do with the holders of said views. And really, who the hell are you trying to appeal to that wouldn’t think bigotry is irrational and repugnant?  Where are you trying to pull people from, MC?  This REALLY shouldn’t be a difficult concept.  But in certain quarters there’s such a fear of anything labeled “woke” that a lot of you forgot to discriminate against assholes, and somehow forgot that doing so (such as in this story that floats around the internet regularly), as long as you don’t use the force of the state, does NOT make you anti-liberty.  Instead, the fear of the woke has let a holocaust denier and an actual groomer into high esteem in the MC’s ranks.  Likewise,
  • Recommending against the amendment to plank 1.4 that explicitly recognizes individuals’ right to determine their own issue of gender expression.  Everything I said above applies, with the rational for no being “an issue of biology” and more anti-woke rambling.  This is both completely ignorant of biology and science, as well in direct conflict of the LP’s long history with LGBTQ rights.  Spoiler alert:  we were always in favor, we ran an out gay man as our first presidential candidate in 1972, and while we of course would much rather see the originally racist government marriage licensing regimes abolished altogether, we were in favor of marriage equality LONG before it was cool.  Furthermore, it would be one thing if trans people were simply not liked by some people.  But even though things are better now than they were, trans people are still under considerable assault from the state, in the form of bathroom bills, bans on care for trans youth, bans on trans athletes, and continued allowance of “trans panic” defenses.  People are facing the full face of state oppression and even being killed for expressing their individuality, and a party that claims to be founded on the sanctity of the individual damn well should be speaking up for them.

I’ve already renounced my support for the Libertarian Party until things change, and announced myself as politically homeless for the first time in my adult life.  Was it worth it over three bad proposals and some terrible people?  Absolutely.  The three bad proposals are very bad, and represent rejection of core libertarian values and core support for individuality.  And the terrible people?  Wouldn’t we-haven’t we-jumped down the throats of major party politicians for the exact same things Borysenko and Woods have done?  Wouldn’t we be furious if a Kennedy had said it was ok to get a woman drunk to sleep with her?  And wouldn’t we-haven’t we-brought up that thing at every opportunity to our major party supporting friends, acquaintances, and audiences?  How dare we not hold ourselves to the same standards?

So, Mises Caucus, the ship is yours.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe you’ll nominate Spike Cohen for president, get a bunch of city council members elected that repeal zoning laws, business licenses, and deprioritize the drug war, fully audit the LP books, come to your senses about trans people, and keep the David Duke types out.  Maybe.

But I’m not holding my breath.

 

 

Libertarians and Abortions, Also Terrible Supreme Court Decisions

Posted on by Scott Halleck

A few days ago a draft Supreme Court decision on abortion, authored by Samuel Alito, leaked.  The reactions are…exactly what you’d expect.  Pro-choice folks are up in arms and out in the streets, pro-lifers are cheering, libertarians are split, and lots of smarmy accusations of hypocrisy are flying through the virtual air.

To fully examine this issue, first a general discussion of libertarian thoughts on abortion is needed, then examining the various charges of hypocrisy, and then looking at the draft itself.  NB:  I am fervently pro-choice, and remain so, but I will do my best to be fair to the pro-life arguments.

Left leaning friends of mine have asked me more than once, “why aren’t libertarians more vocal about abortion?”.  The answer is that to libertarians, who are generally used to seeing issues as very clearly right or wrong, it’s a complicated question.  Libertarianism is a philosophy that has as its fundamental unit of value the sanctity of the individual.  Every bit of our political and legal morality is (at least theoretically) based on that.  Which means, however, that where the individual begins is the breaking point of the philosophy.  At the moment science can’t clearly tell us where life begins, and arguments about viability are very easily countered by “absent modern medical intervention, this fetus would not be viable”.  Rothbard said that the mother’s property right to her own body trumps the fetus (an idea recently advanced by many pro-choice folks), to my idea that the mother’s right to control her actual life trumps the fetus’ right to potential for life.  There are also, of course, a number of arguments from practicality that are not strictly libertarian but worthy of consideration, including long term impacts of unwanted pregnancies, health consequences, a dysfunctional adoption system, and the surprising correlation between the beginnings of fully legal abortion and the drop in crime.

The pro-life arguments are that the since we don’t know where the individual begins, it’s better to err on the side of caution, or religious arguments.  Pro-life people also make arguments from practicality, especially health and psychological effects of abortion, as well as the perils of decoupling sex from consequences.

The Libertarian Party has typically come to what I feel is the best possible compromise on an essentially intractable issue, which is that abortion should be kept 100% safe and legal, but no tax dollars should ever be used to pay for one.  Either way though, it’s complicated, and I still think that while some pro-choicers are Neo-Malthusian whackjobs, and some pro-lifers are patriarchal religious nutjobs interested only in controlling women, generally speaking people of good conscience can hold views on both sides of the issue.

Next, let’s look at some of those hypocrisy charges.  The ones I’ve seen pop up most often have been:

  • Nice to see “my body, my choice” make a comeback after two years of mask and vax mandates.  Not quite the own you think it is, folks.  You can argue the science and legality of those mandates all you want (and essentially the entirety of my social media feeds for the past two years has been two camps of very smart people, with a lot of numbers, calling the other side bastards and idiots), but an airborne virus can spread to others in a way an abortion can’t.  And not protecting oneself and then going out into places with lots of people could arguably be negligence.  It’s the difference between smoking and drinking-neither is good for you, but as far as I know no one’s ever gotten cirrhosis of the liver from secondhand beer.
  • Look at how quickly the left abandons “birthing persons!” in favor of “only women should make decisions about women’s bodies!”.  Yeah, transphobic assholes can @#^! all the way right off.  Check here for some science.  But pro-choice folks, this is one time where the inclusive language really would help show some moral consistency, even if it’s just “women and other birthing persons”, or “women and everyone else with a uterus”.
  • Even if the fetus is a life, the mother’s bodily autonomy trumps all, in much more detail and more articulately here.  This is the argument that makes the most sense to me, and very clearly (though almost certainly unintentionally) echoes Rothbard’s argument from decades earlier.  But here’s the thing-this argument backs directly into the libertarian argument about coercison, extortion, and bodily autonomy.  If you believe that someone cannot be coerced to sacrifice their body to save another, that they have no legal obligation to do so independent of any moral obligation, then consequently you have to believe that no one can be forced to pay for the expansion of someone’s business, or their home, or their healthcare.  The entire statist/socialist conceit falls apart if you truly embrace bodily autonomy.

So let’s look at the decision itself.  Spoiler alert:  it’s mostly terrible, even if you are pro-life.  Also disclaimer:  I am not a lawyer, I do not play one on tv, I am not bar certified in any state, this is not legal or financial advice, discontinue use if rash persists after four weeks.

The crux of the decision, as I read it, rests on two main parts:  first, that Roe was badly decided because it was an incoherent decision, including usurping the legislature by legislating from the bench, and second, that because the right to abortion is not “deeply rooted in American tradition”, and not enumerated in the constitution.

The only part of that I have some concurrence with is the idea that Roe was legislating from the bench.  At least as referenced in this decision, Roe did not come out and say unequivocally abortion is a right or abortion isn’t a right, rather it said that abortion is a right here, but is only kind of a right here, and isn’t a right here.  A proper decision should have either gone all the way in one direction or the other, or punted completely back to the states by saying it was absolutely not a matter for the federal government.  Saying what’s left is a bit of a mess is a fair point, and the decision does cite multiple pro-choice advocates who were never satisfied with the reasoning of Roe.  Aside from pointing out that stare decisis is not necessarily permanent and that the court has screwed up more than a few times, that’s about all it gets right.

Throughout the decision the argument rests on multiple appeals to the common law tradition, but does not recognize that law, like democracy, is not an ends unto itself.  It is a means to an end, that end being liberty.  Yes, the English that became the first Americans brought with them English common law, and that is important, but they were animated by the spirit of natural rights theory.  The US constitution is far more the embodiment of John Locke than William Blackstone, especially the Bill Of Rights-hence the “chains of the Constitution” conceived of by Jefferson.  While it’s true that there are limits to what is implied rather than simply written in the text, especially as concerns negative liberty vs. positive liberty, but almost all the debates of the founding era, and especially the plain text of the ninth and tenth amendments, indicate very strongly that the founders wanted the government to err in the direction of more liberty, not less.

Not a word about either of those two amendments makes it into the decision.

Though to its credit it does recognize that the fourteenth amendment incorporates most (if not all) rights in the federal constitution into state and local documents as well, prohibiting any level of government from impinging on fundamental liberties.

First, a practical matter.  Towards the end of the decision, starting on page 59, it raises the concern of reliance, ie court decisions need to remain stable so that people can make decisions based on known law, unless of course there’s a very good reason to overturn said law.  The decision finds traditional reliance interests uncompelling, because abortion is generally an unplanned decision.  They also found a more vague reliance test lacking as well.

I do not.  Thanks to the sexual revolution (and an expanding idea of bodily autonomy; see below) Americans are generally able to plan when they reproduce and when they don’t.  Yes, much of this is easy access to cheap, reliable, and legal contraception, but some of it is also the knowledge that unwanted pregnancies can be terminated if necessary.  This is an, if not essential, certainly very important part of modern life, and one that depends on reliance on established law, ie a right to abortion.  The opinion gets this wrong. 

More importantly liberty across American history properly evolves in two ways, neither of which the decision recognizes.  The founders recognized that new technologies and new manners of living would arise that they could not entirely predict, so they left mechanisms in place to give people the liberty to adapt to these new circumstances.  First, contra the decision, rights enumerated in the constitution do imply other rights, very easily.  The first amendment in toto is all about freedom of conscience and freedom of thought, and the amendments that deal with criminal jurisprudence clearly guarantee a freedom from coercion except as part of punishment for a crime for which one has been duly convicted.  It’s a very simple leap from here to freedom of marriage, and to freedom from buying a product one finds repugnant or unnecessary.  The enumerated right to being secure in one’s papers very clearly also guarantees being secure from government intrusion in one’s digital papers. 

The second major path of evolution is to a much more expansive view of who is worthy of fundamental rights-of who is human.  During the times cited in the decision when abortion was illegal, women were viewed as second class citizens at best.  They were not thought of as fully human, and not deserving of full bodily autonomy, thus making citations of laws of this time concerning them suspect at best.  Perhaps this is assuming too much-after all, I grant above that pro-life people can believe just as much from good conscience as pro-life-but the historical context has to be examined here.  Failure to do so, and simply listing the history without a broader context of womens’ legal status in the 1800s, was a severe failure of logic.

And then there’s page 32.  “‘These attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s ‘concept of existence’ prove too much…Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like…None of these rights has any claim to being deeply rooted in history.”

Bullshit.

Before it was rephrased as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, John Locke’s rallying cry was “life, liberty, and property”.  In his Second Treatise On Government, he states that “every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.”  The concept of liberty that animates the United States was all about bodily autonomy.  The enumeration of the right of assembly, the right of security of one’s person and effects, and the constitution’s original text creating a free trade and free travel zone in the 13 colonies all add up to liberty of the individual in their own body.  And, in 200 or so years, it’s reasonable to assume that we can and should be much more ecumenical about whose bodies are recognized as autonomous and inviolable.  Furthermore, yes, Justice Alito and company, the implication is absolutely that there is a fundamental right to drug use, prostitution, and the like-as there should be.  The laws prohibiting such things between consenting adults are blatantly unconstitutional at the federal level under the tenth amendment, and the ninth amendment, in concurrence with the first amendment and others above, should very easily guarantee cognitive freedom and freedom of commerce-in short, bodily autonomy. 

Not coincidentally, this is why even pro-life libertarians should be up in arms over this decision.  It scoffs at any concept of rights in the US that would allow for real liberty, and takes such a narrow view of the Bill Of Rights as to completely gut whatever is left of the ninth and tenth amendments.

If this decision had come out unequivocally one way or the other (as Roe probably should have) it would have been required to show much better reasoning.  Instead it punts in the worst way possible, in such a way that not only denies bodily autonomy for women (and others with uteri), but bodily autonomy for all and potentially severely narrows the potential for personal liberty going forward.  It is a terrible decision that ignores history, ignores the plain text of the constitution, and ignores basic principles of natural law.  If any of this reasoning makes it to the final decision it will be terrible for everyone.

Airing the dirty laundry of the libertarian movement part 2: Tom Woods, wtf? And whither LP National.

Posted on by Scott Halleck

My previous entry was something I’ve been meaning to write for a while (sorry, not all of us have the luxury of being full time pundits), and was written when I could dismiss the Mises Caucus as a group of people that attracted some assholes and said some things I disagreed with, but were generally moving in the same direction as me.

And then it hit that Tom Woods met his first wife when he was 26 and she was 15.  The details, including significant corroboration from his ex-wife’s sister, are spelled out here.

Mr. Woods is already a controversial figure in the libertarian movement, being dogged by allegations of racism given his founding of an organization called League Of The South 30 or so years ago.  Personally I thought he did a pretty good job of setting that all to rest here, with receipts.  Moreso since almost every libertarian starts off in one of the big two camps and migrates to a vision of a freer world, and therefore allowances should probably be made for what we believed then if we can prove, by our actions, that we believe different and better now. 

I don’t know that I’d describe him as a personal hero, but I do think he’s done a lot of important scholarship and helped advance the intellectual case for liberty.  Contra Krugman was great work, consistently refuting one of the dumbest people to ever get a PhD.  Without him I wouldn’t know about the Depression of 1920-21, which is one of the clearest historical refutations of Keynsian economic interventionism in modern history.  The man has done the work.

Which makes the revelation here very disappointing.

Let us be clear:  as of right now, Woods is being accused of grooming, which is a crime in the court of public opinion, not in a court of law.  No one has come forward with any evidence that the relationship was consummated before she was 18.  But Wood’s response was…bizarre at best, arrogant and dismissive at worst.  Especially troubling to me was his claim that “traditional Catholics marry young”.  Well fine, yes, more conservative religious folk often do get married young…to other young people, not people eleven years their senior.  If he had responded in pretty much any other way-the timeline is wrong, we were acquaintances and our relationship only deepened after she became an adult, or even something along the lines of “you know what?  This does look bad and it wasn’t my shining hour, but it worked out ok”-it might be grounds for a different conversation.  Instead the whole response basically boils down to “@#^! you, nothing to see here, it’s all ok because I’m a traditional Catholic”.

That’s just gross.

Let’s open the whole can of worms here.  What children are, in a legal sense, is something that can give libertarians, which like nice and neat answers carefully derived from first principles, absolute fits.  Two of the three major answers-that children are the legal property of their parents or that children are immediately completely sovereign individuals from birth-have really awful implications very quickly if carried to any kind of logical conclusion.  The third-that children are in the custody of their parents until they obtain majority, unless the parents screw things up-leads to all sorts of questions about who decides what’s appropriate and when majority happens.  And I’ll even acknowledge (in what I’m sure will please libertarian critics everywhere) that situations like the 17 and 364/18 and 1 make things very messy, and probably indicate a need for some kind of reform.  But regardless, everyone with a modicum of human decency agrees that there is a very strong dividing line before which one cannot consent to sexual relations (or most other adult responsibilities), and after which one can.  Moreover, it’s not anything unreasonable to point out that while age gaps do get smaller and less important as people get older, 15 and 26 is a giant eleven years that pretty much guarantees a huge imbalance of power in the relationship.  You know, the perfect circumstances for grooming, especially if the older person was in a position of trust with the younger person’s family.

If Woods had acknowledged any of that and shown any kind of humility, as long as his ex-wife wasn’t alleging any kind of abuse, this probably would have been a non issue.  Instead his response, again, was basically “@#^& you, I’m Catholic.  Also buy my homeschool course”.

Which brings me to the most galling part of all of this:  the absolute hypocrisy of Woods’ defenders, usually fellow Mises Caucus people.  Since I got back into things during the Jorgensen campaign, I’ve heard all manner of jokes about how pedophiles need to go straight into the woodchipper.  At least in spirit I agree-child abuse is horrific and disgusting, and the only addendum I’d make is “after due process of law”.  I’ve also seen conservatarian after conservatarian attack LGBTQ folk as “groomers” and “child molesters” for daring to say that Johnny might have two moms, and they’re cool, or that Uncle Steve might show up next Thanksgiving as Aunt Barbara, and that’s ok too.  This is, of course, fully ignoring that libertarianism is a whole philosophy based on the sanctity of the individual, that celebrates the individual defining their individuality in their quest of life, and that the LP itself has been pro-LGBTQ since 1972 and ran a gay man as its first presidential candidate.

What, then, have the responses been?  Well how about this from Dave “getting a woman drunk to sleep with her isn’t so bad” Smith?  Or Eric July getting the article yanked from Being Libertarian?  Or the counter accusations of grooming I’ve seen.  Two years of yelling about pedos (sure) and grooming (against people that aren’t groomers, using accusations almost as old and debunked as the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion), and then when presented with an unrepentant groomer in their own midst, the responses are nothing but deflect or excuse.

As libertarians, we claim the moral high ground.  And we usually come to libertarianism because we find ourselves disgusted by the either the inability of the major parties to do good for people, or the shameless power and bloodlust usually on display by their highest standard bearers.  We say, with great regularity, “this is what I believe.  My ideas derive from clear first principles and are not only the best for practical reasons, but because they are morally right.  My ideology, and the people and policies I support are consistent because of this.” 

In my very first real essay here, I made the point that if you claim membership in a group, such as a fandom, or a political movement, you also claim responsibility for the baggage of that group unless you acknowledge it and qualify your loyalty.  Well, Mises Caucus folks, here we are.  You have an actual, unrepentant groomer in your midst, and most of you have either shut up or said “NO U”, because he happens to be from your camp.  If you’ve got credible evidence of other groomers and abusers in our movement, let’s drag them all into the light.  I’m sure Cliff Maloney wasn’t the only garbage lurking in the bowels of #YALtoo, and there’s a reason why this group exists.  But your response to the one that belongs to you is disgusting, galling in its hypocrisy, and absolutely unworthy of people who try to claim the moral high ground.

And speaking of calling out garbage in one’s own camp, to give a final addendum to this horror show, the national Libertarian Party voted down a motion to disinvite Woods to this year’s convention.  Meaning that’s who my party chooses to have on their stage.

Ugh.

“Party of principle” my ass.

If the LP gets its collective shit together and repudiates this garbage I’ll be happy to start working for party causes again.  I’ll support individual candidates as I see fit.  And it’s still better and less scandal ridden than either of the majors.  But this is a bridge too far for me.  I will not donate to LP National, and I will not support any candidate or local affiliate that does not clearly repudiate Woods and his actions.

This is foul, and all of you know it.

 

 

 

Airing the dirty laundry of the libertarian movement part 1: yay or nay on the Mises Caucus?

Posted on by Scott Halleck

Here’s the essay I would have written before the Tom Woods revelations dropped.  I feel it’s important to post in its relatively unaltered form to give context, and to give proper perspective to my feelings on the Woods problem.

Over the last year or two, the Mises Caucus of the Libertarian Party has been at the center of, well, a civil war inside the Libertarian Party and the broader libertarian movement.  Accusations have flown from one side to the other-from the Mises Caucus, they’ve alleged corruption, pandering, appeasement, and the classic not being real libertarians.  The retorts have been homophobia, transphobia, cop worshiping, racism, sexism, and just flat out missing the point, among others, and of course not being real libertarians.  Also there have been many accusations of rules lawyering and rules violations from both sides, which are harder for me to comment on.

I’m a 20+ year veteran of LP politics.  I’ve seen a lot of things in my time in the party, including some successes, some colossal failures, and some seriously missed opportunities.  I left party activism for a long time over my own frustrations with the deficiencies of party leadership.  But the Mises Caucus overall…it makes me uncomfortable. 

To show why, a good deal of background is needed.

First, the modern libertarian movement has its roots as a fusion of ex-Republicans and ex-hippies.  There are socially conservative libertarians.  Internally we disagree on things, most notably abortion and the death penalty, although also strategy, and relative importance of the many issues we do agree on.  That sometimes uncomfortable fusion means that there are libertarian spaces that intersect with the left, sometimes even the asshole left, and some that intersect with the right, including (although far less than our leftist critics would believe) sometimes the alt-right.

Second, there are plenty of very valid criticisms of the Libertarian Party to be leveled.  In my time the most glaring would be:

  • Outright scandals:  in my time there were serious allegations during the second Harry Browne campaign about missing money, and later on with Carla Howell’s campaign for governor.  There were probably a few others along the way that I missed.
  • Mismanagement and unnecessary party expenditures:  The LP’s physical office has always been a source of contention, for location, for expense, for any number of things.  More important to me is the lack of coordination between national and local affiliates.  If the point of a political party is to run candidates that win and thus advance the ideological agenda of that party and ideology, it’s an absolute travesty that national and most local parties have no idea what the elected offices even are, let alone put any real time into candidate recruitment.  I will say that one of the most refreshing things of the Jorgensen/Cohen campaign was actually trying to have some coattails and support local races, and of course Pennsylvania recently kicked ass in local races, but it’s still a major issue.  I’ve also heard tell of significant lack of coordination between the Jorgensen and Cohen sides of the campaign this time out.
  • Everyone wants to be president, no one wants to be dogcatcher:  related to above, and again better than it was in the early 00s, there’s still a cultural problem where everyone wants to run for the top spots, and no one wants to run for city council.  Yes, the top spot campaigns are important, but the only way to build a farm team, a track record of effective, non-societal ending governance, and proving that Libertarians can win is at the local level first.  We need city council members to run for mayor, mayors to run for county supervisor, county supervisors to run for state assembly, and so on.
  • Botching the war issue:  My final disillusionment with the party came in 2002, with the onset of W Bush’s Iraq War.  Despite peace, non-aggression, and anti-imperialism being in our DNA since before our movement had a name, the LP dwaddled on a response at a time when the country was begging for a proper anti-war movement and party.  And since then, while individual libertarians have certainly been leading anti-war voices, the party as a whole hasn’t done a great job on what could be the issue of our time.
  • Soft messaging:  We’re the Libertarian Party, damnit.  Don’t just call for the legalization of marijuana, call for the end of the whole damned drug war and immediate pardons and expungements for any non-violent convictions relating to it.  Don’t just call for no war in Syria, call for the end of the whole damn empire.  This hasn’t always been applicable, to be sure, but there have been a lot of times when LP National should have come out swinging with the biggest bat it could find, and instead was wielding a kid’s whiffleball toy.
  • Running Republican retreads:  Bob “Defense Of Marriage Act” Barr was simply disgusting.  Gary Johnson is, as far as I can tell, a nice guy and a successful governor, but libertarian lite.  And Bill Weld, he of the praise for Hilary and the calls for gun control, had absolutely no business on a libertarian ticket.  Every time we put a former Republican on the top of our ticket (that hasn’t won lower office as a Libertarian first), we a)give credence to the criticism that Libertarians are just Republicans that like pot and b)far more importantly dilute the message.  Libertarians are libertarians, not Republicans or Democrats.  Also, when the LP runs homegrown talent that are committed libertarians, like, say, Jo Jorgensen and Spike Cohen, the people that are brought in are so much more motivated and so much more inclined to stick around.  Johnson’s campaign brought in some fair weather annoyed Republicans.  Jorgensen’s campaign brought in the next generation of city council candidates.

So what about that Mises Caucus then?  Well…I can’t say they’ve done no good.  There are a lot of MC people that are awesome personally and doing good work.  Bringing motivated people into campaigns and activism is generally a good thing.  Some of them have had the sense to reach out to non-LP groups on different issues and start to coalition build, which is essential for actually changing policy when you’re a small movement.   And personally I’m all in favor of radicialism and being unapologetic and loud about one’s beliefs.

BUT…the Mises Caucus’ central conceit seems to be a complete inability to acknowledge good ideas from outside our own camp.  The constant condemnation of anything and everything, including traditionally very libertarian issues, as “woke”-and thus worthy of complete dismissal-is just ignorant.  Some of the posts from Mises affiliated sources have just been idiotic, such as LP New Hampshire’s assertion that “libertarians suffer more oppression than black people”.  Second, the caucus doesn’t isn’t just an intersection between libertarianism and the right, it’s often an intersection between libertarianism and the alt-right.  In the Mises Caucus facebook group and from various members I’ve seen entirely too many posts decrying Black Lives Matter and acting as police apologists (to say nothing of all the “pandering” bullshit during the election season, which I had a lengthy response to), claims about Trump being the most libertarian president ever, a lot more homophobia than I’d expect from libertarians, courting of anti-semites and entertaining their theories (especially gross given that the namesake of their caucus escaped Germany before the rise of the Nazis), and especially a lot of transphobic postings.  Just a little while ago there was a fresh post complaining about “males competing in womens’ sports”, never mind that the current science on the matter is complicated but generally falls on the side of trans athletes, and the very phrasing denies the individuality and identity of people. Some of whom, might I add, are otherwise with us but ready to quit the movement because enough of us can’t get it together there.

And there’s stuff that’s flat out gross, like Dave Smith dismissing the idea of getting someone drunk just to sleep with them being bad, or the way Cliff Maloney had MC affiliated defenders even after being fired in the wake of the #YALtoo revelations, or the embrace of Kyle Rittenhouse as not just legally innocent or in a bad position, but as an outright hero of some kind.

Oh, and then there was Lew Rockwell publishing an article that ends with praise for literal fascists.  No, LewRockwell.com isn’t MC, but there’s enough overlap to not look very good.

Now…all of this is not an everyday occurrence, and the various Mises Caucus groups are still far more tolerant places than a mainstream Republican gathering these days. But it’s still a lot more than I think is appropriate for those claiming to hold libertarian values. And enough of them hold beliefs that I find repugnant for me to be fully comfortable with them.

If you’re doing good work for liberty, keep it up.  But please think carefully about whose banner you choose to wave. Those banners often come with a lot of hidden baggage.  And while yes, the LP absolutely needs a serious housecleaning on a lot of levels, but I don’t think the Mises Caucus is the right group to do it.

 

 

In defense of sex workers and normalization

Posted on by Scott Halleck

 

In the latest round of internecine libertarian infighting, Delta Tkasch and Dave Smith have gotten into it about “normalization of sex work”, with Tkasch, a sex professional, taking the pro side and Mr. Smith dismissing the idea as “goofy”, and even detrimental to the cause of libertarianism.  This twitter thread and its subthreads get into it.  I’m going to try to be as fair to the positions of both sides as possible-some of it is disagreements over terminology-but I’m definitely going to be taking the pro-sex worker side on this, and I wanted to respond in a longer form than I could accomplish in tweets.  Here I’ll be using sex work broadly, so including not just prostitutes, but also strippers, pornographic actors, etc.

Both “combatants” and their respective supporters agree with the longstanding libertarian position that sex work between consenting adults (always an important qualifier, and will be assumed for the remainder of this essay) should be completely legal.  There are a number of core libertarian positions this idea involves, along with many questions of practical effect which I’ll address later.  The core questions include bodily autonomy, self ownership, and freedom of contract.  The question is whether such work should be “normalized”, and if so what exactly normalized means. 

As an aside, terminology matters, and terminology is at the heart of many internal debates in political movements.  Most (though definitely not all) of libertarian debates start with an agreement over the NAP, and then start fighting about what qualifies as aggression.  Tkasch has repeatedly argued specifically for “decriminalization” rather than “legalization” of sex work, although even there qualification is necessary.  In most instances of “decriminalization” being used in non-libertarian contexts that I’ve seen it means that decriminalized activity is still a matter for law enforcement, just with much less priority or serious consequences.  The most notable example would be marijuana possession being punishable by a civil fine like a traffic ticket, and/or pushed to official lowest priority enforcement.  Legalization, on the other hand, means the activity is now completely acceptable in the eyes of the state, and faces no more or less regulation than any other activity.  Tkasch, on the other hand, and some though not all other libertarian commentators, use decriminalization to mean free of state interference, with legalization being undesirable because it subjects that activity to the regulatory regimes of the state, including licensing, taxation, and regulation.  Personally I think that legalization is a lot better than converting something from a cageable to simply a fineable offense, but I can see their point.  Either way though, clarity of definitions is important.

Now on to the heart of the matter-normalization of sex work.  Does normalization mean that everyone needs to embrace prostitution, pornography, stripping, writing terrible fanfiction, etc. as  great and noble profession, and the best of our society?  I don’t think so.  We all have different interests and passions, there are many matters that libertarianism is purposely silent on to give space for religion, ethics, etc., and dare I say it being socially conservative is ok as long as you don’t impose those views on others.  But to simply have it treated as other professions, a part of life like fast food, lawyers, garbage collectors, etc.?  That’s a lot more reasonable proposition.  Elsewhere Smith agrees that there is a major social stigma around sex work, and says that that stigma exists for a reason, and in the same tweet he says that sex workers often have lots of bad things in their early childhoods. 

Let’s take those apart.

As for the idea that all sex workers are traumatized or coerced into their jobs, maybe that was true in the 1970s, but these days?  In my conversations with sex workers I’ve known in real life, reading accounts online, and dare I say it occasionally reading/watching interviews with favorite porn stars (shut up, you’ve done it too), the overwhelming takeaway is…it’s just like any other job these days.  Some people get into it because they’re really passionate about the work, whether it’s the sex, the theatricality, the therapeutic aspects, the technology, etc., some people do it because it’s a job and a means to an end, and yes, some have bad things happen to them early on that lead them to it.  The idea that everyone is in the profession simply because they’re traumatized, desperate nutcases is way too broad a generalization these days.  Ditto for assuming all sex workers are women.

For the second part, the stigma.  Well yes, it exists, and it exists for reasons, but why?  What are those reasons?  They aren’t as cut and dried as you might think, as even a cursory study of history shows that societal attitudes towards sex work have changed many times through human history, including even within Western cultures-even within American culture.  Who’s to say that it can’t change again?  I think the stigma goes to one of the big problems of libertarians, and one that I’ve addressed from a different perspective before, namely failing to recognize that while the state is the greatest threat to human liberty, it is not the only threat to human liberty.   Social stigma can’t send drones to a wedding party like the state can, or kill on an industrial scale the same way, but it can enable terrible laws and completely upend the power dynamics between people.  It’s a lot like Rand’s description of racism as “barnyard or stockyward collectivism”; it gives people permission to view other people as Other and less than.  This is not entirely a bad thing, as there are absolutely good things and bad things, good and evil, and they should be called as such.  But does sex work really worthy of that shame here?  Are services that, to one degree or another, most people avail themselves of, that concern a natural function, that provide people outlets to explore their sexuality and desires, really worth the violence, the terrible law, the empowering of the state, the spreading of disease, and the shame that the social stigma that comes with it all?

I don’t think it is.  And I think as libertarians even though we may choose not to approve or partake ourselves we have a responsibility to speak up for those who are consistently crapped on by society without good reason.  You don’t have to subscribe to someone’s onlyfans, you don’t have to hire your local hooker, but you should be speaking up for them and doing your best to make sure the boot of the state drops as far away from them as possible.

Not because it’s special.  But because it’s normal.

 

A (less brief than I expected) summary of the science and politics of being transgender

Posted on by Scott Halleck

Being transgender isn’t strictly a libertarian issue, but I’ve seen it come up enough lately in various libertarian threads around the internet where it’s just easier to have one link to reply to everything rather than retyping everything.  Because, as with many internet arguments, it gets a little old hearing the same thing over, and over, and over, and having to respond the same way to the same objections.

So…transgender.  People that don’t fit in the convenient male/female box.  And for whom it often takes a lot of time, money, therapy, medication, and surgery to get them into the box they do feel good in, or for them to make their own box.  Religious conservatives, along with socially conservative people in general, are often still REALLY not big on trans folk, for reasons of faith or just being squicked.  Even generally relatively sane Democrat Tulsi Gabbard just introduced a discriminatory bill against transgender athletes.  Libertarians generally do much better (and of course Outright Libertarians includes many trans members), and I haven’t seen any libertarian call for any kind of legal discrimination, but there’s definitely a small but vocal contingent that keeps calling being trans mental illness, claiming that trans people and their supporters deny biology and science, or saying stuff like “I don’t care if a dude wants to cut their dick off and wear a dress.  I’ll call them what they want to be called.  But they’re still a dude”.  That attitude is not a terrible start, and generally reflects libertarians’ live and let live attitude, but it could be so much better.  Libertarians, as individualists, often have as part of their story a long journey to define themselves, and live as authentically as possible.  I would think that someone else trying to do the same would be something that resonates with all of us.  I think a lot of it comes down to ignorance, so…I’m going to try and help everyone be less ignorant.

First off, terms.  Because agreeing on terminology is important, otherwise you just talk past each other (cf Libertarians and Marxists talking about labor bringing in more for an employer than the employee is paid). 

  • biological sex-what your genes make you.  Usually this is traditional XY=male, XX=female in humans (the rest of the animal kingdom can get REALLY complicated), although as I’ll talk about in a minute, even in humans it can get past that quickly.
  • gender-for lack of a better way of putting it, what you feel you are.  This is a complicated interplay between genes, social expectations and mores, and science doesn’t completely understand it yet, but that’s the basic idea.
  • gender expression-what you do to fit in your gender box, or build your own.
  • your gender options-male, female, trans variants of both, and nonbinary/agender/genderqueer/genderfluid, which are varying degrees of not fitting comfortably into either side of the binary or feeling the need to move between the two.
  • cross dressing-dressing as the opposite gender.  Not the same as being trans, though for a lot of trans folks it is a first step.  Depending on who you’re talking to and context, “dressing in drag” is either a direct synonym for cross dressing or the performance art version.
  • sexual orientation-what you’re attracted to, including not being attracted to anything.
  • body dysphoria-the feeling of major uncomfortableness when part of someone’s body isn’t what their brain expects.
  • TERF-trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a contingent of feminist thought that says because men are always the oppressors and heterosexual sex is always rape trans women are just carpetbagger men trying to gain access to feminist stuff.  Related term is SWERF, for sex worker exclusionary radical feminist, which says that sex workers are sellouts and participants in their own exploitation.  And probably gender traitors to boot.

Usually sex, gender, and gender expression occur in relatively regular patterns, but not always.

Next, let’s look at the science of being trans.  As I said above, we don’t completely understand this yet, because humans are complicated.  But…given the documented evidence of trans people in lots of cultures for a long time, it’s a thing that exists.  Even if you wanted to argue just genetics, well, this thread from an expert shows pretty quick that no, it’s not just XX and XY.  And for trans folks, the best understanding we have so far is that it’s not mental illness per se, it’s a lot more like phantom limb syndrome.  The human brain is really good at knowing where it is in the world, in part because it’s really good at knowing where all of its body bits are.  But when a bit is there that shouldn’t be, or when the brain thinks something should be there that isn’t, it doesn’t do very well. 

Which brings us to the brains of trans people.  While biology as destiny is still @#^!ing dumb and everyone is an individual with all the potential therein, there are some biological differences between men and women, broadly speaking, which extends not just to the visible stuff, but to brains as well.  There’s now a lot of scholarly articles out there showing pretty conclusively that the brains of trans people more closely resemble the brains of their “target” gender than their birth gender.  Cf here and here, among many others.  It’s a mismatch between what their brains expect and what’s actually there.  When people say “trust the science”, well…science may not be able to say exactly why or how they exist yet, but science is saying pretty conclusively that trans exists.

And again, granting that the interplay between biology and social and cultural experience is complicated, it turns out that the therapies we have now-hormone replacement therapy, surgery, social transitioning, and a goodly amount of therapy-actually provide much better outcomes for trans people than leaving them untreated.  While the Heritage Foundation disagrees, I find this Cornell metastudy to be much more robust in support of the pro-transition argument.  It’s not quite DS9 era Star Trek, where we can redo someone’s whole plumbing and switch it back in the space of an episode, but it works reasonably well.

So that’s the science, now let’s look at the politics.  You can’t talk about the politics of transgender people without talking about the lived experience of transgender people.  It’s a lot better than it was, but it’s still not great, especially for trans folks at the bottom of the economy.  This article sums it up pretty well, but the short version is that trans people are much more likely to have serious mental health issues, to attempt or commit suicide, or to be disowned by their families (even more than the rest of the rainbow), and also violence and harassment…unless their families and communities accept them for what they are, in which case they tend to turn out no more messed up than the rest of us.

How does this all translate to politics and culture?  In some pretty crappy ways, unfortunately.  Despite the potential advantages of (mtf) transgender athletes being relatively negated over time with hormone replacement therapy (like most things here, it is complicated), and despite lots of local school and private organizations coming up with solutions that work for them and their local communities over the past few years, there’s Gabbard’s bill, which would cut off federal funding for athletics unless the organizations banned trans athletes.  You might say that the federal government has no business subsidizing athletics, or even any business in education, and I would completely agree with you, but it’s like marriage licensing.  The government should have nothing to do with it, but as long as it does it needs to treat everyone equally before the law.  There’s also bathroom bills.  Most worrying to me is that the gay panic defense is still allowed in most of the union, which is entirely too close to a license to murder someone for being LGBT+ than I’m comfortable with.  And even in terms of workplace discrimination yes, I believe in free association, including the right of people to discriminate and be non-violent, non-thieving assholes to each other.  But just because there shouldn’t be a law, do you really want to live in a society that says it’s ok to not hire an otherwise qualified person because of what they are, or some immutable biological fact about them, rather than who they are and what they can do?

What does this mean for us as a libertarian movement?  It’s kind of like us and race.  Yes, the live and let live attitude, and starting with the individual is a great start, and the proper start, but for my more socially conservative or socially isolated brethren in the movement I say that we have to move beyond that.  We need to recognize peoples’ real, lived experiences, and recognize that while the goal is a society of autonomous, freely interacting individuals, in the meantime the groups that we’re part, especially the involuntary ones, impact our lives in real and different ways.  We should seek out people that are different than us and talk to them to understand this-there are plenty of trans libertarians out there who can talk Austrian economics with you, in addition to all the hippies and commies.  And we need to recognize that just because it isn’t the age of Jim Crow anymore that there are real social and legal challenges that need to be addressed as matters of our policy and activism.  It’s how we build a freer and a better society, so we can all go about the business of being individuals.