Category: the left

Further thoughts on abortion, technology, and getting around the state

Posted on by Scott Halleck

NB:  I am fervently pro-choice.  I want abortion to be safe and legal, I want laws to that effect in all 50 states and federally, and I would absolutely support a constitutional amendment explicitly recognizing the right of bodily autonomy.  Read on at your own risk.

A few nights ago I wound up inadvertently pissing a lot of my friends off by ruminating a bit on how technology might render any law prohibiting abortion irrelevant.  Admittedly I was pretty short in my posting and a bit flippant in my tone, and so I was basically accused of wanting to bring back coat hangers.  They were also pissed when I drew equivalencies between the right to bear arms and the right to an abortion.

However, after spending considerable time reading and writing about the leaked Supreme Court decision, I think the ideas are worth expanding on, and writing about more seriously.  So…

One of the biggest ongoing debates in the libertarian movement has always been how do we get from here-a very statist and imperfect world-to there, a world of individual liberty and free, autonomous individuals voluntarily interacting with each other.  Usually the ideas fall into three main camps:  working through the political system (aka the Libertarian Party, or co-opting one of the majors), armed revolt or waiting for things to collapse on their own (what I tend to call the “nihilist libertarian” school of thought), and building competing institutions, such as private education, private security or arbitration firms, alternative currency etc.  Related to this debate is how much defiance of bad law is morally acceptable and practical-civil disobedience in the now, not just in the 1950s and 60s.  History does seem to show that laws that are unenforceable eventually change.  Laws that are resisted change as well.  Prohibition is the classic example, but so too the Jim Crow laws that mandated segregation.  The draft during the Vietnam era.  Laws prohibiting pornography, or dissemination of birth control information.  All of these eventually fell because people refused to comply with them, often actively resisted them, and eventually the law had no choice but to catch up.

What about today?  Let’s start with guns.  There were homebrew guns long before 3d printers (Philip Luty wrote one of the other famous banned books, for example), but 3d printing technology has definitely accelerated the process.  In 2013, the Liberator .380 was a single shot pistol that fell apart after 8-10 shots.  Less than 10 years later the FGC-9 has survived hundreds and even thousands of rounds, and NaviGoBoom’s Amigo Grande has pushed 3d printed weapons into rifle calibers.  Despite the best efforts of gun grabbers, technology may soon render any firearm law irrelevant and push firearms construction and ownership well outside the reach of the state.  The right to bear arms may well wind up guaranteed by entrepreneurs and hackers rather than laws, even if both is ideal.

What about abortion though?  What’s the connection with guns?  The first is a simple question of natural rights.  For those of us that are pro-choice (and I understand that not everyone is), the right to abortion is about bodily autonomy.  Even if you’re pro-life I don’t think the idea of bodily autonomy as a natural right should be in question, contra Alito and company.  You either own yourself or you don’t-and the right of self defense, the right to bear arms is how you guarantee the right of bodily autonomy.  Much as with the other natural rights, it is the insurance policy, and the last check and balance. 

While armed protests, like jury and state nullification, absolutely have a mixed record in history, they have been used to be positive ends.  The penny auctions of the 1930s and the armed aspects of the civil rights movement, along with the Black Panthers immediately come to mind.  The fact that the Portland protests, which while they didn’t have guns, but did feature a lot more fighting back, were able to keep the cops bottled up and effectively useless for weeks.  Why not have armed supporters standing, Black Panther style, outside of abortion clinics to guard patients and staff?  Lefties, if you believe in bodily autonomy then it’s worth defending-not just with words, but with force.  And if the Supreme Court gets guns as right as they got abortion wrong, which is likely, then suddenly that’s going to be much more possible. 

There’s also another possible connection.  In addition to being a small scale pundit, I’m also a geek, and as such I think a lot about the future, and what could come to pass.  3D printed guns represent a decentralization of technology, as well as a resulting decentralization of power.  Similar efforts have been underway for a long time, in computing (such as Linux and just assembling one’s own system), in farming, especially the urban farming movement, and even in other industries as people rediscover old skills and the joy or necessity of making one’s own stuff. 

Medical technology has also been starting to decentralize over the past 20ish years as well.

Obviously since things are much more complicated the pace has been a lot slower. But you’ve seen groups like the 4 Thieves Vinegar Collective emerge. Genome@home and Folding@home have used distributed computing to help with genetics research.  3D printing has made some inroads in prosthetics and other medical devices.  Which leads to the question that, admittedly sans enough surrounding context, greatly bothered many of my friends:  we’ve had abortion recipes going back to the ancient Greeks (and Ben Franklin!).  Even before Roe v. Wade abortion was widely available, whether legally or illegally, especially if you had money.  Given this fact and technological trends, I wonder if enterprising young biohackers will figure out and publish how to make medical grade recipes, or how to 3d print an easy and safe abortion device that will make any laws moot. Can the medical equivalent of Defense Distributed or the gatalog be made?  And if so, why not envision a world where abortion becomes a truly private decision, not because of the return of the coat hanger, but because what can be done at home is just as safe and effective as any Planned Parenthood visit?

Let me once again be 100% clear:  a world that requires armed protestors at abortion clinics, or diy solutions that hide from the state is NOT my first choice.  Women and trans folk with uteri already face a difficult enough decision when considering an abortion, they sure as hell shouldn’t have the state bearing down on them as well  Abortion should be safe and legal as a function of respecting bodily autonomy, and I believe that we should continue fighting through the political process to make sure that continues.  BUT…a world where the edicts of the state didn’t matter because the private citizenry had found a way around them, more or less guaranteeing access for anyone that needed the service…it’s a poor second choice, but it does seem to be the next best thing.  And history has shown that people, over time, are often remarkably good about getting around bad ideas, especially bad ideas turned into bad laws.

 

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.

Post Mortem Jorgensen Part 3: The Bigger Picture & The Longer Game

Posted on by Scott Halleck

In both parts of my previous discussions of the Jorgensen campaign I’ve stressed the point that the next big year for Libertarians is 2021.  Now is not the right time to talk about 2024.  We should be worried about city council runs, not our next presidential ticket.

This is still true.

However Libertarians, being Libertarians and, well, people can’t help but think about the next presidential cycle in the immediate aftermath of this one.  And as such, I’ve got Some Thoughts on what I’ve been reading in libertarian circles post-Election Day.  In no particular order…

Justin Amash 2024:  Simply put, no.  Don’t get me wrong-Amash was an amazing congressman, especially in light of having to be in Congress during the Obama and Trump years.  His regular explanations of his votes were illuminating.  His nearly successful attempt at defunding the NSA was amazing.  And his last potshots at Trump over foreign policy have been wonderful.  He conducted himself with ethics, principles, and intellect.  He was wonderful for a Republican, and he’s continued to move in the right direction since officially joining the LP.  The US could do a lot worse than him as president.  However, he should not carry our standard in 2024.  And the reason is simple:  he’s still a carpetbagger.  He’s still kind of wishywashy on immigration.  Although he seems to be moving in that direction (which I support!) historically he wasn’t the strident non-interventionist that the LP needs and that I feel most comfortable voting for.  And, as a matter of appearances and strategy, as of right now he’s only won election as a Republican.  He needs to win a local office-any local office, whether governor or sanitation board rep-as a Libertarian first before he deserves a shot at our big seat.  For a long time (and still, to a large extent) the LP was seen as a vanity project for failed Republicans.  For whatever the failings of the Jorgensen campaign, the return to homegrown talent was the smartest thing our party has done in years.  It was the beginnings of reclaiming the LP’s identity as its own entity, not just a rump Republican party, and even more importantly the effect of homegrown talent was that the candidates were firmly committed to the message, and as such campaigned harder, articulated the message much better and much more consistently, and brought people in that were motivated rather than meh.  That’s the kind of person we need again in 2024, whether it’s Spike Cohen, Jorgensen again, Hornberger, or one of our many recruits from this cycle-or someone I don’t know yet.

Further thoughts on the presidential nominee:  They should be a proud libertarian of strong principle, but also someone who’s willing to reach out to groups well outside the stereotypical libertarian constituencies-this is another thing that Jorgensen and Cohen did exceptionally well.  They should have a solid body of work behind them.  Ideally we would draw from our stock of officeholders, but I know that’s not always how it goes in the LP.

What issues should we focus on?:  As I said in part 2, there are a lot of local issues to focus on that can make our communities better and prove our ideas can work in the real world, most of which we don’t know about yet. We have such an information gap in our party between what’s happening on the ground and what we’re aware of that it’s tragic.  We need to be out in the world (metaphorically, in the age of quarantine anyway) in a way that we haven’t been.  Even having a libertarian watching a city council meeting and reporting back on it would be an improvement.  And I think that’s where a lot of our energy needs to be. 

That said, the state and national stuff is always bigger and far more egregious.  I think we need to recognize, if we don’t already, that we’re a small movement, and as such look for single issue coalitions on what’s important to us, across the entirety of the traditional political spectrum.  The goal should always be to move society in a more liberty oriented direction and to improve peoples’ lives, but we shouldn’t be ignorant of how things will play out in recruitment either.  In the year of Black Lives Matter and police murder being in the headlines we continue to have natural allies there on qualified immunity, civil asset forfeiture, the drug war, and, in time, ultimately the very nature of the relationship between the state and the individual.  The Jorgensen campaign did a great job of starting that conversation in a way that no Libertarian ticket had done before.  And, when the Biden/Harris administration inevitably lets down that constituency, whether through backburnering criminal justice reform or simply being true to their historical track records, that’s a major opportunity for us to pick up new supporters.  And to anyone who’s screaming pandering right now, or “dirty commie thugs” or somesuch nonsense, my response is here, but more importantly, hear them in their own words.  How anyone-especially those who have been railing against the abuses of the state for so long-can hear the stories of those people and not be moved to tears is beyond me.  Also…in SoCal George Gascon was just elected DA on a campaign of, and I quote, “ending the racist drug war”.  It’s an issue that I wish wasn’t necessary to pursue, but it’s also an issue that wins both morally and at the ballot box.

Given Biden’s stance on guns, expect a lot of people on the right to suddenly care about gun rights again after ignoring Trump’s abuses.  The NRA is in decline (thankfully), but many better groups are out there carrying on the good fight-Firearms Policy Coalition, Gun Owners Of America, and Citizens Committee For The Right To Keep And Bear Arms all come immediately to mind.  There are also a lot of groups that are reaching out in minority communities, often also doing work (or overlapping with the work) of dismantling the drug war and reigning in police abuse.  Maj Toure and Black Guns Matter. The National African American Gun Association.  The Latino Rifle Association.  Armed Equality.  The delightfully named Not Fucking Around Coalition.  I don’t agree with every stance these organizations and people have taken on every issue, and I have serious disagreements with some of them on some things.  But they are all doing important work on an issue that’s very important to us as libertarians, and we need to reach out to these people, go to their meetings, and offer as much support as we can.

War will be another issue which we will need to pursue with great vigor.  With the return of Democrats to the White House the antiwar (mainstream) left will most likely go silent, and I don’t think there’s a lot of antiwar Republicans left among the elected class.  However, the American people have very rarely liked war in the modern era, they’ve just dealt with it as the price for supposedly getting the domestic policies they want.  We can become the antiwar party.  We can reach out across the spectrum to help stop the next war, which we all know is coming giving Biden’s track record.  We can reach out to a broad variety of people here; Adam Forgie’s excellent series of interviews with all of the third party candidates this cycle had one unifying thread-every third party, from nativist to Libertarian to flaming commie, is profoundly antiwar and anti-empire.  This should tell us something big.

The issue we shouldn’t pursue though, or at least seriously modify how we talk about it?  Covid-19.  I have heard entirely too many libertarians, including a lot of candidates and official representatives, talk about the virus almost as if it didn’t exist, and talk about the quarantines and lockdowns as if they’re the second coming of the Soviet Union. 

This is not a winning strategy for us, morally or politically.

I have a more detailed take on this here, but to summarize I agree that lockdowns of private enterprises are unconstitutional and wrong, and they’ve been horribly economically destructive.  However, Libertarians need to have some damned nuance when we talk about this.  In mid-November as I’m writing this we’re facing flu season on top of a resurgence of Covid cases in various places.  And regardless of the percentage of surviveability (the case fatality rate is hovering at about 2%, according to that study), the reality is that almost 250,000 people have died because of this disease, which is somewhere between double and 7 or 8  times typical flu deaths.  Anecdotally Covid support groups have been talking about a lot of dead members, and side effects that linger for a lot longer than a typical flu.  And yes, the numbers might be goosed some (a charge I’ve heard frequently), but there’s still a substantial number of Americans that have been really affected by this.  To not acknowledge this, even as we criticize the abuses of the lockdowns, will win us no friends and quite frankly makes us assholes.  And it may well put us on the wrong side of history-we run the risk of becoming like the early AIDS denialists.  We need to point out the realities of the virus, the people that have died, and what people are living with and risking even as we point out the effects of the lockdowns, and we need to emphasize that private solutions are better here but solutions are still needed for a very real problem.  Simply going out and railing against the lockdowns and calling anyone wearing a mask a cuck or some nonsense just makes us sound like Trumpers.

Finally, tone:   Tone is always the toughest thing for libertarians, and really any ideologues.  We’re often angry and self righteous, and not without justification-there’s a lot to be angry about.  A lot that has been going on for a long time, and didn’t just spontaneously arise in the age of Trump.  The state has been killing people, and robbing people for a long time.  The ideology of control of the individual has had a powerful allure for a long time.  Suppression of dissent is almost as American as dissent.  And while Trump’s loss is welcome, Biden’s election is hardly a cause for celebration.

It’s hard not to be angry.

We should be angry.  We should continue to stand firm against what is wrong, in no uncertain terms (and that was one of the very refreshing things about the Jorgensen/Cohen campaign).  And those in office deserve every bit of the ire and venom that we can give them, especially since a large chunk of the formerly angry populace will probably be turning a blind eye to the sins of the new administration and will need to be reminded that their enemy just pulled a lot of the same crap a year or two ago.

But for those not in office?   We need to be kind.  I’m not talking about the knock down dragout debates we have with our close friends, although some kindness there wouldn’t hurt.  I’m talking about when we go out into the world.  When we’re at a community fair, or a city council meeting, or a protest, or a meeting of a non-Libertarian group.  First off, if we’re going to claim the moral high ground we damned well better act like we deserve it, and lead by example.  Ron Paul said it very well:  “Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms”, and while he was talking about international relationships, if you substitute force of arms with “yelling and screaming and calling someone a filthy statist idiot” it translates pretty well to interpersonal ones too.  More practically, again, we need to recognize that as a small movement if we want to actually affect positive changes in the world rather than self righteously jerking off in our own echo chambers we need to actually convince people to work with us, whether on a single issue or in fully coming over to our camp.  That does not mean compromise our message, change positions, or pretend to be what we’re not.  But it does mean we need to listen a lot more than we talk, we need to be empathetic, we need to hear what peoples’ real concerns are based on their lived experiences, and speak to them in their language, based on their concerns, not just theoretical abstractions.  We also need to recognize that good ideas can come from other camps, that (for the most part) if someone comes to a point of agreement with you on a particular issue through a very different path that’s ok, and that people can and often do come to good faith beliefs that are very different than ours.  The way to reach them isn’t to beat them down.  It’s to listen to their story, to figure out how they got there, to find out where we agree, and build out from there.

Good luck out there.

No, it’s not “pandering”.

Posted on by Scott Halleck

This is not my post-mortem on the Jorgensen campaign.  That will come after election day, and after the winner of this election has finally been decided.  No, this post is about addressing one of the most persistent criticisms of Jorgensen, usually from the more socially conservative wings of the libertarian movement and/or Republicans on the fence, namely that she’s been coopted by Black Lives Matter and antifa, and that she’s somehow a secret commie, a collectivist, diluting the message, or Not A Real Libertarian. 

Let’s put aside that she was Harry Browne’s first running mate for a minute and as such has almost 30 years of party activism under her belt.

Instead, let me tell you a story, about me.  I got involved in Libertarian Party politics in the very late 90s.  At the time we were talking about many things-war, corporate welfare, taxes, censorship (oh, the days of the Communications Decency Act)…oh, and the drug war and police murdering people.

The drug war, to the extent that it was mainstream, was wildly popular.  The idea of police killing people for no reason was farcical to most people that weren’t black.  And yet here were the libertarians, saying over and over that the drug war was a bad idea, that it was contrary to human liberty, that it led to mass incarceration and the rise of gangsters a la alcohol prohibition, that it had destroyed minority communities, and especially in the case of marijuana prohibition had denied countless people access to real and effective medical treatment for a whole host of ailments-not to mention all of the industrial products that could be made from hemp.

Standard libertarian stuff so far, right?

The libertarians were also the only ones (barring of course a few commies and conspiracy theorists, although I didn’t really know much about them at the time) screaming about the state killing people without any due process.  Read through just about any Vin Suprynowicz article from the time, for example.  The names and events that rang out the most for us were Amadou Diallo, Don Scott, Peter McWilliams, Ruby Ridge, and Waco.  Regardless of whether any of the folks killed were personally likable or not, all of them were brutally murdered by agents of the state, and the entire gamut of libertarian thought at the time, from Cato to Lew Rockwell to anti-state.com (RIP), was uniform in condemning them.

And let’s look back further.  As a movement and a philosophy we look to many places that explicitly sanction the right of rebellion, and vigorously protest the brutalization of the individual by the state, such as the radical abolitionists and Thomas Jefferson (I know, it can be odd to see the two mentioned in the same sentence.  But they’re both part of our tradition).  We count William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman as some of our heroes.  We’ve been against police brutality since before there was a Libertarian Party.  And all of this is before we start on the brutalization of the individual that is war, which libertarians have an even longer and prouder history of opposing.

Hopefully all of this sounds familiar to anyone who’s been in the libertarian movement for more than five minutes.

Which brings us to the present day.

Over the last few years there have been a number of high profile shootings and killings of black individuals by police-Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Botham Jean, Michael Brown, and many others-along with some white folks that were also brutally killed by police, such as Kelly Thomas, Duncan Lemp, and Ryan Whitaker.  The (accurate or perceived-it’s actually not really relevant here) feeling that many-even most-black people have had for decades about being under siege from police, and facing a real risk of police harassment or violence every time they leave the house, and even moreso if they go into the wrong neighborhood-is finally mainstream.  The chant of “Black Lives Matter!” has rung out now for months in response to the fear, the anger, and the frustration of real people.  While I think that the best solution-that of repealing terrible laws-has gotten lost in favor of addressing the immediate problem of Not Being Killed, the fact is they’re voicing the same concerns that the libertarian movement has been shouting to the rooftops since its inception, and before.  Sure, some of the people angered by this are professed Marxists.  So?  When did libertarians get a monopoly on being offended by murder?

One of our biggest issues is finally mainstream.  The violence of the state is laid bare for all to see.

And along comes Jo Jorgensen, longtime Libertarian activist, and Spike Cohen, a slightly less longtime activist.  Jorgensen is at a Black Lives Matter rally within a day or two of George Floyd’s murder, and she eventually went on to also visit the site of the Tulsa massacre.  Spike Cohen has been to several Black Lives Matter events on the campaign trail, including the Get The Strap rally with Black Lives Matter 757.  They’ve called repeatedly for ending the drug war, pardoning and exonerating its victims, ending qualified immunity, ending civil asset forfeiture, and ending the war on guns.

And somehow this makes them communists?  Panderers?  Secret collectivists?  Democratic plants?  All charges I’ve seen in various threads, believe it or not.  Nevermind, of course, that the commies have been the ones getting their asses kicked fighting the state…  No, Harry Browne’s running mate is the sellout somehow.

Not on your life.

The only difference between what Jorgensen and Cohen have done vs. any other Libertarian candidate is they’ve actually gone to the people affected and heard them out.  Libertarians, as I’ve said in this entire essay, have been saying “The state murders people, and that’s a Bad Thing” for as long as there have been libertarians.  Our presidential ticket has now had the audacity to say “The state murders people, and that’s a Bad Thing” to people who are saying “The state is murdering us, and that’s a Bad Thing”.

That’s not pandering.  That’s consistency.  And for whatever else they’ve done as candidates, Jorgensen and Cohen were both completely right to do so.  They are right for themselves, for the outreach to communities where Libertarians have traditionally been absent or perceived negatively, and they’re right as a part of a continuation of one of the proudest parts of our tradition.

Liberty in our lifetimes.

Black lives matter.

 

 

An open letter to the left

Posted on by Scott Halleck

Dear progressives, communists, and those on the left,

Hello there!  It’s me, your local capitalist libertarian whackjob.  You know, the people that a lot of you like to dismiss as heartless Republicans that like weed, or tools of the Kochs, or occasionally Russian plants.   And we certainly often have choice words for you, ranging from secret authoritarians to usupers and tyrants to just calling you ignorant.

Those guys. 

I’m hoping that we can put aside our natural antipathy for one another for a few minutes and talk not about what we disagree on (it’s a long list, I know), but what we agree on.

That’s a surprisingly long list as well.

In 2020, much like 2016, both major parties have nominated candidates that are not only terrible on many, many policies, they’re also dumpster fires as human beings too.  Trump has made our immigration policy even more inhumane, endorsed racists, continued our terrible foreign adventures and doubled down on funding Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, attacked trans people in the military, and launched one of the most idiotic protectionist trade wars in our history, along with being incredibly venally corrupt and unable to form a complete sentence.  Biden, on the other hand, has a 40 year track record of voting for crime bills and domestic surveillance.  He stood by and did nothing as VP when Obama wrecked Libya, signed the 2014 NDAA, continued Bush’s wars, deported more people than Trump, gave out gigantic bailouts, and persecuted the three most important whistleblowers of our age.  Along with the wonderful racist gafes like “if you don’t vote for me you ain’t black”.

If you’re more of a centrist, you may not know all of this, or you may be trying to downplay the relative importance of this.  But if you consider yourself a progressive or somewhere in the communist spectrum, you know this just as well as I do.  As we do, really, because Libertarians have been saying this since Biden became the heir apparent.  You’re probably also just as disgusted with the duopoly as we are, and see it as a constricting and destructive force in our country’s politics.  With this in mind, I understand that figuring out who to vote for becomes a very difficult choice.

I’m asking you to vote for our candidate, Jo Jorgensen.  Why, you might ask?  Because Howie Hawkins, while I think he seems like a very decent sort, is not going to be on the ballot in all 50 states, and his campaign hasn’t gotten the same level of public attention.  And because I think she has enough to offer you to let you vote for her in good conscience.

Here’s the case. 

We don’t agree on everything. We disagree vehemently about the fundamental relationship between the individual and the state, and that translates directly into real policy disagreements about healthcare, taxation, environmental policy (to a degree), education, and individual welfare programs. This is all true. However, I urge all of you to consider where we agree, which is on some pretty big issues.  We both agree that the war on drugs is an absolute disaster and should be abolished.  We both agree that police murdering people is unconscionable.  We both agree that mass incarceration, which is usually related to the war on drugs and other victimless crimes, needs to end and its victims need to be released AND exonerated so they can rejoin the above ground economy and not be permanently locked out of employment and life.  We both agree that as part of those same criminal reforms qualified immunity and civil asset forfeiture need to go.  We can probably find real common ground on occupational licensing, especially if we talk about how it’s mostly used to keep poor people out of jobs.  We both agree that the United States empire is horrible, and we shouldn’t have troops in 150 countries, nor should we be bombing any country that hasn’t attacked us (that is to say all of the countries we’re currently bombing save Afghanistan, where I think we took any legitimate vengeance a LONG time ago and have long since crossed over into war crimes).  We both agree that corporate welfare should be abolished. We both agree that liability caps for polluters should be abolished so that polluters have to actually pay for ALL of the damage they cause, not just some pitiful fraction.  We both agree that our immigration policy is stupidly restrictive and more importantly inhumane, and that free people should be allowed to move freely.  We might even agree (or start to agree) on guns, especially given the abuse that’s been heaped on the citizenry by police and federal troops recently.

That’s a lot of common ground, I think.

And right now Jo Jorgensen and Spike Cohen are the only ones that are even _talking_ about most of this stuff.  You sure as hell won’t hear bring the troops home from Trump or Biden.  Or end the drug war for that matter.  And there will be no talk about ending subsidies for anyone from either of them. Moreover, Jorgensen and Cohen have both been out at many protests now, and Jorgensen visited the site of the Tulsa massacre.  Symbolic perhaps, but powerful symbols I think, that neither of the two majors have done.

I know that there’s real gaps in how libertarians and leftists think, and I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise.  But even as a cranky capitalist, more ancap as I get older libertarian who cast his first presidential vote for Harry Browne and never stopped I can recognize that if we had gotten a Nader administration, or a Stein, or a Bernie administration I would have gotten major movement on some of the most vital issues of the day-specifically the drug war, corporate welfare, and the empire, and probably a lot of the surveillance state as well-in a very libertarian direction. I hope that all of you will be able to see the same from the other side.

Thanks for reading.  I hope you vote for Dr. Jo on November 3.