Tom Woods

The venue for our event on June 8 has been announced: The Bowery Electric, 327 Bower, (at 2nd Street), NYC. Doors open at 2pm!

I’m on vacation this week, but here’s a nice resource page I put together on the subject of war and the state. This was a blind spot of mine when I was a young college student. I hope you’ll bookmark the page; I think you’ll find some useful links there.

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All the information necessary to steamroll your position is at the fingertips of anyone with an Internet connection, says Joel Poindexter.

That’s what the headline says, at least. He now thinks maybe jail time isn’t the best policy for marijuana users. Not quite Murray Rothbard.

But Woods, aren’t you happy when people move in your direction? Are you some kind of perfectionist? By saying that Sean Hannity does not merit the libertarian label in any regard, I do not consider myself a perfectionist, no.

Some Robin Hooders in Keene, New Hampshire, who feed parking meters for cars in danger of getting tickets, are being sued by the city. The story says they are harassing the officers who monitor the meters, though this aspect of the story is in dispute. What is not in dispute, I don’t think, is this: if the people in Keene were merely saying critical things to the officers, but not feeding the meters and depriving the city of revenue, there would be no suit.

I keep getting emails from something called the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. They are written by Amitai Etzioni. Communitarianism is supposed to represent a radical break from the current political spectrum.

Sure.

Here are a few communitarian precepts, as I understand them:

(1) Rights do not exist in the absence of government. Therefore, when government expropriates you and transfers your property to someone else, you have no grounds for complaint. Had there been no government, you would have no rights at all. Be happy with what you are permitted to keep.

(2) In many areas of life, public-private partnerships are desirable.

(3) Communitarians believe in “community,” but by this they do not mean your town, your local civic group, or any of the local, flesh-and-blood institutions people associate with community. At least as articulated by Etzioni, the only “community” to which communitarianism makes reference in practice is the nonexistent “national community,” a soulless abstraction. In the name of this “community,” we ought to treat individuals’ property as if it is entirely at the disposal of the political class, so that we may promote the “common good.”

What brave pioneers these communitarians are! Take a moment to catch your breath, now that you’ve seen just how radical a departure this all is from conventional thought.

Although Etzioni flatters himself as being beyond the left-right spectrum, he is not quite correct: he is exactly in the middle. He is a “vital center” liberal of the Truman/Schlesinger variety. That means he is wrong on everything, both domestic and foreign.

Thus his most recent piece is on why impeachment of the president should be more difficult. More difficult! We’ve had a grand total of two impeachments in over 220 years, and this is just too darn many!

(I will spare you his other recent articles, by the way. One is called “Soft Syria Response Worse Than Inaction,” which has nothing to do with preserving localism and community health, as one ought to expect from someone calling himself a communitarian. Another is “Everything Libertarians and Liberals Get Wrong About Drones,” which are “the most effective counter-terrorism tool the United States has found thus far.” Again, I hope the radical originality of Etzioni’s effusions will not lead any of my readers into cardiac arrest.)

Etzioni fears that impeachment drama will “eat up much of whatever little political capital exists in Washington for bipartisan deals and constructive action.” So he’s a communitarian, but he looks to one city, in a country of 310 million people, to direct the resources and energies of all American communities? Of what use is this ridiculous label?

“Bipartisan deals and constructive action.” Yes, that sounds like our nation’s capital. The $222 trillion in unfunded liabilities for the major transfer programs is the result of decades of bipartisanship. The fiasco of a foreign policy the U.S. government has is the result of nearly 70 years of bipartisanship. Thanks to bipartisanship, lots of real-life communities in Iraq were reduced to rubble, and 2-4 million people were displaced from their communities. If impeachment talk may disrupt all this, a genuine believer in community should be delighted.

If one were a genuine communitarian — in the sense of caring about actual communities that involve not some phony “national community” conjured out of thin air but real, face-to-face relationships between actual human beings — he should want to see impeachment after impeachment. He should want to place as many obstructions as possible before the community-destroying circus of sociopaths who rule over us. Etzioni conceives of our Washington overlords as Platonic guardians. Not from him will we uncover the more prosaic reality: we are governed by self-centered cronies who rig rules and regulations in favor of the powerful and who never saw a war or a bailout they didn’t like.

We are not as pathetic and helpless as Etzioni appears to think. He should have a little more confidence in community.

My wife sent me this. All hate mail should be directed her way.

Here’s a campaign against them, with lots of reasons to oppose them.

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