Tom Woods

I’ve been writing lately about what I call commissars of approved opinion, who can be found on both left and right. On the left, I recently profiled the hapless Ian Millhiser, who hops around the Internet trying to stop people from promoting views to which he and his friends haven’t given the official Stamp of Establishment Approval.

Then there’s neocon Jamie Weinstein of the Daily Caller, who tries to destroy Eric Margolis — Eric Margolis! — by falsely calling him a 9/11 truther, and demonizes Walter Block for holding opinions on secession that the old National Review even allowed to be aired in its pages. (I link to Weinstein in Neocons Attack Ron Paul Peace Institute and in Daily Caller Says I Am Missing All Their Deep Points.)

Ludwig von Mises himself believed resolutely in secession. Mises, too, used to appear in National Review. Today, the twentysomethings who run the conservative intellectual movement — an oxymoron if there ever was one — have never heard of Mises.

Weinstein makes sure the Establishment understands that these people are cranks for not sharing 80% of the political presuppositions of Bill Clinton, as Weinstein’s friends (and presumably all other respectables) all do, and that he himself is one of the Reasonable People who may pretend to nibble around the edges of the state, but who, when the Establishment raises its flag, can always be counted on to salute.

Oh, and remember: for Jamie Weinstein it is absolutely not crankish to have run around telling everyone that Saddam Hussein had an unmanned drone program that was going to kill Englishmen within 45 minutes. We are never, ever to use the word crank to refer to Tony Blair or any of the neocons who weaved apologias for him.

It is, furthermore, positively not crankish to have cheered for the stupidest war in American history, based on propaganda that would have insulted a fourth-grader, and which resulted in at least 100,000 and perhaps as many as 1 million deaths, 2-4 million people displaced, an ancient Christian community destroyed, an Islamic constitution written for Iraq, and the strengthening of the very Iranian regime we’re supposed to blow more resources on destroying now.

Nothing crankish about that. How could it be, after all, if Tim Russert favored it?

Finally, there’s poor Jamie Kirchick, who makes fun of Ron Paul by calling his followers “isolationists” — so, like a good neocon, he adopts the left’s smear term against his opponents — and “goldbugs.” He thinks the gold standard is so stupid and contemptible that he once again uses the left’s smear term against — well, against the most free-market economists of the twentieth century. So Henry Hazlitt was a “goldbug” to be ignored? Henry Hazlitt, author of the classic Economics in One Lesson, must be dropped forthwith? To be in good stead with the wise and learned Jamie Kirchick requires quite a sacrifice indeed!

So Kirchick adopts the monetary policy of the left, and of all authoritarians and totalitarians throughout history. (Although, of course, if you are not interested in fattening the American warfare state by rushing to war with Ruritania, it is you who, in Kirchick’s infelicitous phrase, are a “dictator-lover.” Physician, heal thyself.) He is a “conservative.” He supported Rudy Giuliani for president.

Again we have someone who is dying to let everyone know that he holds all the approved opinions, and that he has never soiled his pristine mind with thoughts that were not pre-screened by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The endorsement of Giuliani was really the icing on the cake. As if we needed more proof that Kirchick was basically satisfied with how things are going, and would perhaps like to see things be about 1.2% different.

I am considering having a regular department here in which I go after a “Commissar of the Week.” Part of me is concerned about giving them attention they don’t deserve. But the other part thinks this is an important phenomenon to study, understand, and explain to others. What do you all think?

We’ll soon be unveiling course number eight at LibertyClassroom.com, where you can learn economics, history, and more while on the go. Subscribe by April 30 and I’ll send you a free copy of Nullification: The Rightful Remedy, a DVD documentary produced by the Foundation for a Free Society. Just drop me a note with your address once you’ve joined.

Meanwhile, Prof. Gerard Casey, author of Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State (and who teaches our Introduction to Logic course), will be joining our members tomorrow (Saturday) at 2:00pm ET for a live Q&A.

Writes Michael Sean Winters of the left-wing National Catholic Reporter:

James Hohmann, at Politico, makes the case that libertarianism is going mainstream. This is the scariest development in contemporary American politics and members of both political parties need to be on the alert, especially Catholics. You may find yourself agreeing with this or that policy, but the problem with libertarianism is at the root: When they say “human person,” they understand that differently from the way orthodox Christians do. This is why Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quadragesimo Ano[sic], referred to libertarian economics as a “poisoned spring.” When you get the fundamentals wrong, everything that flows from it tends to be wrong. Focusing only on individual freedom as the first and foremost goal of politics, and understanding the human person in a hyper-individualistic way, demeans everything we Catholics believe about the common good, human flourishing, and the range of human values in any given culture. Libertarianism may be going mainstream, it may not, but it is dangerous in the extreme.

Libertarianism holds exactly one political position: no one may initiate physical aggression against an innocent person. That’s it. From this insight that we ought not try to solve our problems through violence, libertarians are accused of being atomistic individualists, etc., even though this obviously does not follow from the nonaggression principle. To call this lazy thinking is, I suppose, the duty of charity, although I could think of many, far more appropriate words for it.

I have addressed the Pius XI matter, and the issue of economics and Catholic social teaching more generally, in my book The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. (Gerard Casey discusses the matter here, urging me to be even tougher than I was already being.)

On May 4 I’ll be at O’Gara’s in St. Paul, after speaking on Church history in the afternoon. On May 14 it’s the Wisconsin Forum, with drinks, then dinner, and then me.

Finally, the zombie returns: Bob Murphy and I will reprise the zombie and do other fun things in New York City, June 8. Through May 1, tickets are only $10.

House Bill 436 in Missouri has just passed by a veto-proof majority. Proponents say it nullifies virtually all federal gun control, past, present, and future. It quotes copiously from the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Read it here.

What is nullification? See StateNullification.com.

Jim Grant.

Even if you’re not on Twitter, check out my list of recent tweets, most of which are aimed at neocons Jamie Weinstein and Jamie Kirchick, both of whom thought the Iraq War — arguably the dumbest, most heavily propagandized war in U.S. history — was just super, and who are appalled at people whose views would not have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, 2-4 million people displaced, etc.

Every month I give away signed, personalized books to ten people who subscribe to my free e-letter. This month’s winners are:

David Morrow
Tim Bakamjian
Ryan Schumann
Ron Webb
Carole Wandless
Michael Langemeier
Ed Groover
Ricardo Navarro
Debbie Earhart
Patty Hankins

Jamie Weinstein, author of the Daily Caller article critical of Ron Paul’s peace institute, can’t understand my post in reply to him. He tweets:

Talk about terrible reading skills. Each of your bullet points are utterly irrelevant to what I wrote @thomasewoods tomwoods.com/blog/neocons-a…

— Jamie Weinstein (@Jamie_Weinstein) April 24, 2013

The fact that Weinstein can’t see the relevance of the private-property, libertarian principles I laid out in that post to the arguments by Walter Block quoted in his article speaks volumes. More on that in a minute.

First, another matter. Weinstein conducts himself like the leftists he claims to oppose. Take a scholar with 50 years of peer-reviewed material and portray him to the world on the basis of one or two articles, which most of the dumbed-down public is of course not prepared to read.

Walter Block has nearly 500 peer-reviewed articles in economics. That means he has had the equivalent of 10-20 successful careers. Not to mention his books and his enormous influence on students and other scholars.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Daily Caller had never heard of Walter Block until now. I am sort of afraid to ask.

Instead of saying, “Walter Block has an astonishing record of scholarly publication, much of it we agree with, but on foreign policy his ideas must be rejected,” Weinstein says nothing at all about Block, one of the most prolific free-market economists of the past 50 years.

Now Weinstein demands to know the relevance of my bullet points. Why, none of this is relevant!

But of course it’s relevant. Walter is looking at foreign policy not from the point of view of someone who takes for granted, even implicitly, that the U.S. government must be in the right, or that when it’s attacked the attack is entirely out of the blue, or that the U.S. government has been innocently minding its own business in the world. He looks at the facts of the matter, from the point of view of aggression and nonaggression. Weinstein thinks it’s quite all right for the U.S. government to prop up police states and participate in or connive at all manner of moral mischief, because the U.S. government is good and must protect itself against the wicked. He is free to think this way, but he should not be surprised when libertarians, who look at the world through the Rothbardian lens I provided, disagree with him.

Walter’s arguments about the competing moral merits of the claims of the U.S. government as opposed to those of individual Afghans derive from the moral status of the U.S. government as compared with the moral status of individual Afghans. Reading the Rothbard article I linked to — which according to Weinstein is irrelevant to the discussion, even though it is the foundation of libertarian thinking on foreign policy — would have explained this. (I recommend, in tandem with that article, Rothbard’s “The Anatomy of the State.”)

Walter also says no country has the right to avenge 9/11. Weinstein presents this to us without editorial comment, explanation, or context. I provided that context by linking to the Rothbard article, which derives Walter’s points from the private-property, individual-rights foundations of libertarianism.

But I never said people should chant “USA! USA!” says Weinstein. If he wishes to make this obvious point, I yield it to him. The important point, rather, is that from the neoconservative camp we hear nothing but anti-intellectual bellowing about “American exceptionalism,” “moral clarity” (which means normal moral rules don’t apply to the hegemon), etc. Anyone who questions all this, and who even suggests that people around the world might have at least as much reason to dislike Hillary Clinton as the rest of us do, is treated as an appalling deviant, even though the rest of the world holds precisely the same view of Jamie Weinstein and his buddies.

A reader sent along this advice for people who, while in the market for a handgun, may not be too knowledgeable about guns. What do you guys think?