Who Is Matt Welch?
How did Matt Welch, who knows nothing about libertarianism, ever get in the position of becoming editor of Reason, the emblematic libertarian magazine? It is a position, after all, that has a bit of history to it, one that covers the life span of the modern libertarian movement from its very inception. It is a position, therefore, of some honor, one that has been a bit tarnished in recent years, and yet not indelibly damaged until recently. Surely Welch has accomplished exactly this, however, with his laughably ignorant attempt to slander Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul as “racists” – and not only that, but to discredit an entire argument and way of looking at race relations and politics that differs significantly from his culturally leftish version of political correctness.
Welch, of course, has been in the vanguard of the neocon-led smear campaign against Ron Paul from the very beginning. He and his magazine have been on a jihad against Paul and his circle ever since The New Republic made them an issue, albeit a minor one that had no effect on the campaign—newsletters that, read in context, are merely reflective of the typical conservative Republican view of the world, circa 1980-something. I’ve debunked the left-neocon Jamie Kirchick’s interpretation here. Now Welch has come up with the Right-neocon version, a clueless and embarrassing jeremiad, seemingly written by someone utterly unfamiliar with libertarianism.
He mocks Paul for refusing to vote to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday, whilst, two decades later, calling him a “hero” for his strategy of nonviolent resistance against state oppression. Yet anyone even vaguely familiar with libertarianism can see why Welch’s mockery is misplaced.
King was the leading advocate of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade “discrimination” based on race, gender, religion—and the list gets longer with the years, as the politically correct lawyers discover new victim groups to “protect.” Libertarians oppose these laws because they violate property rights—and anyway, as Richard Epstein pointed out in an extensive interview in Reason magazine, the alleged beneficiaries gain nothing from the passage of such legislation. I might add that the interviewer at no time challenged Epstein, or accused him of harboring racist sympathies, even though he (Epstein) was advocating the repeal of Martin Luther King’s life work. Apparently the MLK standard of value, wherein one’s attitude to the slain civil rights leader and plagiarist is the moral and ideological yardstick that measures one’s degree (or lack) of “racism,” is selectively applied.
When it comes to Epstein, and his scholarly and somewhat abstract analysis of the very real harm done by anti-discrimination laws and other “civil rights” legislation, the editors of Reason have been willing to allow discussion, and, more than that, challenge liberal orthodoxy on this question. And I have to say that, having been a reader of Reason since the beginning, I can recall no sympathy for King and his cause while he was still alive. Now we are told that to question or in any way acknowledge the flaws of a complex man—his close association with known Communist Party members, his naïve and quite mistaken economic views, his philandering, deviancy, and human failings—is tantamount to “racism” and “appealing to white resentment.”
What sanctimonious baloney. Reason is constantly polemicizing against drug laws, quite rightly claiming that their enforcement victimizes blacks and other minorities disproportionately: it’s okay to appeal to black racial resentment—or, rather, white “latte liberal” racial resentment on behalf of blacks—but the reverse is not true. It’s not okay to appeal to white resentment of, say, affirmative action or to debunk the idea of “civil rights” by pointing out that King’s legislative monument, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was a massive violation of property rights—precisely the sort of big government scheme one would expect the editor of the premier libertarian magazine to oppose.
On the other hand, Paul’s characterization of King as heroic is not a contradiction, because King himself was contradictory. It is perfectly proper, from a libertarian perspective, to admire the methods of a movement such as, say, Gandhi’s or King’s, without giving unqualified support to the movement’s specific political goals. Yet ideologically, King, like Gandhi, was a mixed bag. Quite aside from campaigning for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he fought against state-enforced segregation, which regulated private property according to racist strictures – and denied blacks equal access to taxpayer-funded public facilities, including the voting booth.
Welch falsely claims that Murray Rothbard held up David Duke as an “exemplar”— an outright lie. He furthermore conflates a speech Rothbard gave to the John Randolph Club with one of Ron Paul’s newsletters. But never mind the details: the point is that neither Rothbard, Paul, or Lew Rockwell held up Duke as an “exemplar” of anything but demagoguery and racial collectivism. What the author of the newsletter in question was saying, as I pointed out here, is that there is some reason why Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, nearly clinched the Republican nomination for governor of Louisiana back in 1991, one that—from a libertarian perspective—was and is entirely legitimate. As many commentators pointed out at the time, the bulk of Duke’s support at the polls came from “protest” votes, and did not constitute endorsement of his racist views. What were these voters protesting? Didn’t they have some legitimate grievances against a system that penalized their sons and daughters in the name of “redressing past injustice”?
The 1992 Los Angeles riots over the Rodney King incident sparked a bout of racial and ideological polarization: the “Great Society” had spawned a culture of entitlement in the black inner cities and the rioters, instead of being universally and roundly condemned, were catered to by the liberal elites, and even excused by black polticians. Duke, who, the Ron Paul newsletter averred, lacked “a consistent package of freedom,” was successful because because he spoke to these concerns—while no other politician dared.
The Rothbard-paleo strategy for the Right, cited by Welch, had nothing to do with “playing on white fears of black criminality,” and everything to do with playing on the fear of law-abiding non-rioters who saw criminality being pandered to and legitimized. As white motorists were dragged out of their cars in Los Angeles, where was the outrage? Imagine, for a moment, the reverse scenario: black drivers being hauled out of their automobiles and stomped half to death on the streets of, say, Alabama. The Matt Welchs of this world would have demanded that the cops shoot the rioters on sight: yet Welch is horrified that Rothbard called for similar “street justice” when the lives and property of the Korean community of Los Angeles were threatened by racist mobs of looters. Apparently, Korean storekeepers do not qualify as an officially-recognized victim group.
What is striking about Welch’s polemic is its utter hypocrisy: on the one hand, Reason magazine has devoted many pages to explaining just why so-called civil right legislation is wrong, counter-productive, and the cause of social tensions. On the other hand, we are supposed to worship at the altar of Martin Luther King—and, furthermore, it is forbidden for any libertarian political figure to actually raise these issues in the public arena. That is the exclusive domain of theoreticians like Epstein and others. In short, as long as libertarianism is consigned to the role of an entertaining intellectual parlor game, talking about these kinds of issues is permitted. But as soon as some libertarian political figure challenges the paradigm—say, by refusing to give millions of federal and state employees a paid holiday in honor of King’s ambiguous legacy—that’s another matter entirely.
Welch’s favorite rhetorical trick is context-dropping, and so you’ll note that he never quotes more than a single word or isolated phrase of Rothbard’s “Strategy for the Right.” As a typical liberal, he blanches at the sight of Joe McCarthy’s name and never addresses what Rothbard actually says about Tail-Gunner Joe. Rothbard is chiefly concerned, in his peroration, with the phenomenon of McCarthyism as a populist, anti-government movement that threatened the liberal elites, and which, for just that reason, was hated by the liberal intellectuals and academicians, and the future neoconservatives, who were then the liberal mandarins of the postwar consensus.
As the wartime era drew to a close, and the long shadow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to recede, the McCarthy movement was the long-suffering right-wing’s revenge against the pinko New Dealers who had called for sedition trials against opponents of the war, smeared FDR”s enemies as “traitors,” and apologized and covered up for the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps. For a while, these “liberals”—of a decidedly illiberal sort—ruled the roost, and took every opportunity to persecute their enemies and drive them out of public life. With the rise of McCarthy and the anti-communist movement, the shoe was suddenly on the other foot.
Rothbard came of political age during the McCarthy era, and saw the pro-McCarthy movement from the inside. Indeed, he was the author of a wonderful speech delivered by George Reisman (now a prominent libertarian economist) to a large McCarthyite rally in which he asked: what was the real reason for the intensity of the hatred directed at McCarthy, Roy Cohn, et al?
The Rothbardian answer: an assault on domestic Reds in the federal government represented a direct threat to “the Socialists and the New Dealers, who have been running our political life for the last twenty-five years, and are still running it!” The crowd of some 1,500—gathered in the Hotel Astor on July 28, 1954, in defense of McCarthy aide Roy Cohn, the only gay AIDs victim in history who is vilified to this day—went wild. Reisman-Rothbard continued:
“As the Chicago Tribune aptly put it, the Case of Roy Cohn is the American Dreyfus case. As Dreyfus was redeemed, so will Roy Cohn when the American people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers, and Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.”
In those days, when Daniel Bell was proclaiming “the end of ideology,” and the social democratic notions of the New York intellectuals were the unchallenged ideological and political status quo, “there was a vital need to appeal directly to the masses, emotionally, even demagogically, over the heads of the Establishment of the Ivy League, the mass media, the liberal intellectuals, of the Republican-Democrat political machine”—and McCarthy fit the bill.
Anyone who bothers to read Rothbard’s “Strategy for the Right” with some modicum of understanding realizes that he is not saying McCarthy was a libertarian, or that his ends were admirable.
“The unique and the glorious thing about McCarthy was not his goals or his ideology but precisely his radical, populist means. For McCarthy was able, for a few years, to short-circuit the intense opposition of all the elites in American life: from the Eisenhower-Rockefeller administration to the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex to liberal and left media and academic elites – to overcome all that opposition and reach and inspire the masses directly. And he did it through television, and without any real movement behind him.”
The neocons – who were then in the Hubert Humphrey-Scoop Jackson phase of their ideological hegira – immediately took out after McCarthy and the McCarthyites. As Peter Viereck, the pet “conservative” of the New York intellectuals, said of the Reisman-Rothbard speech at the Hotel Astor, it was “an outburst of direct democracy,” which “comes straight from the leftist rhetoric of the old Populists and Progressives, a rhetoric forever urging the People to take back ‘their’ government from the conspiring Powers That Be.”
“Take back America” is the slogan of yet another movement of the Right that Señor Welch finds unwholesome, as he berates Rothbard and the paleos for having “rallied around Pitchfork Pat Buchanan for president in 1992.” Curiously, he never mentions the main reason for the Rothbard-Buchanan alliance, which was a mutual agreement on the key issue of foreign policy. With the Cold War over, Buchanan and his fellow paleoconservatives began moving in the direction of a consistent anti-interventionism. Buchanan took on the neocons, almost alone, during the (brief) debate over Gulf War I, which turned out to be a dress rehearsal for the invasion and occupation of Iraq by Bush II. As such, he was way ahead of his time, and so was Rothbard, who foresaw that, with the implosion of Communism, a large section of the right could and would abandon militarism and join with libertarians in urging “Come home, America.”
Welch doesn’t mention this, and for the very good reason that his own foreign-policy views are far from libertarian. In his essay, he says that, as the cold war came to an end, “I was more interested in poking through the rubble of communism abroad.” Which raises the question: who the hell is Welch, anyway?
I had never heard of him until he became known as one of the ill-fated “warbloggers” who arose in the wake of 9/11 to vent their rage at all things Muslim and berate liberal-lefties like Susan Sontag for supposedly “blaming America” for the attacks. (Like Ron Paul and Michael Scheuer, Sontag saw 9/11 as “blowback” from our history of supporting tyrants and otherwise intervening in the Middle East, which is another reason—albeit unadmitted—that Welch has led the charge against Paul and the antiwar paleo-libertarians such as Rockwell).
I see here that Welch was the editor of a magazine published in Prague called Prognosis. While conservatives like Buchanan were discovering that our foreign policy of relentless aggression had a down side, Welch was unearthing new rationales for U.S. military intervention in Central Europe:
“I don’t claim to be an expert on anything, but I can talk pretty confidently about Central Europe from 1990-98, and especially the expansion of NATO and U.S. involvement in the Balkans (both of which I wrote and edited about extensively). And in those cases where my limited knowledge has brushed up against the party line of the Chomskyite Left’s foreign policy views, I have been appalled. For example, I’ve received more than a dozen e-mails from people quoting Chomsky while citing Kosovo as yet another example of empire-extending, militaryindustrialcomplex bloodlust on the part of a hypocritical U.S. This is so wrong, words are hard to come by. (To be an equal opportunity Left-basher, let me also say that Christopher Hitchens is chock full of shit when he implies – as he did in ‘No One Left To Lie To,’ that Clinton’s expansion of NATO was A) wrong, and B) done primarily to “furnish a sales market for those in ‘the contractor community’”). Such explanations (especially Chomsky’s) deny even the existence of Wilsonian diplomacy, or Vaclav Havel’s forceful arguments & access to Clinton’s ear, or of the sea change in U.S. policy that came about when a child of the Munich sellout (Madeleine Albright) took the reigns [sic] of the State Department. It also seems, to my ears, almost oblivious to how the horrifying Balkan slaughter of 1991-94 damaged the collective psyches of diplomats and citizens of West Europe and America. For starters, that period exposed just how not-ready-for-prime-time the idea of collective European defense was, which was yet another argument for expanding NATO.
According to Welch, in this convoluted text, NATO expansion is a good thing. Chomsky is a monster for suggesting otherwise, and for opposing our attack on a nation – Yugoslavia—which never posed a threat to us. No mention is made of the 5,000 of its citizens we killed in the process. One of the few times Christopher Hitchens has ever been right about anything is the occasion for Welch’s condemnation: how wrong—and unlibertarian—could somebody possibly be?
Clinton’s war, in Welch’s view, was glorious: Mad Madeleine Albright is valorized as “the child of the Munich sellout.” U.S. sock puppet Vaclav Havel—how could this saint and his “powerful arguments” ever be wrong? And how about that “Wilsonian diplomacy”—you know, the sort with bombs attached? Of course, you can’t argue with that …
Is this guy for real?
What kind of a “libertarian” is it who lauds war—especially one which led to the creation of a gangster state in Kosovo, where the “Kosovo Liberation Army” has driven out the Serbs except in a small northern enclave and rules the state by means of violence and intimidation? Perhaps he’s attracted to their penchant for burning down churches: now there’s a program (or is that pogrom?) Welch and his fellow “cultural libertarians” can get behind!
Welch now claims he took no position on the Iraq war, yet he spent the run-up to the invasion disdaining antiwar commentary, touting his fellow anti-“Islamofascist” “liberals” like David Rieff for supporting the invasion in the name of “modernity,” denying the atmosphere of intellectual intimidation that made the march to war with Iraq nearly inevitable, and trying vainly to prove that the sanctions imposed on Iraq since the Bush I era only killed a few thousand people, instead of the hundreds of thousands claimed by several experts—and that it was all Saddam’s fault, anyway, for trying to defy the American hegemon.
Is Welch a libertarian? Certainly not—by his own admission:
“I’m a liberal. I take liberalism to mean a belief in policy geared toward easing poverty, extending rights to every walking human who hasn’t utterly forfeited them, getting the government out of the morality business, regulating markets judiciously, ensuring the pervasive yet hopefully efficient delivery of non-market goods such as education, health care and national defense, and otherwise having the sense to let the private sector handle private concerns. What makes me not “liberal” in the way that people who call themselves ‘progressives’ are seen as “liberal,” is that I don’t think the U.S. is the primary fount of global wickedness, I am heartily in favor of the war against Al-Qaeda,” (Emphasis in original)
Welch isn’t just a liberal, he’s a boringly typical representative of the species who responds with knee-jerk irrationality when confronted with people like Joe McCarthy, Pat Buchanan, and anyone who might be characterized as a right-wing populist. He feigns support for the Paul campaign, in spite of the fact that it sprang from – and owes its success to—this very same right-wing populist sentiment, which has always been the core of Paul’s national constituency.
Welch hates Paul—and McCarthy, and Buchanan—for the same reasons the neocons hate populism in all its forms: it’s those right-wing yahoos making trouble again, disturbing the placid waters of the Washington Consensus. The neocons like to have faux-“libertarians” of Welch’s (and Nick Gillespie’s) ilk around, much as royal personages keep court jesters: to entertain them with displays of libertarianism as an intellectual game, and not a serious political philosophy with real roots in the country. That’s why Paul has built a genuine mass movement, and Reason magazine has well under 50,000 subscribers—and can’t get along without massive subsidies from numerous neocon foundations.
I once complained to a Reason staff member that I found it inexplicable the editors of the magazine would find the Iraq war debatable, giving war proponents a platform to air their views, while they wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to advocates of the “war on drugs”—and was told that the funders of the magazine would never allow it to take an unambiguously antiwar position. Welch, whose cowardly—and, in retrospect, downright stupid—refusal to take a clear position one way or the other (all the while encouraging the pro-war crowd, and displaying his contempt for those who warned of the impending disaster) made him a perfect fit for the editorship of Reason, once they got rid of Virginia “More Dynamic Than Thou” Postrel.
Welch’s first editorial for Reason is a blot on the magazine’s once-proud history, and an indication that worse is yet to come. One awaits the Reason cover story on “How To Regulate Markets Judiciously” with bated breath.
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the soon-to-be reissued Reclaiming the American Right.
Comments
I used to read Reason back in the ‘70s. I picked up a copy the other day and couldn’t believe that it had tuturnd into such crap.
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Thought you might like this clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JVLcWu7CnE
and keep up the good work.
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Another excellent expose of a leftist by Justin Raimondo.
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Another Spot-On observation by Mr. Raimondo! As per usual, nice work Sir…
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Health care is a non-market good? Oh my God. Oh well--as long as it’s delivered in a “hopefully efficient” way, I guess.
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I got a subscription to it for my brithday. it is a very mediocre magazine. Are there people who want to read a4 page interview with MTV’s Kurt Loder? Why?
The last issue had this ridiculous narrative about the Paul campaign losing all momentum in New hampshire. Does anyone remember that happening? i certainly don’t. His biggest fundraising day was well after that. I agree that lewRockwell couldhave been more forthcoming about the newsletters, which I would guess were written mainly by Murray Rothbard, but he probably wanted to use the controversey to get Paul well needed publicity.
and whatis with those “I am IJ” ads? “I am IJ!!”
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Another brilliantly written and well-researched piece, sir! Well done!
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I love LewRockwell.com and appreciate their
cutting edge insights on a daily basis, especially on
Ron Paul. The only thing I don’t like about the site is
the occasional anti-Lincoln diatribes.
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Justin, this piece is an absolute killer! So it’s all right to be a warmonger, but it’s not all right to say some insensitive things that weren’t all that different from what you’d read in any right-wing publication at the time.
The Tonight Show—you know, Johnny Carson—did a skit with that crazy right-winger Robin Williams (that’s sarcasm) on the L.A. riots that was far more insensitive than anything in the newsletters. That was America before 17 more years of p.c.
I’ll await their breathless calls for a boycott of Robin Williams and NBC.
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The Leisuretariet couldn’t hack a Libertarian Government anyway and so these dutiful little hipster factotums sign on with the indiscriminate Conventional Wisdom Brigade in order to take a paycheck and enjoy a little fame. It is the kind of self-congratulatory pragmatism that defines the age.....an age where much is written and said but Functional Illiteracy is the State M.O..
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Glad to know that the editor-in-chief of a “libertarian” magazine believes that healthcare and education are “non-market” goods.
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Just as an aside, I’m reading a book on Gandhi and it turns out he may not have been such a mixed bag after all. He actually wrote once that he believed government governs best when it governs least. I wonder how many folks at Reason can express that sentiment with a straight face.
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Very informative piece. It’s nice to learn something concrete so easily. I do not share all of Mr. Raimondo’s non-interventionist positions, i.e. WWII, but he’s very good at these analyses of recent intellectual history.
@jack - thanks for that link to del Valle ranting about the myth of greater Albania.
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Who took the “liberty” out of “libertarian?”
Paul, Rockwell, Rothbard, even Buchanan, each state unequivocally what it is that they value and believe. The clarity of their separate works makes guesswork and pseudo “exposes” completely unnecessary.
On the other hand, some men, like Welch, present themselves as defenders of liberty while adhering to ideas which are in direct opposition to the “image” they create.
Here God Himself gives us profitable advice: we can “know a man by the fruit he bares.”
Paul’s campaign broke through the wall of silence imposed by these phonies, awakened that wonderful spirit of independence and enabled us to begin again speaking aloud about the important issues he raises. Paul reminds us that this is not yet a dictatorship where we dare not trust who might frown on what we say. Finally, one of the greatest achievements of this reawakening has been to expose the manipulative “thought police” for who the are. Feels good, doesn’t it!
Lastly, a response to LOGAN BRAINETREE: Your mind is becoming free and independent, don’t stop reading! Lincoln-worship is the last vestige of a mental serf. Time to go beyond the State-sanctioned descriptive. Much of what we’ve been taught to think has intentionally had all context removed, leaving “useful snippets.” Start reading Lincoln’s own words.. Testing your beliefs about the man against what he actually said is the first step toward reclaiming your independence. Good luck! (Thomas Woods’ well-researched works will also enlighten.)
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Excellent! I subscribed to Reason from 1971 until now. I realized it was not really a libertarian magazine when they attacked Harry Browne. I just toss the new issue into my garbage can when I take it out of my mailbox. Hope my subscription ends soon. Or do they just keep sending them not wanting to admit how much their readership has dropped off.
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Reason mag. acts bipolar. The writers seem to be at odds with each other.
Very strange bunch and NOT Libertarian. Maybe they should go Neol.
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The last issue had this ridiculous narrative about the Paul campaign losing all momentum in New Hampshire.
He polled as high as 14 percent, two pollsters thought he might come in third, and he came in fifth with less than 8 percent.
His biggest fundraising day was well after that.
His biggest fundraising day was 12/16/07. The big post-NH moneybomb, on MLK Day, drew in less than a third as much money.
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So, Dave, are healthcare and education “non-market goods”?
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Bravo Justin!! Thanks for showing what kind of scum-bag this guy is. That magazine has gone down the tubes.
Attacking Harry Browne, Paul, the way they treat Brian Doherty (say what you want, but I think Brian is the only one left over there who is a Libertarian), David Weigel gushing over Mike Gravel joing the LP, Kerry Howley complaing about body parts she can’t sell. And of course their disgusting attacks against the Holy Mother Church. (Didn’t Saint Thomas, practicly create Libertarianism?)
Again, thanks Justin. Keep up the good work my friend.
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Interesting that someone from Reason comes over here and clarifies a couple points by one of the commenters, but says nothing at all about the unbelievably scandalous views of the guy who, you know, actually runs the magazine.
Reason went after me several years ago for a couple columns I wrote while in grad school. They were ignored then, too—my Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which Reason and the New York Times hated (and for the same reasons, naturally), sold in the hundreds of thousands.
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I used to subscribe to Reason, but it is a total joke now. Amazing and sad at the same time. Keep up the good work Justin.
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Matt Welch reminds me of another trendy fraud Bill Maher. Both pretend to be courageously outspoken but in reality express the prejudices of liberal Hollywood. And their targets of ridicule are always the unfashionable: white ethnics, southerners, Catholics, and conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul who refuse to be sycophants of the Israel lobby.
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Mr. Woods’ comment re: Weigel responds to commenter rather than the actual article…
Same tactic that the “left” would implement -consistently- whenever confronted with facts. Is it a coincidence that the neo-fill-in-the-blanks consistently do the same?
Sure do wish these dark-siders would stop stealing our labels (conservative, libertarian, individualist, pro free-market, Patriot). They couldn’t survive if they identified their true hatred of freedom.
While the modern day Loyalists were parroting State-sponsored lies, Paul stood up and spoke the truth, an unforgivable sin in a warmongers’ eyes. One positive result has been the reawakening of liberty’s remnant, the Patriots.
These scurrilous enemies of individualism should scurry back under their rocks and stay there. But they never do which is why there’s so much money in pest control.
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Thank You Justin!
FYI Steve Chapman wrote a article saying it was a good idea to pass a law that
required people to pay for $1000 breathylyzer ignition locks on their cars so that
the government could make sure people didn’t drive drunk.
Ron Bailey seems to think a global carbon cap n trade scheme is advisable becuase it is “free-market”
Michael Young is as much of a pro-empire, pro-war, anti- US citizen paycheck person as you’ll find
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The Rockwellians and Reasonoids can have their little slapfight, but please just be sure to leave Radley Balko out of this. He is an excellent columnist and deserves immunity.
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Oh, and rumor has it that Reason’s Dave Weigel is at work on a book on Ron Paul and the campaign that will portray him/it as “racist,” etc. “We belong to the anti-Ron Paul wing of libertarianism”—man, that must do wonders for subscriptions and fundraising.
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P.S. No, that isn’t an exact quote from Weigel; it’s a paraphrase of a certain point of view.
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I visit both Reason and LRC regularly. While I do think that LRC’s portrayals of Reason as Neo-con are quite exaggerated, I have noticed a change in the libertarian nature of Reason. (I say this as someone who used to describe himself as a “Reason magazine libertarian”.)
I think it best to point out where Welch and other Reason writers might contradict the spirit of libertarian thinking, but the name calling and mudslinging add nothing to the discussion and, in my opinion, make me question the credibility of the critics.
Likewise, while I think the writings in Ron Paul’s newsletters deserve consideration as well as some of his policy stances, Reason’s initial overreaction to the TNR’s hit piece was not what I had come to expect over the years from Reason’s writers.
And Justin, while your writing is wonderful, as always, let’s not gloss over how awfully wrong Pat Buchanan is in so many ways. I would not want anyone to think that PB is *almost* a libertarian.
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I almost-almost! feel sorry for these pathetic neocon shills when Raimondo finishes with them.
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Wow, people actually still consider Justin Raimondo an informative and reasonable writer? After reading the piece, I was looking forward to reading the comments shredding his “analysis.” I have to say, I’m a little disappointed in the Reason crowd for letting such nonsense slide. But I suppose silence is the best defense when faced with reflexive (and often absurd) cries of “neocon!” and “Kochtopus!” or other such ridiculousness.
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Bravo Justin,
I will be letting my subscirption (and one that I gave as a B-day gift) lapse.
Decorum prevents me from listing the exact words that I will be writing on any solicitations to renew, but the family-friendly version goes something like this:
“Fork you, you Forking Forks! After what you did to Ron Paul, I will never, _NEVER_, ever _EVER_ send you another dime. And that goes double for any gift subscriptions I have given.”
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So “Simple Simon” is disappointed in Reason for letting Justin Raimondo’s column “slide.” They have a website, which they’re free to use to answer it. So far, not a word.
How exactly do you “answer” Welch’s own stated views? Either he holds them or he doesn’t. Hello?
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I have had a subscription to Reason since it started. It doesn’t seem like it is as libertarian as it used to be. I still like reading it, although I am mystified that they have any beef with Ron Paul. My question is the same as Justin’s, in his first paragraph. And I don’t see the answer: How did this guy Welch become Editor? I expected some kind of answer to this question. Who was it who chose him, and why?
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Tom,
Mea culpa. I meant to say “Reason supporters” or “cosmotarians” or whatever they’re being called nowadays. I wouldn’t expect that the Reason writers/editors would bother responding.
With regard to Matt’s political orientation, you’re quite right that there’s no “answer” to his stated views. But insofar as I can decipher Justin’s piece (and I admit, it’s not easy), the issue seems to be the way his political beliefs influence his editing of the magazine (and thus, the trajectory of the magazine).
Matt could be a communist, a fascist, a liberal, or an anarchist. But none of those things necessarily impact his ability to write/edit for a libertarian mag.
Justin seems to believe that “revealing” Matt’s political views and pulling quotes from previous articles is some sort of “gotcha,” and is proof enough that the magazine is going downhill. I think he’s making spurious connections.
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Simple Simon,
Wow. If that’s your argument—that Welch’s views don’t affect how he would edit a magazine of opinion—then I’d say the argument, such as it is, is all over. I don’t think even Dave Weigel would accept such a defense, which is probably why, when he stopped by here to comment, he didn’t even try.
And yes, I know Reason’s people are unjustly put upon and called names by those whose libertarian credentials are far stronger than theirs, but you may have noticed that Reason has a way of unloading on people as well.
Usually, as another commenter observed, the targets of their vilest words happen (by just a coincidence, I am sure) to be unpopular for other reasons—they’re religious (especially Catholic), conservative, or whatever. It takes exactly zero ounces of courage to expose the sins of those whom the establishment already despises.
Again, though, you can’t seriously believe what you’re saying. Welch’s views don’t matter? Then I guess Reason won’t mind if someone sent out a letter to their donors quoting from them. You think?
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I first came to think of myself as a libertarian several years ago.
Hungry for more detail on libertarian ideas, I picked up “Reason” because of its
claim to being a magazine of “free minds and free markets.” Eventually, I bought a
subscription.
Then after several issues it dawned on me: These guys were quasi-statist sell-outs!!!
Screw THIS, I thought, and dumped the subscription. I soon discovered that if I wanted
my libertarian intellectual thirst slaked by any periodical, it was best to go to the “Journal of
Libertarian Studies” published by the Mises Institute.
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Tom,
No, that’s not quite it. I don’t say at all that Welch’s view don’t matter. I just don’t think Justin ever shows that they matter.
As I see it, Justin’s argument is:
1. Reason has been going downhill. See examples 1, 2, and 3 which all libertarians “should” agree on.
2. Welch is not a libertarian, but a self described liberal.
So far, so good. Adequate examples proving both (though tinged with a bit of more-libertarian-than-thou bitterness).
However, the case sort of stops there. If you want to make the case that Matt Welch’s liberalness is bringing Reason down, then make it. I think it’s an argument that could be made. But Justin doesn’t (or does poorly). He just sort of assumes that “everyone knows that a liberal could NEVER run a libertarian magazine.” Well, no, not everyone knows that. For my part, I’d argue it’s not necessarily the case, but I’m not writing an article on it. Justin is. And he does so poorly.
This, I think, is very true, and I would have no problem if the argument were made in that context.
And it takes more courage to scream “neocon!” at the slightest sign of libertarian “impurity?” Call me old-fashioned, but I think this is a case where both paleo-libs and cosmotarians are both wrong.
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ps. Some of those paragraphs are your quotes that should have been blockquoted. I guess the form stripped my tags.
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dave weigel- you are correct I had forgotten the dates. still, i don’t recall the momentum shifting after new hampshire.
also, you guys seemed to reduce the entire campaign to the newsletter issue. I admit, they were very edgy in some respects and, again, the campaign could have been more forthcoming in explaining why they were written that way. but there was alot to the Ron Paul campaign that was positive don’t you think?
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Simple Simon wrote:
>He [Justin] just sort of assumes that “everyone knows that a liberal could NEVER run a libertarian magazine.” Well, no, not everyone knows that.
Well… Simple One, I guess you have indeed proved that not everyone does know that – at least, you don’t! So, let me try to enlighten you.
Logically, yes, it might be possible for a Jew to run a Nazi magazine, for an anti-Semite to run a Jewish magazine, or even, less likely, for a liberal such as Matt Welch to successfully run a libertarian magazine. But it is so extraordinarily unlikely that no one here has thought it was really necessary to explain the point to you in detail.
No one really cares what the political/philosophical views of the janitor at reason are. Janitorial work is rather well-defined, fairly mechanical, etc. To some degree, this may even be true of the editor of a book – you can fix the author’s grammar, usage, etc. and even help him express himself better without sharing his views.
But the job description of the editor of an opinion magazine goes beyond that. An opinion magazine exists to propagate a particular point of view: in the case of reason, that view was once libertarianism, and reason still pretends, fraudulently of course, that this is still its perspective. Central to the task of an editor of an opinion magazine is to help the magazine fulfill its purpose of propagating its political perspective.
If an editor holds views antithetical to that perspective, he will not want to help propagate that perspective: indeed, it would be unethical for him to do so, just as it would be unethical for a Jew to help advance the cause of neo-Nazis.
And, even if the editor were so mercenary as to be quite cheerful about advancing views that he thinks are wrong, he’d do a bad job at it. When you think a point of view is wrong-headed, when you have little personal sympathy for it, when you think it cannot be successfully defended because you think it is wrong, you are not likely to be of much help in propagating or defending that point of view.
Of course, Simple One, everything I just said is utterly obvious to all normal human beings, which is why no one here bothered to explain it to you explicitly and why Justin did not insult his readers’ intelligence by going into it. But since you have chosen to publicly embarrass yourself by stating that you really do not know this, I hope you appreciate my charity in explaining it to you.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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Another great article Justin. I might just be able to forgive you for your Obama-shilling (I understand your reasons but I think you’ve been just a little too enthusiastic about him).
As for Reason, they have been in the gutter to me since Virginia Postrel’s tenure. At best, they are the main voice for the ‘Low Tax Liberalism’ wing of the libertarian movement (if they are a part of that movement at all anymore).
I am a bit confused about another poster’s complaint about LRC’s “occasional anti-Lincoln diatribes”. Are they supposed to be pro-Lincoln? You have got to be kidding me. That is the same kind of crap that Matt Welch uses against LRC/Paul, only it is ‘occasional anti-MLK diatribes’.
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I admire most of your work Mr. Raimondo, and I try to read your contributions without fail. I do have a peripheral disagreement with you, regarding Kosovo. I agree that NATO (i.e., American) military involvement --bombing Serbia in 1999-- was wrong, however the Albanians from Kosovo do have a legitimate right to secede (and even join Albania).
Despite the often repeated Serbian claim that Kosovo is the heart of Serbia, the majority of the population of Kosovo has for centuries been Albanian. During the fall of the Ottoman empire in the 19th and 20th centuries, the renewed (after 4 centuries) Serbian state engaged in massive ethnic cleansing of various people, mostly Albanians. Following Serbian (re)occupation, Kosovo was under martial law for decades, as Serbs and Montenegrins were colonized there in an ultimately failed attempt to redress the ethnic balance. The Albanians there never willingly accepted being incorporated into the Serbian, later Yugoslav state.
When you castigate the American empire --justly-- please don’t fall into the trap of defending a resurgent Serbian empire. Yes, I know, this tiny Balkan empire took a well-deserved beating over the last 18 years.
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“Despite the often repeated Serbian claim that Kosovo is the heart of Serbia, the majority of the population of Kosovo has for centuries been Albanian”
While there is, of course, truth to that, I myself wonder if the Albanians/Kosovoians would respect that same principle of secession and allow the Serbs in the north to ‘secede’ back to Serbia? Somehow, I think the answer is a big fat “no”.
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lester wrote:
> you guys [reason] seemed to reduce the entire [Ron Paul] campaign to the newsletter issue. I admit, they were very edgy in some respects…
Lester, rather than “edgy” wouldn’t the more accurate term be “truthful”? Almost all of the critics of the Ron Paul newsletters simply were aghast that the newsletters had pointed out certain truths that are just not supposed to be mentioned, but almost none of those critics went to the trouble to try to argue that the statements in the newsletters were really wrong. To take the most prominent point in the newsletters, the Rodney-King rioters really were overwhelmingly black and really were viciously criminal thugs.
What was so wonderful about reason’s breathlessly inane coverage of the newsletter issue was its inspiring refusal to consider whether the statements in the newsletter were actually true – exactly the same behavior as the liberal mainstream media.
Let’s be honest – most of the prominent people at reason are simply wannabes who would like to work for the respectable liberal mainstream media. But, since most of the reasonistas are lousy writers who couldn’t write their way out of a freshman writing class, they can’t make it in the real world. So, they settle for writing for a liberal, faux-libertarian, incompetently-edited rag like reason, which almost no one actually reads. Really – why would anyone bother to read reason when they can read much better-edited liberal/neocon mags such as The New Republic?
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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I don’t even have to read the article, or the comments--whatever got Tom Woods all hot and bothered and throwing punches over here at TakiMag has my enthusiastic approval!
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Once again, Justin, you allege Communist connections to the civil rights movement (some true, but not that important, in my view), and this time to the SCLC specifically. Yet your own link ("flaws") provides more evidence to the contrary than in support of your claim. I won’t argue with your libertarian disagreement with King’s socialist political-economic views—those are matters of opinion—but I do quarrel with your assertions of fact, including the remark about “deviancy.” I know he was an adulterer, but deviant? What’s your definition? Again, your own link contradicts more than supports that claim. What I find objectionable in the whole argument against King is the desire to find something wrong with the man in order to tarnish the movement he led—an ad hominem attack if I ever heard one.
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lester, The plug was pulled on the RP campaign the night before the NH primary as RP dissembled and stammered as Wolf Blitzer delivered the carefully prepared dagger.
After scoring 8% in NH and less and less in the bigger states, the purpose of his campaign was kaput. After that, his campaign was transformed into not much more than what his 3rd party libertarian run for president was in 1988: an educational outreach effort at best and futile delusion at worst.
Maybe if Ron Paul had responded more honestly to Blitzer the day before the NH primary with something like this, then he might have kept his longshot effort alive:
“Yeah, us libertarians have had cranky racist bigots hanging around us from day 1. We’re kind of like the ACLU. Who do the Klan and the Neo-Nazis call when they need protection for their marches in Skokie? They call the ACLU.
We libertarians are sort of like that. We’re the only people who defend the rights of racists to be racist, so some of the non-violent ones join the movement. To what extent they actually apply the libertarian non-violence principle is sometimes questionable, but we do have some of them come into the movement and if one isn’t careful racist libertarians can end up writing some of their immoral--but not illegal--views in one’s libertarian newsletter.
Its the same with other non-violent libertarians who hold views outside the mainstream such as marijuana or free-sex advocates. Sometimes these activists let their personal views that I actually think are immoral get into their political advocacy.”
But RP didn’t do that and the 8% NH result officially ended the campaign.
Once the Racist Newsletter story was put out there, ALL of the left/independent cross-over support that RP’s campaign depended on evaporated. All of a sudden people who had previously un-ashamedly stood up for Ron Paul had to tag qualifiers to their statements of support that acknowledged the Racist Newsletter issue (e.g. Andrew Sullivan, Bill Maher, and Penn Gillette).
Actually, the Racist Newsletter issue would have been the perfect prop for RP to distinguish his campaign from the previous populist campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Alan Keyes--whose 30% early primary showings RP WAS trying to emulate, but whose dumb hick support RP should NOT have been trying capture.
Unlike Welch, I remember the cozying up to the Buchananite populist period of Murray Rothbard. At the time I was sitting in on his History of Thought classes at UNLV in 1993/94 and the whole thing troubled me greatly, especially to see Rothbard contradict his earlier eloquent defenses of the anti-Berlin wall LP platform planks when people like Ed Clarke would get squeemish about such things.
I also will never forget reading Lew Rockwell’s LA Times editorial in 1991--post-video taping of the Rodney King beating, but PRE-riots, where Rockwell called for the police to carry out beatings/punishments on the spot similar to the Rothbard article that Welch references. I hadn’t remembered that he called for outlawing video cameras as Welch says.
How could these guys have thought such authoritarian positions could ever yield anything but evil down the road? And how after holding those positions and then later (re?) discovering “Red State Fascism” and becoming one of the net’s top anti-police-taser-torture blog sites, could they not feel compelled to make the evolution of their thought an important issue itself.
I agree with Doug Casey who said that after the U.S. government pulls its military out of the 130 countries that it occupies it should make a sincere apology to the world for all of its murder, rape, and pillage. Likewise Rockwell should apologize for advocating police beatings. Honesty is the best policy and would probably have gotten a lot better than 8% in New Hampshire.
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I respond at http://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/response-to-raimondo/
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Chams,
Do you have a source for said 1991 LA Times editorial?
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What exactly wasn’t all that unreasonable about Welch’s article. I believe that those newsletters and their discovery by that warmongering Kirchirk (however, just because somebody is a warmongering statist doesn’t discredit everything they say per se; ad hominem is a fallacy of course) may have cost Ron Paul a win in New Hampshire and the nomination.
Why not just confess that the Paleolibertarianism of the early 90s was a mistake (obviously, I don’t think any of the Paleos defends the statements about how cops should be able to hand out “instant punishments” in the streets anymore)? Why the need to cover up movement history just like the Commies did?
It isn’t exactly fair to single out Ron Paul for newsletters that said the same things that Rush Limbaugh was saying at the time, but that’s how a campaign works. Appealing to collectivist hatreds is not an effective way to get votes. Ron Paul got as far as he did by trying to be reasonable and to bring people together, but he eventually fell apart due to his perceived associations with racists and conspiracy theorists (which was a smear, but was believed, just as the smears against Obama’s pastor have been believed).
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Tom, googling “lew rockwell”, “rodney king”, beating reveals that I apparently wasn’t the only one to find noteworthy rothbard/rockwell’s trite application of their understanding that such a thing as time preference exists to illegal standing armies.
Here’s the first hit that I tried near the top that happened to include the March 10, 1991 L.A. Times editorial and a comment from William Grigg.
http://www.theagitator.com/2008/02/02/lew-rockwell-on-rodney-king-in-the-la-times/
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Infamous Mortimer wrote:
>Finally, whoever mentioned the New Republic as the champion of traditional Conservatism, they’re the ones who revealed the Ron Paul scandal
Mort, dear youngster, did you flunk grade-school reading class? Recently?
I am the person who mentioned TNR, and I referred to it as one of those “liberal/neocon mags” like reason, but, of course, much, much better written and edited than reason and therefore much more widely read.
I can’t imagine that anyone has ever referred to TNR as, to use your phrase, “the champion of traditional Conservatism”! TNR has been a warmongering-“progressive” magazine, AKA liberal/neocon, for decades, indeed since before any of us were born (they were cheerleaders for WW I!).
You are confused, deeply and profoundly confused.
You are also very funny.
You also wrote:
> Apparently like some of the wackos on here seem to think, it’s all the truth, or a reasonable version of it. If so, then enough said. We’ll back away slowly.
Oh, please, please, please do! But don’t go slowly. Go as fast as your little legs will carry you. Go back to grade school and learn how to read.
You said:
>A single paragraph from one of the newsletters likely holds the record for the most bat-shit crazy conspiracy theories in a single paragraph.
Really? Then you should be able to give one little paragraph to illustrate your point.
Oh, I forgot – that would require that you knew how to read.
You wrote:
>Maybe all of this bizarre backbiting is meant to try and win readership for a fledgling online magazine…
No, don’t you get it? We are opposed to the political positions taken by reason. We are not part of the same political movement as reason. We are on the other side.
I would vote for Hillary Clinton before I’d vote for Matt Welch: their political views are basically the same, but at least Hillary is a bit less dishonest.
My views are libertarian. reason is controlled by neocons/liberals like Matt Welch.
Dave
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Brad wrote:
>I believe that those newsletters and their discovery by that warmongering Kirchirk (however, just because somebody is a warmongering statist doesn’t discredit everything they say per se; ad hominem is a fallacy of course) may have cost Ron Paul a win in New Hampshire and the nomination.
Brad, let’s get real. Ron Paul was running for the GOP nomination, and most Republican voters happen to disagree with his views.
That’s why he lost.
I’m, quite frankly, grateful to TNR for breaking the newsletter story. It did a fantastic job of separating us real libertarians from faux libertarians like Matt Welch.
Rodney King was a violent, convicted felon on parole who led police on a dangerous high-speed chase through LA because he was afraid that he’d go back to the joint if they picked him up and found out that he had violated parole. He deserved everything he got and more.
The newsletter controversy has done a wonderful job of separating true libertarians who are willing to acknowledge those facts and who are happy to see violent thugs get their just deserts from politically-correct pseudo-libertarians who are more interested in sucking up to leftist totalitarians than in defending the rights of innocent human beings.
Ron Paul could not have won. But the newsletter flap has wonderfully cleansed the libertarian movement of the leftist hangers-on, like Matt Welch, that have encrusted it in recent years. Now, to the general public, “libertarian,” means “Ron Paulist.”
Dave
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Simple Simon,
I see that you’re doing your best to live up to your pseudonym. Without a word to contradict any of the points Mr. Raimondo raises, you let loose with the standard pseudo-intellectual put-down, of pretending that it’s a given that there’s no need to take him seriously.
If you can argue any of the points he’s raised, then have at it. If not, then you reveal yourself as a shallow little neocon toady. It’s no wonder you’re posting anonymously, you sad little coward.
-jcr
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Dave,
Rodey King could be the devil itself, and that wouldn’t justify the actions of the police officers who beat him on that infamous videotape.
Even in the heat of battle, once your enemy is disarmed and on the ground, it is a crime to physically abuse him. The cops who beat up Rodney King were thugs, just like those who rioted when they were acquitted.
-jcr
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Makram,
Thanks for the link to that column that Lew Rockwell wrote about Rodney King. He was wrong, of course. A police office is entitled to use force to subdue a suspect, and once the suspect is under control, the officer MUST STOP, or become a criminal himself.
No laws empower the police to administer punishment on the spot in the United States; we have the right to trial by jury, to the presumption of innocence, to habeus corpus, and all the other safeguards to limit the power of the state against the accused.
As for Lew’s claim that street crime was not rampant in America in the 1950’s, I must take exception, on the grounds that every instance of the cops beating up a suspect was in fact a crime.
Apologists for the medieval regime in Saudi Arabia often claim that there’s no street crime in the kingdom. That’s a laughable lie too, since they have gangs of semi-literate thugs who will beat up any woman they decide isn’t properly dressed.
-jcr
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James Harry Schaeffer, and anyone else wishing to cancel
their subscription to Reason, make sure you’re not being
automatically renewed and billed to your credit card. Just
waiting for the subscription to run out doesn’t always work.
I’m not accusing Reason of doing this, but it does happen. I
once assumed I’d cancelled a subscription and ended up with
another year’s worth, at least until I forced a chargeback.
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jcr,
There are two separate issues here.
First, did Rodney King get what he deserved? I think any reasonable, honest person would say that, given his behavior (endangering the lives of people in LA, including the cops), yes, he deserved what he got and indeed a lot more.
Second, did the cops behave themselves in terms of the procedural requirements we place on police? After all, we do not want cops to get into the habit of beating suspects, because some of those suspects, unlike Rodney King, will be innocent.
That is a complicated question. The cops claimed that King was violently resisting arrest, and he appeared to be on drugs. He was a big guy.
The Simi Valley jury heard much more on this than you or I know. On the face of it, I am inclined to accept their verdict. At any rate, it was clearly unconstitutional for the cops to be tried again under federal law for exactly the same acts for which the Simi Valley jury had acquitted them. (I know that the federal courts allow this sort of violation of the Constitution as they allow so many violations of the Constitution. That does not change the fact that holding the trial again under federal auspices was double jeopardy.)
Violence, even violence by police, is not per se wrong. I’m an anarchist, and I would like to fully privatize the police function, but it is a legitimate function. Sometimes, it is perfectly appropriate for police to be violent if that is the only way to protect themselves and other innocent people.
One thing that is certain is that it is Rodney King, not the cops, who was responsible for creating a horribly dangerous situation in the first place. Even if one concludes that the cops over-reacted – and the jury which knew more than you or I do did not so conclude – Rodney King bears a great deal of the blame for creating the dangerous situation in the first place.
Dave
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Again, we are treated with another example of why it makes perfect sense for reason to be run by a liberal:most “libertarians” are decidedly liberal.
The CRA act both, ended government enforced segregation on government property, and private acts of segregation on private property. The principled “libertarian,” would, presumably, defend the rights of individuals to associate with whomever they wish, be it in their private life, or business. Further, the principled “libertarian” would see the segregate-or-not-segregate debate as an argument for abolishing public accomodations. For example, since public schools must either side with the segregations or the desegregations, the appropriate libertarian response ought to be to sell the schools so that each school could set its own policy on racial segregation. That is the consistent libertarian position, but it is not argued.
The reason it is not argued is that most “libertarians” are really liberals who hold as an article of faith that the market will result in liberal outcomes, such as desegregation.
For instance, liberal-libertarians often argue that the free market punishes segregations by abitrarily restricting their pool of clients. The housing developer who sells to all races will have more bidders, and, therefore, higher prices for his properties.
The historical facts are different. Racially restrictive covenants exist not because of Jim Crow laws, and such, but, rather, because, historically, racial segregation was an economic good. Knowing that no Negro would move into a neighborhood increased the economic desireablity of a property, ie raised the price, and that is why such covenants exist!
Because of the CRA, racial segregation is no longer either a political or economic good, but segregation by class is still an economic good that most persons affluent enough to purchase do purchase.
Nor has the CRA ended geographical segregation. Once integrated inner-city schools have been resegregated by the selective outmigration of Whites with children to the outer suburbs(as their childless peers remain in the city.) Libertarians ought to consistently brag about how the free market has defeated the intention of liberal busybodies to use government force to integrate our schools, but they don’t.
They don’t because in their hearts they are liberals, not libertarians.
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I cancelled my subscription to Reason when they published this:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28346.html
Now this hateful little hack is the editor. How about dat?
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Great job, Justin. I almost forgive you for your endorsement of the socialist.
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If Matt Welch’s denial of child genocide in Iraq is typical of the fare that we can expect from Reason
under his editorship...is there a real libertarian magazine called Hysteria that I can subscribe to?
In lieu of that: Go get’em Justin!
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Justin,
Thanks.
Your article on Matt Welch explains a lot.
This is what I had posted on the Reason web site:
“I have been a Reason subscriber for nearly 20 years. I voted for John Hospers and Toni Nathan 36 years ago. And every Libertarian Presidential candidate since then.
I am really not sure what Matt Welch’s problem is but someone hired him and someone can fire him. He clearly does not understand libertarian economics or foreign policy. Additionally, he has a personal animosity towards Ron Paul that is borderline psychotic. I really would like to know if they have ever met and if so, just what was said that turned Welch against him. Hating Ron Paul and saying he is not a REAL libertarian and that he is a racist homophobe is just silly.
I do not get it. Why put such a person in charge of Reason?
By the way my subscription runs out in May 2008 and I have been looking for ways to cut back my expenses and simplify my life, as well as lowering my stress level. Reason USED to be a way for me to relax my guard and just enjoy the new ideas coming in without being blindsided and upset by statist pabulum. No more. All it does is RAISE my anger level. I do not need the aggravation. If Welch explains himself or leaves, then I will continue my subscription.”
I guess I need to lose an old friend if the friend is no longer worth having. I would appreciate suggestions for other magazines and web sites that are like the old Reason and approach the world broadly AND from a libertarian perspective. “Liberty” does the best job that I know of AND hopefully there are others.
Thanks again.
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This geeky-looking guy whom Justin is going after looks like a winner. He understands the kind of
libertarianism that is likely to play well with the liberal-neocon power brokers. Although such
gestures may not be our cup of tea, Mat’s yapping about racism and outpouring of PC should land him
a column in the Wall street Journal or a place at the table with Rich Lowry and Andrew Sullivan. This
geek is moving in the path of another brilliant careerist at Reason, Virginia Postrel.
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Two points, and then I’m out of here.
Dave - I’ve cut thru your sneers to find what I believe is your point/opinion: that a job (like an editor) which involves advancing a philosophical perspective cannot be ethically and competently performed by someone who does not himself hold that perspective. I think one could make a strong case that you’re right about the ethics, but I think, or rather, know, that you’re wrong about the rest. Just because you yourself could never hold views in conflict with your job, and apparently can’t imagine that anyone else could do so successfully, does not make it so. Many people, including myself, do so quite successfully every day. Does it wear on the soul? Sometimes. But sometimes work is not pleasant, and one just has to do the best that one can. I hope you appreciate my charity in explaining that to you.
jcr - read my commments. i don’t say that justin is “wrong” or that there is anything to contradict. i argue that his article is poorly written and argued. there is a difference.
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Makram Chams- the ron paul campaign of 2008 was not about rodney king. or racism. it was about the war and the expanding government and so forth. I don’t doubt that lew rockwell, who is not ron Paul, said some wrong things in the past. But you are really really nitpicking. History is not gonig to remember the ron paul revolution as the thing where people historiocally revised the Rodney king beating. I mean you are just not seeing the forest for the trees here.
As the candidate himself said, the campign wasn’t about him AT ALL. It was about the message of smaller government. libertarians don’t agree on much, but surely they can agree on that can’t they?
obviously other factions of libertarians were not keen on Ron’s immigration and abortion positions. Not just the beltway guys but the ancaps at Jeremy Sapienzas board and elswhere. You can aknowledge that and move on. I am certainly not a party to “distributism” or pro Mcartheyism or other things that are discussed here and elsewhere on the paleo side, I was still down for Ron. If the libertrian party was big enough where it could have 10 different candidates of each flavor you’d have a better argument but it ain’t.
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“ I think any reasonable, honest person would say that, given his behavior (endangering the lives of people in LA, including the cops), yes, he deserved what he got and indeed a lot more.”
It would seem that you and I differ on what the words “reasonable and honest” mean, and your definition is flat-out wrong.
What King, just like any other accused person deserved, is a trial, and whatever penalties the court may impose IF, and only if, he is found guilty. If the cops take it upon themselves to administer punishment, they break the law. Once a cop breaks the law, he is no longer an agent of justice.
-jcr
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“ i argue that his article is poorly written and argued.’
You made no such argument. You merely tried to be dismissive, with the standard snotty pseudo-intellectual put-down.
Now, if you’d like to TRY to argue that Justin’s article is poorly written, go for it.
-jcr
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jcr - i did, in my brief response to Tom. i suggested that Justin made spurious connections, leading to the unfortunate response from Dave. what it boils down to is that Justin wrote a long piece that could have been expressed with equal or greater effect in 3 paragraphs. but he has a reputation for writing “exhaustively researched” pieces with numerous points of supporting evidence, so clearly he felt obligated to do so again. nevermind that the numerous pieces of evidence are unnecessary, because his central argument is flawed (see the beginning of this comment, if you’ve forgotten already).
now if you choose to reject my argument and side with Justin and his cadre of followers, that’s fine. ultimately it comes down to opinion. i just choose to read things critically, rather than fawn over everything raimondo chooses to put to paper. in my opinion, his writing (like Reason) has gone seriously downhill.
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What makes Raimondo and Rockwell the Popes of Libertarianism. Seems to anybody with eyes
and ears that they have enough probelms trying to fit their own ideology into libertarianism
Rockwell group suports monarchy, no immigration, no military and think Bill Kristol is more of a
socialist then Noam Chomsky. Whereas, Von Mises suported democracy, favored immigration and suported
conscription during the Cold war(which by Raimondo’s warped sense of values would make Von Mises a
“neocon” by their standards)
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