Libertarianism

What the Latin American left could learn from Ron Paul?

ronpaul

Ron Paul is clearly one of the most influential politicians in America. His presidential campaigns popularized libertarianism in a way no one had  before. Libertarians overseas know him, and a lot of them had a genuine appreciation, but people outside the United States who are not libertarians don’t know him. The foreign media probably doesn’t have a clue why a Republican Party presidential candidate is against war and supports drug legalization.

I’m a Peruvian who came to politics from the radical left but after getting familiar with libertarianism, I think there are a lot of things that the Latin America left could learn from Ron Paul.

Ending the War on Drugs is the most obvious libertarian idea that the left should embrace. Prohibition of drugs was part of an imperialist policy that generated the corruption of Latin American governments and had caused the boom of large narco guerrillas which endanger the civil population mostly in Mexico and Central America but also in Peru and Colombia.

The drug legalization argument could be based on the idea of individual responsibility and freedom of choose, conservatives would sound like hypocrites if they attack these policy on that grounds.

Oppose corporate free trade deals. That’s a position that the left wings in most countries oppose, but Chile, now governed by the Socialist Party, supporting TPP shows that there are exceptions. Even in countries where there is a right-wing government the left should use the argument that free trade deals are just corporate protectionism and have nothing to do with free markets. What could be reaction of conservatives in a parliament if a left-wing congressman argue against free trade while mentioning Ron Paul and the works of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute on the matter? The conservatives would not only look like hypocrites but also ignorant if they continue to support that policy.

Show respect for civil liberties. The Latin American left had a bad experience in the past with coup d’états promote by the United States but I hardly believe that the protests of indigenous people in Bolivia or Ecuador are a product of imperialism. The right of free speech and free assembly should be consider fundamental for any left-wing government.

Stand for anti-imperialism. Imperialism is not a myth of the left but a real policy of global expansion of influence by the United States. Quoting a conservative congressman from United States would made clear that imperialism is not creation of the left but a reality.

Closing U.S. military bases in the region should be a priority, and reducing military spending. The nationalism of Latin American armies is dangerous. A lot of corrupt military leaders had participated in coup d’états in the region. Giving more money and power to them is not a good idea.

While maybe some readers could had been surprised at beginning of the text, there are several policies proposed by Ron Paul that the Latin American left could embrace. In the American context, Ron Paul is to the left of Barack Obama. Ron Paul had spoken that despite not agreeing with the policies of Venezuela, he doesn’t think that sanctions have done any good. Ron Paul has been saying that United States shouldn’t intervene in Latin America and that the embargo toward Cuba must end. He has some fans in the region — probably not part of left — but maybe Latin American radicals could learn something from the Ron Paul revolution.

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Why is a libertarian Nobel Prize winner in favor of free college?

mariovargasllosa

Mario Vargas Llosa’s politics are confusing for a lot of people, in Peru some called him a neoliberal and in United States some think he is conservative, but the fact is that he calls himself liberal and he explains that he is classical liberal, not a Keynesian. The Peruvian Literature Nobel Prize winner is a supporter of democracy, free markets, abortion and gay rights.

He sounds like a serious libertarian, but he supports a policy few libertarians would support — free college. How to explain his support for a policy that socialists like Bernie Sanders have embraced? Well, he is man of his own and even criticize libertarians for focusing more on economics than culture. Libertarian bating sites like Salon usually promote the idea that libertarians are only white male readers of Ayn Rand but I wonder that social democrat writers would think of libertarians supporting free college.

Mario Vargas Llosa studied Literature in National University of San Marcos, the most ancient university in the Americas. In Peru, public universities are completely free. Mario Vargas Llosa had spoken that his alma mater was where he convinced himself to be writer and spoken about the fundamental role of the public education in the development of the country. I attended to the same alma mater that Mario Vargas Llosa, I studied Philosophy there and I know that most students and even professors define themselves as leftists. There are not many people there who define themselves as libertarians but a funny anecdote was when social democratic professor of social science propose to privatize the university. So who was the libertarian and the social democrat in that case?

I think that people are more than political labels, independent thinking is always needed. The libertarian icon Karl Hess used to make fun of libertarians who defined themselves as Hayekians or Misesians, saying they were in same trap of Marxists who called themselves Stalinists or Trotskyists. Karl Hess, like Mario Vargas Llosa thought that politics was more than a devotion to a certain political philosopher or only economics but the product of one’s own experience and culture. Mario Vargas Llosa novels might not be as resolutely pro-free market as some libertarians would like, but the fact is that with his diverse visions of liberty, the Peruvian writer teaches a valuable lesson to supporters and critics of libertarianism, a real free individual is one who can think on his own, not someone who repeats like a parrot the things written in a book of economics.

Why wasn’t anyone talking about police militarization?

Paul Waldman recently wrote a piece at the Washington Post asking a a reasonable question: where is the libertarian outcry against the overbearing use of police force? At face value, his commentary seems very illuminating: the tragedy in Ferguson shocked all reasonable people into consciousness, and we can’t hear the libertarians doing the same, so they must be unreasonable.

If you talked about police militarization before this tragedy, you would be considered somewhere on the spectrum of paranoid conspiracy nuts molded from the same clay as Alex Jones, especially if you identified as a libertarian. The reason that libertarians didn’t seem to adjust their focus to accommodate for Ferguson is because their focus was already there. Everyone else has since moved into this territory, previously occupied only by those conspiracy mongering weirdos.

Simply by googling “police militarization libertarian” and constraining the search for results from before August 9th to a few years back, we get a treasure trove of now embarrassing snark aimed at ostensibly paranoid and reactionaries. Here’s a great one that spends a majority of the article building the case that a Radley Balko is hopeless reactionary puppet, a racist and not a real journalist. Eventually, there is a payoff to this buildup, when Balko takes the side of a man who defended himself against armed, militarized police engaging in a drug bust. The Alternet writers practically roll their eyes at the assertion that this man may have saved his own life by defending himself, and imply that the libertarian noise surrounding police militarization is just paranoia that is attendant upon Balko’s reactionary beliefs. If this same dismissal of police militarization and the right of a black man to defend himself against such militarization were called into question today, you would be called a racist.

You’d probably be someone who watches Fox News, too. In an odd coincidence, libertarian John Stossel warned against the militarization of police in a piece posted on Fox only two weeks before the Michael Brown’s death-by-cop. He isn’t caught up in his own libertarian headspace, either. Stossel makes the point as diplomatically as possible in the title, earnestly trying to appeal across the political spectrum:

It’s healthy for conservatives, libertarians and liberals alike to worry about the militarization of police. Conservatives worry about a repeat of incidents like the raids on religious radicals at Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas. Liberals condemn police brutality like the recent asphyxiation death of a suspect at the hands of police in New York….

This is a rare issue where I agree with left-wing TV host Bill Maher. On his TV show last week, Maher ranted about no-knock raids “breaking up poker games, arresting low-level pot dealers.”

Going a little further back to April 22, a Libertarian Party official in Michigan rallies civilians to sign a petition against the local police being supplied with military equipment. As you might have guessed, the petition ended up doing nothing. Libertarians tried to make as much noise as they could, but nobody really heard them. This is something that libertarians are used to, but everyone else seems to have a selective understanding of just how small of a soapbox the libertarians actually have. The signal to noise ratio between those who cared about police militarization pre-Ferguson and the paranoid isn’t very high. Remember when the DHS had practice targets of children? Take a look at the bizarre comments on that article. Whether it’s conspiracy mongers or johnny-come-lately activists, you can count on the libertarian voice being drowned out.

The conflict of individual against community

Andrew Sullivan, acting a bit more of a spin doctor than usual after reading Mark Lilla’s sobering piece on the modern political context we live in, declared an empathic victory in the name of individual freedom earlier this week, calling modern America a nation of libertarians in an acid-laced bit of wankery the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Windsor decision – or his recent compensatory tirades on manliness, depending on your view of wankery. Money shot (because he’s too much a coward to say it himself):

The core idea of this post-ideological new age was simply expanding the freedom of the individual – and it was embraced economically by the right, socially by the left, and completely by the next generation of pragmatic liberaltarians.

The blather on display here is incredibly detached, and fails to seriously take into consideration that individual freedom has not been triumphant, but in fact contracting more than it has been expanding thanks to government and corporate interests.  But to discuss that at length would be a hindrance, and any response would likely be apathetic.

Instead, let us focus on the core problem Sullivan attempts to address in the post: The matter of foreign policy in response to this development, as well as the loss of hegemony following the quixotic crusades that were Iraq and Afghanistan. In fairness, Brooks’ calls for a return to worshiping the American Dream and the glory that is the nation’s “exceptionalism” (a word which people tend to forget was coined by Stalin as an insult) comes off as dense and paranoiac. It shows him clinging to the old parameters of which the world existed, a time that barely has meaning now. But to call Sullivan’s own response nonsense would be a bit of an understatement:

But there is another, saner response to this, and Lilla points the way. It is to re-exercize the intellectual muscles that created and then defended the idea of democratic capitalism – and to use them, first of all, to address the democratic deficits in our own too-often bought-and-paid-for republic, to build and defend intermediate institutions that check individualism’s acidic power – families, churches, neighborhoods, school-boards, sports leagues, AA meetings. And so we match gay freedom with gay marriage and military service, embracing libertarianism but hitching it to institutions that also connect it to the community as a whole.

To start with, where does Lilla even mention this, other than in a vague hint about the potential of reactionary right with the parable of the golem? Even then, he was more making a point than suggesting a solution. Also, what that has to do with foreign policy is beyond anyone’s imagination.

Sullivan’s extrapolation seems more a desire to display his Thatcherite paternalism than anything functional, for many of his suggestions are institutions designed to strangulate individuality. The military are specialists in this line of business: Nothing strips away individual freedom more than being trained against nature into becoming an efficient killing machine. Yet families, churches, any community-style organization are also capable of undermining the independence of the individual.

But then, that’s the point of a community, and therein lies the modern conflict that Sullivan fails to appreciate.
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