Apparently the cops cops feel no responsibility to give an accounting for why they arrested Brooke Oberwetter.

If you post a lot of comments on different sites you should check out coComment.

(Smearbund - I just can’t get enough of that word lately. That’s why I read Lew’s blog.)

A writer from Lew Rockwell’s stable finally (!) breaks ranks. Gene Callahan has had enough:

The final straw: “Last week, a statement was prepared by Ron Paul’s press secretary Jesse Benton, and approved by Ron Paul, acknowledging Lew Rockwell as having a role in the newsletters. The statement was squashed by campaign chairman Kent Snyder.”

Man, Paul’s behavior regarding these newsletters has been awful. His “I don’t know who wrote these” is about as slippery as a politician can get. Everyone who was around libertarianism in the early 90s knows Lew was in charge of these and knows Rothbard and his crew were into race-baiting back then. (By the way, notice that the longer Lew has been away from Rothbard’s influence, the more decent he’s become? I personally have found him very affable, and I can’t imagine him putting out material like this today. Just shows what hanging around Rothbard can do to you.)

Paul’s got a decent message, but he’s the wrong vehicle for delivering it.

In comments there, co-blogger Bob Murphy farvors a more traditional (*) approach, one that he likens to a blue wall of silence:

I think you are overreacting in the opposite way here, Gene. I.e. yes, I totally agree that (a) certain things in those newsletters were inexcusable, (b) RP is clearly lying about it now when he says he has no idea who wrote it, and (c) it is silly to just dismiss the inquiries as smears.

Having said all that, I do kinda wonder why Sanchez and his co-author decided to write that particular article, when the damage had already been done by the TNR one. If next week some anti-Irish magazine came out with a story that you did a bunch of drugs when you were younger (outlandish, I know), and this was getting you in trouble with your PhD committee, I wouldn’t comment to any reporter who called me up about it. And I sure as heck wouldn’t spend a few days doing research on it because “Callahan won’t come clean on this!”

Does that sound so crazy? If I were to do that, don’t you think some of your buddies would think, “Jeez, I thought Bob was Gene’s friend!” ?

I realize this sounds like cops and their blue wall of silence whenever one of them beats up a suspect, and maybe my view is just that wrong / tribal / petty. But I understand why longtime fans of LRC are lashing out at Reason on this, and don’t view Sanchez as Bob Woodward.

(* Traditional among Rockwell’s writers, that is.)

I saw Ron Paul on CNN’s Situation Room today, he was filibustering to burn up any time during which he might have to face more questions about his newsletters. One thing he said was that he would pardon anyone convicted of a non-violent drug crime. That’s pretty sweet.

But in the Fox debate tonight when the subject of illegal immigration came up he said, “The law is the law and it ought to be enforced.”

Um.

If the law is the law for wetbacks why shouldn’t the law be the law for tweakers?

Doesn’t it?

Winning an argument is not enough if you win it by conceding your opponent’s erroneous ideas. JTK illustrated this at the start of the recent invasion in Iraq:

This is the argument libertarians need to make, not that war is evil, but that it can never be moral to force others to participate. It will do no good to win the argument that a war is evil while implicitly accepting that it is legitimately a collective decision; that’s the wrong hill. The right hill is the one where we reject the collectivist premise first.

Recently, a blog post at The Last Free Voice posted a link to a letter. The Governor of Connecticut recently chided Chesapeake Energy for refusing to sell some of its natural gas, since Chesapeake would lose money. Cheapeake’s CEO responded with a letter outlining why the Governor was wrong. The Last Free Voice, which hosts the letter, said that the letter “explain[ed] all the ways in which Governor Rell was wrong.” I read the letter, and it was entertaining. But the letter did not explain all the ways that Governor Rell was wrong. In fact, although the letter may have won on its various arguments, it ultimately lost, because it conceded Governor Rell’s fundamental premise: that the State of Connecticut has any business telling Chesapeake what to do with the gas it drills.

And there’s the problem. Even when you win an argument, if you concede the wrong premises, you lose. Chesapeake nowhere argued that Connecticut has no business messing with its gas. Chesapeake, then, has implicitly conceded that Connecticut does have business messing with its gas. Chesapeake may win this battle, but it has already conceded the war.

Don Boudreaux’s column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has restarted some of the libertarian immigration debate over at the LRC blog. One of the more interesting posts comes from Ryan McMaken:

Yes, we’ve established that many libertarians, including Rothbard and Mises favored controls on immigration, but as far as I can see neither of them offered specific policies either. I can’t imagine Rothbard supporting REAL ID or greater punishments for business owners, so what’s the answer? Mises speaks vaguely of controlling the borders, but what does that mean exactly? And perhaps Mises was wrong? Mises wants to keep out fifth columnists as quoted by Stephan below. Fine. But how? How exactly does Mises propose that be done? National ID cards? Secret police? What? And if we think national ID cards and secret police are necessary for a functioning society, then why are we libertarians?

Unsurprisingly, No Treason is ahead of its time:

My basic point is that preventing free immigration requires targeting peaceful individuals with deadly force. There is no other way to prevent what they oppose.

Those advocating such immigration control ought to be willing, in principle, to go down and patrol the Mexican border themselves and employ deadly force against a peaceful individual who wants to come mow my lawn.

Indeed. Controlling the borders of the state requires using force, potentially deadly force, against someone who is violating no one’s rights. Furthermore, McMaken is right: our rights will have to be violated in order to close the borders - more taxes, more programs, more agents. And of course, anyone here of Mexican descent becomes immediately suspect and ripe for harassment, both locally and federally.

So, what is the libertarian way to close the borders and enforce it?

From our old friends at the Lew Rockwell Blog comes a link to a Statement of Faith from Rep. Ron Paul published by Reconstructionist website CovenantNews.com. In his Statement of Faith, Rep. Paul makes a rather stunning admission:

I am running for president to restore the rule of law and to stand up for our divinely inspired Constitution.

(emphasis mine)

Politicians are not known for their candor, but supposedly Rep. Paul is an exception to this rule. If he is as truthful as is claimed, then he believes that the Constitution comes from God. This should pose a serious problem to the libertarians behind him. No one needs to remind them of the long and nasty history of church-state relations, nor the reasons why Congress is forbidden from treating one religion differently than another.

It poses interesting theological questions, too. Why would God author a document which permitted slavery for 8 decades? How can mere men hope to improve it with amendments; certainly they do not know more than God, do they? Should politicians who do not follow the Constitution be excommunicated? Where does the Constitution even claim inspiration?

Although Rep. Paul will not win the nomination or a general election, it would be wise for his supporters to clarify exactly what he means. It would not make them look so good to be backing the Constitution’s righteous defender.

’nuff said.

No Treason has written about rational ignorance and rational irrationality before, but it’s instructive and amusing to see what happens when those concepts are presented in a forum with a more mainstream readership:

Some interesting press about a very interesting new book by Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University: The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.

Have a read through the comment thread there and count the Reason Magazine weblog commenters who are doing their damndest to wish away those two concepts. You’d think that once those ideas were presented, they would pretty much spell the end of the libertarian movement.

Then again, people pay no penalty for ignoring those ideas…

Tip: Jay Jardine

“I am shocked, shocked, to find that our shock jock has been engaging in shock jockery!” - MSNBC CEO

It’s time to evaluate a five year bet.

Back in 2001 Bob Murphy, posting as Bobbi-O on anti-state.com, was optimistic about persuading people of the virtues of anarcho-capitalism. I argued that not even 1% of the population would ever be persuaded to endorse anarcho-capitalism, and asked when he thought such a feat might be accomplished.

Murphy responded confidently:

If by “endorse” you mean people who say, “Yes, I agree that would the best system, I just don’t think it’s going to happen,” then I say it will happen in five years, easy.

We’re not trying to convince people to like our favorite musicians, we’re trying to convince them that systematic theft and murder are counterproductive. Call me naive, but I don’t think it will be that hard to convince 1% to admit this. I recall my own conversion process; I had to first hear the ideas (and think they were too radical), then get disillusioned for some inconsequential reason, and at that point remember all of Rothbard et al.’s arguments that I had earlier rejected.

If I can convince my mom to vote for Harry Browne, and my good Rush Limbaugh-devotee friend to favor drug legalization after an hour conversation, I think 1% isn’t too farfetched.

Again, I’m talking about people agreeing that it would be the best system if implemented, not that these people are going to lift a finger to make it so.

I immediately offered to bet $1000 that this would not happen. Bob accepted the bet in principle, and he was backed by Gene Callahan but we never came up with a metric for deciding the outcome so no money was wagered.

The five years ended last November. Based on a population of roughly 300,000,000 Americans, Murphy and Callahan needed to come up with about 3 million ancaps.

I submit that nothing remotely like Murphy’s prediction has happened. I’m confident that there are not even 30,000 Americans who satisfy the criteria, not even close - and that’s just 1% of 1% of the population.

Two questions occur to me:

How could smart cookies like Murphy and Callahan be so far off base?

My guess is that were caught up in excitement of the (then) recent explosive growth of ancap web sites and forums. Someone in the thread said anti-state.com had been growing at a rate of 50% per month. That may have been true but it was ending as he typed, ASC’s growth has been quite modest from that moment on. What had really happened was that the relatively few people sympathetic with anarcho-capitalism suddenly all found each other through the internet in a brief space of time. And then it was over. There was no second wave.

Has this result changed their opinions about the prospects of rational evangelism?

I’d be interested to hear from Murphy and Callahan on this.

Unfortunately there is a final irony here. Not only have 3,000,000 ancaps failed to materialize but one seems to have vanished, at least from the web. It appears that Murphy’s ancap writing on the web has largely been withdrawn recently, including well over 100 articles at lewrockwell.com, anti-state.com and strike-the-root.com.