Fellow libertarians, paleos, white males, southerners, Christians, Americans, Westerners, heterosexuals ... please join me in apologizing to the dimwit-Serioso types. And I apologize for implying that those not on the list aren't allowed to apologize ... Anyone is. Except dimwit-Seriosos.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
I became a libertarian without reading ANY Rand...
I apologize dammit! I have completely embraced libertarianism, and not just the "touchy feely" legalize drugs stuff, but the caustic, damn-the-torpedoes, Kool-Aid enhanced version that apparently goes by the designation anarcho-capitalism. But that's not the bad part. I came to these conclusions and embraced this lunacy without reading one single word from any novel by Ayn Rand! Please don't tell anyone. I apologize deeply and hope the amount of Rothbard, Block, and Hoppe I've consumed will get me through. For now.
Well, at least Block isn't too bad. But you do need to expand your reading. I apologize for ever having read Rothbard. I don't apologize for refusing to have anything to do with Hoppe, Christian Reconstructions like North, League of the South members, white surpemacists, Joe Sobran and his anti-Jewish remarks or such.
ReplyDeleteI only read one Ayn Rand book before becoming an anarcho-capitalist, and her book wasn't even the primary impetus for my doing so. I suppose you could say I was influenced by her, but it was a guerilla attack on her part--and besides the one I read (Anthem) bore certain strong resemblances to Yevgeny Zemyatin's "We", which I also read at the time (Basically, "Anthem" is "We" with a better understanding of the economic effects of dictatorship and more stuff about hardcore individualism and the ego, blah.). For me, it was Zemyatin/Rand and then Molyneux sealed the deal.
ReplyDeleteActually anonymous, you don't need to apologize for not reading a lot of Hoppe. The more one reads of him, the more one might tend to realize that! (He does, I submit, offer some great insights on liberty though.) All kidding aside, there is a little bit too much "South will rise again" lunacy and a little bit too much neo-Confederate overtone in some "libertarian" prose. That's unfortunate, since methodological individualism should be about all individuals, not just the ones with whom one happens to share an ideology or a skin-tone. In other news, I continue to expand my reading. I hope you do the same.
ReplyDeleteI went libertarian before reading Rand, but then I did read her, and I ended up reading a lot of other writers and philosophers because of her. I had a philosophy class with Ronald Nash that did it for me.
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