Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom ~ilana

As analysts of the exit polls in the Virginia gubernatorial race have it, Robert Sarvis, the libertarian lite, third-party candidate is not to blame for “siphoning off” votes from conservative Ken Cuccinelli and spoiling an election in what was once a reliably red state.

“In a straight two-way matchup,” contended one such analyst at FoxNews.com, “voters preferred McAuliffe to Cuccinelli by two points. That’s almost identical to the [race’s] final outcome.”

This is unconvincing. Is it not possible that without Sarvis, those energized “independents and moderates,” whose support Sarvis garnered might have turned out for Cuccinelli? There are those who are convinced that Sarvis cut into Cuccinelli’s support. The tea party’s Steve King, R-Iowa, for example.

Indeed, a jubilant CNN reporter—the nitwork could not conceal its collective glee over the victory, in Virginia, of Democratic fundraiser Terry McAuliffe—conceded that “self-described independents broke for Republican nominee Ken Cuccinelli.” Clearly, there was overlap between the Cuccinelli and Sarvis constituencies.

We all recall another Libertarian Party clown’s perennial struggle to get on the ballot as the party’s presidential nominee. Unlike wacky Gary Johnson, whose “ballot access” was impeded by “Republican operatives,” somebody greased the skids for Sarvis, helping place him on the Virginia ballot.

Good old-fashioned (and near-obsolete) shoe-leather journalism, conducted by The Blaze, revealed that Sarvis had help from “a major Democratic Party benefactor and Obama campaign bundler.” A software billionaire named Joe Liemandt, who acted as one of Barack Obama’s super fundraisers in 2012, galvanized on behalf of Sarvis.

Incriminating as this may appear, evidence of a dark, Democratic scheme it is not. In fairness to Sarvis’ sponsor—who hobnobs with Obama acolytes like Warren Buffet, Vogue editor Anna Wintour and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein—he was in the habit of splitting “political giving between libertarian third-party efforts and liberal Democrats.”

That a political contributor would have no compunction about supporting both the Democratic National Committee and the Libertarian Action Super PAC is not surprising. Politicking in America precludes staking out principled positions.

Besides, the gulf between establishment libertarians and left-liberals is not that wide. The Libertarian Party is a party of “isms,” not individualism. When it comes to playing manipulative politics with hot-button social issues—matters of “racism,” “sexism” (blah, blah)—there’s no daylight between left-libertarians and leftists.

True to type, Sarvis’ same-sex marriage sanctimony is not only pious, but specious. By Wikipedia’s telling, he “supports same sex marriage and says it is a personal issue for him because his own marriage, which is biracial, was illegal in Virginia 50 years ago.” (By the same token, why not support affirmative action, on the ground that it, too, wasn’t the law “in Virginia 50 years ago”?)

True libertarians toil to keep the state out of marriage altogether. In furtherance of liberty, Uncle Sam’s purview must be curtailed, not expanded. On this score, let our gay friends and family members lead the way. Let them solemnize their commitment in contract and through church, synagogue and mosque (that will be the day!). Once interesting and iconoclastic, gays have become colossal bores who crave nothing more than the state’s seal of approval. Go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police’s violations of privacy and private property were the object of gay anger and activism.

Invariably deployed to encroach on private property and police subversives, the political construct that is “discrimination” (“sexism, racism, blah, blah”) ought to be opposed by the party of individualism. So long as the individual keeps his paws to himself, let him think, speak, associate and dissociate at will.

Unsurprisingly, the Libertarian-Party candidate is for open borders, framing the matter with yet more illogical, liberal argumentation. (Here: I know immigrants, therefore immigration should proceed unfettered.)

The immigration vexation has pitted governors like Arizona’s and attorneys general such as Cuccinelli against the Feds in a heroic fight for the right of state representatives to protect their statesmen from trespass. On immigration, left-libertarians come down foursquare on the side of the federales. (Rest assured that the latest, statist amnesty Bill is Sarvis’ dream come true.)

“Insane” is how Mr. libertarian himself, Ron Paul, characterized a vote for a candidate (Robert Sarvis) who was willing to consider a mileage tax on Virginians, complete with government-accessible, GPS surveillance in vehicles.

“Insane” is also an apt description of running a gubernatorial candidate against one of the most libertarian attorneys general a state has had. Ken Cuccinelli’s attempts to nullify federal health insurance mandates in Virginia go back to 2010, when he launched a legal challenge to “shield Virginians from paying any penalties for not purchasing federally-approved health care.

“Cuccinelli, attests Timothy Carney of The Examiner, “wants to cut the state income tax rate by 15 percent for individuals and 33 percent for corporations,” “has an A rating from the National Rifle Association—earned while representing Fairfax County in the state Senate,” contested “smoking bans as a senator,” is known to “choose government restraint over ‘law and order'”; has opposed expanding the death penalty, has criticized the drug war and crusaded to exonerate the wrongly convicted.

Also on target was Cuccinelli’s campaign against Northern Virginia’s consummate carpetbaggers and their land-development schemes. I’d hazard that because he vowed to stop taxpayer subsidies to these crony capitalists, Attorney General Cuccinelli lost the GOP’s financial backing and was, consequently, outspent by his rival.

Lamentably, Beltway libertarian Ed Crane and his Purple PAC backed the insignificant Sarvis partly because this lot is every bit as committed to superfluous social cause célèbresas the “theo-conservatives” they abhor.

Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom.

Every bit as bad as liberals, “libertarian” political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry.

The eerie thing about the elections now looming in the US and Canada is the profile of the voter. The folks who head for the polls in both nations have more in common than not, as are they in lockstep on the issues with voters in Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Overwhelmingly, Medicare and other entitlement programs are the deciding issues. Why then have entitlement programs become the salient feature of elections in Western democracies? Where is the debate, for instance, over foreign policy and the need to replace interventionism with peaceful unbounded free trade?

In After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, scholar Paul Edward Gottfried offers a profound analysis as to why “democratic citizenship has come to mean eligibility for social services and welfare benefits,” and why “being administered and socialized by a custodial class is now the defining aspect of democracy.” As in any voluntary trade, what you give up you value less than what you gain. Citizens, says Gottfried, have willingly abnegated the responsibility of self-government for the guarantee of entitlements.

In tandem with an exploration of how 20th century social planners have gained leverage over citizens by dangling economic entitlements, Gottfried advances the thesis that there is no coherent liberal tradition to which the managerial state can lay claim. Based on meticulous exegesis of intellectual history, Gottfried proves that the liberal democracy that serves as the impetus for the managerial state’s social engineering has no connection to 19th century liberalism.

“19th century liberals did not believe that public administrators should work to change social classes or social values,” writes Gottfried. The liberalism of the 19th century, from which today’s faux liberals depart, stood for private property and constitutional liberty. The removal of tariff barriers and the ushering in of free trade was seen as a means to bring people together. Life, liberty and property were the natural rights governments were to uphold, no more. Social equality, which compels coerced distribution of wealth, was considered incompatible with liberty.

Absent its 19th century heritage, “liberalism now survives as a series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit,” its power maintained by wagging fingers accusingly at antiliberals. The public administrator turned into a social reformer wielding political power with the advent of the welfare state. Along the way, these 20th century social planners, who spoke of “control of production, prices and consumption”–essential socialism–began to call their social planning “liberal”. This continuity is contrived, explains Prof. Gottfried. Notwithstanding the surreptitious “semantic theft”, “punishing homophobes and sexists and trying to rearrange the income curve” doesn’t jibe with liberalism proper.

The present managerial state certainly is not an instantiation of the liberalism of the American Founding Fathers. The post-revolution federal government was not to levy any taxes, and an expansion of its power required the consent of every sovereign state. “The American Revolution,” writes economist Murray Rothbard, “was against empire, taxation, trade monopoly, regulations, militarism and executive power,” all now implicitly embraced by the US and its Western allies.

Undergirding our public administration is an unyielding ideology bolstered by a monolith of toadying journalists and intellectuals. The dubious precepts of social psychology and the enforced “public philosophy” of pluralism have become means through which bureaucrats, educators and state-anointed experts embark on crusades against “prejudice”. Together with official multiculturalism they form an instrument of control, designed to privilege a certain position and to stigmatize those who think differently. By extension, speech codes, human rights legislation, employment quotas and other infringements, contradict the classical liberal espousal of rights to property and freedom of association.

“Unlike the communist garrison state or the Italian fascist “total state,” the managerial state succeeds by denying that it exercises power. It conceals its operation in the language of caring. But “behind the mission to sensitize and teach “human rights” lies the largely unacknowledged right to shape and reshape people’s lives. Any serious appraisal of the managerial regime,” cautions Gottfried, “must consider first and foremost the extent of its control—and the relative powerless of its critics.”

Come elections, look for vestiges, however faint, of equality under the law (flat tax)–but not equality of outcome (affirmative action), reject government expansion (entitlement programs) and intrusion into people’s lives and livings, and look to the affirmation of private property rights as the mother of all liberties. The purists among you may shun most candidates. But we don’t live in the arid arena of pure thought. Prof. Gottfried’s thesis must at the very least assist us to exclude such arch-managers as Al Gore and his party, and the Canadian Liberals and New Democratic Party.

©2000 By Ilana Mercer
The Calgary Herald
November 2