Kantor v. Goldberg
Capt. Goldberg fights the libertarian whale.

By Myles Kantor, columnist for LewRockwell.com
March 6, 2001 11:00 a.m.

onah Goldberg is a blithe fellow whose jocularity has displaced his fidelity to facts. As a subject of his distortions in "Libertarians Under My Skin," I would like to address the immediate and larger inaccuracies therein.

I did not, as Goldberg asserts, call him an "ignoramus." My Webster's gives "dunce" as an alternative word for "ignoramus," and I certainly don't think Goldberg's a dunce. I indeed criticized his insouciant ignorance of Ludwig von Mises's canon. Here, again, are the pertinent sentences: "[I]f you want the purist libertarian stuff, go read something by Ludwig Von Mises. Honestly, though, I don't know what that would be." (For a neoconservative contrast, refer to David Horowitz's appreciation of Mises in The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future.)

Goldberg misrepresents my article's intent as wanting him "to embrace more libertarian thinkers." I am less than preoccupied with whether Goldberg immerses himself in the thought of Mises, Murray Rothbard, and other eminent libertarians. I would simply prefer that he not caricature libertarians as a gaggle of loopy devolutionists (e.g., the "zealots" who logically criticize Friedrich Hayek's un-libertarian positions).

Goldberg reduces my criticisms and those of my colleagues at LewRockwell.com to infantile irrationality. David Dieteman, Gene Callahan, and I "have banged their spoons on their high chairs about me," Dieteman and I "spitting Diet Coke out their noses onto the computer screen." Note that Goldberg avoids the substance of these critiques. (He writes that he will not rebut them because "nobody cares." This point seems tenuous at best.)

While it might disappoint him, Goldberg's haughty hogwash failed to induce nasal ruptures. (I venture to say the same for Mr. Dieteman.) And although I occasionally bang utensils in impersonation of androcentric hegemony, I do so on standard chairs with a fork and/or knife. Suffice it to say that Goldberg's circuitous mockery of contrary views isn't an optimal rebuttal strategy.

Goldberg further perceives libertarianism monochromatically. He writes of "the bile and hatred that so many libertarians have for traditionalists," and no doubt there's truth in this. However, there's also no paucity of libertarians with traditional values, as a perusal of the Ludwig von Mises Institute's faculty reveals. Adjunct scholar William L. Anderson, for example, teaches at North Greenville College — not exactly a bastion of pagan sentiment. (Its website carries the header, "Where Christ Makes the Difference.") Libertarianism, it should go without saying, is not synonymous with libertinism.

Goldberg advances a false dichotomy between classical liberalism's decentralizing prescriptions and conservatism's affirmation of transcendent truths underpinning moral order, citing Frank "fusionism" Meyer's twilight conversion to Catholicism. One wonders, then, how the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.) can be a Catholic; perhaps piety need not be maintained to the exclusion of liberal commitment.

Conversely, a conservative emphasis on authority and virtue need not, and arguably cannot, entail authoritarian governance. Russell Kirk after all identified "persuasion that freedom and property are inseparably connected" as one of the six canons of conservative thought in the 1953 edition of The Conservative Mind, correlating property's erosion to Leviathan's entrenchment.

Goldberg recognizes and inflates common ground between libertarians and conservatives when he writes, "Generally speaking, traditionalist conservatives and free-market libertarians — as opposed to Maoist libertarians? — agree on about 85% of all public-policy issues." This is both theoretically valid and operationally erroneous. Present-day conservatism, such as it is, not only countenances but also promotes policies inimical to federalism and proprietary discretion. Attorney General John Ashcroft — described by Robert Reich as "among the most right-wing politicians in contemporary America" — has affirmed his support of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Fair Housing Act, and Titles II and VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. All of these laws engage in counter-constitutional and anti-conservative trespasses upon property rights and states' rights. (A corresponding phenomenon is the GOP's inane iconolatry of Martin Luther King Jr. See my discussion in the March issue of Chronicles.)

Conservatives' inurement to the anti-discrimination apparatus reflects the extent of their estrangement from the political philosophy of Kirk and Goldwater. (I won't even get into conservatives' complicity with imperial belligerence in the executive branch, or the constitutional destruction inflicted by the Cromwellian war on drugs.)

Goldberg writes of me having "a deep-seated resentment of conservatism and a corresponding white-hot rage directed at anyone who deigns to call libertarians 'conservatives.'" On the contrary, as a college Republican chairman and Intercollegiate Studies Institute campus leader during my college years, I have great respect for conservative thought. (Yes, I still have my copy of Nash's treatise.) Unfortunately, it is apparent that Goldberg lacks a reciprocal respect for libertarianism, which, ironically, is in many ways a better repository of American conservatism than the brand circulated among its ostensible heirs.