This is an unusual debate for me. I’m used to debating pinkos and commies and right-wingers and suchlike — and I’m sure Gary [North] has had similar experience — where here, Gary and I agree on 99.8% of everything and I’m not sure what the other 0.2% is except this one issue.
– Walter Block, around 2 minutes into this video.
For those of you who have read the work of both men, Walter Block is one of those incredibly libertarian folks sometimes referred to as ‘anarcho-capitalist’. Gary North, on the other hand, is a Christian Reconstructionist, of the hard-core variety, the sort whose ideal government would institute the death penalty for idolatry, infant sacrifice, abortion, witchcraft, blasphemy, false prophecy, contempt of court, murder, adultery, homosexual relations, bestiality, rape, incest, kidnapping, life-threatening perjury in a capital case, and incorrigibility toward parents [1]. And so I am confused. Either Walter Block’s knowledge of North is limited to what he has read on lewrockwell.com, or Walter Block is deliberately ignoring the differences between stateless libertarianism and theonomy because of what a good ally Gary North makes. I suspect the latter.
If you look carefully at the debate, you will notice Block’s frequent complimenting of North, while North is a bit more reserved about Block, who is among the sort of people North considers allies of tyranny. If my instinct is right, this one-way showering of love is a symbol for what has been going on in a deeper level in American culture. Pro-choice anti-state libertarians are quickly realizing that if they are going to achieve the goals they desire, they are going to need the aid of larger segments of society. For the foreseeable future, anarcho-capitalists are going to remain a tiny minority of the population, and if they want to influence the direction of the culture of the United States, they are going to need allies.
Though philosophically theonomists like North are utterly opposed to anarchist libertarians, in practice they are united on many issues. For a hard-core libertarian, one of the most odious things that the government has done is to take the great mass of people aged six to eighteen and forcibly schooled them in statist schools at the expense of the taxpayer. While Rothbard was on the sidelines writing writing Free and Compulsory, the nascent Christian Reconstruction movement, in both its “hard-core” and “soft-core” varieties, was opposing public education in a much more powerful way: by beginning a mass exodus of religious children from the public schools and by rapidly building from scratch a network of private schools geared not toward a tiny rich elite, but toward religious folks with average or even below-average income. From a Rothbardian perspective, the libertarian impulses within the conservative Christian population are not pure, but are nonetheless scattered across such a massive population that an adulterated libertarianism of millions of politically active Christians has a far greater potential for increasing human freedom, at least over the next few decades, than all the books a dozen “pure” Rothbardians can crank out in their tiny think-tanks.
The primary concern of the anti-state libertarians is not what would happen in Gary North’s ideal world, but rather North’s actual effects on our current world. And in our current world, North and a host of others like him are chipping away mightily at the foundations of statism: high taxes, constant wars, coerced education, so-called “Social Security,” twisted interpretations of the constitution, and the massive variety of welfare payments. The death penalty for blasphemy or homosexual activity, are so far away from the current state of American politics that libertarians don’t see those things as realistic threats.
This is why, if you visit (as I hope you do) the anarchist site lewrockwell.com, North’s writings feature regularly and prominently. Libertarianism and a variety of other ideologies are coalescing to form a surprisingly powerful voting block that we might call the “anti-war right.” Such figures as Pat Buchanon, Ron Paul, and Rand Paul represent this growing trend. Notably, all three are pro-lifers, but they are rarely, if ever, criticized on that count by libertarians. Similarly, anarchist Hans Hermann Hoppe, a powerful figure in right-libertarian social theory, sees abortion as a sign of a dying culture. In the Libertarian Papers, which more than any other publication is the modern voice of libertarian social theory, Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski has been arguing powerfully against considering the pro-choice position libertarian.
For all practical purposes, libertarianism has given up the pro-choice battle — another symbol of the growing significance of the anti-war right wing. And while I am not Rothbardian enough to allow eight-year-olds to inject heroin, and I am not conservative enough to start looking for witches to burn, I am, on the whole, quite happy with what’s emerging from the dance of these two camps.
[1] You can find a list of the things that Christian Reconstructionists consider capital crimes on page 51 of Ray Sutton’s book Second Chance. To the best of my knowledge, any accusation that would institute the death penalty for any other infractions is false, frightened liberal websites notwithstanding.
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