“Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t.  You cannot shirk this and be a man.  To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may.  If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country – hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

– Mark Twain, “Two Fragments from a Suppressed Book Called ‘Glances at History’ or ‘Outlines of History’ “

Update (Nov. 6)

The Daily Bell, in a comment on this post (in the comments section), suggests that there cannot be more than one motivation for those who pursue global government.  This is a serious mistake. “Causation,” in so far as one can trace it, and it’s always fraught with interpretative and methodological pitfalls, is usually multiple, not singular, because no one entity is involved in the action and not all share the same motivation.

ORIGINAL POST

Here are a few crucial mistakes I see repeated in the language of many libertarians.

These are mistakes that I think are consequential, not simply matters of opinion or differences in emphasis.

They not only do not advance an anti-globalist agenda, they actively help the globalists.

1. Capitalism is a jungle, not a zoo.

Lila: Capitalism is neither a jungle nor a zoo. It is more like an English garden or a game park or an estate, privately managed.

Consequence of error: Statists respond that libertarians believe in the law of the jungle (might makes right) and do not belong to the tradition of Adam Smith. They are simply cultists following some aberrant understanding of liberty and their libertarianism will only lead to fascism.

2. Zionism X Anti-Semitism

Lila:

Zionism/Judeo-Supremacism X Anti-Zionism

Philo-semitism X Anti-Semitism

Consequence of error: Anyone who uses the word Zionism is demonized as being against Jews individually. Critics of Zionism or Israel are thus depicted as racists and silenced. Since the only people condemning the

siphoning off of America’s wealth, military, and technology to the ultimate benefit of Zionists and Israel (not just through the relatively minor amount of aid, but through all sorts of subsidies and other programs) and since the only one railing against Israel’s dominance over policy-making and journalism here are anti-Zionists,  this effectively makes their criticism illegitimate and removes the only obstacle to the Zionists’ efforts.

3. Capitalism is responsible for what we have.

Lila: No. Some part of what we have is also the result of mercantilism and plunder. However, mercantilism and plunder are responsible for having bankrupted us as well. Frankly, we don’t “have” much of anything. We owe much more than we have.

Consequence of error: The status quo (crony/criminal capitalism) is the way it ought to be. Any change is anti-Capitalist. Anyone opposing the warfare state is actually anti-Capitalist

4. Everybody is greedy.

Lila: Everyone is not greedy. Everyone pursues what they want. Which is entirely different. One man may want things consonant with the highest reason and love. He therefore “wants” what is in the best interests of all parties to his actions, in as much as anyone can understand them. Another wants only in the sense of compulsion, since he is a slave to appetite, obsession and lusts. The former want is “angelic”, or in accord with “right reason”. The latter cannot be called a want, but is more in the nature of a mechanical response to external stimulus. It is “demonic”.

Consequence of error: By conflating all types of “wanting”, the defenders of capitalism appear as idiots to the common man, who correctly sees that ordinary people in the middle-way of life are not usually sociopathic, whereas a high proportion of people at the top of this society are indeed sociopaths and/or criminals.

5. “Do what you will and pay the piper” is the only ethics worthy of libertarians.

Lila: There is no such ethics in all traditional religion or in rational ethics, as far as I know. While some moral genius might indeed discover new “truths” about morality, there are few of those, and one would need to look at everything else they wrote and did to find out if their truths were indeed profound and new, or only old error. Moral truths are not like new technology in computers. They don’t wear out or age that fast.  Innovation and eye-appeal are not the criteria, and in fact are usually signs of something amiss.

The Gita says the “drink that is at first bitter is at last sweet.”  In sports, the truism is “no pain, no gain.”

False notions about morality and ethics make libertarianism look like the justification of amoral or unethical behavior.  They also legitimize the statists’ demands for more federal regulation or laws.

Libertarians claim that private institutions can produce the institutions and culture to reign in  bad behavior faster than laws.  If so, they should be the first to denounce criminal actions by corporations, rather than glorify any individual or business that is successful.