Allan Walstad wrote,"It would be nice to see such issues argued on their merits without some libertarians seeking to pin a scarlet"deviations" tag on their fellow travelers."

To which Roderick Long responded,"Hey, I'm the moderate here! Other people have been arguing that those who endorse serious deviations from libertarian purity no longer count as libertarians at all, and I've been arguing against that view.

"If you don't like 'deviation,' what term would you prefer as shorthand for 'view put forward as libertarian but actually (in the opinion of the speaker) inconsistent with libertarian principle'? (Because we need such a term, I think.)"

I agree, and I want to take this opportunity to clarify something: When I say someone can't be a prowar anarchist or libertarian, I am not saying that person cannot have a basically libertarian philosophy overall, or that that person has nothing to teach or offer (of course, that would be absurd – without learning from statists, we could learn practically nothing!), or that there isn't some sense in which it's useful to call such people libertarians or even anarchists. I consider them in error, to the point that calling someone a"pro-war libertarian" strikes me as oxymoronic, and yet I see some use in the label. But I do think it is a deviation.

What I don't agree with is the idea that there is something special about foreign policy that makes it more okay for so-called libertarians (or libertarians very broadly defined) to radically disagree on it than on other issues. In the sense that someone can be a pro-war libertarian, I think one can also be a pro-gun control libertarian, a pro-income tax libertarian, a pro-conscription libertarian or a libertarian thief. But all these are contradictory, and I tell those who I believe are making a bad error on war that, insofar as they make that error, they are clearly straying from libertarianism, because my purpose is to explain why, in my opinion, libertarianism, if it to be taken seriously as a political philosophy, must preclude government war, especially of the modern kind that has been typical of the last century and which the US has pretty much exclusively practiced.

Thus, I think there is some value in calling people libertarians, despite deviations on pretty much any issue, including taxation, gun restrictions, immigration controls or socialized medicine. (Most libertarians would draw the line here, but for one purpose of description, I would not.) But I also think there is another sense in which libertarianism precludes all this, as well as any and all advocacy for state power and activity. (Indeed, if there's any deviation that would disqualify someone from being a libertarian, I would say it's support for war, which is a greater violation of libertarian principle than nearly anything else government does – but I am willing to be big-tent about it to some degree. If you supported the invasion of Afhganistan or even were originally for the Iraq war, maybe you're a libertarian nevertheless. But if you are, then so is anyone who is generally pro-freedom to a sufficient extent, despite some serious deviations. Many people, however, who are very pro-war take it to a level that I find the description of them as libertarians to be totally unjustified.)

We have just passed a tragic benchmark – 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq since the war began – including more than 3,500 since the capture of Saddam and more than 3,000 since the handover to Iraqis in mid-2004, which I, at the time, referred to as the"Iraqization Scam," predicting more bloodshed and escalation to follow. Then there are the tens of thousands wounded, whose number some have suggested has been underreported and whose severity has not been confronted by American society.

For all those American troops who wished to quit their jobs, but were forced to keep fighting under Stop Loss or just the plain threat of being tried for"desertion," there is a moral element to their deaths rarely grasped: Under the principles of the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, the right to liberty is an inalienable right. This was enshrined in the 13th Amendment, which banned not just chattel slavery but involuntary servitude, including indentured servitude. What this means is in America, everyone is supposed to have a right to quit his job, at any time. He cannot sell himself into slavery, even for a term of service. If he violates a contract and quits, he can be held for damages, but he cannot be forced to keep working. Except in the military, where once you sign up, you cannot change jobs, even after your nominal term expires. What this means, in terms of morality, is everyone who is fighting in a war but would rather quit, and is held against his will to keep fighting, is a slave, and should he die while fighting, he is, morally speaking, a victim of murder by his own government. We do not have a fully voluntary military unless people can quit.

However, we can at least say these people, while often manipulated by recruiters, opted to sign up in the first place. But the Iraqis – what did they do to ask for this war? Nothing. This war has been a war of aggression against the Iraqi people, and so we must sympathize with not just Iraqi civilians but also the Iraqi soldiers who were killed in a war of aggression – on top of the possibly more than one million civilians killed as a result of this war, up to three times as many Iraqi soldiers died when compared to American soldiers.

A million civilians? If you think the number sounds too big, cut it in half – or even by 90%. There is something fundamentally dysfunctional about the way Americans tend to view their government's role in world affairs, to think that 100,000 Iraqis, by an extremely, perhaps even irresponsibly low, estimate, have perished in this war – and yet most focus, where there is any focus at all on the human costs of war, is centered on the American deaths.

There never was an excuse for this war, and there certainly is no excuse to stay. Four years ago, we began hearing the argument that if the US were to withdraw, there would be more violence and more death. There have been more violence and more death since – much more. The supposed success of the"surge" has been a return to the horrific levels of violence a few years back, back when the goal was supposedly to plant the roots of democracy and leave Iraq better than the US found it. Now the goal seems to be keeping the death toll to one or two Americans per day, while ignoring completely the mounting Iraqi death toll.

The US empire supported the horrible Saddam Hussein, encouraged his war of aggression against Iran, leaving hundreds of thousands dead, imposed through the United Nations a regime of sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands more, and now has the blood of many, many thousands more on its hands. For nearly three decades, the US has been the greatest enemy of the Iraqi people, for even when we could say it was Saddam, the dictator was being sponsored by the US government. The idea that more American intervention in Iraq is going to bring about peace and stability should seem pathologically absurd on its face by now. It is time to end this atrocity and begin the long process of reconciliation with the Iraqi people. The US government should take this as an opportunity to finally stop being the global policeman.

Lew Rockwell has a great new article that discusses the true problems for liberty presented by racism, sexism, religious bigotry and other such illiberal forms of collectivist confusion. While championing liberty itself, including the crucial freedom of association, he explains how a free society does not bring about the results racists and those who believe in class conflict want, and so they resort to statism, which, when coupled with such bigotry, can lead to the greatest of state horrors and oppressions.

Here, Eric Garris and I lay out our argument for Ron Paul to ditch the GOP and his campaign's conservative triangulation strategy, seek the Libertarian nomination, and keep on running.

Say, I thought we liberated this country.

Of course, the Islamist theocracy that persists in the Middle East is no joke. But it does seem as though many Americans look the other way when a nation we are ostensibly allied with, or helped secure freedom for, engages in such totalitarianism.

Trevor Bothwell has a great article at LewRockwell.com about what fully enforcing America's immigration laws, through mass deportations, would really entail. A choice excerpt:

To say this would be a messy affair would be an understatement of magnificent proportion. SWAT-style assaults and home invasions would be the order of the day. Today's ruthless, tyrannical drug raids would actually look tame in comparison as government thugs went door to door seeking out suspected illegal aliens. The right to privacy of citizens and non-citizens alike would consequently evaporate as property rights became a thing of the past. Chaos would ensue. Racial tensions would intensify as primarily brown targets would be ensnared by their primarily white captors. Protests and riots would erupt, the merits of which would be hard to dispute.

Children born as American citizens would be seized from their parents, automatically rendered homeless and converted into wards of the state as a result of such totalitarian behavior (Huckabee once seemed to understand the demerits of such atrocious behavior). Human beings who have come to this country to make a better life for themselves and their families would be treated like animals as they were hunted, captured, incarcerated, and eventually deported. And this would merely be the fate of those who complied.

I argue here that the biggest proponents of a North American Union, which U.S. nativists and patriots are all up in arms about, have actually been U.S. nationalists, American politicians, and others who wanted to take over the entire continent under the banner of Old Glory.

Certainly not. Listen to the heroic (and civil) Scott Horton take on Stu Bykofsky from the Philadelphia Daily News, author of the crazed article “To save America, we need another 9/11” as well as this unsatisfactory retraction, based on the new insight that even another 9/11 wouldn't do the trick.

This is really wonderful radio. I love listening to Scott's great show regularly, but this is particularly grand. He really corners Bykofsky, dismisses the warmongering nationalism, and makes a great concise case against Bush's war on terror, Clinton's foreign policy, the bipartisan extraConstitutional surveillance state, and American warmongering nationalism in general. Bykofsky tries to make Scott look like a leftie hypocrite. Of course it doesn't work against this intimidatingly well informed Rothbardian dove."Whichever administration is working against my liberty, they are the target of my criticism," Scott says, as he educates his guest.

It's a powerful 18 minutes. Give it a listen.

I write here about the federal war on Springfield, and how The Simpsons has helped move pop culture from the nationalist collectivism so endemic in earlier cartoons.