Throughout the libertarian blogosphere I have seen a bunch of talk recently of left vs. right, and who is more libertarian. It seems that many libertarians take the position that the left is only better right now because it's out of power, that Ted Kennedy and Al Gore and others are only championing the Bill of Rights and opposing the imperial executive because they do not hold the reins to it.

There is absolutely much truth to this. But before getting into the million definitions of left and right, I want to consider the general thrust of the organized left and right during Republican and Democratic administrations, and ponder what, from a libertarian perspective, we should root for (or root the less against) in national politics.

I'm speaking in terrible generalization here, but I think a few issues are important:

—Who is worse, the left or right, when its side holds power?

—Is the left more critical of Democratic administrations, or is the right more critical of Republican ones? Whose criticism of their own party is more libertarian?

—Is the left more critical of Republican administrations, or is the right more critical of Democratic ones? Whose criticism of the other party is more libertarian?

—Which side is more hypocritical?

—How much does all this go out the window in times of war and crisis?

I think the answer to the last question is: A whole lot. On the matter of war and other crises, I have noticed a tendency for the party in power to be terrible and the opposition side to be better. See my article "Waco, Oklahoma City, and the Post-9/11 Left-Right Dynamic"

However, I do suspect that the better radical leftist critiques of warfare and police statism are more in play during Democratic administrations than are conservative critiques of despotism during Republican ones. Leftists opposed Johnson's war. Some even critiqued Clinton's handling of Waco and Kosovo.

I tend to think conservatives are more lockstep in support of their party, especially where it counts. This was certainly true on Berkeley's campus—not a good representation of American politics, I know! But I remember that the leftists were split among two dozen groups, each with a handful of vocal advocates, whereas all the campus conservatives were unified in the Berkeley College Republicans, the largest political group on campus. The Cal Democrats were even split on the Afghan war! (An event, by the way, that started me on my path of disliking the left less than the right.

Conservatives are very well organized behind their party, and seem to defend everything their president does. The question is: Will enough liberals continue criticizing the American empire when it's taken over by Democrats to make the switch, from our perspective, better? Will enough conservatives truly attack the Democratic administration for its unconstitutional despotism? Or will they instead encourage the Democrats to prove they can be tough by launching even more war and invasions of civil liberties than the current administration?

Obviously, the Clintons and the Bushes and the establishment in both parties are thoroughly statist: the difference between jackboot Democrats and spendthrift Republicans is nearly nothing. But what really matters to me is the overall political dynamic in society. In this regard, which party is preferable, from a libertarian standpoint?

Leave aside for the moment the question of divided government. I think we can all agree that a Republican monopoly on all three branches has been a disaster.

Lew Rockwell has a great article about the supposed War on Christmas. It has some interesting insights on politics and there's some really cool historical stuff in there, too. It begins:

The evangelical movement in America—the one that put Bush in the White House and continues to constitute his most dependable base of support—has been whipped into a frothing frenzy over the idea, promoted by the newshounds with too much air time to kill at Fox, that someone, somewhere is waging a War on Christmas.

What? Is the government, some government anywhere, actively preventing Christians from celebrating Christmas, as in the Soviet Union, Cuba, China—or, the egregious case of Massachusetts Colony in the 17th century (we’ll get to that)?

No, apparently not. The problem is more subtle, or so they say.

At a LewRockwell.com conference I gave a talk on why supporting the war implies accepting the premises of statism. An excerpt:

"No one who favors the warfare state can disown the methods by which it's financed. It is no less economically collectivist to root for war than to root for any other government program. If a socialist told you he wants universal healthcare, but he does not favor the taxation and coercion to fund and implement it, you would quickly point out his naked contradiction. Every warmonger is an inflationist and a taxmonger, whether he knows it or not. To accept war is to accept the warfare state, and to accept the warfare state is to accept all the fundamental premises of statism -- the collectivism, the aggression, the ability of central planning to succeed."

Stephan Kinsella has a very interesting post on the LRC blog about good and bad judicial activism, and how conservatives and liberals are all confused in their thinking about this. He adds clarity to the meaning of"judicial activism" for libertarians to use. An excerpt:

From the libertarian point of view, the federal Constitution as written is fairly libertarian, at least compared to the leviathan state into which the original central government has morphed. It is for this reason that we want judges to adhere to the strict text of the Constitution: because it is a way to help hold the federal government to its original, more-limited scheme."Originalism" then--or opposition to activism--has primarily an instrumental value (as I argued in this Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterlyreview essay--which I wrote, coincidentally enough, after the journal approached me, at Professor Barnett's suggestion). Because our Constitution is relatively libertarian, we want the federal government to abide by the limits the Constitution places on it. In such a context, activism is likely to be a lead to unlibertarian results because it will mean invention of new powers or relaxations on the limits placed on the state. We can hardly be surprised that the judicial branch of the state tends to decide in a pro-state manner; but to the extent judges feel bound by the text of the Constitution, the state's growth will be somewhat impeded (albeit, one disadvantage of such as system is that giving some lip service to the "rule of law" cover or myth helps to legitimize the state's actions).

Read the rest.

I explain why trying to use the state to combat the ill influence of"private interests" over the" common good" is nonsensical in theory and bound to cause disaster in practice, in a new article "The Inevitability of Private Interests." Indeed, only the free market can liberate us completely from the private interests we don't want in our lives.

I reconsider foreign intervention in my new LRC article. An excerpt:

We need a solution that will take care of Iraq, Iran, and their embarrassing new affinity to each other. We need a way to continue the war on terror against Iran without stretching the military too thin or exhausting our capabilities for potential intervention elsewhere. We need to keep the new Iraqi Sharia state in check. Since we live in a democracy, we should find an answer that satisfies everyone and saves America's face in world opinion, all the while maintaining consistency and continuity with America's traditions in foreign policy.

Robert Higgs asks, What does it portend?

The Bush administration, [a Washington Post] article explains, no longer expects to produce a model democracy, a well-functioning oil industry, or “a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges” in Iraq. In short, the country is in terrible shape, and the U.S. government cannot solve the Iraqis’ most pressing problems. According to a senior U.S. official, “what we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground. We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”

To appreciate just how shocking this statement is, one must recall that not so long ago, a Bush staffer was quoted as saying, “We’re an empire now, we make our own reality.” Indeed, since 9/11 the Bush administration’s foreign policy has been everything that foreign-policy realism is not. The government’s faith-based occupation of Iraq, however, has not held up well against the rocket-propelled grenades, improvised explosive devices, small-arms fire, and mortar rounds that continue to batter it with distressing regularity, inflicting casualties of nearly 2,000 dead and some 14,000 wounded among U.S. military forces so far. An administration notable for its arrogance now undertakes to “shed the unreality” that underlay its invasion and occupation.

In an interesting article, Lew Rockwell argues that the newest developments in proposed state-level reforms in eminent domain law and practice demonstrate the benefits of decentralized governance, without a central state plenarily empowered to override local laws for the betterment of liberty, and makes the compelling point that

If we are to have a serious debate about eminent domain, we need to get beyond this ridiculous distinction between public and private use. Government is a racket that rewards itself through plunder and always in the name of public purpose. The truth is that there is no coherent way to separate public and private purpose when it comes to government. Its roads benefit private contractors and serve private interests. It’s true they are"free," but so are the streets in shopping malls, which are private. As for public schools, the teachers unions and hordes of bureaucrats are private interests too. Indeed, there is no such thing as the"public," there are only individuals.

Lew Rockwell has an interesting piece criticizing the Libertarian Party's recently published Exit Plan for Iraq in particular, and what he calls"regime libertarianism" in general.

On the particular point of the Exit Plan, I've seen other intriguing arguments for and against — or at least, in some defense of and with objection to — the proposal, notably by Chris Claypoole and Tom Knapp, respectably, over at The Libertarian Enterprise.

(I'm still thinking of my precise take on it, though I do generally dislike the gradualism in the plan, especially the idea of moving the troops from Iraq another countries to continue the"war on terror." Certainly, I don't think Iraqis will be much better off unless they're allowed — not forced into by a foreign power — a more decentralized governance, which would likely lead to a partitioned or federated Iraq, as Ivan Eland has suggested.)

On the more general point of gradualism, Rockwell critiques what he considers a counterproductive approach to public policy and the questions of the state, looking at attitude differences and drawing the line not at minarchism vs. anarchism, but on a more subtle and yet possibly more fundamental distinction in how libertarians view the state. As he puts it in his defense of more radical minarchism,"There is a difference between seeing government as a necessary evil, and viewing liberty as the offspring of power."