I decided to move some discussion from this post up to the top level here. Specifically, Watoosh wrote: "Well, if violence is defined as initiation of force (which, of course, presupposes certain property rights), then I think Rockwell is correct..." Well, if we define cats as elephants, then many people keep elephants in their house. More seriously, firstly, violence is not usually defined that way. It's defined as, you know, violence, so that, say, someone may respond violently or non-violently to someone who aggresses against them. Otherwise, it would make no sense to say, for instance, "He punched me, but I did not stoop to violence in response." And, secondly, the libertarian usage of "initiation of force" is very offbeat. If I wander onto someone's meadow, most people would not say I had "initiated force" -- I mean, sure, I used "force" against the earth to push off walking, but that's not force directed against...
The title by itself is not really a big deal; severed from anything else, it reads like comic exaggeration. Unfortunately, the contents of the post make it clear that Tucker was not in a particularly jocular mood.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteRe "heroic" ascriptions:
ReplyDeleteWithin "free"-market circles, the set-piece affixing of the "heroic" tag to the entrepreneur/tycoon as an ideal type has long amused me. Two aspects stand out here.
1. It's not enough, apparently, to defend the liberties and acquired wealth of businessfolk against their denigration by coercive utopians or the envious. We have to hoist them atop our shoulders and make parade floats of them as well.
2. Such admiration is due them as a pure function of their role within the black-and-white laissez-faire morality play, regardless of the actual cultural/moral content of the goods and services he has sold, toward which as presumably "value-free" social "scientists" we are under strict doctorate's orders to remain silent in purest agnostic indifference.
Until such time, that is, that the formerly *wertfrei* paleolibertarian/Objectivist pauses for a breath...asks "what's that on your shirt?"...changes out of his clinician's hat in the blink of an eye...and launches into a doctrinaire Capitalist Realism lecture on the superior manliness in the defense of Western civilization inhering in, e.g., wool suits, bow ties, .45 caliber penis extensions, Modernist architecture, factory smoke, cigars and whichever brand of distilled spirits are most correct to decant this month, bloody steaks and great car-tipping Flintstones racks of ribs...
It helps, of course, if your motivations in such phenomenological modes are pure, i.e., born of siege-minded culture-warrior resentment rooted in poor toilet training, and above all a desire to piss off "liberals" or "The Left", two mythic phyla the rumors of whose existence I have read much in the Annals of Psychopathia Libertarianis...
Huh? PSH says that "unfortunately" Tucker was not in a jocular mood. How is your comment that "all is well" in agreement with that?
ReplyDelete