My point was about the PSL’s audience, not about the PSL itself. I still don’t see how you’re going to find among them significant numbers of people who are sympathetic to property rights and freedom of economic association.

It’s not too hard to find people who are strongly antiwar who are not Marxist-oriented in their economic thinking. While doing college OPHs, I found the typical score to be clustered around 80 on social issues and about 50 on economic issues. Many of those economic scores came with comments such as “I don’t really understand economics” or “I don’t really care about that stuff.”

Also, while working with peace, anti-prohibition, environmental, and other such groups on campus I ran into many people who would tell me in conversation that they agreed that government is way too big, but they usually prioritized peace and civil liberties issues and stayed quiet on the economic issues.

Finally, there are also many people who weakly hold big government economic views as part of a package deal – because their allies on peace and civil liberties issues, which they care more about, hold similar views, and because the warmongers, theocrats, and other people they strongly line up against tend to (falsely) profess faith in free markets. I used to fall in this category, and I know many other people who did at one time or another.

Ron Paul was able to appeal to many of these kinds of people, and the galvanizing moment that did it was standing up to Giuliani on the war issue. He built a tremendous following among young people, and even got many of them excited about monetary policy of all things – and somehow I don’t think it was because he is pro-life, anti-immigration or anti-gay marriage. So, if anything, Libertarians should be able to do even better with this crowd than Ron Paul did.

Most of these people don’t understand the the Invisible Hand, and instead see in free markets an Imaginary Fist. I remain fundamentally skeptical that very many people have (or will) come to libertarianism through the door marked “antiwar”.

Well, they could. And as for the invisible hand, it has to be explained to them in language they relate to by people they relate to by virtue of already working together on common causes. No, you are not going to get everyone – just as when you appeal to conservatives, there are always some who will see libertarianism as a drug-crazed haven of abortion, prostitution, homosexuality, promiscuity, borders opened to invading Mexicans and Muslims, etc. and so on.

Angela, Eric, et al. — good luck creating creating libertarians out of the sort of people at whom this rhetoric is aimed. It seems likely that either you or your bedfellows are badly misreading your audience.

Is it supposed to be some kind of surprising revelation that a Marxist sect such as PSL uses Marxist terminology?

Both libertarians and Marxists can address the concerns of millions (or even billions) of people who see the same problems of war and social injustice in the world. Obviously, we have different answers as to the causes and solutions, but we don’t get anywhere if we make no attempt to make our viewpoints heard. And in no way should we allow ourselves to be duped into becoming defenders of the statist-corporate status quo.

Type “defending libervention” into Google. The top result — by me — has stood unrebutted for over two and a half years. I’ve asked repeatedly for a point-by-point rebuttal and have never seen it. Do you think you can come up with one?

You apparently haven’t read e.g. Brink Lindsey, Randy Barnett, Tom Palmer, or Jacob Levy on libervention. Quick, what do you consider the least unpersuasive defense of liberventionism that each has written? Or do you admit that you simply haven’t read them at all?

If this reading list is too long, then at http://www.cato.org/events/041022conf.html you can watch a video of prominent libertarians debating the invasion of Iraq.

There’s simply no excuse for claiming that reasonable libertarians cannot disagree about whether the need for a liberty-loving polity to defend human liberty vanishes completely at lines drawn on maps by statists.

So far, I’ve only been able to find one Libertarian (hi Mik!) with the intellectual fortitude to say: “The U.S. military should never be used to depose a genocidal totalitarian WMD-using ballistic-missile-firing neighbor-annexing terrorist-funding sadistic maniac who defiantly persists in what the Security Council declares to be ‘material breach’ of his agreement to be inspected for cessation of his admitted earlier secret WMD programme.”

Who’s interested in becoming #2?

I have asked repeatedly for a “Libertarian” defense of our war(s) and have never seen it. Most likely because there is no Libertarian defense of these wars.

But still, good luck to you creating libertarians with the likes of Sonny Landham.

PEACE

Angela, Eric, et al. — good luck creating creating libertarians out of the sort of people at whom this rhetoric is aimed. It seems likely that either you or your bedfellows are badly misreading your audience.