Jeff Riggenbach on Liberty.me

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left libertarianism

Why I Am a Left Libertarian Aug 6, 2015

Many libertarians say the traditional Left/Right political spectrum has become meaningless and useless.  But to the extent that this is true for them, this is only because they have allowed themselves to be befuddled by political fraud and, perhaps, by a weak background in political history.  The spectrum is just as useful and meaningful as it always was, which is very.  It is necessary only to clarify one’s thinking about the past century in American politics to see that this is so. But let us begin at the beginning – with what the left/right spectrum meant when it was created...

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Is There a Psychology of Liberty? May 7, 2014

In a previous article, "Libertarian Psychology," I made a few very brief remarks on the importance of psychology for libertarians and sketched the lives, careers, and ideas of two particular intellectuals: the libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz and the libertarian psychologist Timothy Leary, both born in the year 1920. Now I'd like to add a few comments on a couple of later libertarian psychologists, one born in the 1930s and another born in the 1940s. The first of these two psychologists, Nathaniel Branden, was born on April 9, 1930, in Brampton, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto. Or so you might say today —...

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‘I Do My Thing and You Do Your Thing’ Dec 26, 2012

Once upon a time in America (it was just after World War II), mainstream psychology came in two and only two forms. There was behaviorism and there was psychoanalysis, and no one with any other intellectual orientation need apply. The theorists on campuses were behaviorists; the therapists in offices were psychoanalysts. Then came the revolution led by the humanistic psychologists, beginning in the 1950s and rapidly gaining strength through the 1960s and early '70s. It brought encounter groups, regional "growth centers" like Northern California's notorious "clothing optional" Esalen Institute, experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic drugs, and "client-centered therapy." Nothing...

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Riggenbach- Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson Aug 15, 2011

Robert Anton Wilson was born January 18, 1932 in Brooklyn. He grew up in the section of Brooklyn known as Flatbush and, later, after his father lost his job on the waterfront, in a much poorer section of Brooklyn known as Gerritsen Beach. "Rents were very low" in Gerritsen Beach, Wilson recalled in his book Down to Earth, the largely autobiographical second volume of his Cosmic Trigger Trilogy, "because only the poor Irish Catholics lived there." At another point in the same account, he refers to his old neighborhood as "an Irish Catholic ghetto." Not that all Irish Catholics were poor,...

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Bastiat for the Ages Jul 8, 2011

It was back in 1962, as I recall, when I was 15 years old and a junior in high school, that I first read something by a French writer on free trade whose name, my friends and I thought at first, would probably be pronounced "Frederick BAHS-tee-aht." Since several of us were enrolled in Madame Wall's beginning French class that semester, it didn't take us too long to discover that his name was probably closer to "Frayed-air-EEK Bah-STYAH." But his ideas fascinated us all the same, as did the organization whose free pamphlets included Bastiat's arguments against tariffs and other...

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Riggenbach- C.M. Kornbluth and the Syndicate

C.M. Kornbluth and the Syndicate Jun 17, 2011

The late Samuel Edward Konkin III was a firm believer in the power of science fiction to spread the libertarian message. He himself had been converted to libertarianism partly by reading the works of Robert A. Heinlein, and Heinlein remained his favorite science fiction writer for the rest of his life. Every July for years, he threw a joint birthday party for himself and Robert A. Heinlein (Sam's birthday was July 8; Heinlein's was July 7). The last and largest issue of his magazine,New Libertarian, was devoted to Heinlein, as was a sort of mini-conference he held, also in the late 1980s, under...

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Riggenbach- The Anarchist Conscience

The Anarchist Conscience Jun 10, 2011

If the libertarian tradition is going to endure and grow (in both size and influence), it's necessary for younger libertarians to do two things. First they need to familiarize themselves with that tradition. Second, and more fundamentally, they need to add to it. Enter Gary Chartier, Southern California law professor. Chartier was born in Southern California in 1966. He grew up in Riverside County, out in the desert east of Los Angeles. And when he hit adolescence, around the early 1980s, his reading about political economy convinced him that he was a libertarian. "I was in many ways a fairly...

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Riggenbach- The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne

The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne May 27, 2011

Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual journalist who flourished for a few years in the second decade of the 20th century — in the Teens, the decade that ran from 1910 to 1920. Bourne wrote mostly for magazines during this period. His byline was particularly familiar to readers of The New Republic — until his radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired. He moved over to The Seven Arts, a newly launched magazine with a smaller circulation than The New Republic and one less well suited to Bourne's particular talents and interests, since its...

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Riggenbach- Ambiguous Utopias

Ambiguous Utopias Apr 15, 2011

The mid-1970s — meaning, let us say, the five-year period encompassing the years 1973, '74, '75, '76, and '77 — was a heady time for the modern American libertarian movement. To those of us who were involved back then, it seemed we were on the verge of a major breakthrough. The first book on the libertarian movement to be brought out by a major mainstream publisher, Jerome Tuccille's Radical Libertarianism, had appeared in 1970. In 1973, it was joined by two more such books — David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom and Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty. That same year, Harry Browne's How I...

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Riggenbach- Friedrich Hayek and American Science Fiction

Friedrich Hayek and American Science Fiction Apr 8, 2011

Friedrich August von Hayek was born in Vienna on the eighth day of May 1899. When he graduated from the University of Vienna in 1921, at the age of 22, he applied for a job with the Austrian Office of Claims Accounts, the government agency charged with paying the nation's war debts as those had recently been defined in the Treaty of Saint Germain, the treaty that, for those who lived in Austria, ended World War I. Hayek had a letter of recommendation from a very high-ranking and influential professor of economics at the university, Friedrich von Wieser, and it seems to...

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Riggenbach- Clarence Darrow on Freedom, Justice, and War

Clarence Darrow on Freedom, Justice, and War Mar 25, 2011

Clarence Darrow is best known today as the Chicago lawyer who defended John T. Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. A character based loosely on him is played by Spencer Tracy in the 1960 movie version of the classic play about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind. Darrow was long known perhaps equally well as the Chicago lawyer who got life imprisonment instead of the death penalty for two 19-year-olds, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, in theirsensational 1924 trial for the kidnapping and murder of a 14-year-old boy, which they had undertaken to prove that they could commit the perfect crime. Orson...

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Riggenbach- Is the Tea Party's Revolution Serious

Is the Tea Party’s Revolution Serious? Mar 18, 2011

Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and a journalist whose work appears in the major mainstream media. The New York Times and theLos Angeles Times are on the list of publications to which she contributes, as is The New Yorker, where she's listed on the masthead as a "staff writer." Her latest book, which was published back in September by Princeton University Press, is called The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. Unsurprisingly, it reads rather like a long magazine article. It meanders here and there in a leisurely fashion; it includes tidbits from...

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Riggenbach- Some Further Notes on Libertarian Science Fiction

Some Further Notes on Libertarian Science Fiction Mar 11, 2011

This essay is about four writers, none of whom was a libertarian, but each of whom wrote something back in the 1960s that made a significant contribution to the libertarian tradition. The first of the four was a science-fiction writer, though only occasionally. He was born 94 years ago last week, on February 25, 1917, in suburban Manchester, England. His name at birth was John Burgess Wilson. His family was Roman Catholic, which at that time virtually guaranteed that he would be confirmed in the Church at the age of about seven. He had, therefore, already come to be known as "Jack...

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Riggenbach- Libertarianism and Science Fiction What's the Connection

Libertarianism and Science Fiction: What’s the Connection? Feb 11, 2011

One day in the late spring of 1951, something rather astonishing happened in an otherwise nondescript shopping district in a medium-sized city somewhere in the American Midwest. Right there, right smack in the middle of the block, where Aunt Sally's Lunch and Patterson Tailors had long stood, there suddenly appeared what a later newspaper account could only describe as "a strange building, apparently a kind of gunshop." The front of this building sported a large, brightly shining sign … which read: FINE WEAPONS • THE RIGHT TO BUY WEAPONS IS THE RIGHT TO BE FREE. The window display was made...

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Riggenbach- The Reagan Fraud- And After

The Reagan Fraud- And After Feb 4, 2011

Like most Republican politicians since the early 1930s, Ronald Reagan always portrayed himself throughout his political career as a champion of limited government, individual rights, and free enterprise — the classical-liberal values, which, of course, he absurdly described as "conservative." But, like almost all Republican politicians since the early 1930s, he seemed to forget all about these values once he got into office and assumed the reins of power. Consider, as a case in point, Reagan's eight years (1966–1974) as governor of California. As Murray Rothbard noted in 1980, Despite his bravado about having stopped the growth of state government, the...

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Riggenbach- Frank Chodorov, Educator

Frank Chodorov, Educator Dec 31, 2010

Frank Chodorov was an early-20th-century Georgist libertarian who devoted the last two decades of his life — basically the 1940s and '50s — to advocacy journalism. He was also a militant nonvoter. "A people can vote themselves into slavery," he wrote, "though they cannot vote themselves out of it." For "never has the vote been used to abolish privilege; it has always been used to demand new ones or to effect a change in the beneficiaries." It was possible, he thought, that "social ostracism" might convince those politicians "whose self-respect ha[d] not dropped to the vanishing point [to] get out of the...

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Riggenbach- Frank Chodorov, Nonvoter

Frank Chodorov, Nonvoter Dec 24, 2010

It was 44 years ago this holiday season, on December 28, 1966, that Frank Chodorov died. Chodorov had been born nearly 80 years earlier, on the day after Valentine's Day, February 15, 1887, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was the youngest child of a pair of Russian Jewish immigrants, who gave him the name Fishel Chodorowsky. But he was the only one of their eleven children to be born in this country, and he seems to have known early on that he was an American who needed an American name. As a child, he rechristened himself "Frank"...

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Riggenbach- Hushing Up Conspiracy Theories

Hushing Up Conspiracy Theories Feb 17, 2010

If you spend much time on the Internet, you probably already know who Cass Sunstein is: he's a former professor of law and political science at the University of Chicago, where, during the 1990s, he met and became close friends with a fellow member of the law-school faculty named Barack Obama. Currently, Sunstein is a law professor at Harvard, but he's taking a leave of absence from that position so he can "serve" as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, according to Wikipedia,...

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