By Manila Ryce
Published Thursday, June 5th, 2008, 12:01 pm
Filed under: Videos: Political, Economic, Society/Culture, Videos, US Politics

9 Responses to “Colbert Interviews Libertarian Presidential Candidate Bob Barr”

1. What a shame Barr is the Lib candidate. If there was any moment for the Libertarian party to shine, expand its appeal, and become a viable third party, it was this election. But the political insiders destroyed that possibility.

   Duder
   06/5/08 at 12:13 pm
   

2. […] Added 05 Jun 08 from www.jwharrison.com Flag as inappropriate or […]

   Colbert Interviews Libertarian Presidential Candidate Bob Barr - The Largest Minority Video
   06/5/08 at 5:04 pm
   
3. 

   Thanks for posting the video and your commentary, will repost.

   DandelionSalad
   06/5/08 at 5:08 pm
   

4. […] Colbert Interviews Libertarian Presidential Candidate Bob Barr Stephen is dead on with his characterization of the comically out of touch Libertarian Party, and even goes on to expose why even Libertarian candidate Bob Barr is a shitty libertarian… though from my experience most Libertarians are shitty libertarians. You’ve gotta love the audacity of a man who says people should vote Libertarian because the Republican/Democratic monopoly has ruined this country with bills like the ones he’s voted for. […]

   Colbert Interviews Libertarian Presidential Candidate Bob Barr By Manila Ryce « Dandelion Salad
   06/5/08 at 5:13 pm
   
5. 

   I’d love to get Cynthia McKinney on Colbert, if anything just to show people that she is running. Her campaign needs publicity stat!

   John Geraghty
   06/5/08 at 7:12 pm
   

6. A true anarchist doesn’t support majority rule over minorities. I’m not about to defend Bob Barr, since I opposed his nomination, but the Libertarian Party is far more concerned about the nature of power than someone who thinks the direct democracy initiative is a good idea. Even today, a majority of Californians are in the process of taking away the marriage equality just granted by the California Supreme Court, through the use of the initiative process. The majority of Germans in the 1930s thought the Jews among them were the main cause of their troubles. Majority rule is not liberty.

   Liberty means nobody rules over others. Not kings, not parliaments, not numerical majorities. Nobody. To be an anarchist means you don’t try to run anybody’s life except your own. You work together with others to achieve social goals in an atmosphere of mutual respect, not by supporting violence as long as it meets with the approval of 51%.

   None of us have lived under unregulated capitalism. What we’ve had in this country is a business-government partnership to give the former privileges at the expense of the rest of society. A true free market means that persuasion, not coercion, is the means by which people pursue their goals. Socialists are closer to today’s government, buying the baloney about democracy and supporting a giant government which they think will work for the powerless. Power doesn’t work for the powerless, and never will.

   That said, I agree with those who think the Libertarian Party wasted a great opportunity this year. It took 6 ballots for Barr’s celebrity to finally eke out a win over anarchist Dr. Mary Ruwart, who still got 45% of the vote on the final ballot. Her “Healing Our World” is a libertarian primer that will give people a good idea of what libertarians believe. The 2003 edition is the best one, but her 1993 version is available online for free at http://ruwart.com/Healing/ruwart_all.html . After November, the opportunists will hopefully leave after a disappointing result, and an anti-war, tolerant, free market majority can be back in charge.

   True Anarchist
   06/6/08 at 1:09 am
   
7. 

   @True Anarchist

   “The majority of Germans in the 1930s thought the Jews among them were the main cause of their troubles. Majority rule is not liberty. Liberty means nobody rules over others. Not kings, not parliaments, not numerical majorities.”

   Strawman. That’s why we have things called rights. Socialists believe we have a right to education, food, shelter, and healthcare. Capitalists do not. Direct democracy is only considered tyranny to capitalists who are willing to overlook the fact that soundly structured democratic societies establish rights that cannot be infringed upon by the majority. However, it’s not a simple question of protecting the minority from the majority. You must consider whether that minority is an oppressed group of people whose rights are being infringed upon, or a group of ruling elites who are actually exploiting the majority. Simply being a minority does not make you a victim. Comparing the plight of persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany to that of CEOs in America simply because they’re both minority groups is frankly disgusting.

   “None of us have lived under unregulated capitalism.”

   No one ever has, and no one ever will. We can debate the merits of some fantasy ideal of the free market, or we can discuss capitalism as it has existed in reality. We have come close to an unregulated market however during the Industrial Revolution, which I recall to be a time rather devoid of liberty for anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to be a captain of industry.

   “Socialists are closer to today’s government, buying the baloney about democracy and supporting a giant government which they think will work for the powerless.”

   You’re confusing socialism with statism. True socialists do not favor big government, especially when that government is a capitalist one. If you’re arguing that we live in a socialist society, you might as well go the full nine and erroneously state that the Soviet Union was also a communist country. Under your own admittance, socialism is democracy. Ergo, the United States must be a democratic nation if it’s a socialist nation. Do you really believe we live in a democratic nation?

   Manila Ryce
   06/6/08 at 1:34 am
   

8. A lot of Libertarians seem to equate democracy with majority rule and then are rightfully wary. This is a strawman. Decision-making institutions can be crafted to give the individual input in proportion to the degree they are affected. Decentralization, consensus, established rights, etc.

   Markets don’t promote free, non coerced cooperation. Markets produce anti-sociality. People with opposed interests like buyers and sellers, employers and employees, or producers and consumers don’t cooperate. They compete.

   Institutions that are designed solely to produce maximum economic return do not cooperate with those they are in competition with, unless they are giants who cooperate to squash the ants.

   There’s no persuasion in markets. Do sellers try to “persuade” buyers using facts and rational discourse, or do they attempt to delude them with imagery and manipulation?

   Markets are hardly institutions that allow people to participate in non coerced conditions. Unequal distribution of capital coerces some to be bosses and most to be bossed. If you don’t have the opportunity to choose not to work for anyone, you’re essentially being coerced to go work under conditions that if applied to the political sphere would be described as tyranny: do as the boss says or go find another boss to work for; essentially the same as live by the laws of the government or go live under another government, minus the rather weak argument that under capitalism, we have the opportunity to start our own “government.”

   Before you go tell someone to start their own business, ask, does everyone really have the same credentials and collateral to get credit in order to receive a loan that would allow them to start that business? Of course not, so let’s stop pretending like Paris Hilton and the poor-white guy in Appalachia have the same opportunity to start their own business.

   Markets allot decision-making power in proportion to how much capital one has. And since by even libertarian standards most capital in this country has not been obtained either legitimately nor can it be justified by the “you own the fruits of your labor” standard, it would follow that the disproportionate decision-making power exercised by owners in markets is also illegitimate. Why the “liberty party” would choose this deformed version of democracy, one can only guess.

   Sam
   06/7/08 at 12:48 am
   

9. It is certainly possible that some of our disagreements are semantic, and to the extent I’ve criticized views you don’t hold, I apologize. But love of democracy really is an obstacle to liberty that must be seriously examined.

   I have no problem with anarcho-socialism: a true anarcho-socialist won’t interfere with other people who choose to voluntarily organize their affairs by specializing and using a price system to inform their actions. I think we will find that both cooperatives and businesses are abundant in a free society, and while I predict more of the latter, that is only a prediction. People who agree that none have the right to rule over others will find a way to live in peace and harmony. It is why we all consistently speak out against war and the military-industrial complex which both the Republicans and Democrats support. It is why we all speak out against the “war on drugs”. It is why we all speak out against corporate welfare. All includes the Libertarian Party.

   I am questioning praise of Gravel’s direct democracy initiative, which isn’t anarchism, but another attempt to reform and rehabilitate the idea that statism can work for the people. To the extent you claim we have rights which majorities cannot infringe, you are rejecting democracy, and we agree. I gave an example of gay couples in California being oppressed by a majority that wants to reserve the special government privileges and benefits of marriage to opposite sex couples, and has put an INITIATIVE on the ballot to ensure that inequality: that isn’t an example involving CEOs being oppressed. I don’t give a damn about CEOs: I care about the actual innocent minorities who have been victimized in every government in history. That is WHY I am an anarchist.

   I’m all for discussing the real world. In the real world, no government is ever going to support the powerless over the powerful. What government does is let the powerful leverage their power with the wealth under the control of the government. A million dollar bribe or campaign contribution or job offer to start after leaving government controls a billion dollar project. Absent that government, a million dollars only controls a million dollars. The richest man in the world, Bill Gates, would be broke after a week spending at the level of the US government. But he can leverage his power with a government that forcibly gathers and reallocates the wealth of society. Sam is right that wealth acquired illegitimately shouldn’t give someone disproportionate market power, but without government, today’s richest man in America has less than 0.1% of total market power, and without his intellectual property protection, most of that disappears as well. If THAT is the concentration of power we have left to condemn after ending coercive government, we have gone more than 99% of the way toward the goal we share. I’ll admit that redressing all of history’s injustices is beyond my imagination, but eliminating 99% of the current excess power of the privileged is certainly one heck of an accomplishment.

   I wasn’t arguing that we live in a socialist society, only that socialists are closer to the government status quo than the Libertarian Party as a whole (Barr is a different matter). I’d say that we live in a corporatist or mercantilist society in which big businesses benefit from the concentration of wealth in government that they can control. I want to get rid of the machinery of oppression that gives them that leverage. Yes, I am oppressed if I only have the choice of either working for one employer or starving. Absent a money monopoly, they don’t control all the capital. Absent intellectual property law, they cannot create artificial scarcity in information. Absent licensing laws, they can’t stop people from starting small businesses as an alternative to employment. All of those are government-created regulatory privileges. I’m okay condemning capitalism, if that is the term you prefer to use. But there is nothing unregulated about our society, and it is regulated for the benefit of the powerful. Government has, throughout history, been a tool for the powerful. Now that divine right no longer works, democracy is the God that keeps them in power. The neocons use it, and the liberal interventionists use it. We shouldn’t. We should favor an end to coercive power and not yet another proposal to put it in the hands of the “good” people who presumably won’t misuse it.

   I don’t agree with Sam that buyers and sellers, employers and employees, and producers and consumers are competing: they are cooperating. Every voluntary exchange occurs because each person gets something that she values more than what she is giving. The idea that either I am oppressing the grocer or the grocer is oppressing me every time I go into the supermarket is silly: we both benefit or I wouldn’t keep going while he keeps welcoming me. My life alone on a desert island would be horrible: the presence of others is either a blessing or neutral as long as they don’t use force against me. I don’t mind others having more goods than me while I enjoy more leisure. If they work harder and produce more, they aren’t taking from me. I’m not the one obsessed with economics. All I want is for the idea of using coercion to achieve any social goal to be thoroughly discredited. Gravel’s National Initiative takes us in the opposite direction.

   But I do want to reiterate that I am disgusted with the presidential choice just made by the Libertarian Party, and if the November results do not discredit that choice, I might well find myself agreeing with the criticism of the LP that started this thread. Truly, the LP of Bob Barr is no place for an anarchist. But, as much as I will always admire his courage during the Vietnam War, neither is the LP of Mike Gravel. In fact, he told reporters at the convention he preferred Barr to the anarchist Ruwart.

   True Anarchist
   06/8/08 at 3:06 am
   

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Tired of filing this information out everytime you leave a comment at the Largest Minority? Why not register as a user? You also get full access to our forum!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>