The latest issue of the Tom Woods Letter, which all the influential people read. Subscribe for free and receive my eBook The Deregulation Bogeyman as a gift.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have non-insane opponents.
Late last week on Twitter a fellow wrote:
“Nothing better illustrates the 2 sides of libertarianism more than these 2 podcasts released today, the day after horrible racist violence killed at least 49 innocent people.”
(Nicholas Sarwark, Libertarian Party chairman, clicked “like” on this Tweet, but you knew that.)
Now which two podcasts (he means podcast episodes, but I won’t be pedantic) would these be?
The good and virtuous one: “Liberty and the African American Experience (with Jonathan Blanks).”
Description: “Jonathan Blanks returns to discuss how versions of liberty were promoted by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X during the Civil Rights Movement.”
(Brion McClanahan and I let poor “Jonathan Blanks” have it not long ago on the Tom Woods Show, I note in passing.)
Now try to think of who, dear reader, released the bad, very bad, episode.
You’ll never guess.
Why, the episode in question is “The Discrimination Myth,” episode 1362 of the wicked Tom Woods Show.
Description: “Frank Karsten returns to discuss myths of discrimination that virtually everyone believes, and which tend to empower the state.”
Now that’s just not allowed — especially after a mosque shooting.
After a mosque shooting, you see, you cannot discuss whether discrimination is the primary cause of disparate outcomes. Doesn’t that make sense, and not sound hysterical at all?
(Not mentioned by our Tweeter: also the day after the shooting, my email newsletter’s subject line condemned politicians who had destroyed the Islamic nation of Libya, and the whole letter was about the horrific human toll of the so-called War on Terror. No need to mention that!)
Of course, I line up my episodes in advance, particularly before I go out of town, as I did last week (I was in New York, as was evident from a glance at my Facebook profile page). It’s all automated and pre-numbered in advance. I recorded that episode in Florida, and I was seeing shows in New York when it came out.
But even if that weren’t the case, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. What on Earth does my episode have to do with mosque shootings?
All it does is pretty much recap the Thomas Sowell/Walter Williams arguments about discrimination and how much it accounts for disparate outcomes. (Spoiler: not much.)
The gender pay gap, for instance, has nothing to do with “discrimination.” Do I need to wait a week after a shooting to point this out? What do shooting or violence have to do with any of this?
Left-libertarians generally don’t dare criticize Sowell, since they know we all love him, and his work is top notch.
But if you’re white and you repeat Sowell’s arguments? Why, you’re insensitive to mosque shootings!
What we actually said in the episode — I’m going to go crazy here and refer to the actual content of the supposedly offending episode — is that official state policy has far more systemic and detrimental effects on minorities than private discrimination does.
Whoa! How insensitive!
You are not supposed to say that!
You’d think a libertarian would be sympathetic to that idea, but this, too, is evidently off the 3 x 5 card of allowable opinion now.
These people really are hopeless. Thank goodness there are so few of them.
The Tweet ends:
“Think long & hard about about which kind of ‘libertarianism’ you want to stand behind & support.”
Think long and hard indeed, dear reader, as to which kind you choose to support: