[Today’s issue of the Tom Woods Letter — which you can subscribe to for free when you download my free eBook Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About Guns.]
Before I get to the juicy stuff, here’s what’s coming up the rest of the week on the Tom Woods Show.
Tomorrow it’s Gareth Porter, on Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran deal. And Friday it’s Gret Glyer, creator of the amazing DonorSee app, which my listeners used to build a house for a widow in Malawi — dubbed The Tom Woods House!
If you haven’t yet subscribed on iTunes, now’s the time.
Now for the fun.
The other day, a left-libertarian fellow had some not-nice things to say about — of all things! — this email newsletter.
He says that Monday’s issue “talks about how advocating for individual rights of marginalized people in the LGBTQ+ community will lead to a tyrannical, socialists [sic] dictatorship.”
That’s what this fellow took away from that email.
(He specifies none of these “individual rights,” natch, because none of them are actual, libertarian rights. As a supporter of the nonaggression principle, I’m against the violation of anyone’s rights to life, liberty, and property.)
What I actually wrote was:
But the crazier and more irrational it is, the more the state thrives on it — because the more coercion, propaganda, and state-sponsored groupthink it will take to engineer people’s agreement.
Incidentally, this is why the state loves “equality” — a concept so compendiously broad that its definition can be endlessly expanded. The state grows ever more powerful and intrusive in pursuit of equality’s ceaseless demands.
Equality can never be attained, for the very moment after we achieve it, when someone first voluntarily transacts with someone else, resources will have been shifted around and “equality” will already have been disturbed.
That’s why the state loves it.
And that’s why the state loves LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP. The more letters, the more bizarre to bourgeois sensibilities, the better. That means that in order to impose it, the state will get to flex — and bulk up — its muscles.
You’re a dance instructor? You’d better be willing to instruct same-sex couples, or you’ll be sorry. And who cares if you’re ruined? You’re a hater and therefore have no rights.
Multiply that throughout civil society, and you’ll see why the state and its legions of lawyers and bureaucrats feel like kids on Christmas morning.
There’s nothing that can remain potentially untouched by all this.
Now any decent person treats other people with respect, period. We don’t need ideological campaigns to teach us that.
But that’s not what this (or political correctness in general) is about.
It is about power and control. It is about intimidating people into silence by threatening to destroy their livelihoods and reputations. It is about cementing the state’s role as the policeman of acceptable opinion and mandatory morality.
None of that is debatable, it seems to me. But it’s just a teensy-weensy bit different from saying that “advocating for individual rights of marginalized people in the LGBTQ+ community will lead to a tyrannical, socialists [sic] dictatorship,” wouldn’t you agree?
The fellow says he continues to receive this newsletter “for the laugh/cringe factor.”
Off the top of my head, here’s what I’ve covered lately:
- David Stockman’s appearance on FBN, where he was chastised for opposing war;
- How one of my listeners stood up to a biased professor who claimed Herbert Hoover favored laissez-faire;
- The statism of “communitarians”;
- People on left and right who kind of like Hitler’s economics;
- The meaninglessness of political representation;
- Kevin Dixie, who teaches firearms safety and self-defense to inner-city blacks;
- Myths of American education, spread by Paul Krugman;
and a bunch more.
What a libertarian would have to “laugh” or “cringe” about here, I cannot begin to fathom.
Sure sign of a fanatic? Someone who is incapable of saying: “X is very good on A, B, and C, but I sure disagree with him on X, Y, and Z.”
If I felt or operated that way, I would never have written my paper on the work of Seymour Melman, the left-wing professor whose analysis of the economics of the Pentagon is second to none.
I would never have written We Who Dared to Say No to War with Murray Polner, a wonderful guy I have almost nothing in common with politically. (That one was published by Basic Books, and earned a coveted starred review from Publishers Weekly.)
Ralph Nader purchased 1200 copies of that book.
There’s the funny thing, by the way: I’ve actually done more successful outreach to the left than all my critics, who complain that I attack the left too much, put together.
And I’ve done it without compromising, or being a bootlicker.
Oh, one last thing: I use troll attacks to build up my following.
(My critic would have known this if he listened to my show, particularly the recent episode with Ben Settle.)
As in:
Do you like and appreciate what I produce every day?
Want to stick it to this guy?
Then join me as a supporter.
