rdfs:comment
| - Rockwell is a hardline libertarian who often attacks the moderates as "Beltway libertarians" (and he in return is often derided as not a true libertarian). He was a close associate of Murray Rothbard, which should explain things. The slogan of his website, lewrockwell.com, is "anti-state, anti-war, pro-market," and he means it. Any deviation is seen as a betrayal of the libertarian movement. Rockwell is stuck in the unenviable position of being part of a movement associated with libertine morality and being a social conservative. Because Rockwell supports policies that would let people smoke doobies while screwing hookers, but actually opposes these acts, he coined the term "paleo-libertarian" to distance himself from the rest of the movement. Rockwell defines his brand of libertarianism:
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abstract
| - Rockwell is a hardline libertarian who often attacks the moderates as "Beltway libertarians" (and he in return is often derided as not a true libertarian). He was a close associate of Murray Rothbard, which should explain things. The slogan of his website, lewrockwell.com, is "anti-state, anti-war, pro-market," and he means it. Any deviation is seen as a betrayal of the libertarian movement. Rockwell is stuck in the unenviable position of being part of a movement associated with libertine morality and being a social conservative. Because Rockwell supports policies that would let people smoke doobies while screwing hookers, but actually opposes these acts, he coined the term "paleo-libertarian" to distance himself from the rest of the movement. Rockwell defines his brand of libertarianism: Paleolibertarianism holds with Lord Acton that liberty is the highest political end of man, and that all forms of government intervention -- economic, cultural, social, international -- amount to an attack on prosperity, morals, and bourgeois civilization itself, and thus must be opposed at all levels and without compromise. It is "paleo" because of its genesis in... [the] interwar Old Right that opposed the New Deal and favored the Old Republic of property rights, freedom of association, and radical political decentralization. Just as important, paleolibertarianism predates the politicization of libertarianism...Instead of principle, the neo-libertarians give us political alliances; instead of intellectually robust ideas, they give us marketable platitudes. What's more, paleolibertarianism distinguishes itself from left-libertarianism because it has made its peace with religion as the bedrock of liberty, property, and the natural order. There is a heavy overlap between writers at Rockwell's site and the von Mises Institute, so you'll get a lot of recycled material. There's some actual Austrian economists like Tom DiLorenzo, Walter Block, and Peter Schiff (of course) writing there, so the site is rife with gold buggery. There's massive amounts of legal history (real and pseudo), much of it dealing with Constitutional originalism. They also hate Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt (along with almost all 20th Century Presidents aside from Warren G. Harding), and Alexander Hamilton.
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