11/21/2011
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Re: Shikha Dalmia Gives Reason’s Game Away: Leftism Before Libertarianism!
From: Brian Riordan
Reason needs to change its name and I'd like to suggest that TREASON would be a more accurate title. It has long been apparent that libertarians just don’t get it about immigration. Take a liberal helping of open borders and add in ingredients such as globalism and "free" trade and you have a recipe for national suicide, as Pat Buchanan has long warned us — nothing reasonable about that. However many of these libertarians were well-meaning — just misguided.
Not having read Reason for many years, I was surprised to find that Shikha Dalmia’s Reason article as described by James Kirkpatrick goes beyond well-meaning foolishness to open hostility to our country and its native-born population. [See Alabama’s War on Immigrants, November 15, 2011]
I suspect that the type of person who becomes a libertarian wants to be thought of as enlightened and cool or hip — or whatever the current slang. They deflected liberal attacks by claiming that they weren’t knuckle-dragging Republicans or even conservatives — they were enlightened libertarians. Eventually even that wasn’t enough: they had to further separate themselves from the stodgy bourgeoisie — those primitive, traditional, white, middle class Americans — to show they were really in the vanguard of progress.
By the way, the traditional libertarian view would have been that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should have been opposed. While government has no right to discriminate against American citizens when government hires (although, in fact, it does discriminate with affirmative action), it usurps property rights when government interferes in who a private business hires. [VDARE.com Note: It certainly was at the time the act was passed — see Property Law and Racial Discrimination, By Robert M. Schuchman, New Individualist Review, Spring 1965]Apparently the libertarian idea that freedom comes first has been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. Now it appears that Shikha Dalmia (email her) and the editors of Reason have further eroded libertarianism by refusing Americans the right to defend themselves from an invasion of hostile foreigners — which includes Dalmia herself.
Many of us who consider ourselves conservatives had long regarded libertarians as kindred spirits — just a little confused. Maybe this Reason article is an indication that it is time to change our opinion and begin to regard libertarians as the enemy — as closer to the left, like the $PLC, than to patriotic Americans.
See Brian Riordan’s earlier letters.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.