Libertarian Racists - TLS047

The LAVA Flow | Libertarian | Anarcho-capitalist | Voluntaryist | Agorist

Are there secret libertarian cabals of racism in the liberty movement? This is episode forty-seven of The LAVA Spurt, Libertarian Racists. This episode is brought to you by Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom, helping you to become a smarter and more informed libertarian than ever before, for just 24 cents a day.

There were a couple of pretty controversial issues last week that I have been asked by several listeners to address. I will tackle one of the topics in this Spurt and I will tackle the other topic in a Spurt later this week.

Today we will be talking about the bashing of certain libertarians because they are suspected of being racists or Nazis. I want to preface all of this first with a caveat. There is nothing in libertarianism that is incompatible with racism. Let me say that again. There is nothing in libertarianism that is incompatible with racism. There is also nothing in libertarianism that is incompatible with being an asshole. And sadly, I know some racist libertarians and I know some asshole libertarians.

Libertarianism means simply that you do not believe in the initiation of force or fraud against another person, nothing more. You can believe that other races are inferior to you, which is the definition of racism, and believe that no one should initiate force against those races. This is entirely compatible. This doesn't make racism right in any way, though, please don't mistake that. Racism is horrendous. To collectivize and hate a particular person because of the color of their skin is disgusting and immoral, period. This should never be in question.

Having said that, there have been many questions about some prominent libertarians out there and whether or not they are racist. This started a couple of weeks ago when Jeff Deist gave a speech at the 2017 Mises University. He ended that speech with a catchphrase that is most commonly associated with Nazism, "blood and soil." This phrase was used before Nazism, but it always meant a sort of extreme nationalism and even racism in some respects. This was a very unfortunate choice of words for Jeff Deist and, personally, not words I would have ever used.