Jewish Involvement in Libertarianism

  1. Is libertarianism a ‘Jewish intellectual movement’?

In his influential study The Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald analyses a number of 20th century intellectual and social movements that were led by Jews and often centred around some charismatic Jewish leader, including Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. Approaching them from an evolutionary psychology and social identity theory perspective, MacDonald argues that they exemplify ‘group-evolutionary strategies’. In brief, he contends that these movements are stratagems used in Jew-Gentile competition: they function to ‘critique’ and undermine the ethnocentrism of Gentile societies so as to make them more hospitable for Jews and Jewish advancement, and to combat resistance to this advancement (labelled ‘anti-Semitism’). MacDonald never claimed to provide an exhaustive list of such movements, but a question this article will consider is whether libertarianism could be placed among them. Though some other authors have suggested or argued this before[1], I have a different take on things to them, as will be explained in due course.

Why might one suspect this of libertarianism? Libertarianism developed from classical liberalism. Though the founding fathers of classical liberalism were gentiles (with the exception of David Ricardo, who converted to Unitarianism against his family’s wishes), the successor ideology of libertarianism has had many Jews as its major figures. In fact, libertarian economist Steven Horwitz describes the Jewish role in libertarianism as pivotal:

It is not a coincidence that among the leading libertarian thinkers of the 20th century, we have a large number of Jews, starting with Mises, Milton Friedman, Israel Kirzner, and Robert Nozick. And despite the [fact that they] rejected their Judaism, we should not forget Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. They are only the tip of the iceberg of the disproportionate number of Jews who have been instrumental in forwarding the ideas of classical liberalism in the last century. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern libertarian movement would not exist were it not for these Jews.[2]

Apparently, libertarian ideas have had a magnetic pull for many Jewish intellectuals; but is libertarianism a ‘Jewish intellectual movement’ in MacDonald’s sense? To answer this we should look to the preface of The Culture of Critique, were he gives four criteria he’s looking for:

1) The movement must be dominated by Jews.

2) There should be evidence that these Jews strongly identify as Jews and believe that they can advance Jewish interests through the movement (though they might deceive themselves about their having this motivation).

3) It should have an influence on gentile society, helping to make the society more hospitable to Jews.

4) It should provoke some response from gentiles, particularly an anti-Semitic response.

Now if Horwitz is right, we can take libertarianism to satisfy the first condition (Walter Block has provided a longer list of prominent Jewish libertarians[3]). Consider next the third criterion—that libertarianism has influenced gentile society and in a way that’s good for the Jews. Though it has had other popular political ideologies and forces to contend with, classical liberalism has certainly been deeply influential in the West, to the extent of being part of the Western identity or self-conception. Moreover, although its successor libertarianism is often regarded as a fringe movement, in the US especially it is promoted by an energetic ecosystem of institutes, political parties, law firms, publishers, journals, magazines and websites. And regarding the Jewish connection, it is often said that Jews have flourished the most in liberal, individualistic countries. Liberal ideas led to Jewish emancipation in Europe, and the US, which perhaps has most approximated to the libertarian ideal, was spoken of as a ‘promised land’ for the Jews. So the influence of (classical) liberal ideas has been ‘good for the Jews’, though perhaps not good enough, with most Jews nevertheless favouring a left-wing, progressive political orientation that campaigns for equality rather than liberty, to the dismay of many Jewish libertarians.[4]

However, it might be argued that liberalism is not good for the Jews at the expense of gentiles, but rather is just good period, that is, for everyone. Jews are not attracted to it for specifically self-interested reasons. Relatedly, it is sometimes said that Jewish overrepresentation in libertarianism is of no special significance since Jews are also overrepresented in the ranks of libertarianism’s arch-enemy, communism. As one writer put it, ‘if Communism and Libertarianism are both great for the Jews, you have to figure that probably just about anything can be construed as good for the Jews.’[5] Mises concurred: ‘these contradictory charges [blaming Jews for both laissez faire capitalism and communism] cancel each other.’[6] Being an urban, intellectual people, Jews will be overrepresented in most intellectual movements.[7]

However, this argument emphasizes the differences between libertarianism and communism while overlooking what they have in common: their shared cosmopolitan or internationalist outlook. Ludwig von Mises described the cosmopolitanism of liberalism as follows:

The ultimate ideal envisioned by liberalism is the perfect cooperation of all mankind, taking place peacefully and without friction. Liberal thinking always has the whole of humanity in view and not just parts. It does not stop at limited groups; it does not end at the border of the village, of the province, of the nation, or of the continent. Its thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical: it takes in all men and the whole world. Liberalism is, in this sense, humanism; and the liberal, a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite.[8]

Replace ‘liberalism/liberal’ with ‘communism/communist’ in this passage and it wouldn’t look out of place in any Marxist tract. We could thus suppose that it’s their shared cosmopolitanism, with its de-emphasis on national borders and ethnic or racial identity, that makes both ideologies attractive to a dispersed, diaspora people like the Jews. And we could then suppose that they would be much less enthused about and much less represented in non-cosmopolitan political orientations like conservatism, nationalism, royalism and theocracy (outside the Israeli context).

Next let’s move on to the fourth condition. It is more difficult to see this one being satisfied, since it does not seem that libertarianism, or Jewish involvement in libertarianism, has provoked any defensive, anti-Semitic responses on the part of gentiles, and the issue of Jewish overrepresentation in libertarianism has not even attracted a great deal of notice or comment. But satisfaction of this seems to be just for bonus points, since MacDonald doesn’t treat it as a necessary condition. For instance, in his discussion of Boasian anthropology, he doesn’t show that it provoked an anti-Semitic reaction but just standard scientific criticism. So it seems that the answer to whether libertarianism is a Jewish group-evolutionary strategy comes down to whether the second condition is satisfied: are Jewish promoters of libertarianism motivated by strong Jewish self-identification and the belief that libertarianism advances specifically Jewish interests (perhaps at the expense of Gentile interests)?

Jewish libertarians can indeed be found who explicitly attribute their adherence to libertarianism to Jewish concerns. For instance, the Jewish American legal scholar Randy Barnett has explained how ‘being a contrarian Jew has affected my academic agenda, my scholarly commitments, and the future direction of my work’. His libertarianism, he tells us, stems from a belief that ‘the reason Jews have thrived in the US is because it was fundamentally a republic that puts a primacy on individual rights rather than a democracy that unduly privileges the will of the majority’, and he criticizes progressive Jews for being ‘short-sighted about what is good for the Jews.’[9] However, Barnett is not a major figure and we should turn our attention to the big Jewish libertarian luminaries. Accordingly we will focus on two main intellectual strands, the Ayn Rand strand and the Mises-Rothbard strand. Different answers, I believe, will be obtained for each.

  1. The objectivist strand of libertarianism

As was mentioned, some have previously argued that libertarianism is a ‘Jewish intellectual movement’. Trudie Pert, for instance, argues this in relation to the Mises-Rothbard strand but doesn’t discuss the Ayn Rand or ‘objectivist’ strand. The view taken here, however, is that a much better case can be made for this claim in relation to the objectivist strand.

Ayn Rand was the founder of objectivism, which combines a libertarian, individualistic political philosophy with some other ideas including an ethics of selfishness. Shortly before the publication of her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, a coterie of admirers began to form around and meet regularly with her, which they jokingly named The Collective. This group formed an institute to promote Rand’s philosophy and was entirely Jewish: as Rothbard, who briefly associated with this group, said, ‘each and every one of them was related to each other, all being part of the one Canadian Jewish family, relatives of either Nathan or Barbara Branden [born Blumenthal and Weidman respectively].’[10] The group believed that Rand was of messianic significance and it has been described as a cult.[11]

In these respects the objectivist movement in its beginnings appeared similar to a paradigmatic MacDonaldian Jewish intellectual movement. But despite the Jewish makeup of The Collective, there is little to suggest that Rand or her group were significantly motivated by Jewish interests. Rand was from a young age introverted and independent. She rarely spoke or wrote about her Jewish identity and showed little interest in it. As with her familial relationships, she didn’t place much importance in it because it was unchosen and therefore not expressive of one’s values: ‘one is simply born into a family. Therefore it’s of no real significance.’[12] Feeling pride (or shame) in one’s family or ethnic background was for Rand irrational and a kind of ‘racism’. It only makes sense to feel pride in one’s own achievements, and anything else is ‘a quest for the unearned.’[13] (Perhaps Rand is looking at this the wrong way. Taking pride in, say, one’s ancestors might not be an attempt to, illogically, claim their achievements as one’s own, but rather to see in their achievements one’s own potentialities; they show to us what we might be capable of.) There is some evidence, however, that later in life Rand developed more of an attachment to her kinsfolk, as she donated to Israel (her first act of giving to a cause) and vehemently defended its right to bring civilization to a ‘primitive’ region. However, she similarly defended European colonialism,[14] so this might have partly stemmed from a universal principle as much as from ethnic loyalty.

Rand was not very interested in leading a movement, and saw her objectivism as a philosophy to be taken up by individuals. The institute associated with The Collective was formed by her main disciple and was called the Nathaniel Branden Institute, and it ended after Branden’s acrimonious break from Rand. It wasn’t until 1985, three years after Rand’s death, that another significant attempt was made to get a movement going, when Collective member Leonard Peikoff, who Rand made heir to her estate, established the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). Peikoff was more concerned with typical Jewish bugbears, and wrote a book called The Ominous Parallels that attempted to explain the rise of Nazism in Germany with a familiar It-could-happen-here trope.

Next in the line of succession was Yaron Brook, who was appointed by Peikoff as Executive Director in 2000 and who has led the institute since then. Brook is a dual American-Israeli citizen and served in Israeli military intelligence before emigrating to the US at age 26, where he gained an MBA and PhD in finance. Brook got into Rand’s ideas in his teenage years, but before joining the ARI he was reportedly not very well known in objectivist circles. Brook said that he left Israel because of the ‘socialist policy, ridiculous political system, constant external threats.’[15] Nevertheless Israel remained close to his heart, and under his directorship at the ARI, Israel advocacy was ramped up.

The gold-standard for establishing whether Jewish activists are sincere in their principles or are just using them as a gambit to advance Jewish interests is perhaps to find evidence of a double-standard, where those principles are pushed on gentiles but not on Jews. Now objectivists are, generally speaking, in favour of open borders and Brook and his colleagues say that this policy is entailed by objectivist principles. But what do they say about the borders of the Jewish state?

In his regular podcast show, after expressing concern about rising nationalism in Europe after the Brexit referendum, Brook said the following:

Now look … any time I mention immigration, any time I mention nationalism, people bring up Israel. … I don’t have time to cover the Israel example. But Israel is an exception.  You heard it here.  Israel is an exception.  Not a good exception.  Not an exception that is ideal.  But it is an exception.  And, uh, why is Israel an exception? … [that’s something] we will get to on a future show, but not now.”[16]

Objectivists advocate not only for the free movement of people but also of goods and money. Brook’s remarks above might now make us wonder whether these other beliefs would hold firm in relation to the Israel case. Brook denounces EU agricultural tariffs but would he also denounce Israeli agricultural tariffs, which protect struggling Israeli farmers who work difficult, dusty land, from global competition?[17] Would he accept Israel being dependent for its food supply on non-Jews, that is, potential anti-Semites? And would he make an exception for the shekel when it comes to currency controls, which might protect it from manipulations by foreign speculators in certain circumstances?

Brook eventually returns to the same topic in another show, but only when the issue is raised again by a caller.

There’s a bunch of people out there that are calling me a hypocrite … because Israel doesn’t allow open immigration. … It’s built a wall, and Mexicans are invading America so — I mean, that’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. Israel is defending itself against a constant military threat from people who wanna wipe it out. They wanna use weapons to kill every Jew in Israel. They say this; they announce it publicly; they do it whenever they have an opportunity. It’s fought multiple wars against armies that have invaded it from these borders, against at least six different Arab-Muslim countries. … [But] Mexicans are coming over the border to get a job … to try to make their lives better lives … how can we be against that? It drives me nuts.[18]

As I’m sure Brook knows, these days there are such things as aeroplanes which can transport people to Israel from countries who are not hostile to it, people who might just want to improve their lives by settling in Israel and contributing to its economy. (Such people might include, for instance, recent non-Jewish African migrants to Israel, who were expelled and resettled in Canada.) How can he be against that? Notice also how Brook raises an altruistic consideration in defence of Mexican immigration, which should carry no weight with an objectivist since they subscribe to an ethics of selfishness. Why should an American objectivist care about a Mexican’s quality of life?

Interestingly, the ARI has a branch in Israel. Though the immigration issue features as a major topic on the U.S. ARI website, this writer, armed with a translator program to translate the Hebrew, could not find any mention of it on the Israeli website, which focuses on more anodyne economic topics about capitalism versus statism.

The Ayn Rand Institute’s Israel advocacy goes well beyond the immigration issue. Under Brook’s and Peikoff’s leadership, the ARI has advanced an agenda barely distinguishable from that of neoconservatism. It has defended the War on Terror, torture, and Israel’s right to ‘exist’ (i.e., expand), and it has called for U.S. military action against Iran. (In fact, Brook has criticized neoconservatism, but his main complaint is that it’s too soft: his line is that the US should dispense with the altruistic nation-building and democracy promotion stuff and just unapologetically pursue its ‘self-interest’ and smash ‘threats to America.’[19]) This agenda, and the hypocrisy implicit in it coming from objectivists, has been meticulously documented by the website ARI Watch. Similar agendas can also be found in other objectivist institutions like The Atlas Society and The Objective Standard, which were founded by people associated with or expelled from the ARI.

Objectivism, then, is led by Jews with a strong sense of Jewish identity and mission. We can therefore conclude with some confidence that the objectivist movement is a Jewish intellectual movement á la MacDonald, though it might not have started out as one. For Brook and his colleagues, objectivism is for thee but not for me. Principles of individualism, liberty and selfishness are selectively applied to accord with Jewish interests. When Israel is considered, suddenly the evaluative frame of reference changes: Israel might violate libertarian and objectivist principles by being statist, socialist, collectivist, having conscription, initiating aggression and so on, but it must be defended because it’s still so much better than what the Arab ‘savages’ (as Rand once called them[20]) have created there. I know of no evidence whatsoever that Brook is still working for Israeli intelligence in some capacity, but it is interesting that his behavior is entirely consistent with this hypothesis.

  1. The Mises-Rothbard strand

Next let’s consider the much more popular Mises-Rothbard strand of libertarianism. Murray Rothbard, the student and follower of Mises, is greatly respected in the libertarian movement, and Walter Block has said he is the closest thing you could find to a guru figure in libertarianism besides Ayn Rand.[21] However, the characters of both were opposite in many respects. In contrast to the austere, intense, authoritarian and haughty Rand, Rothbard was by all accounts affable, gregarious, humorous and down-to-earth. Ideologically he also differed from Rand by advocating the more radical anarcho-capitalist version of libertarianism, which sees no need for government whatsoever, in contrast to objectivism which holds a minimalist theory of the state.

Rothbard rebelled against the communist Jewish milieu he grew up with in New York. But did he retain a strong sense of Jewish identity, or animosity towards gentile culture? In support of this, Pert alleges that Rothbard and Mises were hostile towards Christianity.[22] However, Mises’ attitude to Christianity softened with age,[23] and Pert’s claim is not at all true for Rothbard. Many who knew him personally have said that while being an agnostic he greatly admired the Catholic Church.[24] He had expertise in Church history and theology, loved Baroque Church architecture, and believed that liberalism developed from Christian ideas.[25] Rothbard was also affiliated with the Old Right led by Senator Robert Taft in opposing the ‘welfare-warfare state.’[26] He criticized pillars of Jewish power like the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking, and had trouble getting his PhD because of this opposition. Later in his career he tried to form an alliance with paleoconservatives. He even began to sympathize with ethno-nationalist concerns and took seriously Jean Raspail’s anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, though he believed that anarcho-libertarianism could accommodate those concerns.[27]

This leads to the issue of immigration: what was Rothbard’s position on it? Initially Rothbard held the standard libertarian position. As one of his followers expresses it, ‘Libertarians, for the most part, will support immigration. There’s nothing special about the territory of a particular state. If someone is willing to hire or sponsor an immigrant that should be the end of the matter.’[28] In particular, by rejecting the concept of public property as an absurdity, libertarians often consider public property to be up for grabs (though there are exceptions here: Hans-Hermann Hoppe considers it the property of the taxpayers).

However, Rothbard came to change his attitude to immigration from reflecting on the ideal anarcho-capitalist state.[29] In such a society, all land would be privately owned and therefore there would be no automatic right to enter that territory. Someone wanting to hire an immigrant would need to get the agreement of those whose land the immigrant would need to traverse to reach his business and use thereafter. Anti-immigration views will perhaps gain more traction in libertarian circles; though it’s often said that most libertarians are for open borders, three of the most respected libertarians, Rothbard, Rockwell and Hoppe, have come out against the idea.

This libertarian solution to the immigration problem would hardly be appealing to an ethno-nationalist however. The difficulty is that such restrictions would apply to everyone, not just ‘foreigners’. Without public land, nobody would have an automatic right to roam. It would be a paltry kind of freedom that can only be automatically exercised on one’s private plot. One might think that the landowners could agree to grant such rights to ‘compatriots’ and not ‘foreigners’, but this very distinction presupposes the existence of a state and state borders, which anarcho-libertarianism rejects. (Rothbard’s vision of society also shows a lack of appreciation for the value of wild land, valuable for its beauty and ecological importance.)

What the Ayn Rand Institute is to Rand, the Mises Institute, established by Rothbard’s colleague and friend Lew Rockwell, is to Mises and Rothbard. But one does not find the selective application of libertarian principles there to advance Jewish interests. Israel receives no special favors at the Mises Institute,[30] nor at Rockwell’s website LewRockwell.com or at the ideologically similar Ron Paul Institute. Anti-war and anti-interventionist positions prevail at these forums, in contrast with the ARI.

We can thus conclude that while the Ayn Rand strand of libertarianism is a Jewish Intellectual Movement in MacDonald’s sense, the Mises-Rothbard strand is not. However, there are other strands one might consider and this article makes no claim to completeness. Milton Friedman and the Chicago School haven’t been discussed. This school ascended to become part of the Establishment, and Marco de Wit has already persuasively argued that it is a MacDonaldian Jewish Intellectual Movement.[31] Other strands one could investigate include the Washington-based Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party, though I will leave that to other investigators.

Though many libertarians of the Mises-Rothbard stripe are sincere and principled people, in the rest of this article I will argue that, despite their valuable contributions to economic thought and to the defence of peace and freedom, their doctrine comes to grief with its inability to reckon with the Jewish Question.

  1. Libertarianism and tribalism

The increased Jewish involvement in the development of liberalism coincided with a radicalisation of that tradition, for libertarianism is arguably more extreme and individualistic than classical liberalism. This is partly because while classical liberalism is associated with the Harm Principle (HP)—roughly, that force can only be legitimately used against a person to prevent him from harming others, libertarianism is associated with the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP): that force can only be legitimately used against a person to prevent him from using force or threatening to use force against others or their property.[32] And the latter seems more licentious than the former. For instance, laws against blackmail could plausibly be justified by the HP but not by the NAP.[33] (However, matters are complicated here by the fact that libertarians typically stretch the meaning of ‘aggression’, to include things like fraud or walking through someone else’s property.) The more moderate nature of classical liberalism can also be seen in the willingness of classical liberals to make exceptions to their principles. J. S. Mill, for instance, said that an individual may be compelled by government to do certain positive acts to support the community, such as ‘to give evidence in a court of justice; to bear his fair share in the common defence, or in any other joint work necessary to the interest of the society of which he enjoys the protection; and to perform certain acts of individual beneficence, such as saving a fellow-creature’s life, or interposing to protect the defenceless against ill-usage.’[34] These policies cannot be derived from his Harm Principle. Libertarians, on the other hand, pride themselves on their ‘logical consistency’: their unflinchingly accepting the implications of their limited number of principles, no matter how ‘counterintuitive’ they may seem. But what they applaud as logical consistency others see as dogmatism.[35] Libertarian rhetoric sometimes also has a revolutionary flavour, advocating black-market dealing and tax evasion, and taking or occupying public property, though typically rejecting the use of force.

It is not surprising that members of an ethnic minority like the Jews would be attracted to libertarianism, since its radically individualist philosophy undermines the ethnocentrism of the ethnic majority and thus lowers the drawbridge, so to speak, into that society for outsiders. But is this not a double-edged sword? Wouldn’t an individualistic libertarian order prohibit or at least undermine Jewish ethnocentrism just as much as gentile ethnocentrism?

This question was addressed, at least obliquely, in a recent book by Alan Krinsky[36] that argues for the compatibility of traditional Judaism and libertarianism. Judaism is the polar opposite of a system of thought like libertarianism in many ways, for instance it is extremely non-individualistic or ‘collectivist’. It is difficult to think of a statement more at odds with the libertarian spirit then one from a leading Rabbi quoted by Krinsky, which affirms that the Jewish community is ‘not just an assembly of people who work together for their mutual benefit, but a metaphysical entity, an individuality; I might say, a living whole,’ or a ‘juridic metaphysical person.’[37] Nevertheless, Krinsky argues that this strange kind of entity would be accepted in a libertarian society, because it is ultimately a ‘voluntary association’ and in libertarianism everyone has the right to form such associations as they see fit. Libertarianism has nothing against community, he says, so long as it’s not held together by force.[38]

There is a naivety, however, in conceptualizing Judaism, or the Jewish community more generally, as a mere voluntary association, as if to put it on the level of a local board-game or toastmasters club. Society is not just a site of mutually beneficial interactions but is also an arena of competition for power and resources, and Jews compete in this arena as a group (the existence of a vast, integrated and international network of Jewish advocacy and campaigning groups puts this beyond question.) Their commitment to ‘work[ing] together for their mutual benefit’ manifests itself, for instance, in covertly practiced ethnic nepotism and tactics of collusion and exclusion used in the spheres of business, politics and culture, which non-Jews see as discrimination and unfair competition, just as collusion between players in a poker game is regarded as unfair and is prohibited. But such collectivist tactics are allowable in a libertarian order since they don’t involve using force or the threat of force. They are in accordance with the letter, though not with the individualistic spirit, of libertarianism. This can then lead to a collectivist ‘arms race’, where non-Jews band together as a self-defensive response,[39] which would ultimately destabilize a libertarian system. Interestingly, Krinsky expresses some doubts about libertarianism’s sanguine attitude towards voluntary associations, since they could include ‘discriminatory associations’ like ‘sexist and racist groups.’[40] But he seems to lack the introspective powers necessary to realize that his own Judaism might also be such a discriminatory association.

The sanguine attitude of libertarians towards ‘metaphysical entities’ like the Jewish community points to a fatal weakness with their doctrine. Misguided political ideologies usually end up dashed against the rock of human nature, and libertarianism is no different from Marxism in this respect. But whereas Marxism ignored our ‘selfish’ nature, our tendency to be motivated primarily by personal profit, libertarianism ignores our ‘tribal’ nature, our tendency to identify with and collude in groups. Tribalism runs counter to the individualism that is a key part of libertarianism, and an excess of it would destabilize a libertarian society. Libertarians will, no doubt, acknowledge the existence of tribalism, but then why are they so unworried by it?

One reason is that they seem to treat tribalism not as a deep feature of human nature but as more like superstition: an archaic, irrational tendency that man will grow out of in civilized society. We are left to infer this, at any rate, from their nonchalant attitude towards the immigration of very illiberal tribes into liberal countries, which betrays a naïve confidence that they will give up their old ways of thinking and become good liberal individualists in short order. The point is doubtful, however, as there seems to be no inverse relationship between intelligence/educatedness and tribalism. Jews and North East Asians, for instance, are known for their high IQ and high ethnocentrism.

There is also a strong Rousseauian trend in libertarianism that might explain its attitude towards tribalism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that men were naturally good and lived contentedly until society corrupted them. Life in the State of Nature, Rousseau imagined, was not solitary, nasty, brutish and short as Thomas Hobbes believed. It was solitary, yes, but it was also a state of contented independence living off nature’s bounty, comparable perhaps to how orangutans live, the semi-solitary apes. Libertarians, especially anarcho-libertarians, also hold romantic notions about the State of Nature, imagining it as characterised by harmonious interactions.[41] Man then became corrupted, not so much by society as Rousseau believed but by government. Indeed, there is intellectual pressure on those who believe government to be the root of all evil to have a rosy-eyed view of the State of Nature, since the alleged horrors of the State of Nature have been the main justification for government in much of Western political philosophy. Tribalism, then, could be seen by libertarians as part of this corruption, something artificial that is stirred up and reinforced by the state to further its own agenda, and not as something native to man when left alone.

Implicit in the Rousseauian and libertarian view is the idea that sociality and hence tribalism is not natural or instinctive to man. Men lived naturally solitary lives, and then decided and made a rational calculation (indeed, a miscalculation in Rousseau’s view) to live together under a leader and in a hierarchy. Thus man’s sociality is derived from reason rather than instinct.

Serious reflection on human nature will, however, lead to the conclusion that sociality and tribalism are instinctual and ineradicable. Tribalism may be partly based on the rational calculation that it is better to band together with others to survive and compete, but it is also positively reinforced by elemental feelings like love and affection, pride, attachment to one’s own kind, the desire for recognition, approval and connection, as well being negatively reinforced by feelings of loneliness and insecurity. Further, for most people, living for their own private pleasure like a Randian egoist, however heroically, is not sufficient to give their lives meaning. Most people need to identify with something greater than themselves, and the libertarian individualist is in danger of becoming a shallow libertine. There is little reason to think that humans ever had a solitary way of life that they made a rational decision to leave. If we evolved from apes as the evolutionists say then we likely evolved from social apes, so that man has always lived in social and hierarchical groups and has a nature geared to that mode of existence. The chimpanzee is, after all, our closest relative, not the orangutan.

Libertarianism condemns ethnocentrism and downplays its importance in social life, but ethnocentrism is like weaponry: it would perhaps be nice to live in a world without it, but so long as one group refuses to give it up it would be foolish for others to do so. The libertarian individualist is one who by renouncing tribalism has, as Fredrick Nietzsche might say, ‘strayed most dangerously from [his] instincts.’[42]


1] Lote, S. 2011. Libertarianism: Ideals and reality. The Occidental Quarterly 11(1), pp. 45-50. Pert, T. 2011. Austro-libertarianism, Catholicism, and Judaism. The Occidental Quarterly 11(1), pp. 69-86.

[2] Horwitz, S. Libertarianism rejects anti-Semitism. Foundation for Economic Education. https://fee.org/articles/libertarianism-rejects-anti-semitism/

[3] Block, W. 2017. Are All Jews Socialists, Progressives, Communists, Left-Liberals, Bernie and Hillary Supporters, Democrats? No! Lewrockwell.com. https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/jews-socialists-progressives-communists-left-liberals-bernie-hillary-supporters-democrats-no/

[4] E.g., Friedman, M. 1972. Capitalism and the Jews. https://www.law.uchicago.edu/recordings/milton-friedman-capitalism-and-jews. Block, W. 2018. Is it permissible to criticize Jews? Lewrockwell.com. https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/permissible-criticize-jews/

[5] Lindsay, R. 2015. Jews created libertarianism. https://beyondhighbrow.com/2015/09/30/jews-created-libertarianism/

[6] von Mises, L. 1974[1944]. Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Liberty Fund, p. 209.

[7] Cofnas, N. 2018. Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: A critical analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s theory. Human Nature, 29, p. 138.

[8] Von Mises, L. 1985. Liberalism in the Classical Tradition. Trans: R. Raico. Foundation for Economic Education, pp. 105-6.

[9] Barnett, R. 2015. The making of a libertarian, contrarian, non-observant, but self-identified Jew. Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 1330.

[10] Rothbard, M. The sociology of the Ayn Rand cult. https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/understanding-ayn-randianism/.

[11] See Ibid. Also see Block, W. 2000. Libertarianism vs objectivism: A response to Peter Schwartz. Reason Papers 26.

[12] Rand quoted in Branden, B. 1987. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Anchor Books, p. 72. Also see p. 6.

[13] Rand, A. and Branden, N. 1961. The Virtue of Selfishness. Signet.

[14] Burns, J. 2009. The Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford University Press, p. 266.

[15] Arfa, O. 2007. ‘You don’t fight a tactic’. Jerusalem Post.

[16] The Yaron Brook Show, episode 62. Brexit: What’s on the horizon?

[17] See Katsman, H. Why Israeli farmers are struggling – and government policies aren’t helping. Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/israeli-agriculture-farming-government-policies-tariffs/

[18] The Yaron Brook Show, episode 65. Live from FreedomFest ask me anything.

[19] See Brook, Y. and Epstein, A. 2007. Neoconservative foreign policy: An autopsy. The Objective Standard. The difference between Brook’s approach and the neoconservative one might be smaller than this suggests. Brook either fails to or pretends not to appreciate that the neoconservatives are Straussians who believe in the ‘noble lie’. Was the high-sounding talk of spreading freedom and democracy merely for public consumption? One should not dismiss such possibilities when dealing with neoconservatives.

[20] See video clip, ‘Ayn Rand on Israel and the Middle East.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU

[21] Libertarianism versus objectivism, p. 45.

[22] Pert, p. 71.

[23] See Hülsmann, J.G. Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism. Mises Institute, pp. 982-986 & pp. 437-443.

[24] See Rockwell, L (ed). 1995. Murray N. Rothbard: In Memoriam. Mises Institute.

[25] Rothbard in Memoriam, p. 80.

[26] Rothbard in Memoriam. p. 65.

[27] Rothbard, M. N. 1994. Nations by consent: Decomposing the nation-state. Journal of Libertarian Studies, 11, pp. 1-10.

[28] Casey, G. 2012. Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State. Continuum. p. 8.

[29] Rothbard. Nations by consent. pp. 1-10.

[30] See Halbrook, S. P. 1981. The alienation of a homeland: How Palestine became Israel. The Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 5, pp. 357-374. Rothbard, M. N. 2016[1978]. ‘Little’ Israel. https://mises.org/library/never-dull-moment/html/c/467.

[31] Marco de Wit. 2021. Did Milton Friedman’s Libertarianism Seek to Advance Jewish Interests? Occidental Observer.

[32] Some libertarians claim that their entire system is based on the NAP, while others believe it is just one of a number of principles informing libertarian thinking (see Zwolinski, M. 2016. The libertarian nonaggression Principle. Social Philosophy and Policy, 32(2), pp. 62-90.

[33] See Casey, p. 47. This does not mean libertarianism condones blackmail (libertarianism is not a complete theory of morality).

[34] Mill, J. S. 2003. On Liberty. Yale University Press. p. 82.

[35] E.g., K. MacDonald. 2011. Introduction to the special issue: libertarianism and white racial nationalism. The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 11(1), p. 12.

[36] Krinsky, A. D. 2020. Running in Good Faith? Observant Judaism and Libertarian Politics. Academic Studies Press.

[37] Joseph B. Soloveitchik, quoted in Krinsky, 2020. p. 155.

[38] It should be noted that libertarians often engage in crude black and white thinking about force. To promote community life and consciousness, for instance, governments have more options at their disposal then using force, such as various sorts of carrot or stick incentives and disincentives, but libertarians often classify such tools as the use of force (e.g., ‘No third road is possible here; one must choose compulsion or liberty’ (Casey, p. 54)).

[39] This process is described by MacDonald in Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (2004).

[40] Krinsky, p. 171.

[41] See Casey, p. 32.

[42] Nietzsche, F. The Antichrist. §14.

36 replies
  1. John
    John says:

    To Tucker Carlson,
    Taking one’s own side is NOT a Nazi idea, Tucker, taking your own side is how Nature works, & has been this way ever sense life began. Taking our own side is natural & normal & how we protect our children. Tucker, you are intentionally attempting to discourage us Europeans from coming together, from collectivizing. You, Tucker, are a traitor.
    ——————————————————-
    Suggest all of us to collectivize. It won’t hurt to let Tucker know that we are onto him, that we know what he is doing, which of course, means additionally that he is throwing his children under the bus, fore, it does not matter how rich he is – his minority children will not escape reality.

  2. Atreides
    Atreides says:

    ‘ Likudtarian’ is perhaps an apt nick for
    a * libertarian* along with ‘ free- market bolshevik’😉

    • Miguel Flanderos
      Miguel Flanderos says:

      TRUMP was right once again . now they are talking about arresting Clarence Thomas and purgingthe CHRISTIAN SCOTUS.. I am amazed that MSM /MAGA/Media refuse to talk about the SOROS/Martin Rothblatt/Prytzker/ BILLIONS are funding the TRANS terrorist campaigns…ONLY the TN GOP MAGA fighting back..why?? PD Jennifer BILEK..

  3. Don
    Don says:

    Whether fortunately or unfortunately, there was an historic strain of American libertarianism before Rand, Mises or any of the others. Eighteenth century writer Thomas Paine nibbled around the edges but the mid 19th Century American Lysander Spooner was a full blown libertarian. Other libertarians of note and contemporaries of Rand were Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Patterson, with whom Rand collaborated. Moreover, many of the arguments of 19th century free traders and their borderless vision of the economic world contributed to libertarian thinking. Like many, I went through my libertarian phase, but it’s appeal derived as much from Cold War confrontationalism and the visceral opposition most of us felt against Marxism.

    This article is a very good analysis of the Jewish roots of modern, contemporary libertarianism and a great warning of its dangers. I wish I had read this when I was younger.

    • Giles Carpenter
      Giles Carpenter says:

      @ Don
      Some young students were drawn to the clear and insistent prose of Ayn Rand as a reaction to Marxism and its offshoots. It was not only free speech and personal responsibility attracted them but her apparent espousal of reason, heroism and productive achievement. There were paradoxes: her contrast between the achievement of astronauts and the stupor of flower-power drug fests, the first being a singular achievement of government and the latter a gross example of consumer capitalism.

  4. John White
    John White says:

    Libertarianism is a trick played on gentiles. No ethnic group will be free until we can suppress jewish power. We cannot yield ANY weapon in the service of doing this, and that most certainly includes the use of state power to make laws, enforce a moral code, and make war. We need pro-human, anti-zionist governments.

    • James Ridley
      James Ridley says:

      Some libertarians were not Jewish and some took revisionist positions on WW2, “Holocaust” and Zionism.

  5. Birhan Dargey
    Birhan Dargey says:

    WHO has benefited the MOST from Western LIBERALIST DEMOCRACY within WHITE ANGLO CHRISTIAN GENTILE NATIONS..(Universal BIRTH Citizenship)???? JEWS..They came in/They demanded more benefits/they overwhelmed/They deny those benefits to WHITE Gentile Christians..and they blame whites for RACISM/Antisemiticism/xeno/homo/trans phobias…etc..

  6. Philo
    Philo says:

    Let’s face it:

    Jews are dominant everywhere in America and in every institution and political movement, except very right-wing ones:

    Corporations
    Sports (management)
    Labor
    Electoral politics at the national, state, and Federal level
    Think tanks
    Media
    Hollywood
    Education at every level
    Medicine
    Psychology
    Foreign policy

    You name it, in America Jews rule. We are essentially a Jewish country.

    So it’s hard to identify whether a philosophy or institution is particularly dominated by Jews since they dominate everything.

  7. Ivor A.
    Ivor A. says:

    Great Article. I would like to see Dr. MacDonald analyze Christianity as a Jewish ethnic movement in the context of first century Palestine and/or as it has existed historically continuing from the first century to the present. If Dr. MacDonald has conducted such an analysis, I would greatly appreciate if someone could direct me to that material. Thank you for your insights.

  8. Monsieur X
    Monsieur X says:

    Dear Hugh,
    You are splitting hair with Whites
    While Jews put gel in theirs
    (vous coupez les cheveux des Blancs en quatre alors que les Juifs mettent du gel dans les leurs)

  9. Repatriation
    Repatriation says:

    Like many in this movement, I couldn’t give up my LOLberg priors for a long time until I realized how incompatible it is with whiteness. Many Afrikaners subscribe to the Rothbardian variety too because it is after all indirect fascism, while fascism is applied libertarianism because of free association/disassociation. But it is indeed Jewish. Karl Marx loved free trade/open borders as a means of the same accelerationism Milton Friedman loved.

    One other thing not mentioned are the Jewish transnational corporations, which are considered sacrosanct today by neoliberalism, is also considered inevitable in libertarianism in a bizarre monopoly society that will supplant and privatize the state in all duties. We see how well that has worked the last 3 years. This ideology may not necessarily be a Jewish conspiracy, but it is absolutely a Jewish osmosis. Somehow there are always enough Jews in these boardrooms to have a minyan.

    Also worth mentioning is the curious mass exodus of nearly the entire AnCap Gentiles in the libertarian-to-Alt-Right pipeline the moment a populist-nationalist Goy became formidable. Yet the Jewish libertarians remained and even further consolidated like Dave Smith.

    Libertarianism, Zionism and neoliberalism all work in tandem like a hammer and an anvil to smash Gentile nations. Jews are not ideologues. They are survivors. They will abandon Trotskyism for neoconservatism like a hermit crab trades in a new shell because they realize it is more efficient for Jewish interests and is also a seasonal, cyclical facade, as they always feel the pulse of majoritarian Gentile society to gauge which way the wind is blowing.

  10. Monoculture
    Monoculture says:

    https://twitter.com/Patriots/status/1643621120036200450

    “Daddy, if ‘Hitler was right’ is an evil lie, why can I freely say ‘Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were right’ without destroying my whole life? Can it not be that you yourself are an evil liar? You yourself better get out of the car now and ask the Jews why this is so, when you are so ‘courageous’ to recklessly destroy your son’s life for a lie and political agenda that serves solely to destroy us Whites and our future, and of which you are the propagator!”

    P.S. The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism was started by Robert Kraft, the jewish billionaire who owns the New England Patriots. He was caught paying an Asian “massage parlor” in Florida to use their prostitutes (likely sex slaves), but used his privilege to kill the story.

  11. Space Cowboy
    Space Cowboy says:

    At first glance, concepts like Christianity and communism seem incompatible. And yet they come from the same source and root. Their unifying commonality is universalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, today propagated by the Jews as “humanism”.

    Jean Effel was a French Christian, anti-fascist and cartoonist. His most famous work from 1957, filmed by a certain E. Hofman (my Jewdar reacts), is called “The Creation of the World” and is meant to indoctrinate children with his simplistic dualistic worldview.

    In this bipolar world, only good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, light and shadow exist in principle. Shades of gray, which would represent the complexity of the real world, are negated and faded out.

    In the film, which is unfortunately not available in English, almighty (?) Skydaddy “God” acts always constructively with his holy tiny angels, but as soon as they build something, the evil Devil comes with his wicked children and destroys everything.

    The devil is among other things even responsible for having created the roses their thorns and the Rhino his horn. Of course, they are also responsible for rain, thunder and lightning, which darken the beautiful divine sun.

    The best instruction to create future schizophrenia in children’s brains. As soon as these people later violate the dogmas inculcated in them of having to permanently perform “good deeds” (e.g. feeding the poor Africans exploited by whites), they inevitably develop guilt complexes and become intimidated by the hypermorality of the Jewish world rulers.

    Mr. Effel received the “Lenin Prize” in Moscow in 1967, despite his French nationality and his Christian content. In the production, as you can read in the credits, are also involved personalities with names like “Cohen” and “Wiener”. No further questions, except one: Was Effel himself perhaps a Jew? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Effel

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub57b4gxsAE

  12. Space Cowboy
    Space Cowboy says:

    Btw., the inventor of “Protestantism”, Martin Luther, also inevitably suffered from the same religiously induced delusion of persecution. From him comes the quote: “Where the Lord God builds his church, there the devil immediately builds his chapel next door.”

  13. Space Cowboy
    Space Cowboy says:

    Someone who has to be constantly careful to make everything good and clean is logically permanently under stress and on guard not to cause any unsightly stains. But intolerance of mistakes murders all creativity. In this respect the creation of the perfect world is a lie structure from self-deception and hypocrisy.

  14. Space Cowboy
    Space Cowboy says:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWWfPWdbPC8

    Unfortunately, in 2015 I was not yet intellectually as far as I am today, and I was also occupied by many more private problems. If Mr. MacDonald would make the trip to Europe again, I would secure a ticket for his lecture. He is not only an always interesting writer, but also a very likeable speaker. You just have to like this man if you care about saving our species. Who will replace him if one day he is no longer around? Fortunately, his appearances will at least be preserved for us on video, but who knows what the Jews and their useful idiots will do in the near future, so that our children and grandchildren will never know about it.

  15. Crush Limbraw
    Crush Limbraw says:

    Churchianity and Libertarianism are birds of a feather and share the same philosophical underpinning – wishful thinking. How else can you explain their common complaint about DaTermites infesting their house. (BTW – DaTermites is my reference to those servants of DaSynagogue of Satan who do what is their nature.)
    Whether they yammer about DaLeft or the most current Woke environment, the bottom line is that they lost every institution over the last 200 years.
    Name one that wasn’t – I can’t!
    In short, being long on talk and short on action gets you exactly where we are now. This is my intro into a subject which begins at – http://www.crushlimbraw.com – and continues as long as I do….but I’m just DaLibrarian.

    • Giles Carpenter
      Giles Carpenter says:

      Modern “Christianity” is a form of self-hating indiscriminate altruism and completely opposed on this account by libertarian self-asserting “Objectivism”, except for the coincidence in practice in support for global migration.

  16. John the First
    John the First says:

    It is democracy which produces cultural decline, something which the intelligentsia of society used to be aware of… Democracy is the fertile ground in which Jews are working, aiding to undermine culture. Democracy with its envious egalitarianism, with its tyranny of mediocrity and everything below level, its eternal obsession with destructive revolt, its mad politicization of everything, leads to an ongoing destruction of culture and a lowering of all levels. The western democracies have also produced monstrously large governments, which have been taking over ever more societal functions, sucking the soul out of society, and weakening society. In a situation of democracy and monstrous statist governments, and monstrous social-democracy (a recipe for more weakening of society, as a crypto communism) there is not much power in libertarianism.

    Today libertarians are a product of democracy, that is, they are anti-cultural technicists. An anticultural ‘libertarian’ Jew like Peter Thiel for instance also does not mind to become rich from selling surveillance software to the statist government.
    As a fan of classical liberalism I have investigated the contemporary libertarian scene, to find out that they are a mere product of democracy, they are people without culture, sometimes brute to the point that classical liberals would turn in their graves. What is also striking is that some of them are futurists, they are supposedly about freedom, but they promote the ideas of the powerful post WWII tech-cults. These technicists and tech-fans are no different from the bureaucrats of the government.

    Plato observed that democracy breeds anarchy, contemporary libertarians are ever more a form of anarchy produced by democracy (one of the many forms produced by democracy) , very much in contrast to the often cultured classical liberals of the nineteenth century.

  17. Thijs
    Thijs says:

    Thank you Hugh Moriarty for writing this well researched article about Jewish involvement in Libertarianism. I do have some additions and disagreements to some of your arguments.

    For an outsider there might not be many differences between Rothbard, Friedman and Rand. Who is and isn’t a libertarian is up for debate however. Walter Block considers Friedman and Rand Libertarians (https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/jews-socialists-progressives-communists-left-liberals-bernie-hillary-supporters-democrats-no/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy56A49NHQU&ab_channel=LibertyInOurTime). Rothbard does not consider Friedman one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0bFP5WhYcQ&ab_channel=LibertyInOurTime) and Hoppe does not consider Hayk one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymQoIt5k2AI&ab_channel=PropertyandFreedomSociety). Many Libertarians consider Objectivism part of Libertarianism because of the many overlapping positions but a lot of Objectivists don’t consider themself Libertarian or are outright opposed to it. So if Marco de Wit proves Milton Friedman and the Chicago School to be MacDonaldian, it might be seen seperately from Libertarianism. Same goes for the Objectivists.

    Of the 37 Jewish Libertarians listed by Walter Block, 20 are deceased. Walter adds below his list:
    “Unhappily, Jews of this sort are if not rarer than hen’s teeth, almost as rare. Not all of these Jews would consider themselves libertarians. The Objectivists would certainly reject this appellation. But, none of them, not a single one, were, or would have been, socialists, progressives, communists, liberals, Bernie and Hillary supporters, Democrats.”

    So about point 1 (The movement must be dominated by Jews) I would say that Libertarianism does not fully satisfy this condition. Jews are overrepresented in the movement but do not dominate it since the 1990s. Nowadays Ron Paul is the spiritual leader of the movement, Hoppe is the leading scholar and I consider Lew Rockwell the right hand man of Libertarianism.

    I do not know enough about the Objectivist movement to respond to that part of your arcticle but would like to add something on a related matter you said:
    “The gold-standard for establishing whether Jewish activists are sincere in their principles or are just using them as a gambit to advance Jewish interests is perhaps to find evidence of a double-standard, where those principles are pushed on gentiles but not on Jews.”

    I am surprised that ‘The Libertarian Case for Israel’ was not mentioned in your article. https://forward.com/community/351957/tk-tk/. This article is I think the clearest example of Walter Block (I do not know the other authors) displaying MacDonaldianism. As an ancap Walter is the enemy of all states and here is an article defending one!
    Rand was also very bad on Israel, see https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/08/murray-n-rothbard/ayn-rands-monstrous-views-on-the-middle-east/.

    I would add to the part about the Mises-Rothbard strand a comment from Kevin Macdonald: “Murray’s Libertarianism is a principled way of not caring about his own people.” https://twitter.com/TOOEdit/status/636235982493188096. Indeed in ‘Nations by Consent’ Rothbard says “I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples.”. Would this position make the Mises-Rothbard strand an anti-Jewish intellectual movement? I would also note that Jews are mentioned in many of Rothbard’s articles and seldom in a positive light.

    “It is not surprising that members of an ethnic minority like the Jews would be attracted to libertarianism, since its radically individualist philosophy undermines the ethnocentrism of the ethnic majority and thus lowers the drawbridge, so to speak, into that society for outsiders. But is this not a double-edged sword?”

    I would say it is surprising because not only are very few members of other ethnic minorities attracted to Libertarianism, the ones that are, are not motivated by undermining the ethnic majority. The MacDonaldian aspect of Jews in Libertarianism seems to manifest in support for Israel rather than to lower the drawbridge for outsiders (not in Yaron Brook’s case of course).

    “The sanguine attitude of libertarians towards ‘metaphysical entities’ like the Jewish community points to a fatal weakness with their doctrine. Misguided political ideologies usually end up dashed against the rock of human nature, and libertarianism is no different from Marxism in this respect. But whereas Marxism ignored our ‘selfish’ nature, our tendency to be motivated primarily by personal profit, libertarianism ignores our ‘tribal’ nature, our tendency to identify with and collude in groups. Tribalism runs counter to the individualism that is a key part of libertarianism, and an excess of it would destabilize a libertarian society. Libertarians will, no doubt, acknowledge the existence of tribalism, but then why are they so unworried by it?”

    This would be a problem with libertarians, not with Libertarianism. It is perfectly possible to be a libertarian and not ignore our tribal nature. Furthermore, the individualism in Libertarianism does not mean that every man is an island but that the rights of the individual man trump the well being of the group per your examples of J.S. Mill. Forcing people to act in the interest of the tribe/group/society often means forcing people to work, fight and die for the rulers of the group. It is this lack of individualism that has often been detrimental to societies.

    “There is also a strong Rousseauian trend in libertarianism that might explain its attitude towards tribalism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that men were naturally good and lived contentedly until society corrupted them. … Libertarians, especially anarcho-libertarians, also hold romantic notions about the State of Nature, imagining it as characterised by harmonious interactions.”

    A small minority of libertarians may perhaps believe this. I have read many works of libertarians regarding the ideal Libertarian society and almost nobody claims Libertarianism will usher in Utopia. The closest thing you find in this direction would be the fictional Galt’s Gultch in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and even here there is a judge in case of conflict. Rothbard also answered the Rousseau-menace:

    “The realization that ideas, freely adopted, determine social institutions, and not vice versa, illuminates many critical areas of the study of man. Rousseau and his host of modern followers, who hold that man is good, but corrupted by his institutions, must finally wither under the query: And who but men created these institutions? The tendency of many modern intellectuals to worship the primitive (also the childlike—especially the child “progressively” educated— the “natural” life of the noble savage of the South Seas, and so on) has perhaps the same roots. We are also told repeatedly that differences between largely isolated tribes and ethnic groups are “culturally determined”: tribe X being intelligent or peaceful because of its X-culture; tribe Y, dull or warlike because of Y-culture. If we fully realize that the men of each tribe created its own culture (unless we are to assume its creation by some mystic deus ex machina), we see that this popular “explanation” is no better than explaining the sleep-inducing properties of opium by its “dormitive power.” Indeed, it is worse, because it adds the error of social determinism.” (https://mises.org/wire/study-man-and-problem-free-will)

    “The chimpanzee is, after all, our closest relative, not the orangutan.”

    This may be so, but Richard D. Fuerle makes a good case that we might be descended from the orangutan, not the African apes. Altough I am by no means an expert or even beginner to this subject. (https://www.unz.com/book/richard_d_fuerle__erectus-walks-amongst-us/)

    “The libertarian individualist is one who by renouncing tribalism has, as Fredrick Nietzsche might say, ‘strayed most dangerously from [his] instincts.’”

    Should this not be true for everyone who recounces tribalism then? This is not a problem with libertarians or Libertarianism per se. I do think libertarians should write more about this. In ‘Clash of Group interests Mises did write:

    “We do not have to discuss the problem whether or not it is true that the preservation and the further development of occidental civilization require the maintenance of the geographical segregation of various racial groups. The task of this paper is to deal with the economic aspects of group conflicts. If it is true that racial considerations make it inexpedient to provide an outlet for the colored inhabitans of comparatively overpopulated areas, this would not contradict the statement that in an unhampered capitalist society there are no irreconcilable conflicts of group interests. It would only demonstrate that racial factors make it inexpedient to carry the principle of capitalism and market economy in its utmost consequences and that the conflict among various races is, for reasons commonly called noneconoic, irreconcilable. It would certainly not disprove the statement of the liberals that within a society of free enterprise and free mobility of men, commodities, and capital, there are no irreconcilable conflicts of the rightly understood interests of various individuals and groups of individuals.”

    On a final note a respone to your line:

    “So it seems that the answer to whether libertarianism is a Jewish group-evolutionary strategy comes down to whether the second condition is satisfied: are Jewish promoters of libertarianism motivated by strong Jewish self-identification and the belief that libertarianism advances specifically Jewish interests (perhaps at the expense of Gentile interests)?”

    Jewish promoters of Libertarianism know fully well what a libertarian USA would mean for Israel. As for western countries with (semi-) open borders and no tribalism such as ours, what do Jews have to gain here from Libertarianism from a MacDonaldian perspective and what do they stand to lose?

    All the best,

    • Giles Carpenter
      Giles Carpenter says:

      Murray Rothbard was a one-off special case, notably for his attack on fractional-reserve banking, support for WW2 revisionism, a philosophical excoriation of “equality”, an article on Marx as a young Satanist, and a hilarious playlet satirising from personal experience an Ayn Rand soiree, “Mozart was a Red”, accessible online. As Hitler said of his mother’s doctor, if all Jews were like him, there wouldn’t be much of a problem.

    • Hugh Moriarty
      Hugh Moriarty says:

      Thijis, thank you for your very thoughtful comments. I won’t reply to them all as it would take a long time but most of your points are well taken.

      Let me just reply to one point, regarding Block’s article ‘The libertarian case for Israel’ from Forward, which you were surprised I did not mentioned. I did read this and was considering discussing it. You are right that it seems very ‘MacDonaldian,’ by which we might mean it seems very ethnically partisan and evidences a refusal to apply the same standards to Jews as to non-Jews. The reasoning in the article seems very unlibertarian; he speaks of the rights of ‘Jews’ to the land of Israel based on their ancestors ‘homesteading’ that land ages ago (he has also coauthored a book on this issue by the way, The Classical Liberal Case for Israel). Is he suggesting that Jews have rights as a group? This would be surprising as libertarians seem very insistent on the point that there is no such thing as ‘group rights’ and that only individuals can have rights. Perhaps he could argue that his point is consistent with the rejection of group rights but it seems to me that this would require some intellectual gymnastics.

      But although Block certainly leaves himself open to the charge of having double standards here and being selective in his libertarianism, I didn’t think it was worth making much of this since it didn’t seem to be part of a larger pattern within the Mises-Rothbard Strand of libertarianism. For instance, a short piece was published in LewRockwell.com by Bionic Mosquito that severely criticized the Block article (https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/01/bionic-mosquito/israel-7-percent-legitimate/). I assume that Block’s efforts would not be taken seriously by his libertarian peers and that it’s pretty anomalous in that movement.

      Best regards
      Moriarty

  18. Brian Rockford
    Brian Rockford says:

    Why do “liberals” and “leftists” label BOTH mini-state libertarians & anarcho-capitalists AND statist-fascists & national-socialists “far right”? Because they are all against global “equality” and “altruism”.
    Could “Ayn Rand” also have been a disguised aspirant near-acronym for [D N] Aryan as well as her Jewish surname in Russian script cropped to resemble Roman letters?
    There is an uncanny thematic resemblance between the ideology of “human” control of resources in her essay on “Objectivist Ethics” and “national” control in two early essays in Hitler’s “Second Book”.

    • Adrian Lake
      Adrian Lake says:

      @ Brian Rockford

      You should discard your fantasy that Alisa Rosenbaum acquired an “Aryan” pen-name, even though her chosen forename was Finnish and her industrial-heroine Dagny (Taggart) and pirate-hero Ragnar Danneskjoeld were given Scandinavian names; her banking genius in “Atlas Shrugged” is Irish not Jewish.
      She developed her “rational philosophy” not only from Aristotle, but also after early reading of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and possibly Stirner, as an egoist contradiction of both Marxism-Leninism and Judeo-Christianity.
      Her Jewish “self-identity” is concisely analysed by Jennifer Burns in her (somewhat mistitled) “Goddess of the Market” (2011) in footnotes on pp.315 & 301; also Ann Heller, “Ayn Rand” (2010) pp.56-57 & 180-181.
      Nevertheless, worth consulting online are: (i) Gregory Hood, “‘A Sense of Life,’ Ayn Rand & White Nationalism”, Counter-Currents, November 30, 2015; and (ii) Lorenz Kraus, “Ayn Rand plagiarized Adolf Hitler”, Renegade Tribune, December 4, 2021.
      Of course, just as one “conservative” group or publication after another has been “neo-conned”, so the previously quasi-neo-con Ayn Rand Institute has now been totally “Zionized” under Guru-in-Chief Yaron Brook.

      The history of ideas, and their successive promoters, is complex, however, and cannot be reduced to single-cause madness about control of the entire human universe by an Omnipotent Demonic Entity known as — The Jew.

  19. Fedup
    Fedup says:

    For those interested in supplementing the article above, it helps to delve into what seems to be the fairly common jewish psyche.

    “Alfred Rosenberg – The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages”
    https://archive.org/details/alfred-rosenberg-the-track-of-the-jew-through-the-ages_202006

    Rosenberg writes,

    “The power instinct of the Jews is therefore of a different sort than that of the ancient Romans, Alexander, Bismarck, Napoleon. He does not as a lord demand respect and obedience naturally, the Jew as a personality does not stand openly before his work, but he goes on his way through intrigue, lies, deceit and assassination, he stands as a secret assistant feeling like a communist behind all the corridors of destructive work. The entire Jewish history provides proofs thereof.”

    And,

    “Economically the Jew has acquired power through interest, usury, money…The breaking of the finance slavery, a means that has not succeeded for so long, is sounded today again as a battle-cry. If this could be achieved even only partially the axe would have been laid to the life-tree of the Jew.”

    Rosenberg also mentions the absolute rational materialism of the jewish thought process, devoid of spirituality (ie. the metaphysical) and anyone who embraces any aspect of a non-material path are “simple minds that deny real life”.

  20. VEL
    VEL says:

    “Tribalism may be partly based on the rational calculation that it is better to band together with others to survive and compete, but it is also positively reinforced by elemental feelings like love and affection, pride, attachment to one’s own kind, the desire for recognition, approval and connection, as well being negatively reinforced by feelings of loneliness and insecurity.”

    I would combine these two ideas.

    Tribalism is indeed based on “rational calculation that it is better to band together with others to survive and compete”, but this is a calculation performed, not by individuals rationally calculating their interests, but rather by natural selection operating on the psychology of our distant ancestors.

    In short, we have evolved to be social because doing so caused our ancestors to have have higher rates of survival and reproductive success.

    On this view, the emotions to which the author refers (“love and affection, pride, attachment to one’s own kind” etc.) evolved in part as a means of motivating us to be social.

    In other words, emotions function to execute the rational calculation performed by natural selection.

    In this sense, then, in an inversion of Hume’s maxim, ‘the passions are the servant of reason’, i.e. of the rational calculation of natural selection.

    Interesting piece, though, especially the final section on “Libertarianism and Tribalism”.

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