From: ptireland@charter.net Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 11:55 AM To: Brian Holtz Cc: marketliberal@yahoogroups.com; libertarian@yahoogroups.com Subject: RE: RE: Allow me represent you in the Ex-Com Brian Holtz wrote: No libertarian should regard either the U.S. Constitution or George Washington as an unquestionable moral authority. As a libertarian, I'm more concerned about the defense of liberty than about the defense of any particular nation, state, county, or precinct. My response: I wasn't aware that anyone did regard the U.S. Constitution or Goerge Washington as an unquestionable moral authority. As a libertarian you're entitled to volunteer to defend any nation on earth, but you are NOT entitled to use MY military for anything other than to defend U.S. soil and ships from direct attack. The U.S. Constitution isn't a moral authority, but it is a legal one and what the government may or may not do is defined and limited by it. The U.S. Military is defined as being solely for the defense of America. If you feel so strongly about winning freedom for the Iraqi people, by all means volunteer to join the forces of Iraqi people willing to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Send money, weapons, etc. But do not ever presume to use the U.S. military to undertake such an action. Brian Holtz wrote: Are you questioning the honesty of my self-report in saying that I desire liberty for the Iraqi people? Are you a mind-reader? My response: I haven't questioned your desire for the liberty of the Iraqi people. I have questioned your desire to start an unprovoked war against a non-threatening nation with an unconstitutional use of the the U.S. military. Freedom is to be won by those who want it. If you want to help them win freedom, you can volunteer to help them win it for themselves, but you are NOT entitled to use the U.S. military to do it. Brian Holtz wrote: To a libertarian, the purpose of the state military is to defend liberty. I disagree with the assertion that defending liberty outside our borders is never helpful for defending liberty inside our borders. My response: To a libertarian, the purpose of the state military is to DEFEND our own liberty, and not to meddle in the affairs and disputes of other nations. Libertarians believe we own ourselves and so do others. Libertarians believe in respecting the national sovereignty of other nations. Libertarians believe that other nations don't require the permission of this nation to have any weapons they want, any policies they want, any form of government they want, etc. and if they are living under a form of government we don't like for instance a dictatorship they must shake off that government on their own and earn their own freedom. Libertarianism has ALWAYS been about non-interventionism. Brian Holtz wrote: I agree that the U.S. government should not be the guarantor of every human's liberty. I do not agree that the U.S. government's duty to fight tyranny ends completely at America's borders. My response: This is where you deviate from libertarianism. Brian Holtz wrote: What is your evidence for this claim? Even the most pessimistic estimate (published in The Lancet) estimates only 100,000 "excess" deaths since the 2003 invasion. 50,000 fatalities is probably closer to the truth; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_in_the_conflict_in_Iraq for details. My response: Every single death related to the war in Iraq is America?s fault including the deaths by beheadings, deaths on Spanish trains, deaths of American and other allies, and the deaths of the 100,000 civilians and several thousand others who were merely defending their own country from a hostile invasion force that had no justification to attack. All of these deaths could have been avoided if Bush didn?t start this war all by himself without a legitimate cause, and in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Keep in mind these numbers don?t include the 200,000 who were starved to death and kept from life saving medicines or who were bombed for 12 years straight after America?s first unlawful and unwarranted attack in 1991 or those who died in that attack. Brian Holtz wrote: If you are indeed more concerned about fatalities over there than you are about having clean hands over here, then consider that Saddam caused around two million deaths. The Iran-Iraq war he started killed an estimated million people. He got about 100,000 of his troops killed by invading Kuwait. He caused several hundred thousand excess deaths of Iraqi children by refusing to comply with the United Nations' oil-for-food conditions in the aftermath of his war of aggression against Kuwait. He killed hundreds of thousands of Kuwaitis, Kurds, Shiites, and dissidents. For details, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Iraq_War http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/2000/09/iraq-000918.htm http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/hussein.htm http://academic.regis.edu/jriley/saddam_hussein.htm My response: I don?t care if Saddam Hussein personally murdered 100 million men, raped their wives, boiled their children in oil and ate them on live television. It still isn?t a valid use of the U.S. Military to stop him. What happens in their country is a matter for their people to deal with and not ours. I don?t care if Iraq invaded Kuwait and every other nation in the entire middle-east, none of that is valid justification to use the U.S. military and no real libertarian would claim it to be. Brian Holtz wrote: What is your evidence for this claim? I know quite a few liberty sympathizers who are put off by the LP's crypto-anarchism, but I don't know anyone who left the LP because it's not anarchist enough. My response: All you need to do is look at the membership numbers since Bush took office. And I personally know more than 100 people who have left the party due to the destructive influence of ?Republitarians? like those in the party who claim to be libertarian and yet violate the foundation of libertarianism by supporting an unwarranted, unjustified, unlibertarian, and unconstitutional war in Iraq. Brian Holtz wrote: Are you saying you would favor the expulsion of anyone who would ever advocate America forcibly replacing tyranny with liberty? To my mind, an "actual libertarian" is one who seeks to minimize coercion by everyone, and who isn't afraid to do more about it than simply set a good example. But I wouldn't expel those who fall short of this ideal. My response: I?m saying I?d favor the expulsion of anyone who would ever advocate America using its military to attack any country that hasn?t attacked America first or anyone who would advocate using the military for ANY REASON other than the defense of our own country from direct attacks and not ?possible threats?. In other words I?d advocate removing all non-libertarians from the Libertarian Party. Brian Holtz wrote: Do you have evidence that what they "claim to support" differs from what they actually desire? Or is this more mind-reading? :-) My response: If they actually supported those things they would never vote for a member of the Republican Party. Any vote for people in the Republican Party is a vote for larger, costlier, more intrusive government that attacks our civil rights, steals our money, and misuses our military. Brian Holtz wrote: I disagree with much about the way the Bush administration initiated and conducted the war. But I have no problem with the U.S. military deposing a tyrant who killed well over a million people, invaded one neighbor, annexed another, fired ballistic missiles at two more, and defied disarmament mandates. My response: Disarmament mandates from whom? Sovereign nations don?t require permission to have any weapons they choose. Neither America, nor the U.N. has any authority to tell any nation what weapons they may or may not have, or to attack them when they don?t comply. Every one of your responses are directly opposed to the non-aggression principle and therefore directly opposed to libertarianism itself. You?re free to believe anything you want, but anyone who thinks it?s ok to use the military for anything other than our own defense is NOT a libertarian. Brian Holtz wrote: I proudly support the use of force for defending human liberty. Unless you're an anarchist, you agree with this principle and simply disagree with me about how to apply it. (Do you think someone who is on trial should be allowed to compel the attendance for testimony of an innocent bystanding witness? If so, you support the initiation of force.) My response: I proudly support the non-aggression principle and the sovereignty of nations. Unless you also support this, you are not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination. I support the right of anyone charged with a crime to be able to present evidence in their defense, but this has nothing to do with the topic at hand, so I?ll leave it at that. Brian Holtz wrote: Like you, I too think that some Libertarians -- I'm thinking of anarchists, isolationists, non-coercitarians -- fall short of my own standard of 100% libertarianism. But since we all want to move America northward on the Nolan chart, I think it makes sense for us to join forces in a party that pulls in that direction. America is stuck in the ditch of nanny-statism, and I'll gladly pull with anybody who wants to get it out. The time to part company will only come when America is back on the high road of liberty, and the misguided few still want to keep pulling toward the opposite ditch of anarchism. My response: I laugh at your use of the phrase ?non-coercitarians? because that is pretty much the definition of a libertarian. If you support coercion, force, etc. for political gain or social engineering in this or any other country, you?re not a libertarian. Also some ignorantly mislabel military non-interventionism as isolationism. Using your own military to defend only your own country is not now, nor has it ever been isolationism. Libertarians promote trading freely with all nations, and having good diplomatic relations with them, but never using our military to defend any nation but our own or to get involved in their affairs.