http://www.lewrockwell.com/blo.....22229.html

August 01, 2008
Those Wacky CATO Protesters
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at August 1, 2008 10:52 AM

A few emailers have alerted me to the fact that CATO’s vice president for global junketeering,Tom Palmer, has apparently descended into one of his sputtering hate fits over my blog yesterday about the ragtag group of protesers at CATO. (Palmer, who has never had an academic job, has never written a book or pubished a peer-reviewed academic article, and took about 20 years to get a terminal degree, apparently struts around as some kind of high priest of academe and denounces me as “unscholarly” for linking to a Wikipedia entry on this blog. Scandalous!).

The protesters were protesting Cato’s support of NAFTA, and are apparently opposed as well to the building of the I-69 highway from Mexico to Canada. As is his custom, Palmer lies through his teeth about what I’ve said. I never said I opposed this particular Cato-supported socialist road-building project, only that the protesters don’t like it.

Unfortunatley, the rent-a-mob that showed up at Smearbund Central yesterday is grossly uneducated. They protest NAFTA because they mistakenly believe it is “free trade.” But as the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s James Sheehan showed more than a decade ago, it consists of hundreds of pages of legalese that constitutes “managed” or centrally planned trade. Genuine free trade would only require one sentence prohibiting all tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade, period.
—-

I agree that NAFTA is not free trade, but it did represent freer trade, and that’s a good thing. I prefer unilateral approaches, which, as Razeen Sally of the LSE has shown, has produced most of the trade liberalization in recent years, anyway. I think I’ve responded adequately to the cultist’s posts; racism is a bad thing, vicious mudslinging about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks is racist, and association with racist collectivism harms libertarianism, which is a philosophy of equal individual rights. And on to the least important of all, DiLorenzo’s account of my intellectual history is, shall we say, untrue, but it’s not worth getting that far into the mud with him. I’ll just leave it at that.

Thank you, sir, for amply demonstrating that the emperor has no clothes (though I might add you probably exposed a little too much of the venomous underbelly of your clique for the tastes of all here save your patron).

http://www.tomgpalmer.com/archives/026647.php

Read it and see if you don’t get sick.

I attended two Mises Institute events and I was appalled at the behavior, including racist jokes and comments from organizers. The intellectual intolerance was also amazing, but not surprising when I realized what motivated them. Say something nice about the theories of Milton Friedman, George Stigler, or Gary Becker and you were hissed at and called a Communist. That was 7 years ago. I would not go to one of their events if you paid me ten million dollars. (Ok, I might, but only for the money and under a pseudonym and disguise.)

Give it up, Francisco; you’re a shill for Lew Rockwell sent over to make the comment thread so long no one can follow it.

Tom, you should close this thread. There’s plenty for people to make up their own minds, without letting lying shills like Francisco just raise one phony pseudoissue after another.

DiLorenzo is scum. I could tell that when I heard his lectures. Not much depth, but a lot of invective.

How magnanimous of you to forgive what you see as a Freudian slip amidst all the rumors and innuendo. Glory be to God that you don’t believe stoning might be in order.

Anonymous

An affair, Tom?

I believe the original suggestion was little more than the documented fact that James Kirchick frequents the social circles of Beltway libertarianism.

I’ll forgive you for your Freudian slip though.

That said, will you do the favor of obliging a question of my own now? If a good, sound, and correct libertarian policy position was being credibly considered before the courts, a legislature, a committee of congress or something of the sort, and in doing so had drawn the backing of Rockwell and the Mises Institute, do you believe that Tom Palmer would briefly put aside his decades-old feud with them and support said effort because of agreement on the policy end itself aside from their past differences?

Because I do not think he would do so. In fact, I think his hatred for the Mises crowd has reached a level of irreparable separation in which even the most natural points of policy agreement with them are precluded by emotional hysterics of the type that he has seen fit to litter all over this discussion.

And that is the reason I maintain that the larger libertarian movement is being materially harmed by Palmer’s role in and continuation of this silly feud.

1. You misstate my request, perhaps willfully, by suggesting that I require a regression as proof of the Paul campaign’s suffering from the newsletters. Aside from the fact that it is indeed theoretically possible to isolate a variable of that sort assuming the right data were available, I made no such request. Rather, I simply asked for empirical evidence to illustrate the alleged harm. Show me a decline in his polling, a precipitous dropoff in votes, a record of former supporters leaving him for other candidates in droves, something, anything. You’ve been given that opportunity many times over now, and yet you still produce…nothing. You assert the harm occurred yet you have nothing beyond your own anecdotal claims to prove it. Ergo, you lose.

2. For all your dancing and word wrangling about DiLorenzo and Rosa Parks, at the end of the day all you have is *still* a quoted Cedric the Entertainer joke. You’ve described that joke as everything from belittlement to “hateful” and “racist” attacks, much as you did when you first posted it years ago and found yourself widely ridiculed then by cooler heads, removed from your silly feud. The telltale sign of your hyperbole is that you deem it necessary to assign the attributes of “hate” and “racism” and all sorts of other horrible things to that quote as if such noxious and overplayed repetition somehow solidifies your original disputed characterization. One of the few fortunate things about instances of racial hate is that they are usually pretty easy to pick out, Tom. If somebody uses the n-word it is immediately noticed and rightly condemned. To borrow another unfortunate cliche, with racism you know it when you see it. The problem with your attack upon DiLorenzo though is that the average level-headed and dispassionate reader does *not* automatically know or see racism in the simple act of quoting a mainstream comedian’s joke at Rosa Parks’ expense…hence your need to repeat the characterizations you assign to it. But in the end of the day, one need only strip away your accompanying commentary to find that its hyperbole simply isn’t sustained in the original text, res ipsa loquitur.

3. Nowhere do I accuse you of calling for the invalidation of all laws passed under states of disenfranchisement. Rather, I simply pointed out that this is the logical consequence of your argument against the 1894 Mississippi flag when taken to its end. As of the present, that observation remains uncontested and thus one I stand by. Your second argument merits some consideration to the point that I will say this: you are treading dangerously close to the position that governing should be conducted by an arbitrary and fluid concept of supermajoritarianism. You have asserted in effect that a policy should be opposed if if “offends” and unspecified minority percentage of the society for reason of that alleged offense, have you not? My question then is where do we draw the line? How many “offended” people are enough to cause disfavor upon a policy? And how do we ever know that line has been crossed (aside from a chance coincidence to the whim of your personal feud with Rockwell)? This question is pertinent, because the Mississippi flag referendum was not even remotely contentious at the ballot box. It passed in a slam dunk, a landslide that was readily acknowledged by both sides. If such a lopsided political victory fails your seemingly arbitrary test of political offensiveness, that does not bode well for the far more contentious and evenly divided disputes of everyday government in this country.

Deny, deny, deny to your heart’s content, Tom, but these and other pertinent issues continue to plague your arguments in this discussion. I see you’ve taken to avoiding them of late by disparaging me personally, as seems to be your style. I expected nothing less and consider it a welcome badge of honor to have invoked a mention in the lead from your ire. But all of that is little more than a diversion from the points of argument I have raised, and taken on their merits outside of the personality disputes that seem to trail you wherever you go, you’re losing every one.

Have a nice day though.

“reason: What do you think of Martin Luther King?

Paul: Martin Luther King is one of my heroes because he believed in nonviolence and that’s a libertarian principle. Rosa Parks is the same way. Gandhi, I admire. Because they’re willing to take on the government, they were willing to take on bad laws. So I believe in civil disobedience if you understand the consequences. Martin Luther King was a great person because he did that and he changed America for the better because of that.

reason: You didn’t write the derogatory things about him in the letter?

Paul: No
( http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124281.html )”

How deep or sincere is that admiration when Paul surrounds himself with people at Rockwell.com, publishes articles there, advertises his books there and is associated with their Mises institute? It’s not as if one or two quirky writers had an occasional lapse of judgment. DiLorenzo, Hoppe, Rockwell, North…and a bunch of other angry war-on-government anti-war — am I allowed to say demagogues?

A lot of people were interested in Paul’s candidacy and would prefer any improvement on what the Bush era has wrought. But Paul’s reliance on his friends in Auburn, Alabama, reduces his credibility to the zero range.

1. You assert that the Paul campaign was seriously harmed and damaged by the newsletter story…yet you cannot be bothered to produce one shred of empirical evidence to show any significant loss of support for his candidacy precipitated by the newsletter story.

2. You assert that you many adversaries in the Rockwell feud said “hateful” and “racist” things about Rosa Parks…yet you cannot produce anything more on them than a quoted Cedric the Entertainer joke at her expense.

3. You assert that a placement in time simply necessitates that late 19th century segregationist motives inspired the 1894 Mississippi flag…yet you cannot be bothered to produce any documented historical evidence of this beyond your own post hoc conjecture.

You are correct about one thing though. Somebody has indeed lost this debate, Tom. That person is you.

You are spinning, spinning, spinning. And the more you do it and the more attention you attract to the ugliness, the fewer people are fooled. You should know when to stop. The Rockwellians are generally smarter and change their posts (without any acknowledgement) or take them down, rather than defending them and drawing yet more attention to them.

The disgusting comments from DiLorenzo, who belittled (not “humanized”) a decent and honest person who made life better for all of us, and of Huebert (“then Ms. Parks begins singing a song or something,” as if the struggle for civil rights were simply an annoyance), and the comparison of the widely accepted *account* of the civil rights movement with the brutal historical *reality* of state-enforced segregation (with the former being worse than the latter!!) endorsed by Lew Rockwell are not merely noting an affiliation. You lose.

As to Ron Paul’s campaign being hurt — get real. You demand a statistical regression (not possible in this case, anyway, as there are too many variables, like other candidates dropping out, differing demographics, and more) as evidence. Less demanding standards are appropriate and the evidence is available. The fact is that Ron Paul himself strongly repudiated and disavowed the racist remarks (why do that if they were not a great embarrassment?) and said that they did not reflect his views. The gross ugly smears in the Ron Paul newsletters about Martin Luther King (e.g., that “he seduced underage girls and boys” http://www.tnr.com/downloads/december1990.pdf ), written by Lew Rockwell, are not compatible with Ron Paul’s statements praising King and with Paul’s fundraising efforts on King’s birthday, an effort that I recall showed a major drop in success compared to the moneybombs before the newsletter story broke. (I do not have the information before me; perhaps someone can check how much was raised, but I recall being surprised by a large drop in support.) It is likely that the newsletters hurt his fundraising; I was told by several people who donated before (yes, I have friends who strongly supported Paul and just didn’t like his associations) that they were less enthusiastic after the newsletters; judging from the numbers, there were enough to make a big difference. The newsletters did hurt Ron’s candidacy; that’s why he took such pains to repudiate them in very strong terms and to affirm his admiration (not shared by DiLorenzo, Huebert, or Rockwell) for Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King:

—-
reason: What do you think of Martin Luther King?

Paul: Martin Luther King is one of my heroes because he believed in nonviolence and that’s a libertarian principle. Rosa Parks is the same way. Gandhi, I admire. Because they’re willing to take on the government, they were willing to take on bad laws. So I believe in civil disobedience if you understand the consequences. Martin Luther King was a great person because he did that and he changed America for the better because of that.

reason: You didn’t write the derogatory things about him in the letter?

Paul: No
( http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124281.html )
—-

Regarding the Mississippi disenfranchisement, you have again tried to spin and grossly distorted my view. I did not call for “invalidating” all laws passed under disenfranchisement. (Laws against assault, for example, or “seducing underage boys and girls,” should not be invalidated, merely because passed in a non-democratic way.) I believe that the voters should have voted to replace the flag with one that was not a poke in the eye to a large percentage of the population.

You have laid down one red herring after another. But, in the end, you do your case no good. You merely draw yet more attention to the ugliness you are trying to explain away. It doesn’t work.

If a left-winger or a religious conservative defend the rights that are written down in the constitution (e.g. first or second amendment), does that make their case less credible? Would you consider them as allies in that case? If they would go to the Supreme Court, would you be a plaintiff too?

Moving on to Paul, I notice you cannot resist dismissing my argument as “lame” though you also did not bother yourself with answering any of my questions, much less offering any empirical evidence of your oft-repeated but never substantiated claim that the newsletters “harmed” Paul’s campaign. Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Re Mississippi, you continue to dig your rut of historical ignorance deeper and deeper. First, there is absolutely no historical evidence linking the adoption of the 1894 flag to any earlier act of voting rights disenfranchisement. The sole instigating event for the 1894 flag was a request from the governor’s office asking the legislature to design a flag since Mississippi didn’t have one at the time. Second, the logic of your representation argument is immediately susceptible to the fact that it also invalidates virtually every action of the United States government prior to the late 1960’s. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, every congress and president elected before the 19th amendment, and every congress and president elected before the voting rights act all came to power under systems that legally disenfranchised large parts of the electorate – blacks, women, non-landowners etc. If the 1894 Mississippi flag is to be dismissed by reason of disenfranchisement, then so too must every act of government adopted prior to the modern era. Third, the representation argument, even if we accept what you contend about the implications of disenfranchisement, is mooted by the 2001 referendum in which the people of Mississippi voted in the overwhelming margin of two to one to retain the 1894 flag. If majoritarian opinion is our guiding principle, then the people have spoken and it seems that you are simply dissatisfied with the results…or, perhaps more accurately, with your libertarian feud adversaries who happen to support those results, thereby bringing your scorn to them.

The “humanizing” information about Rosa Parks? You know better. It is not “humanizing,” it is belittling, insulting, and demeaning. She was a decent human being who changed the world through courage and determination. Insulting her is not an act of “humanization.”

But enough for now, or I shall miss my train.

I’ll further add that, while you at least acknowledged your error in date, you persist in confusing the factual history of the two cases by attempting to draw a parallel between Georgia and Mississippi that simply is not sustainable in the historical evidence. Georgia’s flag was indeed changed with what were at least in part segregationist undertones (though ostensibly, it was also done in part to commemorate the centennial of the civil war and, as such, paralleled the actions of dozens of states, north and south, which went on a civil war monument building spree in the late 50’s and early 60’s). The timing in Georgia followed Brown v. Board and accompanied a period of backlash among the Georgia political class against the civil rights movement.

It is difficult to draw analogy though between that case and the Mississippi flag of 1894. Legislative records from the Mississippi case conclusively show that the driving motive there was to design a flag de novo, and in so doing extend a commemoration to civil war veterans. This was plainly stated when the flag was proposed, and the racial rhetoric that accompanied the 1956 Georgia debate was absent from the 1894 Mississippi debate. That many of these civil war veterans were still alive and serving in the legislature that designed the flag should not be lost upon the historian seeking to determine its motive. To continue to misstate and confuse two very different motives from two different flags in two different periods of time, as you do, is to continue to abuse history in a fashion just as grievous as the original error of date.

Regarding Boaz’s essay, I suspect that DiLorenzo’s ire (and not knowing his comment in full context, I cannot speak more to it than that) is over a confusion that is readily apparent in Boaz’s essay. His argument addresses, as you say, the issue of “putting [the confederate flag] on the courthouse” as if it were an affirmative policy decision in the present, yet his logic fails because he attempts to apply it to a case where the flag is already over the courthouse and, in this particular case, has been there more than a century.

It requires a policy decision that alters the status quo, and in doing so makes what is potentially a state endorsement of a rather odious stream of political thought. At the risk of repeating a cliche, the argument for nixing long-existant uses of un-PC symbols such as the confederate portion of the Mississippi flag is extremely susceptible to the same slippery slope that desires to dismantle the busts of slaveowners on Mount Rushmore and strike George Washington’s name from elementary school doorways.

Without desiring to rehash the Rosa Parks debate further, I will gladly echo your invitation for anyone who so desires to read the text itself. They will find a quoted joke from Cedric the Entertainer, and they will find humanizing facts about Rosa Parks the human person juxtaposed against Rosa Parks the secular deity of media frenzy and political hype. Only a mind with an agenda to push against the authors of those comments will find the “hatefulness” you describe though, and that is not merely my own observation but also the observation of multiple leveler heads than your own on this issue when it was first raised as per the comments to the original thread.

As for Paul, if you wish to maintain your contention that the newsletters damaged his campaign, it is only reasonable of me to demand conclusive empirical evidence of this from you. To date I have seen no such evidence, nor have I seen evidence that Paul’s newsletters even caused distress to much of anybody beyond (a) people on the political left who already hated him for plenty of other reasons, and (b) a small cadre of DC area libertarians, who were lukewarm to his campaign at best and made absolutely ZERO material impact on his support elsewhere. You can post beltway blog links and rumors about what Tom Lizardo supposedly said to so-and-so to your heart’s content, but as evidence of “harm” to Paul’s campaign it is little more than speculation, anecdote, and gossip. But without empirical evidence, yours is simply not a claim that can be supported.

The issue was indeed the very one that suggested to me and others that DiLorenzo had gone off the deep end, for he responded to this reasonable essay by David Boaz:
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4320
with the claim that Boaz had called for a ban of the confederate flag, which he certainly did not. If you want to fly it on your home, that’s your business. Putting it on a court house is another matter.

Go ahead and defend the vile and grotesque attacks on Rosa Parks by the people at Lew Rockwell. I hope that others will read the evidence here:
http://www.tomgpalmer.com/archives/026647.php
and make up their own minds. ONLY someone with the agenda of defending such trash would dismiss the remarks as unoffensive.

Lew Rockwell’s disgusting and racist comments, which Ron Paul disavowed and denounced (and credibly, as he has never been reported — ever — as having uttered such things, which is a good sign that they were not his own views), most certainly did cause damage to his campaign and to the proposals for liberty associated with it. Ron’s strongest showings were after other candidates had dropped out, which is not a good sign for your weak case that no one cared. And it did create a lasting impression among the national media that was quite clearly negative. Rockwell should have been booted Rockwell for the disgraceful things he did, and Ron Paul was about to do and had written a statement, until his now late campaign chairman convinced him it would be unwise:
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124485.html

1. The notion that Rosa Parks was a brave woman is not inherently at odds with the fact that she was also a political activist, that she supported and belonged to a very left-wing organization that espouses many plainly anti-libertarian positions, or even that she can be a subject of a joke by a well known black comedian over the media hype and attention that surrounds her name. It is simply unreasonable if not deranged to assert that repeating that joke, or stating facts about her activism with the NAACP somehow undermines her “dignity” as a person (unless, of course, you are asserting, Tom, that her dignity is somehow besmirched by knowledge of her membership in the NAACP) or depicts her in a “hateful” light. In short, your alleged racial grievances are shrill, whiny, hyperbolic, and generally lacking in any meaningful substance or perspective beyond the obvious reality, to wit: they are the product of the childish antics of your long running and well documented personal feud with Rockwell.

2. Your comments on the Mississippi flag exhibit both appalling ignorance for someone of your alleged academic caliber and a propensity to grossly misstate basic historical facts. The current Mississippi flag with the confederate image in the ensign was adopted over a century ago in response to a request by then Gov. John Stone to create an official state flag, which Mississippi had not had since the civil war. The matter was sent to a committee in the legislature, which included several civil war veterans among its membership. They unsurprisingly included the confederate image in their design, which was approved by Stone (who was also a civil war veteran) and officially adopted on February 7, 1894, not the 1950’s “to keep black people in their place” as you claim. Considering the amount of time you have spent on this very thread nitpicking at DiLorenzo for errors in his history, your own endeavor into that field plainly leaves much to be desired and exposes you to the very same kind of hypocrisy that quickly engulfed your whines about Wikipedia links at the outset of this escapade.

3. It is simply absurd to say that the Ron Paul newsletters story caused “tremendous damage,” or any noticeable harm at all for that matter, anywhere outside of the small clique of beltway libertarians in which you personally reside. Paul continued to draw significant money bomb funding well after the newsletter story (including $1.8 million raised on MLK day) and he made his strongest percentage showings (Nevada, Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, and Washington) long after the story broke. Considering that the support for Paul’s candidacy was, at best, lukewarm among the membership of that same clique before so much as a drop of ink had been spent on the newsletters, it is difficult to see how the loss of your confidence materially impacted Paul’s campaign in any way.

Should you respond in acknowledgment of these points at all, I suppose it will only be to impugn my “impartiality” from your own perch in the cat-littered end of sandbox that is the libertarian movement’s most notorious schoolyard feud. If that is how you feel, Tom, so be it. I’ll rest content with the knowledge that you have thoroughly embarrassed your own credibility through a combination of hypocritical indignation, historical ignorance, and venomous name-calling over a decades-long playground fight from which you have apparently yet to recover, all done in the borrowed moniker of condemning the very same things you have come to perpetrate and embody.

They are also an embarrassment to the very idea of civilized discourse, which is based on thought, analysis, and respect for evidence.