Perhaps libertarians should desist from forming large organizations. Empirically, it has never worked. In theory, we can see why. We are a distinct minority, yet a strong voting block, and any large libertarian organization will be composed of a majority of newcomers without strong understanding of the issues. Any large such organization will be a ripe target for the use of others, and we have no good means to prevent it. Consider the Tea Parties, which started off decentralized and unconnected, yet there was a push to organize and coalesce into a large movement - which in a matter of months became another flavor of conservatism, complete with ConAgra sponsorship - and an attempt to get rid of Ron Paul because he's anti-interventionist! Similar comment apply to C4L and, in larger measure, the LP. Maybe we shouldn't do this.
There was a post somewhere within the forums with a link to an article written about 8 years ago that you may find agrees with your post here.
If I can find it, I will link it... unless someone else beats me to it.
"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." -James Madison
"If government were efficient, it would cease to exist."
Market based enterprise is not a problem it is the solution. However organizing institutions without ownership is a problem.
Live_Free_Or_Die: Market based enterprise is not a problem it is the solution. However organizing institutions without ownership is a problem.
A market is just a relationship between an organization and the rest of society. It doesn't tell us how or why that organization should be structured.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power
JAlanKatz:Similar comment apply to C4L and, in larger measure, the LP.
Also Koch's destruction of IHS. I suppose libertarians need to take more seriously the public choice problems of political reform.
JAlanKatz:Any large such organization will be a ripe target for the use of others, and we have no good means to prevent it.
I'm reminded of Long's slogan: "Organization Without Centralization."
The moral I take from this is: first, electoral politics should be at most a small part of libertarian strategy; second, the libertarian movement needs to be explicitly anarchist, to disassociate ourselves from the conservative ticks.
AnalyticalAnarchism.net - The Positive Political Economy of Anarchism
Sage:The moral I take from this is: first, electoral politics should be at most a small part of libertarian strategy; second, the libertarian movement needs to be explicitly anarchist, to disassociate ourselves from the conservative ticks.
Yes, this seems to happen more to electoral organizations than to others, but that could be because we have more electoral organizations than non-electoral organizations. It happened to the IHS, as you point out. FEE was in danger of going this way in the past too.
It seems that we need to use some anarchist points here. Maybe the same way we point out that you can't "take over" an anarchy because you can't conquer the capital, we should have leaderless, decentralized groups so that there is nothign to take over.
I see an analogy with mainstream vs. alternative medicine (excluding the quacks of course).
The first part is to understand the phenomenon of the development of states as a disease of society - perhaps as a lack of education about the ill-effects of statehood. And/or perhaps the common superstition that we need the State. See the post in my sig for more on that. And/or the lack of acceptance of personal responsibility, the rampant paternalism, and what have you.
Provided you accept this "State as disease" paradigm, I'll let Jon Barron complete the analogy (the main point is in bold).
"In almost all cases, alternative therapies for cancer are administered as part of a comprehensive program or protocol. Nevertheless, when members of the medical community decide to test the validity of a particular treatment, they insist on separating out the pieces from the whole and testing them in isolation. Thus they feel the need to stop the test subjects from using any other supplements at anything beyond ridiculously low RDA levels so those other nutrients would have no impact on the study results.Although this may at first appear to be reasonable and "scientific," it is not. In fact, it is akin to deciding to test a prospective football quarterback by putting him on the field with no one else playing offense. The "alternative approach," of course, would be to put him on the field with an entire team and see how he plays. If he scores, if he leads the team to victory, if he wins the Super Bowl, we would say he is a good quarterback. To many people, that would seem to make sense -- unfortunately, not to anyone in the medical community.The "medical approach," on the other hand, is quite different. "How can we really tell if he's any good if there are other players on the field? Great receivers could catch lousy passes, and we'd never know. A great offensive line could make our quarterback look good by blocking so well that he has all the time in the world to find his receivers. No! The only way to truly tell if he's any good is to put him on the field alone against an entire all-pro defensive team, and then see how he does." And, of course, the moment the ball is hiked, he's swarmed over and killed.So far, so good; but we have a hanging chad that needs to be dealt with. And that is that drugs pass this kind of testing. How do they do it? Quite simply, drugs are "magic bullets." Returning to our football analogy, we can indeed put our quarterback out on the field all alone to test his skills -- but this time armed with an AK-47 assault rifle. Of course, as soon as the ball is hiked, he shoots the entire defensive team and walks across the goal line. He wins! Unfortunately, although he scores, there are side effects. The other team is dead, and the game is over -- but he did score.Look, just like football is a team game (with the team only as strong as its weakest link) so too is alternative therapy when it comes to treating cancer. On occasion, you may get good results using just one component or another, but overall you will get the best results when you run the program as a whole. To isolate components of a program from the whole is to treat them as drugs. That's not what they are, and they will fail that test by definition.Another point to keep in mind is that alternative therapies are not subtractive. They are "additive." An alternative treatment that would be dismissed as ineffective because testing showed it to be only 10% effective in isolation might nevertheless be an invaluable part of a comprehensive program that contained seven 10% components -- giving you a 70%* chance of overcoming your cancer. But the medical establishment deliberately chooses not to test alternative therapies in this way -- thus condemning all seven components with the "quackery" label. So the only way you hear about effective alternatives is by word of mouth or anecdotal evidence. Clinical studies are almost designed to fail alternative therapies by definition."
*Argh, statistics fail. But you get the idea.
This is kind of roundabout, but essentially the argument is that there are no magic bullets; the only way to really cure a disease (permanently, so it can't come back or weasel out of it) is to improve the health of the cells that constitute the organism (think the people that constitute the society), because it was that lack of health that causes the disease (statism) in the first place. The symptoms we just manifestations of the underlying problem.
Austrians point out that leftists only look at the proximate causes of unemployment (companies laying people off) rather than the root causes (minimum wage laws). The argument here is quite analogous: mainstream medicine looks at the proximate causes, whereas alternative therapies (the effective ones!) try to get at the root causes.
This to me suggests a view of institutions like mises.org as beneficial because they take the more holistic approach of trying to change the nature of the people that constitute society (by educating them, certainly not by changing human nature as such). If the post in my sig is correct, this may be the only way.
Why anarchy fails
With help from solos, I'm linking the article I mentioned above.