Welcome to The Pendulum. That is the title of a book I hope to write over the next year or two. It’s an unusual book and I’ll be looking for Alpha Readers when it’s finished. An Alpha Reader is a volunteer who will read the manuscript and offer critiques and suggestions to improve it.
The book is unusual in that I, a lifelong libertarian, will be arguing for the status quo. I will be arguing that our contemporary western democracies, warts and all, are the best governance we’re likely to get. I’ll argue why this is so and offer some ideas for some minor changes to make it consistent with libertarian principles while retaining its essential nature. Warts and all.
I have been blogging since Aug. 30, 2015 as The Jolly Libertarian. I started that blog after I got back into the libertarian movement again after being out of it for around fifteen years. I joined some libertarian Facebook pages and I couldn’t believe how many angry, sour-puss libertarians there were. What a miserable lot. So I started the blog. Now seven and a half years later with over 400 posts and over 170,000 page views, I actually have enough material to put together several books. I could just compile some of my past essays and put this book together, but I have only scratched the surface of the topic and I am still doing research.
My ideas on libertarianism have changed over the years. Indeed they had been in flux since around 2000 when I left the active libertarian movement to focus on family and other things. I left partly because I found myself at odds with some libertarian thought and wanted to get away from libertarian orthodoxy and explore other ideas.
I wrote my first contrarian essay in 2003, a long five part piece in which I challenged libertarian orthodoxy on the gold standard. Since its inception in the late 1960s, most modern libertarians have been gold bugs. Gold was money. Fiat currency was not. Nothing but gold would do. A good number of libertarians became financial writers, publishing newsletters and books extolling the virtues of gold. And these pundits were a gloomy bunch. Doom and gloom. The economy was headed to hell in a handbasket and you better follow our advice to save your hide. I called my five part essay, The Trouble With Doom and Gloomers. I’ll be reprinting it here on this blog in the weeks ahead.
But my disenchantment with the gold bugs was just part of a general malaise I felt about libertarianism. A lot of it had to do, not so much with libertarian ideas as with how they were being promoted.
To be sure, much of my blog, in the early days, promoted an orthodox version of libertarianism. But over time I became a critic of the movement from within. I started reading books that took me outside of mainstream libertarianism into new territory. I felt invigorated by fresh breaths of air.
And in 2018, I went back to university to get a degree. I had dropped out in 1972 without finishing. In 2022 I finally got a degree, with distinction no less. (See It Only Took 55 Years!) A Bachelor of Integrated Studies degree with a focus on political science and philosophy.
My university experience as well as my outside reading led to significant changes in my thinking. Whereas I had been into what Matt Zwollinski and John Tomasi call strict libertarianism, the rationalist and absolutist philosophy that derives its whole edifice from a few simple axioms, I had come to espouse a pluralistic and pragmatic approach to politics in its stead. Or rather as an augmented and out of the box approach that looks to incorporate pluralism and pragmatism into a strict libertarian worldview. Libertarianism to me means and has always meant “Live and let live.” I have no interest in telling others how they should live or what they should do.
But orthodox libertarianism wanted to change the world. It expected that its perfectly reasoned arguments were so irrefutable that any thinking person would see the light. There was only one truth and they had it. It was a Utopian view I have come to reject.
Now I plan to formalize the ideas that have been percolating for a few years into a book, hopefully to be published by an academic publisher like University of Toronto Press.
I’m writing this blog as an adjunct, as a backgrounder explaining my thinking on various issues as they crop up. Sort of a diary about writing the book. I’ll be discussing what I am reading and why and what I am getting out of it.
And as noted, I’ll reprint some of my earlier essays that document changes in my thinking.
My book will offer a common sense justification of our current western political democracy using the ideas of strict libertarianism as well as other works to justify it.
It should appeal to non-libertarians as well as libertarians. In particular, so-called Bleeding Heart Libertarians may find the ideas intriguing. Fair-minded liberals may find it interesting. Maybe even some conservatives will find it challenging. And maybe even some anarchists will find the arguments intriguing even if not entirely convincing.
Let me know if you’d like to be an Alpha Reader. I’d like to have a diverse group with different points of view. I’d like critical and insightful feedback. I’d like to have my Alpha Readers point out inconsistencies or errors as they see them. I will acknowledge my Alpha Readers in the book.
Stay tuned for more!