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Title: An Outlaw in My Heart: A Political Activist's User's Manual by Stephen Gaskin ISBN: 0-940159-64-3 Publisher: Camino Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: A hippie in the White House
Comment: My all-time favorite bumper sticker is the one that says "Vote NO for President". I've been a libertarian for as long as I've been anything; as far as I'm concerned, we'd all be better off without the governmental institutions of the territorial nation-state. (Oh, we need courts and stuff, but I'm not persuaded that these work any better with territorial nation-states than without them.)
But as long as territorial nation-states do exist, it would be nice to have folks at the helm who would work to undo, or at least counterbalance, all the mischief these Leviathans cause. It's a simple matter of economic fact that the poor are poorer than they would be without government intervention in the economy. If the folks at the economic margins are, for example, receiving less medical care than they'd have received in a genuinely free society, then isn't there a case to be made that the government that caused this problem has some responsibility for correcting it?
And even for hard-core libertarians, there's an argument in favor of some forms of antitrust law -- namely, that powerful megacorporations exist in the first place only because they enjoy various sorts of protection from the state, and therefore the state has some sort of responsibility to keep them in check. Sure, it would be better to end protectionism and "crony capitalism" altogether. But if that doesn't happen, an admittedly distant second best is for the State to regulate the monsters it has created. It may not be ideal by libertarian standards, but it sure beats having legislators and judges in the corporations' pockets.
All of this is by way of explaining why I, a "green libertarian" whose politics are in some respects at least superficially at odds with Stephen Gaskin's, am writing a highly favorable review of this book.
See, Stephen ran for president in 2000, and this book is a collection of exceprts from writings and interviews that describe his platform. More generally, it's about what it might be like to have a hippie in the White House. And some readers will dismiss it as (what they think is) the usual hippie claptrap.
It's no such thing. For one thing, as anyone familiar with Stephen's own history is surely aware, he's strongly in favor of self-reliance at the level of the local community. He doesn't want the feds to operate charitable, welfare-promoting institutions; he wants _us_ to do it, just as they do it on the Farm (the commune in Tennessee that Stephen helped found some thirty years ago; it's still there).
He also has a healthy distrust of government authority, although you might not know it from his views on (e.g.) gun control. I'm against gun-control-by-law myself, not because I want to have an arsenal in my basement, but because I don't trust any government that doesn't trust an armed citizenry. I don't think Stephen is entirely consistent on this issue and I don't think making people disarm under government authority is any more peaceful or nonviolent than holding the gun on them yourself. There are other, more genuinely peaceful ways to encourage people to lay down their arms.
But despite a few disagreements on some points with some of Stephen's specific views on what the government should ideally do, I agree completely with where his opinions are _from_, if you follow me. There are some differences in what we see, but we're looking out from the same place.
I'd love to see the Greens and the Libertarians get closer together. And I can get behind every one of Stephen's aims as long as I'm allowed to be a little critical about exactly _how_ they're implemented.
So if you're curious what it might be like to have a hippie in the White House, check this out. Stephen and his crew are kind folks, and given the extreme unlikelihood of my _ever_ agreeing at every point with a political candidate, I'd be more likely to vote for him on the basis of his overall vision than to vote for a real creep who happens to agree with me on a few specific points. As they say, when the wrong person does the right thing, it's the wrong thing; the corollary is obvious.
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Title: This Season's People: A Book of Spiritual Teachings by Stephen Gaskin ISBN: 0913990051 Publisher: Book Publishing Company (TN) Pub. Date: 01 June, 1978 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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