Following the media campaign against Senator Trent Lott, many people were astonished by the Senator’s willingness to jettison all political principle for the sake of saving his status as Majority Leader. Why would a conservative Republican suddenly find himself embracing the full panoply of the left-wing racial agenda and flog himself so mercilessly?

Consider what a Chinese political prisoner under Maoist Communism had to say about the role of self-criticism, denunciation, and confession:

We’re supposed to venerate Martin Luther King, Jr., but that’s not easy for a believer in economic liberty. Time and again, King called on us to “question the capitalistic economy” and “restructure America.”

“You see, my friends,” said King, “you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?’”

“The real choice isn’t between liberty and security; it is between our security and the state’s.”

An interview request from a famed center-left publication allowed me to put together some further thoughts on the rise of red-state fascism in America, and the libertarian response. So here are my notes on the topic, prior to publication.

Our times are much like the 1930s, when it was widely assumed that there are only two viable ideological positions: communism or fascism. Liberalism of the old school was considered to be a failure, and not even worth considering.

Which is a greater cause of cultural and moral decline: the private sector or the government? Asked another way, which is doing more to promote a return to civilized social norms: the market or the central state? The answer highlights a dividing line between left and right.

The essence of the economic order is the price system. Without it, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated in 1920, society is doomed to mass starvation.

Even the KGB and the Gulag couldn’t entirely wipe out the price system, so the USSR managed to stagger along, but only through suffering and bloodshed.

Our own Gosplan, the US Congress, hasn’t been as extreme, thanks to the American people and our traditions of liberty. But it’s still the biggest collection of economic meddlers and ignoramuses west of Moscow.

Give it up, drug warriors. You will never stop the production and consumption of marijuana, cocaine, or any other substance that people want to grow and repackage for others who want to buy. The attempt to do so vastly increases the price and thereby benefits some producers at the expense of others, breeds crime and corruption in public agencies, and violates people’s civil liberties.

Americans, perhaps like all people, have a remarkable capacity for tuning out unpleasantries that do not directly affect them. I’m thinking here of wars on foreign lands, but also the astonishing fact that the United States has become the world’s most jail-loving country, with well over 1 in 100 adults living as slaves in prison. Building and managing prisons, and locking people up, has become a major facet of government power in our time, and it is long past time for those who love liberty to start to care.