A Response to Tom Woods on the 2022 Midterm Elections

I'm a subscriber to Tom Woods' email list and his recent response to the 2022 midterm elections was, I figured, a good point to start this blog. Below are various quotes and my responses, generally put, I think he and many of the newly minted conservative leaning libertarians and anarcho capitalists are missing a vital piece of the puzzle when it comes to the reality of a free society. I do not, and it's sad this requires stating outright, but I do not think these people are evil, I think they are wrong. Some of them like Tom Woods are exceptionally good at messaging and marketing, and get underserved hate from more left or liberal leaning corners of the community. That crap I do not support either, it's annoying and moronic, but I also think those people raise points which are correct and worth addressing. 

"How is it possible for there not to have been a massive and brutal repudiation of the Democrats and their bizarre and evil program, not to mention their fact-free Covid hysteria for two years that did massive damage to society without doing a thing to keep people healthy?"

The answer to this is simple: it wasn't just the Democrats pushing the nonsense and evil. The fact that two or three Republican governors weren't as utterly screwed up as the majority were in state and federal executive and legislative branches doesn't negate the fact that there were lockdowns and mask/vaccine mandates in states that were controlled by both Democrats and Republicans. Even the sainted Ron DeSantis locked down his state for a short while. This is not a clear Democrat=wrong and Republican=right issue.

"Then 2020 came, and we learned something equally as bad: a huge portion of the human race will actively cheer when people destroy their livelihoods, decimate their savings, postpone their surgeries, starve the developing world, disrupt supply chains, tear families apart, and force their grandparents to die alone and have 10 people at their funerals."

This has always been true of both Democrats and Republicans, and humanity in general. That's why we have the world and the governments we have: there is a demand for it. Most people place a high value on being busybodies to the extreme, and enjoy the idea of making their 'enemies' suffer. A smaller portion of humanity like to be the ones actually doling out that punishment, and they tend to seek political office or positions in law enforcement. The simply reality is humanity is dominated by people who would happily while away their days striking out their neighbor's eyes to address the motes within them, while ignoring the massive log jam in their own eyes.

"They won't even bother to check to see if any of this actually does any good. They won't compare the hysterical places with the semi-normal places, and find that the difference in outcomes is negligible to nonexistent. Or the Google mobility data, which shows that there's no correlation (1) between people moving around or "staying at home to save lives" and (2) health outcomes."

They don't care, that's why. It's not about outcomes, it's about control, domination, and power. Facts never mattered, humanity is not rational in the strong sense of the word, and all value is subjective. Most people value being able to dominate other people more than being right about anything in particular in a factual sense. To many people the lockdowns and mandates were the ends in themselves. Whether they worked or not didn't matter, obedience is what they sought, not effectiveness, and certainly not freedom, at least not for others, and probably not even for themselves. Humans are barely evolved chimps with automatic weapons and strong opinions, you will get outcomes in all processes commensurate with that reality.

I agree that people need to keep fighting, however the reaction of Tom Woods and others to this recent election tells me most people still don't get what they need to fight. The number of self proclaimed 'libertarians' and 'anarcho capitalists' who are utterly deflated that the Republicans seem to have only had a moderate win as opposed to a blood bath is truly disappointing, but not unexpected. It's not unexpected because most of those people were never libertarians or anarcho capitalists, they were just Republicans LARPing as radicals. They never cared about actual freedom, they never cared about liberty, they never truly understood the economic and social dynamism that markets unleash, and in fact are actively opposed to the latter. Like so many other people in this world, they just wanted to see the 'other side' suffer rather than all of humanity prosper. They are more interested in revenge rather than justice, control rather than progress, and domination rather than freedom. They never confronted the very real possibility that a truly free world might produce a society and culture they would not like or want to live in. Rather, they assume that a free world would result in a society magically aligned with what they find morally, ethically, and aesthetically pleasing, with no major deviations, and like so many are utterly dumbfounded when it turns out a lot of people disagree with them.

You need to fight the arbitrary exercise of power over people regardless of its source, be it government or private, and whether or not you agree with its intended goals, whether they be hedonist or conservative, secular or Christian, etc. You need to fight the desire of all humans to try and dominate and control others, and you can't do that when you're still unaware of and unable to come to terms with your own desires to dominate and control others.