[Urbane Guerrilla]

I see by his post Radar doesn't actually want libertarianism to occur anywhere. Why then did he bother? He might as well have stayed over in the hard Left, whence he seems to have originated.

I want free peoples all over the globe, where Radar is quite explicitly content to leave them in their chains. Chains don't come off without a little crowbar work, you know. I say his views are quite immoral, quite unconscionable -- and quite eccentric, unless the man is at bottom a slavemonger, which on the evidence of his writing and the attitudes he has expressed since I first made his acquaintance, he is. His "don't do anything to free anybody ever" attitude would warm Hitler's cockles, and Stalin's too; the same thing warms them both, so he's not eccentric from a fascistocommunistic point of view. He's not happy with any freedom of thought except that freedom to agree with his -- all his isolationism, all his absence of foreign policy, all his just leaving the Gap to ruin and cause us of the Core more troubles. Phooey on that "idea." It's so poorly founded I'm surprised he allows himself to retain it; I certainly would not. I don't have his manifest xenophobia. Read between his lines and you can see it -- and explicitly in post #53 he lays out not a nation, but a sort of vast monastery, disconnected from the rest of the globe. I've said before that isolationism is a nonstarter; national isolationism would only really work in the absence of any other nation state anywhere on the Earth. This not being the case, some other approach to global socioeconomics seems called for.

Frankly, no American is an imperialist. Our temporary and halfhearted dabbling in it after the Spanish-American War goes to prove the point. It had its roots in mercantilist economic theories of international trade, and we never hewed to these, having started in laissez-faire capitalism, which unlike mercantilism's tying of cash crops and resources from the colonies and empire for manufactured goods returning to those colonies, and free trade elsewhere discouraged, we began as all about free trade, and we've stuck with it, even when we think it hurts, as in NAFTA. Capitalism trumps imperialism and makes globalism -- and makes globalism more efficient too. We preferred and prefer prosperity to naked power, as our national behavior shows. We aren't in, at bottom, any imperial habit. We also know the only real prosperity is a general prosperity. We've never lost sight of that.