the libertarian divide over the south central farmers issue

There are many examples out there refuting the silly stereotypes and claims regarding libertarians as being all the same. There are many different types of libertarians in reality, and certain issues bring difference of opinion amongst them to the forefront. The most recent example of this involves the plight of the South Central Farmers out in Los Angeles.

I'm sure that liberals and lefties are assuming that all libertarians are siding with Ralph Horowitz, the man who is claiming ownership of the land and is using the city goons to get rid of those pesky farmers. Indeed, there are some libertarians that I am aware of who are indeed taking this position. Examples of this come from Kirsten at Enjoy Every Sandwich and certain people over at the Mises Institute blog.

An assumption that all libertarians would be siding against the farmers would not be true though. The other side of the debate is being defended by some libertarians. Examples here include blog posts by Rad Geek, David at the view from below, along with Brad Spangler's comments in the Mises discussion linked to above.

I don't have the time to spell out my full opinion on this, but I will say that I personally am siding with the farmers, and not just because I love what they've done with the land over the past 14 years.

update & links

I'm back... sort of. Posting will remain quite scarce for the next couple of months or so. My mother has just returned home from spending the past month in the hospital and is extremely sick and crippled. She requires constant care and attention, and I'm the primary person in charge of that. With that in mind, it's obvious that blogging has become an extremely low priority for me.

There are a few things I'd like to mention here briefly. These things have already been mentioned elsewhere, but I'd like to link to them here anyway.

* freedomSLUT: This great new resource provides liberty oriented social bookmarking - kind of like del.icio.us for libertarians.

* 2 new Myspace groups for radical libertarians: It's nice to see such subversive ideas being promoted over in that popular interweb networking scene. There is the Confederation of Agorist for agorists and Anarcho-Individualists for anarchists of an individualist persuasion.

* Thanks to Roderick Long, Joseph Stromberg's "English Enclosures and Soviet Collectivization: Two Instances of an Anti-Peasant Mode of Development" is now available online at the Molinari Institute site. This is the excellent essay from The Agorist Quarterly that I blogged about back in April. I must also thank Stromberg himself for not only writing the essay but also allowing it to be published online.