I spent almost a week writing this long essay. It was exhausting, and personally important. I’ve been betrayed by my intellectual tribe — parts of it, anyway.<\/p>\n
Last August, I met former Belarusian Presidential candidate Yaroslav Romanchuk at a libertarian conference near Lviv, Ukraine. He was somewhat of a Ron Paul figure, a businessman-turned-politician advocating radical free market reforms in Belarus. The consequences for being a libertarian in or near Russia are much more severe than in the United States. In 1994 he faced pressure: to stay in business he’d have to either join the mafia or join the government. He ended up abandoning the import-export business he had spent years building.<\/p>\n
We joked about America’s RT (Russia Today) news service — that the United States government should sponsor a Russian language libertarian channel in Russia and Eastern Europe. The joke, which for us needed no explanation, was that governments can invoke principles of freedom when they undermine a rival government, while simultaneously behaving like a savage tyrant at home. This should not be difficult to understand.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
http:\/\/romaninukraine.com\/putins-libertarians\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent almost a week writing this long essay. It was exhausting, and personally important. I’ve been betrayed by my intellectual tribe — parts of it, anyway. Last August, I met former Belarusian Presidential candidate Yaroslav Romanchuk at a libertarian conference near Lviv, Ukraine. He was somewhat of a Ron Paul figure, a businessman-turned-politician advocating … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":95,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[50],"tags":[48],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/romanskaskiw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/romanskaskiw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/romanskaskiw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/romanskaskiw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/95"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/romanskaskiw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1044"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/romanskaskiw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1319,"href":"http:\/\/romanskaskiw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions\/1319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/romanskaskiw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/romanskaskiw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/romanskaskiw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}