Over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, Steve Horwitz has a long and thoughful piece that every libertarian ought to read and pass along to five friends.

After a good deal of history on Ron Paul and his unsavory associates and associations, Horwitz gets to the heart of the matter:

So why deal with this now, when libertarianism is so hot? Because those newsletters are not what libertarianism is and the sooner and louder we make that clear, the better. There are too many young people who don’t understand all of this and who we need to help see the alternative liberal vision of libertarianism – and to understand that “liberal libertarianism” is radical, principled, and humane and not “beltway selling out.” To do that, we need to confront the past and explicitly reject it. That doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting Ron Paul in electoral politics, but it does mean that we cannot pretend the past doesn’t exist and it means that Paul and the others involved need to do the right thing and take explicit responsibility for what they said two decades ago. That has not happened yet. Then we need a complete and utter rejection of the paleo world-view and we need to create a movement that will simply not be attractive to racists, homophobes, anti-Semites etc., by emphasizing, as we have done at this blog, libertarianism’s liberal roots.

What we need right now is Rothbard’s vision of a free society as sketched in For a New Liberty, but we need it defended better. More carefully. More richly. More empirically. More humanely. More progressively. More tolerantly. With better scholarship. And we have to do it in a way that’s immune to the charge that libertarians don’t care about making the world a better place, especially for the least well off and those historically victimized by the color of their skin, their gender, their sexual orientation, or anything else that’s irrelevant to their moral status as human actors.

The writings of the paleolibertarians will continue to stain that project unless and until the rest of the libertarian movement stops trying to apologize for them (“you don’t understand the context” or “it was a long time ago” or “Ron’s from a different generation”) or kicking the can down the road because Ron Paul might win (“why bring this up now when we’re winning?” or “Libertarians just like the circular firing squad”) or just plain saying they don’t matter because it’s all media bias (“it’s just the liberal media trying to destroy the libertarian candidate”).

It’s time to face our ugly past head on and to explicitly reject it. And it is the past of every libertarian. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t there, or weren’t alive, or think it’s stupid: if you call yourself a libertarian and especially if you support Ron Paul, it’s part of your past like it or not.