From its 2008 blunder of giving Barrack Obama the peace prize, this year's Nobel Prize in literature went to legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
While this may seem an odd choice, Dylan's lyrics have long been recognized as poetry. Dylan first came to prominence in the 1960's and was originally known for his political songs like Blowing in the Wind and The Times They Are a Changing.
While Dylan abandoned political songs by the mid-sixties (some of his songs Like a Rolling Stone and Positively Fourth Street suggest hostility to the sixties left who claimed to be "free thinking rebels against conformity" but strictly enforce a party line in politics and aesthetics) he is still regarded as a man of the left.
However, Dylan has broken with leftist orthodoxy on a number of occasions. In 2015. I wrote about how Dylan seemed to have some sympathy for Supply Side economics and was a dissenter from the cult of Obama.
Dylan's early political songs focused on opposition to laws enforcing racial segregation and war. The left-right paradigm of the time placed his support for ending Jim Crow and a peaceful foreign policy. This placed Dylan squarely on the left side of the political spectrum. But opposition to laws that deny individuals their natural rights to property and contract based on their race, as well as opposition to war, are more constituents with libertarianism than modern liberalism.
Campaign for Liberty Chairman Ron Paul quoted from Dylan's classic anti-war anthem "Masters of War" to introduce a chapter in Swords into Plowshares.
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PDFTags: Swords into Plowshares, protest music