If there is one principle, and only one principle, that libertarians ought to apply when considering strategy, it is this: radical decentralization of state power must be our relentless goal.…
…democracy as a concept must be attacked and ridiculed whenever possible. Private property forms the basis for a free society, while majority rule — i.e., the system that permits the theft of private property — forms the antithesis of a free society.Worth a read.
Four Common Strategies
When libertarians talk about what must be done, the discussion tends to revolve around four common strategy options. None of them are mutually exclusive necessarily and there can be plenty of overlap between them.
1. The Political Option
The first, we’ll call the political option, or to borrow a tired phrase, “working within the system.”…
2. Strategic Withdrawal
A second approach libertarians often consider might be loosely termed strategic withdrawal. You may have heard of the “Benedict option” being discussed by Catholics unhappy with the direction of the Church and the broader culture.…
This approach involves separating, withdrawing, or segregating in some way from the larger society and political landscape..…
3. Hearts and Minds
A third tactic that libertarians often advocate we might call “winning hearts and minds.” This approach is multi-pronged, involving education, academia, traditional and social media, religion, books and articles, literature, and even pop culture. …
4. Resistance
Of course another strategy often discussed among libertarians involves simple resistance to the state, whether open or covert. This tactic contemplates actions like civil disobedience, tax protests, evading or ignoring regulations, and engaging in agorism and black markets.
It also contemplates the use of technological advances to advance freedom. “Third way” libertarian technologists promote this approach, citing advances like encryption, cybercurrencies, and platforms like Uber — all of which when first developed existed in a sort of grey area as regards their legality.…
Mises Dailies
Four Ways to Build a Free SocietyJeff Deist
49 comments:
What's the difference between this and the usual line from anarchists?
Does it escape Libertarians how they arrived at ownership of land and the other common resources?
I don't subscribe to Proudhons "all property is theft", after all to steal implies it was owned by someone else.
Personally I believe we are all custodians of the planet with equivalent claim to it's bounty. Exploitation would be with a common understanding of mutual benefit.
Not a free for all, game of finders keepers enforced at the pointy end of a gun, which is all their philosophy boils down to. Maybe I should make my objections known using the only currency they believe in.....
The ruling elite - that's a libertarian term, I prefer the ruling class - stole all the land in Europe during the Middle Ages, either through conquest of other countries, or just seizing the land and throwing the peasants off it, or letting them stay but making them pay high taxes. The Normans conquered Britain and most of the landed aristocracy are direct descendents of the French.
Carlos no need to capitalize the "L" in libertarian the author doesn't....
allotment of land is the Old Testament model God laid down via the Mosaic Law for Israel... they were "tenants of God's land", had to pay a tithe to Levites and comply with other aspects of law in debt of their tenancy... it forms the basis of today's "borrow > default > forgive > borrow > default > forgive > borrow...." model that current TPTB want to impose...
Paul taught "issue > redeem > issue > redeem > issue...." (grace) to we of the nations apart from Israel...
So we continue to run what is at core an Israelite/Mosaic system being imposed by nominal Christians under heavy OT influence and many actual Israelites in current TPTB.... its never going to work well here imo... Paul's message of the grace of God, ie "issue > redeem" goes completely ignored in current Christendumb and instead they want to franchise church soup kitchens and other "charity" works in debt to correct the economic chaos they impose in the first place by ignoring the current grace of God...
If we ever get this figured out economically its going to mark a major concurrent spiritual change in mankind...
A major concurrent spiritual change in mankind would be nice.
Secular humanist states all round please.
I'm wracking my brain for the last one..... The axial age?
Clear and present danger. People used to make fun of me when I said that libertarianism was hostile to democracy.
FTR I never did Dan... ;)
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." - James Madison
MMTer “analysis” of libertarianism is analogous to MSM “analysis” of Obama’s installation of authentic Nazis in Ukraine: Nothing but complete fabrication, lies and a complete refusal to face or acknowledge the truth of the matter. You are obviously all scared to death of libertarian analysis or else you would meticulously and fairly address and engage all of the points in our analysis and refute them. You choose evasion and lies because you know that you cannot refute them.
The MAJOR problem that has always faced mankind is VIOLENCE, murder, pillage, theft, enslavement etc… Private property and self ownership of one’s body solved all of those problems and facilitated our amazing modern luxuries. The meticulous differentiation between aggressive and defensive violence is part of EVERY libertarian analysis and it is based upon the NON-AGGRESSION PRINCIPLE. The first thing one reads in Rothbard’s seminal “Power and Market” is the definition of the three types of violent intervention. One then differentiates this from non-violence and respect for the bodies and property of others. Someone as clueless as Matt Franko dares not allow those simple but precise differentiations to enter his brain.
Bad things do not happen under the non-aggression principle. The market does not fail and the elite does not make off with the majority of wealth in society when the NAP is enforced. Gabriel Kolko demonstrated in 1963 that the “Robber Barons” figured out that they could not monopolize the economy without creating and controlling the government regulatory system. Laissez faire did not and does not fail. I’ve owned the book since 1973 so I have decades of experience watching “progressives” pretend it does not exist.
http://tinyurl.com/pgpfn4d
Similarly, Shepsle and Rabushka showed in 1972 that big government social democracy in multi-ethnic societies invariably and quickly breaks down into ethnic conflict and often ethnic slaughter. I’ve also owned that book since 1973.
http://tinyurl.com/np6zrtp
Multi-ethnic Africa tried “democracy” without private property. Look where it is today. There’s a section in the book about Burundi. And, guess what? Multi-ethnic Burundi is again in the news this week. . Of course, there are never any apologies from the “progressives”.
MMTers, being totalitarians, are hostile to private property. The entire raison d'être of MMT is to facilitate the total and complete looting of society by whatever gang of thugs happens to be in control of the “sovereign”. $200 trillion in government promises can easily be paid because (it is argued) the current government gang of thugs will never be “revenue constrained” because it can buy EVERYTHING with its unlimited supply of funny money. Of course, you guys (and not Stalin or Pol Pot or Dubya) will invariably be in charge of that system everywhere on the planet now and into the future. Right?
Democracy is nothing more than two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner.
http://tinyurl.com/q76bqtg
What's the difference between this and the usual line from anarchists?
There are different flavors of anarchism, that is, anti-statism, "the state" in the Hobbesian sense being viewed as the source of asymmetrical power and privilege that is artificially imposed in interest of social order. Most anarchists are Rouseauians that don't regard a Hobbesian state as a necessary condition for social order.
The fundamental difference between anarchists of the left and right is the stance regarding property rights.
There are essentially three positions.
1. Property right is absolute and dominant.
2. Human and civil rights take precedence over other rights including property.
3. There is no right to property.
There is also a fourth position that rights are merely legal and institutional, therefore, relative to context such as culture or utility. I think that most anarchists would reject this position. Most rights advocates seek to ground their view in natural rights, so they would disagree with this POV as justifying just about anything.
From the ethical POV, the first three views are deontological (rule-based), and the fourth is consequentialist (preference-based).
Carlos no need to capitalize the "L" in libertarian the author doesn't....
There is a difference between "Libertarian" and "libertarian." The term "libertarian" apples to the set of anarchists (anti-statists), left and right. The term "Libertarian" is generally used to denote a recent school of libertarianism of the American right.
The term libertarian was first used by late-Enlightenment freethinkers to refer to the metaphysical belief in free will, as opposed to determinism.[12] The first recorded use was in 1789, when William Belsham wrote about libertarianism in opposition to "necessitarian", i.e. determinist, views.[13][14]
Libertarian came to mean an advocate or defender of liberty, especially in the political and social spheres, as early as 1796, when the London Packet printed on 12 February: "Lately marched out of the Prison at Bristol, 450 of the French Libertarians."[15] The word was again used in a political sense in 1802, in a short piece critiquing a poem by "the author of Gebir", and has since been used with this meaning.[16][17][18]
The use of the word libertarian to describe a new set of political positions has been traced to the French cognate, libertaire, coined in a scathing letter French libertarian communist Joseph Déjacque wrote to mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1857, castigating him for his sexist political views.[19][20] Déjacque also used the term for his anarchist publication Le Libertaire: Journal du Mouvement Social, which was printed from 9 June 1858 to 4 February 1861 in New York City.[21][22] In the mid-1890s, Sébastien Faure began publishing a new Le Libertaire while France's Third Republic enacted the lois scélérates ("villainous laws"), which banned anarchist publications in France. Libertarianism has frequently been used as a synonym for anarchism since this time.[23][24][25]
Although the word libertarian continues to be widely used to refer to socialists internationally, its meaning in the United States has deviated from its political origins.[26][27] Libertarianism in the United States has been described as conservative on economic issues and liberal on personal freedom[28] (for common meanings of conservative and liberal in the United States); it is also often associated with a foreign policy of non-interventionism.[29][30] Since the resurgence of neoliberalism in the 1970s, free-market capitalist libertarianism has spread beyond North America via think tanks and political parties.[31]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Etymology
I'm wracking my brain for the last one..... The axial age?
Maybe the Second Axial Age. The first one was in the 8th to 3rd century BCE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age
How do I explain the non-aggression principle to a thug?
"Democracy is nothing more than two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner."
What do you propose to replace democracy?
Bob Roddis,
http://www.capx.co/a-little-too-much-freedom-has-led-to-socialism-for-the-rich/
What country is ruled by democracy now? What states have ever been ruled by democracy other than ancient Athens, which condemned Socrates to death for impiety and corrupting the youth.
There is no optimal solution without raising the level of collective consciousness.
The question is what practical solution can be applied in different countries to do the least harm and most good possible with the available resources, of which the level of collective consciousness is one.
The problem both Anarchists and Libertarians have is that they deny the rise of the Big Man. All ape societies end up with a Big Man and ours are no different.
So the question is do you want a Big Man you notionally control, or one that you don't.
Because those are the only choices.
Neil Wilson said...
The problem both Anarchists and Libertarians have is that they deny the rise of the Big Man. All ape societies end up with a Big Man and ours are no different.
So the question is do you want a Big Man you notionally control, or one that you don't.
Because those are the only choices.
That allegation is preposterous, baseless and without any basis in theory or history. It was addressed and eviscerated in the Kolko book I cited above. A main purpose of the prohibition on the initiation of force and violence is to defang “The Big Man”. And it works. Create a center of political power and evil people and the .1% will control it for their own devices. Who controls the present funny money fiat system today? Who is getting rich off it of it and who is getting impoverished?
This topic is addressed every 11 minutes by libertarian analysis. Your meticulous unfamiliarity with this analysis is not a special wild card that wins the debate.
Re: "A little too much freedom has led to socialism for the rich"
Socialism for the rich is the inevitable result of the economic interventionism proposed by both the left and the crony pro-business types. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE if the non-aggression principle is enforced.
Again, this has been discussed, explained and analyzed in utter detail by libertarians and Austrians about every 11 minutes for decades. Being oblivious to this analysis is not your ace in the hole.
"IT IS IMPOSSIBLE if the non-aggression principle is enforced. "
Isn't private property based on coercion?
Bob, I really want to know what you PROPOSE.
"Create a center of political power and evil people and the .1% will control it for their own devices. "
True, but good people can too. We are arguing for the good people, you are arguing it can't happen. But I think we are really allies even if we don't know it.
"showed in 1972 that big government social democracy in multi-ethnic societies invariably and quickly breaks down into ethnic conflict and often ethnic slaughter."
One question - do you support open borders? I fail to see how ethnic conflict discredits MMT.
Quote: A main purpose of the prohibition on the initiation of force and violence is to defang “The Big Man”. And it works."
Oh Boy. Bob Robbis is back.
So Bob Roddis is literally saying aggression-free safe spaces to cure toxic masculinity of the Big Man?
Bob is now the Libertarian SJW. Go back to tumblr with you safe safe PC crap.
Does your non-aggression principle apply to mircoagressions Bob?
The problem with AnarchoAutist like Bob is that he can't conceive idea that concept of aggression itself is a socio-political construct that depends on a historical context and cannot be argued for in the absolute abstract.
Tom, Matt, Dan, myself, and many other from both the non-autist right, left, and moderate positions have pointed this out probably well over a hundred times by now and he still come backs like retarded puppy with the exact same shit.
Bob, I see you compared us to those Ebil Nazis again for no damn reason. I suggest you get a vpn ( they are pretty cheap now) go to 8chan /pol/ and proceed to spam your anarcho-crapitalism non-aggression BS to your fellow autist trolls who are actual Nazis. The lols would be fantastic and they will never get tired of your crap because they are just stupid as you are and they have converted more anarcho-caps to nazism and in your case it would be an intellectual improvement.
Oh dear Bob it all falls apart when you start trying to enforce the non-aggression principle. To enforce non-aggression someone has to possess superior force and power, with no democratic checks and balances apparently.
Unless the world goes all flower power on us, that is a ridiculous utopian pipe dream.
You and your kind will be using excessive force to lock up every marginalised Tom, Dick and Harry threatening your damn property rights, not to mention the right to bear arms. Nothing could go wrong with a non-aggression principle could it?
I should know not to engage you, it flys straight over your head. Tangential thoughts are welcomed.
Carlos:
You should write a new chapter in "1984":
"Meticulous enforcement of the prohibition against the initiation of violence will CAUSE violence." [An important addition to "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH].
Somehow, if the vast majority of people decide to not aggress against their neighbors then such an eventuality will invariably cause much more aggression than if they actually planned to engage in violence in the first place, right? Somehow, if religious people were to renounce the initiation of violence against, for example, non-religious people that this would necessarily cause those peaceful people to become major dickheads about petty and minimal property violations, right? Because being peaceful and respectful towards other people invariably leads to being a petty dickhead, right? Cause and effect.
Wow. You've convinced me. I'm back to supporting murder, pillage and rape. Thanks for sharing your deep thoughts.
Well I am choosing freedom to ignore your bogus claims to property and claim my own property.
Thank you very much, roll over Bob.
Carlos:
I suppose that my neighbors must have bogus claims to owning their own cars and bodies, right? Is it OK with you if I steal their cars and rape the neighbors? And then burn down their homes to which they have only bogus property claims anyway.
I have to admit it. I get a big kick out of you guys finding it necessary to twist and distort well understood and unambiguous words and concepts in order to justify your lust for political violence.
Bob, you are the one violating people bodies by violently excluding them against their will from necessary resource like land by claiming a right to private property. Private Property is a violence voucher against other people and violates the NAP.
The reason some property claims can be just is because violence is necessary part of life and all civil society is based on a organized hierarchy of violent impositions aka lawful authority. If you do not acknowledge the absolute facts of violence as a necessary part of life then you do not live in reality and have nothing to say about it. Go back to your hugbox.
'I suppose that my neighbors must have bogus claims to owning their own cars and bodies, right? Is it OK with you if I steal their cars and rape the neighbors? And then burn down their homes to which they have only bogus property claims anyway.'
BR = reductio ad absurdum, per usual
"A main purpose of the prohibition on the initiation of force and violence is to defang"
No law without enforcement. If you can enforce a prohibition then you are the Big Man.
So as usual with Libertarians they are internally inconsistent. It's the same on the anarchist side.
And then they rely on reductio ad absurdum arguments to try and justify the nonsense. Thankfully most people see right through this sort of childish argument and chuckle quietly to themselves.
"The Big Man" is effectively dealt with in some cultures:
In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe “a man who … repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women—someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.” When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, “Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”
from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-psychopath-means/
@Bob: I am genuinely confused, how is this non-aggression principle actually enforced? I tried Google but ended up even more confused.
If we don't have recourse to the rule of law, how can we be safe from criminals? How can we do business if the rule of law can't be enforced, if contract law isn't enforced? Your posts seem to imply that it would somehow all happen voluntarily, but that would require all humans to be beyond reproach, which doesn't seem to be the case in the world we live in.
As Neil says, the minute someone or some organisation has the power to enforce the non-aggression principle then that person has the potential to be corrupted/captured or at the very least be biased. It just seems to be completely impractical and utopian.
Easy to pontificate on non-aggression when all you got you owe to some brutal aggressor ancestor.
Also easy to theorize on things without having any sort of proof of concept. Even many sorts of communism, widely criticized by libertarians, have worked in stable societies for a good while, but no one has ever seen this ideal paradise of non-aggression anarcho-capitalists (even if we ignore all non-physical aggression and bullying practiced by the so-called "libertarians") in practice.
And wherever the concept has been remotely tried it failed within one or two years, even in small cohesive societies.
Boooooring pseudo-philosophizing which does not get us anywhere. Call me back when you have founded your ideal paradise and got it working for longer than one month in Mars Bob.
"The Big Man" is effectively dealt with in some cultures:
Ancient and modern tribal cultures have a way of dealing with enforcement the same way they govern themselves — through a system of elders and group consensus. They had no formal state apparatus. The "nation" was group of tribes with no government of its own. Tribes got together to decide consensually what to do as a larger group, e.g., to present a unified front in defending territory. They didn't have militaries, either, since all the able bodied were warriors as well as hunters.
Government as separate from the people (the Big Man) didn't arise until after the agricultural revolution and the creation of surplus societies that gave rise to class structure that separated workers from priests, warriors, and rulers. Once there was a surplus rather than subsistence, the issue of distribution of the surplus arose and Big Men got involved institutionally and became privileged not only socially and politically, but also legally.
… the Big Chimp only lasts awhile: youth trumps ageing. The rest of them don't exactly vote him in. From one angle he could be considered a success in evolution; from another he serves species propagation. He doesn't exactly own his body either, because of the oxidising process and recycling of the atoms: - its on loan like every other life form. From my pov, no-one should confuse the space-suit with the consciousness evolving within. Unless you believe consciousness arises from the atoms which is either an assumption or working hypothesis.
The success of one Big Man is similar; or a murder (corvus) of Big Men. Human beings have more responsibility because they vote for them. What they would really like is a ruler with a Big Heart. But for that, people will have to learn to look within. Mind has no answers; just a question generator and terminal ego. The success of the human persona is a gift in that the physical emotional and mental nature have been coordinated and applied to some goal; but the unexplored territory is the human heart.
Just as the ape got tired of being an ape and transformed itself into a human (perhaps with a little help), the human will get tired of all of his days ending in nothing and transcend, transmute and transform himself into the consciousness that he already is, on the inside. From this pov, that is the history of the world. There is a story, about a little owl, who stayed awake against the advice of his parents and all of the owl pundits, and flew on the back and promise of a white swan, far above the dark forest – and Yes, there was a Sun …..!
And somewhere, one third in along the trailing arms of the Milky Way, there is a little solar system with a beautiful blue-green jewel of a planet, absolutely unique amongst the stars – but somebody is thinking: ' my they have evolved quickly, but still going ape ….'
Neil:
"anarcho-capitalists" and right-wing so-called "libertarians" are neither anarchists nor libertarians. Ancapism is simply a pure nonsense doctrine which serves no purpose other than as right-wing propaganda to dupe imbeciles, and right-wing "libertarianism" is just the usual right-wing hierarchical authoritarianism, in a slightly different package.
Bob Roddis is a sick, delusional and profoundly dishonest individual. But many of the followers of these absurd cults are. It's really quite sad.
"Shepsle and Rabushka showed in 1972 that big government social democracy in multi-ethnic societies invariably and quickly breaks down into ethnic conflict and often ethnic slaughter. I’ve also owned that book since 1973."
It's quite amaxing how Roddis repeats the same lies no matter how many times it is pointed out to him that what he is saying is false. The man literally has no interest in truth at all.
Wow Philippe. I see you are still alive and engaging in your "nuanced" approach to differentiating the initiation of violence from defensive violence so that the difference just disappears. Amazing. You've presented a wonderful addition to the study of violence against women and children.
Regarding Shepsle and Rabushka, the entire book is available free as a pdf here:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.363.6093&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Read about Switzerland on page 208 and item #4 on page 216 about reducing the scope of "public goods". The more "public goods", the more stuff the various ethnic groups have to fight over come election time.
I've read it before and educated you on it twice before but you continue to spout the same nonsense because you're not interested in saying things which are accurate and true if they get in the way of your usual absurd posturing.
Jeff Deist: A Wall Street lawyer specializing in murders and executions, sorry I mean mergers and acquisitions. Yeah, what an anti-statist anarchist. Give me a break.
I guess it should be obvious why someone like Philippe is so hostile to a prohibition upon the initiation of violence and a prohibition upon lying. A screen shot of Shepsle and Rabushka, page 216:
http://tinyurl.com/oomo7os
I'm so intrigued with the concept of defensive violence.
A better kind of violence I imagine.
Carlos: Ever take a first year law school course on criminal law or torts?
1. Suppose you are sitting on your front porch with your dog and her newborn puppies along with your two year old toddler. You just happen to have an iron pipe sitting nearby. Suddenly, a crazed maniacal person jumps out of a car with a razor sharp meat cleaver shouting that he is going to chop up you, the baby, the puppies and the mama dog. As he runs toward the baby swinging the meat cleaver, you smack him in the head with the pipe knocking him out. You, the baby, the puppies and the mama dog are now safe. That is defensive violence. It is justifiable. It's not a crime and it's not a tort.
2. Suppose you are sitting on your front porch and just happen to have an iron pipe sitting nearby. A couple of senior citizens come walking by. Just for fun, you grab the pipe and beat them both about the head with the pipe killing them. That is the initiation of violence. It's a crime (and technically also a tort). You will probably go to prison for life or be executed.
Libertarianism meticulously distinguishes between those two types of events and strictly prohibits #2 regardless of the excuse made for it. That's all it is. There is no secret agenda.
Are you really that dumb and/or dishonest? As I endless repeat, the only engagement of libertarian ideas is by way of the total distortion of well known and well understood words and concepts. Those tactics prove that you already know that you cannot refute our analysis in a fair and honest manner or else you wouldn't ALWAYS resort to such nonsense. You prove my point for the 5,423rd time.
the Shepsle and Rabushka paper is about what they call 'plural' societies, which they describe as follows:
"The hallmark of the plural society, and the feature that distinguishes it from its pluralistic counterpart, is the practice of politics almost exclusively along ethnic lines. To put the emphasis differently, in the plural society — but not in the pluralistic society — the overwhelming preponderance of political conflicts is perceived in ethnic terms. Permanent ethnic communities acting cohesively on nearly all political issues determine a plural society and distinguish it from a culturally heterogeneous, nonplural society."
(p.20)
I've informed you of this a few times, but there seems to be something seriously wrong with your brain.
Philippe:
Yes, and then 90% of the book is nothing but example upon example of election behavior in plural societies, with the lone exception to the rule being Switzerland due to its decentralized canton system. There are no examples of multi-cultural democracies which are not "plural societies" in the book except Switzerland.
The lesson of the book is that if the goal is an end to ethnic strife in plural societies:
a. Limit the extent of multi-ethnic elections [Switzerland]; or, if that cannot be done,
b. Limit the amount of “public goods” subject to a multi-cultural election [more free markets].
So you are lying. As always.
Most western countries are 'multicultural' to some extent and practically all of them are not what S+R would describe as 'plural societies', as politics within them is not conducted "almost exclusively along ethnic lines". The US for example is 'multicultural' but you don't have large political parties which stand solely for the interests of one ethnic group over another. The UK is similarly a 'multicultural' country but there are no political parties which are affiliated to one particular ethnic group against others. People of different ethnicities vote for all sorts of different parties. And there is nothing 'social democratic' about politics conducted "almost exclusively along ethnic lines".
In societies where there are extreme divisions between ethnic groups, which are manifested in the existence of politics conducted "almost exclusively along ethnic lines", the problem is not public goods per se but the underlying ethnic division which leads to ethnic conflict over things such as public goods. Privatising these things would do nothing to change the underlying causes of the conflict. In fact, denying an oppressed ethnic group access to public goods would probably increase conflict. Furthermore 'the private market' is not even able to adequately produce many public goods (or not able to produce them at all). The real solution is to resolve the underlying reasons for conflict and to try to work together.
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