For some time now, I’ve had an item for sale online. It’s an antique tractor seat, forged about a century ago in nearby Hoosick, New York, and various collectors prize these particular kind – though they generally don’t fetch much at market. Mine’s priced well above the going rate, and that’s quite deliberate: If someone wants it badly enough, and is willing to pay extra, I’ll part with it.
Author: Alex R. Knight III
Alex R. Knight III is originally from Groveland, Massachusetts, where he grew up listening to rock and roll, reading J.R.R. Tolkien, and the comic books of the 1970s. He today lives in rural southern Vermont where he welds, plays guitar, paints abstracts, reads avidly, and writes. He is the author of the short fiction collection, Tales From Dark 7, in addition to the novels The Morris Room, and Empty World. And, he is a Voluntaryist. Visit his MeWe group here.
Bad People
Popular gun control advocacy position: “We have to keep guns out of the hands of bad people.” Well, then the best way to do that is to abolish government.
What Donald Trump Has Shown Us All
It was a fluke, really – a case of the enemy having their guard down that enabled Donald J. Trump to navigate his way to presidential victory in 2016 to begin with. Personally, I chalk it up to overconfidence on the part of the establishment: A smug certainty that such an entrenched, politically-connected public figure as former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could easily wipe an outspoken billionaire-entrepreneur-turned-TV-personality off the map without much rigging of the system. But of course, they were wrong.
Fried Chicken in a Hardware Store
Or, horror fiction on a libertarian website, if you prefer (see my bio below). Most of us have heard this expression, but for the uninitiated, it means attempting to market a product, service, or idea to the wrong or inappropriate audience or demographic. Thing is, I recall a hardware store in New Hampshire about 20 years ago that did sell fried chicken – and it was delicious.
In Government We No Longer Trust
The results, so far, of the 2020 US presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been nothing so much as chaos – and where they go from here is absolutely anybody’s guess, but I’ll venture one (admittedly obvious) prediction: Whichever “side” loses will regard the outcome as having been stolen and achieved fraudulently by the opposition.
Impossible Simplicity
It’s incredibly fundamental and basic, isn’t it? Don’t physically attack anyone, and don’t steal or destroy what belongs to them. And aside from those two rules, do whatever the fuck you please. And don’t ask permission.
Extrication
With respect to libertarianism, I’m far past the point where I’m really interested in changing other people’s minds. Ultimately, I don’t care what or how you think at all. I only care that if what you believe is something that calls for the control of my life and/or property, that I’m able to find some way to extricate myself from your plans.
If Only We Could Escape
In a 1972 interview, here’s what Murray Rothbard had to say about voting: “I really don’t care about whether people vote or not. To me the important thing is, who do you support. Who do you hope will win the election? You can be a non-voter and say ‘I don’t want to sanction the state’…
Suicide
Let me be clear: I consider suicide a tremendous tragedy. It has touched my life and my family very deeply, and personally. It seems to me that there are a thousand and one options, in most cases, before one should undertake such a dramatic, final, and irreversible course of action. That said, in the final analysis, the decision to live or not to live is – and should be – 100% the exclusive choice of the owner of that life – and never some outside party. Ever.
Human Nature
I was just recently contemplating the fact that Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848), Gustave de Molinari’s The Production of Security (1849), and many if not most of Lysander Spooner’s core works all coincided with one another temporally.