Author: Alex R. Knight III

I’ve written elsewhere, in places too numerous now to recall, about the fact that many if not most libertarians make the erroneous – and largely false – assumption that the average person actually wants to be free.  All the evidence demonstrates that they don’t. There’s another reason why libertarianism fails to gain mass appeal:  It’s too rational.

There were differences between these two ostensibly “antiestablishment” lifestyles, and not all of them merely temporal.  The Beats projected a different vision than the hippies who followed after them, and it was one that, I contend, appealed much more to an individualistic sensibility.

Increasingly, I see myself as a kind of lapsed libertarian, and veering into political atheism.  Call it environmental conditioning, if you want. I just see it as the way things are.

… a little recent repartee from Quora: Is socialism when the government does stuff? Alex Knight BA from Union Institute & University Answered Feb 24 “Government itself is socialism. It does not rely upon market forces, but coercive force in order to secure its financing. It then imposes (not provides) “services” (many of which would…

If you’ll pardon me, I’m going to engage in a little of my own Paul Harvey here:  If I were Satan (and likely, there are more than a few leftists out there by now who believe precisely that), I would promote and engage in virtually every idea and activity that the modern Left presently does.

My Gitmo.  A small enclave where the philosophy of freedom still exists.  Outside, in much of the rest of Vermont, is an ethical and intellectual wasteland filled with devious, diabolical, destructive, and downright evil ideas such as critical race theory, socialism, gun control, suppression of free speech, and cultural Marxism.  Those things are not welcome here.  Not on my 20 acres.  Not at my Gitmo.

What do the two share in common?  The original end-concept of the latter was that ultimately, via socialism, the State would simply disappear altogether.

No one really believes the government itself anymore.  Those days began dying, in all truth, when JFK did.  Public incredulity of media and its relationship to government has only escalated ever since.

Some neighbors of mine, who “own” around 370 acres of land, are finding it necessary (like many others here in Vermont) to have portions of their property timbered off by loggers in order to raise the necessary capital to pay the property taxes imposed by government – lest that same government should seize their property by force.

As has not been lost on many modern-day libertarians, the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics counselled – among many other things – that since the vast majority of occurrences we encounter in life are matters beyond our control, it only makes rational sense to disregard such goings-on, and focus exclusively on those things which are of immediate concern to us, and fall within our own sphere of personal influence.