Author: Alex R. Knight III

… 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.

“They’re going to think you’re a Pegasus who just came down from a cloud,” a friend of mine from New Hampshire told me over the phone last summer, when I told him I’d be summonsed for “jury duty” here in Vermont.  “They’ll probably be asking themselves whether you’re going to burn the building down. And I know it won’t be filmed or recorded, but it would be absolutely hilarious to see the answers you give them.”

“I find it nothing short of amazing that all of this indignation has been (most correctly, in my view) been levelled at this Marxist ‘teacher’ – yet no one is pointing out the most abundantly obvious underlying fact here:  That the ‘public’ (government) tax-financed school system itself is a 100% Marxist construct.”

At the risk of covering old ground, I find it necessary to begin by re-paraphrasing something I believe Dr. Robert Higgs stated quite some time ago — to the effect that one of the biggest mistakes modern libertarians make is the erroneous presupposition that people, by and large, actually want to be free.