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.
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.
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.
A Defense of Atrophy
“Progressives” – those who believe that a maximized involvement of government in your life and economic affairs (not just theirs, of course) is in fact progress, i.e., the creation of a better world – see individual liberty as a liability, not an asset.
Fuck You, Facebook: I’m Leaving
Mark Zuckerberg was the first to create a program we now refer to as a social media network, and was thereby successful in establishing Facebook (more properly known now as Fascistbook) as the “industry standard.” When I first joined a decade ago, FB was relatively unfettered. You could write and post freely, with little chance of being banned or censored. All of that, in more recent times, has changed dramatically.
What Most People Care About
On March 26, 2020, at the once excellent but now mostly defunct website Daily Anarchist, Seth King broke almost five years of silence by publishing a piece that contained the following statement: “I don’t think libertarians, be they minimalists or anarcho-capitalists, are ever going to realize their dreams in this life. Freedom just isn’t popular.” Unfortunately, I’m inclined to concur.
What Most People Apparently Believe
There will never come a day — ever — when the political class decides that there are numerous enough laws, enough taxes, and enough control mechanisms over people’s lives.
Clarification of Misnomer Terminology
You’re not “progressive.” You’re RE-gressive. You’re anti-progress. You actively seek the destruction of progress and freedoms that have taken literally thousands of years of bloodshed, toil, suffering, and sacrifice to bring even this far.
America Proved Minarchism is a Myth
It is beyond any measure of denial to assert that the American experiment in “limited government” – “constitutional” or otherwise – has proven itself an abject failure. The US government is the largest, most expensive, and most powerful cabal on the planet. And it shows no signs of reversing course. But for the true believers in minarchism, it gets even worse.