PROPOSITION: Until libertarians tailor their ideology and their actions to accommodate the common people’s nativism, nationalism, ethnic bigotry, and support for U.S. imperialism abroad and police brutality at home, they can never gain enough adherents to become a serious factor in American political life.
Tag: action
Preferences Give Zero Authority
I find myself becoming increasingly less tolerant of people who attempt to use violence (including leveraging the violence of the state) to impose their preferences on others. In fact, I am fast approaching zero tolerance.
Markets are Amoral, and Inevitable
The market is nothing more than individuals using each other to satisfy their own desires. It just so happens that in the vast majority of cases, people can satisfy their desires in ways which are mutually beneficial.
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 10
In the first year of Praxis, there were several desperate-for-a-silver-bullet moments. Bewildering circumstances where the gum in the works couldn’t be pinpointed. Just a tough slog. Every step forward took Herculean effort. This can’t continue if we’re going to grow like we want to!
US Has One of the Cruelest Injustice Systems in the World
The cynical “tough on crime” political strategy combined with rampant over-criminalization has led to a country where more than one in four people has a criminal record.
But This Time It’ll Be Done Right!
It should never be a surprise that government will do a poor, even nightmarish job when it declares itself the only entity that can oversee what it forces people into participating in.
Advocacy of Peaceful Transactions
There is no right to force another person to provide goods or services. How can it be about “freedom,” then, when it’s someone imposing his “freedom” on another, who will be beaten and jailed for peacefully declining business?
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 7
If your market includes everyone, it includes no one. I knew I’d do better with a tighter market. Ideally, as Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One, a tiny niche I could monopolize. But even this was broad enough for me to lose focus. The real break-through for choosing actions to get traction came when I got down to the smallest unit possible.
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 6
It takes a lot longer to exhaust all possible bootstrap growth activities than you think. When money is not an option, you get way, way more creative. Every time you think you’ve reached a true stopping point, where nothing more can be done without money, you discover a new batch of things you can do to move forward.
What the Left Should Like about Public Choice
Although the public choice school of political economy has been demonized in a new work of putatively progressive fiction masquerading as intellectual history, good-faith leftists (if they don’t already regard themselves as libertarians) may be surprised by how their cause could benefit from the insights of James Buchanan, et al.