Even I sometimes forget how thoroughly the religious belief in political “authority” mangles people’s ability to think. For example, a certain statist just expressed genuine confusion and bafflement when trying to comprehend this: Sometimes I don’t want “A” to happen, and yet I don’t feel justified in using force (on my own or via “government”) to prevent “A” from happening.
Tag: death
Capitalism for Dummies (and Socialists)
The whole notion of capitalism is that those with capital are incentivized to invest it in order to obtain a profit. If profits are outlawed or significantly reduced through confiscatory taxation, the incentive to invest is reduced or eliminated. If profit is forbidden, I have no incentive to invest rather than consume. Why would I delay gratification and take on risk to plant a field or build a factory if I don’t stand to make a profit by doing so?
Doppelganger
It seems that Jefferson was still romantically attached to liberty; but his eyes and his dreams were on the arising French Revolution. He must have assumed he had left the American experiment in good hands. This is the nature of idea men — they are great at founding dreams, but they are terrible at (if not entirely absent during) implementation.
If Men Were Angels
Although I admit that the outcome in a stateless society will be bad, because not only are people not angels, but many of them are irredeemably vicious in the extreme, I conjecture that the outcome in a society under a state will be worse, indeed much worse, because, first, the most vicious people in society will tend to gain control of the state and, second, by virtue of this control over the state’s powerful engines of death and destruction, they will wreak vastly more harm than they ever could have caused outside the state.
Is the Non-Aggression Principle Self-Negating? You Decide!
A person named Jared emailed me out of the blue about a week ago with the following letter. It contains a request for feedback followed by an argument that the Non-Aggression Principle as made popular by Murray Rothbard was self-negating on the grounds that the creation of private property is an act of aggression. What ensued were several letters back and forth in which we both flesh out the other’s argument and offer our critique. In the end we understood each other better, but alas no consensus was reach.
The Assumption of Ignorance
Assuming that the world is ignorant brings society down. We’ve begun talking, teaching, and working to the lowest common denominator. We assume that people need to be taught, led, coddled, and motivated. When you presume that other people are ignorant, you do both yourself and them a disservice. You create more work for yourself and increase the dependency of others on you. You become the hub at the center of a wheel, and the spokes don’t know how to think independently because they’ve been brought up in a system where there is always someone else telling them what they need to know.
The Role of War in a Voluntaryist Society
Most voluntaryists understand that war is one of the most terrible, wasteful, horrific tools at the state’s disposal. There can be no doubt that the death, devastation, and warping of the mind caused by war are terrible evils. But the question remains: “Is war ever justified?” Before a coherent answer can be given, we should first define war. If war is defined as a purely statist activity, then war is never justified for the simple reason that statism is never justified. However, if we include private, large-scale military operations in the definition of war, then war could be justified under certain specific conditions.
Adolf Hitler: How Could a Monster Succeed in Blinding a Nation?
Is it still possible in today’s Germany to escape the realization that without the mistreatment of children, without a form of child-rearing based on violence to inculcate blind obedience, there would not have been a Hitler and his followers? And thus not millions of murdered victims either? Probably every thinking person in the post-war period has wondered at some time or other how it could have happened that a human being devised a gigantic machinery of death and found millions of helpers to set it in motion.
The Violence And Justice Monopoly
Almost all of us hold two beliefs which contradict a third near-universal belief. The first is that a state, however else defined, is a geographic monopoly of security and justice. One cannot appeal a ruling beyond the state, and whatever private providers of security and justice may exist, they do so in pronounced subservience to and supervision by the state. The second is that monopolies invariably cause high prices and low quality.
Immigrants and Socialistic Ideologies
I am sick unto death with hearing the argument that if large numbers of immigrants, especially Mexicans and Central Americans, are admitted to the USA, they will bring with them their “socialistic” ideologies, vote en masse for Democrats, and hence destroy the free economy and society in the USA. It’s a terrible idea for several reasons.