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.

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.