Tag: liberty

Brexit is Progress

Kent McManigal

It’s interesting to me how Brexit is portrayed by the statist media as a step backwards. Like anyone who is intelligent should understand it’s a disaster to pull out of a Big State, and only rubes would want such a thing. And, obviously, it’s going to lead to starvation and chaos in the streets.

How ridiculous.

To me, it’s secession. Something I’m always in favor of.

Yes, I understand it reeks of “nationalism”, which I oppose. But I also oppose globalism when it means ever-bigger government. I’m in favor of “national” (territorial) societies and global societies, and I oppose political governments/states of any size because politics is antisocial.

No, the UK’s government isn’t better than the EU. It is irredeemably corrupt and evil– just like any political government. But at least it’s smaller than the EU’s political government. And Brexit makes the EU a little weaker.

Just as Texit would make the US Empire a bit weaker. That’s a good thing.

Break up all governments into smaller and smaller bits until you get to the individual– the only legitimate government there can ever be.

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You Get the Political Circus You Voted On

Kent McManigal

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, and all the rest of you, too! Welcome to the Big Top. Yes, that’s right: the Impeachment Circus, with its dancing elephants and prancing donkeys, is coming to town.

It has been announced amid much fanfare. The flyers have been tacked to telephone poles all over America and I think I hear the parade of animals coming up the street. Grab your manure shovels from the tool shed and be ready to start scooping.

If only it were this exciting or momentous. I’m already bored with it and it hasn’t even started. It has become a tedious political ritual.

These days the show promises to kick off once per administration or so, but it usually gets canceled for lack of interest. This time it seems it will actually happen.

It would save a lot of time and strife if impeachment proceedings were automatically begun upon each new president’s oath-of-office. This way the opposition party could skip the saber-rattling theatrics and just get on with collecting the president’s offenses as they find (or imagine) them.

Or they could if the theatrics weren’t the whole point. They are performing tricks for their voters. It’s a shame it still works.

Every president does something — and usually many things — the political opposition feels deserve impeachment. So they keep testing the waters, trying to gauge how much support for impeachment they could get from the rest of the congressvermin in their own party and from their supporters in the population.

Unfortunately, before they get so caught up in impeachment fever, they normally manage to pass some new legislation. I’m firmly against this development. Seeing as how there are only two kinds of legislation — the unnecessary and the harmful — I would rather they spend their time trying to politically crucify the president they hate. It’s a much less harmful way to earn political points. Better to sacrifice every president than the people’s lives, liberty, and property.

Since it’s a political circus, I’m inclined to say “Not my circus; not my monkeys;” but I know a lot of people are very attached to this circus and to its monkeys — or elephants and donkeys as the case may be — claiming them as their own.

I hope you enjoy the show. As long as you keep buying tickets — by casting votes — you’ll keep getting the government you deserve. It’s what you voted for no matter who you voted for.

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Statism is The Strongest Witness Against Itself

Kent McManigal

Not only does it show the flaw in statists’ beliefs when statists worry about who gets to v*te, but statism is full of contradictions that show the flaws in statism.

Property rights are the biggest, most obvious strike against any chance of logic in statism.

If you believe I should be forced– at gunpoint– to finance a gang you claim is needed to fight theft, you’ve made a fool of yourself.

If you believe it’s necessary to violate private property rights in order to protect property rights– through borders, “taxes”, etc., then you’ve testified against yourself.

But there are more problems.

If you believe you need a State/government to “defend freedom” by violating individual liberty, you’re not so brilliant. And if you buy A/Ru/dolph Giuliani’s steaming load claiming “freedom is about authority” then you might as well just get on the next shrimp boat to North Korea.

If you buy into the statist lie that drugs can destroy your life, so we need to impose prohibition so we have an excuse to kick your door down in the middle of the night, and murder your family and– if you survive– throw you in a cage, make it so you can’t get a job, and destroy your life, then you’ve admitted that you’re an idiot.

Statism is incompatible with ethics; statism is incompatible with life, liberty, and property; statism is incompatible with humanity. You can tell this just by looking at the claims statism makes and where it leads.

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What Liberty Allows for and What it Demands

Jakub B. Wiśniewski

Liberty allows for recklessness, but it demands accepting its consequences; it does not repress vices, but it encourages the development of virtues; it tolerates diversity, but it excludes it from ventures based on unanimity; and it does not condemn self-love, but it flourishes in the love of one’s neighbor.

In other words, liberty does not fight against things that are morally neutral, it does not respond to evil with greater evil, and it is a necessary condition of doing good. Thus, there is no good reason whatever to give up on it, but there are infinite good reasons to use it ever more fully.

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Thomas DiLorenzo: Ten Things You Should Know about Socialism (50m)

Skyler J. Collins (Editor)

This episode features a lecture by economics professor and Austro-libertarian Thomas DiLorenzo from 2016. He looks at the many aspects of socialism and why its a disastrous economic system for liberty and prosperity. Purchase books by Thomas DiLorenzo on Amazon here.

Listen To This Episode (50m, mp3, 64kbps)

Subscribe via RSS here, or in any podcast app by searching for “voluntaryist voices”. Support the podcast at Patreon.com/evc or PayPal.me/everythingvoluntary.

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Banning 3D-Printed Guns

Kent McManigal

Scott Adams says 3D-printed guns will be effectively stopped (or severely limited) with “friction” by government “laws” or 3D printer company policies/apps. (You did save the files before the anti-liberty bigots of the U.S. feral government threatened everyone into taking them offline, didn’t you?)

He believes 3D printers will end up being manufactured by just a few big companies, as usually happens with products like that, and you’ll have to download their approved apps from their app stores to print items. And that they’ll simply forbid gun-printing apps. He’s probably right.

Yes, he admits hackers might get around this, and some people will build their own printers without this limitation, but this is where his “friction” fetish comes in play. For the average person, this added difficulty will be enough to prevent them from printing guns.

But will it, though?

If guns required gun-specific parts which couldn’t be used for other things, he might be right. But they don’t. That’s why you can build a gun from plumbing.

And, if 3D-printed guns were banned by government or the printer manufacturers, don’t you think more effort would go into designing guns which are built from parts no one could possibly recognize as gun parts? Or parts which have other, actual uses.

Print this lamp part, this repair piece for your coffee pot, this game piece, etc., put them all together in this way, and you’ve got a gun. No gun or gun part was printed. Yet a gun was printed after all. By someone who didn’t have to be a hacker or build their own 3D printer, but who just wanted a gun enough to print one. Kind of like the way it happens now.

Does he really imagine the app stores would be able to tell all the parts which can be used to make a gun from the parts which can’t?

Yes, it still might reduce the number of guns being printed, and if you start with a flawed assumption you might see this as a win. But that’s an admission that you aren’t thinking rationally.

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