Here I am, a radical libertarian, enjoying a show whose protagonist is the monarch of one of the world’s brutal and oppressive empires. How do I square that circle?
Tag: philosophy
Cooperation vs. Interventionism
Henry J. Gomez of buzzfeed recently wrote an article about libertarianism. To his credit, he mostly describes libertarian foreign politics as non-interventionist – except for one awful passage: “libertarians believe […] less-interventionist, more-isolationist themes.” No, no, a thousand times no.
A Voluntaryist 7-Point Plan
As advocates of a truly free society, we voluntaryists, unlike the statists who outnumber us, do not engage in traditional political activism. This simple fact got me thinking about a habitual plan or checklist each of us might form or follow quite naturally, in the course of our daily lives in order to promote the kind of stateless socioeconomic order we envision.
libertarian + voluntaryist + individualist …
I cannot be pegged by the 3 labels above, however, because, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes. Each individual is the only one of her kind in all the universes.
Trump’s Americanized Fascism
Sure, Trump says: “In America, the people govern, the people rule, and the people are sovereign. I was elected not to take power, but to give power to the American people, where it belongs.” But that cliched claptrap cannot withstand scrutiny. “The people” neither govern nor rule. Only persons act, and only certain persons rule. There is no way everyone can rule — unless all people individually rule their own lives. That’s not what Trump means.
Liberty Out The Yin-Yang!
Several years ago, my online friend Kevin Wilmeth brought Taoism to my attention and sent me a copy of the Tao Te Ching. It turns out Taoism is an early libertarian philosophy, and is pretty interesting. (You probably knew that long before I did.)
Things I Do
Friends and I meet monthly, and we call ourselves, informally, the logic group. The inevitable question came up but what do you do about it? I begin to make a mental list of things I do.
Compulsory Schooling Is Incompatible with Freedom
If we care about freedom, we should reject compulsory schooling. A relic of 19th-century industrial America, compulsory schooling statutes reduced the broad and noble goal of an educated citizenry into a one-size-fits-all system of state-controlled mass schooling that persists today.
School Should Be More Like Summer Camp
Perhaps we should look more to summer for the solutions to our school-year woes, and challenge a system that puts more emphasis on containment than freedom.
Tying Yourself to Identity is Foolish
I think it is natural to tie your ego into your characteristics in a wholistic way. It is also good to like aspects about your being that you think are productive to your goals and values. That being said, i think it an absolute disaster to tie your ego into individual or small groups of characteristics you hold. This is why I am so against “identity.”