In the few years since deciding the label “anarchist” most accurately represented my own political philosophy, I’ve learned of other, powerful, confirmatory and congruent philosophies as well, that have helped to grow my own anarchism further outside the political realm. In other words, I may have started as a political anarchist, but ultimately, my own brand of anarchy has stretched beyond solely politics.
Tag: politics
An Open Letter to a Statist
If you have an opinion about politics that differs from mine, I can’t just ignore the difference and get along with you. Why not? Because any “political” opinion that differs from mine necessarily includes you wanting men with guns forcing me to live my life, make my choices, and spend my money according to your preferences and whims. There is no such thing, and can be no such thing, as a tolerant statist. If you want peaceful coexistence, you have to stop advocating violent aggression against your fellow man.
The Profound Value of Market Values
Even though economists, like others, don’t know the objective value of anything, they do know that as long as people voluntarily enter market arrangements, all parties to each transaction expect that the subjective value they will receive as benefits will exceed the subjective value they bear as costs. Greater subjective values for all is the result. And any coercive intrusion that forcibly moves the quantity exchanged away from what individuals would voluntarily choose destroys joint gains to participants, making the “solutions” offered by economists’ Wilde-eyed critics worse than the supposed problems used to justify them.
The Political Cycle
A couple years ago, back when I was in the limited government phase of my political belief progression, I wrote down a very brief outline of what I believed to be the cycle of politics in most nations throughout history. Today I rewrote that outline based on voluntaryist principles.
Screw Finding Your Passion
Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “What are the relative merits of learning baseball versus football?” You just ran around the playground and played baseball and football. You built sand castles and played tag and asked silly questions and looked for bugs and dug up grass and pretended you were a sewer monster.
Ideology, Identity, Solidarity, and Collective Action
The interrelated complex of ideology, identity, solidarity, and collective action form the ground level in fruitful social analysis. Leaving out this complex, as both mainstream and Austrian economists usually do, means that one sacrifices the opportunity to understand what otherwise seems inexplicable or gets explained only by bizarrely twisting the standard model. At least, so I have argued since the early 1980s, most fully in chapter 3 of Crisis and Leviathan, but with some elaboration and many applications in later works.
Fake News, Fake Politics, and Fake Policy
Fake news is as old as news itself. Political reporting in particular has always served as a tool of those who hold or seek to gain a grip on power. Respectable news sources, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, are not and never have been strangers to the distribution of false, twisted, or selectively partial and slanted reports. Less prestigious news outlets have also played the game. Perhaps the only new development on this front recently is the use of the Internet to spread fake news quicker and farther than the old media could. The news cycle revolves constantly now, and hence news, true and false, is placed before the public on an instant, worldwide scale as never before.
Attitudes Toward Power: Boromir vs. Gandalf
“With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly… Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.”
The Relational Anarchist Primer
According to relational anarchists, the better humans connect with each other, the more peace and understanding that will exist between them. The greater the strength of the relationships, the less likely rulers will become necessary or begin to emerge. Anarchism means “without rulers.” And besides being a political assertion, this is a psychological and relational preference. It is apolitical, based on preferred relationship standards. Instead of dispensing violence, these anarchists dispense compassion.
Editor’s Break 002 – Political Consent (12m)
Editor’s Break 002 is an exploration of the concept of political consent as it concerns both taxation and being bombed by predator drones. Skyler posted on Facebook the following, “People staying in an area with taxation means they consent. People staying in an area with drone bombings means they consent.” An invalid equivalency? Perhaps, or perhaps not.