Maybe the toxicity of the “Right” rhetoric repelled them so thoroughly that they bounced directly into a belief system exactly as repugnant. They took on the “social justice” causes, no matter how anti-liberty they are, just because they weren’t the causes of the “Right.”
Tag: religion
More Reasons to Read About Religion
Studying religion teaches us a tremendous amount about human psychology: our eagerness to embrace doctrines that outsiders consider nonsense, our pretentious overconfidence and hyperbole, our willingness to oppress and even murder over objectively trivial issues.
The Liberal Spirit and Its Opposite, Alt-Rightism
Maybe a few self-described libertarians cling to the idea that property is essentially about exclusion, but they are fated to hit a wall: liberalism is a spirit as well as a set of ideas, and it cannot be turned against itself. It fosters human solidarity, not separation. Libertarianism, like its precursor, is an answer to the question: under what conditions do reasoning social animals best flourish? In answering that question the way it has, liberalism offers no home to sowers of division.
The Problem with Ancap Thought Experiments
Yes, you can make a point with using an example of a small number of people interacting in an isolated system, but you could just as easily create a thought experiment starting from our current situation that people might find easier to follow. Such a thought experiment might look something like this.
Abortion: A Voluntaryist Perspective
From the moment an egg is fertilized, there is a living cell with a unique set of human DNA. That is — scientifically — a human life. However, science cannot answer questions of morality on its own; that is the realm of ethics and philosophy and religion. Here, we consider the moral question from the Voluntaryist standpoint.
Tribalism and Economic Nationalism – Cut from the Same Cloth
Why would anyone underestimate the benefits of interacting with foreigners? It might be because they are, well, foreign. Combine this bias with an ignorance of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (spontaneous order) and a suspicion that exchange is zero-sum rather than positive-sum, and you have the making of an economic nationalist.
Individualist, Voluntaryist, and a Human Being
I believe that if your actions neither pick my pocket nor break my leg, they’re none of my business. I believe in peaceful coexistence, voluntary transactions, and free markets.
Suit, Robe, or Uniform: Does it Matter What Criminals Wear?
My bias aside, we shouldn’t believe that all business people strictly follow free market principles. Perhaps, even, most of them don’t. Who knows? What I do know is that every single person is capable of behaving in ways contrary to voluntaryism, and a strong majority of us have at some point in our lives.
The Liberty of Man
The consistent libertarian is not “hostile to family, to religion, to tradition, to culture, and to civic or social institutions,” but he is also not necessarily supportive of any particular version of these things.
Immigration and Social Engineering
Social engineers of all parties and persuasions talk as though an economy is some kind of mechanism to be centrally fine-tuned and overhauled occasionally according to a plan. Even those who style themselves free enterprisers display the central-planning mentality when it comes to immigration.