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.
Tag: respect
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.
Child Labor In School And Out
School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn’t take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
How to Unschool
1. Give your love generously and criticism sparingly. Be your children’s partner. Support them and respect them. Never belittle them or their interests, no matter how superficial, unimportant, or even misguided their interests may seem to you. Be a guide, not a dictator. Shine a light ahead for them, and lend them a hand, but don’t drag or push them. You will sometimes despair when your vision of what your child ought to be bangs up against the reality that they are their own person. But that same reality can also give you great joy if you learn not to cling to your own preconceived notions and expectations.
Importing New Democrats? Or Creating Them?
“Conservatives” yapping about “illegals” sound just as dumb as “liberals” droning on about guns. But consider this: “Conservatives” say they oppose the independent migrants because they are being imported (or allowed to enter) to become “new Democratic voters”. Well, who do you think they’d vote for? The people who are “welcoming” them with hatred, calling them “illegals”, and waving the Federal flag in their faces?
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.
Advice from Cops: Don’t Talk to Cops
Almost every time I speak at a college or law school campus, there are one or two audience members whose mother or father is a police officer or a prosecutor. I always ask them: What did your parents tell you about dealing with the police? Every one of them, without exception, has told me the same thing: My parents in law enforcement taught me years ago that I should never talk to the police, or agree to let them interview me about anything, or let them search my car or my apartment or my backpack without a warrant. You need to stop for a minute, and let that sink in.
Compassionate Connection: Attachment Parenting & Nonviolent Communication
How do we deal with a two-year-old when he grabs every toy his friend plays with? What do we say to a four-year-old who screams in rage when her baby brother cries? How do we talk with a ten-year-old about the chores he has left undone, again? What strategies will keep our teenager open with us – and safe? Nonviolent Communication (NVC), sometimes referred to as Compassionate Communication, offers a powerful approach for extending the values of attachment parenting beyond infancy. A process for connecting deeply with ourselves and others, and for creating social change, NVC has been used worldwide in intimate family settings as well as in organizations, schools, prisons, and war-torn countries.
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.
Is Anarchy Compatible With…? – 3rd Wave Feminism
When a movement, like 3rd wave feminism, openly and publicly calls for the castration of men, praises the lack of parental rights of the father, the destruction of the family unit, and equates consensual sex between males and females as rape, we should begin to see the decidedly non-egalitarian nature of the movement.