The Back Story 015 looks at road building a free society.
Tag: roads
Who Will Build The Roads? Anarchists.
The Portland anarchists at PARC are out to fix more roads and serve their community, by voluntary action. Without government permission and at government dismay. Only few anarchists are bandana-wearing, Molotov cocktail-wielding protestors, while many are peaceful, liberty-loving people who want to help their community via voluntary association.
“Spurious Quotes”
It bothers me when a quote which is truthful is doubted just because the “famous person” the quote is attributed to may not have ever said it.
Truth isn’t propped up by the person who says it; people are raised up by the truth they speak.
Words Poorly Used #82 — Process
Process overwhelms purpose. We wanted to live in a world free of crime, so we asked the state to make that guarantee, now we are guaranteed the abuses of crime and the abuses of the state. Substitute any antonym for a “public good” for which we have whored ourselves, and the statement holds.
What is Fascism?
As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.
Stories Told to Scare Children
When I was a kid, my parents told me several times about kids my age who met with tragedy–while doing whatever it was they didn’t want me to do. What a coincidence!
An Argument for a Stateless Society
The state fundamentally violates the non-aggression principle. Only its death can absolve its infringement, and I think this simple fact alone is more than enough justification for its termination.
In Praise of Immigrants
Three new technologies of the last 20 years made America’s economy great again: the iPhone, Google search, and horizontal drilling and fracturing. All came from first-generation immigrants.
Collectivist Thinking Leads to Atrocities
Collectivist thinking isn’t just about being cliquish or rude to others; carried to its natural extreme, it allows individuals to imagine a conflict where none exists and to use that imaginary conflict as an excuse for the most barbaric of behaviors.
Freedom of Movement is a Libertarian Virtue
“Freedom of movement” is a libertarian virtue in any location which is not privately owned or where the owner does not opt to restrict movement. Moreover, just because libertarians advocate a fully privatized society, it does not necessarily follow that every square inch of ground will be privately owned nor that every property owner will choose to deny access to visitors and travelers.