In general, I support the “incrementalist” approach, both academically (debating/proselytizing online and in person) and practically (what I’d like to happen to government/economy/social freedom) in the future USA and every other country. When debating with actual libertarian-ish minarchists, I agree that we’re correct in actively promoting the philosophy of anarchism; they should know better by now. But because most of the world isn’t even close to minarchist, academic incrementalism and practical implementation of incrementalism might be useful and warranted.

More specifically, what I mean by academic incrementalism is: I think it is more helpful to sway people towards a philosophy of freedom in small, comfortable, easy-to-handle bits than to tell them their entire worldview (and that of 95% of the human race) is wrong. Justified or not, that leads many people to lump you in with the Alex Jones types who say everything is a lie and a conspiracy. Keep in mind that many people’s objection to libertarian ideas is not based on their opposition to increases in freedom and their support of massive violations of rights—they don’t see libertarianism as “right” or “just” and don’t see State intrusions as intrusions at all. Therefore, it is difficult to get them to see that even cutting taxes, stopping inflation, not enacting more business regulations, etc. are helpful to people’s material well-being, much less that they are more philosophically just than the opposite policies. For this reason, they are likely to be swayed by arguments saying “a little less government would be better here” and to progressively support more and more reductions in government if the initial arguments are successful.

And by practical incrementalism, more specifically, I mean that the collapse of a giant state and the sudden fracturing of society into pockets of anarchic and minarchic (and other) regions would be very jarring to most people, possibly in a way that is harmful both to the freedom movement and to people’s actual safety and well-being. Therefore, allowing people to see the benefits of low taxes and fewer regulations and fewer government handouts will lead them to support the complete elimination of all those things. Or, at least, it will lead to people being free and able to opt out of monopolistic governance more easily and smoothly. At least, it seems like it should. It makes sense to me, as I’m sure you’ve heard before, that it’s a lot easier to go from very small government to no monopolistic government than it is to go from Leviathan State to no monopolistic government. That’s why I generally support the practical implementation of incremental decreases in State power.

I don’t know whether or to what extent this conflicts with the approach that most libertarians call agorism. The way I and most other libertarians seem to use the term, agorism means gradually building “black-market” social and economic structures that don’t depend on, don’t support, and aren’t (directly) affected by the State and all its immoral laws. There are probably several reasons agorism is superior to a Libertarian Party–style incrementalism, not the least of which is that legal and “proper” reductions of State power are almost impossible to achieve in this day and age, so doing it illicitly is our only recourse.

However, interestingly, agorism should itself be considered an incrementalist strategy because gradually building economic and social connections that don’t require and don’t support the State, such that the State withers away and becomes irrelevant, is one way to implement the incremental changes that I talked about above. Also interestingly, successfully creating agorist social/economic structures (which, it must be admitted, is also nearly impossible on a large scale because of the police state we live in) doesn’t require that most participants have a firm philosophical commitment to anarcho-libertarianism. It just requires that they see the monetary benefit to operating out from under the heel of the State and act upon some of the illicit agorist opportunities they come across. This again should be considered incrementalist: recognize the benefit of not paying this tax or not following that regulation; recognize the benefits of committing more and more perfectly just and victimless “crimes”; recognize the moral justness of libertarianism.

Libertarianism is individual liberty, personal sovereignty, voluntary association, and moral egalitarianism for all people. By “moral egalitarianism” I mean everyone is equally imbued with and bound by the same rights and the same moral obligation to respect the identical rights of others; no one has the right to do anything that anyone else may not also do. I think the existence of those rights and the non-aggression principle that follows from them come as close to epistemological certainty as they can get, and the burden is on Statists to explain why these principles are imaginary, illegitimate, or impractical and why they have the right to threaten murder on any who would assert these rights.

I doubt very many people oppose those beliefs in principle. What they oppose are their fantastical imaginings of what those beliefs would imply in practice. At the same time they remain willfully ignorant of how the State opposes those innate rights—is essentially the institutionalization of the negation of liberty. What they refuse to grasp is that the very existence of the monopolistic State implies threats of murder to anyone who secedes or doesn’t participate. As hard as it is to come to grips with, Statists must realize that peaceful abstention is a violation of their moral code, and that this is abominable.

It would be helpful to the blogosphere and to the worldwide discourse on political philosophy in general if a significant number of Statists would challenge themselves as far as they could with this question: “If the first principles that libertarians endorse are right and just, then why does (my vision of) their practical implementation strike me as so frightening, so horrific? What experiences, conditioning, or other principles make me either (a) reject the implementation of those principles anyway, and/or (b) insist that Statism and not freedom are the natural corollary of those principles?”

Most people’s experience with states, living their whole lives under one, never considering what true freedom can do for a society and not looking too closely lest their Statist foundation be shaken, causes them to believe that states are a force of good even when the balance of evidence is against them. So they lash out in ridicule at libertarians instead of focusing their skepticism on their own beliefs, which is where everyone’s skepticism belongs at first.

In the comments to Radley Balko’s very good, polite, short post about Ted Kennedy, a few peculiar Statist sentiments blemish an otherwise sensible discussion about the lack of merit in Ted Kennedy’s career and agreement with Balko that Kennedy shouldn’t be venerated simply because he’s no longer eligible for the census. On the other hand, they did provide me a good starting point for yet another instructional blag post.

As you could have guessed, the contentious comments concerned Balko’s opinion that we shouldn’t admire Kennedy’s “ability to use politics, as opposed to civil society, to solve problems” and that “Getting elected to political office in itself adds no value to society as a whole”.

One commenter began,

Huh? How would be have better effected change via civil society? Presided over the local kiwanis club? Written the Great American Novel? Become a pundit? Blogger (journalist)? CEO?

Always interesting to hear what libertarians value, how small-minded they are – I guarantee there’s total radio silence on the passing of major business figures, however they themselves used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests. However corrupt and crass they are within their own sphere.

Instead of living off of the labor of captive taxpayers and voting to take and spend more of their money every year, Kennedy could have spent his inherited wealth on charity, community organizations, and private businesses that provided goods and services to people who wanted them, voluntarily. The reason people donate to non-profit organizations and do business with private companies is (usually) because they want to, because they prefer the goods or services more than they prefer the money they part with and more than the goods or services they could get elsewhere. The reason the state and federal governments have to take your taxes upon threats of murder is because the government is not voluntary and people don’t want to give their money to it. Even Ted Kennedy himself didn’t want to give more of his money to the Imperial Federal Government than he had to…otherwise he would have. He could have worked for free, but he didn’t.

In this instance, we see that the commenter’s failure to understand that “civil society” is superior to government action results from his failure to understand what “government action” implies: Submit to their edicts and give them your money, or they will take the money plus penalties and they will enter your home or business to make you comply; insist on keeping your money and living your life how you please, as is your perfect right, and they will enslave you in a metal-and-concrete cage for five or ten years; resist their beatings, kidnapping, and enslavement, as is your perfect right, and they will shoot you. It is not possible to misunderstand that the State and all its agents are the aggressors in this scenario—in the real world, every day.

If committing the atrocious offenses of not sharing much of your money and behaving or doing business in frowned-upon ways is enough to warrant the death penalty, then surely actually threatening people with murder and interfering with their lives in myriad ways is a crime against humanity that removes all pretense of legitimacy from their operation. If you would claim the latter response is necessary and proper for the former offenses, then it still remains to be explained how non-violent non-participation ranks as criminal, or even dangerous, to the Statist. The laws and the infrastructure to make and follow through on the threats precede any act by any citizen; in fact, they predate even the birth of every citizen (except at the founding of a new state); so they cannot reasonably be passed off as a response to a preexisting danger.

Doubtless the true believer would respond, “But it is in man’s nature to be contentious and violent; the preexisting State with its threat-and-punish infrastructure keeps everyone civil, cooperative, and happy.” Glossing over the fact that this is simply false, it is obvious that elected and unelected officials are not angels; they are impaired by the same shortcomings as everyone else. Further, it is obvious that the types of people who are attracted to the violent, deadly police power of the State suffer from even greater hubris, intolerance, greed, and megalomania than the average person and in proportion to the power they aspire to attain.

I have stated what principles libertarians value and gone into a little detail about what we oppose in the State. So we’re “small-minded”? Believing in the strength of community, free exchange, voluntary cooperation, and the physical, emotional, and psychological independence from the controlling hubris of others—the conviction that the answer to many of our material and psychological problems is in ceasing to kill, threaten, and coerce each other—this is small-minded? You can’t possibly comprehend what is implied by our statement “peaceful action is a better way to effect change than is governmental coercion”—what’s implied is an all-encompassing, revolutionary conception of community, law, economics, war, peace, and everything else about human interrelationships—and still refer to it as small-minded.

The better libertarian thinkers (and those of us who follow them) rail against “major business figures” who “used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests” as fervently as we do against the government agents themselves. See, for instance, this masterful essay by Roderick Long, this Kevin Carson column, and this post of mine. Maybe my fellow libertarian blaggers can leave some more links in the comments; there must surely be 100 easily accessible anti-corporatist writings that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

The commenter continued,

You could say the same you said here about FDR or Lincoln: proper management of the state, and the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world – it’s oh-so-dirty. Libertarians would rather sit on a perch apart from it all, sometimes hiding their eyes, sometimes throwing peanuts, or pretending like all problems can be solved via a little Mill or communitarianism. And that there’s a nice clean wall between politics and everything else.

7/15/2050: Radley Balko dies, contributed not much of anything because he spent his life as a journalist, and on the basis of a little Rand and Econ 101 and utilitarian philosophy decided that it would be of some value to humanity or even his community to give the stock libertarian take on whatever was at the top of the news cycle. And what do journalists really do for us anyway?

Obviously you are not paying attention.

We could say the same about FDR or Lincoln? Child, much, much worse has been said about FDR and Lincoln, and deservedly so. They are more responsible for our corporate-military-socialist state than any other two people. The death and impoverishment they permitted to be visited upon innocent people is, quite possibly, incalculable.

It is almost unfathomable to me that anyone could think the State is “the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world.” I shall take the liberty of assuming this statement refers mainly to economics—the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy our needs. The claim is that the government can take care of any problem or need that arises in a community better than the free market—especially in the 21st century with technology making the entire world more connected than ever and the pace of business faster than ever. Though my libertarian readers are already familiar with Ludwig von Mises, Statists would benefit—if only to bring a little more knowledge and sophistication to the debate—from reading Mises’s seminal essay on why socialism can’t calculate and Murray Rothbard’s perspective on Mises, his opponents, and the calculation debate.

Without reading an entire economics essay, Statists could just answer me this: How is it that elected officials and coercive referendums voted for by “the people” are better able to govern society than the cooperative choices and economic exchanges made voluntarily by “the people”?

If the “collective action problems” he refers to are legal and court systems, his position is no less secure. Check out my posts about Anthony de Jasay’s masterpiece The State (here) and Bruce Benson’s masterpiece The Enterprise of Law (here and here).

Another commenter answered his smear that libertarians, journalists, and others outside of the professional criminal class do nothing for society:

MLK never had to get elected to spur social change.

And BTW, Radley helped get a guy off of death row because of his work. More than I can say for Ted Kennedy. Other journalists have also managed to force a president’s resignation over Watergate and bring to light the massacre at My Lai just to name a couple of things. I would say that journalists have done more to expose corruption and spur change than any politician ever has.

We don’t just sit on our perch either. Go check out the work that Libertarians have done at the Institute for Justice and FIRE. Real results that actually matter to every day people who are being mistreated by peaceful legislators and their good intention regulations.

The discussion was mostly downhill from there:

“Working as a legislator isn’t a peaceful way to make change. After all, the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance or else we would be imprisoned or fined. There isn’t anything peaceful about that at all.”

And here’s the reason folks, why libertarians will never have any serious chance as politicians in the country. Nutters.

“the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance”

And he was elected to do so as public official by you, we, the people of the country, along with the other 99 senators. You’re acting like this is a dictatorship.

It is more common than I would have thought, though no less peculiar, for Statists to justify a rights-violation because multiple people commit it rather than one. What difference does the number of people committing it make? Seriously. Blags have comments for a reason. I like getting comments.

Referring to the same passage that the previous person thought was “nutters,” the original Statist commenter wrote:

This is childish. You need to grow up. It’s not different from me saying that prisons are bad because people get locked up against their will, but refusing to take on what to do about murderers.

What to do about power and how one should distribute power is the paramount question for any society at any time in history, and solutions are judged in terms of bad and less bad. If you can’t bring yourself to stare it in the face and maybe try to make the best of it, your opinion on anything to do with politics is worthless. You don’t get to complain and be taken seriously if you want to hide.

What is childish is the Statist attitude that the majority should rule, that people who peacefully abstain are somehow doing some unspecified thing that endangers your person or property, and that everyone who disagrees with your grand vision of how to run the world should be punished and made to comply. I can think of nothing more childish in the political arena. You have made no effort to understand any theory of ethics or morality, nor anything like property rights or economics. Literally the only framework you go by is “majority rules.” You don’t appreciate that people have good reason to object to their freedoms being put to a vote and to complain after losing the vote. You refuse to see how pointing guns at, restricting the preexisting freedoms of, and taking property from people who haven’t harmed or even threatened anyone is worse than the hypothetical harm that they might have done; that the government agents are committing aggression even by their own standards. You are unable to understand how anyone could object to being lorded over by a charlatan with a bright smile and a fancy suit, nor have you shown any ability to grasp how rights or freedoms could exist prior to and independently from a monopolistic state. Your political philosophy begins and ends with “majority rule.” This is the single least nuanced idea in the history of the world since “woman submit to man because he is stronger.” You are a childish buffoon who should have NO SAY in how I or any other human being run our lives.

Our objections to the aggression that defines states are very different from objecting to locking real, actual aggressors up in prison (though you just said “people” and libertarians know that governments should lock up their own people before anyone else). Your analogy looks, to me, like this: illegitimacy of legislation : no alternative to legislation :: illegitimacy of prison : no solution to murder.

Okay, analogies weren’t your strong point in fifth grade. You are ignoring stuff YOU WROTE, in the same discussion thread. Our alternative to governmental legislation is offering a goddamned product to people and selling it to them for an agreeable price. Writing a book. Starting a charity. Educating your own children instead of leaving it to the State. Et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam. These are the things you ridiculed in your first post as being ineffective compared to coercive legislation. Libertarians have plenty of solutions to murder, and all crime. Eliminating the police state is a nice first step.

Distributing power is not the paramount question for all societies. It is protecting individual rights, which allows real community to develop voluntarily and “organically” and which allows for the material progress that has increased our standard of living over the centuries. When private property rights are protected and individuals have a sincere, personal, reciprocal interest in the well-being of their neighbors, then power and many other things will be distributed more heterogeneously. Surely you don’t think giving power to politicians and taking it away from the public will distribute power in any just way? If you’d like a scholarly but brief and accessible discussion on the distribution of power in society, read the first part of Our Enemy, the State by Albert Jay Nock.

You seem very dissatisfied with this country. There are plenty of other ones out there. Why don’t you try the libertarian oasis of Somalia? You won’t have to worry about the pesky ‘dictatorship of the majority against the minority” (also called Democracy) there! You’ll be free to do as you please. No pesky governments to get in your way (they won’t even bother to build your roads!)

If things get too tough, you can always try your luck in the socialist hellhole of Sweden or Norway :)

Seriously, most of you sound like Ruby Ridge wannabe’s under a guise of reading a few Ayn Rand books, which is why you won’t be taken seriously.

Personally, if I were going to compete for a Special Olympics medal on a political website, taking the contradictory stance from what I know most readers there take, I would go to some effort to gussy up my arguments and review my thought processes to make sure I was representing my ideology well. You know, being a good ambassador for libertarianism.

None of that for these Statists. Why don’t you try the Statist’s wet dream of North Korea, or Cuba, or Zimbabwe? You gave the worst example of (what you misunderstand as) anarchy; it isn’t fair to counter with the worst examples of your beloved monopolistic States? Oh, there’s only one type of anarchy but many varied and sundry types of states. I see. And that American and Ethiopian military force attempting to impose order but, somehow unsurprisingly, only supplying murder, terror, and destruction to Somalia—you gonna pin that one on the anti-military, non-interventionist libertarians, too? You haven’t made sense yet; you might as well shoot for the moon and hope some more of your hysterical mischaracterizations of libertarianism stick for your Statist brethren.

We have observed no fewer than two of the classic inane, ignorant dismissals of libertarians in a single comment thread about Teddy freaking Kennedy: “You’re always free to move elsewhere” and “Oh, you’re just a stupid Randroid.” Add a third item to the list of ideologies Statists don’t understand. OBJECTIVISM IS NOT LIBERTARIANISM! WE ACTUALLY DON’T LIKE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH!

Sorry for rambling. I got up on my soap box for the first time in a while and wanted to flesh out my thoughts thoroughly. It’s clear from reading the whole discussion thread that brief, pointed criticisms of their statements are insufficient to sway them in the least. I know this was old hat for my libertarian colleagues; this was written to any and all non-libertarians, so I hope they read it and find some sense in it, coming away with a better understanding of freedom and the State than Radley Balko’s commenters came with.

There are two words that really separate us hard-core libertarians from small-government Republicans and civil-liberties-focused Democrats: Chaos and Anarchy. Libertarians love chaos and anarchy, while most Americans still cringe from these words. For most folks, chaos is some Road Warrior-style dystopia and anarchy is Molotov cocktails sailing into passing cars.

But chaos and anarchy are in fact the hallmarks of a free society. They imply a bottom-up society where the shape and pattern of everything is driven by the sum of individual decisions, each decision made with that person’s own optimization equation of his or her best interests, constrained only by the requirement they interact with other people without use of force or fraud. Our wealth, our technology, our modern economy are all born out of this chaos.
—Warren Meyer

Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. Chaos always defeats order because it is better organized.
—Terry Pratchett

[A]narchy is order, whereas government is civil war.
—Anselme Bellegarrigue

Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together.
—Thomas Paine

Therefore, when minarchists and other inconsistent, delusional, unrealistic hypocrites speak of having “the government provide the basic needs of society like police, courts, national defense [and sometimes the roads], and letting the free market take care of the rest, since it is the most efficient system,” I get a little twitch in my neck and I want to hurt somebody. Like the minarchists.

These thoughts were prompted by a comment to David Z.’s recent post about social contracts and voluntary taxation and other nonsense, Taxation really is theft! His friend Zach S. left a comment that included this paragraph, which I really disagree with:

I believe Brad G and I spoke about this and his idea would be for the government to run the most basic of needs: fire department, police department, military, etc.

I left a comment saying, basically, that those types of things are not the most basic needs; food, water, shelter, and medical care are. Fire departments, defense from outside attackers, and criminal investigation/prosecution/punishment systems are very important in any remotely large society, but they are secondary needs. People have to be living healthily before they even consider those things relevant.

Therefore, if minarchists think the free market is both more just and more efficient at providing the four basic needs to humans, then why in the world does it completely fail, to the point of justifying a monopolistic state, at providing secondary needs like those mentioned? No one except severely misinformed and biased Statists want the government to have anything to do with provision of the four basic needs of (modern) human survival, so why do minarchists say food and housing should be produced and traded freely, secondary needs like police and fire departments should be completely involuntary, but then everything else should be freely traded, too? Is there something special about secondary human needs that doesn’t apply to anything else? Is there something special and intrinsic about monopolistic states that allows them to provide four or five specific things perfectly justly (i.e., non-aggressively) and efficiently, but not anything else? Is there any principle behind that whatsoever?

I don’t know Zach S. or Brad G., but I know they would probably fit my criteria of “broadly libertarian” or “semi-libertarian.” I know it would take a long, long time and a lot of government-reducing reforms before we found a single one to disagree about (other than maybe the order in which to eliminate government activities). (I also know that isn’t the road to agorism, but we’d both prefer much less government in the meantime if we could get it.) So I know minarchists like them are my philosophical allies and I’m not trying to harass or browbeat them into growing into anarchists. I’m just trying to make my point forcefully because it is an important point that deserves to be made forcefully.

I know this subject could have warranted a much longer, more detailed, more philosophical treatment, but I just wanted to reproduce and expand upon my comment to David Z.’s post.

…this got me thinking about the curious principle of tacit consent. Here are the thoughts I jotted down today. (I’ll be returning to this subject, I’m sure.)

• When did I or anyone consent?(One of my interlocutors seemed to think this was an invalid, even unfair question.)
• If I have tacitly consented to be taxed, why haven’t I also tacitly consented to all the purposes to which the state puts my money?
• Why can’t I withdraw my consent?
• How do I withdraw my consent? Must I move out of the state’s jurisdiction?
• If that is the only way, doesn’t that imply that the state owns the territory?
• How did that come about? (I’m thinking of Monte [sic] Python and the Holy Grail now; script is here.)
• Presumably the state has obligations under the social contract. But what if the state defaults on its obligations? Does that nullify the contract?
• Who decides when and if that has occurred? Presumably, the state’s own courts.
• Why do the state’s courts get to judge a claim that the state has defaulted on the contract? Why not a truly neutral arbiter?
• Is my consent tacit, unconditional, and perpetual?
• How can that be?

Perhaps you’ve encountered this analogy, which does not violate Godwin’s Rule. In Nazi Germany, Jews were kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, and murdered solely because of their religion. Determining that some people are evil and need to be punished unmercifully and then exterminated simply because of the religious community they were born into is a monstrously evil way to decide anything. Therefore, if you objected to being kidnapped and murdered, because you were not a Jew but a Christian, you have used their criterion (religion) to avoid punishment, which means you have consented to their method of deciding who should be kidnapped and murdered. The only moral way to object to their decision to send you to a concentration camp would be to persuade them that you have harmed no one and their actions are wrong, and not mention religion at all. Right?

The point is that if you’re forced into an objectionable situation, playing by your captors’ rules and trying to improve your situation and that of others by allowable means is not necessarily evil. That alone doesn’t make voting in any and all democratic elections moral, but it makes it understandable. The problem is that voting in democratic elections, even for candidates who are (practically) anarchist and who have no chance of gaining control of the State, doesn’t tend to improve anyone’s lot; furthermore, it’s possible that increasing voter turnout by our participation in election day can actually harm others (or everyone), and improving your lot by doing harm to others is not permitted under libertarian morality.

It is argued that high voter turnout harms everyone because it strengthens the notion of the legitimacy of democratic elections in the public’s minds. This reminds me of what Herbert Spencer said. The Statists will use any excuse they can muster to maintain and expand their power over us, and will misconstrue any action on our part as representing our consent to their rule. If we vote, even for an anti-establishment and anti-State candidate, then they misconstrue that as our agreement that the election was the right way to choose our masters and therefore we must agree to live under the rulers chosen by that method. If we don’t vote, they take our apathy as a lack of objection to the democratic system, so we have no right to complain about the result the mob forces on us.

I’m not sure that high voter turnout increases the legitimacy of democratic elections in the minds of the public or in the minds of the professional criminal class; I’m pretty positive low voter turnout doesn’t decrease the feeling of moral superiority and legitimacy that our masters in the State feel. They are so consumed by moral indignation and elitism that they would hardly be humbled by being empowered by only 10% of the populace as opposed to 50%. How many people freely voted for Josef Stalin, Kim Jong Il, or Saddam Hussein, over numerous alternatives? I am skeptical of the libertarian claim that if voter turnout decreases to an embarrassingly low level, politicians will interpret that as a rejection not only of their platform but of the entire mob-rule system, and work to reform their ways so as to allow humans to govern themselves.

I guess it’s possible that if voter turnout decreased to 10% or 20% in a presidential election year, a major outcry from the media and politicians and activists would lead to discussions and analyses of the disillusionment that led to such low turnout, and a few libertarian perspectives might be discussed, so this would provide an opportunity to popularize the libertarian message. Especially with the internet. Not so much the mainstream media.

But the goal of the agorist movement is not to get a majority of people to vote for Harry Browne and Ron Paul, and continue voting in libertarians who will decrease the size of government gradually until our government is so minarchist that anarchism seems feasible, desirable, and obvious. The real agorist ideal, which all libertarians should subscribe to, is to live and work outside and above and around the State to such a great extent, and augment the black and gray markets to such a great extent, that large numbers of people become impractical for the State to govern and individual secession becomes feasible.

I’m not sure which route to freedom is faster or easier, but there don’t seem to be many reasons to keep our hopes resting on the first one.

The best reasons I’ve heard for libertarians to vote are, first, as an active protestation against the corrupt and immoral government that insists on deciding things by mob-rule. (This is as opposed to the passive protest of non-participation.) I suppose the only ways to claim moral superiority in this case would be to vote for someone who obviously has no chance of winning, who wasn’t expected to win by his supporters, and who only represents a protest-vote, an anti-vote; or, to vote for someone who opposes aggressive force of all kinds and therefore endorses the elimination of the State altogether, both in his jurisdiction and across the world. (Note that this second type of candidate is, in reality, automatically also the first type of candidate.)

I don’t buy the argument that the anti-establishment candidate and the protest-vote constitute an endorsement of the mob-rule system, just as I reject the idea that avoiding the Nazi concentration camp based on your religion is an endorsement of the religious-discrimination system of Nazi Germany. The problem is that our masters in the government and their myrmidons in the public take voting as implied consent to the mob-rule system. Not that they need our consent to see it as legitimate, seeing as how our philosophy of peace, liberty, and individual sovereignty are so far off their radar that they would take our opposition to mob-rule as evidence of its correctness.

Another understandable reason, in my mind, is to vote for publicity. Vote to increase the visibility of the general libertarian (even if it isn’t real libertarian) message. There are good points in opposition to and in support of this. In opposition to it is what I talked about above: increasing voter turnout, even if it’s for anti-Republocrat, anti-establishment, anti-State candidates, might increase the general air of legitimacy that the professional criminal class and, especially, the dumb masses assign to the democratic process. They won’t see this protest-vote as an actual protest-vote, unless they pay close attention to the actual issues, and they’ll just see the large number of votes for “alternative” candidates as proof that their beloved, rigged, two-party system does still allow for non-mainstream possibilities. Interestingly, however, the public’s widespread approval of mob-rule provides a particular argument in favor of promoting anti-State candidates. The public at large does not pay attention to, and in fact hasn’t the slightest cognizance of or interest in, libertarian philosophers or economists. They think that monster Hillary Clinton and that charlatan Barack Obama had significant differences in policy positions. They think those two dolts Hannity and Colmes represent the opposite ends of the political spectrum. They pay attention to electoral politics and presidential candidates! Introducing people to the libertarian philosophy in a very non-pushy way, a way that they see as more normal and acceptable—via support of or at least partial agreement with minarchist political candidates—is, I think, a good way to spread the message and increase the effectiveness of libertarian education. Better than sending your friends links to LRC columns or Proudhon essays, or getting into deep economic/philosophical discussions with them. Save that for later.

As an example of the potential effectiveness of spreading the libertarian message through semi-libertarian political candidates, ask yourself how many average but freedom-minded Americans had gotten up in arms about the Federal Reserve, one of the most insidious and destructive institutions of our corporate-state socialist system, before Ron Paul’s anti-presidential run? Compare that to how many average voters were converted to an anti-Fed, free-market-currency philosophy by Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard. I’d guess not nearly as many, since we’re counting average American voters, not hardcore libertarian blaggers like you and me. I know two hardcore liberal Republocrats who took note of that issue and agreed with Ron Paul about it. It isn’t much, but I’d argue that his candidacy did a lot of good to introduce people to some issues they wouldn’t otherwise pay attention to.

Maybe I’m letting my fairly enthusiastic support of Ron Paul, driven largely by the LRC machine, bias my thoughts and excuse what doesn’t deserve excusing. I wanted more people to know that small government doesn’t have anything to do with the Republican Party, that the real anti-Republican in this presidential race was Ron Paul, not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, and that if more people were exposed to a fairly popular and somewhat-almost-mainstream presidential candidate, then a few more people would learn something about the smaller-government movement in the United States.

For some reason, the LRC blag no longer has a blagroll, but back when it did, consider how easy it was for an uninformed conservative/undecided potential voter to search for Ron Paul and reach an anarchist left-libertarian web page. Someone hears how many young activists are supporting Ron Paul at rallies and on the internet, and they see that he’s around Rudy Giuliani’s or Mike Huckabee’s numbers in some primaries, and they notice the curiosity that he seems to be a “conservative” Republican who is staunchly anti-war, and so they search for Ron Paul news and commentary. They come to the LewRockwell.com blag, click on Roderick Long’s link in the blagroll, and after one search and two clicks they find themselves at the web page of a hardcore left-libertarian philosopher. One more click and they’re at either Charles Johnson, Kevin Carson, David Friedman, Gene Callahan/Bob Murphy, Arthur Silber, Sheldon Richman, Stefan Molyneux, or Agorism.info, the Center for a Stateless Society, or the Ludwig von Mises Institute. All anarchist libertarian sites. They might also click from Dr. Long’s blag to Reason’s Hit & Run, not real libertarianism but perhaps somewhat unfamiliar minarchist-civil-libertarianism.

So using the democratic-election machine to promote directly anti-democratic and in fact entirely anti-State ideals works some of the time. Maybe the bad offsets the good, though. Still, playing the Statists’ game and using their system against them is not wrong. People believe in the State and they pay attention to candidates and elections. If Ron Paul and Harry Browne popularized a watered-down version of libertarianism, and stimulated people to research, read, and learn about real libertarianism—which they did—then publicity for some broadly libertarianish platform is a perfectly just goal to shoot for. It is not saying the ends justify the means, and it is not saying if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Libertarians around the internet, especially those who strongly advocate implementing agorism in practice, talk a lot about how this isn’t practical yet and we should still focus on the education phase of agorist libertarianism, to convert more people to the philosophy of freedom and increase the number of people we can trust and freely trade with, and increase the impracticability of being governed by the Leviathan State. So promoting and talking about, and sometimes actually voting for, mostly-libertarian political candidates is something I support and engage in for publicity and education purposes.

I think the best argument against libertarians voting for other libertarians is that it doesn’t result in any shrinkage of the State and only ends up watering down parties and candidates that had a chance to be truly libertarian (like the LP), and so gradually seceding and becoming ungovernable by the State will be more effective at achieving freedom than voting for less and less government until it is voted away. And that promoting the message of semi-libertarian candidates for educational and proselytization purposes in the meantime is unacceptable for other reasons. If you agree with my assertion that promoting semi-libertarian candidates (or even pure libertarian candidates like Mary Ruwart, as Roderick Long did) is an acceptable and effective way to spread the libertarian message to people who don’t want to hear about Rothbard or Tucker or your philosophy of the nature of human beings’ relationship with one another, then you can see why I excuse libertarians who endorse and even vote for minarchist candidates.

Call it my Statist indoctrination, but I am actually kind of disappointed there are no libertarian presidential candidates to vote for. If I learn that there are propositions in my state or district that I want to vote for or against (all to decrease the size and scope of government, of course), then I will probably write in my own name in the president section. No one is fit to govern me except myself.

This probably rankles many libertarians, but, I figure it’s good to be rankled every once in a while, especially by your philosophical allies. Maybe I should give myself agorist demerits à la Roderick Long.

Ostrowski says, “First, they chose the far weaker of two candidates for the nomination. Actually, the voters probably chose Hillary but the crazy rules chose Obama.” Pff. False. Obama was clearly the better candidate. Hillary is the most hated, mistrusted, non-down-to-Earth politician in the United States in a long time except for George W. Bush. America would never have tolerated her, especially if John McCain still chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Hillary’s arrogance, her megalomania, her elitism, and that droning, cutting, incessant harpy voice would have destroyed her.

But, the only reason I’m writing this post is the link Ostrowski points us to in this sentence: “Now, Obama’s intellectually bankrupt liberalism has been exposed including by Palin last night. See this nice commentary by Mike Rebmann, a libertarian/Paulian.”

First, in Mike Rebmann’s credit, he is right about several things in this post, so I’ll give him his due by quoting those:

Where Palin loses me is her republicanesque playing of the fear card regarding the “dangerous world” we live in. She still favors a costly, interventionist foreign policy. Until we adopt a policy of defense for our natural borders, combined with free-trade, the military costs we bear will continue to dog any true economic upturn for America. …

At the end of the day, we are still left with one big question that needs an answer, who to vote for. As far as I’m concerned, Obama does not even deserve consideration. He became the Democrat’s nominess based on oratorical skills, school girl-like fawning from the media and a misplaced desire to see a black candidate, regardless of the real costs to this nation. …

The only way to justify a vote for McCain/Palin, is to subscribe to the lessor of two evils philosophy. It would take a large degree of pragmatism, or abdication of one’s values, to support a ticket that views foreign intervention as a vital part of our foreign policy.
[...]
We are going to end up with either a train wreck (Obama) as President, or McCain, a fear monger. I believe that McCain will win. My hope, in that case, is that Congress finally grows some balls and cuts the military budget, forcing a sensible foreign policy.

I’m not sure why he thinks we have to vote for anyone or why he doesn’t even mention any other candidates (he is a “Paulian,” after all), but the real idiocy comes during his discussion of his disagreements with Sarah Palin on social issues. Really they are Constitutional issues—states’ rights, to be exact:

States’ rights are an important concept that our country has strayed from. It gives people the opportunity to vote with their feet. Anyone can choose to live in a State that most closely mirrors their own personal values.

No, it gives retards, ignoramuses, and people who generally know nothing and care less about individual liberty an opportunity to excrete mindless drivel about “voting with their feet” and “choosing a government that most closely mirrors their own personal values.” My own personal values are to live exactly where I want and how I want and interact with whom I want in ways that we agree upon, without having my rights put to a vote by morons like you, while mutually acknowledging everyone else’s identical right.

Good god, when are people going to get it through their thick, State-corrupted skulls that just becuase the “minimal” government they advocate would be much better than our current governments, that doesn’t make it any more just to tell people, “If you don’t like the small government we’re forcing on you, you can always move hundreds of miles away and get a new job and make new friends and cut off any close ties you have with friends and family, to go live under a small government that suits you better. We have the guns, after all, and this is our government, so if you don’t like it, we graciously give you the freedom to vote with your feet.”

That is not freedom, idiots. That is less Statism than before. Fact: A government that most closely mirrors my own personal values is no monopolistic government at all. Fact: I would never force you into my or anyone else’s sytem of governance, or any type of involuntary situation of any kind, and I would never put your rights up for a vote.

Does it bother you to realize you don’t give us the same respect? Does that not bother any of the self-described “libertarian” minarchists out there?

I started reading it tonight, and I already like it, and I can see how the first chapter already relates to the points I tried to make in that essay about policies gaining widespread acceptance and the pressure to conform to popular standards of decency, so I have few paragraphs I thought I’d transcribe for your enlightenment and enjoyment:

Law can be imposed from above by some authority, such as a king, a legislature, or a supreme court, or law can develop “from the ground” as customs and practice evolve. Law imposed from the top—authoritarian law—typically requires the support of a powerful minority; law developed from the bottom up—customary law—requires widespread acceptance. Hayek explained that many issues of law are not

whether the parties have abused anybody’s will, but whether their actions have conformed to expectations which other parties had reasonably formed because they corresponded to the practices on which the everyday conduct of the members of the group was based. The significance of customs here is that they give rise to expectations that guide people’s actions, and what will be regarded as binding will therefore be those practices that everybody counts on being observed and which thereby condition the success of most activities.

Customary law is recognized, not because it is backed by some strong individual or institution, but because each individual recognizes the benefits of behaving in accordance with other individuals’ expectations given that others also behave as he expects. Alternatively, if a minority coercively imposes law from above, then that law will require much more force to maintain social order than is required when law develops from the bottom through mutual recognition and acceptance.

I suppose a large amount of the objection to libertarianism by minarchists and other Statists originates from the question of whether customary law is actually very likely to gain widespread recognition and acceptance “on its own” and how it’s supposed to be enforced “on its own.” I also suppose that’s a debate worth having, and I think a lot of the book will address this issue.

Reciprocities are the basic source both of the recognition of duty to obey law and of law enforcement in a customary law system. That is, individuals must “exchange” recognition of certain behavioral rules for their mutual benefit. …

Because the source of recognition of customary law is reciprocity, private property rights and the rights of individuals are likely to constitute the most important primary rules of conduct in such legal systems. After all, voluntary recognition of laws and participation in their enforcement is likely to arise only when substantial benefits from doing so can be internalized by each individual. Punishment is frequently the threat that induces recognition of law imposed from above, but incentives must be largely positive when customary law prevails. Individuals must expect to gain as much or more than the costs they bear from voluntary involvement in the legal system. Protection of personal property and individual rights is a very attractive benefit.
[...]
Demsetz explained that property rights will be defined when the benefits of doing so cover the costs of defining and enforcing such rights. Such benefits may become evident because a dispute arises, implying that existing rules do not adequately cover some new situation. The parties involved must expect the benefits from resolving the dispute (e.g., avoiding a violent confrontation), and of establishing a new rule, to outweigh the cost of resolving the dispute and enforcing the resulting judgment, or they would not take it to the adjudication system.

Dispute resolution can be a major source of legal change since an adjudicator will often make more precise those rules about which differences of opinion exist, and even supply new rules because no generally recognized rules cover a new situation. If the relevant group accepts the ruling it becomes part of customary law, but not because it is coercively imposed on a group by some authority backing the court. Thus, good rules that facilitate interaction tend to be selected over time, while bad decisions are ignored.
[...]
Carl Menger proposed that the origin, formation, and ultimate process of all social institutions (including law) is essentially the same as the spontaneous order Adam Smith described for markets. Markets coordinate interactions, as does customary law. Both develop as they do because the actions they are intended to coordinate are performed more effectively under one system or process than another. The more effective institutional arrangement replaces the less effective one.

Which is, perhaps, exactly why Statists accustomed to the societal status quo are put off and even a little frightened by the dynamic, fluid nature of libertarian legal, social, and economic structures, which they misinterpret as chaos.

I have no interest in trolling liberal, neocon, or other non-Austro-libertarian discussion threads, mainly because I don’t have the time. It’s also because I prefer recording my thoughts and feelings on my own web page to raising my blood pressure and clouding my mind with anger for a few hours by competing for Special Olympics medals with Statolatrists who have no interest in morals, philosophy, principles, or applying their imagination to potential benefits of libertarianism.

Several Statists do visit Mises.org and comment often, though. I think it’s great because they are usually civil and so are the libertarians who mop the floor with them. It’s great because these people are stepping out of their comfort zone of self-reinforcing homogeneity and reading the ideas of people who drastically disagree with them about the very nature of freedom, rights, and government.

Yesterday I observed this from a fellow named Tom Ritchford, who commented on Jeffrey Tucker’s post about the “informal sector” of the economy (gray market) and how taxation and regulation would prevent those mutually beneficial transactions from occurring, not facilitate them. I should start by crediting Tom Ritchford for admitting that government is evil (“a necessary evil”), but it’s all downhill from there. For one, he knowingly and openly supports evil. Here are some gems from his comments:

Sure, most of your taxes go on killing strangers and arresting people for smoking pot but that’s just because Americans are determined to destroy themselves and everyone else. In a civilized country, in a country where the government wasn’t going out of its way to prove that the government is only good for oppressing people and starting wars, you might actually see some good from your taxes, things like “health care” and “bridges that don’t fall down”…

If you look at your commie pinko welfare state countries, it’s amazing how well – and how long – they live relative to Americans, how much better educated they are. What’s particularly amazing is how much less they worry than Americans – they actually have a life outside of work and they don’t have those nightmares of suddenly falling off the bottom rung.

Public roads? Taxes. Clean drinking water? Taxes. Remember all those plagues? Polio? Even measles? What happened to them? Well, the government immunized all the kids – with your taxes. Education? Remember when kids came out of school being able to read and write? …

So ha ha ha you people don’t pay taxes, you’re SOOOO much smarter than the rest of us! Glad to have you responsible, ethical, honest people on board with us! I’m sure we can rely on you when the shit really hits the fan.

It is kind of depressing but no less amazing how many people assume unequivocally that if the State didn’t do something, it could never, ever get done. I’ll actually give credit to the United States government, the Soviet Union, and the WHO for eradicating smallpox and nearly eradicating polio and other diseases that struck children and lowered life expectancy so much. It’s funny that he brings up education because the State is precisely the reason Western education systems are so poor (not just in the U.S., obviously). But he will go on thinking that only the stupid Republican education reforms are bad and that just the right amount of government would solve all of those problems.

It’s also really weird that he thinks we “don’t pay taxes.” Our income tax rate has gone almost nowhere but up since the passing of the 16th Amendment. He probably hasn’t gone to any effort to learn anything about inflation (or he ignores what he has learned, since he is a Mises.org reader), but inflation is the most insidious tax and has also increased astronomically for the dollar since the founding of the Federal Reserve. Inflation is constant, debilitating, and used by the State to increase its domestic and foreign spending, just like income taxation.

Great public goods like “trucking” (where we get all this fresh food) can only exist because of a standardized system of roads, and that could only have been built with public money.

If you don’t believe it, please name a country – any country you might want to live in – where most of the roads were built with private money.

What an idiot. How about you name a country where the free market was allowed to flourish and enter the road-building enterprise. Name a country where purchase, use, and allocation of land was based entirely on freedom, property rights, and homesteading and not at all on government fiat.

I understand that the concept of “a living wage for regular work” is foreign to people here, that you want to have a few Randian superheroes and everyone else living as peasants…

The “living wage,” also known as the minimum wage, is an immoral violation of contractual rights, and not surprisingly the result is higher unemployment, not higher employment or more comfortable livelihood for people earning it.

I think his allusion to Ayn Rand on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website belies his misunderstanding of real libertarianism as espoused by the LRC/Mises group (generally, “right-libertarians”) and also of that espoused by all the left-libertarians out there (Roderick Long, Charles Johnson, Sheldon Richman, thousands of others). Anarcho-capitalists are the only consistent and convincing debunkers of Objectivism, because only the philosophy of true private property rights and true freedom from government can expose the fallacies of Objectivism with philosophical consistency.

[quoting another commenter] “It is not taxes that make the world go round and provide the infrastructure of society, but rather private individuals.”

No, it’s both, clearly. Some things are obviously better done on a “for profit” basis. Other things, like roads, are better done by a government.

But, according to your own admissions, tax money is often wasted by American politicians, on things like wars and No Child Left Behind (we assume that no politician with a “D” after his name has ever wasted a significant amount of tax dollars). Therefore, good governance and wise voting and a healthy dose of public skepticism are necessary to keep government in check and make sure it taxes people at the right rate and spends its stolen money on Good Things.

Gee, it’s a good thing we have people like Tom Ritchford around, or else none of us would know what to do with our own money! We wouldn’t know if ten, twenty, thirty, seventy-five percent of it should be graciously given to our State overlords, or what! We wouldn’t be able to build roads or sanitize the water without Tom Ritchford and his wise politicians! We’d just be throwing money into pyramid retirement schemes and terrible schools and corrupt court systems and incompetent bureaucracies without him allocating our own money for us! It’s a good thing you know what that proper income-theft rate is, you arrogant, intolerant, amoral, bullying, and willfully ignorant State lover. It’s a good thing you and your liberal socialist politicians of choice are spun from a finer clay than the rest of us, because while we would make publicly harmful decisions with 50% of our own money, you and your ilk do not suffer from such a shortcoming. How nice it must be up on your pedestal of arrogance and enlightenment, looking down on the rest of us ignorant, irresponsible freedom lovers.

That attitude makes me sick. It is a pretty common attitude.

Government is a necessary evil. Am I trying to claim that governments don’t rip the people off? Of course not. …

But a lot of good things come from government as well – just spend some time in Africa to see what happens in a country where government provides no services. I would say that there’s literally no place in the world you’d want to live without a strong government providing billions of dollars worth of services every year.

I have an idea: Let’s try one country or one state without a monopolistic government, and one with, and I can live in one and you in t’other, and we’ll just agree to trade but not bother each other outside of that.

Oh, what? Your moral code doesn’t work that way? You can force me to submit to your State and your morality, but I can’t do the same to you—I can’t even refrain from adhering to yours and leave you alone? Yeah, excuse me for not acting surprised at the fact that such an amoral and antisocial code of interpersonal relations has created most of the death, misery, and poverty the human race has ever known.

We’ve just seen what happens after eight years of a government that doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of government – the rich loot the government.

Right, that only happened during the last eight years of neocon rule. I see how in touch you are with reality. This is going downhill even faster…

When you’re a teenager, you have polarized emotions: “soldiers are evil”, “government is bad”, “save the planet”. When you grow up, you realize that the world is a more complex place and cannot be summed up in a few slogans; that government can sometimes be good and sometimes bad but is inevitable and essential and that you should try to make it work in the most efficient manner rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.

His bizarre accusations that libertarians, of all people, rally behind slogans and simple emotion-based positions tells me this might be his first visit to Mises.org. I hope it isn’t his last.

For several years I have thought of Statism as a very childlike, if not downright primitive, social structure. Think of how many impulsive and irresponsible actions the State shares in common with a child. We want something someone else has—just take it! The law of supply and demand says this will never work as intended—I don’t care, I want it so let’s do it! Other people don’t want this government program—it doesn’t matter what they want, we want it so we’re going to force them to comply! That law is completely unjust; people who broke it shouldn’t be punished—I don’t care, we made the law and we’re going to enforce it, even if it means enslaving people in cages with real criminals for several years!

But, y’know, I’m sure Tom Ritchford’s wise and moderate (imaginary) government would never go to those extremes.

In well-run countries…

Ha! You lose.

I think what we have here is another Statist who fails to appreciate two facts: the aforementioned reality that Frederic Bastiat expressed so eloquently:

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

and the fact that even in the world of government, even in the world of “well-run, minimalist” government, trade-offs exist and you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Let me illustrate his failure to understand this by expounding upon a few of my own refutations above.

Tom Ritchford claims that a “living wage” is necessary for the people to live happy, comfortable, healthy, long lives. I think he would be right in that statement. What he really means, though, is a State-enforced prohibition of voluntary contracts between two parties—business and worker. I’m sure he is aware that there is an immense body of anti-socialist literature debunking every argument for the coerced minimum wage. The fact that he acts unaware of it proves either his lack of desire to understand reality or his inability to grasp the simplest economic concepts. What I’m sure he’s never considered is that you can’t have coercive minimum wages without the wasteful bureaucratic regulatory network that comes along with it—related and completely unrelated to labor law. The alphabet soup of federal agencies and their bloat and waste are always going to exist in any socialist-regulatory state. The “unnecessary” taxes, “unnecessary” programs, and “unnecessary” regulations are a huge strain on economies and bank accounts everywhere in the world. They raise prices and restrict job growth. They keep small businesses small or out of business. The wasted money and restriction of growth that governments are responsible for are so staggering as to be nearly unfathomable. He appears to claim that with the right politicians (i.e., left-liberals) in charge, the mostly-helpful State activities will still exist and the mostly-harmful ones will be abolished. He is a helpless Utopian dreamer.

He harps on public roads in his two comments. He claims that this necessary part of national infrastructure would never, ever have been remotely imaginable without bloated federal bureaucracy and massive income theft. (Oh, sorry, moderate federal bureaucracy and appropriate income theft.) He doesn’t appreciate the public waste that they represent and the inhibition of the development and flourishing of alternative societal structures that they cause. Alternative things like actual public transportation (railroads, short-range airplanes, who knows what else) and less-spread-out communities. Many libertarians have addressed public vs. private roads, and quite well. I’m not going to harp on it.

He also insinuates that he is enamored of State health care. Look, I think all the vaccinations and eradication efforts that governments organized were great, but Frederic Bastiat’s point still applies. The problem is that any State interference leads to total State management of health care. This is already turning into a disaster in Western Europe and Canada, and America will follow a few decades behind. This is still the one political issue that scares me more than any other, though expansion of warfare and institution of military slavery by a crazed Bush or McCain is gaining fast.

In my Biology of Aging class my senior year of college, we learned about a British doctor, Thomas McEwen, who wrote two books about the causes of the population explosion and increase in life expectancy that the United Kingdom experienced starting in the late 19th century. He concluded that medical innovation played a very small role in the increase in life expectancy, but that nutrition and improved living standards contributed the most to higher childhood (and adult) survival rates. This is largely because people were healthy enough to survive childhood infections, whereas they weren’t before.

Now, given Tom Ritchford’s propensity to ignore the obvious and tell outright lies, he will probably claim this is all due to the wisdom and beneficence of the glorious British mixed economy. Every bit of economics knowledge that has ever existed tells us that free-market capitalism lowers prices, increases the supply of goods to the common man, and raises everyone’s standard of living, especially the poor. Socialist road systems probably played a role in transporting food across the country; I don’t know how many roads there were or how they were funded in Victorian England; but the socialism part was not necessary to get the transportation part. It takes a special kind of ignorance to claim that capitalism can bring food, housing, clothing, automobiles, computers, and every kind of service industry to the common man, but it fails miserably at water, education, and roads and the government does better.

The government did not and does not make people healthier, nor does it facilitate the private sector making people healthier. It only takes and destroys, it doesn’t produce or create. Even if some magical middle ground in State regulation of health care did exist, it would be absolutely impossible for the State itself to discover it and settle there. The State will keep growing (it always has, after all), and the unintended consequences and the waste and the restrictions will accumulate, all while politicians and their gullible voters call for more State fixes to solve the problems the State caused in the first place. This has been gone over before.

I have a personal question for people like Tom Ritchford. Maybe I should have posted it on the Mises blag last night, but I read it really late and I had to go to bed and wasn’t going to let myself get sucked into writing about politics. But this is a simple question. It isn’t about political, philosophical, or pragmatic details. I just want to know: How do you feel about the fact that, whereas libertarians want to fight for a world where we would be unable to impose our will upon you (and you upon us), the very basis of your entire Statist system is that we are unable to even defend ourselves against you and your agents, much less opt out entirely? What do you think about that difference in goals and moralities?

One last question, again personal: How do you feel about the fact that in order to accomplish all the glorious things that, supposedly, only governments can accomplish, it has to take the funds from peaceful people by force, upon penalty of death if they don’t submit obediently?