Upgrading my blog
Just a quick note that I'm doing a long-overdue upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. I apologize for any weirdness that results in the next few days.
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Why not just become an anarchist?
This question is directed to a certain, possibly large, group of people: those who, when debating anarchism, concede that it is true that social arrangements and interactions should be purely voluntary, that it is fundamentally unjust to initiate force against others (even in the name of funding for security and dispute resolution), but who then insist that they cannot subscribe to anarchism/voluntaryism because of their reservations about how it would play out on a practical level in the real world.
This is a position I don't understand. Isn't it somewhat akin to someone in the days of chattel slavery claiming that they surely see the injustice of slavery but simply can't become an abolitionist and agitate for the abolition of slavery because they can't see how society would work without it?
So what if you don't know how adjudication or immigration or crime control or defense against foreign states would be handled in a stateless society? So what if you can't quite see how voluntary mechanisms would evolve to produce safe food and drugs, efficient roads, and a well-educated population? Neither can I! Who cares? If you recognize something to be wrong, then for the love of all that's decent and sacred, declare your utter opposition to it, and call for it's elimination!
Hey, a stateless society won't emerge overnight, anyway, so why the reluctance to embrace the philosophy? Why not just become an anarchist and advocate for the abolition of the state on principle while at the same time taking part in the vibrant and diverse conversations about the ways in which a voluntary society might deal with things currently done by the state? You could even try coming up with a plan for a business or community organization that would take on such tasks in place of the state.
The more individuals who declare their commitment to peaceful, voluntary social relations and act to further that cause, the more people will be exposed to the ideas and the more society will begin to shift in that direction, leading to a steady and organically evolving transition to that state of affairs that you already agree is more just and moral than statism. So all you statists and minarchists out there who agree with the moral case for anarchy, for the love of Rothbard, stop worrying about exactly how things will work, and loudly and proudly declare yourself an anarchist!
[Update: To clear up a potential source of confusion, I'm not saying you ought to use the "anarchist" term in particular. I'm just saying you should (if you agree with the moral argument for a voluntary society) commit to the philosophy and argue for it, regardless of whether you call yourself anarchist, market anarchist, anarchocapitalist, libertarian, voluntaryist, autarchist, or whatever.]
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Unhappy Constitution Day
People across the U.S. today are celebrating Constitution Day (including many of my fellow libertarians). Personally, I'm not sure what there is to celebrate. I understand the argument that it was a document that, on its face, set up a somewhat limited government (especially by today's standards), but that limited government was orders of magnitude more powerful (even on paper) than the previous one set up under the Articles of Confederation. And I understand that Madison and those guys came up with some seemingly very clever checks and balances that probably seemed really cool to people that were used to powerful monarchs, but all those checks and balances were functions of one single government. If the government wants to, there's nothing to theoretically prevent it from doing whatever it wants. Even allowing voters the occasional choice of rulers is a largely meaningless check since nothing can be done between elections, and the majority of voters almost always vote for the candidate who promises them the biggest chunk of their neighbors' money or the biggest expansion of government's ability to make their neighbors behave the way they want.
The U.S. Constitution specifically gives the federal government 18 enumerated powers. To make matters worse, it contains vague language, like the Commerce Clause, the General Welfare Clause, and the Necessary and Proper Clause, which have made it frighteningly easy for the government to continually interpret new powers into existence for itself. In fact, the only way the Federalists were even able to get the Constitution ratified was by including the Bill of Rights, which placed specific limits on government power. But even these, as we have seen over and over in our history, can be ignored with great impunity by Presidents and Congresses with a mind to do so.
Ah, you say, but we have the Supreme Court to check the other branches and make sure they don't violate the Constitution. That's a nice theory, but that's not what usually happens. Who appoints the Supreme Court justices? The Executive, with Senate confirmation. There's no inherent reason for one branch to fear (as Madison hoped) a growth in power by another branch and thus act to stop it. In fact, each branch has the most to gain if it can help the other branches gain more power. And this is exactly what we have seen in reality as each branch has grown ever more powerful and placed ever more severe limits on the ability of individuals to act and interact freely. And the propaganda that has been built up around the Constitution has most Americans mindlessly repeating quaint platitudes about "a blueprint for limited government" and "the Articles of Confederation just didn't create a strong enough central government to hold the union together" (as if that should ever have been considered a legitimate end in the first place).
So the reality appears to be that the Constitution has had the perverse effect of advancing and legitimizing a perpetually expanding government while convincing the majority of people that it's supposed to do the opposite.
No, I don't believe I'll be celebrating Constitution Day. But I certainly will tip my hat to the Anti-Federalists and supporters of the Bill of Rights, since they saw the Constitution for what it was.
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Still alive
In case anyone was curious, I am indeed still alive. I've just been a bit tied up with the birth of my second child last Wednesday and the events leading up to it, as well as my real estate business picking up. I'll make more of an effort to post regularly, even if they're just short blurbs.
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Blog Action Day 2008
Just a quick heads up about an upcoming blog post: For the second year in a row, I'm participating in Blog Action Day, an event that consists of mostly left-wing bloggers (it seems to me) all posting on a particular topic on a single day in order to catalyze a global discussion and search for solutions. I'm not about to let the left monopolize something like this, so I'm going to give my libertarian perspective. The subject this year is poverty, and the day is October 15.
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Disturbing video (not for the faint of heart)
I guess everyone's seen this by now since it was on Drudge, but this video of children singing a song worshiping Obama is extremely disturbing. This kind of brainwashing of innocent children (while certainly within their parents' rights) is possibly even creepier than kids waving their hands in the air and singing songs worshiping mystical characters from ancient religious books. In both cases, the poor kids have no idea what's really going on and are being used by adults to further their respective dogmas that demand the repudiation of logic and reason.
Update: I've replaced the video link with a working one since the first one was made private.
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Time to Sever the Government-Market Connection
I was excited to see that the bailout plan (at least the first incarnation of it) was voted down yesterday. I was disappointed, however, to see the market plunge so dramatically in response. This points to the socialist/fascist/statist connection between the government and the market.
How is it that we have permitted such a degeneration into the uncivilized state of affairs in which a primitive, parasitic, political class can affect business transactions through the actions they take (or fail to take) in the halls of Congress? We should be ashamed of ourselves for voting for these despicable creatures and for allowing them to remain in power. From the writing of the Constitution on, we have steadily given the organized criminals we call politicians more and more power over us and our economy. This, as I've mentioned before, has led to a class of large businesses proficient at using the laws to crush their competitors.
But it's really our fault for asking politicians to fix various things we have perceived as problems through the years. What a primitive mindset. We don't like something, so we team up with others to use violence (government) to make them bend to our will, whether it's child labor, low wages, pollution, drugs, prostitution, or the way a bank is doing business. Rather than take the civilized route and work through voluntary efforts to persuade people to change their actions, we throw the very concept of human dignity and natural rights out the window and point a gun at our perceived "enemies." We've created an inhuman and wealth-destroying entanglement of government and markets, which has led directly to the crisis in which we now find ourselves.
We're now at a point where we can grow up and decide to stop our use of force to get what we want, or we can plunge so far into statism that we can't climb back out. We can say "no" not only to this bailout but to any bailouts, ever. We can say "no" not only to any proposed new regulations but to any regulations, ever. We can demand the dissolution of the IRS and Federal Reserve and an end to the use of violence to restrict banking or any other industry. We can call the entire spectrum of government regulation exactly what it is--a violation of the natural rights of every one of us and a sentence for our children and grandchildren to never achieve the prosperity and happiness that could be theirs under a true free market.
We can sever the destructive link between government and the economy, but our window of opportunity may be closing quickly.
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Wait for it…wait for it…
Starting to get pissed off enough again at government coercion to get back to blogging....
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Taking a Break
No Coercion readers,
I will be taking a break from my blog for a while. And no smart ass comments about how I don't post regularly enough to have anything from which to take a break!
I'll return at an indeterminate point in the future. In the meantime, visit the blogs on my blogroll for similar libertarian thinking.
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Are You a Genius?
Because...um...I am.
Check it out!
Seriously, though...it must use a bad algorithm or something. Still, I'm adding it to my sidebar...'cause that's awesome. And a great man once told me to never pass up on an opportunity for self-bragging.
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