Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Top 10 Reasons Libertarians Aren't Nice to You - Christopher Cantwell

There is a whole Libertarian Party...

People would do what they've always done. Band together for either strength or protection. Which in itself becomes some sort of government.

But doing away completely with order and rule of law is stupid.

They are the same thing. When people band together their is a structure. Always is. How sophisticated it is varies, but it's always structured. With leadership positions and rules. And people who follow those rules.

Doesn't fit the definition of anarchy. But I've been told I don't know what it is.

OK, let's try this. If it was so good why did it go away? Why does this supposed anarchy not take hold, anywhere, and thrive? How does it defend itself?

Actually, anarchism has served pretty well at various times in history; for example in Iceland (for longer than the US has been in existence) and, to a lesser extent in Ireland. There's a form of ordered anarchism in many prisons, and it continues to exist because A) it's impossible to completely eradicate it, and B) it can make life considerably more pleasant for everyone, prisoners and correctional officers alike. Anarchism in Somalia produced nearly the highest technology of any black-run African nation. The underground Polish legal system under Communism had significant anarchistic features.

But you have to have the right kind of people. Americans, today, are not the right kind of people.

I've yet to see an Anarchist argument on how to address aggression. The whole premise of anarchy is based upon nonagression, which is not in the nature of man.

Wrong again. Man is.

But this seems to be a trait peculiar to (or widely shared by) libertarians. No? Randians are the same way. The smugness, the cultish mindset. Its off-putting, to say the least.

The ancap method for dealing with aggression is to spread it out so that it's really thin. Somebody gets out of hand in a free society, you get a couple of guys together and take him out back and have a word with him; suddenly he's back in hand. Or if he's not, maybe tomorrow morning he winds up stacked at the curb with your trash, and you can't buy your own beer for a week.

The statist method for dealing with aggression is to institutionalize it, concentrate it, amplify it, and tax the people to give it thugs and heavy weapons.

Then go away.

The ancap method for dealing with aggression is to spread it out so that it's really thin. Somebody gets out of hand in a free society, you get a couple of guys together and take him out back and have a word with him; suddenly he's back in hand. Or if he's not, maybe tomorrow morning he winds up stacked at the curb with your trash, and you can't buy your own beer for a week.

The statist method for dealing with aggression is to institutionalize it, concentrate it, amplify it, and tax the people to give it thugs and heavy weapons.

A man, even a really aggressive man, operating on his own, can only kill a dozen or so people before folks begin to object and kill him back.

Governments, on the other hand, can kill over 200 million people in one century.

Are you sure you've read it? Because that's not what he says at all.

Found this on the web. Very appropriate.

"Imagine a world where Sir Isaac Newton, after getting bonked in the head by an apple, proclaimed, �Gravity is the ENEMY!�

Imagine a world where, from that initial proclamation, legions of potentially highly constructive, productive beings devoted their lives (time) and resources to shouting down and vilifying the enemy, gravity. Imagine if those folks pursued the ultimate defeat of the force of gravity and its continuous imposition on our worldly experiences. What kind of person could actually construct a life that revolves around the faith that gravity can, and should, be defeated and eliminated? I don�t think it really takes any special characteristics beyond the pre-existing built-in human tendency to react to challenges to faith with blind outrage and definace, even in the face of reason which obviously exposes the futility of such wastes of the most precious resource any individual possesses, their time here on earth.

Fortunately, Newton did not paint gravity as the enemy�but as a force that exists in our reality that we can learn about and understand. Science then set about understanding gravity and it�s interactions with the rest of our experience.

Murray Rothbard on the other hand, after some metaphorical bonk on the head by consequences of government proclaimed THE STATE is the ENEMY! From that day forward his sycophants have wasted their potential trying to defeat that �enemy.� If Rothbard had been as wise as Newton, he would have recognized, as L.v. Mises had decades before, that the State is a force that exists in our reality as a consequence of the law of human action. It is a permanent, pervasive force that can be understood and dealt with through constructive human action to either amplify it�s effects or to dampen those effects. Rothbard�s faith that government was the enemy and could be defeated blinded him to the Misean view that government/bureaucracy exists as a result of the interactions of humans through the law of human action. As long as 2 or more individuals are vying for control of the same limited resources there will be government. In other words, always.

Mr. Rothbard was dead wrong and blind to it. Sadly, horrifyingly, his err has cost the defense of liberty dearly as an entire generation or more of potentially constructive political defenders of liberty have wasted their potential on shouting down a boogeyman. Many have devoted their resources and time to this futility politically by abandoning GOP into the hands of those whose driving motivation is to INCREASE the force of the state in an ever-accelerating manner. Abandoning the most powerful tool for limiting the growth of the state is an ridiculous strategy for the defense of liberty. Murray Rothbard was wrong about that, too.
The State is no more the enemy than is gravity.

The unlimited growth of the state is the enemy; just as unlimited growth of the force of gravity would spell doom, so to does the unlimited growth of the state.

Wasting decades fighting the wrong enemy is a burden Mr. Rothbard�s legacy will bear forever. In the long run I think it is likely his great economic thinking and wonderful writing style about vast topics will be overshadowed by his personal responsibility for the damage government has done to liberty for the past several decades and for many more to come."

That attitude is why you are losing---and actually harming the true cause of liberty.

"Here's a good definition of government. A government is the entity enjoying a legitimized monopoly over the initiation of force in a given geographic region.

To have a government, you have to have initiation of force. The presence of the sort of retaliatory or defensive force your voluntary band of people would apply for protection is not enough to qualify as a government. Even if they were to preemptively invade or raid other groups, that wouldn't make them a government, because the other groups would grant them no legitimacy.

In order to be a government, one group of them would have to threaten or attack another group of them while a third group looked on approvingly--for example, the way the BLM attacked Bundy & Friends while lots of Campfire folks nodded and jabbered about how they deserved it." Barak


Complete idiocy. Jeeze, where do we start to disentangle this confusion? If a group of people get together and agree upon a set of rules to govern the behavior of each and of the group and cede a portion of their natural sovereignty to that group on the basis of their belief that this arrangement (these rules) will best maximize their safety and happiness, that is government. It is based on the consent of the governed. Hence its legitimacy in origination, is consent based on natural equal rights, not force. This is the social contract theory of government (in a state of nature) upon which (in part) this nation was founded. Where in any of this is the "initiation of force" or any force at all?

You have to smuggle force into the definition of the inititaton of government (quite illegitimately) because anarcho-libertarians are compelled, by their utterly false originating assumptions and ideas that any modicum of government (even very limited) is evil. Not because such is actually the case, but because they are compelled to think that it is.

Of course, as the person I quoted above stated, the burden Rothbardian anarcho-libertarians will have to carry is the destructiveness of their misplaced idealism on libery, not any limitation on government they might otherwise have achieved, had they been rational. The whole enterprise is a giant fraud.

Then go away.