In a Facebook note, Kyle Bennett lists:

15 Ways You Are Probably Wrong About Anarchists, Agorists, and Voluntaryists

1. We don’t want to turn your government anarchist. That makes as much sense as accusing you of wanting to dye your hair “bald”.

2. We get it, there’s no historical precedent. That tends to be a common problem with new things, yet new things are created every day.

3. We don’t expect utopia. If you think that’s what we’re after, maybe it says more about your idea of the function of government than ours.

4. Some of us live with our parents, and maybe even have a room in the basement. Some of us are parents. Most of us are just adults with lives not too different than yours.

5. Arguing on facebook is not how we think we’re getting anything done, it’s what we do in our spare time. It’s what we do to connect with each other, to exercise our ideas before applying them out in the real world, or just for fun.

6. Convincing you is not important to us, except in an abstract or personal sense. You’re probably not as important as you’d like us to think you are.

7. We’re not seeking consensus, nor to sway the masses. The requirement that our lives be ruled by public opinion is one of the things we oppose.

8. We’re not the ones breaking Starbuck’s windows. We like coffee too.

9. We’re not trying to mooch off the system, we want to be free to produce for ourselves the useful things the system produces, and to do it better.

10. We’re against a lot of the same things you are, and more. We value most of the same things you do, and maybe more highly. It’s our means that are different. When those values and oppositions come into conflict, we don’t make excuses, we resolve it.

11. We’re not nihilists. We’re for a lot more than we’re against, it’s just that the main thing we’re against is so overwhelming it blots out the view of everything else.

12. Solving problems requires work and time. We’re not the ones with illusions of having our wishes fulfilled through documentation and edict.

13. We don’t blame you for creating the system, but we’re amused by how obviously self-fulfilling your prophecy that “we can’t do anything about it” is.

14. We don’t want a violent revolution, we want billions of peaceful ones.

15. “We” are neither a monolith nor a collective. We’re not defined by our label, our label is a recognition of the overlap between our individual beliefs. Extrapolate from it at your own risk.

At least Anthony Gregory had the honesty to admit how he totally screwed us all, along with any hope for liberty:

“We were on the verge of obtaining a reasonable degree of liberty. We were going to get our taxes slashed and simplified but not abolished, the military budget reduced and the troops brought home, drugs decriminalized and managed via harm reduction, a significant liberalization of immigration controls without totally open borders, new restrictions on the Fed’s central planning powers adopted in 2008 and 2009, some more flexibility on pharmaceutical testing and health insurance, moderate patent reform, a diminution of pages in the Federal Register, prison reform, genuine oversight and remedies for police misconduct, strengthened due process and warrant requirements in national security cases, a plan to phase out massive entitlements, some fair-minded school reform, and a scaling back of federal gun laws. We were on the cusp of this moderate but significant step toward liberty, where we would not get all we wanted, but we would get much of what we wanted. But I ruined it all. I cited Murray Rothbard and Lysander Spooner. I made the perfect the enemy of the good, and now the liberty that was in our grasp is lost forever. Sorry, everyone. My selfish desire to adhere to ideological purity has spoiled our chances at increased freedom once again.”

I accidentally flicked on Hannity tonight and there was Ron Paul’s former son, Senator Quisling of Kentucky, explaining that we really don’t need to lay off any government workers because of the sequester.

Imagine my relief. I was afraid some parasites might actually have to find work in the productive sector….

Here’s a list of my articles that have been featured on other sites. At some point I expect to republish all the articles here, but for now at least these are links to the articles or archived copies:

On anti-state.com:

The Fundamental Fallacy of Government

Marketing Market Anarchism

A Parliament of Whores?

The Revolution Will Be All Business

Disputing Narveson On The Coercion Of Free Riders

Economic Secession

On Strike-The-Root.com:

Look Ma: Invisible Hands

The Invisible Hand Of Spontaneous Corruption

The Wrong Hill

An Embedded Premise

The Fallacy Of Control

A Short Argument For Intellectual Property
(I now recognize the above argument is wrong.)

At the Free State Project:

A Porcupine’s Worth Is His Price

Just two rules:

1. Take a drink every time either candidate says something stupid.

2. Drink a shot every time either candidate says something evil.

(It is highly recommended that you have all your affairs in order before commencing this game.)

In my last article I argued that equal treatment is not a principle of justice. There are various formulations of equal treatment – equality under he law, equality of opportunity, or equality of outcome, for instance. I’ve sought to demonstrate that these formulations are incoherent, that they add nothing to justice, and they strongly tend to erode justice.

In Equality: The Unknown Ideal, Roderick Long points to a very different kind of equality as the foundation of justice. First he draws our attention to a passage from an early draft of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable: that all men are created equal and independent; that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But what sort of equality did Jefferson have in mind, in claiming to derive rights from “equal creation”?

Long:

For the answer to this question we must turn from Jefferson to Jefferson’s source, John Locke, who tells us exactly what “equality” in the libertarian sense is: namely, a condition

wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection….

In short, the equality that Locke and Jefferson speak of is equality in authority: the prohibition of any “subordination or subjection” of one person to another. Since any interference by A with B’s liberty constitutes a subordination or subjection of B to A, the right to liberty follows straightforwardly from the equality of “power and jurisdiction.” As Locke explains:

[B]eing all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…. And, being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.

Locke points to the self-evident fact that no individual is born with moral authority over, or moral subordination to, any other individual. By nature individuals have equal authority – legitimate authority over their own lives, but not over the lives of others.

Right there, Locke has essentially derived the non-aggression principle, a priori. The fact that individuals naturally have equal moral authority means that no individual can morally aggress against another.

Notice that equal authority in no way implies equal treatment of the types previously discussed. The only offense against equal authority is forceful interference with another individual’s legitimate authority over himself.

This coincides perfectly with what I said in my last article:

So what is just? There is a very simple principle of justice and it has been identified by libertarians – justice is embodied in the principle of non-aggression. Aggression is unjust and the proper goal of libertarianism is to identify and curtail such injustice. That’s it.

I’ve pointed to James Buchanan’s attempt to apply an incoherent notion of generality to constitutional law. This principle of generality is really what people mean by “equality before the law”. In a review of Politics by Principle, Not Interest by Buchanan and Roger Congleton, Anthony de Jasay gently, but thoroughly, shreds the principle.

Consider taxation: The principle of generality, or equality before the law, posits that all individuals should be taxed equally. That sounds pleasing to many. Unfortunately the principle can give us no guidance on what such generality or equality needs to look like. Does a poll tax where every citizen pays an equal sum satisfy equality before the law? How about a flat tax on income where every citizen pays an equal percentage? But then again, why a tax on income instead of total wealth? Or why not a tax where every citizen is left with an equal income after taxes?

Which of these proposed polices satisfies the principle of equality before the law? Sober reflection reveals that the principle provides no standard by which one may choose between these polices – any ranking of the policies depends on an entirely subjective understanding of equality which has nothing to do with equality before the law.

Jasay:

Although the “treat like cases alike” meaning of generality is no more than a tautology for “apply the rule,” the “non-discrimination” meaning clearly does not bear pushing anywhere near its logical limit – a telling sign that it has some defect that comes to light when the meaning comes to be stretched a little. In fact, Buchanan and Congleton are far too intelligent not to sense this problem. They are fairly diffident about providing a working definition that would tell us, in every case, what rule would pass for general.

In one basic case, though, they are perfectly confident about what rule would be the truly general one. This case is the two-person (or two-coalition), two-strategy game of benefit- or burden-sharing, as exemplified by Hume’s farmers digging a drainage ditch. A two-by-two matrix describes four alternative allocations of the workload. Along what the authors call the diagonal, both farmers dig for two days or neither digs. Along the off-diagonal, either one digs for three days and the other for one, or the other way round. Which of the two off-diagonal, asymmetrical alternatives is the actual solution depends on which “farmer” is enabled by the political choice mechanism to coerce the other. A rule applied to this type of case is general if it outlaws the off diagonal solution, so that only the symmetrical, equal-sharing solutions remain available.

Both farmers work the same length of time. Obviously, the Pareto-optimal solution among all the symmetrical ones is that they should both work as long as it takes to complete the ditch; but this is not the point. The point is that generality has been found to reside in symmetry. From here, a promising avenue seems to lead toward a more developed form of generality. The simple version of the rule would say that the farmers, when placed in the circumstances described, should dig the same number of days, preserving one kind of equality, albeit a rather rudimentary one.

However, there is no compelling reason why equality of days worked should be regarded as the best, let alone the sole valid criterion of symmetry. If one farmer is frail, old, or arthritic, or if one has a higher opportunity cost because when he digs he cannot attend to the calving or lambing, or if his end of the ditch has a nasty, sticky, clayey patch, then a rule laying down equality of labor time might well be held to produce asymmetrical shares of pain or cost. Likewise, it might also be argued that symmetry calls for labor time to vary inversely with productivity or directly with the benefit each farmer will derive from the drained meadow. Symmetry in the relevant variable must prevail, but why is labor time the relevant variable rather than pain, productivity, opportunity cost, benefit, or something else?

I rather enjoyed the gentle dancing bits at the beginning of this protest at the Jefferson Memorial, but one reason I’m disinclined to take part in something like this is that you never know when the Human Megaphone is going to start chanting something pathetic like: “THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!”

At this point, I pictured Charles Durning from O Brother Where Art Thou playing Murray “Pass The Free Trade Pappy” Rothbard, with his idiot son Junior:

Junior:

People like that democracy Pappy, maybe we should get us some…

Rothbard:

Sweet weepin’ Jesus on the cross, is that the best idea you can come up with?

HOW WE GONNA RUN DEMOCRACY WHEN WE’RE THE DAMN LIBERTARIAN??

Thank God your momma died giving birth, if she’d a seen ya she’d a died of shame!

I find many valuable insights in James Buchanan’s essay The Soul of Classical Liberalism, but I was particularly struck by a point that Buchanan only touches upon tangentially:

Much has been made of the American spirit or soul as influenced by the availability of the territorial frontier during the first century of the United States’ historical experience. Why was the frontier important? The proper economic interpretation of frontier lies in its guarantee of an exit option, the presence of which dramatically limits the potential for interpersonal exploitation. There has been a general failure to recognize that the effectively operating market order acts in precisely the same way as the frontier; it offers each participant exit options in each relationship.

The rational evangelists of libertarianism think we need to argue better, but it’s really exit that makes liberty possible, and exit is not an argument. Libertarians need better exits, not better arguments. They need to see markets as the solution rather than the goal.

I love Nevada.  We have wild horses, slot machines, legal brothels, and guys who die leaving $7 million in gold bullion stored in their garages.  We also value a certain arms length congeniality.  So when Carson City resident Walter Samaszko, 69,  passed away in his home in June of a heart attack, it was a few weeks before anyone started wondering where he was.

“He was a good neighbor.  I never saw him that much,” said Joe Baxter.

The men had exchanged waves on occasion from across Mountain View Street,  a modestly quiet area in the northeast part of town.  Baxter didn’t know Samaszko very well, but recently accepted an offer from a real estate agent friend to go through some of the dead man’s possessions  prior to putting the house on the market.  Imagine their surprise when they came upon a couple of ammo cans filled with 4000 ounces of gold coins.  They contacted the Carson City County Clerk Alan Glover and that’s when the clucking started.

“The amount of it was what was overwhelming.  They had to use a wheelbarrow to move boxes and boxes of gold from the house,”  claims Glover, but while 4000 ounces is 250 pounds, the volume only occupies the space of about 1.5 gallons of water.  I may well have used a wheelbarrow, too, but boxes and boxes?  This sounds like something of an exaggeration of the facts.  Easy to do in a case like this, but Glover continues.

“He was a hoarder.  He had cases of salmon.  Cases of tunafish.”

Apparently Glover doesn’t shop at Costco, where it’s common to see customers rolling Kirkland tuna out of the store by the case.  And because Mr. Samaszko possessed what Clerk Glover characterizes as conspiracy books along with some guns and cases of ammo, he concludes that:

“It appears he did not like government very much.”

It’s not apparent in print, but if you watched the KRNV video, Glover clearly comments with some disdain about a man who really can’t correct any of Glover’s conclusions or possible misconceptions.  For example, the use of the term “hoarder” in today’s vernacular connotes crazy people from reality TV who cram their homes with junk, but gold, guns, ammo, and food are not junk.  We like that sort of thing out here in these parts.

And just what does Glover mean by conspiracy books?  Did Samaszko have a copy of The Creature From Jekyll Island or, God forbid, Ron Paul’s End the Fed?  Is that where he got the whacky idea that gold bullion might be a valuable thing to keep around.  Wow.  How crazy is that?

You thought No Treason was gone for good, but I warned you that you weren’t that lucky. After a 4 year hiatus from the web, the bad boys (and girl) of market anarchism are back! (Or at least their body of work from 2001-2008 is back online….)

Now that’s pretty funny.