If RP is a truly a closet anarcho-capitalist, and therefore believes the state is simply evil and not a necessary evil, doesn’t that mean he’s an immoral individual? I can understand the ancap logic of voting for the nicer overseer, but I can’t see the morality of seeking to be an overseer. Is it morally acceptable for an ancap to run for office, to hold elective office, and to basically engage in violence? If he truly believes that the government is inherently evil, and serves no legitimate purpose, then how does he justify the fact that he’s been in Congress for a quite a long time?
Personally it seems as if RP would be less admirable if he was actually an ancap.
How can the State and the statist disease be stopped? Now I will come to my strategic considerations. First off, three fundamental insights or guiding principles must be recognized. First: that the protection of private property and of law, justice, and law enforcement, is essential to any human society. But there is no reason whatsoever why this task must be taken on by one single agency, by a monopolist. As a matter of fact, it is precisely the case that as soon as you have a monopolist taking on this task, he will with necessity destroy justice and render us defenseless against foreign as well as domestic invaders and aggressors.
It is then one’s ultimate goal which one has to keep in mind is the demonopolization of protection and justice. Protection, security, defense, law, order, and arbitration in conflicts can and must be supplied competitively — that is, entry into the field of being a judge must be free.
Second, because a monopoly of protection is the root of all evil, any territorial expansion of such a monopoly is per se evil too. Every political centralization must be on principle grounds rejected. In turn, every attempt at political decentralization — segregation, separation, secession and so forth — must be supported.
The third basic insight is that a democratic protection monopoly in particular must be rejected as a moral and economic perversity. Majority rule and private property protection are incompatible. The idea of democracy must be ridiculed: it is nothing else but mob rule parading as justice. To be labeled a democrat must be considered the worst of all possible compliments! This does not mean that one may not participate in democratic policies; I will come to that a little bit later.
But one must use democratic means only for defensive purposes; that is, one may use an antidemocratic platform to be elected by an antidemocratic constituency to implement antidemocratic — that is, anti-egalitarian and pro-private property — policies. Or, to put it differently, a person is not honorable because he is democratically elected. If anything, this makes him a suspect. Despite the fact that a person has been elected democratically, he may still be a decent and honorable man; we have heard one before. ~ HHH
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He’s not. And that’s the point.
“Of course I’m cheering on Ron Paul because he is exposing the nature of the whole system. He is not running for president. He is running against the presidency as it is currently understood. Ultimately, however, I do not believe that politics offers a way out. What we need is a new consciousness concerning the idea of human liberty.” - Lew Rockwell
And I agree. Nothing is going to change by votes, Ron Paul has also acknowledged this. His purpose is education, and that’s what he’s done and continues to do.
Is it a violation of the NAP?
If the person adds to the level of statism in anyway, then they become a criminal and are liable for the destruction. That’s how I see it. If not, ie it is purely defensive and they vote down every statist measure, and put forward Bills like Ending the Fed.. acceptable.
This is the same accusation that liberty student levelled against me for running in elections. There are only two independent criteria for criminality: the act of aggression and the advocation of aggression. In my case you will not be able to find a single act of or advocation of aggression. RP may have done the latter here and there in his appeal to different interest groups. But, running for office and even holding office is neither.
CrazyCoot:
Is it morally acceptable for an ancap to run for office
Is it a violation of the NAP?"
I don’t know; does being an elected official, and therefore receiving money obtained through coercion, constitute a violation of the NAP? Does voting for legislation that affects people who never actually agreed to constitute a violation of the NAP?
Isn’t him being in Congress the same as advocating Congress, and therefore the state, and therefore aggression? Could the fact that he lends credence to the institution, at least among some, be construed as advocating aggression and therefore criminal?
Anything can be construed as anything. I could construe the entire planet as my property by construing the continuity of matter as a continuation of my body.