Well govt cant get bigger forever, let it reductio ad absurdio itselfio. I mean, we believe that things need to change because the old ways dont work, so if they dont work, let them fail. You dont have to cut that which can be untied, you dont have to euthanize a dying man.
I dont really have a plan, I just call em like I see 'em. Earlier when I said ‘plan’ I meant talking to people instead of shooting them. Like when I’m standing in line for something thats regulated, I make sure to let everybody know how the price system handles scarcity, in the long term making things cheap and plentiful. Or when they ask me if I want to send candy to the troops, I tell them I would rather bring the troops home where the candy is. Its a state of mind, I guess.
You have to understand that in modern ‘democracies’, people identify with the state. Thus any assault on the state or coup d’etat is considered an affront to themselves, and the entire populace is mobilised against you. That was not the case in the old, pre-nationalistic monarchies, where the people viewed the ruler as apart from them and it was largely irrelevant to most people who that particular person was. Your plan for a coup d’etat, then, would be much more effective in such an enviornment. Try conquering some place that has no ‘politics’.
Have you read Etienne de la Boetie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude?
That would be ‘se ad absurdum reducat’. 
I had to put your Latin in Google Translator.
But on a serious note, I’m not sure I am particularly crazy about sitting around and waiting for the state to fail, something that could produce extreme chaos in itself.
Unfortunately I have not read it. But I suppose mass education is needed in order to make a revolution succeed in that regard.
Reductio ad absurdio is a reduction to absurdity, like when you say “we need govt to tell us what to do” and I say “I like it when they tell me to wipe from front to back”
youre not supposed to be sitting around waiting, youre supposed to educate yourself and others. Yah, when everyone has trillions of dollars but theres no food and no farms, its gonna be bad. Thats why we need to educate people and convince them to walk away instead of go down with the ship.
I also changed my mind. The official plan is this:Talk to People instead of Shooting Them.
thanks, Aristippus
Okay. So in Paulian terms, an “intellectual revolution.”
He made it pretty widespread due to his presidential campaign that, as I said before, I have a strong feeling was never meant to get in in the first place, just to educate. How do you propose we mass educate people once again? I’m not going to make a game-changing difference if a convince one guy of the libertarian ways.
Well somebody had to tell Ron Paul, right? One man can write a book that speaks to millions for hundreds of years.
I feel that a more effective plan would go beyond the intellectual aspect into actually gaining social and economic standing through solidarity between libertarians. This would allow libertarians to acquire the necessary resources, connections, and organization to be a major force in society. Of course, the education aspect has to be there in order to recruit new core members and to create a general understanding of liberty, but that is only the beginning.
Hmm…how did Marx do it? I guess he automatically gained support from low wage workers who liked the “dictatorship of the proletariat” scam.
Oh wait, that scam came from some other Marxist.
Hence my support for making sure to retaliate against the state IF we have made sure taht we can abolish it instead of petty rebellions.
If you retaliated agains the huge muslce massed man pushing you, you will get beat up instead of being merely pushed, that is, if you lose the fight. If you can win the fight, then might as well retaliate.
I dont think that intellectual revolution, nor a violent revolution will do it.
We need all of them combined. We need people who are poltiically active in their libertarian mindset, and educated, and also strong if need arises to do so.
Hence the perfect libtertarian man will be like me. Buff, smart, strong, and charming.
I think what you just described was, in it’s libertarian form, Foco.
Marxism works as an agitation philosophy because it feeds into weaknesses in the human personality, you deserve better, these are the criminals, you can have what you want, nice things, power, status, those are the people responsible for taking the nice things and status, all that is necessary is for us to rise up together (this eliminates guilt, youre not an individual, youre part of something bigger than yourself) and create the world we dream about. Its just like any other malevolent ideology, it mixes truth with attractive lies, asks people to deny their reason, and follow someone else. Well, we tell unvarnished truth, we embrace reason, and we are methodological individualists. End with a bang! pumps fist, exits stage right
Yep. It’s just a power-hungry douchebag’s way of getting into power by winning the support of the masses by making hell look like heaven for them. That’s why Marxism targets the destruction of culture over anything else, because that’s what you have to control if you want the people to keep following the dillusion of the communist spirit. Hitler did it the other way. He controlled the culture by revering it and forming it around him, rather than the communist way of completely destroying it and then reforming it. Either way, when you have control of the culture, you can make anything seem cool.
Rothbard was a great man, but a little irresponsible when writing short commentary like this. An extenuating circumstance perhaps is that he wrote 8 pages per hour so it is unlikely he ever slept on a short current affairs article like this.
I think you do have to work within the system, but the power isn’t in the elections. It’s in the bureaucracies. The appointed positions, management(upper and lower). Imagine you were in charge of hiring all the _________ inspectors in the state. There’d be an awful lot of’ everyone’s in compliance’ in a big hurry.
It’s jury nullification in a society where law is decided by dork in a uniform with a ticket book. Customs agents, OSHA, Department of whatevers, DMV! That’s where you can make magic happen. What if suddenly car registration and licensing was an efficient process? Then somebody at a newspaper says “do we even really need one?” at the right time. And have you ever met a top-level POS at a DMV? They’re Nazis, no question. These people need to be on the street, out of jobs.
But think about it. Everyone loves the government until they have to deal with them. They love the military, but not girls who’ve dated someone in the Marines. They love the cops, until they get a ticket and have to go to court. Really, all that’s happening is what you already do: Talk to the people most receptive to the message. And where are people more accepting of anti-government rhetoric than government buildings?
Is that what happened in Russia for the USSR to be found? Or for that matter, is that how the USSR ended? Nah.
The end of the USSR is actually a decent model for how the US could be freed from federal tyranny. Basically, the USSR was broken up by powerful regional governors simply deciding to ignore the Kremlin from then on. They walked away from the Kremlin, and it collapse. But there was broad support for this, even within the Kremlin. Gorbachev knew Russia was floundering too, so he couldn’t bring himself to oppose this change like, say, Stalin would have.
Maybe one day the US governors of state can simply walk away from the Fed too. Businesses could refuse to withhold. Etc.
Listen, the state needs to be deligitimized in the eyes of the masses before broad-based change can occur. The left has long known the connection between legitimacy and political power, and we libertarians understand it fairly well.
Americans still believe in the concept of America, so American leadership is still legitimate and will successfully resist any attempt to break out of the system entirely. The delegitimation strategy is more powerful than the education strategy, but really the two go hand in hand.
Even things like my creation of a seastead help towards delegitimation depending on the US’s response to it. The great thing is, whether they allow my seastead or not, both decisions hurt US legitimacy and advance the education aspect of libertarianism, for it generates news either way and they’ll have to break their own laws to shut me down, thus showing the hypocrisy of the system.
I maintain that as long as the possibility of voting in change still exists, and as long as you have the right to end their aggression by non-violent means such as leaving the country and renouncing citizenship, then you don’t have a right to violent revolt within the US.
Even if you did consider seriously a violent revolt, you realize that such a revolt held to the bounds of the NAP would mean stopping only their aggression against you and no more? It wouldn’t be a revolt in any sense like historical ones. You couldn’t storm Washington DC or anything Only engage in just enough force to stop their aggression against you. Which would mean things like becoming a tax protestor.
At which point they’d simply drag you to tax court and you end up in jail for a term. Because they still have legitimacy on their side when it comes to taxes.
The intellectual state-allies that run all the state schools have inoculated the masses against critical thinking, against political and ethical reasoning, against even reading in general.
With a populace that doesn’t like to read, I don’t think the education strategy will be particularly effective. What we need are to create events that will create international news which then give a forum to our ideas and attract others to our cause. Secondly we need to group together physically, for iron sharpens iron. Things like Liberty Fest or w/e are good for that.
I think things will take off once we have a libertarian jurisdiction to settle in. From there, ways to influence the world will multiply rapidly.
I think what you just described was essentially the free-state project.