so im reading the first paragraph and im like,hmm sure im those things
anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government, -anarchist
natural rights vs. utilitarianism, -natural rightist
and war vs. peace -of course, peace
abolitionism vs. gradualism, ehhh i guess ill be a gradualist you know, if we just pushed the rothbard button right now…
Then at the end of the article: And that is why the radical libertarian is not only an abolitionist,…
Ehh ok, i know i hate the state too, but if we delete it all at the same time then wont things be kind of, scary??
So is it so wrong for me to disagree with rothbard on this one, or am i missing something? Or am i not as a hardcore of an anarchist as rothbard is?
Ive always thought that the road to anarcho capitalist is to gradually chip away at the state, put someone like ron paul in office, get the liberty mindset, then start chipping away, untill the government is small enough to where we can abolish it.
Kinda like a drug addict, if you yank away the drugs and lock him in a cage, he will go through massive withdrawal symptoms, but with a gradual rehabilitation program it wont be as bad.
No, you’re perfectly right. The state being abolished immediately would cause more coercion and greater harm to living standards than its maintenance would.
He seems to be saying that if you really truly hate the state that the potential consequences of abolishing the state shouldn’t be your first concern. Your first concern should simply be abolishing the state, full stop.
“With such an integrated worldview, the radical libertarian could never dream of confronting either a magic button or any real-life problem with some arid cost-benefit calculation. He knows that the State must be diminished as fast and as completely as possible. Period.”
Can’t be done. Actually either one can’t be done. That’s why we haven’t done it for the last 70+ years of trying. Ron Paul should be a moral story more than anything; here’s a life dedicated to the libertarian cause, virtually complete consistency, dedication to libertarian principle, and actually makes his way into the halls of power–where he’s a virtual outcast. Ignored, lampooned, with no real power. Running for president time after time and making little to no headway. Even his most recent run, he never had a chance.
Suppose even that libertarians took over the republican party. The left might actually love that, because we wouldn’t be bringing the masses with us. The repubs might be permanently removed from power were that to happen, because the masses would not understand it and would stop voting for libertarian repubs. It’s the masses and their beliefs that keep statism in power. Or else RINOs would again gain power as the only repubs being voted for, people like Chris Christie.
We cannot educate our way out of the state.
We cannot and will not use violence to overthrow the state.
We cannot convince the masses to abandon either the largesse they vote to themselves nor egalitarianism nor coercion.
As long as majority rule (democracy) is in place, the idiots will always outvote the enlightened; that’s the main problem.
And here suddenly perhaps I see some merit in Plato’s ideal of the philosophy king (even if he had the wrong version of them in mind). But even here, a libertarian must reject even the offer of tyrannical powers, for we would not coerce a state into becoming free, would we? Would you? I’ve concluded such would be antithetical. If I were king for a day, my first act must be to abolish kings.
There is but one thing we can do that would actually create the effect we’re looking for: set up an independent nation in unclaimed territory and begin living as libertarians in a libertarian political system. I suggest seasteading.
Yeah, it’d probably have to be minarch initially. But which would you rather live in, minarch, or the 90% tyranny of today’s countries?
The only historical example I see of a country deregulating is when they were outcompeted by a freer country.
Two examples: Britain in the late 19th, and Russia in the 80’s.
Both tales involve economic competition of a high degree.
When the Americans invented clipper ships and had free trade, they began running away with the trade of the entire world, paying much higher prices because they could afford to, and getting the best of everything and trading it the world round, taking British trade from under their noses. The British certainly did not have free trade and had many regulations to boot. (See Lane’s Discovery of Freedom).
The British’s first instinct was to foment war. However, they were convinced by political groups at home (classical liberals [that don’t exist there anymore]) that the superior American competition was a result of free trade and better ships. The British thereafter deregulated, built clipper ships of their own, and built the resulting British empire.
The Americans meanwhile began creating tariffs and lost their trade advantage.
The second, more recent example, of the USSR dissolving because it could not keep up militarily, because it could not keep up economically, was also deregulation by comparison and being outcompeted.
What we need to do is create a libertarian enclave with no taxes, free trade, and market services for everything and watch as that society takes off like a rocket, to the shock of the world. Because no one would see it coming.
I’m dedicated to seeing it happen in my lifetime. I want to have the first buildings on the water within a decade and declare sovereignty soon thereafter
I’m sure if such a place existed, many on this forum, among others, would be virtually compelled by their beliefs (and their pocketbooks?) to move there in actuality.
Maybe with a few hundred more years of education, the US public might actually understand enough economics to accept Austrianism. But has that trend been getting better or worse for us? It’s gotten worse. The public and the media understand less econ now than they did in the 1950’s.
Want to abolish the state? First abolish it in your own life. Live a life without the state, show others not only that it can be done (they don’t even believe it can, in fact they’ve never even had an inkling of a thought that it might be tried) but that it can be prospered by so doing.
That is the only kind of abolition someone who accepts the NAP is likely to be able to achieve, since fomenting violent revolution is out of the question, and it is achieved by foot-voting–by moving to a free region.
I’m a deontologist once ethical principles are established. But I don’t believe that those principles are established by God on Sinai or in any other mystical-otherwordly way. They have their roots in the real world, in human minds. We begin by taking stock of everyone’s wants, and then ask: how can these wants best be satisfied? We attempt to discover which principles of behavior (ethical principles), when universally adopted, would lead to the greatest possible satisfaction of our wants. If everyone has contradictory wants, then no such universalizable ethics can be developed. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of people do have compatible wants: namely, maximum possible material prosperity and freedom from aggression. For the aggressive minority, tough luck, this ethics is not for your benefit. So, once we use reason (both inductive and deductive) to scientifically establish which principles should be adopted in order to produce the desired results for members of society, there is no reason to waver from those principles.
and war vs. peace
How can a libertarian be in favor of war? Seems a basic contradiction. Of course, if we’re operating within the context of the nation-state, then (“defensive”) war is a necessity. But no libertarian can actually favor war as such.
abolitionism vs. gradualism
As Murray noted in the article, the lines are blurred. No abolitionist in his right mind is going to refuse a move in the right direction. And I seriously doubt, for all their talk about pushing the button, that any abolitionist would actually want to see the State vanish overnight: as the result would obviously be chaos, and almost certainly the emergence of a new, even more brutal State. As this is my view, I suppose I would call myself a gradualist.
I think a more important distinction than gradualist v. abolitionist is idealist v. pragmatist. For example, suppose you have good empirical evidence that an anarcho-capitalist society, if established somewhere in the world today, would quickly be conquered by an aggressive foreign State. If you’re an idealist, I suppose you go ahead with establishing the anarcho-capitalist society regardless, because you are unwilling to tolerate - for example - a minarchist interregnum. I would be in the other camp. I’d happily settle for a temporary minarchy (to last until such time as the world is made safe for anarcho-capitalism: to paraphrase a certain scumbag) rather than risk the collapse of the entire libertarian project amidst war.
Ive always thought that the road to anarcho capitalist is to gradually chip away at the state, put someone like ron paul in office, get the liberty mindset, then start chipping away, until the government is small enough to where we can abolish it.
That’s my view as well. Firstly, there is in fact no magic button. So what does abolition mean in reality? It must mean either (1) violent revolution, or (2) some inexplicable collapse of the State. I’d argue that violent revolution is essentially impossible given the state of technology, and that a libertarian strategy resting on a predicted collapse of the State amounts to wishful thinking. I didn’t mention counter-economics, but that’s because I don’t see as having any real chance of success. It is in the nature of power structures that they can be changed only in two ways: through violence from without (foreign conquest or domestic revolution) or peacefully from within (through whatever processes the power structure itself recognizes as legitimate). I favor the latter (though if I were generalissimo of a few hundred-thousand well-trained soldiers within marching distance of Washington D.C., I may well change my tune).
Obviously the goal for any anarcho-capitalist should be the total abolition of the state. However, it is not contradictory for us to advocate for the elimination of all government while at the same time accepting transitory demands.
There is but one thing we can do that would actually create the effect we’re looking for: set up an independent nation in unclaimed territory and begin living as libertarians in a libertarian political system. I suggest seasteading.
The great problem for a free society once-established, in my opinion, is the threat posed by aggressive foreign States. Not only would a free society be rich pickings, but more importantly its very existence would post a mortal threat to all States. States ultimately rest on the consent of the population, and that consent is based in the idea that “we need them.” If a concrete example is provided to the people of the world that, in fact, we don’t need “them,” that’s the end of all States. I imagine a libertarian society would face a coalition of States rather like Revolutionary France did, and for similar reasons.
Now, the problem with seasteading is that a seatseading community will only gradually attain a size that would allow it to defend itself against foreign aggression. And there’s no reason to suppose that foreign States are going to sit idly by and watch this happen. I expect they would try to nip it in the bud. Hence the advantage of using the political process to take control of any existing State. As then, foreign States would be presented all of the sudden with a full-grown society, already capable of defending itself from external aggression in virtue of the military apparatus that the new libertarians government inherited from its predecessor. As an American, I obviously hold out hope that the U.S. could be this libertarian nation, as that would - given the geography and size of the country - assure us against conquest from without.
However, another option, which interests me increasingly the more I think about it, is for libertarians to venture into the last unclaimed terrestrial territory on Earth: Africa. Africa is not uninhabited, obviously, but its governments are so weak and its affair so chaotic, that foreigners can and do easily intervene and establish themselves as authorities. Moreover, private companies do this. Why not a libertarian company? Something analogous (sans the monopoly granted by the government back-home) to the “Companies” that set out from Europe to colonize the rest of the world in centuries past? Consider: how much would it really cost to hire enough mercenaries to conquer, say, Sierra Leone? More or less than what it would cost in campaign spending to take control of the U.S. federal government through the electoral means? Africa has so much natural potential, which is being squandered because of the absence of security for property. Libertarians could provide that security. Moreover, the average man on the street in Africa has no loyalty to the “nation” which some European bureaucrat created by arbitrarily drawing lines on a map. There is nothing to overcome but the - usually hated and tyrannical - gaggle of warlords running the “nation,” who incidentally, are probably using arms that were already outdated in the 1970’s, and who would almost to a man prefer to flee with their loot than fight to defend their “nation.”
Well if we try to slowly abolish the state, through means that i described (ron paul, smarter voting etc) we will never get it done, thats a fact. Even if ron paul becomes president, he will get murdered, or the congress will never pass any of his proposals.
So what if we go in the other direction?
Increase the state, increase taxation, let the fed ruin the dollar, let the government oppress the masses (this is the hardest part), then people will find tha tthey hate the state, and eventually it will collapse (like the ussr); yes this will be extremely painful, but i think if we let the government keep growing and more shit to fly, then it will collapse faster.
But then u always have the chance of a more oppressive state of rising.
I do actually like the idea of creating our own libertarian nation though.
I do actually like the idea of creating our own libertarian nation though.
What do you think of the idea of “conquering” (that word brings up the wrong connotations, as we would really be freeing people from subjugation) a chaotic-lawless African country with a private company?
I mentioned Sierra Leone, only as an example of an African country in chaos. A better example, one that I might propose at the board meeting of the “Africa Company” if such existed, is the Democratic Republic (haha) of the Congo. It has VAST natural resources, a population of 70+ million, a navigable river with the hydroelectric capacity to supply all of Southern Africa, not much in the way of sectarian conflict (the conflict is mostly between the warlords and everyone else, not ethnic), AND it has no government/military to speak of. The DRC has a navy with no command structure and nothing but patrol boats armed with machine guns, an airforce with no functioning aircraft, a handful of 1970’s or older era battle tanks which in all likelihood don’t work anymore, 150k nominal army which however has no training, little armament, and rarely gets paid (hence they live off raping, looting, and murdering the peasantry), and a 10k strong “Republican Guard,” which is regularly paid but only slightly better trained and armed. If a private company could raise a few billion dollars to fund, say, 20k well-trained light infantry they could defeat the “government” in Kinshasha, and create order: which will draw in foreign investment. The hydroelectric potential of the Congo river is truly astounding. There’s currently a project on the books for the “Inga” Dam, which will produce 39GW of power. An excise tax at a mere $.005 per KW-hour would yield about $1.7 billion annually, more than enough to sustain the security operations of the “Congo Company” (the current “government” spends only about $90 million annually on security, much of which no doubt ends up in the pockets of corrupt officials). A minarchist-type government could thrive in the Congo, do absolute wonders for the people (who currently live in a state of perpetual civil war on about $350 annually) and make a tidy profit in the process.
Now, this is armchair generaling/politicking in the extreme, but I’m just trying to paint a picture of what might be possible if a group of libertarian investors set their mind to creating a Libertopia somewhere in Africa.
Why conquer an area–maybe I’m naive and no government would do it, but it seems to me one could buy sovereign land from some impoverished nation and end up making billions in the process.
A Libertarian land developer buys say 10 square milesof wilderness from some impoverised nation, at maybe double the expected price for the country to forfeit its rule over that property. The developer/king then lays out a minarchist constitution/contract complete with contracting for the transition from minarchy to anarchy either in time, or as milestones in development are reached. I’d expect the land value to skyrocket
I know very little about Dubais history, or where it stands now, but I assume it emerged from the desert for one reason:
The major advantage in setting up in a free zone is that you are entitled to:
100 per cent foreign ownership of the enterprise
100 per cent import and export tax exemptions
100 per cent repatriation of capital and profits
No corporate taxes for 15 years, renewable for an additional 15 years
No personal income taxes
Assistance with labour recruitment, and additional support services, such as sponsorship and housing.
Isn’t that a bit utilitarian? I’d rather begin from a property ethic and build from there.
Everyone does have differing wants, because everyone has differing value scales.
Agreed.
A libertarian society can engage in war just fine, as long as it is a defensive war.
Okay.
Certainly. And this is the problem with the end of Atlas Shrugged. The concept that societal breakdown would clear the way for a new order to rise up strikes me as incredibly unlikely. What usually results from societal breakdown is desperation, and desperation rationalizes aggression. The result would be new tyranny.
I’ve tended to view my scheme as minarchist in the past, but it’s beginning to blur the lines between minarch and ancap. It has none of the features that ancap peeps say they hate the state for. Yet it is a political order, albeit one created specifically to ensure individualism prevails on society.
We would have no grounds for that under the NAP unless and until all avenues of voluntary change are cut off; that is, the point where a totalitarian gov has taken over. As long as it remains possible to vote in change, you’ll have no moral case for violent revolution.
It wouldn’t be inexplicable, just wait and the dollar will crash at some point. Politicians are still telling each other it doesn’t matter how much money they borrow because “we owe it to ourselves.”
Certainly.
What do you mean by the term ‘counter-economics’?
Unfortunately the momentum towards statism was cast in stone with the writing of the constitution. No development has arrested this momentum in 230+ years, not even a civil war.
But would they realize it in time? That’s going to be the great gamble. And, there are ways to game the system. For instance, I’m an American citizen. And I will be starting a seasteading nation in international waters off the California coast. I won’t initially publicize it as a new nation, we’ll need a certain critical mass first. It’ll be a curiosity to start, a way of “living in california cheaply”, paying no property tax, no sales tax, yet still having an ocean view.
Will the US see a small seasteading operation as such a threat that they’d do anything, considering there’s naught but American citizens and students with HB-1 visas living there? Doubt it.
Whether this historical epoch will be favorable is another factor. The USA grew up while Europe was embroiled in war with Napolean and the like. Napolean originally planned to conquer North American after he was done with Europe. That’s why he sold us the Louisiana territory, the most important acquisition of all, because he needed money for his wars and he believed that he would get the land back anyway through war.
Ideally, the US’s debt woes would distract them while such a nation grew. Ideally, enacting health care would not only drive people to a tax free society where you could still buy quality health-care, it’d drive the US to the brink of bankruptcy–which I’m convinced is a left-wing plan to subvert American militarism anyway.
Sure, but how? There’s an decades old seastead called Sealand off the coast of Britain. They’ve been left alone.
I imagine the most the US could do would be to force us out from 14 miles to out of the exclusive economic zone, some 140 miles out. As long as we reach critical mass before that point, no big deal. It’s not hard to creating a floating airport by that point. Give me 100,000 citizens by that point and I’ll give you a libertarian paradise
If you’re serious about it, then libertarians in the US should seek to collectively move to some major city and take over politically, much as homosexuals did with San Francisco. Problem is, libertarians apparently just don’t have the numbers. No one’s born a libertarian. I don’t think we’re even as high a % of the population as homosexuals. And most libetarians even don’t care enough as there’d still be a huge price to pay, starting over in a small town while still under the thumb of state government.
After reading that you’ll also understand why a seastead nation is the only viable means of creating a new nation that also has potential to be a world power. It all comes down to ports, shipping access, and land-availability. You go to Africa you’ll be doing more war than commerce.
Don’t they have like blood-diamond-funded militias there? >_>
I’d like to setup a seasteading nation and then invite other nations to join, then you could walk in and show people how to live free. Anyone with a coast could setup floating communities of their own, begin ocean-living too. Libertarian evangelism
This is the kind of thinking the left wants you to do. Just give them everything they want, exactly! That will signal their total victory and the complete surrender of our ideals. Plus, then you have to live through all that, and so do your children. Look at Russia, they’re still embroiled in statism.
No, foot-voting is the best answer. Stop participating in systems you can’t bear to live under. Move to a libertarian nation.
I’m working on a formal proposal, in conceptual stages now, and once we get the balls rolling we can see if it builds momentum of its own accord. I’ve been lately working on what seasteading domiciles will look like, cost, construction techniques (lookup up ‘monolithic dome’ on youtube for example), etc. You tie these domes together with floating walkways and platforms between them and build a real community. They’re cheap to build, practically indestructible, and last forever.
I’ll probably have to start (another) construction company to get these off the ground. No one’s ever tried to create a floating dome house to my knowledge.
The hard part is that, until the community is well established there’s only a certain class of people that can move there. This means knowledge workers and others whom can telecommute, those in fishing and sun-farming industries, seaweed farming, etc., and possibly algae-based biofuel. It may be possible, and much cheaper, to produce biofuel actually on the ocean itself. All things I’m investigating. All in good time.
If you could get a people group to invite you in for help, maybe. I just don’t see the end-game playing out well.
So do the Russian steppes, but the access to shipping is poor at best in both places. Plus, Africa is so poor that it’s very difficult to accumulate capital. Theft is rampant. Anything you can’t watch literally will be stolen.
Combine poor shipping, hostile bandits all over the place, political instability everywhere, cultural poverty, and an anti-capital accumulation environment, and you’ll soon find yourself just as poor as the surrounding nations. I think you should investigate and play with this idea a loooot more to see if what I’m saying isn’t valid counterpoint. There’s nothing worse in life than climbing your favorite mountain only to discover and realize that you’ve climbed the wrong mountain.
The Nile? Navigable? For somewhat short distances. But there’s a lot of waterfalls and the like. It’s not like the USA’s waterways which are basically flat from New Orleans to up near Michigan. See that Strafor article I linked before for a discussion of the importance of waterways on economic development.
You might be interested in this article. While I understand the desire to have floating cities, just consider the pricetag, $500 million. Sure, it’s probably tricked out, but no matter how you slice it, a floating city of any size is going to cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars at the very least. I don’t think the costs outweigh the benefits regarding floating cities just yet.
Separately, regarding abolition vs gradualism, suppose we framed the question around slavery. If offered the choice between immediate abolition of slavery versus gradual abolition, what should a libertarian choose? Well, a libertarian should choose immediate abolition. But what about all the chaos from freeing all the slaves? Um, what about the enslavement of all the slaves?
The point of immediate abolition of the state is that it is an immoral and evil institution. If given the choice, any libertarian should choose immediate abolition. Our one out of this problem is that it is a very rare choice to immediately abolish something, especially something as huge as the state. While we ought to support immediate abolition in theory, gradualism really is the only way to it in practice.
Well, an article about the world’s biggest yacht doesn’t tell you much about my concept. For $500 million I could build and furnish houses in a floating city for probably 10,000 people A floating house for $50k, that’s 10k people. Doable. I’ve run the numbers already. And we’re not talking dinky houses either. This is the Pacific ocean. 2,000 square feet minimum.
A floating home doesn’t need to go anywhere, it’s designed to stay in place. You want to move, hire someone to tow your house, and that would be pretty cheap too. In most respects it’s just like living on land
But then there’s the benefits: no state income tax (US citizens still pay income tax even living abroad, regrettably, on any earnings I believe it was over $84k.), no sales tax, no tax on production goods of any kind, no building permits, no rent or land to purchase, no business red tape, no social security of FICA tax, no controls on prices, no government healthcare. I expect we’ll see a seasteading rush from young families much as the American west did. The worse the US gets the more foot voting we’d pick up. People already love living in California weather, we’d have that, now imagine living in California weather -and- doing so inexpensively, with an ocean view. Unheard of.
I first began developing this concept as an idea for a novel, but the more research I did the more viable it seemed. That trend continues to be true.
True, abolition would be better, despite the massive disruption. But, in the case of the state, we don’t have the option of abolition like that, unfortunately.
What if there were already a floating libertarian society off the California coast, how would that change your calculation on this issue? Wouldn’t it rather become a tradeoff between hoping to influence the US versus the risks of living in a new and young and small libertarian society.
“What do you think of the idea of “conquering” (that word brings up the wrong connotations, as we would really be freeing people from subjugation) a chaotic-lawless African country with a private company?”
It looks bad.
Socialist nations will look at us and say, look at the greedy capitalists trying to oppress the african people!
Fuck the socialists, lets take an african nation then.
Ok guys, so how we gonna do this?
Or we can secede a state of the US from the union? Though thats unrealistic and we will get killed for treason.
All in all, i like anemone’s idea. Instead of abolishing something, lets separate and build something up.
I’m not very well connected in the libertarian circles or anything but I’m surprised more people aren’t making an effort to do exactly what Anenome is talking about.
Large-scale seasteading has really only become viable in the last few decades, if not far more recently.
For instance, it couldn’t have been done before we had ubiquitous GPS, because seasteading requires new ways to determine property boundaries in the ocean. Obviously it’s hard to build a fence around a 3D plot of water, but with GPS and computer-mapping we can do it.
Similarly, there are a host of tech I’ve collected which is quite modern: a wave redirecting wall capable of hiding everything inside the wall from wave action, dome housing, egg-beater propulsion systems, modern efficient desalinators, solar cells of all sort, and much more.
The two main problems are water and fuel.
Water can be solved by harvesting sunlight, something like floating solar-cells. Considering that a sea-borne society is incredibly rich in space, shouldn’t be an issue. You could cover square miles with floating solar cells and never bother anyone. That would be impossible on land, you’d be taxed out of profitability. So, your only cost would be that of buying, deploying, and maintaining your kit.
Fuel may be solved by algae-based biodiesel.
Actually things get interesting here, because algae are natural to the ocean. It may be possible to drastically reduce the cost of producing algae-derived biodiesel by adapting the process natively to production on the ocean. Algae biodiesel costs something like $17 - $30 a gallon right now–but that’s with current tech, current facilities, and production based on land with its requisite costs.
Turn biodiesel production into an aquaculture project and you might be able to drastically reduce costs. You don’t need access to large quantities of water anymore–you’re on the ocean. You don’t need to pay for large amounts of land to gather sunlight or special harvesting gear with reflectors and the like, glass tubes–you’re on the ocean. Provide simple protected shallow growing floating-pools with minor filtration, pump in fresh seawater as needed, done.
They just had a breakthrough on algae oil production reported in recent weeks. They figured out how to coax algae into overproducing oil without stopping their growth cycle (which till then had been a major problem limiting production severely). A simple addition of overfeeding the algae carbon causes rapid oil production, they become fat with oil and yet still continue dividing.
If I can convince a biodisel maker to setup a pilot plant on the sea, we could begin growing organically from there. A project like that could grow its own support community for workers spending large amounts of time on the ocean.
Then you factor in automation? Pools that automatically pilot themselves in when ready for harvest, floating over to a harvestor, robots taking over labor intense processes. Done deal.
Has the side benefit of taking dollars away from mideastern oil and all their resulting agitations to the rest of the world. There’s easily, easily enough ocean in the pacific to supply the world’s biodiesel needs. Could turn mideastern oil into a niche product, assuming such production methods can drastically reduce the price of biodiesel, which I think may be a good bet.
