Recently on LewRockwell.com, Walter Block added to the “Open Letter Series,” with this little jewel. Finding it almost comically ironic that he would challenge the Anarchists with not being “true libertarians,” I called him out in a blog just written tonight, here.
I just found it too odd that he could claim we Anarchsits are not libertarians while he compromises with the rightist, paleo-cons and the Paul cult on his own.
I found that particular part of the open letter disturbing as well. Supporting a particular politician, Ron Paul included, should not be (correction: is not) a valid criteria for being a libertarian.
I read your blog. Wow, very poor arguments throughout. Your attempts to respond to Block’s points miss his points altogether. I’ll touch on only one example to save readers the monotony of repetition. His comment regarding choosing between two masters is obviously not about whether such a choice is better or worse than choosing no master at all, as you seem to take it. His point is that in making such a choice the slave has said nothing about his hatred for slavery. Further, any thinking person would have to admit that by choosing the “nicer” master the slave has increased his chance for liberty since; all other things being equal, any reasonable person would understand that the slave and any of his fellows would stand a better chance of freeing themselves from a “nice” master. To think otherwise is to fail to use reason. It then follows that the slave’s strategy for freeing himself is better than your “strategy” of refusing to make a choice for fear of contaminating yourself with the pestilence of your master. Your misguided attempt at purity defeats your own ultimate goal. Your strategy is seriously flawed. The “corrupt” slave who, according to you, does not understand the proper strategy for achieving liberty will in fact achieve it before you.
Wow, you ruled out the possibility of any kind of civil disobedience as a choice from the get go. There’s nothing that bothers me more then the choice not to vote being mischaracterized as “doing nothing”, as if there are no alternatives to voting as a vehicle of change.
sits back, lights a cigar and watches
This is going to be interesting.
This paper of Walter Block’s is probably good for context: http://mises.org/journals/scholar/block15.pdf
I absolutely hate this argument. This voting/non-voting garbage makes me want to vomit. Anyway, I couldn’t help but throw in my two cents. However I will make the attempt to avoid replying to so-called refutations. I may or may not be successful.
Nobody ruled out civil disobedience. You can vote (or not vote) and still perform civil disobedience. If you are caught up as a slave in the machine there is nothing morally wrong with voting from the libertarian perspective. Voting for someone who is promoting liberty isn’t imposing anything on anyone. Nor are you consenting to the system because nothing you do counts as not consenting. This includes not voting. Voting in the manner of which we speak is an act of self-defense. Yes, in many if not most cases pragmatism does become an issue on whether or not to go through with the act itself. However, if there is a situation where there is a chance that it could actually make a real difference, I think it is a strategic mistake to rule it out.
Niccolo you barely lay a glove on Block. Firstly your attempt at refuting his morality point does not work. To be consistent you should cease all use of anything state owned or state subsidised. If you were to do so you would starve since walking out of your house to buy bread requires the use of state owned roads. Secondly the idea that you either support top down political change or under ground and educational change is a completely false dichotomy. We should use any means we can to abolish the state. Block I am sure supports educational change (I’ll address the underground economy later) as part of a two pronged attack to dismantle to the state. Your complete failure, along with Mr Trembley, to see that Maoist China is worse than pre-Lincolnian US and that the latter is preferable and any effort to be towards that than Mao’s is surely a more desirable state of affairs. As long as the top down change does not conflict with libertarian principles these two stratergies can be complementary.
Now to the underground economy. This may well be a place to conduct voluntary exchanges which should be legal and do undermine the state; it does not follow that we should support it. A lot of the underground economy though consists of things such as drugs and prostitution which though should be legal I refuse to support engaging and to say that an anarchist should support this is to give him positive obligations which is in contradistinction to libertarian principles. This is the heart of your attack. You believe the only true anarchists are of the left variety and that those on the right, which include Block and Hoppe, are impure and not real anarchists. Your position is well summed up in Hoppe’s Natural Order, the State and the Immigration Problem , and most consumatley in On Libertarianism and Conservatism in DTGTF.
Well said.
I agree with Physiocrat on this.
Not-voting is no more likely to lead to the abolition of the state than voting. I honestly just do not see the point of anarchists not voting.
I don’t want to get into the debate, I actually agree with what Block says although, from a strictly libertarian point of view I don’t see why one libertarian will not want to vote another libertarian in office simply because…well, because he doesn’t like his face ! It’s foolish? idiosyncratic? childish? stupid ? capricious ? Sure ! But is libertarianism about all that ?!
Anyway, I wanna comment on Hoppe’s argument against immigration because I think somebody has to say something about this. It’s thoroughly anti-libertarian. It’s one thing to say that you, I or an association between the two of us, our friends and relative have exclusive control over our own land property and can decide to invite guest or not, and it’s an all together different thing to say that it is permissible for the state to ever restrict the movement of people ! Once you accepted that the state can ever legitimately restrict the movement of (peaceful) people, then there is absolutely no reasons for you to agree to restrictions in the movement of capital goods, price controls etc. Block is correctly in favour of free emigration, as was Rothbard tough during the last part of his lifetime when he became increasingly associated with the conservative movement started talking about “nations by consent”…(has anyone seen one ?) But I think it’s very, very sad that Block gives some sort of credit to the anti-libertarian anti-immigration position of Hoppe by exalting his status of all-around libertarian expert. And the saddest thing is that Hoppe, who describes himself as a misesian, can quote Ludwig von Mises at lenght on price controls etc while totally disregarding his continuous and thorough defense of free movement of people, i.e. labour force, and nobody from the Mises Institute faculty, not even his admirer Block, dares to remind him the logical contradiction in which he engages when he defends free movement of goods but unfree movement of people !
Not wishing to digress too much on this issue here is what I wrote a while back on this:
Now with public land immigration is not voluntary; it becomes forced intergration since immigrants enter areas without consent by using public parks and especially public roads. They can thus skip from one place to the other and infringing on property rights. These “public” lands are not state owned but owned by the net taxpayers. So in essence the UK is a sort of forced residential golf club. Nobody else has any right to be there unless they are invited or buy one plot of the Golf club- buying real estate- and since they latter needs to parties to agree then this is invited immigration. In the former case however the immigrant would have signed in the guest book and becuase I was willing to take him in I would have to take responsibility of him for wages, housing and crime: if he smased up the club house I would be responsible because I was the one who invited him in; this does not however preclude me then taking legal action against my guest. With free trade both parties invite reciprocally the trade and bear the costs of their actions. With immigration this does not happen and the only way to make it comparable to it is to introduce the Hoppeian pass system: a current resident issues a pass to a foriegner without which they would not be allowed entrance; this would detail the length of stay and would gurantee that I the invitor would bear the full costs of the immigrant.
On Rothbard’s Nations by Consent he was referring to the natural association of similar peoples which would voluntarily create a discernable geographical area known as a nation. A nation does not necessarily mean a nation state.
Hoppe and Block generally criticize each other politely. However, Hoppe’s position is not entirely devoid of merit; the State provides many socialized goods, amongst them roads and the like, making it easier for undesirable individuals (from the POV of the citizenry) to associate with the citizens of a country. Hoppe argues that private owners would exercise a degree of discrimination, in accordance with how much immigration (better yet: movement) they (or in the case of firms, their clients) are willing to tolerate - some will be far more welcoming than others. With state ownership of goods such as the roads, the result is forced association, as anyone can utilize these goods, even though the ultimate owners of these goods would prefer them not to. Hoppe thus notes that open borders coupled with a welfare state and substantial public ownership of goods is unlibertarian and a recipe for disaster; he is not against actual free movement of individuals. Agree with him or not, he has a point. The problem arises in that many people who utilize his arguments do not share his rationale, and probably do not even understand it.
i’m one of the agreers. strangely, i don’t recall seeing hoppe squeezed into the “immigrant hate” forum.
I know what Block meant, and I was pointing out that it was a triviality.
I’m going to warn you just once, boy: Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.
Spoken like a true house ni… er… slave.
Again, the issue is not about choosing the “nicest master” (if such a thing exists) and choosing the nicest master will NOT bring about any liberty. Certainly, people have thought they were choosing the “nicest master” every time they chose. What’s come of it?
Thanks for playing, but this seems to have gone completely over your head.
Another knife fighter…
It wasn’t an attempt to refute it. It was an attempt - a successful one - to invalidate a logical fallacy. Typically, when one uses a logical fallacy - in this case a tu quoque fallacy - it invalidates their argument as logical.
If this were not about Ron Paul and Walter Block’s undying love for him, maybe the consistency by which the moral opponents of Block would matter. However, since we’re specifically talking about Block, it remains a tu quoque fallacy.
ME: “Voting Ron Paul is not moral.”
GUY 1: “Hmmm…”
YOU: "Oh don’t trust him! He drives on a ROAD!!!"
It’s not a false dichotomy if we can prove that by doing this scenario of the ballot with the bullet then we are being allocatively inefficient.
Let’s look at history to demonstrate this: How many times has the government actually shrank in aggregate side thanks to the ballot? How many times has government been overthrown?
The latter certainly doesn’t happen often, but better than never happening at all.
And allocatively inefficient! YAY!
What does Mao have to do with anything? Red-herring?
Guilt by association? Also, you’re correct in the sense that drugs and prostitutes do constitute a portion of the underground economy, but you’re incorrect in your analysis that (A.) They make up the majority, and (B.) The current state of the black market is the state Agorists wish to pass on into the second stage of the revolution.
I’m certain Block and Hoppe are Anarchists on some issues, but on others they’re mistaken, or at least weak and ineffective at this time.
As for that particular paper, it more or less just demonstrates Hoppe’s preconceived racism than it does any logical formula of “immigration problems.”
Sorry, bucko, the right to move anywhere on unowned land is a libertarian ideal, the right for businesses to pick and choose who they wish to serve without government reigning over them and telling them that this spic “ain’t no good 'cause he’s from dat 'det mehico,” is not a libertarian argument. Is the immigration debate unsettled between libertarians? No. Just many libertarians happen to be wrong on that issue.
The point is that as Anarchists we make more of a statement by “not voting” and raising the issue of “not voting” than we do of “voting.” If your excaliber on the argument is, “well voting is just the way you voice your opinionz… hyuck, hyuck,” then by not voting you’re doing the same thing and as Anarchists we’re doing it on a principle, not on a whim to see the fastest little bit of unsubstantial change in the most inefficient way.
It’s put quite well here,
What point? Blame the rape victim for the rape? Give me a break!
I don’t recall Hoppe blaming the victim - I recall him arguing that the State is incapable of acting as a responsible private property owner when it is in favour of forced association. Trying to pin this on some sort of ‘racism’ or other such nonsense does little to discredit Hoppe. My only point of divergence from Hoppe is that I think that closed borders are silly; better to just melt the welfare state - and the state more generally - down.
You have failed to prove this point. For example the Gladstonian government in the 19th century reduced the size of the state and was voted in. Also the Thatcher government in the 80s stemmed, though didn’t really reverse, the advance of statism which continued quicker before and after her time in office. Further the costs, to me of voting are tiny. I walk to the station and vote; hardly much of an allocative efficiency; further standing for election allows a high profile propagandising opportunity.
Secondly you have failed to show that voting is immoral or compromises libertarian principles.
Please enlighten me on the second stage of the Agorist revolution and what main other things constitute the black market. Also do you consider right libertarians to be impure?
Again we see Niccolo the Pure. It is actually quite reminisent of the factionally in fighting of the communists arguing that they were purer than the others; France has four communist parties!!
“Hoppe’s racism”- that is a rather unsubstansiated claim. What evidence do you have for this? Also before you do please try to define “racism”? It is as nearly as undefinable as homophobic or sexist.
Government land is owned by the taxpayer; it is not unowned. What are the floors of the forced residential golf club analogy?