If there is a limit to how many people you can convince to become radicals, then you need to move radicalism into the mainstream.
Of course not. But if you think one man is going to dismantle the state, then you’re missing the point. A libertarian president increases the profile of the message, it lends it a degree of perceived legitimacy (necessary or unnecessary). It creates the opportunity for libertarian statesmen to take office and continue promoting liberty and attempting to slow and hinder rampant statism.
Can you provide one example of this?
The presumption here is that the state won’t just kill or incarcerate “the resistance”. That it won’t co-opt the resistance by addressing the points of greatest discord, while undermining something else. That the state will be static.
I’m Canadian. If we have a popular movement to ignore the state, the American government has signed an agreement with our government that allows them to use their troops inside our country for civil disturbances.
Again, the state, all states and the status quo are not static. They not only have an imperative to grow, but an instinct to supress.
Let’s not put lipstick on a pig. People will be tortured. They will be shot. They will be kidnapped and renditioned. They will have their children taken away. They will lose their property. I have no doubt that the state will kill 1,000 leaders and use the co-opted news to inform everyone that they were terrorists, subverisves, religious fanatics etc.
I believe that progressive resistance requires having people in place where the state gives its orders, allocates it resources and divines it’s strategies. Politicians may not be able to create an anarchistic utopia, but they can certainly help bring it into existence by shifting the state closer to liberty, allowing the radicals to become mainstream, and marginalizing statists.
Intervention takes many shapes. Sometimes intervention is just financial and organizational support, as was provided to Boris Yeltsin when he was about to be beaten by the communists. Sometimes it is just moral support, as was given to Augusto Pinochet. The Soviet-style spring of Prague repression is out of fashion. All it would take to stop a Libertarian takeover of government, in the miraculous eventuality of its realization (you don’t seem to understand quite how impossible the effort necessary to achieve this is), is one unfortunate plane crash death of its leader.
If our objective is less taxation and less regulation, then a strategy of active resistance achieves this better than a strategy of government conquest. If we are succesfully resisting, then it doesn’t matter who actually holds office at the time. They will have no choice but to shrink government to placate us before we destabilize their power. This is how, for example, the SPD were so successful in the second reich, even though they were never actually in command of the state, they held enough popular power that their demands had to be met.
Harry Browne wrote in How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World that relying on other people to get what you want is a trap. If we rely on the mass electorate to bring us to power, we will in all likelihood never achieve anything. If we only use our own resources to act directly against the state, we may achieve little, we may achieve a lot, or we may achieve everything, but we will get real results.
If that is your strategy, then it is even more impossible than I thought. It is now in the astronomically improbable range of likelihood. The sun will die out before that is achieved.
You are saying that once the “right people” are in power, that they won’t use their power to exploit the people, but to evangelize the people to become libertarians, so that they will vote for more and more liberty instead of voting for the candidate that promises to use the state to exploit others in their benefit. That is quite a fantasy.
Even the British Empire, one of the most ruthless empires history has ever known, could not kill Gandhi, because their power, like anyone else’s, rested on public opinion. Because Gandhi did not threaten the public, violence could not be used against him. To do so would have further marginalized British rule and made it impossible to govern. (When Gandhi was jailed during WWII and fell ill, the governor had to release him as risking his death in prison would cause outrage against the British.) Gandhi found the Empire’s schwerpunkt and focused on it entirely, and the Empire collapsed into pieces.
The first objective of a rebellion is to stay alive. This means never doing anything that would give the state cause to employ overwhelming force. If they do so without cause, it will be their defeat.
We can’t do an armed stand-off with the police. No rebellion can do that. We must withdraw and ambush.
This belief is pointless because it is impossible to realize. You are not going to win elections. The system is rigged to prevent that. Abandon the idea that elections can be won, immediately. They only take you for a fool.
The best you can hope for is a protest vote. That alone will not bring more liberty. Going mainstream means competing with candidates who offer to exploit minorities for the benefit of their electors, and so it means that you yourself will have to become an exploiter and become no different from the statists.
I don’t see how that is a fantasy. Isn’t that what Ron Paul is doing? And it’s not abour the “right people”. It’s about everyone and anyone. If we all ran for local office, we could take over the state immediately, and close it the next day. All it takes is people making an effort instead of sitting on the sidelines, pushaw-pushawing the idea.
There is a uniqueness to Gandhi’s situation which makes it less useful for your purposes. The British were an occupying power, fighting a native leader in his homeland. We’re not asking Americans/Canadians to resist the Chinese, the Russians or Muslims. We’re asking them to resist themselves.
Not to mention that each example presented, never ends in some form of short term anarchy (say, 20 years). Gandhi may have helped collapse the British Empire, but not statism.
Growing a pascifist rebellion is enough for the state to use overwhelming force. Again, the state is not static. It will not allow you to build a domestic populist movement without working actively to derail it.
Ron Paul has won elections. That former Governor of New Mexico had won election. I think a lot of this electorlal defeatist talk is based around failure and laziness.
I’m not cut out for politics myself, but I fully intend to continue supporting liberty oriented candidates as much as possible for local and higher offices.
Why would there have been anarchy when that wasn’t the objective he pursued? Gandhi followed a strategy that exploited the Empire’s weaknesses and thus forced it to negotiate terms with him. He certainly didn’t try to get elected to the British parliament. That would have been completely futile.
I see what your problem is. You are still intellectually bound to collectivism. That is why you believe that the state is the people, and that only through the state can liberty be achieved. There is nothing we can say that will refute this since it is doctrine of the cult of the state religion you have been brought up in.
Of course it won’t. We cannot avoid confrontation. We can only manoeuvre to confront the state to our advantage, and avoid disadvantageous confrontation. This is what Gandhi did, once again.
You cannot count on other people to get things done, then blame everyone else when you fail. That is the trap of collectivism. You can only count on yourself. What can you do, as one man, to bring liberty? Only resistance will succeed.
Ron Paul was a reluctant presidential candidate because he knew that the presidency was unattainable. He has only ever succeeded at winning a congressional seat, a protest vote that is, and never won any power.
As for the governor of New Mexico, who is he and why should we care?
Then why are you using him as an example for anarchist strategy, when he used his technique to resolve a political dispute by negotiating with the state?
If you’re going to resort to Ad Hominem, then we just as well should leave the debate and go our separate ways. Nothing productive is going to come out of name calling and accusations.
I’m not counting on anyone else. I’m counting on my contribution to like minded ideas and objectives making a difference.
Never won any power? Are you or I able to challenge Ben Bernanke on the record? Are we able to participate in Presidential debates? Have you been invited to address thousands of people, in different cities nationwide?
I’m not American and I know that the congressional seat is a lot more meaningful than just as a protest vote.
Which is ironic, because you’re strategy calls for general strikes of protest. It’s just when Ron Paul acts alone, as a single man, he’s somehow a failure as opposed to the anarchist who acts alone outside of the political sphere.
You should care because if you don’t know who he is, how can you possibly know that he isn’t someone who disproves your assertion that it’s impossible to gain political power for libertarian ideals?
Stranger, I don’t quite understand why an electoral strategy wouldn’t help your plan. It would both speed up the process and cut back on the asset seizure, jailings, etc., which all discourage anyone to join you.
Because he defeated the mightiest Empire the world had ever seen and didn’t die.
I am not accusing you of being a collectivist, I am diagnosing you as a collectivist. If you believe the people and the state are the same, I don’t see how you can agree with us on anything.
Your argument is that resistance won’t work because it is an attack on the people itself. You also believe that government can be used to change people to make them libertarians. That is collectivism. I am not employing it as a slur against you. You really do believe these things.
Once again, Ron Paul has not increased the liberty of Americans one iota. All that he has done is to recruit more libertarians, which is good in itself, but does not bring more liberty unless their energy can be focused against something.
You did not answer the question. I don’t know of anyone here ever mentioning the governor of New Mexico as a model. What’s so great about him?
We only have limited energy and we must allocate it economically. You’re not specifying what kind of electoral strategy you are in favor of. If the goal is conquering the government in order to use its power to make people libertarian, that strategy is nonsense. All of the energy employed to bring it about will be wasted. However, if the goal is to resist the government and use a political party as a disruptive, protesting voice in the center of power, then the electoral strategy exists in support of the main strategy of resistance. Its purpose is to protect the resistance and not to take over the government, and thus it will require fewer resources but also have more realistic objectives.
We could vote against candidates whose policies are the most difficult to undo.
Or, we could run moderate candidates with great rhetoric and use them as a tool to educate people about capitalism. Use all of the money raised to educate more people, etc.
For a given candidate, even if the campaign is lost (and if we run moderate candidates, they don’t have to end in losses), we’ve exposed more people to capitalist ideas.
Gandhi didn’t defeat the “mightiest Empire”. He won a battle with them. And his negotiating with the state proves the argument you are attributing to me.
I don’t think you are making an accurate diagnosis. Not when you know so little about me.
I did not say that I believed they are the same. Could you point out where I did?
Btw, I’m not interested in agreeing with “us”. I don’t need collective approval.
That’s incorrect.
That’s also incorrect.
You have my beliefs and arguments misunderstood. I find it very interesting that you make claims like, “you really do believe these things”, as though you are trying to convince me of what I believe.
Did I claim that Ron Paul had increased liberty?
Yes, he’s recruited more libertarians. That’s the point isn’t it? To have a mass movement which seeks liberty at the expense of the state?
That’s the objective, one thing we don’t differ upon. However, we’re talking about methods.
Good thing I’m not yearning, or you would be able to call me a collectivist then?
I’m wondering how a mass movement is collectivist though. Is any popular idea collectivist? Are large associations of people with a common cause collectivist?
Could you explain how freedom is attainable without a mass movement? For example, are you capable of achieving liberty in the United States, all by yourself?
The idea that they are necessary in order to live is collectivist. You are placing your fate in the actions of other people instead of your own.
Anything that makes abuses of liberty more costly and less beneficial for the ruling class achieves liberty. The marginal rebel may not add very much liberty, but his result is tangible, which is the point of this thread.
We do not know how much success a rebellion can achieve. What we do know is that liberal-democracy has been tried for the past two centuries and the result has been a constant retreat against the advance of power. I have no idea why you believe that this time it will be different. As the saying goes, [insanity] is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Stanger, you are relying that the legion of leftists who want to rob the rich, set up a national healthcare system, use the government to forcibly set wages and prices, etc. will change their minds and not crack down on you. No matter what, we are up against millions of people.
