"I’ve had much of the same journey as you. In the end if you agree that freedom and voluntarism is good and I agree too and we can work out a rational way of settling differences that doesn’t involve bloodshed, we’re likely to live in a more agreeable world. In the end people can personally justify it however they want but the goal should be toward better results and getting bogged down in ideological arguments over whether such rights are “natural”, axiomatic or what have you doesn’t help and in fact can turn people off from libertarianism when the difference of opinion is really over a small difference.
I’ve found David Friedman’s writings interesting here in how he casts problems in an economic light and analyzes things from that perspective."
Thanks, Ultima, good to hear. I actually draw a lot of inspiration from Friedman’s work as well, and I think that the approach I’m taking is very compatible with that work. Basically: in the end, the market is going to decide the exact form of things, assuming some basic AnCap structure. There is no “universally best” way of thinking about things, and the attempt to come up with one is so much mental masturbation, mostly because: it doesn’t matter. No matter how powerful your philosophical derivations are, they are only going to “move” a small, small fraction of people who are incredibly interested at that level of depth (which may not be much more than the readers of mises.org, say).
What I’m really interested in is moving the world away from statism and away from violence/force (with a sufficiently large wave of the hand. basically the same things). After 25 years of doing this, I’ve realized that trying to argue people into agreeing with us doesn’t work, and while certain condescending people can say that it is simply because I’m not good enough as a debater - and I make no claims to be particularly good at it, so he has a point there - it is my hypothesis that it doesn’t matter. To convince someone that involves a relatively intellectually complex “proof” requires that the person being convinced have several qualities that, as a percentage, most people don’t have individually must less all of them, e.g.: an interest in following the conversation to that depth; the intelligence to do so; the necessary educational background to follow the argument; a lack of other mental models/assumptions/incentives to be predisposed to your argument; etc.
So I’ve been asking myself the question “if debate/arguing/education doesn’t work as a way to get the majority of people onboard that we’d need onboard to really make this world more peaceful and less statist, what is?” The idea I’ve had is basically economical: you don’t need to have everyone involved sold on the theory of AnCap, you just have to be able to present an economic trade to them that they will see in their self interest. This does, again, involve those people having enough intelligence and educational background to evaluate the trade, but I’m pretty confident that more people can understand a trade like “I’ll agree not to kill you if you agree not to kill me” than the finer distinctions between statist and AnCap arguments.
The vast majority of people don’t have to understand the theory of a system to actually live in it. You would not have to explain to everyone why government intervention in the market creates distortions in price signals and thus malinvestement etc etc. (ok, my really quick weak attempt to explain ABC) before they can be onboard in some sort of libertarian/AnCap world; you just have to remind them that because they probably aren’t all that interested in murdering, raping, or stealing from their neighbors, they have very little to lose and a lot to gain by agreeing not to do those things to their neighbors in return for them not doing the same to them. That that “trade” is incompatible with the state/government as we currently know it isn’t really a theory they have to know. Most people in today’s world don’t understand the “theory” behind their current form of government (I"m not really even sure I do, e.g. I still can’t really precisely define “democracy” or at least precisely say which governments are or are not democracies, even though the word is used by everyone and their mother with great confidence… do they really know what they are talking about, or is that just a nice rallying cry?), and yet they are still able to live their lives within it.
