We at the Voluntaryist Reader have begun a series giving weekly installments of Auberon Herbert’s A Plea for Voluntaryism(part one) to the end of presenting to the world what, exactly, voluntaryism is. But there are those on the blogosphere and elsewhere who attack voluntaryism and I want to give an answer to Francois Tremblay, in particular, who has regularly criticized voluntaryism. His latest post on the subject is here. Tremblay immediately states that not only is voluntaryism a target, it is among “the roots that support the institutionalized evils around us.”
This is puzzling since – as voluntaryists – we not only see voluntaryism as precisely the opposite, we actually define it as such. Voluntaryism is the opposition to aggression in any form, whether institutionalized or not. The only possibilities are that either a) we are terribly confused or b) we are devious liars.
Tremblay is an irritant. He came and trolled on here a few years ago. He’s incredibly difficult to discuss with- I remember one time him argue that voluntarists were inconsistent because they use government roads and just repeated it ad nauseum
The only interesting point he may have stumbled across (which he brings up as a comment on Clayton’s article) is how much force does there need to be to make a contract illegitimate: if I point a gun at you and force you sign a document that would clearly be wrong however if there’s only one business in an area due to a government granted monopoly your employment choices are artifically restricted by force. Can we call the latter truly voluntary?
Well it depends on what you mean by left-libertarianism. I don’t think there’s really much to say about cultural left-libertarianism. Or do you refer to anarcho-communism, rather than Long’s (or Kevin Carson’s) brand of market anarchism?
