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At the heart of libertarianism is the claim that in order to fully enjoy your natural rights you must be free of coercion. That is, you are not subject to the claims of other people either directly or indirectly. The only direct claim a person has on another person is the enforcement of a contract. Similarly, you can demand that whole society respects your autonomy and property rights. Otherwise, no person in a libertarian society has a claim on any other person in the society.
Simplifying it, the libertarian society assumes you have absolute dominion over yourself, outside of the narrow exceptions for the enforcement of contracts and the defense of private property. More important, maybe most important, members of a libertarian society have an obligation to respect the autonomy of others. The social contract, if you will, gives members the maximum liberty, in exchange for the maximum amount of minding your own business.
Hans Hermann-Hoppe identified two unsolved problems within libertarian theory that he has spent a long time trying to solve. One is that there is no way within libertarian theory to go from our current societies to a libertarian one. The other problem is there is no way within libertarian theory to police a libertarian society. The non-aggression principle rules out coercion as a way to keep people from straying from libertarianism into something like socialism or even communism.
It is the first problem that has occupied the minds of libertarians. How can we get from where we are now to even a few steps down the road toward paradise? One effort has been to convince people to become libertarians. Proselytizing has always been a central part of the movement, which is why many people outside of the libertarian subculture view it as something like a cult. The libertarian, like the vegetarian, is always ready to announce his membership in the cause.
The proselytizing has always come with an eye on politics. In theory, libertarians must reject the premise of liberal democracy. The closest they can come is some sort of democratic process for settling direct and indirect claims. Otherwise, there is no role for the state so there is no reason to have elections. Even so, libertarians have tried to use the democratic process to change the law in their favor. The legalization of drugs, for example, has been a main cause of libertarians.
A lot has been made about the effect this has had on conservatism. Way back in the last century, Frank Meyer cooked up a new formula for the American right that brought libertarians into an alliance with traditionalists and neoconservatives. This Cold War coalition would make up what was called the conservative movement. After the end of communism, this coalition fell apart. Today it is nearly impossible to see the difference between libertarianism and mainstream conservatism.
Something else happened during the last century. The contact with mainstream liberal democratic politics deranged libertarianism. Some libertarians, the left-libertarians, transformed into corporate libertines. In exchange for a comfortable lifestyle, they promote every degenerate fad of the left in the name of freedom. The left-libertarians have been enthusiastic for every subversive cultural fad, as long as it came with fat donations from corporate sponsors.
Right-libertarians have largely avoided the cultural issues, instead focusing all of their energy on the power of the state. Ron Paul has been the best known of the bunch, fashioning a political career as a platform to promote libertarianism. At the heart of his argument is the assumption that once the state is removed from the lives of people, the cultural questions will answer themselves. It is the state that puts its thumb on the cultural scale, creating the culture war.
It is a nifty bit of logic, which turns the old Marxist formulation on its head. Marx said that once you get the morality right, there is no need for politics. That is, once everyone has the same morality, there is no need to debate public policy. The friend enemy distinction goes away as we all share the same goals. Ron Paul argues that once you get the politics right, the moral issues settle themselves. Without an active state, there is no need for culture and therefore no culture war.
The last ten years has provided a test for that theory. It has also brought us back around to that second conflict within libertarianism identified by Hoppe. Over the last decade, corporations have assumed greater power over the lives of citizens and they have become active in directing the culture of society. On the one hand we have non-government elements of society that are trying to coerce others. On the other hand, that coercion is specifically over cultural issues.
For left-libertarians, this has not been a problem. They sold out to corporate interests long ago so this works fine. If you do not like Apple sexualizing your kids and funding grooming gangs, just start your own trillion dollar tech company. Interestingly, this approach was aped by neocons like Ben Shapiro. He was a leading voice in the “just build your own internet” phase of the crisis. The neocon – libertarian nexus is something that warrants further exploration.
Putting that aside, the right-libertarians have had a dilemma. You cannot on the one hand put personal independence at the top of your moral hierarchy and at the same time ignore or excuse the grotesque abuse of basic rights by corporations. The solution has been something like what you see in this Ron Paul post. You see, the tech giants are not rampaging through the culture and trampling your rights because they want to do it, they are doing it to please the state.
After a long story about Ed Markey howling for censorship, Paul writes, “Big tech companies silence their users to curry favor with politicians and bureaucrats, often after “encouragement” from politicians and bureaucrats. Therefore, to end big tech’s censorship, Americans should demand that all government officials — including the president — not violate the First Amendment.” You see, that army of scolds hired by Twitter was to please the state, not the shareholders.
The reason Ron Paul and other libertarians cling to this ridiculous idea that corporations are unwilling participants in the culture war is that they have no answer to the problem of corporate activism within libertarian theory. In fact, to even acknowledge such a thing as corporate activism blows a hole in libertarianism. The whole point of libertarianism is the maximizing of freedom. If it has no way to defend your freedom from powerful members of society, then why would anyone be a libertarian?
Of course, this is the problem Hoppe identified years ago. Individualism is a wonderful concept as long as it exists within a collective outer shell. In other words, the extreme individualism expressed by libertarianism works only if everyone has been so thoroughly conditioned by a pre-existing cultural framework that no one within the libertarian society would ever consider coercion. Libertarian man must be the result of severe cultural programming.
This is why Marx still matters and von Mises does not. Marx was wrong about many things, but he was correct about one big thing. If you get the morality right, then everything else falls into place. Politics is therefore about getting the morality right, even imposing morality on the whole, in order to make it possible for the citizens to maximize their life within society. Put another way, the point of political struggle is to define “who we are” and then put an end to the debate.
In the fullness of time, the 20th century will be viewed as a long human experiment with the ideas of the 18th and 18th century. Various forms of socialism, communism and libertarianism were put through their bloody paces, only to see all of them fail as an answer to the only question that matters. “Who we are” is the question every civilization must answer. That is a moral question. Perhaps the 21st century will be remembered for finally having answered that question properly.
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At the heat of libertarianism is the claim that it is wrong to use force against those who are not a direct physical threat to one’s life, liberty or property. There are other wrongs too. There is no special badge or uniform that make it ok to use force against a peaceful person. Crimes still happen, but we will all be held individually accountable for our actions regardless of the hat or robe we wear.
The people in society that believe this provide the blessings of liberty to the rest of us.
Libertarians are not pacifists. We believe in the use of force to counter force.
When defining politics as implementing the application of force, then libertarianism works well in the limited sphere of political theory. Using libertarian theory as a guide for delineating the limits of the use of force is entirely appropriate.
Libertarianism does not work for defining morality or life goals. Libertarian theory fails to provide moral guidance since it is based on self-ownership. We do not own ourselves, we belong to God. Clearly self-harm is a bad thing.
Expecting libertarianism to provide a complete blueprint for society is foolish. Saying it doesn’t work on those terms is misleading.
“Who are we?” is not a universal political problem. It is a sepcial political problem of multicultural societies, which are largely modern. I don’t think Hoppe is the answer to everything, but it is true that he’s spent time thinking about this problem. His models of how we would have multi-ethnic, multi-religious ” insurance companies” dispensing law, order, and justice seem to me unworkable, but he hasn’t just taken the Paul-ian perspective described by Z-man. It seems to me that we could have something like what Hoppe envisions within the context of a Minarchist state. It would have to be a non-democratic state, though, or it would eventually end up back where we are now. It’s easy to see how Yarvin settled on monarchy to solve this problem. He is fond of saying, why not look at Elizabeth I instead of Stalin as a model for monarchy? But in a real monarchy, you can’t choose, and his idea of an anonymous board of directors is too clever by half.
The only solution would seem to be some sort repression/expulsion and conformity. But that is not a real solution.
I think the answer is that there is no steady-state solution that will provide lasting order and prosperity. Life in community is an ongoing political struggle. The thing to be most on guard against is a revolution or tyrant that prevents politics. Otherwise, we just have to be constantly pushing for devolving government to smaller localities, for less control and less meddling, and proselytizing our fellows with regard to the good life. Rothbard and Hoppe provide useful critiques and stake ideals against which we can hold up policy proposals, as do other political thinkers. The point is to think clearly, argue, and tweak.
Oh, lets just have “Marxist Libertarianism” then, where we will use the State to “force people to be free,” and once everyone understands that their only option is to be free or else then what? Wait, we’ve heard this one before: With the advent of the “New Libertarian Man” the State will just wither away? All the pols and bureaucrats that people gave over power and authority will just realize that their jobs are done and walk away to polish up their resumes and resign en masse? That worked out so well in the Soviet Union, didn’t it.
Yeah, you need to be dismissing Mises out of hand. Clearly, you have no understanding of how the market works. The Big Corporations are entirely the children of the Big Managerial State and without it, the market competitors would eat them alive, but of course, you do not believe that.
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Maybe some old heads will remember a congressman from the late 70s to early 80s named Larry McDonald. President of the Birchers, died in a plane. The closest to the Platonic ideal of right wing libertarian purist.
But why did McDonald hold those views. Nothing in his formal ideology logically followed with his positions on cultural issues. It’s simply because of his upbringing, an upbringing in a decidedly non libertarian society and culture. So that if he had his way ironically, he never would have had his views in the first place. Similar to Christian Democrats who take for granted christian mores and ways of being, but with conditions that never would have arisen in the first place under a christian democratic ideological framework. Ie christian democracy is staunchly multi faith, but only bares its namesake due to historical realities that they would find abhorrent. Rejections of multiculturalism and irreligion. Its very name harkens to a rejection of their mode of being, a snake eating its own tail.
About 20 years ago, I was once interesting in libertarianism.
Now I say to current day ardent libertarians this question that I found an answer to long ago:
How do you deal with the people who deserve a bullet in the back of their head?
You answered your own question.
My guess is that you are using a very limited definition of “aggression”. Someone does not have to pull the trigger. Pointing the gun at you is enough. Taking some action that will destroy your life or your way of life is enough. Simply being a commie is not. Acting on being a commie is.
If there is one core lesson here, it is the immortal wisdom of St. Paul, that the love of money is the root of all (or at least a great many) evils. I’d add other inducements too: positions of power, etc. Every man will sell his soul for a price, not just left-libertarians. The profit motive has its uses, but like any good idea, it can be taken to extremes. Arrogating wealth and power to oneself would appear to be such a category.
Like Aristotle said, moderation, the golden mean.
Ambition, greed, money – all good, in moderation. Enough is never enough for whom enough is never enough.
Ever the optimist, I read columns like this hoping that Hoppe won’t be deified yet again, but my hopes are always dashed.
Molyneaux is close. Or maybe he’s been able to close the gap over the last decade or so since I last checked. Bylund has it pretty much spot on, though because of his career path, I get that he can’t go there. Block can’t get things like contractualism out of his head long enough to realize that’s all smoke and mirrors. Rothbard would have benefitted a lot had he lived long enough for people to poke holes in his ideas, so he could fix them.
The thing is if the rules change, then the rules change. You have to get your mind outside the tiny box that is contract or aggression or communal action requires X or whatever else.
How do you get to a libertarian (anarchic) society? One dead commie at a time.
How do you maintain a libertarian (anarchic) society? One dead commie at a time.
That’s not all that terribly different than the way you achieve and maintain any society.
I never met a libertardian IRL who was not an obvious psychopath [and typically very spergtardedly so].
Note that “psychopath” does not necessarily mean “Evil”; psychopath means “the absence of empathy”.
Can’t speak to that, not knowing who you have met.
I used to run into them at the sale barn all the time. Ranchers are often libertarians who just don’t know it. If being able to run a multi-million dollar operation like that, 24/7/365 in any weather from drought to whiteout blizzard is what you mean by “psychopath”, we need more of them.
Personally, I’m somewhere between a 1788 Jefferson and our host.
Robert Heinlein:
“Ah, yes, the “unalienable rights.” Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What “right” to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What “right” to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of “right”? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is “unalienable”? And is it “right”? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. The third “right”? – the “pursuit of happiness”? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can “pursue happiness” as long as my brain lives – but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.”
this article points out a simple truth . morality is a statement of right and wrong . in a disordered world of atheism, there can be no right or wrong . Which is why our western culture has literally turned to shit. I am one of those Catholics that the pope calls out for ” rigidity”. The bible says that if you walk away from god , he is fine with that , and he turn you over to your own reprobate mind . this goes for peoples too.
this guy has clearly left the faith of his parents and look where it took him . he is a is a high ranking government official stealing women’s luggage. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10523529/Bidens-pick-nuclear-waste-job-Southern-Baptists-son-turned-drag-queen-Sister-Ray-Dee-OActive.html
I noticed he is from IOWA . The craziest woke whites seem to be from there . IDKW
Excellent essay. Since the so-called Enlightenment, Western culture has tried to based their society on impossible things, on squared circles. Even with the huge amount of wealth that has protected us against a quick collapse, this has produced all kinds of absurd ideologies. Libertarianism is one of them.
Libertarianism is only the logical consequence of one of these absurdities proposed by the Enlightenment. Please, read this sentence:
“The political system should be based on freedom. Nobody can impose his will on other people and everybody is free to do anything he wants, except crimes or similar. And your freedom ends when other person’s freedom starts”.
I can almost feel the approval of most of you and good vibes that have flooded the brain of many of you. Well, congratulations, you have been brainwashed to believe such an obvious absurdity, as absurd as there may be married bachelors. Western civilization is the story about how to protect this kind of nonsense in real life without nobody noticing what is front of their eyes.
No political system can be based on freedom, because the freedom of a person is the lack of freedom of another person. Your freedom to divorce is the lack of freedom of your spouse and children to have a stable family. The freedom of trans of living life as a woman is the lack of freedom of everybody else not to lie. The freedom of gays not to be discriminated when buying a cake is the lack of freedom of a Christian baker not to betray his beliefs while baking a cake.
There is only a way to have complete freedom. Go to a mountain and stay away from society. If you live in society, your freedom is the lack of freedom of someone else. So there is no political system that can be founded on freedom, the same way there is no road with only a left side and no right side. This is why libertarianism is absurd and the Western political tradition is too.
What any political system does is to prioritize some freedoms and restrict other freedoms based on some set of values, that is, some morality. So there are not political systems that are freer than another ones. They prioritize different freedoms.
So a Christian political system (which does not exist anymore) would prioritize the freedom of the Christian baker to bake according their beliefs, because it is based on Christian values and prioritizes Christian freedom. A progressive political system would prioritize the freedom of gays of buying any cake without discrimination, because it is based on progressive values and prioritizes progressive freedoms.
That is to say, “freedom” is a smokescreen. The values are the ones that decide how a society works. Any conflict has a “freedom” part and a “lack of freedom” part. So you can justify any political decision looking at the freedom part and disregarding the “lack of freedom” part. Of course, we are protecting the freedom of Christian bakers of following their beliefs! Of course, we are protecting the freedom of gays of not being discriminated!
Are Muslim political systems less free than ours? I don’t think so. They privilege freedoms like women having the freedom not to work, men having stable families, children having stable families, people living the Muslim religion without being forced all kinds of degeneracy upon them, which at are not available in our society. Of course, this means restricting other freedoms, but this is unavoidable.
How did we end up creating a myth for our society that it is obviously impossible? You can discuss whether Christ is Son of God or Mohammed the Prophet of Allah… but these beliefs are POSSIBLE. “We live in a political system based on freedom” is impossible and it is obvious that it is impossible. It is like saying your society is based on a squared circle.
The history tell us how. The bourgeois wanted to take the political power from the nobles (the aristocrats). The ideological justification of the nobles and the Ancien Regime, as any other sane political system, was based on duty, hierarchy and tradition. The bourgeois used three values that were the opposite: liberty (the opposite from duty), equality (the opposite from hierarchy) and progress (the opposite from tradition).
They didn’t believe them. The Founding Fathers waxed lyrically about the equality of men while having slave and producing a political system where only people with property could vote. For the bourgeois, the meaning of liberty was “we don’t want the rules of the Ancien Regime: we want our own rules”. The meaning of equality was “we are not less than the nobles. We can have power”. The meaning of progress was “we have to trash the old Ancien Regim and move to the future, that is, us having power”
However, the bourgeois revolutions won and the incoherent concepts of liberty and equality and the false concept of progress were enshrined as the new gods of the new religion. They were put in constitutions, laws and textbooks and the population was brainwashed to accept them, even if they are completely absurd. (I have only spoken of liberty here, but equality is also incoherent and progress is false).
I just can’t America anymore bro.
“Future, or ruin!”
– A.H.
I think Libertarians were working backwards. They were trying to find patterns for what functioned well in different sectors of society. They saw people following the unspoken rules of engagement, becoming successful and raising families. “Why, eureka! These people don’t need laws! They’re incentivized by the market to do the right thing you see.” Maybe after a million years of genetic engineering, when everyone has an IQ of 160, we’ll all be so future oriented and wise that no laws or government will be necessary. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a high IQ world and no longer even a high IQ country. It seems to me that The lower the average IQ, the more of a police state is required to contend with the domestic chaos. The future is going to be wonderful.
Well, no more Taki posts and apparently now no more Lew Rockwell posts.
This was POSTED on lewrockwell.com. This is actually depressing. The last remaining libertarians have given up on libertarianism.
YES. Exactly. Clearly, someone’s nephew who needs the work has been put in charge of what links to post on Rockwell’s site and nobody but nobody over there is taking the time to so much as speed-read through these things before linking. How else to explain a site affiliated with the von Mises Institute linking an article which casually offers Mises the back of the author’s hand, also while engaging in very low-quality intellectual theorizing. UGH.
It’s true: dey waz kangz.
Whadaya mean, Mises doesn’t matter? The “praexiology” of Human Acton rests on the premise that a living, breathing entity can’t just sit there. He, she, it has to do something if only to think. The rest of the canon follows. Mises was well aware of Marx and explained why the socialist commonwealth, on its own terms, couldn’t work. Mises can be refuted only by the eclipse of all freedom. Even the prisoner in their cell can pee now or wait til before dinner.
“The only question that matters. “Who we are” is the question every civilization must answer. That is a moral question.” That’s the counter to Mises. Once you bring “we” into the picture, morality is enforced at the point of “we”‘s gun, sometimes loaded. Thus has it ever been.
It an also be refuted by the removal of a functioning consciousness and a regression to an NPC bicameral state governed by implanted commands and semantic virus constructs.
what good are societal freedoms to non-conscious beings?
why do people not recognize that the insanity is pushed as an assault on human consciousness and logical thought itself?
Which is why libertarianism is even sillier than Marxism.
Interestingly, the last true libertarians over at lewrockwell.com linked to this essay.
The dissident Right is aligning ideologically around the Caesar option.
OT: anyone check out the Wall Street Journal today? An article by Pence slamming Trump for dining with Ye and Fuentes followed by an editorial saying the same thing again for good measure. He’s giving nazis and anti-semites a place at the table! Ooh, evil words!
Obviously, the WSJ is the establishment par excellance. But still just a perfect illustration of the Republican party attacking anyone to their Right with all the invective of the Left. Have they ever attacked the Leftists with such passion?
Does it not occur to these people, that lots of Republican voters see the likes of Obama, AOC, Nadler, Pelosi, Schumer, Waters, Weingarten, the squad, and on and on with the same level of utter disgust and contempt that they see Fuentes?
The difference being that the those we hate are in the center of power and can’t be called the subversive communists that they are. Oh, how nice it would be to have an actual right wing political party!
Still waiting for the brave, freedom loving Han to rise up and overthrow the evil Xi that was breathlessly promised in yesterday’s WSJ.
Of course, if that actually happened in the USA, it would be an insurrection and perpetrators would be sent to the DC gulag for indefinite confinement without trial.
What do they care, voters are a transient product, not a force that matters.
only those who program the voting machines matter. did you see 2020 and 2022? do you think any future election will be different ?
Really hope I land an audition for that Black Spectre movie! I talked to Jeff Winston about it at AmRen, and he told me to email him!
The cinematography on the trailer is VERY high quality. Due to a number of factors, including funding, most art from “The Right” tends to be subpar. If that film is anything like the trailer looks, it will be very good.
Good luck on snagging a part.
I remember having a conversation with a libertarian who was incensed by a news story about some poor slob getting grief from his condominium association for flying an unapproved flag or some such.
I asked why he was so angry since condominiums represent the closest real world analogue to the libertarian paradise:
They are absolutely voluntary – if you don’t buy in, you aren’t subject to the rules.
They are limited – if you live next door to, but not in, the condominium, they have no way of making you do anything.
Also, the rules are easy to understand – in my day job I frequently have reason to review condominium by-laws and they are written so anyone with a high school command of English can comprehend them.
All other defects aside, the condominium association represents the inevitable end state for any libertarian society since the idea of non-coercion goes right out the window as soon as some jerk gets a little bit of authority.
I cannot conceive of any bigger snitch than some sperg-artarian with a little bit of power – he’ll be measuring how tall your grass is and going through your recycling in no time.
it’s true, once I became a petty bureaucrat I went mad with power.
Shakespeare got it right, of course, in Measure for Measure
O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
. . .
Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
. . .
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep;
The actions of the Masked Minions of Covid were the best example.
” Individualism is a wonderful concept as long as it exists within a collective outer shell.”
True dat. The idea of millions of atomized Howard Roarks of varying levels of brilliance maintaining a coherent society is preposterous. There has to be a collective framework of race/religion/morality.
“Politics is therefore about getting the morality right, even imposing morality on the whole. . .Put another way, the point of political struggle is to define “who we are” and then put an end to the debate.”
It’s the point of politics and SHOWBIZ! Decades of entertainment making it crystal clear who the good guys and the bad guys are; like all of history is a pro-wrestling match or a superhero comic that started in WWII. It’s sheer propaganda and I *might* be ok with it except for the fact we’re the bad guys.
Shapiro delenda est
Once Shapiro-ism is extirpated from our territories, these chick-and-egg questions concerning politics and morality will resolve themselves.
Excellent post. It’s funny how not even the libertarians can avoid the leftist machine gobbling up everything in our society. There is not one iota of difference between a leftist and a “left libertarian” The “left libertarians” would be just as comfortable in and say the same exact things in Stalinist “party.” The only thing which changes is the framing.
Left-libertarians are crypto-communists. For them, libertarianism is just a means to a communist end. They know that in any utterly free society, Leftism will ultimately triumph because Leftists are political animals through and through.
Right-libertarians are naive anarchists. They truly believe an utterly free society can exist and that that is a good thing. The belief, alas, is naive in the extreme. There is no evidence in human history that anarchy can prevail for any length of time. To a significant degree, human history is the history of war and governance.
“Left-libertarians are crypto-communists.”
YES. You definitely get that impression listening to them. Plus, they are every bit as bad as any wokester when it comes to ganging up on their enemies and using corporate power to silence them. They just frame it as “well, this is the market…this is freedom baby!” Of course, you deviate by one minor detail of what they’re saying and you are the dreaded fascist. There ain’t no non-aggression principle when it comes to “fascists,” in which case it’s “bash the fash”
“There is no evidence in human history that anarchy can prevail for any length of time. ”
Unless you realize that the world order at the level of nation states has been anarchy since, well, ever, but particularly since Westphalia.
At a smaller level, it seems true that anarchy is not stable. The question is how much collective action is necessary. The neighborhood might be a bit small, but obviously the nation-state is way too big.
The nation-state is not anarchical. If it was, libertarians wouldn’t rail against it. Moreover, the relations between nation-states are anything but anarchical. They are certainly complex and often foolhardy, but they’re also very carefully calculated and rationalized.
The only true anarchy is atomized individualism. This seems to be the libertarian ideal, but it has never existed on any broad scale and never will.
I’m coming to believe, that the Republicans now being a spent force that don’t yet know it’s the Whig Party, the political dynamics will shift to the left and the inner working of the Democrats. Keep in mind that 1) the left is more cohesive and institutional by nature. and 2) that giant 1960’s Dem machine, with all the political machine trappings like Daley was nearly completely taken over by dirty hippies in the space of eight years. I see a similar dynamic with the millennials. I see a Bernie 2.0 coming, whomever it is, with “Medicare for all” as the primary agenda. A younger, dynamic Bernie. A Huey Long for our time. The Republicans will be so desperate they’ll support the institutional Democrats, locking together in an attempt to stop this. Nancy Pelosi’s greatest achievement in hindsight, may have been locking the door to far left power as she day traded like a good corporatist.
The left wing rage from the youth these days is palpable. They’ll look for any Bernie like horse going forward, but someone younger.
You’re too optimistic. If the “new generation” of leftists take over, Bernie Sanders is going to be the good old days. Bernie 2.0? Stalin 2.0! Preferably a POC Stalin 2.0….
The old leftists grew up in liberal democracy and it was integral to their program and in their thinking. The new left doesn’t believe in any of that.
True in part, wrong in part. You are correct that the Republican Party is a zombie and youth have a leftwing rage. Where you are wrong, I think, and this is the most important part, is who the “youth” are. They most assuredly are not the White Millennials all gaga over Bernie.
The ascendant youth are POC and their first order of business will be to marginalize and remove from power the Bernie Bros (if not outright expel and liquidate them at a later date). People like Rep. Eric Swalwell, to name one example, are past their expiry date even now. The young POC could care less about Medicare for All and so forth except as to how that transfers wealth from Whites to themselves. These people are incapable of wealth creation and are locusts by necessity. All that concerns them is taking what others have. This differs from Marxism in that the only goal is the acquisition.
This ends in a catastrophic collapse as a direct result. The White “youth” to whom you refer can run things in a half-ass fashion.* The youth who actually are ascendant cannot run or do anything substantive and will be scrapping and salvaging after nothing is left to loot.
The die is cast, and the only solution for us is to survive and sort through the ruins. That day is not far into the future, either.
*They will try to negotiate and use their marginal competency as a bargaining chip. It will not work.
you have made the category error of viewing POC aw a monolithic bloc; which they are not. once white control is finally dissolved, all the various tribes will be going at each other hammer and tongs. fedgov dies and regional blocs form. what comes after nation states? city states…
“once white control is finally dissolved,”
No doubt. There will be an interim period, though. I expect young White Leftist domination to be brief and play out somewhat along the lines you mentioned.
There is war within the Democratic party about whether to prioritize economic issues (Bernie) or racial grievance. My friends who are liberals due to concern for the working class are bewildered and intimidated by the racial grievance activists. Instead of “free healthcare for all,” it may be “free healthcare for non-whites only.”
Your last full sentence is absolutely correct. We need to think well beyond the traditional Left and their economic concerns. The sole issue is racial grievance.
And this should have been obvious to all with eyes to see a good 30 years ago, let alone now. Beginning in the late 60s, class warfare began giving way to race warfare (Black Panthers, anyone?). At this point class (capital) is almost totally irrelevant and culture (race) is the nub of it all.
This younger white left is on track to achieve power about the same time the money to pay for their fantasies runs out. But this will not cause them to admit defeat. It will only increase their rage. And they will be looking for somebody to pin the blame on. We all know who that is. Question is if they can find somebody to do their dirty work for them. Pretty sure they won’t be doing it themselves. This is the safe space generation after all.
Given demographics, the young White Left’s reign likely will be very brief and cataclysmic. It might not survive one election cycle. While it will attempt to divert blame, the young White Left leadership will be targeted by POC almost immediately. We need to think in terms of raw tribalism.
I’m ok with white lefty getting shanked, so long as they are all jabbed, boosted and wearing masks.
Yes, and you have wonder when people would stop being intimidated by paper tigers.
They have money to explore their fantasies. The flip side is, we get paid to lick their boots. Who needs dignity when you’ve got stuff?
Or maybe cucking has become traditional on the right, perish the thought. Certainly lefty expects to have her way.
More like Mugabe
You’re mistaken if you think the ascendant POCs are thinking anything more than “gib me whiteys stuff”, “white devils b evil”. Definitely are not sitting around debating the finer points of socialism.
Another of the libertarian problems they won’t address is their color-blindness and fondness for open borders. They simply can’t accept that their theories may possibly work in a homogenous high-trust society – but inviting in a flood of third worlders would instantly destroy their utopia (if it was ever possible).
That right there explains why libertarianism, as a political movement, was undergirded and promoted by such pillars as Goldwater, Mises, Rothbard, and Rand.
No, I don’t mean “secret conspiracy.” I mean they truly believe in the brotherhood of man.
The weed issue was their attempt to turn back the corruption and blackmail wrought by their own tribe.
Likewise with the antiwar stance.
The piracy by what is now the Deep State has brought no love to our people, neither has it brought love to theirs.
I have found Libertarians to be so libertarian that they can’t organize well, this is also a general problem on the true right.
Exceptions of course.
What I noticed about a recent dissident meeting was that behind the well functioning booths was a well organized person somewhere and many times that person was a woman.
Women are very good at organizing and helping men.
We need to do more in that area.
A lot of the Christian worlds success down through history was due to the role women took in it.
The mistake was allowing the progressives to distort that role and make women’s rights more important than women’s work and contribution.
Indeed, G. Lordon, indeed. What an exceptional statement. We must, absolutely must, bring our women back to our side, and this is the way to do it.
They want an important role to play, just look at 3rd wave (((feminism’s))) success marketing careerism. As always, the majority was betrayed and left behind.
Now it is only a few women struggling belatedly to defend the ancient and sacred prerogatives of women. They are called TERFs, anti-vaxxers, parental domestic terrorists, whores, Mollie Hatchetts, and more.
What men must do, is organize other men. This is natural to us, the hunting bands; women are drawn to the man, but stay for his band of brothers. They seek a tribe, especially since “provider” has been so diminished.
Women after WWll eagerly left the factories to become wives and mothers. What they returned to were Elk’s Clubs, bowling leagues, the PTA, part-time jobs, and daily trips to the fish market.
Women were dying to get out of the house for a bit, as men did to the local watering hole. To fraternize with other gals, trading tips and news, while doing something important, essential, and connected.
To strand them alone, isolate, with only tiresome chores and squalling brats is why The Feminine Mystique got a hold on them in the first place.
Build it, men, and they will come.
We provide a structure, under which they can sort themselves.
As they conspire to build a nest for you, you conspire to build a shelter for them.
I know the system is headwinds against us. But fk ’em. Are we not men?
I can’t believe you are serious. They don’t miss the Elks Club. They have money now. Money changes everything.
Neither do I buy that any Western female hanging around or not yet born cares about nationalism or “community-building” very much. They do care about public morality— which is not the same thing.
If you let women know that Taliban-style “fairness” rules will be imposed on other women they dislike, you’ll get 50% plus one female support. So much for Feminism.
I have an anecdote that is related to this post. I was recently in England. I visited the first Norman chapel which was built alongside a new cathedral. The chapel was a tiny quarter reserved for the new Norman nobility. On the columns were carved some Christian symbols and several pagan symbols including the first carving of a mermaid ever found on English soil.
When visiting the cathedral the guide mentioned several times how the Normans and the Anglo Saxons negotiated the aesthetics and symbolism of the new cathedral.
Look around. Is this regime negotiating the aesthetics and symbolism with the conquered people? No. This isn’t one elite that conquered another elite. This is a civilization where The People were to be the sovereign. Thus, like any conquering, it is the old sovereign that must be eliminated, in our case, The People.
I saw an image today of some soccer player covered in tattoos running around the field with the coalition of all but white-men flag. I wonder, just who will we make common cause with. It will be everyone whose sensibilities are utterly disgusted with this regime. From there, the rest will be sorted out. We must be prepared for both great sortings. See yesterday’s post for why.
I mentioned the mermaid carving because that clearly comes from the ancient mythology of Scandinavia. Of course, Disney is erasing the peoplehood from that symbol and the origins of the mythology. I don’t understand why inclusivity means erasing the people and supplanting them with another people in their myths.
If they were inclusive, wouldn’t they find an African story/myth of a Hippopatomus or a gazelle or some mythical savannah creature and make a movie about that?
In any case, I hope the White Art collective has a division spun up to tell our people’s mythology and stories to our children that preserve our peoplehood. It is being replaced along with us.
Its because many of those places have no real cultural stories apart from ones that are so limited that they are equivalent to basic children’s stories.
The appropriation is in some ways an effort to give themselves an antecedent identity that can stand up in an more advanced society. Otherwise they are left with nothing culturally to stand on to subsume and consume other aspects of society they are also trying to appropriate.
They and the usual suspects try and replace us in our own history and mythology in tandem with the the traitors replacing us in the present.
I imagine that already many of the invaders believe they were somehow part of the white cultural force that invented and made possible the modern world.
Many of the normies also have internalized this lie that is of such a gigantic scale it beggars belief that it does not result in lynchings of academia and media that promote it.
Orwell’s how many fingers scene is writ large all around us.
It looks like J.D. Vance and his handlers are ready with an answer to what conservatism is: https://americancompass.org/oren-cass-and-j-d-vance-on-the-future-of-the-republican-party/
Notice that the project says nothing about rights, culture, peoplehood, citizenship. The success of Britain and America were due to the morality and culture of the people, and a commitment by its ruling elite to play by the same rules. That isn’t to say they didn’t confer themselves advantages, but they did it, thanks to primogeniture, within the same framework. They also had a means to allocate resources – a vast set of new, continental size territories to explore and civilize. It is a lot easier for everyone top to bottom to win when expansion of that magnitude is at your disposal.
Let’s be real, we are going through contraction and decline. Why a ruling elite would choose population replacement as its grand plan to manage decline is truly astounding. This is happening with one primary competing tribe in the corridors of power. Wait until their coalition of multiple tribes are stalking the corridors of power. This explains throwing whitey under the bus I guess. It is quick, convenient and easy it seems. They would have been much better off going through shared sacrifice and having a coherent, maximally stable culture to arrive at some equilibrium.
The West did many great things. Perhaps its greatest achievement was to have a net surplus of rulers who understood that just transacting is not valuable. In fact, zero sum transacting is very, very damaging. We were overtaken by cultural forces that for all of their supposed intelligence, value transacting, even if it is zero-sum, over a more just mutually beneficial exchange at whose basis are a people that produce who you hold some cultural ties and obligations to.
It seems like what we did in the 20th century’s second half was globalized usury. It didn’t work well when it was more localized. Taking it onto a global scale may give Tom Friedman and his buddies the giggles, but the banquet of s*** sandwiches it is producing don’t seem like much of a party,
We’ve gone through the revolution. Now the revolutionaries and conquerors are doing what they always do. I pray and act with the means at my disposal with the goal that our people and our cultural heritage can survive.
PeriheliusLux: I have never been a Vance fan. He publicly eviscerated his people and heritage – the good and the bad, for public/liberal acclaim and money. He married a subcon. I am assuming, from your comment, she is a putative Christian. This is one area I am in direct disagreement with many Christians and conservatives – while baptism and the adoption of Christianity is supposed to mean spiritual rebirth and a turn away from previous sinning, it does not automatically negate someone’s genetic heritage and history. While such change is possible, it is difficult and unlikely. And even with the best will in the world, Vance’s children have a spit genetic inheritance, and will always know their subcon grandparents and their ways, while Vance has rejected his own White Appalachian ancestors and their ways.
3g4me –
I don’t know the first thing about Vance’s wife’s religious leanings. There are Christians on the Indian subcontinent – I’ve worked with a few who even take Christian names.
I suspect that Vance is a construction, a product designed to be sold to Flyover Country. I dug around in his, “VC”, background. Six or seven months ago, his portfolio was a joke – laughable. A month ago I looked and it looked much stronger. This suggests to me his handlers looked at his weaknesses and made it look better. You can’t be on the campaign trail and transform your VC portfolio that rapidly. It was an engineered makeover. Then there is his military background. His military career is undistinguished either by combat performance (if he saw combat), and in the rank he rose to and any other distinction.
A long time ago, I worked with a guy, extremely tall and handsome, but I couldn’t figure out what he really did at this company. One night, I we were both pulling an all nighter. So, I asked him and he told me. He was bent on a career as a politician. He told me how the people who enter that game are literally bent on it from at the latest the age of 18 and every life move they make is to get into office. Every word, every handshake, every decision, every move is bent on politics. He was at this company doing a job I couldn’t understand to get, “worked in the private sector in Silicon Valley”, on his checklist checked. He never made it. He actually had integrity and his issue was legitimate education reform. I recently searched him and the municipality he chose to implement reform saw him tarred and feathered and kicked to the curb by the Dem/TeachersUnion machine. He is off in the boonies now. He didn’t know that being a any guy, much less a white guy reforming the district he tried to reform was a bad choice of entry point into the first hill he could plant his flag on.
My point is, Vance is scratching someone’s back to get to his position – especially that quickly. It is almost certain that he is owned. As for his kids, even if he had strong conviction for his heritage, they will gravitate toward their sub-con heritage if only to escape being an evil white. Most likely, if daddy stays a Senator for any period of time, they will have no identity other than as members of the international elite. They will be raised in private schools with the children of the global elite who are probably going to form their own ideas of who they are and who they are not. Who and what that is we cannot know.
A big problem for our people was that we stripped ourselves of our continental, ethnic identity to commit to the propositions of the propositional nation. None of the other tribes did that. That is why we have been cast out and are beneath the jack boot. A big part of our job is educating our progeny starting back on the pontic steppes, the forests of Germania, the fields of Scandinavia, Britain and Italy and move through the great men of our civilization. America turned out to be the place where their ancestors came to be deracinated and forsaken. If it is not to be the place where they are x extinguished entirely they will need to know they can be an Alexander, Rollo, Alfred or a Caesar or one of their reliable and indispensible great men or a woman willing and able to support such a man and their family.
As for Vance, it is likely that his conservatism is what Cass and Gieb are telling him it will be. As to be expected, that conservatism is all tied to economics and not tied to a people and a culture and a nation. It is tied to a job. It is just another usurious longhouse. I suppose it can be a step up from offshored joblessness and a subsidized meth or fentanyl habit.
May a million Alexanders rise and make a more glorious life for themselves someday.
I am in complete agreement with you regarding the non-negation of ones genetic heritage and history, as my youngest child has had an unfortunate episode with this very subject.
She went to a birthday party for a classmate who happens to be a Catholic pajeet. Her bestie at school but once she got to the party, said friend all but ignored her. In addition to which, said friends extended family and other pajeet friends looked at her like she materialized from another planet. They talked about her in front of her in Hindi as well. I got a call from her about forty minutes after I dropped her off, as she couldn’t wait to leave.
The next time she ran into her at school, she confronted this girl about her and her family’s behavior. This girl actually told her, “You do not understand, my family, my people are different than you. I am sorry if this offends you, but I will behave differently while they are around.”
I told my daughter that this is why I am always telling you and your siblings that these other groups will be kind while you are alone, but turn on you the second a member of their own tribe enters the picture. She nodded, but was still very upset because she has the Achilles heel that all Euro-Americans have, “I’ll treat you with respect, you should be treating me the same way as well.”
Hopefully this lesson will stay with her and she’ll reflect on it.
3g4me –
I made my way through that Vance, “interview”, with Gieb and Cass. First of all, Cass is yet another feminized goof. Vance is maddening. He correctly calls the consumer/ad “tech” of the past twenty years as parasitic. Then he lauds, “technologies like the mRNA vaccines that rid the world of Covid-19.” I go from almost certain that he is owned to absolutely certain that he is owned. Fwiw, Thiel is parroting the exact same line.
So, it looks like Bourlas owns Vance and American Compass – which probably points straight to the Eastern Mediterranean.
The same is true for most of not all of these new promoted populists. Greene and Boebert come out of the explore talent site run by a jewish pornographer, as was Melissa Carone fronted by Guiliani. They were obviously recruited from that.
These backgrounds, and for many others, given negative promotion in the media are entirely indicative of control and give a huge lie to the inanimate forces argument.
They are intentionally set up and promoted for the marching morons to glom onto.
Real opposition is, as you pointed, silenced and not allowed through the door.
I’m of the belief that pain is moral. Self-discipline, punishment, deferring gratification, working out, doing things that ought to be done even if you don’t want to, etc.
Otherwise you’re a slave, an animal, chained down by your passions. (Of course you can go too far and become a miserable person, or a pervert.) We have a society based on pain-avoidance for the proles to the benefit of the disciplined elite. Slave society might be too harsh a description, but not by much. Some will argue ease and pleasure are always good, but I guess they’re lying, or they never read Brave New World.
At any rate, it’s breaking down because the elite are becoming undisciplined, too. We’re all slaves to our passions now, lol.
A big problem libertarians have is their incompetence at organizing. It’s not just their philosophy of non-aggression, but their personalities are incapable of it. They’re the opposite of today’s hyper-organizing leftists.
You could say that about the entirety of the right.
“You could say that about the entirety of the right.”
Well, the corporatist Republicans have been supremely organized for decades. Then again, they are not really of the right, except in the dullard estimations of the mainstream media.
Corporatist Republicans (aka – Useful Idiots).
No, that’s not it at all. As the Zman details the fundamental ideology is hostile to effective organization. They’re not necessarily incompetent at it, their ideology simply prohibits them from doing the things that are necessary for effective organization. Certainly, that ideology may select for personalities that are ineffective at organizing, but it’s the ideology itself that is the wellspring of the problem.
I think the Russians are working this out reasonably well, tbqh. It turns out that you can have a technologically-advanced culture that rejects the atomization of the Enlightenment. The morality comes from the Church and it supported by the state all with the goal of the flourishing of the people, their customs, their children.
Such a program worked in the west for quite some time, also. It could work again.
Christianity, before it got subverted, was pretty effective at telling people where is their place and keeping them mostly happy with it.
Before Christianity got subverted? When was that? 1500 years ago?
It happened right around the same time “Israel” stopped referring to The Church and instead really meant a 20th-century Jewish political state in Palestine.
““Who we are” is the question every civilization must answer. That is a moral question.”
Yes, which is exactly why Obama used to love saying “that’s not who we are.” He was attempting to impose his morality on others.
What’s happening now in this country is the ruling class keeps saying that various beliefs – tranny love, whites suck, etc. – are “who we are” but many folks, including yours truly, are saying, wait, that’s not who I am. Many a Joe Normie is realizing that they are not a part of the “we” of the ruling class.
Their problem is that they don’t know with whom they do belong. They are just beginning to search for their people. But they will find them in time, and that’s when things get fun because they will then know “who we are” and will not want to live under a different group with different ancestry, history and culture.
When I read that statement my mind likewise went straight to Obama’s quote (repeated ad nauseum). As for the fun to which you refer – I can hardly wait.
Ugh. During the Obama years, every TV show managed to stuff that “Not who we are/Not who I am” verbiage in everywhere while doing the requisite moral posturing and scolding. It was like fingernails on a chalkboard.
“The neocon – libertarian nexus is something that warrants further exploration.”
Seems pretty straight forward. Promote extreme individualism for everyone else while your group works as a team. Reap the rewards.
One thing you notice reading Mises and Rothbard is, for the most part, their praxeology is correct. It does give a very effective methodology of determining how people behave, respond to incentives, and the secondary effects of various government policies. The issue with their works is the implicit moral framework that determines what is good or bad behavior.
Sure, corrupting the money supply makes the true value of goods and services harder to ascertain, but in their own praxeology, the people in power have an interest in wielding these distortions to their advantage. A pure form of money isn’t some sort of ascendant god that must be obeyed, but simply a tool that the powerful can use. Sure, in the long term it can create a crash of the currency, but that could just be another opportunity to gain even more power. See CBDC’s.
The same can be said for economic incentives for supporting the current thing or any other part. It corrupts a pure supply and demand model, but this doesn’t matter to the ruling class. They simply don’t care and only need to ensure an alternative never gets the opportunity to get off the ground. Hence why ESG is a thing now.
Does it really explain human behavior? Much of what people do is the result of conditioning, not purposeful behavior. A trip to the grocery store makes this abundantly clear. They stocking of impulse items at the cash register is based on the understanding that people often act impulsively, without real purpose.
Libertarian economics makes perfect sense within a model of human society that can never exist. This is the same problem Marxists slammed into with their economic theories. Marxist economic did not fail because it lacked an adequate replacement for price in allocating goods and service. It failed because humans are not communists. Libertarian economics suffers the same problem, in my view. It only works if humans stop being human.
There’s still an underlying logic to even impulsive decisions, it usually just points to a high time preference. The goodies at a checkout gives the customer instant gratification for a relatively low price without any mental effort in actively seeking it out. The purpose is as simple as “I get a small treat at low expense”.
The same goes for types of conditioning. It’s a simple mental shortcut that has worked in the past so the person will continue in his behavior until some sort of breaking point requires him to reassess.
Apparently only an absolutely perfect description of behavior is of any use,
Carrying this to it’s logical conclusion, then China should be Heaven?
It would appear that for the Chinese, it mostly is.
Not defending China, but it was hilarious to see the 100 protestors chanting Liberty, Equality, and a bunch of other catchphrases that screamed western op and being heckled relentlessly by other Chinese people telling them to eff off.
Then western media portrayed it as some great pro-freedom uprising.
That being said, outside this obvious op, there is good evidence of general unrest from Covid policy but no more severe than what happened in Western countries, and we know how ineffective the western protests were.
Unless political leaders start to be found butchered in their beds, or the military stops taking orders, any excitement of a general uprising are overstated.
Ah. Thousands marched against Covid.
Right now, literal millions are marching for Bolsonaro.
The Chinese protest is being focused on by our media liars to divert attention away from Brazil and stolen elections.
(The Chinese, to be fair, is not another pathetic Hong Kong or Iran oppo. They are rightfully pissed and afraid since news of the world’s largest concentration- er, quarantine- camp got out.)
China gets the morality wrong because they are unable to answer: what is the purpose of life? I mean, they have some sort of answer, but it is wrong.
If you’re going to say their answer is wrong, you should at least say what their answer is.
He did.
Wrong.
Their answer is, “Wrong.”
*****
Correction. You must say it with a Chinese accent.
Since they can’t say, “r”, their answer would be, “Wong.”
Oddly enough. they say the same about you.
Funny Dat.
We like to poke Shlubertarians when we say that Somalia is a Libertarian paradise, but it is not. It’s just low-trust low-IQ anarchy.
Switzerland is in fact the Shlubertarian paradise. Consider:
*Decentralized, but with solid community controls on the local level;
*Low taxes as well as a tax haven;
*Capital-friendly;
*Non-allied, but has citizen militias, and the only standing army is the one that protects the Pope;
*Almost all men are issued firearms;
*Flinty, laconic types
Why do you think this is the logical conclusion of the post?
Sorry, I meant to infer that we like, and want to be with, those that share our historical ancestry and values, and understand our cultural references. You would hardly ever see a Somali librarian, or an Italian nonna at a bris, or a Vermonter attending a quinceanera, or a low rider in Nantucket. Like the Finn who loves Japan, but no matter how hard he tries to fit in he will always be the gaijin, the John Blackthorne. Not to say that we couldn’t be friendly and polite and our kids might play together, but unless the “other” tries very very hard to fit into our world, no birthday party invites for you. Maxine Waters may live in a white gated community but I’ll bet she’s not invited next door for kringler and gluhwien.
I agree with this, which is why I stated above that for the typical Chinaman, he’s living in what he would define as a paradise. He’s surrounded by his people and his culture, a confident people and confident culture, with no fear of replacement or dilution.
Hear, hear, Marko!
A Euro cultural version of libertarianism, like the Constitutional libertarians promoting 10th Amendment solutions, not an economic corporate libertarianism as the Misesians and Chicago boys promote.
What do you think of the following theory?
Most Asians like living in conformist, authoritarian societies. You, as a person of European descent may find this unbelievable, but you come from a very different evolutionary chain.
The protesters that you see demanding Western mores and freedoms are outliers to the Asian people in the same way that trannies are outliers to ours. Just like we shouldn’t make allowances for the trannies, the Asians shouldn’t make allowances for those who demand Western morality.
Lawsy. Don’t think so.
We forget those bloody Chinks riot at the drop of a hat.
The Zman once said negroes riot every ten years.
So do Chinese. It’s like clockwork. I mean, ever read about their civil wars?
Perhaps this is the end of the Mao Party dynasty, and of the Red Princes, his grandchildren.
Or perhaps, a Reformation, with Deng as Martin Luther.
Martin Luther Deng, wot…
“Heaven” in the context of a political state in which the citizens are content with their place in the system and the rulership of the system is necessarily going to be different for different people.
Icelandics don’t *want* to live like the Chinese. They come up with different solutions for how to organize their society. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.
Libertarians solve it by claiming that in an ideal libertarian society, the individual can choose their own “government” from a large selection of insurance/security companies competing in the free market.
You can try one and if you don’t like their services, you can switch to another one at any time or just rely on yourself without external help.
These companies would make sure that nothing happens to you, the paying customer. They wouldn’t want to lose the revenue stream.
The scope of their services would differ from company to company, from simple physical protection, to comprehensive insurance services including health. Justice would be operated by private judges and enforced by these same insurance companies.
Not sure if these theories came from Rothbard or Hoppe or other libertarian writers. It’s been many years since I read any libertarian literature.
It’s not difficult to see where such arrangements would very quickly go. Unsurprisingly, Moldbug built partially on top of these ideas.
That simply avoids the problem of what can be done to prevent one of those “government” gaining power and then imposing its will on everyone. What happens when the “governments” are all led by Nazis or Marxists? At the hear of this argument is magic, as in something magical happens so this likely scenario never comes about.
You don’t need all the “governments” being led by Nazis (Btw, this is where Hoppe sugests physical removal).
A praxeological argument can be made that the real interest of the companies would be to collude and cheat in certain areas, for example justice or insurance coverage. Also, the strong companies would inevitably eat the weak ones. Independent individuals would be bullied into signing up with one of the companies.
The end result is just one centralized government or a hierarchy of governments, which is in effect the same.
Huh. Monarchs arose to end the warlordism.
Chinese Emperors, too. Anybody else see “Hero,” starring Jet Li?
This is reminiscent of an extremely simplified explanation of Marx’s view on capital: The initial de- equilibrium that comes from a one exchange can be parlayed in subsequent transactions (in M-C-M, of course), further tilting the table.
“They wouldn’t want to lose the revenue stream.”
This is a major blind spot of libertarians. When a company is struggling, the above is true, however, once a company or individual becomes wealthy enough they are more than happy to lose lots of money in the service of imposing their values on the culture.
Individual or companies can be become so wealthy that they are effectively immune from market forces and can engineer the culture as much as a government. George Soros, for example.
Soros is a front to funnel the endless tax money back into endless NGO and agitation organizations against you.
He is not spending his own money, these people never do. You are funding it all.
He is no different than FTX and a myriad of other similar funnels.
> It’s not difficult to see where such arrangements would very quickly go.
It’s also not difficult to understand the strong overlap between committed libertarians and recreational drug users.
Wow, a lot to unpack today.
First, what today’s post describes is what I call big “L” libertarianism, which has been thoroughly corrupted like all major political movements. Small “l” libertarianism is essentially about self-reliance and the live-and-let-live ethos. It is about how an individual may choose to behave in the course of their life. And at the extremis interface with society-at-large, it becomes “leave me alone or I will be incentivized to eliminate you as a problem in my life.” The ideal libertarian is the exact opposite of a parasite, and mankind should aspire to be the opposite of a parasitic species.
Second, prior to civilization, morality was evolved, not imposed. Morality was whatever kept the tribe alive and reproducing in the local environment. And different environments produced different moral behaviors. The effort to create a “universal” moral code is a modern invention, and ultimately about the power to impose this indoctrination on others. But no universal code works in every environment all the time, and thrashing about in search of the “true” universal morality is pointless.
But there is one exception to the above. If you proactively work to morph all of mankind into an homogenized hive species, then in concept, a universal code of everything can work. This is the Great Reset policy being pushed by the GEF and others. Do you want to become an insect?
Morality being evolved…
There is considerably less innovation in morality than you seem to think. And these innovations seem to be associated with very bad things. Morality, then, being of paramount importance, requires structures that prevent too much innovation.
The evolutionary timeline is measured in reproduction cycles. For humans, that cycle is about 9 months, but for bacteria, can be measured in minutes. The former is much slower than the latter, and consequently, human evolutionary change is typically revealed over centuries or millennia. And for most of our specie’s history, these changes were encoded in DNA.
Then language and civilization happened, and it was a whole new ballgame. Nurture rose in prominence due to postpartum verbal education of youth and subsequent habit formation based upon local wisdom and customs. Now DNA had a partner, and both operated to enhance survivability and fecundity.
Morality (right/wrong, good/bad) cannot persist without human reproduction, which remains the fundamental imperative. That is, until we start manufacturing people via cloning. We are now living in an era of hyper-accelerating change, and the main victim of reality is specie’s robustness. We are becoming fragile in a coddled man-made environment, and colony collapse is now a real possibility.
Disagree. There is not much new going on these days. Women out of control and ruining civilization? Story old as time. Gays taking over and turning everything useless and gay? The Byzantines felt with such a problem 14 centuries back. Gender-bending lunacy? Have a look at the gods of the Near East.
It’s not a new morality we are seeing. It is a tiresome old one.
||| “Who we are” is the question every civilization must answer. That is a moral question. |||
Indeed.
However, the answer to the question “Who am I” takes precedence. And, yes, that too is a moral question because Man first and foremost is a *moral* being.
Let’s do an experiment here. Let’s see if we can develop a “morality manifesto” for a DR state that we would all be comfortable having imposed on us and enforced by a future DR State.
I appreciate Z’s logic here but I wonder if it’s possible. There are many great thinkers here, so who will kick off?
I see where you’re going, but the problem with positive “black letter” law is that by the time you’re forced to resort to it, it’s already too late. I remember going out to see my grandparents, for example, in their tiny little farm town. It was the kind of place where nobody even thought about locking their doors, and if you started working on a project out in your yard — replacing some roof shingles or whatever — half the old coots in town would wander by to help out. And then their wives would start fixing snacks, the older kids would take care of the younger kids, and so on. Spontaneously.
Thirty years later, none of that applies. Everyone locks their doors. Nobody helps anybody. There’s simply no way to recreate the old way in black-letter law, largely because the new way came about from the abuses of previous black letter law. All it took was one jerk threatening to sue because he got a loose shingle dropped on his head by accident, and it spiraled from there. Pretty soon everybody’s kid was a Very Clever Boy looking to get over on everybody else, so they can find ways to jailhouse lawyer any law you come up with far faster than you can come up with laws….
The first line of this “morality manifesto” has already been writ: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” by Shakespeare.
Then it matters not whose noggin the shingle hits.
Severian: Yes . . . and no. It’s a trope that “no one can legislate morality” and that’s only partially true. The law may initially be intended to express/enforce a group’s morality, but it can and has been easily subverted. While you are correct that there is no going back via today’s political framework and using AINO’s polyglot masses, a people can – and have – been changed.
God had Moses keep the juice wandering around the desert because they had been inculcated with the morality and instincts of the slave. Moses didn’t try to deprogram them or issue new laws that their already corrupted characters would have somehow embraced.
Any new White polity would initially require an authoritarian government. Let the people with the experience of diversity, or the ideas of tolerance, or the embrace of corporatism die out. Let a generation or two be raised on explicitly pro-White values, be repeatedly and graphically warned of what befell their ancestors, and mercilessly cull any spiteful mutants who try to spread any of the eternally recurring utopian ideas.
Yes, there will always be dissenters. You do not tolerate them or wait for them to ‘outgrow’ their ‘foolishness.’ You stamp it out. Again and again. In the real world of fallen human nature, there is no other way to return a fallen, degraded people to spiritual and cultural health.
And that level of government control – even if said government is by White people explicitly in pursuit of a pro-White and pro-family society – is something most of us would not want to live under. The big question is how long that level of control would be necessary. Once you have culled the bottom ‘x’ percent for a few generations you would theoretically have a population of largely productive, intelligent, moral, and functional people who can police themselves. But there will always be exceptions, and it’s tolerance of those exceptions that leads to ruin.
tl;dr: Sympathy unlimited by reason is dangerous; reason without empathy is inhuman. Don’t let women run anything – even their own lives – without male guidance.
Upvote if only for the last paragraph.
As I read the account, God kept Moses “wandering around the desert” because Moses didn’t entirely follow God’s plan of putting every man, woman, and child to death that they came across. Which is one of the reasons I reject the bible and the god of Israel.
It is an odd paradox – you can’t legislate morality in the sense that having a law on the books doesn’t mean it will be followed; yet, morality is the most common thing to be legislated. Nearly every law has some moral basis, or seeks to impose some moral responsibility – stopping at a red light imposes the moral obligation to respect the safety of others.
Let’s start from the very basics:
– People are not equal. Some are smarter, many are dumb. Some are strong, some weak, etc.
– Superior people should lead the masses
– Hierarchy is inevitable. Every person has an ideal spot in the hierarchy, where they maximize their potential.
Yes. Someone mentioned sometime something about
For the body is not one member, but many.
If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?
…
But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him…
But now are they many members, yet but one body.
…
And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.
The concept in the middle ages was exactly this idea – a theoretically non-exploitative, hierarchical body of people. They saw themselves as the Body of Christ, which imposed duties and responsibilities on all.
“Superior” is a subjective quality.
If it’s subjective why don’t you fight it out with a MMA fighter?
Then say strength and fighting acumen (as opposed to wit, mendacity, or other attributes that can be construed as “superior).
Do all leaders rely on physical strength?
Why would I say that? I just gave one example. Requirements for a ruler are obviously more complex. I am sure there is quite a large body of work discussing this.
You did when you equivocated. You didn’t give an example of leadership – you gave an example of strength and skill, and then used that to “prove” superior as objective. My point is “superior” is a loose term that doesn’t really work as a metric. Not all MMA fighters are leaders. Nor are all leaders strong.
You said “superior people should lead the masses” – I just mean that your statement doesn’t really give any true criteria.
Per the hierarchy, Jerome Nadler, and other stellar figures of politics and film, is much smarter and stronger than all of us combined.
The purpose of the state is to promote the flourishing of white people. All other ends are subservient to this necessarily vague goal. All means are permitted in the service of this goal. The state can punish you for advocating for non-white immigration, for example.
The nation should be a federation of states. When large groups within the nation disagree about an important issue, for example, Christians versus non-Christians or libertarians versus socialists, they should separate into distinct states such that the disagreement is minimized. The federation of states should concern itself only with issues like common defense, preventing unwanted immigration and monetary issues.
Caveat: All constitutions, like this one, can be subverted due to the imprecision of words and the complexity of the world. However, they can be useful. Imagine where we’d be if the Founders hadn’t written the first and second amendments.
Addendum: States and even neighborhoods can deny any new person or business that wishes to settle within it.
Libertarians would do well to revisit Hobbes, especially the notion of a “corporate person.” In the Latinate English of Hobbes’s day, “corporate” was a verb: “To make into a body.” The Leviathan wasn’t a specific, physical individual; he was a “corporate person,” a legal fiction, the embodiment of the general will (if you’ll allow me an anachronism for clarity). Because the Leviathan is *our* creation, then, “he” by definition *can’t* go against the interests of “his” people.
This argument was a specific response to the execution of Charles I. The Roundheads convicted King Charles of the spectacularly odd crime of “treason.” Against the kingdom he was king of. This implies that the king is not only subservient to his own laws, but therefore subservient to any coalition of people who can grab the lawmaking bureaucracy. Obviously that CAN go against the interests of the nation as a whole, because as Hobbes saw it, “faction” was the entire cause of the English Civil War (specifically, a group of over-educated religious fanatics with bizarre ideas about social justice; nothing new under the sun).
The problem with “corporate personhood” in the Leviathan sense, though, is that business concerns are also “corporate persons” who are capable of doing to the Leviathan what the Roundheads did to King Charles: essentially seizing the apparatus of government in their own interests. Hobbes saw a bit of it himself, as he was involved in the Virginia Company, but that kind of “corporate personhood” really came into its own a century later, when the East India Company dragged Britain into all kinds of ruinous foreign wars (the American War of Independence, for example, was certainly accelerated by the EIC).
Hobbes didn’t have an answer, but his attempts to work it through are very much worth studying. Especially (for the Libertarians) his “first law of nature,” which is: “Endeavor peace.” Yep — the “non-aggression principle” is his very first law of nature, from which he derives the most absolute possible despotism.
Well – the corpus of people needs a head – the body and head form the Leviathan. And, though it has been many years since I have read the text, if I recall the will is to avoid violent death (in the State of Nature sense) – something that is really an outside factor of the populace – not emanating from them. The contract that forms the polity to avoid violent death is the compulsory aspect that cannot be cast aside.
The answer that the libertarians are looking for (but don’t want to admit to) is something that the left has understood for years – whoever wields power over you is, effectively, your government, no matter whether they call themselves one or not. The socialists of old understood that the man in the mansion on the hill overlooking the company town with its company store and its company-paid Pinkerton enforcers was, effectively, the government that ruled over the workers, no matter what the formal de jure arrangements may have been. Thus, the man in the mansion had to be overthrown just as much as the king did, otherwise all we would have was a change in de jure governance but none in de facto governance.
But the modern left isn’t interested in overthrowing our corporate overlords, because they’ve co-opted them completely via the Long March through the institutions. This time they are out to defend our shadow government, and they can do so very effectively because the libertarians and conservatives facing them can’t admit that those socialists of old were right all along.
I don’t think leftist uninterest in resisting corporate power is because corporations have come to be left-dominated or state-pleasing or whatever. Libertarians say that, and libertarians are always wrong.
Leftism as we know it now—the actual existing thing, not its supposed intellectual lineage—is the managerial ideology *of* those organizations. The “far left” (as conservatives call them) are the blindest adherents to it.
Democratic Socialists of America meetings sound like corporate HR self-criticism sessions because *that’s what they are*. HR did it first. If there was a “long march,” it was of “the institutions” through leftism.
Agreed. Kapitalism funded Communism.
I say this explains the longevity and nature of the small hats, and their coevals- the secret of their strength is that they work, ever, to keep the ruling class families in power. To ride the horse, not to be the horse.
They owned the East India Companies, true, but they owned them as Crown corporations.
The horse teams are changed, at times, favors withdrawn or proffered, disputes and factions arise; but what remains is the support system.
Once locked in, that system itself becomes the defined arena in whose constraints the contests are fought. The boundaries provide a comprehensible field of rules and opportunities, to quit or be exiled from the system leaves a contender as rudderless as a man whose debit card no longer works.
The world’s oldest mafia doesn’t want to be the government. Whenever they tried that, it led to their overthrow in but a few generations. Their own society was constantly riven by civil war, such repeated schism is what brought the Romans in as referee.
Fronts and janissaries like Schwab are the way to go, human shields to take the arrows.
Communism? Just an overseer class. You want to be House nigga, or do you only get to be Field?