reactionary liberty - the libertarian counter-revolution

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Reactionary Liberty

The Libertarian Counter-Revolution

By Robert Taylor

Reactionaryliberty.com

THE LIBERTARIAN COUNTER-REVOLUTION

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Copyright © 2016 Robert Taylor

All Rights Reserved. ISBN-13: 978-1537539072

ISBN-10: 1537539078

Cover Art by James Edmondson © 2016 Oh No Type Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Reactionary Liberty 5

1. Libertarian Ethics 9

2. Economics 25

3. Spontaneous Order and the Free Market 42

4. Cultural Marxism and Libertarian Wolves 58

5. Decentralize Everything 77

6. The Mythology of State Power 92

7. The Constitution and Limited Government 111

8. Anarcho-Tyranny and the Police State 126

9. Cobweb of Coercion 144

10. Mutual Aid and the Welfare State 166

11. Withdraw Consent 184

12. Bitcoin, Crypto-Anarchy, and the P2P Revolution 205

13. The Libertarian Case Against Open Borders 222

14. Secession, Nullification, and Voting With Your Feet 242

15. Down With Democracy 260


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Introduction

Reactionary Liberty

For libertarians like myself, Dr. Ron Paul’s 2008 and 2012 presidential runs were an absolute revelation. During the debates and in his media appearances, we saw a humble and decent man tirelessly seek out the Remnant of liberty in our dark age of perpetual war and unlimited state power. With uncompromising courage, Paul introduced millions of people to libertarianism.

Witnessing Paul openly denounce the Iraq War, central banking, and the entire premise of global empire launched my own personal philosophical journey. The works of Frederic Bastiat, Henry Hazlitt, and Friedrich Hayek began overflowing my bookshelves. And when I eventually began reading as much Murray Rothbard as I possibly could, I was hooked.

Rothbard, like his mentor Ludwig von Mises, in addition to Old Right figures like H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, and Garet Garrett, wrote beautifully in defense of liberty and private property while paying homage to the traditions of Western civilization that had birthed libertarianism. In their manners, customs, dress, and cultural attitudes, they were bourgeois men of the Right. While Rothbard flirted with the Left when he was young, he eventually concluded that they were irredeemable; his last years were spent writing scathing critiques of egalitarianism. Paul, too, represented this traditionalism; Paul is married to his high school sweetheart, admits that he never touched drugs, and always conducted himself like a Christian gentleman.

Up until the end of Paul’s last presidential run and his retirement from public office in 2014, libertarianism fell on the Right side of the political spectrum by default. Its biggest proponents and advocates rarely spoke too loudly on cultural issues, but whenever they did, they were unmistakably un-Leftist.

Fast forward just two years after Paul retired, and the libertarian movement is now a shell of what it used to be. Its major party candidate in 2016, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, exemplifies this direction that libertarianism has taken ever since. Johnson, who displayed little intellectual curiosity and even rejected the key tenets of libertarianism (the non-aggression principle and free association), never missed a chance to advertise his politically correct, Leftist positions on marijuana, gay marriage, and abortion. Johnson even bragged that he is politically quite similar to fellow 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a not too subtle attempt to appeal to young liberals.

What in the world happened? How did libertarianism evolve from a highly disciplined and radical study of economics, rights, and the use of force in society

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(that also understood the necessity and desirability of hierarchy and tradition), into the milquetoast branding of “low-tax liberalism” and “fiscally conservative and socially liberal?”

At the 2015 Students for Liberty Conference, ideological shots were fired. Several Leftists calling themselves libertarians intentionally interrupted Ron Paul’s speech and publicly read their “open letter” to Paul.1 In the letter, they lauded a “second wave libertarianism” that would replace the “racism, sexism, and homophobia” of the old guard (meaning real) libertarians, which included the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Gary North, Walter Block, and Paul himself.

Thanks to the Leftism that had accomplished a slow but steady coup of libertarianism, the man who had done more than anyone in history to spread libertarianism around the world was being denounced with language reserved for Bolsheviks. Under the new Libertarian Thought Police, lip service was paid to free markets and limited government, but the majority of the energy was spent attacking traditional Western social norms, denouncing patriarchal oppression, promoting feminism, and adopting the language and attitudes of Marxists. Libertarianism, Inc. was now completely on board with the Left’s culture of political correctness and cultural Marxism, and anyone even remotely on the Right was to be shunned and purged from the movement.

This book, then, is dedicated to what I call reactionary liberty: the defense of radical libertarianism and an unapologetic cultural traditionalism that rejects, root and branch, both state power and cultural Marxism. While libertarianism as a political philosophy concerns itself only with the question of political force, I argue that the libertarian ethic of non-aggression and private property necessitates a rejection of egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and diversity. “Private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are as unlikely a combination as socialism and cultural conservatism...libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives,” argues Hans-Hermann Hoppe.2

Without this reactionary element, libertarianism can never be a serious movement because it will always fall victim to John O’Sullivan’s Law: that any movement, entity, or institution that is not explicitly right-wing will eventually turn left-wing.3 While libertarians may believe that they are “above” or “beyond” Left and Right, the Leftist infiltration of libertarianism (combined with the evolutionary psychology of r/K selection theory4) proves that libertarians cannot be neutral.5

1 Christopher Cantwell, “Against ‘Second-Wave Libertarianism,’” February 22, 2015. 2 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of

Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (Transaction Publishers, 2001), 207-208. 3 John O’Sullivan, “O’Sullivan’s First Law,” June 26, 2003.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100715191034/http://old.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback-jos062603.asp

4 See Chapter 4.


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Thus, the reactionary libertarian prefers the conservative Edmund Burke to the revolutionary Jacobins of the French Revolution. “Burke argued for the traditional liberties of the English against the ‘abstract’ Rights of Man advocated by the revolutionaries, predicting correctly that such abstract rights, with no force of custom behind them, would perish in a reign of terror,” notes Joseph Sobran. “The revolutionaries, he said, were so obsessed with man’s rights that they had forgotten man’s nature.”6

This nature is avoidable, and we cannot wish it away. Humans are largely tribal, and they place tremendous importance on the blood and soil of family, religion, tradition, culture, and private, non-state social institutions—civil society—over the soulless, atomization of the individual. Libertarians should not run from this. Civil society is not only how we organize society without the state, but represents the strongest bulwark there is against the encroachment of the state. “Liberty should offer the binding glue of cooperation, not some unnatural hyper-individualism, divorced from human experience,” urges Jeff Deist.7

This is why civil society is always attacked by the Left; destroy the culture, and the state can begin to grow. Since the French Revolution and Robespierre’s guillotines, Leftism has been the ideology of destruction: social engineering at the barrel of a gun—perpetual revolution, carried out via coercion.8

With floating abstractions and ever-changing goal posts, the Left seeks to expand state power and will use any means at their disposal in order to do so. After political Marxism and communism were proven to be economic disasters—creating famines, starvation, gulags, and piling up millions of corpses—their focus shifted on subverting traditional Western culture. Karl Marx’s disciples quickly became cultural Marxists, creating the weaponized language of political correctness as a virus to attack Western civilization’s anti-communist, traditionalist immune system.

For the reactionary libertarian, this requires an uncompromising opposition to this cultural Marxism—a counter-revolution against the perpetual revolution of Leftism. Individuals are different from another, and not equal; we live in an unavoidably tribal world; men and are not women and women are not men; freedom is both a responsibility and a right; democracy must be de-legitimized, but if we are to live in a democratic society, then the franchise should be severely limited. These insights into the human condition—including a complete rejection

5 The Anarchist Notebook, “Why Libertarianism Could Not and Will Not Ever Be a Real

Movement,” September 23, 2016. https://anarchistnotebook.com/2016/09/23/why-libertarianism-could-not-and-will-not-ever-be-a-real-movement/

6 Joe Sobran, “Hijacking the Conservative Movement,” November 2006. http://www.sobran.com/articles/leads/2006-11-lead.shtml

7 Jeff Deist, “The 2016 Election’s Silver Lining,” November 9, 2016. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/11/jeff-deist/time-rebrand-libertarianism/

8 Tom Woods, “Trying to Reason With the Left? Have Fun,” November 12, 2016. http://tomwoods.com/blog/trying-to-reason-with-the-left-have-fun/

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of egalitarianism—form the foundation for a consistent, coherent, and forceful philosophy of liberty.9

The first five chapters of this book will defend the logical, philosophical, ethical, and historical case for libertarianism and a refutation of both political and cultural Marxism. Chapters six through ten offer a thorough critique of Leviathan—the large, bureaucratic state that tramples our rights, fights useless wars, commits horrific atrocities, cripples the free market, and degrades the culture. The last five chapters of the book are dedicated to how we can actually advance liberty in this continual dark age of perpetual war, perpetual expropriation, and perpetual revolution. This includes the use of technological advancements to increase privacy, Bitcoin, the withdrawal of consent, secession, nullification, and decentralization to both shrink the state and the restore traditional Western culture, the case against open borders, and a devastating critique of democracy.

The Italian traditionalist Julius Evola wore the term “reactionary” on his sleeve proudly, calling it “the true test of courage.”10 With this book, I look to blend this Evolian courage with a radical libertarianism to forge a coherent and forceful philosophy of liberty—reactionary means for libertarian ends.

9 Lawrence Murray, “The Fight for the Alt-Right: The Rising Tide of Ideological Autism

Against Big Tent Supremacy,” March 7, 2016. http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/03/the-fight-for-the-alt-right/

10 Rural Reactionary, “Evola on Being a Reactionary (and Cuckservatives),” August 4, 2015. http://ruralreactionary.blogspot.com/2015/08/evola-on-being-reactionary-and.html


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Chapter 1

Libertarian Ethics

The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) is the backbone of libertarian ethics. It states that no one has the right to initiate, or threaten to initiate, aggression against another person’s body or property; violence is justified only in self-defense.

Aggression is defined as physical force. Since “it can be argued that everything everybody does concerns, affects or regards another in some way or another, however trivial,”11 the NAP applies only to physical coercion—murder, rape, theft, or assault, for example. Unless an act is accompanied by force or threat of force, it is not aggression. Body odor, musical tastes or personal prejudices may offend or “harm” you, but none constitute an act of aggression that may be justifiably met with defensive force.12

Libertarianism argues that most social problems and conflicts exist in society because of the failure to apply the principles of self-ownership and private property, which are deemed logically consistent, peaceful, and just. Thus, the NAP is derived from the concepts of self-ownership and property rights. To own something, whether it is your body or property, one must have final and exclusive control over the use of whatever is owned as long as these actions do not violate the right of other individuals to do the same with their bodies and property.

Libertarianism “specifies that individuals, not the state, are owners of their own bodies and property.”13 We have “property rights” to our bodies and each of us owns himself completely: “though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a ‘property’ in his own ‘person.’ This nobody has any right to but himself.”14

Because we require the consumption of scarce physical resources to survive, “the problem of social order, then, stems from mutually exclusive desires for how to employ such scarce goods.”15 There are numerous ways in which states and political ideologies attempt to “solve” this dilemma through the use of arbitrary rules and/or brute force. Only libertarianism, however, provides a consistent and conflict-mitigating answer to this unavoidable problem of scarcity because full and

11 Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State (London: Continuum, 2012), 47. 12 Ibid., 48. 13 Stephan Kinsella, “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide,” May 27, 2011.

https://mises.org/library/argumentation-ethics-and-liberty-concise-guide 14 John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Chapter 5 http://press-

pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s3.html 15 Chase Rachels, Spontaneous Order: The Capitalist Case for a Free Society (2015), 11.

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complete self-ownership is what sets libertarianism apart from all other political ideologies.

The purpose and importance of a rational and consistent definition of self-ownership and property rights is to permit conflicts over scarce (rivalrous) resources to be avoided. To fulfill this purpose, property titles to particular resources are assigned to particular owners. The assignment must not, however, be random, arbitrary, or biased, if it is to actually be a property norm and possibly help conflict to be avoided. What this means is that title has to be assigned to one of the competing claimants based on the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between owner and the resource claimed.16

Property rights are thus derived from the ownership rights we have in our own bodies as individuals. Property rights over scarce resources are acquired through original appropriation or voluntary exchange. Ownership equals control; whether in our bodies or property, individuals have the right to exclude others from using their property, and the right to defend it from aggressive action or invasion.

Original appropriation, or “homesteading” as John Locke called it, is the act of being the first one to mix one’s labor with a previously unowned resource. Homesteading a given resource is conflict-free and is the only fair justification for owning the resource because no one can possibly have a more valid claim to the resource than can the first user. If this were not the case, any non-first user—whether second or ninety-second—of an unowned resource could lay claim to it, leading to conflict.17

Voluntary exchange is the second and only other means by which one may rightfully acquire resources (an exchange is a trade between owned resources, i.e. property). This includes any voluntary transfer of property over to someone else: gifts, charity, barters, inheritances, the exchange of money for a good in a sale, and any other way individuals can voluntarily coordinate and cooperate. This, also, is a conflict-mitigating means of the rights and rules for property.18

Any other means of acquiring property besides original appropriation and voluntary exchange is incompatible with the libertarian ethic. Private property and liberty are inexorably linked: one cannot exist without the other. As Ludwig von Mises argued, “Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will. It allows other forces to arise side by side with and in opposition to political power. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in

16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.


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which the autonomy of the individual and ultimately all intellectual and material progress are rooted.”19

Without the private ownership of property based on homesteading and voluntary exchange, societies and economies have to then be organized by some form of central planning with inherently arbitrary rules and coercion. There are an infinite amount of human wants and needs, but only a scarce number of resources to fulfill those desires. When property is privately owned and peacefully exchanged, this allows us to economize these preferences and make the most rational decisions about how to allocate and use these scarce resources.

Central planners, however, have no mechanisms other than brute force and arbitrary rules to determine what goods should be produced, in what quantity, using what resources, etc. For example, Venezuela, although rich in natural resources, has an incredibly poor populace who suffer the frequent shortage of goods precisely because of central planning and lack of private property. No matter how many guns the state points at the problem, without private property, society will always be relatively poorer.20

Another problem with a non-libertarian allocation of property is that very few raw material goods are actually immediately ready to be consumed and used.

There are no resources on the planet that do not require at least [a minimal amount] of effort to transform into a consumable product. Even edible berries growing in the wild must be harvested, meaning that someone must transport himself to the berries’ location and pull them from the bush at just the proper time. The cost of doing so is the value one places on forfeiting his leisure. Of course, other natural resources require much more effort to convert to consumable products, passing through many stages of production.21

If a berry farmer is unsure whether his property is secure from confiscation, his incentive to maintain long-term production of the farm is diminished and thus the price structure is also disrupted. He is less incentivized to take care of his property if he worries it might possibly be stolen from him by the state. This is an aspect of the ‘tragedy of the commons’—another damning feature of non-libertarian property rights.22

Libertarianism wishes to advance the principles of property, but in no way wishes to defend all property that is currently referred to as “private.”23 Against the standard of the libertarian definition of justly acquired property, virtually all

19 Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010), 67-68. 20 Patrick Barron, “Why We Need Private Property to Deal With Scarce Resources,”

November 2, 2015. https://mises.org/library/why-we-need-private-property-deal-scarce-resources

21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Karl Hess, “Where Are the Specifics [of Libertarianism]?”

http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html

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property that is labeled as private is not actually so: it has not been homesteaded or acquired through the result of peaceful, voluntary exchange. For example, the property that Wal-Mart claims is nominally dubbed private; Wal-Mart, however, is an entity—like all corporations—that receives tremendous amount of state (i.e. non-libertarian) benefits and privileges in the acquisition of its property. It benefits from state roads, the state military that protects its overseas imports, eminent domain land-seizures, and the selling of goods to state agencies. All of these are non-libertarian, which means that Wal-Mart might as well be part of the state apparatus rather than the product of libertarian property claims. As Karl Hess puts it, much of what is considered “private” property is

Deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.24

Virtually every piece of “privately” owned land has changed hands via non-libertarians means. This, however, does not mean that we need to have the state forcibly redistribute the property back to its original owners; original property claims can date back hundreds of years, and the state itself is largely the prime cause of property being acquired through non-libertarian means.

As a philosophy dedicated to liberty, justly acquired property and conflict-mitigation in society, libertarianism seeks to remove the state apparatus from society and then allow the bottom-up mechanisms of the market to sort out property claims. As the largest beneficiaries of state power, large corporations who have built their wealth through fraud, war and coercion would have the most to lose in a libertarian society: their illegitimate assets would be extremely difficult to maintain without state-sponsored coercion. The abolition of the State would likely encourage decentralization, corporate splits, and a reclaiming of power and property closer to the individual level where it belongs. It would be impossible to rectify centuries of injustice through “reparations”, which would require more state intervention into society. What is more important is that we employ the proper theory of property—self-ownership, homesteading, and voluntary exchange—so as to avoid future such injustices.

Where Do Rights Come From?

Libertarian theory rests largely on the concepts of natural law and natural rights. We live in a world in which real, fallible human beings think, speak, act, feel, enjoy, and suffer. Society is comprised of a multitude of separate, diverse, individual—but not isolated—human agents whose survival and well-being depend on their ability to cooperate peacefully with one another.

The libertarianism that is defended in this book falls under the “natural law” tradition: that every person has natural rights to life, liberty, and property and the

24 Ibid.


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ability to use these things in whatever manner an individual may choose so long as he does not violate the rights of others to do exercise their natural rights. Libertarian rights are “negative” in nature; they do not prescribe or demand any “positive” obligations on individuals other than to refrain from physically interfering with the freedoms of other individuals.

Unfortunately, natural law and natural rights are not as “natural” and inherent as the libertarian would like them to be: states and private actors have committed and will continue to commit gross violations of natural rights with little to no consequences. Unlike, say, the law of gravity, which has obvious and apparent consequences when attempting to violate it, there is no natural force field that automatically repels a thief, rapist, or IRS agent from violating your rights. This is why the argument for natural rights often relies on the metaphysical or supernatural—in the Christian tradition, God blesses each individual with inherent rights and dignity.

Murray Rothbard, however, argues that there is a long tradition of Western philosophical thought defending natural law and natural rights using strictly reason, not mysticism:

The believer in a rationally established natural law must, then, face the hostility of both camps: the one group sensing in this position an antagonism toward religion; and the other group suspecting that God and mysticism are being slipped in by the back door. To the first group, it must be said that they are reflecting an extreme Augustinian position which held that faith rather than reason was the only legitimate tool for investigating man's nature and man's proper ends. In short, in this fideist tradition, theology had completely displaced philosophy. The Thomist tradition, on the contrary, was precisely the opposite: vindicating the independence of philosophy from theology, and proclaiming the ability of man's reason to understand and arrive at the laws, physical and ethical, of the natural order, if belief in a systematic order of natural laws open to discovery by man's reason is per se anti-religious, then anti-religious also were St. Thomas and the later Scholastics, as well as the devout Protestant jurist Hugo Grotius. The statement that there is an order of natural law, in short, leaves open the problem of whether or not God has created that order; and the assertion of the viability of man's reason to discover the natural order leaves open the question of whether or not that reason was given to man by God. The assertion of an order of natural laws discoverable by reason is, by itself, neither pro- nor anti-religious.25

Natural law, then, highlights what is best for man by attempting to harmonize his ends with his nature. In the Thomistic tradition (named after the philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas), natural law is an ethical as well as physical law; and the instrument of discovery is man’s reason—not faith, intuition, grace,

25 Murray Rothbard, “Introduction to Natural Law,” January 12, 2007.

https://mises.org/library/introduction-natural-law

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or revelation. Understanding that individuals always act purposively, Aquinas argues that ends can be apprehended by reason as either objectively good or bad, or “right reason.” Using this “right reason,” we can then discover just ends, and how best to achieve those ends. Since reason requires us to be logically consistent, a “natural order” of means and ends requires us to accept a theory of rights that is universally applied and does not make arbitrary exceptions. We abstain from aggressing against others because we flourish by engaging the humanity of other individuals. Refraining from aggression is not the only way to engage their humanity, just as aggression is not the only way to deny their humanity, but it is the starting point of rights in a civilized society.26

If one is unpersuaded by a religious, metaphysical, or reasoned defense of natural rights, then libertarian scholar Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics offers a different, and perhaps even stronger, justification for natural rights. Rather than focus on action, Hoppe takes a step back and focuses on the nature of argumentation:

Any truth claim, the claim connected with any proposition that it is true, objective or valid (all terms used synonymously here), is and must be raised and settled in the course of an argumentation. Since it cannot be disputed that this is so (one cannot communicate and argue that one cannot communicate and argue), and since it must be assumed that everyone knows what it means to claim something to be true (one cannot deny this statement without claiming its negation to be true), this very fact has been aptly called “the a priori of communication and argumentation.”27

By its very nature, argumentation and discourse are a conflict-free way of interacting with another person, which requires individual control of scarce resources (brain, voice box, lungs, etc.).

Argumentation is a conflict-free way of interacting. Not in the sense that there is always agreement on the things said, but in the sense that as long as argumentation is in progress it is always possible to agree at least on the fact that there is disagreement about the validity of what has been said. And this is to say nothing else than that a mutual recognition of each person's exclusive control over his own body must be presupposed as long as there is argumentation (note again, that it is impossible to deny this and claim this denial to be true without implicitly having to admit its truth).28

Self-ownership and libertarian homesteading, which are the basis for our natural rights of life, liberty and property, are thus proved by Hoppe’s argumentation ethics using immutable factors of our existence and without

26 Ibid. 27 Stephan Kinsella, “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide,” May 27, 2011.

https://mises.org/library/argumentation-ethics-and-liberty-concise-guide. 28 Ibid.


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invoking God or the supernatural. By advocating for the initiation of force while using argumentation, one cannot help but contradict oneself.

Thus, libertarianism—whether justified through metaphysics, reason, or argumentation ethics—is the only political philosophy that offers non-contradictory, non-arbitrary, and logically consistent theories of rights and property.

As an extension of owning ourselves and possessing natural rights, we have the right to defend our bodies and our justly acquired property from all acts of initiated aggression. Self-defense is a fundamental natural right. Libertarians, then, defend the right of individuals to own and carry weapons in order to defend themselves, their family, or their justly acquired property from physical aggression. The irony behind “gun control,” of course, is that those who favor it are calling upon the state to use guns to enforce this prohibition or restriction. To deny someone their right to defend themselves is an egregious violation of natural rights.

A libertarian theory of rights rejects the concept of “positive rights.” In order for rights to be just, fair and apply to everyone equally, there can be no such thing as a “right” to a specific service, good, or product. Rights are obligations of non-aggression—not coercive mandates imposed by a central authority. If a claimed right conflicts with another individual’s right to self-ownership and property, it is invalid and illegitimate. No one has a “right” to an education or healthcare, for example, because this would require that someone else be forced to provide that service for you under the threat or application of state violence. These are services that individuals, using their rights of self-ownership and property, may provide to others for an exchange of resources (or as an act of charity), but they also have the right not to provide them as well.

In order to have liberty, individuals must have the right to associate, or not associate, with whomever they please. If one party does not consent to an exchange or an interaction, then he has every right not to participate and should never be forced to do so, no matter his reasons. As an extension of self-ownership and private property, free association is an essential component of a civilized, libertarian society.

This would mean a repeal of all “anti-discrimination” laws that force people to associate with those they would not freely choose to interact with. Free association allows individuals and property owners to set the rules. If both parties do not consent, then the exchange or interaction does not take place. Period.

The State

Once we understand libertarian ethics and the principles of private property, liberty, self-ownership, and free association, it becomes easier to see why libertarianism is so hostile to state power.

The state, by its very definition, is a criminal institution. The state is an organization that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of

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physical force within a given territory. A monopoly on violence is the defining attribute of the state. According to Albert Jay Nock, “the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime…it forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.”29

Murray Rothbard—expanding on Franz Oppenheimer's definition of the state as a predatory institution—argues that there are essentially two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth: the “economic” means of production and exchange in the free market, and the “political” means, which is the use of predation, force and violence:

The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory. For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State.30

The state is an institution maintained by the legal power to initiate force and to prohibit competitors from competing with its expropriation racket. It has exclusive possession and control within its geographical area of whatever functions it is able to effectively monopolize, and it maintains this control by force of its laws and its guns—both against other governments and against any private individuals who might object to its rule. To the extent that it controls any function, the state prohibits competition, permits it on a limited basis only, contracts out certain services, or creates legal entities (such as corporations or charters) that enable this institutionalized coercion to operate more efficiently.

The history of the state is one of war, conquest, violence and subjugation.

If you were to ask David Hume how the state originated he would say that ‘Almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been found originally in usurpation or conquest or both, without any pretense of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people. Charles Tilly, too, is not guilty of reticence on the matter, for the very title of his seminal 1985 article is ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.’ Anthony de Jasay writes that, as a matter of fact, the real life states that people actually endure have come into existence because their ancestors ‘were beaten into obedience by an invader, and sometimes due to Hobson’s choice’ had to take one king so as to escape the threat of getting another while Crispin Sartwell remarks

29 Albert Jay Nock, On Doing the Right Thing: And Other Essays (New York and London:

Harper & Brothers, 1928), 143. 30 Murray Rothbard, Anatomy of the State (Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2009), 15-16.


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that ‘Almost any realistic view of the origin of states will attribute their founding or at any rate their development and preservation, to the large-scale application of violence.’ The renowned attorney Clarence S. Darrow rejects as a fairy story for children the idea that states came into existence to discourage and punish the evil and the lawless and to protect the weak and helpless. On the contrary, he claims, history shows that ‘the state was born in aggression, and that in all the various stages through which it has passed its essential characteristics have been preserved.’ The action of the state ‘rests on violence and force; is sustained by soldiers, policemen, and the courts; and is contrary to the ideal peace and order that make for the happiness and progress of the human race [emphasis added].31

Occasionally, the state may throw its subjects some crumbs or attempt to provide a valued social service—but it does so only as a means to placate the people it loots, extorts, and coerces. The state, as Murray Rothbard explains, is not a “public service” agency:

The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the “private sector” and often winning in this competition of resources. With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, “we are the government.” The useful collective term “we” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves”; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred…

...If, then, the State is not “us,” if it is not “the human family” getting together to decide mutual problems, if it is not a lodge meeting or country club, what is it? Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions

31 Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State (London: Continuum, 2012), 16-

17.

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obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet. Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects. One would think that simple observation of all States through history and over the globe would be proof enough of this assertion; but the miasma of myth has lain so long over State activity that elaboration is necessary.32

The state acquires its revenue only through expropriation: either directly through taxation, or indirectly through monetary inflation or debt (which must eventually be paid for through taxation). Taken to its logical conclusion, a libertarian society would entail an absence of taxation since it represents either an involuntary exchange or a non-homesteaded acquisition of property. Just because one is promised some type of service or good in exchange for this violation of the NAP does not make taxation legitimate. Libertarianism opposes taxation on a moral basis since it requires the initiation of violence in order to implement.

As Robert Nozick argues, “taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.” When you are forced to pay in taxes a percentage of what you earn from laboring, you are in effect forced to labor for someone else because the fruits of part of your labor is taken from you at the threat of violence and used for someone else’s purposes. Nozick uses the analogy of a slave on a plantation to highlight this point. A slave has 100% of the fruits of his labor taken from him by force by the plantation owner, which is obviously unjust. The slave-master eventually “frees” the slave on the condition that he work only three days per week on the plantation. Eventually, he allows the former slave to work anywhere he wants in any occupation for any number of hours he chooses, but he must fork over three days’ pay to him at the end of the week. This, we would all agree, is also unjust. Well, Nozick reasons, at what percentage does this relationship not constitute forced labor and, therefore, some level of slavery?33

Besides, the taxes extracted from us by the state are not even used to fund services and programs (even if that were to somehow justify institutionalized theft). According to the 1984 Grace Commission Report, “100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the federal debt and by federal government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services [that] taxpayers expect from their government.”34 Government expenditures are funded by either inflating the money supply or by borrowing money. Our stolen labor is then used as collateral for this inflating and borrowing, allowing the state to

32 Rothbard, Anatomy of the State, 9-12. 33 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1975),

Chapter 7. 34 Truth in Taxation, “Where Do Your Taxes Go?”

http://www.truthintaxation.us/?tax_inform=whereTaxesGo


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continue to inflate and borrow, and the cycle continues. This is how the U.S. government has accumulated over 200 trillion dollars worth of unfunded liabilities.35 200 trillion dollars.

With this vast ability to legally expropriate, it is no wonder that political power exhibits similar addictive effects on the brain as cocaine.36

The making of the modern state and the making of war also go hand in hand—and lots of other people’s money is required for both.37 War brings regimentation and centralization, the dream of all great collectivist ideologies from the ancient Pharaohs to the Progressives of the early 20th century. Militarism and war are, and have always been, the greatest means of expanding government power.

War also serves as a way to permanently entrench the State into our daily lives in areas we once thought it would be unacceptable. Robert Higgs calls this the “the ratchet effect:”38 after a war, a state may reduce some spending and lengthen the leashes around their subject’s neck a bit, but the level of government power and spending never go back to their pre-war levels. State acts that citizens were only willing to tolerate during war now become standard during peacetime. Temporary “defense contractors” now become a military-industrial-complex. TSA molestation is now an entrenched part of flying. Self-purported “libertarian” Milton Friedman’s income-tax withholding proposal39—sold as a “temporary” wartime measure during World War II—has been the standard ever since.

Libertarianism doesn’t necessitate pacifism, however. Violence is justified only in self-defense against someone who has physically aggressed against you, is in the process of it, or has made credible threats to do so. On the defensibility of war from a libertarian perspective, Murray Rothbard argues:

The libertarian’s basic attitude toward war must then be: it is legitimate to use violence against criminals in defense of one’s rights of person and property; it is completely impermissible to violate the rights of other innocent people. War, then, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals. We may judge for

35 Joseph Lawler, “Economist Laurence Kotlikoff: U.S. $222 Trillion in Debt,” December

1, 2012. http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2012/12/01/economist_laurence_kotlikoff_us_222_trillion_in_debt_363.html

36 Ian Robertson, “Like baboons, our elected leaders are literally addicted to power,” The Telegraph, April 26, 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/9228257/Like-baboons-our-elected-leaders-are-literally-addicted-to-power.html

37 Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy, 20. 38 Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American

Government. This book is a must-read for understanding how governments uses crises, whether real or imagined, to expand their power.

39 Murray Rothbard, “Milton Friedman Unraveled.” http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard43.html

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ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion.40

Wars are also anti-market and bad for the economy. Or rather, they are bad for the poor and working class— who are forced to pay for the bills for this socialism—but good for the politically connected corporations.

Wars are not good for the economy, but they are good for some businesses: those that produce military equipment and weaponry, such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman; those that provide “infrastructure” in occupied territory, such as Halliburton and KBR; and those that provide “private” military services, such as Blackwater. These “merchants of death” are not “free-market” entities; without a government buying their goods and services to wage war, they would not exist as we know them. They are economic parasites, who take society’s resources but do not produce anything for civilian use in return. Libertarians have consistently echoed President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex”—a warning that Republican and Democrat politicians have almost universally ignored as the war profiteers successfully lobby them year after year.41

The libertarian alternative —a social order built on private property and free association—is met with many objections. But rather than ask, “who will build the roads?”—as if free people could not possibly find a way to build them peacefully42—there are some questions that the defenders of state power should have to answer: without the state, who would seize tiny houses from homeless people?43 Who will lock people up in cages for victimless crimes? Who will force the middle-class and the poor to subsidize the losses of giant corporations and create a nepotistic breeding ground for monopolies? Who will wage war and commit mass murder in foreign countries that could not possibly pose a threat to us? Who will shoot our dogs and SWAT our homes?44 Who will create a permanent underclass of poor and uneducated, buried in a debt slavery that will take 398,879,561 years to pay off?45 Who will arrest 90-year-old veterans for

40 Murray Rothbard, “War, Peace, and the State,” July 20, 2005.

https://mises.org/library/war-peace-and-state 41 Jacob H. Huebert, “Libertarianism Is Antiwar,” December 8, 2011.

http://original.antiwar.com/jacob-huebert/2011/12/07/libertarianism-is-antiwar/ 42 See: Walter, Block, The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic

Factors. 43 Brian Doherty, “Los Angeles Steals Homeless People’s Tiny Houses,” February 26,

2016. https://fee.org/articles/los-angeles-steals-homeless-peoples-tiny-houses/ 44 Bill Buppert, “Badged Serial Killers: The Growing Murder Culture of Cops (Part I),”

February 19, 2014. http://www.copblock.org/46992/badged-serial-killers-the-growing-murder-culture-of-cops-part-i-by-bill-buppert/

45 Tyler Durden, “It Will Take 398,879,561 Years To Pay Off The US Government's Debt,” October 22, 2014. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-22/it-will-take-398879561-years-pay-us-governments-debt


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feeding the homeless?46

Libertarian Class Theory

Almost everyone is familiar with the idea of “class struggle” popularized by Karl Marx. Marx claimed that there is an inherent conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; drawing on the “labor theory of value” from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx argued that only the proletariat create value in society while the owners of capital belong to the exploiting class. Profit and interest collected by these capitalists were extracted from worker’s just rewards—hence their exploitation. According to Marx, there is inherent exploitation regardless of whether a capitalist receives favors from the state.47

In the same way that progressives stole the word ‘liberal’ from libertarians, they also stole the theory of class struggle—as Marx freely admits. “[A]s far as I am concerned, the credit for having discovered the existence and the conflict of classes in modern society does not belong to me. Historians presented the historical development of this class struggle, and the economists showed its economic anatomy long before I did,” wrote Marx.48 He was referring to libertarians like Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and other early 19th century French writers. Marx stole what he liked from them and ignored or misread anything else that did not fit his narrative.49

The real class struggle, however, is between the producers and the predators, the voluntary market and the political class. As Ralph Raico argues:

In any given society, a sharp distinction may be drawn between those who live by plunder and those who live by production. The first are characterized in several ways by Comte and Dunoyer; they are “the idle,” “the devouring,” and “the hornets.” The second, are termed, among other things, “the industrious” and “the bees.” The attempt to live without producing is to live “as savages.” The producers are “the civilized men.”

Cultural evolution has been such that whole societies may be designated as primarily plundering and idle, or as productive and industrious. Industrialism is thus not only an analysis of social dynamics, but also a theory of historical development. Indeed, much of Industrialist theory is embedded in its account of historical evolution.

46 James Gordon, “90-Year-Old Vet Arrested For Feeding Homeless Will Hand Out

Christmas Eve Dinner,” November 4, 2014. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2821129/90-year-old-man-arrested-feeding-homeless-Fort-Lauderdale-new-law-introduced-bans-people-sharing-food-public.html

47 Sheldon Richman, “Class Struggle Rightly Conceived,” July 13, 2007. https://fee.org/articles/class-struggle-rightly-conceived/

48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.

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The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggles between the plundering and the producing classes.50

What Marx did not understand is that capitalists unsupported by state privilege were and still are part of the exploited class that is preyed upon by state power. Both capitalists and workers are not amorphous blobs with inherent interests and united ideas. We are all individuals with unique and diverse interests, beliefs, prejudices, and desires. Many early capitalists wanted state favors and state privileges, but many eschewed them as well. Some workers wanted state-protected unions, while others wanted to be free and independent. In a free society, the role of capitalist and worker are not fixed; we are all capitalists and we are all workers serving each other voluntarily in the market, and it is the state—the political class—that created these artificial distinctions through privilege and violence. Contrary to Marx, the class struggle that has existed for centuries is not the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie, rich versus poor; it is, rather, between those who create wealth and those who plunder it.51

One of Marx’s crucial errors was his reliance on the labor theory of value as the starting point for his analysis. If his theory of value is wrong, then Marxist class theory collapses before it can stand; and not only mislabels exploitation, but leaves the door open for massive amounts of actual exploitation—state violence—to enter into society. Marx’s labor theory of value—shared by even classical liberal economists Smith and Ricardo before him—states that that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of labor required to produce it. Thus, when a capitalist makes a profit, he is supposedly exploiting the laborer by stealing value from him.

The labor theory of value was refuted by the Austrian economist Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, who demonstrated that a capitalist’s profits are the interest arising from his advancement of wages to workers before the final product is sold. Bohm-Bawerk argued that not only is the capitalist’s profit not exploitation, it actually helps the employee. While the capitalist will have to wait until the final product is sold (if it is sold at all) on the market to receive his profit, the worker receives an immediate payment. The capitalist’s profit and the worker’s advance (wage) both serve to coordinate production over time.52

Carl Menger put the final nail in Marx’s coffin by discovering the subjective theory of value. Menger argued that the value of a good is not determined by any inherent property of the good, nor by the amount of labor necessary to produce the good, but by the importance an individual places on a good for the achievement of his desired ends.53 The capitalist-labor relationship is thus not exploitative—it is, 50 Ralph Raico, “Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Class,” June 14, 2006.

https://mises.org/library/classical-liberal-roots-marxist-doctrine-classes 51 Ibid. 52 Robert Murphy, “Bohm-Bawerk’s Critique of the Exploitation Theory of Interest,”

November 26, 2004. https://mises.org/library/ library/böhm-bawerk’s-critique-exploitation-theory-interest

53 Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (Ludwig Van Mises Institute, 2007), 120.


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according to Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a harmonious and mutually beneficial one (provided state violence is not entered into the equation):

What is wrong with Marx’s theory of exploitation, then, is that he does not understand the phenomena of time preference as a universal category of human action. That the laborer does not receive his “full worth” has nothing to do with exploitation but merely reflects the fact that it is impossible for man to exchange future goods against present ones except at a discount. Unlike the case of slave and slave master, where the latter benefits at the expense of the former, the relationship between the free laborer and the capitalist is a mutually beneficial one. The laborer enters the agreement because, given his time preference, he prefers a smaller amount of present goods over a larger future one; and the capitalist enters it because, given his time preference, he has a reverse preference order and ranks a larger future amount of goods more highly than a smaller present one. Their interests are not antagonistic but harmonious. Without the capitalist’s expectation of an interest return, the laborer would be worse off because he would have to wait longer than he wishes to wait; and without the laborer’s preference for present goods the capitalist would be worse off because he would have to resort to more roundabout and less efficient production methods than those he desires to adopt.54

How many employees would agree to work for a company who could only pay them after the final good was sold? An entrepreneur’s profit is a result of his lower time preference (future-oriented), and the laborer’s wage is the result of his higher time preference (present-oriented). The entrepreneur’s profit is also not guaranteed. The laborer will be paid weeks, months, or even years before the product is finally sold. Even if the entrepreneur’s low time preference proves to be unwise and he fails to make a profit, the laborer will still have received money in exchange for his labor the entire time he was employed.

If everyone has exclusive control over his own body and homesteaded property, then there can be no exploitation, continues Hoppe:

It is logically absurd to claim that a person who homesteads goods not previously homesteaded by anybody else, or who employs such goods in the production of future goods, or saves presently homesteaded or produced goods in order to increase the future supply of goods, could thereby exploit anybody. Nothing has been taken away from anybody in the process, and additional goods have actually been created. Exploitation takes places whenever any deviation from the homesteading principle occurs. Exploitation occurs whenever a person successfully claims partial or full control over scarce resources he has not homesteaded, saved, or produced, and which he has not acquired contractually from a previous producer-owner. Exploitation is the expropriation of homesteaders,

54 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis,” The Journal of

Libertarian Studies, Volume 9: Number 2 (1990), 82.

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producers, and savers by late-coming non-homesteaders, non-producers, non-savers, and non-contractors.55

Under Marx’s proposed solution of socialized production, where private property is abolished, “the development of productive forces would not reach new heights but would instead sink dramatically.”56 The accumulation of capital and wealth is brought about by individuals through homesteading, producing, exchanging, and saving with the expectation that this will lead to an increase in the output of future goods. If, in the model of collectivized production, an actor is no longer granted sole control over his accumulated wealth and capital and instead non-homesteaders, non-producers, non-exchangers and non-savers are granted full or partial control by the state, the value he places on the expected income is reduced. His time preference will rise, and there will be less homesteading of scarce resources, less saving, less exchange, less production and thus less wealth and prosperity for everyone.57

It is not a “perversion” or “misunderstanding” of Marxism that has led to the famines, shortages, starvation, gulags, and death squads in communist countries. Rather, it is the result of the direct implementation of Marx’s theories that have spread so much misery around the world.

The taxing power of the state, not the capitalist’s profit, is the cause of exploitation and injustice in society. This power creates two classes: the taxpayer and the tax-eater: those who create wealth and those who steal it. The producers of wealth have a natural desire to want to keep it and use it for their own purposes, and those who wish to expropriate it will always look for ways to do this without upsetting those who engage in peaceful exchange, homesteading, saving, and producing. This is where the modern democratic state has been so successful: socializing the expropriation among anyone and everyone and masking the exploitative nature of the state.58

Libertarianism seeks to undermine state power, and it starts by exposing flawed ideas—especially those, like Marxism, which have lead to so much misery, exploitation and expropriation—and substituting them with a social order built on liberty, self-ownership, free association, and private property.

55 Ibid., 83. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 83-84. 58 Richman, https://fee.org/articles/class-struggle-rightly-conceived/


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Chapter 2

Economics

A proper study of economics requires a priori reasoning; economic laws are prior to, and independent of, economic experience. All reasoning, in fact, has an a priori aspect; to deny this is to imply that “the mind is a sheet of white paper upon which the external world writes its own story.”59 In order for the mind to properly process events, it must have a set of tools for understanding or grasping reality. “Experience,” notes Ludwig von Mises, “provides only the raw material out of which the mind forms what is called knowledge.”60 In order for us to begin to process, analyze, and understand empirical data, our mind must first apply certain built-in conceptions —like the laws of logic—to these factors. Without these built-in conceptions, all of our sensations would be meaningless.61

Praxeology

Even the natural sciences must use a priori reasoning in order for empirical experience to be at all useful in discovering scientific laws. “Without [a priori reasoning], we would never have developed agriculture, because we would have no reason to infer from past seasonal cycles that similar seasonal cycles might occur in the future,” argues Dan Sanchez. “Without it, we would never even avoid contact with flame, because we would have no reason to infer from past contact the pain and damage we would incur from future contact.”62

Applying this a priori science to human action is called praxeology. Using this deductive process, we can conclude several truths about economics: why prices occur, the important role they play in sending correct signals and coordinating production, the roots of voluntary exchange, and the existence of scarcity (or, why there is no such thing as a “free” service).

In the same way that “the ancient Greeks pioneered using long chains of deductive inferences to discover geometric principles...by reasoning from the Pythagorean theorem…[and were] able to use deductive geometry to discover a great many geometric principles that would have been too subtle to find with empirical methods,”63 we can use deductive reasoning to discover elemental truths about human action.

59 Dan Sanchez, “Mises on Mind and Method,” April 21, 2011.

https://mises.org/library/mises-mind-and-method 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid.

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We start from the fact that all humans exist and act. From this axiom, we can conclude that action implies purposeful behavior; it is directed toward goals. A man’s decision to act implies that he has consciously chosen certain means to reach his goals. Since he wishes to attain these goals, they must be important to him, and thus he must have values that govern his choices. By acting, he reveals that he believes he has the technological knowledge that certain means will achieve his desired ends. Praxeology does not assume that a person's choice of values or goals are wise or proper, or that he has chosen the correct method of reaching his desired ends. All that we can conclude is that each individual actor adopts goals and believes, whether erroneously or correctly, that he can arrive at them by the employment of certain means.64

Only individuals can act. This is purely a methodological point—it does not mean, “that economists deny the existence of social collectives, or that economists think individuals always behave ‘atomistically.’ Of course, a person may act differently when he is in a mob; but, nonetheless, even ‘mob behavior’ is still the sum total of the behavior of each individual comprising the ‘mob.’”65

All action must take place through time and is directed toward the future attainment of an end. If all of a person's desires could be instantaneously fulfilled, there would be no reason for him to act at all. That a man acts implies that he believes his actions will make a difference; in other words, that he will prefer the results of action to those of inaction. Action, therefore, implies that man does not have omniscient knowledge of the future, and that we live in a world of an uncertain future.66

The concept of scarcity is also demonstrated through the logic of human action. The fact that people act implies that the means they choose to employ are scarce relative to their desired ends; if means were not scarce, then the ends would have already been achieved and there would be no need to act. Means are also rivalrous; in order for me to employ a hammer to start building my house, you cannot also use the hammer at the exact same time. The study of economics applies only to means that are scarce and rivalrous in the physical world. Additionally, notes Murray Rothbard:

Resources that are superabundant no longer function as means, because they are no longer objects of action. Thus, air is indispensable to life and hence to the attainment of goals; however, air being superabundant is not an object of action and therefore cannot be considered a means, but rather what Mises called a “general condition of human welfare…”

64 Murray Rothbard, “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics,” July 4, 2012.

https://mises.org/library/praxeology-methodology-austrian-economics 65 Robert P. Murphy, Study Guide to Man, Economy and State: A Treatise on Economic

Principles with Power and Market, Government and the Economy (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2006), 3.

66 Rothbard, “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics," https://mises.org/library/praxeology-methodology-austrian-economics


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…Where air is not superabundant, it may become an object of action, for example, where cool air is desired and warm air is transformed through air conditioning. Even with the absurdly unlikely advent of Eden (or what a few years ago was considered in some quarters to be an imminent “postscarcity” world), in which all desires could be fulfilled instantaneously, there would still be at least one scarce means: the individual's time, each unit of which if allocated to one purpose is necessarily not allocated to some other goal.67

Thus, starting from the simple observation that humans act, we can conclude that man employs purposeful action and scarce resources in order to achieve his desirable ends. When we combine these logical implications of human action with the libertarian concepts of self-ownership, scarcity and homesteaded property, we can then make some true claims about economics—as long as there is still no break in the chain of our deductive reasoning.

The means used to satisfy wants are called goods. Goods do not have “intrinsic value”; their value, contrary to what the Marxist and classical school of economics claim, is subjective, “deriv[ing] from the value that acting man places on” them.68 Value rankings cannot be mathematically or objectively quantified: they “are always ordinal, never cardinal. There is no unit of happiness or utility, and hence we can only say that a man preferred A to B; we can never say he preferred A ‘three times as much.’”69

Because individuals act “on the margin,” we derive the Law of Marginal Utility. People do not choose between food and clothes but rather between a unit of food and a unit of clothes. Therefore, “as an actor acquires more and more units of a good, he devotes them to successively less and less urgent ends (i.e., ends that are lower on his scale of values). Therefore the marginal utility of a good declines as its supply increases. This is the law of diminishing marginal utility.”70

Man acts purposefully and thus he is always engaged in the process of decision-making. At any given point, a conscious actor trades, or exchanges, one state of affairs for a different one. This is the driving force of all purposeful action. He enters into exchanges of owned goods with others because the goods he more urgently desires are more highly valued than those that he desires less urgently. The location of a good on an individual’s value scale relative to other goods is the value preference that he assigns to it. Value preferences are subject to change; his preferences may change tomorrow, but at the moment of the exchange, both parties value what the other has more than their own goods which they are exchanging. This is why free exchange is mutually beneficial: both parties “profit,

67 Ibid. 68 Murphy, Study Guide to Man, Economy and State, 4. 69 Ibid., 6. 70 Ibid.

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or perceive that they will, at the point of the exchange. Otherwise, they would not have engaged in the act.”71

Free, mutually beneficial exchange can only occur when the libertarian concepts of self-ownership and homesteaded property exist. An exchange that occurs when these principles are violated or non-existent is an unfree exchange—for example, when the state expropriates homesteaded property under the threat of violence in order to transfer it to someone else—and thus cannot be considered legitimate in a libertarian society.

Economics is a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive, science. It does not tell people how they ought to act or what public policies to favor, only that man acts with scarce means to achieve non-scarce ends, and that there are consequences when man is prevented (whether through private or state coercion) from freely acting. A praxeological study of economics tell us that “wealth can be brought into existence or increased in three and only three ways: by perceiving certain nature-given things as scarce and actively bringing them into one's possession before anyone else has done so (homesteading); by producing goods with the help of one's labor and such previously appropriated resources; or by acquiring a good through voluntary, contractual transfer from a previous appropriator or producer.”72 Wealth does not fall from a tree, nor does it come into existence by an act of state coercion. Wealth is only created through purposeful and peaceful human action.

The “free market,” then, is not a public policy proposal or a program that is implemented through state legislation, but rather a description of the condition when purposeful, voluntary human actors are fully allowed to use and exchange their private property peacefully with one another.

Prices, Profit, and Interest

Prices serve an invaluable role as a reflection of society’s voluntary preferences, while also helping to discourage goods, services and behavior society does not value. If an individual is benefiting society and creating value, he will experience profits, and if an individual is harming society or simply misrepresenting other individuals’ wants, needs, and desires, he will experience a loss. For example, if an entrepreneur takes $11,000 worth of resources—land, labor, materials, etc.—in order to produce a car and then sells it for $15,000, the only way he knows if he is creating value is if consumers voluntarily exchanges their money for the car. The consumer values the car more than the money, and the entrepreneur values the money more than the car. Because of his low time preference in taking the time to save and invest with the expectation that he will be

71 Rothbard, https://mises.org/library/praxeology-methodology-austrian-economics 72 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics

of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (Transaction Publishers, 2001), 121.


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rewarded in the long-term future, the entrepreneur’s $4,000 profit is his reward for creating specific value in society where previously it did not exist.73

If, on the other hand, the car manufacturer takes $11,000 worth of inputs and no customer values it at more than $8,000, he “has taken perfectly good resources—materials, labor, and overhead—and recombined them in such a manner that they are now worth only $8,000 to buyers. He has destroyed value in the world. Such an act deserves condemnation for impoverishing humanity. Had the businessman not come on the scene the world would have been richer by $3,000 in value.”74 These losses send a signal that the entrepreneur is not meeting the voluntary and subjective needs of society, and he is then punished in the process. Losses serve just as important a function as profits do: when there is outside interference in this profit-and-loss process—for example, if either one of them are socialized, subsidized, controlled, or regulated by the state—then this delicate coordination is distorted.

Interest is the price that arises out of our individual time preferences. Humans tend to prefer consumption of goods sooner rather than later. Thus, in order to receive a good in the future, there needs to be a premium attached to them. This premium reflects their time preference, or their discount of the future. Interest rates that arise on the market reflect these time preferences of individuals in society. This is how purposeful human action allocates capital towards investment and establishes the price of time.

For example, an individual might prefer two units of steak next year over one unit of steak this year. (Because of time preference, an individual will always prefer the same quantity of a given good earlier rather than later.) A different individual, however, might consider one unit of present steak to give more utility than two units of future steak. There is thus a potential gain from trade, with the first individual selling one unit of present steak in exchange for the other individual’s promise to deliver two units of steak next year. The pure rate of interest (i.e., exchange rate between present and future goods) will be established by the various individuals’ time preferences in the same way that any other price is established…

...The role of the capitalists is to provide an “advance” to factor owners in exchange for the future consumer goods that these factors help yield. Because present goods exchange for future goods at a premium, the capitalist who invests in a particular process ends up with more capital funds than he started with. This “excess” return is not due to the productivity of the inputs, but instead to the fact that present goods are subjectively preferred to future goods.75

73 Jim Cox, The Concise Guide to Economics (Savannah, Georgia: Savannah-Pikeville,

1997), 6. 74 Ibid. 75 Murphy, Study Guide to Man, Economy and State, 69.

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From the fact that man acts purposefully, employing scare resources to achieve desired ends, prices arise without any centralized direction. These prices serve as signals, demonstrating reality in an uncertain world of scarcity. Price controls—when the state coercively prevents prices from falling or rising—then, are “comparable to plugging a thermometer so that it never can read greater than 72 degrees even though the actual temperature may be higher.” Although the state may try to ignore the praxeological nature of prices and implement price controls, “the law of supply and demand cannot be repealed.”76

States often panic and implement price controls as a way of preventing prices from adjusting, erroneously supposing that fixed prices result in greater economic stability. However, since prices contain vital information about the fluctuating value of goods, price controls severely hamper the market mechanisms that convey this information to sellers and consumers. States panic most—and thus cause the most damage with their price controls—during crises such as national emergencies.

If one person (the seller) has plywood and is willing to part with it for $50.00, it is because he would prefer having the money to having the plywood. If another person (the buyer) has $50.00 and is willing to part with the money for the plywood, it is because he would prefer the plywood to the $50.00. No one is forced to engage in this transaction, individual freedom is preserved in this voluntary exchange, and it results in a mutual benefit. Can anything be less objectionable than a free exchange of goods which results in a mutual benefit?

Second, a successful effort to prevent price gouging would harm the very intended beneficiaries in our example. With thousands of needs, there is a vastly increased demand for plywood. At the same time, the storm has destroyed existing plywood (trapped under rubble, damaged or lost) and made it exceptionally difficult to transport additional supplies into the area. Preventing increased prices as a way of allocating the reduced supply with the increased demand would result in a more severe shortage, and plywood going to uses that are less than the most urgently needed ones. An example: If one could sell a sheet of plywood for a legal or socially stigmatized maximum of $8.00, he may well decide to keep it for some relatively trivial use rather than part with it for a use considered by the potential buyer to be of the most urgent importance. At $50.00 the choice is likely to be otherwise. Misery is thereby increased by the implementation of measures to prevent price gouging.

The point should also be made that the price of a good is determined by the actual conditions of supply and demand. The willingness and ability of buyers and sellers to trade is what establishes any particular price—before and after an emergency situation. In an emergency, the facts have obviously been changed. It is reactionary and a revolt against reality to

76 Cox, The Concise Guide to Economics, 19.


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demand a never-changing price forevermore in the ever-changing world we inhabit.77

Preventing prices from adjusting to reflect supply and demand also results in fewer entrepreneurs flooding into the affected area to help solve the problem. If the price of plywood increases from $8 to $50, then that is a signal to would-be entrepreneurs that there is a severe lack of supply relative to the demand. In a free market, any lack of supply translates to opportunity. Entrepreneurs rush in to fill the void, which in turn naturally lowers the price of the good (e.g. the plywood) because now the supply meets or exceeds the demand. Price controls, by hindering the important signals prices send, are as helpful as preventing a man lost in the woods from screaming or calling for help.

The most crippling price controls of them all come from central banks. When the Federal Reserve artificially lowers interest rates, it gives a (false) signal that there has been an increase in savings. This causes a ripple of errors and malinvestment every single time money is exchanged for a good or service. Only free exchanges in a market can create prices that reflect reality and our changing subjective values and preferences. Any state attempt to set fixed prices creates massive disruptions in the peaceful process of free exchange.

No matter how much economic demagoguery is peddled—the need to bailout certain industries, artificially raise wages through legislation, or demand “free” services, for example—no emotional appeal can shield oneself from the consequences of economic law. Prices, profits and losses are not morally “good” or “bad”; they are simply a result of our purposeful behavior as human actors.

Money and Banking

Sound money, combined with the proper understanding of self-ownership and property, are the building blocks of a free market.

Money arose spontaneously in society out of need to overcome to the problems of barter, not from government decree.

In a barter economy, if a baker wants an apple, he will trade with the grocer by offering the grocer a loaf of bread. They both agree on how many apples each loaf is worth and make an exchange. But what if, say, an economics professor wants to get a haircut? He needs to find a barber willing to trade him a haircut in return for an economics lesson which might be hard, if not impossible, to do. This problem in the barter economy is known as the double coincidence of wants: in order for a barter exchange to occur, both parties have to want exactly what the other is willing to trade, a rare double coincidence. This greatly reduces the ease with which people can trade and thus undermines the specialization of labor. The difference in how readily certain goods are accepted in trade—in the above

77 Ibid., 15-16.

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examples, the bread is easier to trade than an economic lesson—is referred to as their saleability (marketability, liquidity).78

In order for these actors to better satisfy their needs and improve their situations through exchange, they develop highly saleable goods that are used to facilitate trade and not for personal consumption. These saleable goods become the medium of exchange for indirect barter.

An effective medium of exchange needs to be highly saleable, portable, durable, and divisible. “It is clear that in every society the most marketable goods will be gradually selected as the media for exchange,” notes Murray Rothbard. “As they are more and more selected as media, the demand for them increases because of this use, and so they become even more marketable. The result is a reinforcing spiral: more marketability causes wider use as a medium, which causes more marketability, etc. Eventually, one or two commodities are used as general media—in almost all exchanges—and these are called money.”79

Historically, this process has resulted in many different types of goods being used as money: tobacco, sugar, salt, copper, beads, tea, and shells. Throughout the centuries, however,

Two commodities, gold and silver, have emerged as money in the free competition of the market, and have displaced the other commodities. Both are uniquely marketable, are in great demand as ornaments, and excel in the other necessary qualities. In recent times, silver, being relatively more abundant than gold, has been found more useful for smaller exchanges, while gold is more useful for larger transactions. At any rate, the important thing is that whatever the reason, the free market has found gold and silver to be the most efficient moneys.

This process—the cumulative development of a medium of exchange on the free market—is the only way money can become established. Money cannot originate in any other way, neither by everyone suddenly deciding to create money out of useless material, nor by government calling bits of paper “money.” For embedded in the demand for money is knowledge of the money-prices of the immediate past; in contrast to directly-used consumers’ or producers’ goods, money must have preexisting prices on which to ground a demand. But the only way this can happen is by beginning with a useful commodity under barter, and then adding demand for a medium for exchange to the previous demand for direct use (e.g. for ornaments, in the case of gold). Thus, government is powerless to create money for the economy; it can only be developed by the processes of the free market.80

78 Austrian Economics Explained, “Interest,” March 19, 2008.

http://austrianeco.blogspot.com/2008/03/interest.html 79 Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? (Ludwig Von Mises

Institute, 1990), 7-8. 80 Ibid., 8-9.


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Money, in other words, cannot be created by the state. As an agency of violence, the state does not have the voluntary exchange feedback mechanism that the market does; thus, any state “creation” of money is inherently arbitrary. Money is merely the representation of the subjective value of prices that were previously determined through barter. As such, money can be created only through human action in the market.

The emergence of money was a great boon to civilization. Money allows individuals to specialize and expand the division of labor, it solves the problems of direct barter exchange, and allows for a “structure of production” to be formed—with land, labor, and capital cooperating in order to advance production and receive payment at each stage. Exchanges being made in money allow people to compare goods with other goods and find a common denominator for all prices. Money also helps a society form a more advanced economy because “businessmen can now judge how well they are satisfying consumer demands by seeing how the selling-prices of their products compare with the prices they have to pay for [the cost of production]...Since all these prices are expressed in terms of money, the businessmen can determine whether they are making profits or losses. Such calculations guide businessmen, laborers, and landowners in their search for monetary income on the market. Only such calculations can allocate resources to their most productive uses—to those uses that will most satisfy the demands of consumers.”81

With commodity money, paper substitutes can replace physical gold or silver as it becomes impractical to carry around so many coins. The key point to remember, however, is that these certificates are a physical claim on gold or silver and are redeemable, at any point, by the holder of the physical bullion. In a free market, warehouses function as depositories, much like how any storage facility works today. The owner deposits his gold or silver, pays a storage fee, purchases insurance if desired, and receives a receipt certifying the deposit that he can then use to exchange in trades or save for future redeeming.

Individuals can then simply trade receipts as if trading actual gold or silver. These paper receipts, or bank notes, help eliminate transaction costs. In order to avoid counterfeiting, well-known and trusted warehouses issue hard to counterfeit notes. Since these warehouses issue receipts that are immediately redeemable, they must keep all of the gold or silver on hand at all times; to do otherwise would be theft or fraud. They are not the owners of money, only the caretakers of other people’s money.82

Before delving into the topic of banking, it is important to understand the essence of savings and lending. Money is not wealth; real wealth consists of tangible physical goods, like your house, your furniture, or your car. Money, as the medium of exchange, is a claim on real wealth. Therefore, the act of saving is the

81 Ibid., 10-11. 82 Austrian Economics Explained, “Money,” September 5, 2007.

http://austrianeco.blogspot.com/2007/09/introduction-to-money.html

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expression of an individual’s preference to relinquish his claim on wealth today for wealth at a future date. This is true of lending as well. If James borrows $1,000 today to purchase goods and services, he repays the money, but is actually repaying what the money can purchase. He borrows real wealth, and returns real wealth. Therefore, lending implies a transfer of real wealth from lender to borrower, with the money used as the medium for this transfer of wealth.83

With gold or silver backed money stored in warehouses or banks and receipts issued to the holders, there exists a “100-percent reserve” banking system; all paper receipts issues are redeemable for their value in gold or silver immediately. As Rothbard notes, “almost all warehouses keep all the goods for their owners (100 percent reserve) as a matter of course—in fact, it would be considered fraud or theft to do otherwise. Their profits are earned from service charges to their customers. The banks can charge for their services in the same way. If it is objected that customers will not pay the high service charges, this means that the banks’ services are not in very great demand, and the use of their services will fall to the levels that consumers find worthwhile.”84

The current practice, however, of “fractional reserve banking” is a distortion on the natural evolution of money. This is a process where the state establishes an arbitrary, non-market reserve ratio, which is the fraction of deposits that must be held at the bank. Thus, if the reserve ratio is 0.1, then 10% of all deposits must be held at the bank and 90% are free to be lent out (which is generally the rule today). This has the net effect of allowing nine times the deposited amount to be lent out. Here is how this process works:

Jones deposits $1,000 at bank A. With a 0.1 reserve ratio, bank A can lend out $900 of that deposit and keep $100 on hand as reserves. Let us say they lend out $900 and it makes its way to Smith—either he borrowed it, or the real borrower used it to pay him. Smith now has $900 that he deposits at another bank, B. Bank B, in turn, keeps $90 as reserve (10% of $900) and lends out $810 to someone else. This $810 is spent and deposited at bank C, which keeps $81 as reserves and lends out $729 to someone else.85

As this process of depositing, holding 10 percent reserves, and lending continues, this creates an untold amount of distortions that ripple through the entire economy, confusing price signals by incorrectly correlating the amount of money to the actual wealth that exists in society. Through this fractional-reserve system, money is created out of thin air. This a system based on fraud; it can exist only through the backstop of violent state power. The only way to produce wealth is delaying consumption (saving), free exchange, or homesteading. Since these require difficulty, labor, and a low time preference, the state and politically

83 Ibid. 84 Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? 40. 85 Austrian Economics Explained, “Money,” September 5, 2007.

http://austrianeco.blogspot.com/2007/09/introduction-to-money.html


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connected industries seek to bypass this process by artificially inflating the money supply.

Fractional reserve banking benefits bankers and debt-holders. For governments, as large debt holders interested in more money without directly taxing their subjects, this system is a dream. It is no coincidence that the income tax was implemented in the same year as the fractional-reserve system. The state uses our productive labor as collateral for the costs of this monetary inflation, and both of these inflict tremendous harm on economic coordination, exchange, and the creation of real capital through savings.

Without the state, fractional reserve banking would be nearly impossible. Under a system of sound money with 100% reserves, banks are checked by the profit and loss regulation of the market, the threat of bank runs, and the ability of customers to withdraw money and take it to a competitor if they know or sense fraudulent activity.86

Another benefit of commodity money (backed by a scarce asset like gold or silver) is a long-term increase in purchasing power, which correlates with a rise in wages and improved overall standards of living. Subject to the laws of supply and demand like any commodity, gold and silver money tend to experience a relatively small and stable increase as the demand for money increases. Commodity money, unlike state-issued money, cannot be printed limitlessly. In order to increase the amount of money in circulation, labor and capital (e.g. mining and minting gold or silver) are required—not the state’s printing press. This market production of money keeps a check on how much of it there is in the economy; money, like prices, is subject to the laws of supply and demand. Because of this, goods become cheaper relative to the price of money. Even if a worker never receives a pay increase for the rest of his life, the value of his money increases as the prices of goods steadily fall.

This, of course, is the exact opposite of what occurs with fiat, government money. For example, in 1964, before President Nixon officially cut all commodity ties to the U.S. dollar, the minimum wage was around $1.25, or 1.25 ounces of silver. In 2016, the minimum wage is around $7.25. Those same 1.25 ounces of silver, however, are now worth almost $20. Silver is not all-of-a-sudden more valuable; the dollar is simply weakened through the process of inflation. If we are concerned about inequality, perhaps we should be less worried about raising the minimum wage and more focused on reinstating the principles of sound money.

Even though inequality is a natural feature of all societies, whether it is libertarian, socialist, or primitive, commodity money tends to prevent the creation of the permanent, oligarchical ruling classes typically seen in countries with fractional-reserve banking, large governments, and entrenched bureaucracies. A well-developed libertarian society with commodity money tends to have a large middle class, a small lower class, and a revolving upper class. The low-income class is small because there are no legal barriers to opening new businesses, but 86 Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? 44-48.

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there are incentives to earn, save, and be entrepreneurial. The upper class is “revolving” because there are no monopoly privileges or bailouts.

“Economic inequality declined in the US from 1917 to the early 1970s when Nixon took America off of the gold standard...Economic inequality increased during the inflationary 1920s, but the lower income classes rapidly improved versus the [wealthiest] 1 percent when the gold standard was restored after World War II,” explains Mark Thorton. “[There was] both marginal improvement and stability in economic inequality from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. The trend has been for greater economic inequality ever since...Part of the answer to the problem of economic inequality is to return to an honest and sound monetary system including—but not limited to—the gold standard.”87

Inflation and The Business Cycle

State-regulated money and fractional reserve banking creates inflation. Inflation is not a rise in prices; it is an artificial increase in the money supply without the real wealth that money represents also expanding. Price increases are only a symptom of inflation. Inflation has a number of negative consequences:

Inflation...redistributes the wealth in favor of the first-comers and at the expense of the laggards in the race. And inflation is, in effect, a race—to see who can get the new money earliest. The latecomers—the ones stuck with the loss—are often called the “fixed income groups.” Ministers, teachers, people on salaries, lag notoriously behind other groups in acquiring the new money. Particular sufferers will be those depending on fixed money contracts—contracts made in the days before the inflationary rise in prices. Life insurance beneficiaries and annuitants, retired persons living off pensions, landlords with long term leases, bondholders and other creditors, those holding cash, all will bear the brunt of the inflation. They will be the ones who are “taxed.”

Inflation has other disastrous effects. It distorts that keystone of our economy: business calculation. Since prices do not all change uniformly and at the same speed, it becomes very difficult for business to separate the lasting from the transitional, and gauge truly the demands of consumers or the cost of their operations. For example, accounting practice enters the “cost” of an asset at the amount the business has paid for it. But if inflation intervenes, the cost of replacing the asset when it wears out will be far greater than that recorded on the books. As a result, business accounting will seriously overstate their profits during inflation—and may even consume capital while presumably increasing their investments. Similarly, stockholders and real estate holders will acquire capital gains during an inflation that are not really “gains” at all.

87 Mark Thornton, “Gold and Economic Inequality,” June 16, 2015.

https://mises.org/library/gold-and-economic-inequality


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But they may spend part of these gains without realizing that they are thereby consuming their original capital.88

Inflation rewards inefficient firms and punishes efficient firms by creating illusory profits and distorting economic calculation. People become susceptible to “get-rich-quick” schemes in an era of ever-rising prices and will tend to shy away from activities with lower time preferences. Because your money is generally worth less in the future, there is an incentive to spend quickly and shy away from savings and actual capital accumulation, which fuels consumerism and encourages debt. Prices rise, especially for staple and essential goods, and demagogues rush in to blame the free market and greedy capitalists. Largely ignorant or unaware of how inflation occurs, people call for the state to intervene to fix a problem that the state itself, and only it, creates in the first place, leading to price controls and further restrictions. The free market gets blamed again, and more and more controls are implemented.89

If the inflation process is unchecked, it can lead to hyperinflation. The supply of money skyrockets, the demand plummets, and prices rise astronomically. Production falls sharply, as people spend more and more of their time finding ways to get rid of their money. The monetary system breaks down completely, and people search for other money—real money, such as gold and silver. In the early 1920s, hyperinflation in Germany pushed Germans to fill wheelbarrows with worthless paper ‘money’ and use it to light their stoves. In Zimbabwe, hyperinflation hit so hard that their central bank began issuing $100 trillion notes.

In 2008, the U.S. economy crashed and experienced the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. According to mainstream opinion, this was a result of de-regulation, greed, and capitalism: Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, noted free market ideologues, had slashed government to the bone and let corporations run roughshod all over the country.

This is an exaggeration, of course, but it is not an entirely inaccurate description of the story mainstream economists paint after a crash or bust. Libertarian economics, however, has a slightly different explanation for why the economy crashed in 2008, and why modern economies experience boom-and-bust cycles in general.

The role of inflation in depressions, as Rothbard explains, works as follows:

New money is issued by the banking system, under the aegis of government, and loaned to business. To businessmen, the new funds seem to be genuine investments, but these funds do not, like free-market investments, arise from voluntary savings. The new money is invested by businessmen in various projects, and paid out to workers and other factors as higher wages and prices...Liquidation of the wasteful investments of

88 Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? 53-54. 89 Ibid.

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the inflationary boom constitutes the depression phase of the business cycle.90

In other words, the wrong signals are sent throughout the entire economy. Credit inflation distorts the market relationship of savings and interest rates by making it appear that more wealth exists for current production than is actually sustainable, creating an artificial boom. Since this is in fact an illusion, the endeavors of entrepreneurs to create a structure of production not reflecting actual consumer time preferences must end in failure, i.e. a bust.

In a free market, interest rates can come down only if the public saves more. But under a fractional reserve system, the central bank (the Federal Reserve) forces them down. Businesses respond to the lower rates by borrowing to finance new projects, which would not have been profitable at the higher interest rates that had previously existed. These projects tend to be clustered in what are called the higher-order stages of production which are generally far removed from finished consumer goods: for example, mining, raw materials, construction, housing, and capital equipment. The more time-consuming the project is, the more sensitive it is to changing interest rates.

If the low interest rates are caused by increased savings by the public, then the economy functions smoothly. The public’s delayed consumption creates the capital needed for long-term investment projects. When the free market is allowed to set interest rates, they coordinate production across time and encourage businesses to embark on long-term projects only when the public has made available the necessary savings to finance them. Prices, again, are not arbitrary, but exist as vital signals.

If low interest rates are created artificially, as when the Fed pushes them down by fiat, a huge problem arises: additional resources and wealth do not just suddenly appear simply because the Fed has forced down interest rates. The public has not saved the necessary resources that are required to complete all of these new projects. With a large increase in the number of market actors using freshly borrowed money to buy an unchanged supply of factors of production, the prices of these factors begin to rise. It soon becomes clear that the factors of production actually do not exist in sufficient abundance to make all of these projects profitable, and the bust sets in.

What is important, but often forgotten, is that the key problem is not the bust—a crash is the market’s way of trying to adjust prices, liquidate debt and bad investments, and restructure itself. The problem is caused by the boom, where credit and monetary inflation create an artificial bubble. Real capital investment and savings is hard work, requiring the discipline to develop low time preferences and delay consumption. The state—which generally exhibits, especially in its democratic form, a high time preference—pushes interest rates down without the necessary savings. But there are consequences to breaking economic laws, and the bust sets in. 90 Ibid., 55-56.


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There are many who blame factors such as changes in regulation, greed, or speculation for the boom-and-bust cycles; but this is like arguing that gravity is what caused a plane to crash. This cannot account for why there are a “cluster of errors” during a bust. Since inflation affects the price of the currency, credit, and interest rates, it distorts every aspect of the economy that relies on these inputs, which is almost every single economic transaction. No amount of government regulation or controls can tame the chaos of incorrect price signals that inflation produces.

Without a proper understanding of how inflation creates these boom-and-bust cycles, and by focusing on the bust rather than the boom as the source of the problem, it is impossible to properly diagnose the problem and fix it—a doctor treating a sick patient for the wrong disease is likely to make the patient even worse.

Before proposing solutions, the cause of these cycles must be stopped. So long as inflation and state control of interest rates exist, there will continue to be booms and busts and there will be no real economic recovery—only bubbles after more bubbles. Despite the fact that the free market gets blamed for all of our economic woes, the solution proposed by libertarians involve doing the exact opposite of what has been done since 2008.

If, say, Ron Paul had been elected president in 2008 and had the power to do so, he would have immediately stopped the bleeding by shutting the doors on the Federal Reserve and allowed interest rates to be set by the market, not the state. Since the bust is a signal that there needs to be massive readjustment, the worst thing that could have been done was what the U.S. government did: bailout banks, buy up debt that should have been liquidated, and socialize the losses of those who made risky and dangerous investments. If a President Paul had abolished the Federal Reserve and let the necessary liquidation occur, the recession would have been over in two years and real, sustainable economic growth could occur.

Instead, we have had nothing but bailouts, even lower interest rates, quantitative easing, and more bubbles.

There is precedent for this libertarian solution as well. In 1920, after years of horrific war in Europe, the inflation introduced to fund World War I led to a predictable bust. In terms of unemployment and decreased economic output, the crash of 1920-1921 was actually worse than the crash of 1929 that led to the Great Depression. President Warren G. Harding, one of those “bad” presidents we are supposed to ignore—he didn’t commit mass murder or loot the public like all of the great ones—raised interest rates, cut taxes, reduced the public debt, and balanced the federal budget.

Eighteen months later, the depression was over. In 1922, the unemployment rate fell from 15.6 percent to 9 percent (on its way to 3.2 percent in 1923), while

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constant-dollar output leapt by 16 percent.91 Although this happened almost a century ago, the similarities between this crash and 2007-2008 are eerily similar.92 And, adds Jim Grant, “Harding convened a world disarmament conference and overhauled the creaky machinery of federal budget-making. For his trouble, historians customarily place him last, or next to last, in their rankings of U.S. presidents.”93 FDR carpet-bombed civilian cities and prolonged the Depression94 so, naturally, he is ranked near the top.

Economics is a rigorous discipline of which nearly everyone, regardless of their knowledge on the subject, has an opinion. If you ask a layman about physics, biology, or chemistry, he will probably not have much to say. This is entirely reasonable; if he is not a specialist on the subject, he will likely have done little to no research. When the subject of economics comes up, however, virtually everyone has a strong, and often emotional, opinion regardless of how much or little they have studied the discipline.

Why is this the case? As Henry Hazlitt argues, “economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident.”95 The first reason, according to Hazlitt, is a conflict of interest:

The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine—the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.96

The second reason is the problem of the “seen and the unseen.”

91 James Grant, “Warren Harding, curing a depression through austerity,” January 20, 2012.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/warren-harding-curing-a-depression-through-austerity/2012/01/19/gIQA5VEsEQ_story.html

92 Joseph Calandro, Jr., “James Grant Explains ‘The Forgotten Depression,’” December 15, 2014. https://mises.org/library/james-grant-explains-forgotten-depression

93 James Grant, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/warren-harding-curing-a-depression-through-austerity/2012/01/19/gIQA5VEsEQ_story.html

94 Robert Higgs, “How FDR Made the Depression Worse,” February 1, 1995. https://mises.org/library/how-fdr-made-depression-worse

95 Henry Hazlitt, Chapter 1 from “Economics in One Lesson.” http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap01p1.html

96 Ibid.


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This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but also on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

In this lies the whole difference between good economics and bad. The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.97

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science,’” warns Murray Rothbard. “But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”98

What is more important than spending decades studying economics is to understand praxeological principles and why economics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, science. If an “economist” is telling you what the state, through violence, should be doing to “fix” the economy, this should raise immediate red flags. Combining basic economic principles—rooted in how we live, breathe, and act to improve our lives—with the libertarian ethics of self-ownership and private property, we can then understand the moral foundation of the free market.

97 Ibid. 98 Matthew McCaffrey, “Rothbard on Economic Ignorance,” October 13, 2015.

https://mises.org/blog/rothbard-economic-ignorance

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Chapter 3

Spontaneous Order and the Free Market

The free market “is simply the economic form of the libertarian ethic.”99 It describes the social and economic relationships people enjoy as a result of the praxeological implications of human action: individuals organizing and cooperating in ways that respect, and indeed originate from, their natural rights of self-ownership and homesteaded property. A free market requires only that individual rights are respected and no initiatory compulsion or coercion is present.

The Socialist Calculation Problem

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises published his classic essay, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” arguing that state socialism and centralized economic planning are impossible. Since the state lacks the price system of the market, Mises predicted—70 years before the fall of communist Soviet Union—that central planning would end in chaos. Mises’s revolutionary insight into the practical impossibility of a society functioning without prices—and the praxeological reasons prices occur—remains one of the strongest arguments against socialism and in favor of a free market.

Monetary calculation is an indispensable tool for making rational decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends in order to best meet the needs and demands of society. For example, if a railroad company wants to build a new line, should they use steel or titanium rails? Either project could technically be completed, but only a working price mechanism conveys that, at the margin, titanium is more expensive than steel and titanium should then be saved for more urgently desired investment projects. Socialism, which collectivizes ownership, severely hampers or destroys the markets in which goods are traded by eliminating prices, making rational economic calculation impossible. With no markets for the factors of production, there can be no prices for the factors of production; and with no prices for the factors of production, it is impossible to calculate which lines of production are profitable. With no information regarding profitability, nobody could properly determine what goods to produce or how to produce them. Without the signals of prices in a market, people are blind to the subjective needs and values of others and are unable to properly meet their demands.100

99 Karl Hess, “The Death of Politics,” October 16, 2009. https://mises.org/library/death-

politics 100 Alex Salter, “Economics and the Calculation Problem,” October 29, 2012.

http://fee.org/articles/economics-and-the-calculation-problem/


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This incentive and coordination problem was generally understood by proponents of Marxism and socialism; as Murray Rothbard explains, if “everyone was supposed to produce ‘according to his ability’ but receive ‘according to his needs,’ then, to sum it up in the famous question: Who, under socialism, will take out the garbage?”101 The traditional socialist answer was that human nature would be transformed and purged of its selfishness to create a New Socialist Man. This New Man would work as hard and as eagerly as possible to achieve the goals and obey the orders of the socialist state (unlike we utopian libertarians, see, socialists are grounded in reality).

This is why an economy cannot be successfully centrally planned. In even the more mild forms of socialistic central planning, the lack of market prices causes shortages and increased poverty. At its worst, centrally planned economies result in famines, forced labor camps, and gulags. Eventually, authorities resort to the only tool they have—brute force—in efforts to create the Socialist Man—a truly futile attempt to achieve the order that only markets, prices, and voluntary cooperation can produce. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues, this disorder is not a bug, but rather a feature, of any attempt to coordinate production without prices:

As long as the defining characteristic—the essence—of socialism, i.e., the absence of the private ownership of factors of production, remains in place, no reform will be of any help. The idea of a socialist economy is a contradiction in terms, and the claim that socialism represents a 'higher,' more efficient mode of social production is absurd. In order to reach one's own ends efficiently and without waste within the framework of an exchange economy based on division of labor, it is necessary that one engage in monetary calculation (cost-accounting). Everywhere outside the system of a primitive self-sufficient single household economy, monetary calculation is the sole tool of rational and efficient action. Only by comparing inputs and outputs arithmetically in terms of a common medium of exchange (money) can a person determine whether his actions are successful or not. In distinct contrast, socialism means to have no economy, no economizing, at all, because under these conditions monetary calculation and cost-accounting is impossible by definition. If no private property in factors of production exists, then no prices for any production factor exists, hence, it is impossible to determine whether or not they are employed economically. Accordingly, socialism is not a higher mode of production but rather economic chaos and regression to primitivism.102

Staggering from Mises’s punches, state socialists eventually conceded his point about the importance of prices and revised their doctrines. Yes, prices are

101 Murray Rothbard, “The End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited,”

December 8, 2006. https://mises.org/library/end-socialism-and-calculation-debate-revisited

102 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (Transaction Publishers, 2001), 245.

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necessary, but if there is powerful enough scientific computing and planning, bureaucrats could then use a system of equations to incorporate prices into producer goods. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, picking up where Mises left off, dismantled these new arguments by showing that even this adapted form of non-market pricing will not work because it fails to understand the praxeological nature of prices. The knowledge that is used to motivate people’s actions can never properly be quantified or articulated because it does not exist before individuals are encountered with often-unanticipated alternatives.103

In other words, to reiterate the Austrian insight, value is always subjective and can never be objectively quantified. The only information we can gather from an economic transaction is that both parties perceived value at the exact moment of the exchange. Rational prices can only be acquired through the praxeological process of voluntary market exchange. Without this, they will be arbitrary, unreflective of society’s subjective preferences, and will not properly coordinate production.

Any attempts by states to centrally plan an economy also suffer from the “knowledge problem.” In a free market, millions of individuals use their distributed information to express their preferences; prices then reflect these decentralized preferences that no central authority can duplicate. Economic knowledge and information can only emerge “when private property owners are at liberty to exchange goods and services against money according to their individual value judgments and price appraisals...In their consumer roles, all people make monetary bids for the existing stocks of final goods according to their subjective valuations, leading to the emergence of objective monetary exchange ratios which relate the values of all consumer goods to one another.”104

Prices are the result of a “discovery process” of trial-and-error, enabling us to learn things we could never have learned otherwise. Profits signal that an entrepreneur is using prices in a socially beneficial way—adding value to society—while losses indicate that value has been destroyed, which forces producers to relocate assets to different entrepreneurs who will set prices according to market demand and thus better satisfy customers. Market prices, as long as there is no state intervention, allow customers, not entrepreneurs, to determine who controls the means of production.105

Even if we assume, however, that the calculation-knowledge issue was not a problem, non-market means of organizing economic production still fails. Public Choice Theory suggests that politicians and bureaucrats, just like the rest of us, see the world through the prism of personal interest even if they have the intention of serving as “public servants.” They are pursuing careers, and have an incentive to keep their job, advance up the ladder, and gain more power and influence. They 103 Sheldon Richman, “From State to Society,” October 1, 2012. http://www.cato-

unbound.org/2012/10/01/sheldon-richman/state-society 104 Joseph T. Salerno, “Why a Socialist Economy is ‘Impossible.’”

https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth/html/c/25 105 Richman, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/10/01/sheldon-richman/state-society


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cannot, by definition, serve the public because their revenue is acquired by force. In the market, people offer services to potential customers who are free to say no, but a bureaucracy does not give the public this option. It does not matter how altruistic or moral the individuals in a state apparatus may be; any institution that can compel support lacks the feedback that consumers are constantly providing to entrepreneurs in the market.106

Public Choice Theory thus elaborates upon Murray Rothbard’s Iron Law of Oligarchy: in every organization, a few (generally the most able and/or the most interested) will end up as leaders, with the rest filling the ranks of the followers. States have an inherent tendency to serve and protect the interests of a well-connected elite because government programs tend to concentrate their benefits on well-organized interest groups while dispersing the costs of these programs, through taxation, on the general population. The costs of, say, subsidies to the ethanol industry to any particular individual is relatively small, but the benefits to ethanol producers is tremendous. This system lends itself towards interventions that socialize the risks and costs of special interest groups while privatizing the benefits. The free market, however, creates a system where costs are privatized and benefits are privatized and socialized.107

Spontaneous Order

In Leonard Read’s classic essay, “I, Pencil,” Read explains how an ordinary wooden pencil is made. It is a long, complicated process, from the harvesting of wood for the body to the mixing of clay for the eraser. No man on earth can make a pencil by himself, Read explains, because the pencil is the end product of a complex chain of human activity guided by prices and voluntary exchanges in the market. Not even the pencil company itself possesses all of the knowledge necessary to make a pencil. They rely on loggers, truckers, miners, and factory workers; and these workers in turn rely on those who manufacture saws, trucks, equipment, and machines. All of these individuals contribute to the production of an ordinary pencil, and they do so in pursuit of their own interests without a grand design or overarching plan to produce anything specific. Their voluntary cooperation at so many stages of production makes the pencil possible.108

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design,” argues Friedrich Hayek. “To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet

106 Ibid. 107 Murray Rothbard, “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/were-not-equal/ 108 Leonard Reed, “I, Pencil.” http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

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that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.”109

In other words, society develops from a “spontaneous order;” the result of human action but not of human design. Society is too complex to be created piece by piece in a strictly rational, logical manner; instead, order relies on millions of individual actors, acting peacefully in the market, constantly tinkering and adjusting information that no one on their own could possibly know without millions of other individual inputs. This concept does not just apply to economics either. Language, the structure of crystals, game theory, and biological evolution are also examples of bottom-up order being created without a central planner.110

The market order “serves our ends not merely, as all order does, by guiding us in our actions and by bringing about a certain correspondence between the expectations of the different persons, but also...by increasing the prospects or chances of everyone of a greater command over the various goods (i.e., commodities and services) than we are able to secure in any other way.”111 Social order and regulation come not from control and state violence, but from the absence of it. Politics foists a one-size-fits-all on the public, even on those who do not consent. In the market, everyone’s needs can be met; the steak-lover or the vegan, the hip-hop fan or the classical musical enthusiast. The market provides a far more democratic order than the state could ever impose.

Markets create order through the use of regulation as well. It is common to assume that if the state does not regulate the free market, then the market is “unregulated.” But there is no such thing as an unregulated market; the issue, is, rather, who is doing the regulating. “‘Unregulated economy,’ like a square circle, is a contradiction in terms,” argues Sheldon Richman. “If it’s truly unregulated it’s not an economy, and if it’s an economy, it’s not unregulated. The term ‘free market’ does not mean free of regulation. It means free of government interference, that is, legal plunder and other official aggressive force.”112 Markets, like prices, are regulated from the bottom-up.

All markets are regulated. In a freed market we all know what would happen if someone charged, say, $100 per apple. He’d sell few apples because (under current cost conditions) someone else would offer to sell them for less or, pending that, consumers would switch to alternative products. “The market” would not permit the seller to successfully charge $100.

109 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1989), 76. 110 F.A. Hayek, “The Market Order or Catallaxy,” in David Boaz, ed., The Libertarian

Reader (The Free Press, 1997), 394-395. 111 Ibid. 112 Sheldon Richman, “The Free Market Doesn’t Need Government Regulation,” August 5,

2012. http://reason.com/archives/2012/08/05/the-free-market-doesnt-need-government-r


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Similarly, in a freed market employers would not succeed in offering $1 an hour and workers would not succeed in demanding $20 an hour for a job that produces only $10 worth of output an hour. If they try, they will quickly see their mistake and learn.

And again, in a freed market an employer who subjected his employees to perilous conditions without adequately compensating them to their satisfaction for the danger would lose them to competitors.

What regulates the conduct of these people? Market forces. (I keep specifying “in a freed market” because in a state-regulated economy, competitive market forces are diminished or suppressed.) Economically speaking, people cannot do whatever they want—and get away with it—in a freed market because other people are free to counteract them and it’s in their interest to do so. That’s part of what we mean by market forces.113

It is also more difficult to comprehend how markets regulate behavior because of how unfree the market currently is in America (and throughout the world). The less a market is restricted by the state, the more it becomes regulated by market forces. Conversely, the more government restrictions there are, the less regulation of market forces there will be. There is a direct trade-off between the two.114

Markets also provide order to society by making trust the rule, not the exception. Outside of our close friends and co-workers, almost everyone we interact with on a daily basis is a complete stranger. Without the ability to have an element of trust with others, economic cooperation becomes increasingly difficult. Prices help regulate trust by providing individuals with trade-offs and choices that they use to indirectly reveal vital information to the rest of society, where everyone contributes to the reputation of everyone else. If a company wishes to stay in business, predictable negative effects on future business act as a check against misbehavior. Companies don’t want current customers to refuse to deal with them in the future or for a bad reputation to scare away prospective trading partners. Without the violence of the state to subsidize their bad behavior or protect them from competition, entrepreneurs have to please their customers and provide value to society or they will lose money and fail.

Reputation is one of the most effective ways markets regulate. Modern technology has only enhanced these voluntary reputational institutions. It allows people to detect “cheating” on quality more quickly, reducing the gains to be had from that misbehavior, and individual consumers have instantaneous transaction-by-transaction feedback from those on both sides of exchanges on platforms like eBay, Amazon, and Uber. Technology spreads the word to other potential trading partners far faster and more broadly than was once the case, increasing the ability

113 Ibid. 114 Howard Baetjer, Jr., “There’s No Such Thing As An Unregulated Market,” January 14,

2015. http://fee.org/articles/theres-no-such-thing-as-an-unregulated-market/

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to punish, and thereby deter, such misbehavior. Politics, on the other hand, gives us nothing but division and lies. Every price ceiling, price floor, subsidy, tax, and every control distorts the truths that market prices tell.115

State regulators also suffer from perverse incentives. A government agency in charge of regulating a certain industry will receive more money and power if it fails to ensure safety and quality. For example, if there are poor schools, an environmental disaster, contaminated meat, or dangerous drugs, the regulatory or bureaucratic bodies in charge of these respective fields will always receive more power, money, and authority despite their failure to protect the public. In the free market, this process is completely reversed. Underwriter Laboratories (UL)—a private regulator that provides safety-related certification, validation, testing, inspection, and training for electrical equipment—would lose influence and their good reputation if they put their stamp on a faulty product. Organizations like Yelp, eBay, Amazon, Uber, Lyft, and AirBnb live and die by the market regulation of customer feedback and ratings. And who would be easier to bribe: a government regulator or a UL employee?

What the free market does is provide governance without government. The free market, through the spontaneous order of millions of people pursuing their own self-interest, creates the tightest regulations of them all: the price signals, profit and loss, competition, customer satisfaction, commercial ostracism (credit ratings, boycotting, reputation, etc.), and supply and demand. All of these serve as checks on human behavior, rewarding those who add value to society while punishing those who do not. The market internalizes costs, meaning that individuals themselves bear the responsibility of their actions through decentralized accountability systems.

How Markets Socialize Profits and Privatize Losses

Contrary to the political system—which privatizes profits and socializes costs—the market does the exact opposite.

In a competitive marketplace with advancing technology, as the effort required to produce and, hence, acquire things diminishes, the price of gaining utility falls. For example, if the average worker had to work two hours, 40 minutes, to buy a chicken in 1900, but only 14 minutes as the 21st century approached (actual statistics), [Frederic] Bastiat would say the chicken “is obtained for less expenditure of human effort; less service is performed as it passes from hand to hand; it has less value; in a word, it has become gratis, [though] not completely.” In other words, most of the utility that had to be paid for with painful effort in 1900 was free by 2000. (By “less value,” Bastiat meant that the market price has fallen, not that the chicken is less useful)…Thus progress through the market order consists in ever more people satisfying more of their wants at less and less effort. Bastiat calls this a move from private property to common

115 Gary M. Galles, “How Markets Tells the Truth and Politics Lie,” February 4, 2015.

http://fee.org/articles/how-markets-tell-the-truth-and-politics-tells-lies/


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wealth because he roots property in effort, and greater wealth is available to all with less effort.116

This is why Americans in 2016 are far richer than John D. Rockefeller was in 1916.117 The average person may not have the same amount of money Rockefeller did, but the necessities of today—a car, air conditioning, refrigerator, indoor plumbing—would have been unheard of luxuries to even the richest man of that time. This process can only occur through repeated capital accumulation, savings, and investment as part of the market economy.

Bastiat, like his predecessor Adam Smith, acknowledged that this process of passing wealth from the private to the communal domain is driven by people’s self-interest: “What other stimulant would urge them forward with the same degree of energy?” Today it is largely unappreciated that the market order—private property, competitive entrepreneurship, free pricing, profit/loss—aligns private and public interest as no other institutional setting possibly could.118

The profits and wealth earned by entrepreneurs are used to improve the existing capital stock, invest in projects, makes labor more productive, and—if unhampered by state violence—makes goods available for continuously less and less work.

Egalitarian critics of the market—usually well aware that state control over resources leads to more poverty—instead focus on the supposed “distorting effects” of accumulating wealth. They argue that the market produces an “unfair” distribution of wealth. Since the owners of capital do most of the saving they also determine the rate of capital accumulation, and thus of economic progress, in their favor. In the current and historical climate of the corporatist system, this is entirely true, and it is why libertarians oppose it. But this is not an inherent feature of a free market economy, only of a corporatist one. It is important to remember that wealth is not “distributed,” it is earned and exchanged, and that wealth is not a fixed pie.

Even on the grounds of the socialist argument for “redistribution,” however, the market beats the state socialists at their own game. The distribution of wealth in society is always subject to modification by market forces. “In a world of unexpected change,” argues Ludwig Lachmann, “the maintenance of wealth is

116 Sheldon Richman, “Bastiat on the Socialization of Wealth,” March 22, 2013.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/tgif-socializing-wealth/ 117 Chelsea German, “Americans in 2016 Richer Than John D. Rockefeller in 1916,”

February 23, 2016. http://humanprogress.org/blog/americans-in-2016-richer-than-john-d-rockefeller-in-1916

118 Richman, http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/tgif-socializing-wealth/

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always problematical; and in the long run it may be said to be impossible.”119 The market, continues Lachmann, is always socializing wealth:

The market process is thus seen to be a leveling process. In a market economy a process of redistribution of wealth is taking place all the time before which those outwardly similar processes which modern politicians are in the habit of instituting, pale into comparative insignificance, if for no other reason than that the market gives wealth to those who can hold it, while politicians give it to their constituents who, as a rule, cannot...

...More aptly, we may now describe these results as an instance of what Pareto called “the circulation of elites.” Wealth is unlikely to stay for long in the same hands. It passes from hand to hand as unforeseen change confers value, now on this, now on that specific resource, engendering capital gains and losses. The owners of wealth, we might say with Schumpeter, are like the guests at a hotel or the passengers in a train: They are always there but are never for long the same people.120

Without the backstop of state power, long-term profits are very difficult to maintain, consumer demand is shifting, and the utility of capital is always changing as society’s demands evolve. Yesterday’s profits are tomorrow’s losses.

Anti-market egalitarians ignore this leveling process and are prone to looking at “snapshots” of the economy without properly accounting for the context these numbers and data exist in. Numbers often have the habit of being twisted to conform to our own biases, which is another reason why proper economics is done through praxeological reasoning and not through the study of statistics. As Thomas Sowell notes:

Americans in the top one percent, like Americans in most income brackets, are not there permanently, despite being talked about and written about as if they are an enduring “class”—especially by those who have overdosed on the magic formula of “race, class and gender,” which has replaced thought in many intellectual circles.

At the highest income levels, people are especially likely to be transient at that level. Recent data from the Internal Revenue Service show that more than half the people who were in the top one percent in 1996 were no longer there in 2005...

...Most Americans in the top fifth, the bottom fifth, or any of the fifths in between, do not stay there for a whole decade, much less for life. And most certainly do not remain permanently in the top one percent or the top one-hundredth of one percent.

119 Ludwig Lachmann, “The Market Economy and the Distribution of Wealth.”

http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/lachmann-capital-expectations-and-the-market-process#lf0721_div_125

120 Ibid.


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Most income statistics do not follow given individuals from year to year, the way Internal Revenue statistics do. But those other statistics can create the misleading illusion that they do by comparing income brackets from year to year, even though people are moving in and out of those brackets all the time.121

Even in a highly corporatist market, there is still significant and constant change of who makes up certain income brackets; in a free market, this process would only be enhanced. Simply citing a snapshot statistic on inequality does not provide this nuance, but it can sure stir up your emotions and create a demand for more of the same laws, taxes, and regulations that feed the corporatist state in the first place.

Inequality is a natural condition of the human experience and egalitarian attempts to change this must resort to state force and a stalling of the market’s natural leveling processes. For the libertarian, however, the only income inequality that matters is the kind resulting from violent, non-market means, of which inflation, and the state apparatus in general, are the biggest culprits.

For example, in Rockefeller’s time, the rich drove a Model T Ford or a horse-and-carriage while the poor were forced to walk everywhere. Now the rich drive Ferraris and Lamborghinis while the rest of us drive increasingly safe and reliable cars like Toyota Corollas and Honda Accords. Virtually every car now comes with standard features, like air-conditioning, heating, radio, and even GPS, that were not even available to the wealthiest of previous generations; in the free market, yesterday’s luxuries are standard in any home or apartment. This is thanks to decades of capital investment and reinvestment. Throughout most of human history, global wealth has hardly changed. But thanks to trade and industrialization, wealth has skyrocketed since the 1900s and continues to climb. Should this “inequality” really be condemned?

“Because the pie is growing, focusing solely on inequality...makes little sense,” writes Chelsea German. “Most of us would rather have a relatively small slice of a gigantic pie than the biggest slice of a microscopic pie. In other words, most of us would rather be wealthier in absolute terms, regardless of our relative position. This is why many of us, if given the choice, would choose to be an ordinary person today instead of a member of the upper crust a century ago or a 17th century king.”122

It might be objected, however, that the gains in wealth over the centuries have come in the midst of large states and are not a result of the free market. This is absolutely true; as we have seen, the state serves only to concentrate wealth and

121 Thomas Sowell, “That ‘Top One Percent,’” November 27, 2007.

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2007/11/27/that_top_one_percent/page/full

122 Chelsea Morgan, “2016: the ‘Year of the 1%’ or the Year Poverty Fell to a New Low,” April 12, 2016. http://www.cato.org/blog/2016-year-1-or-year-poverty-fell-new-low

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transfer it from those who produced it to those who do not. This is a process that can only destroy, not create, wealth; true wealth is produced despite of, not because of, state power. How much richer would we be if the state had not waged brutal and bloody wars, used its taxing and regulatory powers to privatize wealth and socialize losses, put up artificial barriers that prevent individuals from starting businesses and competing, and saddled us with untold trillions of dollars of debt?

Those who have gained wealth and power through the illegitimate process of non-market means do not deserve their fortunes, and the best way to undercut them is through a free market. It is no wonder that the corporate state would rather watch the world burn than have a real, libertarian market.

Marketization Versus Privatization

Due to the calculation-knowledge problem and the incentive structure of a state bureaucracy, the state cannot be counted on to provide satisfactory goods and service to the public. The libertarian answer to this problem, and the illegitimate wealth of corporate cronies, is that this stolen wealth should be immediately given back to the people that it was stolen from, while eliminating the state’s chief function as the muscle for the ruling and corporate classes.

This process is incorrectly called “privatization.” Privatization, while rhetorically giving a wink and a nod to private enterprise, is where state violence is contracted out to a third, usually corporate, party. Remember that the state has no wealth of its own and it must steal it from those who produce it. The state does not and cannot actually build anything; roads, for example, are built by contractors who are paid by the money stolen from taxpayers. In a sense, all state actions are privatized. Public Choice theory reminds us that special interest groups always control bureaucracies in order to privatize profits and socialize losses. This is why virtually everything the state does, from military weaponry and intelligence to prisons and schools, is being privatized.

Due to the state’s inefficiency, but unwillingness to relinquish its desire to point guns at the rest of society, it finds it convenient to “privatize” many of its functions so that their social control and exploitation can be run more smoothly. Corporations contracted out by the state, for example, now run many prisons, and the number of prisoners in the last few decades has increased exponentially. But this is hardly the result of a free market or a limiting or removing of state power from society. In fact, the state’s expropriation is made more efficient; victimless crime laws and the myriad of statutes and fines imposed by the state are the reasons that these prisons exist in the first place.123

Libertarians obviously oppose this. As the term has been poisoned, and is actually fairly inaccurate in describing what libertarians call for, a term like marketization makes more practical and definitional sense. This is a process where

123 Joe Wright, “A Predatory System Invested in Slavery,” December 23, 2013.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/joe-wright/a-predatory-system-invested-in-slavery/


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the state doesn’t redistribute the violence to a third party, but instead gives back the money and property to the people that it was stolen from. Privatization seeks to redistribute the state’s violence. Marketization, in contrast, would be the repeal of state laws so that free people in the free market organize production.

An essential aspect of privatization is the cozy relationship between business interests and the state, which will always be present as long as there is a state apparatus to leach onto. The larger the state is, the greater the privatization. The state makes this possible through its regulatory web, inflation, taxation, licensing, and subsidies, all of which restrict the peaceful, decentralized coordination of the market and benefits corporations who cozy up to the vast tax-trough. While privatization as it is traditionally practiced involves giving special benefits to nominally private entities, marketization is an attempt to restore the libertarian ethic by applying proper homesteading principles and the protection of genuine private property from current and future expropriation.

In the current climate of expansive welfare states and large amounts of socialism that currently plague the West, this marketization process will not be perfect and easy; cleaning up the messes that the state creates never is. The most important concepts to marketization, then, involve the dissolving of political power to more local levels and the return of public property back to the original private owners. Libertarians do not seek to contract out state violence through corporate privatization schemes, but rather to restore natural law and the justice that occurs under the application of libertarian ethics.

“Since socialism cannot arise without the expropriation of assets originally ‘created’ and owned by individual homesteaders, producers, and/ or contractors, all socialist property, ill begotten from the very start, should be forfeited,” argues Hans-Hermann Hoppe.124 The state does not and cannot legitimately own property; therefore, you do not have the right to sell or auction off what you do not own. This was one of the biggest injustices of privatization schemes that occurred after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; state property was sold off to oligarchic vultures rather than transferred back to the respective peoples that it was originally and continually expropriated from.

The same goes for the softer socialism of the Western nations, almost all of which suffer under the weight of large, bureaucratic welfare states. Even though democracy tends to unfortunately muddle the distinction between public and private, taxpayer and tax-eater, expropriators and expropriated, a marketization program can still be implemented. “Publicly owned buildings and structures were all financed by taxes, and as far as undeveloped public land is concerned, it is the result of a public, i.e., tax-funded and enforced, policy prohibiting the private appropriation and development of nature and natural resources,” continues Hoppe. “Hence, it would appear that it is taxpayers, in accordance with their amount of

124 Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed, 125.

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taxes paid, who should be given title to public buildings and structures, while undeveloped public land simply should be opened up to private homesteading.”125

As net tax-recipients, government employees should not have the right to homestead previously unowned public property or have access to the titles over previously state-owned buildings. It would add insult to injury, as well as be inconsistent with libertarian homesteading principles, if government employees—whose salaries and benefits are paid for by state expropriation of legitimate, homesteaded property—were now able to become private owners or shareholders instead of the taxpayers who were forced to pay their salaries.126

Although the process of restoring a private property social order through marketization is easier said than done, several simple steps could be taken in order to determine the proper ownership rights over property illegitimately owned by the state. Individuals could provide some type of documentation showing their tax records and thus how much they were forced to contribute to public property, while deducting the amount of taxes they received in the form of welfare payments. “In a fully [marketized] society, the task of finding a detailed solution to this problem would be typically assumed by private accountants, lawyers, and arbitration agencies, financed directly or indirectly—against a contingency free—by the individual claimants.”127 Other examples, like American Indian reservations, pose logistical problems, but they could be transferred immediately back to the people themselves to be governed and controlled in the manner they see fit without federal subsidies or intervention. Since it is difficult to always find the original, homesteaded owners of a given piece of property, and because the state’s violence is so interwoven into society, it is important that the state play absolutely no role in transferring property titles or wealth.

Ultimately, the means of marketization do not matter as much as the principles that are used to guide the process. Since state property is always illegitimate, it should never be privatized or “sold off,” but given back to its original owners in as close accordance to libertarian homesteading and property ethics as possible. Through this marketization process, we can not only provide justice to those who have been institutionally expropriated by the state, but also limit—and ultimately eliminate—state property while discovering the best way to protect and continue a private property, libertarian social order.

In an environment permeated by the state in nearly every aspect of our lives, the details can be difficult, but the principle is what is most important: repealing laws and regulations, not adding new ones; abolishing all taxes, not redirecting them at a different class or group; give people back their money from the state, not selling off their assets to corporate bidders. Repeal monopolies, and free the market.

Free Markets Are Decentralized Markets

125 Ibid., 136 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid.


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It will be nearly impossible to know what a real free market will look like. This is not a defect of the market, but one of its greatest features. Humans are pattern-seeking animals, however, and we tend to be uncomfortable when solutions are not apparent or obvious. This is why Henry Hazlitt’s fallacies concerning the “seen and the unseen” tend to be so widespread.

All that is required for a free market to exist is a direct application of the libertarian ethic to society, including self-ownership, property and a sound currency. That’s it. It is not a program to be implemented from the top-down by the state or created through legislative action. Rather, it is simply what happens when the institutionalized violence of the state apparatus is removed from human interaction, where free individuals, not bureaucracies, govern.

Describing what a free market will look like, or how a particular good will be provided without state coercion, is unfair because it is difficult to predict how a spontaneous order will take form. To ask this question misses the entire point of the free market because markets do not rely on social control, only on consent, cooperation, and free exchange. The principles behind the market are what matter most. What is possible, however, is using these principles to create a broad outline of what a free market entails.

Two of the most important features of markets are radically decentralized decision-making based on distributed knowledge and the availability of alternatives. In a free market, everyone has the option of finding their own niche and communities. This increases social harmony and peace by allowing like minds to associate and unlike minds to dissociate, without the power to restrict products, services, or choices simply because they may not approve of them. By allowing for alternatives, markets create competitive pressures that serve as constant checks on any and all institutions in society. Economic arrangements are constantly subject to evaluation and re-evaluation.

The free market is not limited to economic exchanges; economics simply explains the means of cooperating, never the ends. Libertarianism and free markets are often incorrectly criticized as “atomistic” or isolated; in a free society, you have every right to be completely left alone, but the market is everything but isolation. The division of labor creates a vast web of interdependence and cooperation, fostering healthy networks of mutual aid and community organizations with members who voluntarily subscribe and organize themselves as they see fit. Commercial relationships provide a forum to exchange wealth, but they also serve a positive, non-economic function. Coffee shops, restaurants, record stores and music venues engage in free exchange with their customers and suppliers, but also serve as a place for book clubs, discussion groups, and a place where community thrives.128

Since markets socialize wealth, greater technological innovation and efficiency increasingly act as levelers, decentralizing power more and more to the 128 Jason Lee Byas, “Towards an Anarchy of Production,” April 3, 2014.

http://s4ss.org/from-nl-1-1-toward-an-anarchy-of-production-pt-i-jason-lee-byas/

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individual. We can now Skype with anyone we want across the entire globe for free and use message boards and online forums to connect with people who share our interests. Gatekeepers, try as they might, are no match for the market; we have the ability to print and distribute our own newsletters, publish our own books, and share our own music without asking for permission from anyone. Freeing up the market will only increase this power.129

In a free market, individuals are freer to operate without the sanction of licensing boards, regulatory bodies, or established corporate interests. The pyramidal structure of state power gives way to increased decision-making authority into the hands of individuals and communities. Even though they have only existed for less than a few decades, concepts like Bitcoin, distributed networks, and peer-to-peer exchanges are already undermining and leveling the power of the state that has been accumulated and desperately held onto for centuries.

In a free market, without the state propping up large corporations, companies would be “smaller, flatter, and more crowded.”130 While it is true that even smaller companies receive illegitimate benefits from the state, these tend to be outweighed by the regulatory burdens placed on them, which usually works in the opposite way with larger corporations.

...To borrow Bastiat’s phraseology, the small firms that benefit from government assistance are those that are seen; the ones that are most harmed by government action are those that are unseen because they are prevented from coming into business in the first place. In the absence of licensure, zoning, and other regulations, how many people would start a restaurant today if all they needed was their living room and their kitchen? How many people would start a beauty salon today if all they needed was a chair and some scissors, combs, gels, and so on? How many people would start a taxi service today if all they needed was a car and a cell phone? How many people would start a day care service today if a bunch of working parents could simply get together and pool their resources to pay a few of their number to take care of the children of the rest? These are not the sorts of small businesses that receive SBIR awards; they are the sorts of small businesses that get hammered down by the full strength of the state whenever they dare to make an appearance without threading the lengthy and costly maze of the state’s permission process. The assistance that small firms receive comes largely at the expense, not of larger firms, but of still smaller firms—or of those who would start such smaller firms if they could.131

129 Ibid. 130 Roderick Long, “Free Market Firms: Smaller, Flatter, and More Crowded,” November

25, 2008. http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/25/roderick-t-long/free-market-firms-smaller-flatter-more-crowded

131 Ibid.


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In a free market, continues Roderick Long, “...There are limits to how large such firms can get before the diseconomies of scale overtake the economies and calculational chaos ensues; and absent the ability to socialize the diseconomies (as corporatist policies enable them to do), such firms must then fail. Assuming that such problems could be overcome by sufficiently clever entrepreneurship is comparable to assuming that state-socialist central planning can be made to work by sufficiently wise bureaucrats and sufficiently patriotic citizens.”132 We can thank state intervention—through regulations, subsidies, contracts, and monetary inflation—for the corporatization and centralization of our economy as the corporate-state works symbiotically as parasites on the production of a genuine free market.

Markets and corporations will likely be far more decentralized and smaller without the cartelizing effects of state intervention, but this does not imply an absence of hierarchy. Entrepreneurship (and nature) necessarily entails a hierarchy and is absolutely fundamental for the market processes of price discovery, coordination, the flow of capital, the means of production, and forecasting, providing decisive action under uncertain conditions. Hierarchy is a vital component of any social order; the free market simply restores a natural hierarchy and undermines the Progressive-managerial, parasitical elites that have dominated Western democracies for the last century. It is no wonder why the corporate-state is so hostile to libertarianism, private property, and free markets.133

While it is impossible to predict what a true free market will look like, like weeds pushing through cracks in the cement, the spirit of the market breathes through the state’s iron grip. It exists wherever the state is absent or ignored, where there are cultural institutions and traditions that foster free exchange and voluntary interactions. Without the corporate state leeching off of the rest of us, markets becomes decentralized, localized and more diverse, reflecting the cultural preferences and habits of the praxeological beings they reflect.

Free markets create a spontaneous, decentralized order that reflect our praxeological nature, the sum of the entire voluntary, free, and consensual relationships that exist in society. They not only create wealth and prosperity but also represent a direct threat to Leviathan and rootless corporate interests.

132 Ibid. 133 WTI, “The Bastardization of Knowledge,” September 22, 2016.

http://www.altarandthrone.com/the-bastardization-of-knowledge/

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Chapter 4

Cultural Marxism and Libertarian Wolves

Libertarianism is the philosophy of liberty, the non-aggression principle, self-ownership, and private property. As a political theory, it says nothing about how one should exercise their liberty so long as one does not violate the rights of others. The libertarian ethic, however, is a necessary but not sufficient component of a free society. If libertarianism is to have any chance of success in the future, then cultural Marxism must be rejected, undermined, and dismantled.

In a society where cultural Marxism is dominant and controls the narrative, a free society is impossible. Like a virus that attacks the immune system, cultural Marxism is inherently parasitic and seeks to weaken the host, making the society it inflicts vulnerable and self-destructive. The influence and spread of this virus over the last century in the West has created a society without, unaware of, or even embarrassed of, its once healthy immune system.

Western civilization, and its unique tradition of libertarianism, has little chance of surviving unless libertarians become white blood cells against the virus of cultural Marxism, move the Overton Window in our direction, and offer a cultural alternative rooted in the West’s unique identity and traditions.

Cultural Marxism

Marxist theory had predicted that in the event of a big European war, the working class all over Europe would rise up to overthrow the evil capitalist system and implement communism. But when war came in 1914, that did not happen. When it finally did happen in Russia in 1917, workers in other European countries did not support it. What had gone wrong? Independently, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came to the same answer: traditional Western culture—a unique blend of Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy—had blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interest. Thus, implementing communism was impossible in the West until its culture was destroyed. Cultural Marxism was born.134

In the 1930s, the “Frankfurt School” at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, was formed with the goal of translating economic Marxism into cultural terms. The Frankfurt School argued that culture was not just part of what Marx had called society’s “superstructure,” but rather an independent and

134 William S. Lind, “What is Cultural Marxism?”

http://www.marylandthursdaymeeting.com/Archives/SpecialWebDocuments/Cultural.Marxism.htm


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very important variable. The working class would not lead a Marxist revolution because it was becoming part of the middle class, the hated bourgeoisie.135

After fleeing Germany in 1933, the Frankfurt School reestablished itself in New York City. From there, they shifted their focus from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to destroying it in America. To do so, “Critical Theory” was invented. This involved the criticism and deconstruction of virtually every institution responsible for the rise and success of Western civilization—strong families, traditional sexual norms and roles, private property, and religion. Since these institutions and concepts have traditionally served as bulwarks against state power and social engineering, they were to be attacked brutally and unremittingly. They wrote a series of “studies in prejudice,” crossing Marx with Freud to use psychology as a technique of social conditioning. Anyone who believed in traditional Western culture was now prejudiced, racist, sexist, fascist, and mentally ill.136

During the 1960s, critical theory gained traction with the Left in both Europe and America, where it is now dominant in the social sciences and humanities at virtually every institution of “higher” learning. This is why your average college student will encounter a dozen courses on race, gender, and white privilege studies before they ever, if ever at all, study the writers, thinkers, and philosophers that have been integral to the Western tradition. Aquinas? Shakespeare? Jefferson? Nope, these men were all members of the patriarchal-oppressor class. Because of this, their opinions are automatically invalid.

There is probably no more influential Cultural Marxist than Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse’s writings are peppered with the language and rhetoric that has given rise to political correctness, Leftist identity politics, third-wave feminism, and the permanently outraged. In 1965, Marcuse argued that, “the small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped. Their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to oppress these minorities.”137 Marcuse called for a new “White Man’s Burden” to save (and use) those helpless “oppressed” minorities to ignite the Marxist revolution.

Under Cultural Marxism, every aspect of a person’s identity—whether it is gender, race, sexual orientation, family, culture or religion—is to be deconstructed. Every norm or standard in society should be challenged and, ideally, altered in order to benefit oppressed groups. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat of classic Marxist theory are substituted by those with privilege, and those without it. Minorities, permanently exploited by European culture, replaced the working class. The majority (especially heterosexual, cisgender, Christian white males) are labeled as privileged and oppressive, while minorities (everyone 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137 Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance.”

http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm

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else) are under-privileged and oppressed. If straight, white, Christian men are the oppressors, then the solution is to promote and celebrate other forms of sexuality, racial diversity, and any non-Christian religion (especially Islam). This is not a libertarian tolerance for individual diversity and differences; it is selective tolerance and selective diversity, rooted in a hatred for Western civilization.138

Theodor Adorno, a colleague of Marcuse at the Frankfurt School, argued that parenthood, pride in one’s own family, Christianity, traditional gender roles and attitudes towards sex, and the love of one’s own country are all pathological phenomena which need to be engineered, and if necessary, beaten out of people, in order to soften them up for communism.139

This tendency to pathologize the opinions and cultural traditions not in accordance with its own political ends is done in order to weaken the naturally anti-communist immune system of the West, notes Nathan Bedford Forrest:

The Frankfurt School was a Jewish intellectual movement beginning in Weimar Germany, which rejected Marxist class warfare (Klassenkampf) for cultural warfare (Kulturkampf). Disappointed with the triumph of fascism in Europe and the rise of a totalitarian state in the Soviet Union (especially when Joseph Stalin purged the formerly Jewish-dominated Bolshevik Party), the Frankfurt School determined that the reason for Communism’s failure was ethno-centrism, anti-Semitism, and authoritarian personality traits in the Gentile proletariat. So long as these personality traits existed—which the Frankfurt School believed stemmed from childhood—the Gentile proletariat would continue to fall short of their revolution and utopia. Using Freudian psychoanalysis (itself another Jewish intellectual movement) to seek and destroy these personality traits, the Frankfurt School “pathologized” healthy and high-functioning human behavior as “ethno-centric,” “anti-Semitic,” and “authoritarian.” Only when these personality traits were removed could true Communism be achieved…

…For example, in their seminal study, The Authoritarian Personality, the Frankfurt School subjected Western culture to what they called “critical theory.” Preferring your in-group over an out-group and conforming to cultural norms is racist; not having an in-group preference and rejecting cultural norms is open-minded. Obeying your parents as a child and adopting their values as an adult is submissive; disobeying your parents and rejecting their values is free-thinking. Succeeding socially and economically is just “pseudo-success” to hide secret anxieties; social and economic insecurity is a sign of true success. In conclusion, those who

138 EuropeanUnity565, "What Is Cultural Marxism?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8pPbrbJJQs 139 Ibid.


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are unhappiest are diagnosed as mentally healthy and those who are happiest are diagnosed with mental disorders.140

The successful spread of Cultural Marxism is no accident. The Marxists, well aware that communism was not going to be implemented through a revolution of the proletariat, began their “long march through the institutions.”141 Traditional Western society would be subverted through the infiltration of universities, governments, churches, and the media.

A popular and propagandist manifestation of Cultural Marxism is political correctness. Language is used to define and re-define words in order to control political discourse and alter cultural norms. Racism and sexism are not acts of violence or discrimination based on someone’s gender or race; they are now a product of prejudice plus power, inherent in the oppressor class. Any deviation from this narrative will simply be disregarded based on your identity of oppression.142

This narrative, however, is not always applied consistently. Straight, white, Christian males are the oppressor class and everyone else belongs to the oppressed class—except, of course, if members of the oppressed class do not act or think in the proper, Marxist narrative. If a minority dares to not have opinions equal to what the cultural Marxists want their opinions to be, they are summarily dismissed, insulted, and stabbed with brutal insults about how they are “traitors” to their race, gender, or sexual identity.

For example, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, two of the most influential economists, authors, and professors of the last half-century, are black libertarian/conservatives. Sowell is a brilliant scholar who has written over a dozen books on economics, race, history, and culture. Williams, an economist and prolific author, famously granted a Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon to whites so that “Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry.”143 The arguments of Williams and Sowell do not need to be refuted, however; these “Uncle Toms” are suffering from “false consciousness” and can simply be dismissed. For the Cultural Marxist, narrative always matters more than the truth and genuine intellectual diversity.

For nearly a century, Cultural Marxists have been pushing and pushing and pushing so hard—calling everyone who disagrees with them a racist, bigot, or a

140 Nathan Bedford Forrest, “The Frankfurt School Goes to the Movies,” November 29,

2016. http://therightstuff.biz/2016/11/29/the-frankfurt-school-goes-to-the-movies/ 141 Paul Austin Murphy, “Antonio Gramsci: Take over the Institutions!” April 26, 2014.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/04/antonio_gramsci_take_over_the_institutions.html

142 EuropeanUnity565, "What Is Cultural Marxism?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8pPbrbJJQs

143 Walter Williams, “Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to all Americans of European Descent.” http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/gift.html

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whatever-o-phobe—that eventually, what is left of the Western white-blood cells are going to snap. Maybe they already have, as David Marcus suggests:

Privilege theory and the concept of systemic racism dealt the deathblow to the [racial] détente. In embracing these theories, minorities and progressives broke their essential rule, which was to not run around calling everyone a racist. As these theories took hold, every white person became a racist who must confess that racism and actively make amends. Yet if the white woman who teaches gender studies at Barnard with the Ben Shahn drawings in her office is a racist, what chance do the rest of have?

Within the past few years, as privilege theory took hold, many whites began to think that no matter what they did they would be called racist, because, in fact, that was happening. Previously there were rules. They shifted at times, but if adhered to they largely protected one from the charge of racism. It’s like the Morrissey lyric: “is evil just something you are, or something you do.” Under the détente, racism was something you did; under privilege theory it is something you are.

That shift, from carefully directed accusations of racism for direct actions to more general charges of unconscious racism, took away the carrot for whites. Worse, it led to a defensiveness and feeling of victimization that make today’s whites in many ways much more tribal than they were 30 years ago. White people are constantly told to examine their whiteness, not to think of themselves as racially neutral. That they did, but the result was not introspection that led to reconciliation, it was a decision that white people have just as much right to think of themselves as a special interest group as anyone else....

…Furthermore, the ever-present drumbeat from the Left that every conservative victory is the death throes of bad, old white people who are about to be swept away by waves of brown immigration is making many whites dig in. On a certain level, how can you blame them? They are explicitly being told that their values and way of life are under the sword. How do we expect them to react?144

What Cultural Marxism does is essentially create eternal warfare, hostility, and horizontal fighting between ever more narrowly defined groups, substituting reality and genuine tolerance and diversity for cultural, social, and political engineering. Without firing a shot or winning a single election, the Marxists have spread their cultural poison. One can only wonder what they will do and say once the minorities they love to champion (or, rather, caricature) eventually become the majorities in Western societies and fail to express the same tolerance and doormat

144 David Marcus, “This Election Marks the End of America’s Racial Détente,” November

14, 2016. http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/14/election-marks-end-americas-racial-detente/


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attitude (also known as pathological altruism) of the Western oppressor class they love to demonize.

In the same way that libertarianism refuted economic Marxism, libertarians need to do the same with its cultural twin.

Rejecting Egalitarianism

In their quest to tear down the Christian God that once stood at the center of Western civilization, Cultural Marxism replaced Him with the secular god of egalitarianism. All humans are equal, asserted without proof, is the first commandment. Thus, any inequalities in society are the fault of racism, prejudice, and privilege, rather than our inherent inequalities, diversities, and differences, and must be rooted out through social engineering or through the brute force of the state if necessary.

“One of the great glories of mankind,” writes Murray Rothbard, “is that, in contrast to other species, each individual is unique, and hence irreplaceable; whatever the similarities and common attributes among men, it is their differences that lead us to honor, or celebrate, or deplore the qualities or actions of any particular person. It is the diversity, the heterogeneity, of human beings that is one of the most striking attributes of mankind.”145 The libertarian understands that through our individual differences, preferences, and choices, liberty necessitates inequality. Inequality is a fundamental fact of the human condition. Thanks to the freedom in the market, however, people are free to exchange goods and organize in mutually beneficial ways in order to increase their wealth and improve their lives.

An opposition to egalitarianism and equality thus becomes a cultural component of reactionary libertarianism; “‘equality’” starkly violates the essential nature of mankind, and therefore can only be pursued, let alone attempt to succeed, by the use of extreme coercion [emphasis added].”146

The current veneration of equality is, indeed, a very recent notion in the history of human thought. Among philosophers or prominent thinkers the idea scarcely existed before the mid-eighteenth century; if mentioned, it was only as the object of horror or ridicule. The profoundly anti-human and violently coercive nature of egalitarianism was made clear in the influential classical myth of Procrustes, who “forced passing travelers to lie down on a bed, and if they were too long for the bed he lopped off those parts of their bodies which protruded, while racking out the legs of the ones who were too short. This was why he was given the name of Procrustes [The Racker].”147

145 Murray Rothbard, “Egalitarianism and the Elites,” December 18, 2015.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/12/murray-n-rothbard/oligarchs-love-equality/ 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid.

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Some people are taller, more handsome or beautiful, born with more athletic ability or intellect, better vision or hearing, and so on. Why is there not a call among the egalitarians for a redistribution of eyes from those with sight to the blind? Surely, a proposal like this would actually bring more equality than monetary redistribution, since those who previously were not able to see now can enter the workplace and produce wealth. Sex and intimacy are also fundamental human needs. Is it unfair that those with better looks and charm have more sex than those without these traits? Shouldn’t women be divided equally among men so that everyone is made more equal?

Most people would be horrified at the idea of an eye lottery or the redistribution of sexual partners. Why, then, is egalitarianism with regards to money so popular? Money, unlike eyes, is a liquid asset that is easily confiscated. Combine this with the flawed Marxist theory of exploitation that fans class envy, bitter hatred, economic ignorance, and emotional appeals among the general public, and forced wealth redistribution is an easier sell.

Yet the question is rarely asked—is wealth inequality inherently undesirable? For example, let us say that John makes $50,000 per year and Michael makes $25,000 per year, an “inequality” of $25,000. After several years in a free economy that is peacefully producing wealth, John is now making $100,000 per year and Michael is making $50,000. Their “inequality” has now doubled! But is Michael really worse off for this increase in inequality?

Another problem with egalitarianism—leaving aside the moral and ethical issues of state violence—is the “Day 2 problem.” Let us imagine that everyone’s incomes were made perfectly equal by the state. The next day, millions of individuals would then buy, save, or do nothing with their money. They are immediately made “unequal” as a result of their voluntary actions and choices. We are then back at the starting point, and the state would have to once again forcibly make everyone equal again, and continue to do so ad infinitum. This is why egalitarianism requires so much force, restrictions, controls, monitoring, and regulations; all the while creating an economic environment where it becomes less and less likely people will homestead, exchange, save, and produce wealth if they know that it will immediately be expropriated by the state. This further lowers the total wealth in society as the pie becomes smaller and smaller. In a free economy, however, voluntary exchange allows individuals to increase the amount of value and wealth in society; the economic pie is never fixed.

Egalitarians understand these practical and incentive problems and have thus painted themselves into an uncomfortable corner.

Moreover, even if wealth and real incomes are both equalized, how are people, their abilities, cultures, and traits, to be equalized? Even if the monetary position of each family is the same, will not children be born into families with very different natures, abilities, and qualities? Isn’t that, to use a notorious egalitarian term, “unfair”? How then can families be made equal, that is, uniform? Doesn’t a child in a cultured and intelligent and wise family enjoy an “unfair” advantage over a child in a


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broken, moronic, and “dysfunctional” home? The egalitarian must therefore press forward and advocate, as have many communist theorists, the nationalization of all kids from birth, and their rearing in legal and identical state nurseries. But even here the goal of equality and uniformity cannot be achieved. The pesky problem of location will remain, and a state nursery in the Bay Area, even if otherwise identical in every way with one in the wilds of central Pennsylvania, will still enjoy inestimable advantages — or, at the very least, ineradicable differences from the other nurseries. But apart from location, the people — the administrators, nurses, teachers, inside and outside of the various encampments — will all be different, thus giving each child an inescapably different experience, and wrecking the quest for equality for all.148

The “nationalization of kids” is, in fact, what some egalitarians call for. Professor Adam Swift of the University of Warwick argues that, “One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.”149 Harry Brighouse of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, does a lot of “thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn't need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children.”150

While one can perhaps admire their philosophical consistency, the consequences of accepting the lie of equality leads to some horrifying conclusions. This may not dissuade the true believer, of course, because fundamentally it is has little to do with equality and everything to do with power. Once again, Murray Rothbard’s Iron Law of Oligarchy helps us dissect the egalitarians. “One reason that an egalitarian political program must lead to the installation of a new coercive political elite is that hierarchies and inequalities of decision-making are inevitable in any human organization that achieves any degree of success in attaining its goals,” notes Rothbard.151 The Jeffersonian concept of a “natural hierarchy”—of authority and respect that is earned as a result of reputation and skill in the market—is replaced by the iron fist of the state.

“To bring about and maintain such equality,” continues Rothbard, “necessarily requires the permanent imposition of a power elite armed with devastating coercive power. For an egalitarian program clearly requires a powerful ruling elite to wield the formidable weapons of coercion and even terror required

148 Ibid. 149 J.D. Tucille, “Abolish the Family? Or Just Hobble Parents So They Don't Give Kids

‘Unfair’ Advantages?” May 6, 2015. http://reason.com/blog/2015/05/06/abolish-the-family-or-just-hobble-parent

150 Ibid. 151 Rothbard, https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/12/murray-n-rothbard/oligarchs-love-

equality/

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to operate the Procrustean rack: to try to force everyone into an egalitarian mold.”152 One rarely finds the egalitarians, busy climbing the greasy social ladder at intellectually isolated universities and campuses, divesting themselves of their worldly goods, prestige, and status to go and live humbly and anonymously among the poor and destitute. Egalitarianism at the barrel of a gun, just not in my backyard.

It is simply absurd to presume that a vast group of people, all of whom have had different experiences, different educational backgrounds, work in different vocations, live in different areas, and socialize with different people, should all be treated equally upon one basis or another. To do so removes the process of selective evaluation, which causes people to treat each other as individuals; unique, diverse and beautiful.

As a floating abstraction with ever-moving goal posts, egalitarianism becomes a God, which all liberty must be sacrificed to. Because equality can and never will be achieved, calls for redistribution and control will never cease; the egalitarian appetite can never be satiated. Any inequality between people is blamed on external forces that condescendingly deny agency to individuals. If there is a supposed “pay gap” between men and women, than it must be the fault of sexism rather than the different careers and hours each choose to work; to admit this would be to admit that men and women are not the same. If certain racial groups commit vastly more crime than others and thus are in prison more often and have more interactions with police, racism is the only conclusion of the egalitarian. Society, culture, oppression, patriarchy, or whatever the next fashionable term might be, is to blame for any inequality of outcomes. More control and coercion is always the answer.

This is why the ideology of egalitarianism always tends toward socialism. “Private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are as unlikely a combination as socialism and cultural conservatism,” writes Hans Hermann Hoppe. “...What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social ‘discrimination’ and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian lifestyle experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.”153

Libertarians, then, must be principally anti-egalitarian. Liberty, private property, self-ownership, the NAP, and a free society simply cannot exist without rejecting the social engineering inherent in egalitarianism.

Wolves Versus Rabbits

152 Ibid. 153 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics

of Monarchy, Democracy and Natural Order (Transaction Publishers, 2001), 207-208.


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Libertarians can argue logically until they are blue in the face in favor of sound economics and against egalitarianism, yet still never gain any ground in the culture. This is because logic and reason unfortunately have very little to do with how we think when it comes to politics, economics, and culture.

In Anonymous Conservative’s (AC) The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans, AC argues that what is commonly known as Left and Right are biological and epigenetic phenomenon, not necessarily conclusions based on weighing the evidence and studying the facts. AC applies r/K selection theory and evolutionary psychology to our political minds, which “describes two environmental extremes, and the strategies a population will produce to exploit each extreme. As a result of these strategies, each of these two environments will produce a very particular psychology in the individuals exposed to them.”154

The r survival strategy, like that of a rabbit, works when resources are plentiful and you may get eaten at any moment. Quickly breeding is the best way to get your genes into the next generation. K strategy, exemplified by the wolf, exists when food is scarce and you need to hunt in a group to acquire it, and where each new offspring must earn its keep and be trained to do so. Humans lean towards r or K, depending on their environment.

R-selected animals tend to observe several traits: aversion to competition, tolerance for promiscuity, single parenting, earlier sexualization, and a lack of in-group loyalty. It would be a waste of time and energy for a rabbit to defend its offspring against a predator when it knows that it can easily produce more with any other rabbit in a very short period of time. There is very little need to develop and select positive traits in a sexual partner, take careful time to raise their young, or have a low time preference for resources when grass is plentiful and abundant.

“R-selection is literally about producing quantity over quality, in an environment where quality offers no advantage,” argues AC. “In such an environment, the effort to produce quality is actually a disadvantage statistically, due to the absence of competitive stresses which would favor it, and the presence of real numerical advantages of copious reproduction that will be seized by other individuals.”155 Thus, r-selection will gradually weaken a society’s immune system (its complex adaptations, institutions, and traditions) as to maximize the environment for the continued reproduction and survival of r’s.

K-selected animals (like wolves), on the other hand, tend to accept the necessity of competition, reject promiscuity, have high-investment parenting, delayed sexuality, and display intense in-group loyalty. For K-selected animals, where resources are scarce and not guaranteed, they must rely on careful mate

154 Anonymous Conservative, “r/K Selection Theory.”

http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-selection-theory/ 155 Anonymous Conservative, The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How

Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans (Federalist Publications, 2014), 35.

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selection, teaching their offspring how to hunt, and maintaining a hierarchical, tight-knit social group in order to survive. “K-selection is produced by the presence of a competitive stress which aggressively favors the survival and reproduction of only the more advanced and competitive individuals with more complex, energy-consuming adaptations,” notes AC, which is why K-selection tends to occur in an environment with scarce resources.156

All organisms exist to replicate themselves. Thus, an r-selected animal has a biological incentive to perpetuate an environment conducive to his reproductive strategy, and the same goes for the K’s. While genetics play a huge role in r/K selection, it is not entirely biological. An important function of r/K selection is epigenetic, or environmental. Different environmental conditions—scarce or excess resources, or a heightening of fear—can trigger changes and responses in the brain that move an environment towards r or K. While not a perfect representation, if you zoom out far enough, the Left tends to be r-selected while the Right tends to be K-selected. Since the terms liberal and conservative have little to no actual meaning anymore, in today’s political environment, r-selected animals represent the Cultural Marxists (regardless of their “liberal” or “conservative” political positions) while K-selected animals are traditionalists and anti-egalitarians.

R and K selected animals compete and fight for dominance in society. For the r-selected Cultural Marxist with a high time preference, he will tend to ignore the reality of scarcity and assume an abundance of resources. Thus, he will support welfare, wealth redistribution, and public debt in order to advance an r-selected environment, regardless of the long-term consequences. A reduction in welfare benefits—even if he is not a direct recipient—or any threat to immediate sexual gratification is met with hostility. Since competition is an inherent threat to the r-selected, high taxes and restrictions on the free market also have the advantage of taking resources away from the K-selected. Mass immigration and open borders are encouraged, especially among differing cultures, since this prevents the traditional cultural homogeneity favored by the K-selected. For the r-selected, gun control also makes complete sense. Rabbits face random threats from predators; if one acquires a firearm, however, and can defend himself, his family, and his property, this creates an inequality of danger and the r’s weaker genes may not survive this type of environment. A culture that propagates gender reversal and fluidity also helps stimulate further r-selection; single motherhood is encouraged, traditional masculinity is scorned, and sexual education and promotion among ever-younger age groups is promoted.157

Contrary to r’s, K-selected animals celebrate tradition as a necessary link to ensure that the delicate traits necessary for survival in a resource-scarce environment are propagated. This necessitates a need for strength and a scorn for weakness. Support for traditional gender roles and high-investment parenting is encouraged since they both tend to produce the offspring needed to compete and

156 Ibid. 157 Ibid., 45-46 and 81-94.


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survive. A work ethic and strong communal and family bonds are favored thanks to a high in-group preference and loyalty. Since competition is an inevitable and necessary part of a resource-scarce environment, they accept that there will be winners and losers and thus have an inherent aversion to wealth redistribution. Opposition to welfare is not only a moral issue, but also a survival instinct; welfare creates the environment where the parasitic r-selected animals can flourish and thus undermine the K’s ability to survive.158

This r/K selection theory suggests that logic and evidence have little to do with our political opinions. Ideologies are simply genomes battling for survival to create environments friendlier to their reproductive strategies.

Averse to competition, r’s largely fight surreptitiously. Knowing K folks care heavily for the young, they use emotional pleas concerning children to solicit welfare. And rather than fight K directly, rs enlist enemy Ks to do so...They would never take a conservative’s gun, but they will ask the government to do it. They promote immigration, as they think there is enough for all. Additionally, having a multilingual nation erodes cohesion and loyalty as it justifies welfare increases. In their desire for a placid, competition-free environment, rs have the government enforce PC rules. And then they push their government programs by claiming they are superior (despite lacking accomplishments) in order to avoid direct competitive debating.

The brain’s amygdala signals fear. A small amygdala in monkeys causes impaired threat assessment (thus calling people ‘phobic’), and increases novelty seeking and appetite (moving for more grass) that parallels promiscuity; it decreases eye contact (verifying r being anti-competitive) as well as childcare. EPBP links smaller amygdalas to such behaviors in humans via disease profiles, lesion studies and more. The DRD4-7r allele builds dopamine receptors which, in turn, helps the prefrontal cortex control the amygdala’s fear. With a defective DRD4-7 allele, unable to control fear, r youth avoid combat and competition; thus the unused amygdala shrinks. Dopamine production is also correlated with oxytocin production, which promotes group bonding. Thus, EPBP identifies the very mechanism, (the DRD4-7r allele), that makes us r or K; liberal or conservative.159

Researchers at the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience in London, led by Dr. Ryota Kanai, examined MRIs taken of the brains of both liberals and conservatives and found two main structural differences. According to their research (which supports earlier studies examining the cognitive difference between partisan ideologies), liberals tend to have a smaller amygdala (which is responsible for processing fear) and a larger anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) than 158 John K. Press, “r/K Theory and Biohistory: A Culturist Review (Part One),” May 26,

2016. http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2016/05/rk-theory-and-biohistory-culturist.html

159 Ibid.

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conservatives. The ACC is a “neural alarm system,” which is usually activated by perceptions of unfairness, social exclusion, or discrimination. In other words, liberals and conservatives essentially have entirely different brains and their respective ideologies are largely the product of biology, brain function, and epigenetic factors rather than logic or reason.160

It is out of biological necessity that Cultural Marxists and egalitarians constantly push their ideology and seek to use the state to impose it upon society. Wealth redistribution, mass immigration, sexual promiscuity, promotion of non-traditional gender roles and sexual mores, and attacks on Christianity and Western civilization in general, are in their reproductive and survival interests. Liberty, markets, competition, non-state institutions, sexual restraint, monogamy, and cultural traditionalism, however, represent direct threats to the propagation and survival of the r-selected mind of the Cultural Marxist, and are thus opposed. No amount of Rothbard or Mises will persuade a r-selected Cultural Marxist to advocate what is against the interests of his reproductive strategy.

The paradox of the modern age is that thanks to the K-selected environment of low time preferences, high-investment parenting, and traditionalism, individuals in the West were able to conquer scarcity by developing prices, free markets, and private property. This helped create the type of wealth and abundance that our ancestors even four or five generations ago could never have even dreamed of. This type of environment, however, benefits the r-selected who lack the values necessary to propagate this delicate process of civilization. Instead, they have used this opportunity to spread their genomes, bury future generations in massive debt, enact large welfare states, send K-selected men to kill and die in foreign wars, and make the environment as hostile as possible to the K’s.

AC argues that in this r/K selection theory, a broadly libertarian strategy does exist, but that it will always be a minority strategy:

If politics was intellectual and logical, surely libertarianism would be what everyone could agree on. Lets all leave each other alone. But politics isn’t logical. These are reproductive strategies. They are burned in as deeply as any instinct.

In areas where humans are densely packed and resources are overabundant, you get the conflict and competition-averse r-selected reproductive strategy of liberalism. Where humans are densely packed enough to routinely encounter other humans, but resources are scarce, you get the competitive K-selected strategy of conservatism. Where humans adopt an r or K-strategy they seek to use government to make the world around them either r or K, so the world they live in will be congruent with what they are designed to encounter.

Libertarianism is what you see in animals like Grizzly Bears that are so spread out they rarely encounter others of their species. For that reason, it

160 Anonymous Conservative, The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics, 99 and 110.


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will only emerge in humans rarely, and most often where they are spread out away from each other like Alaska or the western states.

All the logic and reason in the world will not make K-strategists and r-strategists ignore their instincts. Compromise is impossible.161

R-selected individuals do not seek to have an honest conversation or open dialogue with traditionalist K’s because logic and dialectic play little to no role in their worldview. This is why we are seeing the rise of safe spaces, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, temper tantrums, violent protests, the shutting down of free speech, and an intense intellectual pogrom for anyone who dares to dissent with their orthodoxy. Libertarians will never, ever persuade r-selected animals that private property and liberty lead to a superior social order—especially when they currently live an environment that is friendly to rabbits—because they have a biological and reproductive interest not to. Their genes cannot survive in a competitive market and a traditionalist culture.

Political, cultural, and economic separation may be the only answer; it is impossible for libertarians and traditionalists to live under the same political system as Cultural Marxists. The task, then, of libertarianism is to make the culture as hostile as possible to r-selection—strengthen society’s immune system and attack the r-selected virus. Secession and political separation is absolutely necessary. This serves two positive functions: as inherently parasitic, cultural Marxists need the taxes confiscated from K-selected individuals in order to survive, and political separation denies them this; and without these stolen resources, r-selected genes will have a harder time to replicate.

A Culture of Liberty

Libertarianism should support cultural and traditional institutions that foster K-selected attitudes. No one has the right to initiate physical aggression, but this does not mean that we cannot have private opinions or refrain from peacefully discouraging destructive behavior. Historically, families, churches, communities, and mutual-aid organizations played a vital role in nurturing K-selection and strengthening the collective immune system. The state has largely forced these institutions to take a back seat, but in a free society there would likely be a resurgence and re-emergence of these institutions.

Economically, the market creates an environment that rewards social behavior while punishing and discouraging anti-social behavior, while also leaving room for both high and low culture. Libertarianism does not mean libertine; personal responsibility, respect for private, legitimate authorities, strong

161 Anonymous Conservative, “Libertarianism Will Always be a Minority Strategy,”

October 4, 2015. http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/libertarianism-will-always-be-a-minority-strategy/

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intermediary institutions between the citizen and the state, and a reverence for the Thomistic and common law should be fundamental to a libertarian culture.162

A libertarian society is most likely to flourish under low, rather than high, time preferences. The Federal Reserve and its policy of monetary inflation have helped create a culture of mass consumerism and debt. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues, societies with low time preferences initiate the “process of civilization”—a positive feedback loop where capital accumulation is increased, the relative value of future goods climbs, the division of labor is expanded and life expectancies rise. Libertarians should never be shy in encouraging the cultural customs and habits that are conducive to low time preferences.163

Support for a low time preference over instant gratification is integral in culture and social norms, not just economics. There is a tendency, even among libertarians, to equate sexual promiscuity, drug use, and non-monogamy with liberation and freedom. But as Aldous Huxley argued in the preface to his classic novel Brave New World, “As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends to compensatingly increase. And the dictator…will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.”164

Traditional social and sexual norms were adopted by the West for a reason. They are not arbitrary or part of some patriarchal conspiracy; far from being oppressive, they are what allow a healthy civilization, and thus liberty, to flourish. “[Traditionalist social norms] have been evolutionarily selected to reduce social costs. There are many group beneficial-effects of monogamy. For one, by limiting intrasexual competition and reducing the number of married men, monogamy reduces crime—primarily violent crime like rape, murder, assault, robbery—and decreases personal abuses, fostering a more healthy society.”165

According to a study put together by several universities, called “The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,”166 K-selection and monogamy reinforce each other, civilizing both men and women. This leads to “increases [in] savings, child investment, and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of

162 Chesterton’s Ghost, “The Future of Libertarianism: In the Long Run, They’re All

Statists!” February 19, 2016. http://therightstuff.biz/2016/02/19/in-the-long-run-theyre-all-statists/

163 Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed, 6-7. 164 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited (Harper-Collins,

2005), 13. 165 Asa J, “Traditional Sexual Norms Are Oppressive Patriarchy Maaaannnnnn,” June 2,

2016. http://1stirregulars.com/traditional-sexual-norms-are-oppressive-patriarchy-maaaannnnnn/

166 Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richerson, “The puzzle of monogamous marriage.” http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/367/1589/657.full.pdf


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child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide.”167 Throughout history, the amount of monogamy a society experiences correlates with the level of civilization a society experiences. Polyamory and other non-monogamous sexual relationships have existed, and continue to exist, in less successful societies (like in sub-Saharan Africa).168

In his work Sex and Culture, which is considered one of the most comprehensive studies on civilizational decline, [J.D.] Unwin looked at 86 civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observed.

Unwin was testing the hypothesis of Sigmund Freud, who postulated that the progress of a civilization was a product of repressed sexuality. In short, Unwin’s work found that sexual discipline appropriated social energy toward ends that were more conducive to building and maintaining civilizations – and that heterosexual monogamy was the optimal arrangement for the planning, nurturing, and maintaining of the family.169

According to a study done by the Dunedin School of Medicine in New Zealand,170 there exists a strong correlation of increased depression, anxiety, drug abuse, and physical abuse with a higher number of sexual partners. The study points out that repeated incidents of casual sex tends to create a spiral, feeding off of each other; more sexual partners leads to higher rates of alcohol abuse and negative psychological programs, which then leads to more sexual partners, and so on. This is true for men, but especially for the women in the study.

Non-monogamous and casual sexual encounters also have a negative correlation with divorce rates. Since the 1970s, women with ten or more sexual partners before marriage are far more likely to get divorced than women with zero or one partner before marriage. When analyzing marriages after five years, a man was 560 percent more likely to find himself divorced if he married a woman with ten or more sexual partners than if he married a virgin.171

After at least a half century of cultural Marxism creeping into virtually every facet of the culture, especially in regards to sex and gender roles, women continue to report that they are far less happy than their mothers and grandmothers.172 Even 167 Asa J, http://1stirregulars.com/traditional-sexual-norms-are-oppressive-patriarchy-

maaaannnnnn/ 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 170 Susan Krauss Whitbourne, “The Lingering Psychological Effects of Multiple Sex

Partners,” April 20, 2013. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201304/the-lingering-psychological-effects-multiple-sex-partners

171 Alpha Game, “N matters, a lot,” June 8, 2016. http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2016/06/n-matters-lot.html?m=1

172 David Leonhardt, “He’s Happier, She’s Less So,” September 26, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/business/26leonhardt.html

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when you take a more snapshot approach, and compare women who identify as feminist with their more traditionalist peers, women with more “progressive” gender roles are also less happy and fulfilled.173 While it may seem counterintuitive in our egalitarian-obsessed culture, marriages in which men and women split housework equally, or where both partners work, are more likely to end in divorce than traditional marriages where the husband works and the wife stays home.174 Couples with more traditional marriages also have better sex lives than their progressive and “liberated” counterparts.175

Perhaps the intuitions of the K-selected traditionalists have been right all along: that men and women are not equal, that traditional gender roles exist for a beneficial purpose, and, that egalitarianism is a lie and a dangerous, false god. “Brain scans, controlled studies, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology demonstrate that men and women are not the same,” explains Julia Tourianski. “We are physically and mentally different. We input, process and deliver information differently. We evolved with different priorities, and we are marinated in different combinations of hormones,” she concludes in her incredibly thorough study on over fifty biological differences between men and women.176 Men and women are distinct, different, and yet complimentary to one another. Why is this beautiful diversity not promoted and celebrated?

Cultural Marxists are very aware of the correlation between traditionalist cultural and sexual norms and a healthy civilization. This is why nearly every Progressive or Marxist movement seeks to discourage individual restraint and low time preferences while encouraging libertine behavior in the name of “freedom” and “liberation.”

Georg Lukacs, a Hungarian Marxist and Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived communist Bela Kun regime in Hungary in 1919, understood that Christianity in Hungary—and the West in general—must be undermined if Marxism was to be advanced. Lukacs took over the schools and infected as many children as he could with the Cultural Marxist virus. “Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church

173 Meghan O’Rourke, “Desperate Feminist Wives,” March 6, 2006.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_highbrow/2006/03/desperate_feminist_wives.html

174 Henry Samuel, “Couples who share the housework are more likely to divorce, study finds,” September 27, 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/9572187/Couples-who-share-the-housework-are-more-likely-to-divorce-study-finds.html

175 Sabino Kornrich, Julie Brines, and Katrina Leupp, “Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4273893/

176 Julia Tourianski, “50 Real Differences Between Men and Women,” August 9, 2016. http://bravetheworld.com/2016/08/09/50-real-differences-men-women/


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authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters.”177

Why? Because strong families are society’s first defense against the state. To destroy the family is to destroy the bourgeois class and its resistance to the power of government. It is in the family where capital is accumulated and passed on to future generations. It is in the family where independence accrues—independence from the state.

The family is where tradition is learned and passed on. It is where reverence is maintained for something outside of government. It’s where voluntary associations are cultivated that can be appealed to instead of the state. The family is the ultimate stabilizer of civilization. If someone from a strong family is having difficulty, they can turn to a family member for aid. Someone from a family that has disintegrated doesn’t have that option and are inevitably forced to turn to the state for help in the form of things like welfare and other subsidies—and are more apt to have to utilize things like public education.178

A decentralized culture with strong communal bonds, families, and non-state institutions is much harder, if not impossible, to control and impose statism upon. The classic, Thomistic concept of liberty recognizes that civilization cannot exist if responsibility and freedom are not intertwined. Huxley’s world of atomized individuals and instant gratification is a dystopian setting for a reason. Until we can achieve political separation, libertarians, then, must be the constant white-blood cells against the viruses of egalitarianism and Cultural Marxism that seek to weaken the cultural immune system necessary for liberty, civilization, and private property to exist. Politics is always downstream of culture, which is why a defense of Western culture—which has provided the necessary institutional framework for liberty to be possible—is so important.

Unfortunately, as civilizations became more advanced and wealthier, the same r-selection that agitates for the welfare state begins to advocate the loosening of sexual norms. In the same way that it is easier to create a welfare state than to encourage independence and private charity (especially in a democratic society), abandoning heterosexual monogamy and sexual restraint is far easier than the reactionary, K-selected switch in the other direction. Once a government program is implemented, it is nearly impossible to repeal it; and once traditionalist norms are abandoned, that toothpaste is rarely put back in that bottle without a good deal of societal discomfort. Shifts in the direction of K-selection are never easy, and rarely peaceful.

The importance of the ethics of libertarianism, non-aggression, and self-ownership as a political philosophy can never be understated. History shows,

177 Linda Kimball, “Cultural Marxism,” February 15, 2007.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2007/02/cultural_marxism.html 178 Asa J, http://1stirregulars.com/traditional-sexual-norms-are-oppressive-patriarchy-

maaaannnnnn/

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however, that culture can have a far bigger effect on politics than the political structure can have on the culture. Culture matters. Cultural Marxists infiltrated the culture, changed the language, and in less than three generations, without firing a shot, they have transformed society. Libertarians can counter this by offering a radical, yet practical, cultural alternative: low time preference and restraint over instant gratification, natural hierarchy, human-scale organization, and a traditionalist libertarian ethic.


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Chapter 5

Decentralize Everything

One of the more pervasive modern myths that libertarianism seeks to dismantle is the idea that large, centralized states are a symbol of progress. Rooted in the Progressive movements of the early 20th century, dominated by an ideology of instilling a professional and a managerial class to run society and the economy with scientific precision, the Western world began to be dominated by centralized regulatory agencies, total war, and corporatist capitalism. These trends were enabled by the rise of mass democracy and Cultural Marxist ideology, and have been nothing but hostile towards liberty.

“According to the orthodox view, centralization is generally a good and progressive movement, whereas disintegration and secession, even if sometimes unavoidable, represent an anachronism,” writes Hans-Hermann Hoppe. “However, rather than reflecting any truth, this orthodox view is more illustrative of the fact that history is typically written by its victors. Correlation or temporal coincidences do not prove causation. In fact, the relationship between economic prosperity and centralization is very different from and indeed almost the opposite of what orthodoxy alleges.”179

Decentralized organization, whether private or governmental, was deemed to be inadequate by the new democratic ruling class for the regimentation of society needed to uproot and disintegrate traditional Western culture. Large-scale wars could not be fought and new federal bureaucracies could not be implemented if the citizenry were foolishly clinging to the ancient traditions of local rule, community organizations, self-government, and attachments to their blood and soil.

Thus, the Progressive movement sought and created large organizations, both bureaucratic and corporate, as a way to impose social control, loyalty to the big and abstract over the small and human-scale, and undermine the very traditions and checks of decentralism that make liberty, private property, and free markets possible.

How European Decentralization Created Liberty and Law

Besides a few verses attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, virtually all of the ideas of liberty are Western in nature: individual rights, private property, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of trade, separation of powers, and equality before the law.

179 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics

of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (Transaction Publishers, 2001), 109.

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Traditional means of protecting liberty, like devising written constitutions, bills of rights, and an independent judiciary, also developed in the West. The West, or what used to be called Christendom, was also the first civilization to abolish slavery. While there have been conquerors in the West, there has also been a distinguished and lengthy anti-militarist tradition and rules for limiting war, like the Christian Just War doctrine.180

But these principles and customs were not passed down by a lawgiver, created out of blank slates. They were created and developed in a highly decentralized political order that dominated Europe until the Napoleonic wars. While Marxists and other Leftists blame Europe’s unparalleled economic growth on imperialism, slavery, conquest, and the exploitation of the working class, these fail to explain why Islamic, Chinese, and other ancient civilizations—who were also no strangers to barbarism and exploitation—did not achieve the same increases in wealth or traditions of liberty that European cultures did.

All of these other non-Western civilizations also enjoyed certain levels of economic freedom and cultural institutions that valued entrepreneurship. What separated Europe, however, was the existence of radical decentralization, where thousands of city-states, courts, crowns, and polities governed small numbers of people. This allowed for a greater protection of private property and a natural check on political power because it was easier for people to escape oppressive or overbearing laws.

Thanks to Europe’s relatively decentralized political structure, the existence of thousands of small polities and city-states, combined with Christian culture, over nearly two millennia the West slowly built the culture and political environment that enshrined several concepts we take for granted today: individual liberty, private property, markets and economic exchange, checks against state power, constitutional government, habeus corpus, jury trials, and the abolition of slavery.181

In medieval Europe, taxes were administered by local assemblies made up of the people who actually had to pay the taxes. Combined with the incentives of competing polities, they were relatively low and uniform. “Although geographical factors played a role,” writes Ralph Raico, “the key to western development is to be found in the fact that, while Europe constituted a single civilization—Latin Christendom—it was at the same time radically decentralized.”182 In the Asian and Islamic empires that lacked the radical decentralization of Europe, fines and extortions served as sources of quick revenue, social control, and, most importantly, served as means to prevent any outside threats from chaellenging their large power structures.

180 Jim Powell, “Why Has Liberty Flourished in the West?” September 1, 2000.

http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-has-liberty-flourished-west 181 Ralph Raico, “The European Miracle,” May 10, 2013.

https://mises.org/library/european-miracle 182 Ibid.


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Because it was never unified politically, only culturally, and unburned by a large, centralized state casting a shadow over the entire continent, Europe developed into a mosaic of kingdoms, principalities, city-states, ecclesiastical domains, and other small political entities. These entities found that infringing upon property rights would not only lead to an exodus of citizens but left them at a disadvantage against any neighboring polities that left their people alone. Through this struggle, representative bodies were developed, and rulers were further restrained by charters of rights (like the Magna Carta). “In the end,” continues Raico, “even within the relatively small states of Europe, power was dispersed among estates, orders, chartered towns, religious communities, corps, universities, etc., each with its own guaranteed liberties. The rule of law came to be established throughout much of the Continent.”183

Over time, with the increased ability to keep the fruits of your labor, property rights and self-ownership became more sharply defined. This allowed individuals to further capture the benefits of their labor and investments, and create the beginnings of a market society built on property rights, free exchange, and a decentralized order. As they began to adopt these concepts and create prosperity, a “demonstration effect” helped spread them to more and more of these small city-states across Europe.

Christianity, too, played a key role in this decentralization process. After the fall of Rome, as Europe began to adopt Christianity—a culture that emphasized “the mitigation of slavery and a greater equality within the family to the concepts of natural law, including the legitimacy of resistance to unjust rulers”184— institutional envy between power centers began to develop. The influence of the Catholic Church prevented the concentration of power, dividing the loyalty of Europeans between their priest and king. This further cemented the rule of divided and competing jurisdictions, allowing for diverse, polycentric legal systems even in the same geographic area—a hallmark of Western law. Many medieval popes even threatened to excommunicate kings or rulers who raised taxes or enacted laws without popular consent.185

Centuries later, the Church developed the concept of subsidiarity, where “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.” According to this principle, political and organizational decisions should always be handled by the smallest or least centralized competent authority as possible. Subsidiary also rejects all forms of collectivism, recognizes limits to state power, and that the state


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should never interfere with or substitute itself for civil society’s private institutions. This principle of subsidiarity discouraged political centralization.186

Religious competition, like political decentralization, also fostered liberty.

Moreover, the 16th century brought religious competition. Not, it’s true, within particular regions where Catholicism (southern and western Europe) or Protestantism (northern Europe) had a monopoly. But there was serious religious rivalry, something not seen in many other parts of the world. Furthermore, Protestantism itself involved competing sects.

This meant tragic wars, but it also meant there was no centralized religious state. As Voltaire wrote, “If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.”187

Wherever there was more decentralization and competing political institutions, there was the most liberty, fewest taxes, and higher economic growth. The Low Countries, especially in what is now modern day Holland, had the most open economic system and the greatest protection of property rights. The Dutch model began to be emulated throughout Europe because it was “a ‘headless commonwealth’ that combined secure property rights, the rule of law, religious toleration, and intellectual freedom.”188 England started developing protections of property and liberty outside of royal courts where they were most easily threatened and usurped. The centralized Spanish crown, on the other hand, began seizing property from Jews and the Muslim Moors, creating a climate where no property or contract was secure and thus did not enjoy economic growth. In China and Japan, economic growth was at its greatest when there was political division.189

We can thank Europe’s decentralized institutions for the rise of free-market capitalism. “Precisely the fact that Europe possessed a highly decentralized power structure composed of countless independent political units explains the origin of capitalism—the expansion of market participation and of economic growth—in the Western worlds,” argues Hans Hermann Hoppe. “It is not by accident that capitalism first flourished under conditions of extreme political decentralization: in the northern Italian city states, in southern Germany, and in the secessionist Low Countries (Netherlands).”190

Law—supposedly a service that only a central monopoly can provide—was also created, or rather, discovered, by decentralized means. English common law was not something that was created by a king or legislature, violently enforced and 186 “The Catechism of the Catholic Church,” Section 1: Chapter 2, Article 1.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c2a1.htm 187 Powell, http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-has-liberty-flourished-

west 188 Raico, https://mises.org/library/european-miracle 189 Ibid. 190 Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed, 111.


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imposed from the top-down on society. Instead, like the formation of prices in the market, law was case-generated law—spontaneously evolving from the settlement of actual disputes.

Tort law, which provides protection against personal injury; property law, which demarcates property rights; contract law, which provides the grounding for exchange; commercial law, which facilitates complex business transactions; and even criminal law, which punishes harmful behavior, all arose through this evolutionary process. It is true that most of our current law exists in the form of statutes. This is because much of the common law has been codified through legislation. But the fact that politicians recognized the wisdom of the common law by enacting it into statutes, hardly proves that government is necessary to create rules of law. Indeed, it proves precisely the opposite.191

When disputes inevitably arise in society, they can either be solved peacefully or violently. Since violence is expensive and tends to produce unexpected and uncontrollable consequences, the decentralized polities of Europe were incentivized to arbitrate their conflicts in a more peaceful manner. This process lead to a spontaneous, bottom-up generation of popular laws and mechanisms to deliver justice—especially non-violent tools like negotiation and mediation—that began to be adopted and applied in a widespread manner. This is precisely what happened in early Anglo-Saxon courts that developed common law traditions.192

Common law created a libertarian legal system that maximized individual freedom, protected private property, and punished NAP violations precisely because of its decentralized, private nature. Because of these incentives to create peaceful solutions to interpersonal conflicts, rules governing property rights, contract law and the obligations and punishments for putting other individuals in a state of harm were enacted. The wide dispersal of information and knowledge in society requires decentralized and non-coercive institutions, especially concerning something so important and necessary as law and order. These developments could have never been developed by the political process, which suffers from the same calculation problems as it does in economic planning.193

This “private law society”—where laws are discovered and enforced privately, without a legislature—is thus superior to state law because it provides diversity and uniformity.

[Private law allows] for greater variability of law. Rather than imposing a uniform set of standards onto everyone (as under statist conditions), protection agencies could compete against each other not just via price but also through product differentiation...

191 John Hasnas, “The Obviousness of Anarchy.”

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/AnarchyDraft.pdf 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid.

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On the other hand, the very same system of private law and order production would promote a tendency toward the unification of law. The "domestic" law — Catholic, Jewish, Roman, etc. — would apply only to the person and property of those who had chosen it, the insurer, and all others insured by the same insurer under the same law. Canon law, for instance, would apply only to professed Catholics and deal solely with intra-Catholic conflict and conflict resolution. Yet it is also possible, of course, that a Catholic might come into conflict with the subscriber of some other law code, e.g., a Muslim. If both law codes reached the same or a similar conclusion, no difficulties exist.194

The market provides uniformity when it is needed and diversity where it is not. There is no law banning triangular-shaped ATM cards, for example. Anyone trying to market them would soon go out of business because they would not fit into existing machines. This market coordination is also why a retailer will not sell a $100 gallon of milk, even if no law prohibits him from doing so. “Your ATM card,” writes Roderick Long, “is more valuable to you if everyone else is using the same kind as well or a kind compatible with it so that you can all use the machines wherever you go.” Under a system of private law and courts, “if they want to make a profit, they're going to provide uniformity. So the market has an incentive to provide uniformity in a way that government doesn't necessarily.” Where uniformity is not needed, like in the production of chairs, a diversity of products are provided.195

In medieval Europe, merchant law spawned out of private courts to deal with international disputes, enforcing their rulings through ostracism and boycotts. Since markets and the division of labor are interconnected webs of cooperation, merchants were incentivized to abide by the decisions of the private courts without force because they would lose significant business and their reputation would be harmed if they ignored them. In a modern society, these tools of ostracism and boycotts could be even more effective.196

Common law evolved thanks to competing, decentralized jurisdictions that lacked the type of control and power that states assume and wield today. Even when Royal courts in England began to develop centuries after common law, it competed with and existed next to over a dozen different types of court systems that had fluid jurisdictional boundaries. Competition, reputation and customers—not state coercion—regulated these courts. It was not until the late 19th Century

194 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Idea of a Private Law Society,” July 28, 2006.

https://mises.org/library/idea-private-law-society 195 Roderick Long, “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections,” August 19,

2004. http://archive.lewrockwell.com/long/long11.html 196 Murray Rothbard, “Police, Law, and the Courts,” in Edward Stringham, ed., Anarchy

and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 25.


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that the British government monopolized and centralized its court system into the monolithic, hierarchical structure that exists today.197

Christendom, thanks to its decentralization, not only fostered the institutions, traditions, and philosophy that created liberty, but stands alone in regards to innovation, prosperity, and scientific discoveries. Since the year 800 B.C., “whether measured in people or events, 97 percent of accomplishment in the scientific inventories occurred in Europe and North America.”198 Broken down even further, from 1400-1950 A.D., Britain, France, Germany, and Italy alone account for 72 percent of these accomplishments. Throw in Russia and the Netherlands, and that number jumps to 80 percent. All of the top 20 countries in scientific accomplishments in the last millennia are European.199

It is not a coincidence that the civilization in which traditional liberty was developed and began to flourish—combined with the collective belief in a providential, natural order—would also produce such an overwhelming number of inventions, technological improvements, scientific advancements, innovation, and human progress. This libertarian theory of European history once again runs counter to the Marxist narrative.

According to Marx, Engels, and the theoreticians of the “Golden Age” of the Second International, history proceeds basically via changes in the “material productive forces” (the technological base), which render obsolete the existing "mode of production" (the property system). Because of technological changes, the mode of production is compelled to change; with it, everything else — the whole legal, political, and ideological "superstructure" of society — is transformed, as well. As Marx put it aphoristically: “The windmill yields a society with feudal lords, the steam mill a society with industrial capitalists.”

Marxism has, of course, been subjected for generations to withering rebuttal on many different fronts, not least in regard to its philosophy of history. The newer understanding of European history is particularly destructive of its fundamental claims, however, in that it directs attention to the peculiar shallowness of “historical materialism.” This newer understanding insists that the colossal growth of technology in the Western world in the past millennium must itself be explained, and the explanation it provides is in terms of the institutional and moral matrix that emerged in Europe over many centuries. New and more productive machines did not spring forth mysteriously and spontaneously, nor was the spectacular expansion of technical and scientific knowledge somehow inevitable. As Anderson has summed up the evidence, "the scientific and technical stasis that followed the remarkable achievements of the Song dynasty, or of the flowering of early Islam, indicates that scientific

197 Ibid. 198 Charles Murray, Human Excellence: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences,

800 B.C. to 1950 (HarperCollins Publishers, 2003), 252. 199 Ibid., 296.

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inquiry and technology do not necessarily possess in themselves the dynamism suggested by the European experience.” On the contrary, technology and science emerged out of an interrelated set of political, legal, philosophical, religious, and moral elements in what orthodox Marxism has traditionally disparaged as the “superstructure” of society.200

In other words, Europe did not achieve economic growth, law, and liberty by accident. It was a result of several cultural factors, but most importantly it was the due to the existence of radically decentralized and competing political jurisdictions that allowed the principles of a free society—secure property rights and individual liberty—to be experimented with and elaborated upon.201

Decentralization creates liberty, and liberty creates decentralization. While there are multiple factors that played a role in how Europe developed the libertarian ethic—including Christian philosophy, geography, and genetics—the fact that Europe was not governed by a centralized state for over 1,000 years was perhaps the most important cause. Centralization, then, can only be viewed as progress if power, empires, bureaucracies, and economic controls are valued. Decentralization, on other hand, creates an atmosphere for expanding liberty, markets and economic growth, without which the West would have not developed the libertarian ethic.

We Need More Government

There are approximately 320 million people living in the United States, representing different ethnicities, languages, histories, cultures, religions, accents, and often times radically opposing political views. The idea that this many people, with this many differences, could or should be ruled by one federal government and 535 “representatives” is absurd. Nearly 5 million unelected people are tasked with administering federal laws against the population, divided into anywhere from 60 to 300 federal agencies. The Feds actually have no idea how many agencies exist.202

The Constitution refers to the United States in the plural form (The United States are), as a collection of small, sovereign entities creating a confederation for the benefit of each state, not the other way around. Thanks to the ideology of centralization, however, the states, local governments, and municipalities, with few exceptions, have become little more than the enforcement arms of federal power, bought and sold by the lure of federal money and programs. Their National Guards are sent to slaughter people in Iraq, not protect their home states or respond to emergencies. Now, the United States is a monolithic, regimented, militarized, bureaucratic war machine.

200 Raico, https://mises.org/library/european-miracle 201 For those counting, libertarians have refuted and completely dismantled economic,

cultural, and historical Marxist theories. 202 Clyde Wayne Crews, “Nobody Knows How Many Federal Agencies Exist,” August 26,

2015. https://cei.org/blog/nobody-knows-how-many-federal-agencies-exist


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One not need be a Rothbardian anarchist to conclude that the United States is simply too big to be anything but a tyranny.

The average congressman now represents an average of 700,000 people. On average, a congressman needs 350,001 votes to get elected. This means that 349,999 people are forced to be represented by a candidate they did not vote for. Congressmen also have over a 90% re-election rate and serve an average of ten years. Leaving aside the moral and philosophical issues of whether an agency of coercion can actually “represent” people—if individuals do not have the right to initiate violence, how can they delegate this non-existent right to someone else?—the fact that there are so few congressional members representing so many people is evidence that the U.S. is simply too big.

The framers of the Constitution argued that the population of congressional districts should never be larger than about 30,000-50,000 people, but thanks to the Reapportionment Act of 1929, the number of congressman has been capped at 435. If this law were repealed, as it should be—libertarians love repealing bad laws, not adding new ones—using the numbers of the framers, at a maximum of 50,000 people per district, there would have to be 6,400 members of Congress, and over 10,000 if we limited it to 30,000 people per district.203

While 10,000 congressmen provide better and more accurate representation, it would be highly impractical to have this many representatives sent to one city. Rather than go through the expense and inconvenience of having so many congressmen, perhaps it would be better to admit that the U.S. federal system is too large and centralized. It needs to be dissolved down to much, much smaller political units. 435 members of Congress representing 320 million people is great if you want an empire, massive bureaucracy, and absorption of state, local, community, and individual sovereignty—but not if you want liberty.

This conclusion is starting at us in the face, yet we refuse to accept this reality. Half the population enjoys wielding power over the other half, shoving their values down each other’s throats, while the ruling elite loves an outcome where half of the people are always dissatisfied with Predator R or Predator D. We have become so addicted to centralization and the forced association of large political units that it has become our God; 150 years ago, nearly a million people were murdered under this banner, and the president who waged that war is revered and honored to this day.

Perhaps we are too afraid to admit that our experiment in large-scale republicanism has failed in the task of maintaining a constitutional, federalist system with the rule of law (as if that is what 90% of the public even wants anyway). We always search for top-down reform; get money out of politics, new amendments, voting in new people, etc. None of these solutions, however, address the horrific size of the federal apparatus. The only solution to a problem of size is to become smaller.

203 http://www.thirty-thousand.org/

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What, then, is the optimal size of political units?

History suggests that the founders were onto something with the 30,000-50,000 numbers. But even that was only the recommended maximum size of a congressional district, not necessarily an independent, sovereign body. The ancient Greek city-states had about 50,000 citizens, while Athens at the height of its power never grew larger than 150,000. The polities of medieval Europe rarely had more than 50,000 people; Bologna at around 35,000, Paris at 50,000, Oxford and Cambridge under 20,000, and Italian cities that created the Renaissance boasted similar sizes.204

How would this apply to the U.S.? Should Charleston, South Carolina really be forced to live under the same political structure and regulations as Berkeley, California? They represent entirely different cultures, and even their geography would suggest a more decentralized and diversified rule.

There are at least 11 distinct cultures that exist within the United States, each with its own diverse set of politics, history, accents and customs. These unique cultures transcend and blend artificial state borders, including Yankeedom and New Netherland in the upper East Coast of the United States, the Midlands and Tidewater in the Midwest and upper South, the liberals in the Left Coast and the conservative desert regions in the Southwest, and the First Nation of Native Americans.205 If all of the secessionist and independence movements throughout American history has been successful, there would be 124 states instead of 50.206

Why should all of these people be forced to live under the same roof?

Secession and smallness may be dirty words in age of McMansions, big-box stores, and big bureaucracies, but over half of the world countries have less than 5.5 million people. 18 of the top 20 most prosperous nations are under 5 million, and a majority of the freest countries have less than 5 million—while almost 40 percent of those have less than 1 million people. Of the approximately 220 political entities counted by the United Nations, almost 100 of them are less than 10,000 square miles (about the size of Vermont). Nearly 80% of the world’s richest countries are smaller than average, and more than 15 are even smaller than Vermont.207

204 Kirkpatrick Sale, “Devolution, Dissolution, Secession, Separatism,” January 2, 2014.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/kirkpatrick-sale/devolution-dissolution-secession-separatism/

205 Matthew Speiser, “The 11 Nations of the United States,” July 27, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-11-nations-of-the-united-states-2015-7

206 Kelsey Campbell-Dolloghan, “A Map of the 124 United States of America That Could Have Been,” December 31, 2013. http://gizmodo.com/a-map-of-the-124-united-states-of-america-that-could-ha-1492308074

207 Sale, https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/kirkpatrick-sale/devolution-dissolution-secession-separatism/


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How many of those countries exist now thanks to secession and devolution of power? Should they have been forced at the point of a gun to join a centralized political unit they had no interest in?

...The optimum size of successful states was in the range of 3 to 5 million people, about the size of South Carolina, and no bigger than 35,000 square miles, about the size of…South Carolina.

So there we have some guidelines for the kinds of nations that seem to work well, in contrast to the besotted behemoth we have around us today. It’s not all that complicated, really: past a certain population, past a certain size, control and efficient government become more difficult, true representation (much less any semblance of democracy) becomes impossible, and costs of administration, transportation, distribution, and communication become unsustainable.208

Using these guidelines, there should be as many as 100 sovereign, independent political units in the continental U.S. From a libertarian standpoint, a state the size of Texas alone should have 100 of its own political units, but 100 independent political units would be a good start.

Vermont’s eastern neighbor New Hampshire serves as an excellent example of what a more realistic and viable political unit looks like. Despite being surrounded by Leftists, and under the thumb of a distant and bloody empire whose capital is over a 7-hour drive away, New Hampshire has no state income tax or sales tax, very few gun restrictions, and a “Live Free or Die” state motto. With barely over 1 million residents, their state house boasts 400 representatives, or about 1 for every 3,000 people. It is much harder to buy off state representatives or pass government-expanding bills in this type of political environment.

We have now divided up this oversized empire down to 11 unique cultures and chopped it down further into 100 political units—but, still, even more decentralization is optimal. “Dunbar’s number” suggests that human cooperation and organization is not a universal phenomenon. It is limited to a size far smaller than even 100 unique and independent political units. Dunbar’s number states that human beings can only maintain about 150 stable relationships. If a group becomes any larger than this, then social cohesion is only created by implementing laws that invariably end up violating liberty and private property.

Many companies have found that problems begin to arise in any building that houses more than about 150 people, and most social groups tend to naturally cluster around this number. This number correlates with the relative size of our neocortex and its ability to process only so much social complexity, limiting the

208 Ibid.

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amount of people we can directly trust. Monkeys and apes, with slightly smaller neocortex function, have a Dunbar number in the 5 to 50 range.209

“Of course we should treat everyone we come across—be it family, friend, or stranger with decency and respect,” notes Andrew Syrios. “But, if naturally-cohesive human groups are small, as the scientific evidence clearly shows, then what sort of societal arrangement would best suit our species in the complex, modern world our minds are clearly not designed for? One governed by a massive state apparatus, or one of more localized, federated communities?”210

Libertarianism is often labeled as “atomistic” by its detractors. It is the state and political centralization, however, which creates isolation and destroys local and communal bonds, while the libertarian values of liberty, property, and decentralization provide the atmosphere necessary to build genuine community and organization.

In the early 20th century, before the creation of a federal welfare state, nearly everyone in society belonged to various local and voluntary mutual-aid societies that provided medical care, insurance, welfare, assistance, job training, and a sense of community and comradery. On average, yearly membership to these mutual-aid societies cost about one day’s pay. These institutions represented society’s ability to self-organize and provide human-scale, voluntary, and authentic community.211 It is no coincidence that this decentralized organization governed by social capital—used to describe social and communal networks built on trust, reciprocity and cooperation—began to decline immediately after the Great Society welfare state programs were implemented in the early 1960s.212

Families, both nuclear and extended, are some of the least atomistic societal arrangements as well. Thanks to the coercive and centralized welfare state, however, the family as a vital social unit has virtually crumbled as the state has now replaced the authority of the family—especially the role of the father. In 1960, only 6% of children were born out of wedlock, while today that number is close to 40%. Divorces have skyrocketed. Adding insult to injury, the state then breaks up families further by sending men and now women—husbands, wives, sons, daughters—to kill and die in senseless wars.213

Charles Murray...has made the case that happiness and social capital are built on four virtues; industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion. And the government interferes with each to varying degrees. For example, welfare dependency reduces industriousness and incentivizes

209 Andrew Syrios, “Humans Are Hard-Wired to Value Some People over Others,” March

9, 2016. https://mises.org/library/humans-are-hard-wired-value-some-people-over-others

210 Ibid. 211 Andrew Syrios, “Markets Are Our Best Hope for Peaceful Cooperation,” March 23,

2016. https://mises.org/library/markets-are-our-best-hope-peaceful-cooperation 212 Ibid. 213 Ibid.


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family breakdown and a lack of family formation. This argument certainly fits better with the timeline and what we know about human nature.

This is especially true given that force is not a good means to build a cooperative society and the government uses little more than force.

No, the government destroys a sense of community and pits groups of people against each other. Human societies organize naturally through voluntary means, just as libertarians have predicted. And furthermore, a market economy based on mutually beneficial trade is the only way yet found for multiple groups of disparate and overlapping “tribes” or groups of “Dunbar’s numbers” to live peacefully and prosperously in a large, interconnected, and complex modern society.214

The large, centralized state has been nothing but a hindrance to actual, authentic community, voluntary and mutually beneficial relationships, and the market order. It not only prevents local and human-scale organization to flourish, but it constantly attacks and seeks to replace many of the private, non-state institutions that communities have relied upon for millennia to provide social order and harmony. This centralized model of society can only gain support or at least acceptance in society if traditional cultural and local traditions are undermined, which is why those who seek to expand the state (like Cultural Marxists) always attack civil society.

Decentralize Everything

Libertarianism can only be achieved by radical decentralization and a rejection of large-scale state power as a means of governing and ordering society. The same principles that make the market preferable to coercive government are the same reasons that a “market” for governing institutions has worked so well in the past—and would continue to do so in the future if given the opportunity.

A more free and voluntary society can be expanded through the political process of outright secession and local/state nullification of federal laws or, perhaps more realistically, simply asserting our rights of free association and igniting a massive movement of individuals personally ignoring federal and illegitimate authority.

State and local governments can undoubtedly be tyrannical and abusive, but it is far easier to control or change a localized authority than a centralized one. A large number of small, independent polities, like the medieval city-states that flourished in Europe, provide people with greater options and choices and the ability to exit the jurisdiction completely without too much burden. These restraints and checks on power afford the greatest incentive for liberty to grow.

Whether this process is achieved through civil disobedience or brave governors and mayors standing up to the Washington warlords, the best chance

214 Ibid.

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freedom and private property have to flourish is through dissolving and decentralizing power as close to the individual level as practically possible.

Unfortunately, as the wars and the civilizational decline of the 20th century have demonstrated, even a civilization that can create the traditions and safeguards of liberty can quickly fall prey to the poisonous ideologies of totalitarianism. Free societies not only require traditions of liberty, but also brave individuals willing to defend freedom and tell the truth no matter the consequences they may face.

The ancient Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero denounced the tyranny and bloodshed unleashed by Julius Caesar and his successors; his actions did not bear immediate fruit, but centuries later, his passion and writings would influence Erasmus, John Locke, Voltaire, and the founding of the American republic. The English “Leveller” John Lilburne wrote and distributed pamphlets challenging the Church of England’s monopoly. By refusing to incriminate himself, as was customary at the time, Lilburne argued that he had the right to know the charges levied against him. He also demanded the right to an attorney, enough time to prepare a defense, and the right to cross-examine witnesses. Following his lead, others began asserting these rights, and eventually they became a staple of the English legal system and codified in the 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, surrounded by totalitarianism in Europe, risked everything he had in order to publish his brilliant libertarian economic writings that refuted socialism, defended liberty, and inspired others to carry on the tradition. 215

These are just several individual examples; the history of the people who risked their lives, fortunes, and reputations to defend liberty and the Western tradition are too numerous to document here. It is vital, as an ode to our ancestors and as gifts to our children, that we defend this liberty that countless individuals risked so much for. “History shows that when liberty isn’t adequately defended,” argues Jim Powell, “it tends to slip away as intellectuals promote statist ideas, special interests lobby for favors, and politicians gain more power. All of us can play an important role by keeping ourselves informed, educating our children, speaking up at school meetings, telling our friends, using our professional influence, contributing time and money to help keep this uniquely glorious civilization alive.”216

Thanks to the advancements of technology, decentralization is becoming increasingly more realistic and viable.

This will require a strong commitment by all emerging communities and networks to a civic innovation called Exit Rights- the right to opt-out. Every time you press the “unsubscribe button” on annoying emails, you are practicing your exit rights on a small scale. On a larger scale, I believe the principle is sound and should be universalized to all forms of human

215 Powell, http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-has-liberty-flourished-

west 216 Ibid.


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interaction and political arrangements. The U.S. Constitution is a good illustration of the danger of creating the “perfect system” on paper without allowing for exit rights. The Constitution created a limited government, restricted by the Bill of Rights to a few central duties. Yet in reality, over the past two hundred years it has grown into the largest government in history, with the largest military, an endless complex of oppressive regulations and a national debt to the tune of 19 trillion dollars. Things didn’t turn out as planned, to say the least. And many European nation states are in a similar predicament, or worse. Idealists can create wonderful systems on paper, but these ideals over time are inevitably corrupted by short-termists and power seekers. Exit rights will protect future generations from systems that become tyrannical. The freedom of each individual human being to enter or leave a particular political arrangement at any time will be an incentive for future polycentric orders to respect the rights of its citizens, while creating competition between orderies that will drive them toward transparency and excellence.217

In order to be free, it is imperative that we not only recognize the basic principles of libertarian ethics but also understand that they are a unique creation of Western culture and political decentralization. These pillars represent the most potent weapons against the powers of the modern, centralized, corporatized, blood-soaked Leviathan state. Its top-heavy, bloated structure, however, becomes increasingly weaker and fragile against forces of decentralization.

217 Phillip Saunders, “From Nation States to Stateless Nations,” November 5, 2015.

https://medium.com/@Physes/from-nation-states-to-stateless-nations-52c73c79bd92#.vsqzniv0d

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Chapter 6

The Mythology of State Power

Any state, no matter how powerful, cannot not rule solely through the use of brute force. There are too few rulers and too many of us for coercion alone to be an effective means of control. The political class must rely on ideology to achieve popular compliance, masking the iron fist in a velvet glove. Violence is always behind every state action, but the most efficient form of expropriation occurs when the public believes it is in their interests to be extorted.

Mythology is necessary to blunt the violent nature of state power in order to maximize the plunder of property—and, most importantly, provide an aura of legitimacy. The perception of legitimacy “is the only thing distinguishing a tax collector from an extortionist, a police officer from a vigilante, and a soldier from a mercenary. Legitimacy is an illusion in the mind without which the government does not even exist.”218

State authority, and public obedience to it, is manufactured through smokescreens of ideology and deception. These myths sustain the state and offer an illusion of legitimacy, where orders, no matter how immoral or horrific, are followed because they are seen as emanating from a just authority. The state cannot implement violence against everyone everywhere and overwhelm the host, so the battle is waged against the hearts and minds of the public. Fear is exploited, language is distorted, and propaganda is spread, while narratives and history are tightly controlled. The gulag of state power, first and foremost, always exists in the mind.

If the mythology of state power is smashed, then the state is exposed for what it is: institutionalized violence, expropriator of the peaceful and productive, and entirely illegitimate.

The Myth of the Rule of Law

In order for a society to have peace and order, there needs to be a set of largely uniform and neutral laws in which the vast majority of the public agree are fair and just. Throughout the history of Western law, a decentralized process of trial-and-error, competing courts, and private arbitration achieved these rules. A monopoly power was not necessary, nor desirable. Before the rise of the modern bureaucratic, democratic nation-state, the monarch was the symbol of

218 Davi Barker, Authoritarian Sociopathy: Toward a Renegade Psychological Experiment

(Free Press Publications, 2015), 4.


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monopolistic order, and his power consisted mostly in enforcing the private common-law tradition that had already developed over centuries.219

Eventually, the nation-state model we see today grew and absorbed this decentralized tradition into a monolithic, top-down coercive regime imposed by legislatures, state police, and bureaucracies. The “rule of law” became the propaganda term used to justify this radical departure from the Western tradition of common-law and private arbitration. The law was now political in nature, subject to the usual array of corruption and disincentives inherent in any political order. With the monopoly state now in charge of law, the idea that a coercively imposed system of justice—in which everyone is governed by neutral rules that are objectively applied by judges—became a powerful myth for states to exert control over society.

As a myth, however, the concept of the rule of law is both powerful and dangerous. Its power derives from its great emotive appeal. The rule of law suggests an absence of arbitrariness, an absence of the worst abuses of tyranny. The image presented by the slogan “America is a government of laws and not people” is one of fair and impartial rule rather than subjugation to human whim. This is an image that can command both the allegiance and affection of the citizenry. After all, who wouldn't be in favor of the rule of law if the only alternative were arbitrary rule? But this image is also the source of the myth's danger. For if citizens really believe that they are being governed by fair and impartial rules and that the only alternative is subjection to personal rule, they will be much more likely to support the state as it progressively curtails their freedom.220

The rule of law, imposed by the state, is simply a myth. There is no such thing as “a government of laws and not people.” Legislative edicts are always subject to the biases and agendas of those who interpret them, and will be imposed in this manner by whoever currently wields the power of the monopoly state over society.

For example, despite the U.S. Constitution’s very clear language in most of its passages (there are some dangerously vague sections, of course), the most trained and brilliant legal minds can come to completely opposite conclusions over the exact same clause. Whether it is a particular amendment in the Bill of Rights or the particular language of executive or legislative power, a liberal and conservative judge could use sound reasoning and cite historical precedent to make their case—and they would both be right. “...Because the law consists of contradictory rules and principles,” argues John Hasnas, “sound legal arguments will be available for all legal conclusions, and hence, the normative

219 John Hasnas, “The Myth of the Rule of Law.”

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm 220 Ibid.

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predispositions of the decision makers, rather than the law itself, determine the outcome of cases.”221

The law, then, is not a neutral body of rules to help keep order and govern society; it is merely an opinion with a gun. Whenever the state is in charge of anything, the outcomes, process, and administration are always political in nature. There can never be a system of definite, consistent rules that produce determinate results because these laws, no matter how they are written, will always be subjected to the biases, prejudices, and discrimination of those who interpret and enforce them.

The idea that the law is not neutral or determinant is not a revolutionary doctrine and should not be entirely shocking. Over a century ago, former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that certainty in law is an illusion; judicial decisions rely more on the language of logic than they do on objective enforcement. Since at least the 1970s, the Critical Legal Studies movement has recognized this, and even they are just reviving the legal realists who made these same insights decades before them. The idea of determinate law is actually an undesirable feature—even if we were to overcome the impossibility of making it so—as the strength of an effective legal system lies in its ability to have certain amounts of flexibility. This is why the decentralized, private law tradition was able to produce several codes of uniform laws—do not murder, steal, assault, or initiate aggression in general—while providing the room to adapt to social change and distinct cultures.222

When the law is under the dominion of a top-down, coercive state it is transformed from a system of governance to a body of expropriation. Whether through the use of logic or emotional appeals, whoever wields the state apparatus says what the law is and they will dispense their armed enforcers to make sure their law is fulfilled.

If an objective rule of law is impossible, then why does this myth persist? To ask the question is to answer it. “...Like all myths,” notes Hasnas, “it is designed to serve an emotive, rather than cognitive, function. The purpose of a myth is not to persuade one's reason, but to enlist one's emotions in support of an idea. And this is precisely the case for the myth of the rule of law; its purpose is to enlist the emotions of the public in support of society's political power structure.”223

If the public views the law as a neutral and objective arbiter, then they are more willing to support state power and its violent expropriation and parasitism. We are more willing to accept the comfortable delusion of objectivity and the need for predictable laws than deal with the frightening alternatives of supposedly unpredictable anarchy. “Once they believe that they are being commanded by an impersonal law rather than other human beings,” people “view their obedience to political authority as a public-spirited acceptance of the requirements of social life



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rather than mere acquiescence to superior power,” notes Hasnas.224 Tyrants of the past used to claim that their rule was inspired by Divine Right to mask the fact that their rule was an exercise of naked aggression over their subjects. When this doctrine became discredited, a new myth was needed, and the rule of law was born.

No matter how impossible the rule of law may be, the state has a heavy interest in promoting this myth.

Before the rise of legislative law, the private, decentralized, and polycentric common-law system was effective at promoting peace and public order because it lacked the monopoly power of a centralized state. Under both models, laws are never determinate or universally objective. But under a private law system, bad decisions that were not accepted by the public or viewed as overreaches could not be coercively imposed on society. This system of checks and balances allowed laws beneficial to the protection of private property to flourish while weeding out the bad laws.

Under a state system, however, it is much harder, if not impossible, to fix bad laws as there now exists a political incentive to keep the law on the books, while most judges serve lengthy or even life terms. If the judge, legislature, and police are all part of the state apparatus, they will tend to find expansive definitions for state power with limited definitions of individual freedoms.

“...The myth of the rule of law does more than render the people submissive to state authority; it also turns them into the state's accomplices in the exercise of its power,” concludes Hasnas. “For people who would ordinarily consider it a great evil to deprive individuals of their rights or oppress politically powerless minority groups will respond with patriotic fervor when these same actions are described as upholding the rule of law.”225 While the state does indeed provide some law and order under its jurisdiction, the “rule of law” has been used as a propaganda tool in order to help cement and legitimize state power.

Fear and Propaganda

Fear is a necessary component of the human condition. It allows us to survive and adapt by affording us the ability to sense danger and then take the necessary precautions against it, whether it be running away, defending ourselves, or taking the steps to avoid or confront these dangers in the future. The state is very aware of the role that fear plays in our lives, cultivating it to achieve popular submission, compliance with edicts, and even cooperation with the state’s love affair with mass murder. “Without popular fear,” writes Robert Higgs, “no government could endure more than twenty-four hours.”226

224 Ibid. 225 Ibid. 226 Robert Higgs, “The Political Economy of Fear,” May 16, 2005.

https://mises.org/library/political-economy-fear

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Since brute force alone tends to be a costly and inefficient way of generating a steady flow of tribute, states have historically used fear as the favored weapon of compliance. Subjects were taught to fear the Pharaoh's sword and his divine powers, thus putting their bodies and souls in jeopardy if power was not obeyed.

Internal and external threats are one of the most common ways the state uses fear to gain, secure, and expand power.

Over the ages, governments refined their appeals to popular fears, fostering an ideology that emphasizes the people's vulnerability to a variety of internal and external dangers from which the governors—of all people!—are said to be their protectors. Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats. Sometimes the government, as if seeking to fortify the mythology with grains of truth, does protect people in this fashion—even the shepherd protects his sheep, but he does so to serve his own interest, not theirs, and when the time comes, he will shear or slaughter them as his interest dictates. When the government fails to protect the people as promised, it always has a good excuse, often blaming some element of the population—scapegoats such as traders, money lenders, and unpopular ethnic or religious minorities. “[N]o prince," Machiavelli assures us, “was ever at a loss for plausible reasons to cloak a breach of faith.”227

It is never difficult to persuade people to defend their homes, families, and communities from actual, physical threats to their safety. It takes the ideology of state, however, to convince these same people to fly thousands of miles away from their homes to blindly kill strangers who posed no threat to them.

Fear, however, is a depreciating asset. After the threats the state claims are necessary to protect against fail to materialize or are later proven to be gross exaggerations, the public may be wary or skeptical of future warnings of impending doom. The state must then counter this tendency by creating an industry of fear, using the media and state contractors as allies to perpetuate alarm. Military contractors conduct studies that unsurprisingly confirm the state’s claim about a supposed foreign threat, while the media mercilessly pounds a narrative of talking points and slogans that mimic state propaganda. Each party benefits from this relationship; the state gains the necessary public acceptance, the contractor receives their stolen loot, and the media outlet increases its viewership (if it bleeds, it leads).228

It should come as no surprise that many of the same neoconservatives who created a “stove pipe” of deliberate disinformation about Iraq had previously worked for Lockheed Martin—a merchant of death that receives almost 90% of its revenue from state subsidies. Using their influence both inside the Bush administration—including a secretive Office of Special Plans shadow department 227 Ibid. 228 Ibid.


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inside the Pentagon—and in various news outlets and think tanks, this small cabal of neocons created policy papers urging war, regime change, and a general policy of military expansion and hegemony throughout the entire Middle East.229

For decades, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies either outright owned or highly controlled several prominent newspapers and media outlets like The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time magazine as part of Operation Mockingbird. As then CIA director William Casey put it in 1981, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”230

The best way to achieve popular compliance of illegitimate authority is the use of fear. Whether it is the fear of prison or the fear of an external bogeyman, state power could not be maintained without scaring the public into submission. Legitimate authority, on the other hand, like the family unit, stems from persuasion, cooperation, and affection. The farther an authority strays from the local level where it belongs, the more coercion and fear is needed to maintain it. “Fear and obedience are the brick and mortar of the state and the collectivists are the stonemasons,” argues Bill Buppert.231

“Were we ever to stop being afraid of the government itself and to cast off the phony fears it has fostered,” concludes Higgs, “the government would shrivel and die, and the host would disappear for the tens of millions of parasites in the United States—not to speak of the vast number of others in the rest of the world—who now feed directly and indirectly off the public's wealth and energies. On that glorious day, everyone who had been living at public expense would have to get an honest job, and the rest of us, recognizing government as the false god it has always been, could set about assuaging our remaining fears in more productive and morally defensible ways.”232

Government Schooling

Government schools also serve the function of instilling a mindset of fear, obedience, and propaganda. They are funded—and attendance is mandated—through the use of physical violence (taxation and truancy laws). For 15,000 hours of their young and impressionable lives, every child is subjected to instruction on how and why state power is not only necessary, but also virtuous. Presidents’ faces are plastered on the walls; the more people they murdered and the more expropriation they initiated, the more often they are praised and studied. The 229 Daniel Schulman, “The Iraq War, Brought to You by Your Friends at Lockheed Martin,”

January 16, 2007. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2007/01/iraq-war-brought-you-your-friends-lockheed-martin

230 Melissa Dykes, “CIA Admits to Congress the Agency Uses Mainstream Media to Distribute Disinformation,” August 30, 2015. http://www.globalresearch.ca/1975-video-cia-admits-to-congress-the-agency-uses-mainstream-media-to-distribute-disinformation/5424860

231 Bill Buppert, “The Evil That Men Do: Willful Submission to Illegitimate Authority,” March 5, 2016. http://zerogov.com/?p=4692

232 Higgs, https://mises.org/library/political-economy-fear

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Pledge of Allegiance, which praises an indivisible union, is cited every morning, while bells coordinate the child’s behavior—a perfect model for creating subservience and obedience. After a minimum of twelve years of government schooling, is it any wonder that a large majority of people view the state as legitimate, necessary, and beneficial to society?

Modeled after the militaristic Prussian system of schooling, government education serves the purpose of creating individuals who will take orders, work corporate jobs, and who will believe what to think, never how to think. Originating in 16th and 17th century Prussia and expanded upon when Germany was unified in the 19th century, the goal of a compulsory, tax-funded, state education system was “education to the State, education for the State, education by the State.”233 Public schooling was built on instilling obedience, respect for arbitrary orders, conditioning, and memorization. Whole ideas were broken into fragmented “subjects” and school days were divided into fixed periods so that self-motivation and intellectual independence would always be interrupted and molded.234

John Taylor Gatto—winner of multiple New York City Teacher of the Year awards and a harsh critic of modern public education—notes that American advocates of government schooling observed this militaristic model of education, loved it, and sought to implement it in the United States:

A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century; fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to these shores. Prussia’s ultimate goal was to unify Germany; the Americans’ was to mold hordes of immigrant Catholics to a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that, children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influences.235

Nowhere is this more evident in the creation of kindergarten. The first kindergarten was opened in Germany in 1840 with the goal of molding and socializing children to be soldiers and workers for the state. Kindergarten was to be a “garden of children,” who were to be cultivated like plants by Progressive social engineers. Three decades later, the first government kindergarten was opened in America. Rather than emphasize play and free expression, children were now schooled to be good subjects. Keeping children busy, occupied, and disciplined was far more preferable than unstructured self-learning, independence, and freedom.236

It must always be remembered that any and all actions undertaken by the state are backed by the threat or the application of lethal force. While the

233 Sheldon Richman, Separating School and State: How to Liberate American Families

(Future of Freedom Foundation, 2013), 45. 234 Ibid., 46. 235 Ibid. 236 Ibid., 46-47.


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Americans of today, after generations of this type of schooling, are conditioned to think that government schooling is virtuous, previous Americans with thicker spines knew otherwise. When Massachusetts attempted to set up the first modern government schooling system in 1852, the armed government enforcers tasked with implementing it faced intense resistance from the public. Children were literally dragged kicking and screaming from their parents’ arms when the military was eventually used to enforce government education.

Some 80 percent of the people of Massachusetts resisted the imposition of public schooling. In 1880, it took the militia to persuade the parents of Barnstable, on Cape Cod, to give up their children to the system. By 1900, nearly every state had government schools and compulsory attendance. At first, only elementary education was provided by the state. Later, the government system was extended to high school. These days, the many advocates of public schooling want the state to provide day care beginning at an early age and year-round schooling. The trend is unmistakable.237

Only under a system of compulsory, top-down government schooling can a nation become so accustomed to and indifferent towards the war and mass slaughter that is commonly perpetuated by the U.S. government. From “the classroom to the killing fields,” as Dan Sanchez argues:

The dependency and docility are cultivated by placing children under constant direction and supervision by teachers and administrators, who bestow favors and inflict punishments at will. Then there is the regimentation: the prescribed classroom routines, constantly being lined up, the P.E. exercises in military drill formation, the assigned movements from cell to cell according to a Pavlovian bell. Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, a daily ritual of professing submission to the State, originally prescribed it to be accompanied by what he termed “a military salute”: the same salute now famously associated with the Nazis...

...All this conditioning is reinforced by the content of the curriculum, which emphasizes reverence for authority: from its glorification of the police to its cult of the presidency. The factory schools mass-produce lockstep “patriots,” ready to fall in line in support of whatever war his government has declared, and to hate whichever foreigners his government has instructed him to hate. They also churn out “good soldiers” ready to enlist or be conscripted, and then to lay down their lives if so commanded: the ultimate “pledge of allegiance” to the State.238

Government schooling takes people when they are at their most creative, curious, and energetic and then does everything possible to suppress these

237 Ibid., 48. 238 Dan Sanchez, “How Schooling Leads to War,” May 10, 2016.

http://original.antiwar.com/dan_sanchez/2016/05/09/schooling-leads-war/

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instincts. Even with no malicious intent whatsoever—based solely on the incentives of mass democratic egalitarianism and bureaucratic regimentation—government schools teach children to conform, pass tests, recite knowledge rather than comprehend it, obey authority blindly, deny them their liberty, interfere with their cognition and ability to nurture, cooperate, develop responsibility, and show empathy, and links learning with fear and drudgery.239

Is it any surprise that in this type of environment, children in schools are recipients of vicious bullying, forced to take psychotropic drugs240 (especially boys), graduate unprepared for the real world, lack the ability to reason or use logic, suffer from an extended childhood of perpetual adolescence—unaware of their civilization and culture—and posses nowhere near the agency to accept the responsibilities of liberty and a free society?

As of 2013, 14 percent of the population cannot read, 21 percent read below a 5th grade level, and nearly 20 percent of high school graduates are illiterate.241 In 1970, adjusted for inflation, the total cost of a K-12 education in a government school was $57,602. By 2011, that number had ballooned to $166,703, with either no improvement in math, science, and reading scores or actual declines.242 Despite (or because of?) trillions of dollars of government spending—including the creation of a federal department of education—we see the ugly reality of government-run services: quality goes down, cost goes up.

Before government schools, where education was run privately, voluntarily, and in a decentralized manner, “From 1650 to 1795, male literacy climbed from 60 to 90 percent; female literacy went from 30 to 45 percent,” notes Sheldon Richman. “Between 1800 and 1840, literacy in the Northern States rose from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent. And in the South during the same span, the rate grew from 50-60 percent to 81 percent.”243

Massachusetts had reached a level of 98 percent literacy in 1850 before the state's compulsory education law of 1852. Private schools were overwhelmingly meeting the demands of the public and providing a far better education than we receive today at a fraction of the price.244

239 Peter Gray, “Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education,” September 9, 2009.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/seven-sins-our-system-forced-education

240 Brian Shilhavy, “Medical Kidnapping: A Threat to Every Family in America Today,” March 2, 2016. http://medicalkidnap.com/2016/05/09/medical-kidnapping-a-threat-to-every-family-in-america/

241 “The U.S. Illiteracy Rate Hasn’t Changed In 10 Years,” September 6, 2013. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html

242 David Boaz, “What Do We Know about Education?” July 7, 2016. https://www.cato.org/blog/what-do-we-know-about-education

243 Richman, Separating School and State, 41. 244 Ibid.


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The militarized model of schooling not only promotes state supremacy but instills psychological habits into children at such a young age that they become difficult, if not impossible, to break. In the story of the elephant and the rope, a man is perplexed when he sees an elephant tied to a post by a rope without any chains or cages. The large elephant could easily break the rope, yet makes no attempt at running away. A trainer explains to the man that these elephants are tied with the very same rope when they are very small animals and are not yet strong enough to flee. As they grow older, they have been conditioned to believe that the rope can still hold them. Thanks to this conditioning at such a young age, a weak rope will suffice.245

The weak rope not only can bind a large and powerful creature, but even more importantly, discourages any thoughts of individual freedom and sovereignty.

Situational Leninism and Identity Politics

Vladimir Lenin—the early 20th century Russian revolutionary, Marxist, and mass butcher—was perhaps the most honest practitioner of political science the world has ever seen. Shedding the use of sophistry and mythology that most defenders of state power employ, Lenin embraced the fact that politics is violence. To Lenin, the only question that matters is, “who does what to whom?” “Power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules,” was Lenin’s mantra. The state is able to expand through the ideology of the arbitrary application of Lenin’s doctrine, or “situational Leninism.” To Lenin, rights and ethics are not objective concepts discovered through logical deduction and historical tradition but are instead dependent on Who and Whom.246

For the Left, this situational Leninism tends to take place in the realm of “identity politics.” Whenever a progressive tells someone to “check their privilege, it is an injunction to check your identity status,” writes Dan Sanchez. “But of course, you are not supposed to check your individual identity; you are called on to check which class or collective identity you have been assigned. Are you a member of an ‘official victim’ class or an ‘official oppressor’ class? Is your voice to be heard or muted? Are you to be sympathized with or vilified? Empowered or fettered? Are you to be a Who or a Whom?”247

Virtually the entire Leftist and Marxist worldview is rooted in warfare sociology. Human affairs are always and everywhere guided by conflict; capital over labor, rich against poor, white versus black, men over women, straight versus gay. The Leftist project consists of crusades to reverse this unending war and

245 “The Elephant and the Rope.” http://theunboundedspirit.com/short-story-the-elephant-

and-the-rope/ 246 William N. Grigg, “Law and Order Leninism,” December 27, 2014.

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2014/12/law-and-order-leninism.html 247 Dan Sanchez, “Warfare Sociology and Identity Politics,” June 6, 2014.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/06/dan-sanchez/witchs-brew/

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conflict, even if these supposed “privileged groups” had committed no crime. Their identity alone is guilt enough. The goal is to switch the roles of this perpetual struggle, flipping the Who and the Whom.248

The what—state power employed by the Who against the Whom—is the natural progression of this situational Leninism. Rights, law, morality, and justice are not objective and natural to us; to the Marxist, they are merely conditional. This is also why Marxism defends and promotes mass democracy, where liberty and property are up for bid at every election.

This process of situational Leninism serves the state’s interests by always allowing for some popular excuse for employing violence against a Whom in favor of a Who. The parties may change, but this matters little as long as the state is able to expand power and extract wealth from the population. Marxist-Leninism, in its rejection of private property and natural rights, will always pave a path poverty and chaos. To the Marxist, societies, identities, and classes are permanently at war. The state, then, serves as the medium for perpetual revolution as the proverbial What for the ever-changing Who and Whom.

Situational Leninism also gives everyone in society an excuse to support the state. Each side cheers for blood when the police implement violence against their respective Whoms. Without the NAP and the libertarian ethic, everyone’s liberties and properties are subject to the situational discretion of the Who wielding power.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the hypocritical reactions of Progressives to Michael Brown, LaVoy Finicum, and Cliven Bundy.

Cliven Bundy was essentially accused of tax evasion as he refused to pay grazing fees to the federal government. Bundy was confronted by the state, whose agents were prepared to confiscate his property and kill him if he resisted. Bundy—who is still alive thanks to the intervention of armed citizens who pointed their privately owned guns back at the state in defense of him and his family—was dishonestly labeled a racist by the Left. Progressives screeched and urged the state to employ any and all violence at its disposal against Bundy. Bundy, as a privileged, cisgendered, straight white man, was guilty simply because of his identity.249

Lavoy Finicum, who organized a group calling itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, had had enough of federal control over lands in the Western U.S. and decided to resist. After several weeks, he was eventually shot in cold blood by the FBI and Oregon State Troopers, left to bleed and die in the snow. He was not a violent criminal; but he committed the unforgivable sin of defying the sanctity of state power, and was summarily executed. For the Left, since Finicum was a white, conservative, God-fearing family man, his 4th and 5th Amendment rights no longer applied. The Left called Finicum and his group

248 Ibid. 249 Grigg, http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2014/12/law-and-order-leninism.html


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“Y’all Qaeda” and urged the state to deal with these “militants” with anything from drone strikes to a Ruby Ridge style massacre.250

The same Progressives who begged for Finicum’s death, however, had a slightly different tone a year earlier when Michael Brown was killed in the middle of the street by a police officer. Despite the fact that Brown had robbed a convenience store and then charged at Officer Darren Wilson, the Left portrayed Brown as a “gentle giant” who was shot by a racist cop with his hands up. As a member of the oppressed class, Brown—a young black male killed by a white police officer—received nothing but passionate support and defense from the Left. His 4th and 5th Amendment rights were violated by Officer Darren Wilson, you see, because of his identity and class. Finicum? Obviously a racist, probably an Islamophobe, so he has no rights.251

The situational Leninism of Finicum and Brown also featured a layer of irony on top of the hypocrisy of selective outrage and blood thirst. While Brown’s killing popularized the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protest slogan (which turned out to be a lie), an unarmed LaVoy Finicum was actually murdered with his hands up.252

Libertarianism, on the other hand, has no use for situational Leninism. Flowing from the NAP and the libertarian ethic, all violations of individual rights are to be opposed. Identity politics and Cultural Marxism are rejected because they are little more than sophistry used to justify a preference on how institutionalized violence will be employed.

The Psychology of Power

As a parasitic and violent institution, a state can only survive if its actions are perceived as legitimate by a majority of the population. Unfortunately for the cause of liberty, several scientific experiments have revealed that the psychology of authority is a very powerful tool in maintenance of state power.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram published the results of experiments he designed in order to measure just how willing people are to obey unethical or immoral orders from authority figures. Experiment participants were divided into “teachers” and “learners” and placed in different rooms and were only able to hear each other. The experimenter instructed the teachers to read questions to the learners, and if they answered incorrectly they were to administer electric shocks of ever increasing voltage. The teachers, however, were unaware that they were the subjects of the experiment; the electric shocks were fake and the reactions were prerecorded.253

250 Dan Sanchez, “Hands Up, Don’t Execute,” February 2, 2016.

http://www.dansanchez.me/feed/hands-up-dont-execute 251 Ibid. 252 Ibid. 253 Barker, Authoritarian Sociopathy, 6.

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Eventually, after several increases in the voltage of the shocks, the learners were instructed to bang on the wall, complain of a heart condition, or even go silent. The teachers would express a desire to stop the experiment, but with simple and direct encouragement from the experimenter—including being told that they would be absolved of all responsibility for their actions—the teachers would continue to administer shocks. The experiment only ended after the maximum shock was given three times or if a teacher insisted on stopping after all four of the experimenter’s verbal prods (“Please continue,” “The experiment requires that you continue,” “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” “You have no other choice, you must go on”) were exhausted.254

Milgram and his contemporaries predicted that only 1-3% of his subjects would administer a lethal shock. They were shocked when over 65% of the subjects administered the maximum 450-volt shock. These results were not unique to Milgram’s experiments. Other psychologists have conducted similar experiments throughout the world and have produced nearly identical results. A large majority of diverse subjects were willing to deliver lethal jolts of electricity to a complete stranger, while the stranger screamed and pleaded them to stop, based solely on the instructions of an authority figure in a lab coat.255

In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted his now infamous Stanford Prison experiment. Zimbardo assembled a fake prison in the basement of Stanford building. 24 paid volunteers, who had no criminal background or a history of mental problems, were assigned the roles of prison guard or prisoner based on the random results of a coin flip. Zimbardo acted as prison superintendent while his undergraduate research assistant took on the role of the warden. The prison guards were instructed to keep a fixed schedule, make the prisoners feel powerless, take away the prisoners’ individuality, and given uniforms, mirrored glasses to prevent eye contact, and wooden batons as a sign of status. They were told to maintain control but were not allowed to use physical violence.256

The prisoners were fake-arrested from their homes by the Palo Alto police department, given fake charges, fingerprinted, had their mug shots taken, handcuffed, chained around the ankles, and sent to the mock prison. They were then strip-searched, dressed in typical prisoner clothes, and issued numbers. Within just 24 hours, the guards became psychologically and physically abusive as they quickly welcomed their new positions of power. The prisoners also adapted to their new roles; they took on the identities of the prison number assigned to then, began losing their independent personalities, developed submissive attitudes, passively accepted physical punishment, and punished fellow prisoners when ordered to by the guards.257

Over the next few days, the guards begin to use torture to elicit compliance from the prisoners while setting up separate rooms for the prisoners based on their 254 Ibid. 255 Ibid., 7. 256 Ibid., 11. 257 Ibid., 12.


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level of obedience. The prisoners used their beds to barricade the cell door while the guards emptied out fire extinguishers at them. In response to a prisoner hunger strike, the guards implemented exercise drills, took away their beds, forced them to go naked, locked them in solitary confinement in a dark closet, and forced prisoners to use a bucket as a toilet.258

The prisoners also began to police themselves, engaging in horizontal discipline even without orders from the guards. Since the state does not have the ability to police our every action, horizontal enforcement from the citizenry against those who dare to act independently or question this master-slave relationship is essential to political control. After only six days, Zimbardo finally stopped the experiment.259

Zimbardo explained that not only did the prisoners and guards fully internalize their fictional identities, but that he did so as well in his role as superintendent. The experiment should have been stopped sooner, Zimbardo admits, and he began to prioritize the prison over the ethics of the experiment. Prisoners were fully aware that they could stop at any time, yet only two of them quit the experiment early. Most of the guards expressed disappointment that it only lasted six days, while the prisoners expressed guilt and remorse for crimes they did not commit.260

“What is clear from both the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment,” concludes Davi Barker, “is that abuse of authority, and obedience to corrupt authority seem to be caused by the situation more than a result of individual personalities.”261

Control The Language, Control The People

One of the most effective ways of controlling a population is through the manipulation of language. As one of the hallmarks of our species, language has evolved over thousands of years in a decentralized, bottom-up way to reflect the localized and unique peoples of a given area. Accents and dialects are a beautiful reminder of this. In civil society, language is used to communicate, define concepts, express preferences, and define our humanity. For the state and ruling classes, however, language is used as a means of manipulation, control, and deception.

This is perhaps most evident in the use of the term “we” when referring to an act committed by the state. With the rise of democracy as supposedly the highest form of political order—a thesis which generally goes unquestioned and always asserted self-evidently—“the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, ‘we are the government,’” writes

258 Ibid. 259 Ibid. 260 Ibid. 261 Ibid.

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Murray Rothbard. “The useful collective term ‘we’ has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If ‘we are the government,’ then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also ‘voluntary’ on the part of the individual concerned.”262

This simple tool of collectivizing state power blurs the lines between citizen and state and hides the real nature of the state’s role and relationship to the rest of the society. For the libertarian, there is no “we” when referring to the state. “We” didn’t bomb, invade, occupy, and murder hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, they (the U.S. government) did. We didn’t steal our own money and transfer it to someone else, they did. We didn’t throw innocent people into cages, they did. The state’s exploitation is masked by collectivizing it; but no matter what type of political system exists in a country, the state is always a separate, parasitic institution.

In order for the state to legitimize its organized crime syndicate, its actions must be cloaked in euphemisms, sophistry, and the softening of the language. This has become such a common occurrence in everyday life that it may even be difficult to notice how ubiquitous this practice is. Although the state participates in theft on the grandest scale, by calling these acts taxation, suddenly the practice is viewed as legitimate and even necessary. Murder is a universally condemned act of aggression, but when states commit horrific acts of mass murder, it is called war. The civilian deaths that result are dismissed as “collateral damage.”

Torture becomes “enhanced interrogation.” Sexual assaults are “TSA pat-downs.” Police have “sovereign immunity” when they break the laws they are sworn to uphold. If a citizen counterfeits money, he will be prosecuted, but if done on a large, centralized scale it’s called monetary policy and “quantitative easing.” The peaceful, voluntary order of civil society is dubbed “private”—implying greed, selfishness, or exclusion—while the violence of the state is referred to as “public.”

Aware of the power of language and its effect on how ideas are perceived, virtually all legislation and programs are also riddled with unobjectionable terms. The PATRIOT Act, which gutted huge sections of constitutional rights the federal government is theoretically supposed to uphold, passed with virtually no friction through Congress. What are you, unpatriotic? A bill that vastly increased the federalization and top-down, bureaucratic control of education was called No Child Left Behind, implicitly stating that opposition to this program means that you wanted children left behind.

Virtually every government program is ribboned with a benevolent title and almost always produces the exact opposite effect of what it was supposedly intended to do; Obamacare (The Affordable Care Act), Head Start, Great Society, Social Security, Department of Defense, Protect and Serve. The list could go on forever.

262 Murray Rothbard, Anatomy of the State (Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2009), 9-10.


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The manipulation of language is not limited to the political class, however. The Cultural Marxism that has been sweeping across the West uses vicious methods of policing speech and language, bullying, and intimidating people for holding opinions not compatible with The Current Year. The idea of being on the “wrong side of history” is, in fact, a Marxist notion as well. According to Marx, History was a scientifically determined and inevitable Force steamrolling through the world. The idea that history may be cyclical—or that order may be a delicate, even providential process, unique to a given people at a certain time and dependent upon specific cultural factors—is never even considered.

Rather than engage in discussion and debate, anyone who disagrees with the Cultural Marxist program of radical cultural transformation, identity politics, the mass importation of people with foreign languages, religions and customs, or who dares to defend the West’s unique heritage and history, is diagnosed with pathology. You are simply an Islamophobe, homophobe, transphobe, racist, bigot, sexist, etc. if you believe in Western civilization, and your arguments can be dismissed without debate.

People are divided into classes based on their “oppressor/oppressed scale,” intersectionalized, sliced, diced, and deconstructed into ever-increasing classes of victimhood. Our language, thoughts, and habits are then intensely and vigorously policed in order to subjugate everyone to these narratives, while opinions of certain groups can be dismissed outright simply based on their religion and ethnicity. To the Cultural Marxist, virtually everything —from science to gender to reality itself—is a “social construct” imposed by patriarchy and colonization. This cultural poison and language control has a near-universal presence in universities.

Those who fail to comply with the edicts of the Thought Police will have their motives questioned and their jobs threatened. They will point, shriek, bully, scream, yell, disrupt speaking events, and riot against anyone or any idea that threatens their worldview or any language that does not sufficiently align with their Leninism. Any pushback is met with hysterical pearl clutching. Like the Bolsheviks who turned Russia into a prison camp, Cultural Marxists require permanent revolution. Policing the language is one of the most effective ways of waging it.

The ethos of Cultural Marxism now dominates virtually every institution in America. The narrative of politically-correct Progressivism dominates both major political parties in America, nearly all departments of the federal government, academia from kindergarten on up, the boardrooms and branding of major corporations, traditional media, social media, and Hollywood and television. All major religious institutions in the West, from the Vatican to mainline Protestant churches to nearly all synagogues, are now thoroughly Progressive both politically and doctrinally.263

263 Jeff Deist, “Progressives, Left and Right,” May 2, 2016.

https://mises.org/blog/progressives-left-and-right

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American conservatism, which builds itself up as the antithesis to progressivism, has no interest in conserving anything. While there was a time when conservatism was an anti-state, anti-war, Burkean critique of the corporate state, conservatives have spent the last few decades promoting their own version of progressivism: globalism, nation-building, massive federal spending, mass immigration, and replacing unique, local American cultures with monolithic mega-churches, strip malls, and golf courses.

The Orwellian use of language and doublespeak is used to blunt the inherent violence of state action, quell opposition to control by painting opponents as heartless or uncompassionate, fracture social orders that are conducive to decentralized governance and liberty, and sell the public an aura of legitimacy. It is PR for the psychopaths, controllers, regulators, and executioners. If the beginning of truth is to see things as they are and call them by their proper names, then it is easy to see why the state must use complex and broad terms to mask its organized criminality. The job of anyone who favors liberty, then, is to refuse to accept this manipulation of the language and stop using the state’s euphemisms.

Statolatry

State power has always relied on mysticism, myth, and magic to gain popular support and legitimacy. Its power, by definition, rests on placing it above society, like God, and claiming the monopoly right to initiate violence against peaceful people. Over the centuries, the state has always tried to claim for itself some level of divinity; the Pharaohs were said to be gods, while the monarchs of the Middle Ages had a divine right to rule. In the West, Christianity served as a competitive threat to the loyalties of the people and so the state—and those who support its expansion—works to undermine religious influence altogether.

As the West has become more secular, the state has replaced religion as the idol of worship. During World War II, Ludwig von Mises noticed this collectivist trend of state worship, calling it statolatry. “A new type of superstition has got hold of people’s minds, the worship of the state,” worried Mises. “People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!”264

The worship of the state is the civic religion in America today. Religions have their holy days and sacraments, and the state does too. Memorial Day, Labor Day and Independence Day are replete with military and civic worship. Lincoln, Washington, and MLK are the saints. Flags, uniforms, and medals are venerated. Elections are the sacrament of the democratic state. The Pledge of Allegiance is recited by millions of helpless children everyday, unaware of the creepy statolatry they are regurgitating. Hardly a sports game goes by without our hats removed and our hearts covered for the hymns of the Empire. Human sacrifice in the form of military service is venerated as the ultimate sign of religious devotion to the God of the State. 264 Charles Burris, “American Statolatry,” December 30, 2012.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/american-statolatry/


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All one needs to do is spend a day in the Imperial Capital to see how the state is treated as a secular religion. “Take a look at America’s most venerated monuments in the Nation’s Capital erected to this statolatry,” writes Charles Burris. “You have a massive statue of the martyred Abraham Lincoln sitting in a temple of Zeus upon a throne replete with fasces (the symbols of imperium); the Jefferson Memorial consciously built as a modern Pantheon by the same eminent architect commissioned to design [the House of the Temple] in Washington, DC; or most telling, the apotheosis of George Washington in the dome of the rotunda of the US Capitol building, ascending into Heaven.”265

This is why it is not uncommon to receive emotional, angry, and hostile responses when the libertarian ethic is discussed. The statist sees their religion—the worldview, rituals, and over a dozen years of propaganda and schooling—challenged.

Since at least the time of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Progressive statists have argued that private religion (especially Christianity) must be discouraged, undermined, and ultimately replaced by the civic religion of statolatry. Every society needs myths and legends, and in order to properly control and coerce a population, the state must be the dominant or sole source of external meaning. The more totalitarian states of the 20th Century not only violently suppressed religious belief, but undoubtedly took advantage of the West’s increased secularism, making the total, omnipotent states of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China easier to achieve as people sought to replace their ancient gods with new ones.

This statolatry, seen at any presidential rally or college classroom, is the culmination of all of the mythologies of state power: propaganda, fear, morality exceptions, and the power of language. It is how the state can steal, loot, kill, print money, and expropriate the public, call it taxation, war, and public policy, and deceive entire populations that these are both necessary and just. Statolatry is what convinces otherwise decent men to committ atrocities under the guise of “following orders.” It is what allows people to believe that a large, coercive institution could possibly centrally plan an economy without producing chaos.

The power of illegitimate authority, exemplified by the coercive state, fundamentally lives in the minds of the general public. The state claims a monopoly of initiatory violence in a given geographical region, but the most important monopoly is spiritual.

A state is not a particular band of men, along with their weapons, cages, and other resources. It is the subject’s attitude toward those men and implements, and the myths that inform (misinform) that attitude. It is a “great fiction,” as Frederic Bastiat said, and a “dangerous superstition” as Larken Rose says. It is a victimizer’s lie internalized by the victim. It is the Stockholm Syndrome institutionalized. A state is a disease living in the minds of its victims. It is only there, in the battleground of the mind,

265 Burris, https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/american-statolatry/

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that a state is to be truly and totally vanquished. A de-legitimized state is a contradiction in terms. Destroy a state’s legitimacy in the minds of its subjects by debunking the lies that underpin that legitimacy, and you’ve already annihilated the state itself, leaving in its stead a hopelessly outnumbered band of common criminals.266

This is why revolutions often lead to bloodshed and an even worse political regime put in its place.

The state can only exist if the majority of people believe that it is a noble institution or simply the least bad alternative, a necessary evil to be tolerated. The libertarian answer, then, is not to de-legitimize any particular state, but statism in general.

266 Dan Sanchez, “The State Lives in the Mind of its Victims,” September 17, 2014.

http://www.dansanchez.me/feed/the-state-lives-in-the-minds-of-its-victims


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Chapter 7

The Constitution and Limited Government

Once the power to initiate violence is granted to the state, then there will always be a tendency for this power to grow. Limiting government, especially in a democratic society, is simply impossible.

Among advocates of limited government—the idea that the state should only be in charge of a few services like police, courts, and the military—the U.S. Constitution is a document worthy of near sacred reverence. But after over 200 years since its ratification, the Constitution has proven to be an absolute failure at limiting state power and protecting liberty.

The early American republic seemed to be getting off on the right start. When the Constitution was ratified in 1789, Americans paid virtually no taxes, the currency was backed by gold or silver, and private property was protected and clearly defined. There was no standing army, and President Washington urged a peaceful, non-interventionist foreign policy. America was to be a commercial, constitutional republic dedicated to the protection of the rights and traditions our Western forefathers fought, killed, and died for.

Two centuries later, Americans now live under the largest and most expensive central state the world has ever seen. Nearly half of our incomes are now confiscated by the state and redistributed domestically and internationally. Money and interest rates are centrally planned by an unaccountable central bank. Private property and free association no longer govern social affairs, and are now subject to endless legislation, legal uncertainty, and moral hazards. Favored industries are bailed out and crippling regulations cartelize the economy. The U.S. government now maintains a global empire with thousands of foreign bases, wages war at will, and sends the American public the tab. Law and order has been replaced with increasing lawlessness.267

Liberty and private property have been dismantled in the U.S. because of, not despite, the Constitution. By erecting a massive political apparatus of expropriation, the Constitution ensured that the natural law protections of liberty, private property, and natural rights would be undermined.

As the Declaration of Independence noted, government is supposed to protect life, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet in granting government the power to tax and legislate without consent, the


of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (Transaction Publishers, 2001), 278-279.

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Constitution cannot possibly assure this goal but is instead the very instrument for invading and destroying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is absurd to believe that an agency which may tax without consent can be a property protector. Likewise, it is absurd to believe that an agency with legislative powers can preserve law and order. Rather, it must be recognized that the Constitution is itself unconstitutional, i.e., incompatible with the very doctrine of natural human rights that inspired the American Revolution. Indeed, no one in his right mind would agree to a contract that allowed one's alleged protector to determine unilaterally —without one’s consent—and irrevocably—without the possibility of exit—how much to charge for protection; and no one in his right mind would agree to an irrevocable contract which granted one's alleged protector the right to ultimate decision making regarding one's own person and property, i.e., of unilateral lawmaking.268

The transformation of a constitutional republic into a globe-straddling Leviathan was not the result of bad leaders or a bug in the system. Governments simply cannot be limited. “Whether the Constitution really be one thing or another, this much is certain,” argues Lysander Spooner, “that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”269

The Constitution and the Coup of 1789

The U.S. Constitution was not created with the intention of preserving liberty and restricting state power. It is riddled with incredibly vague language that is very open to a broad number of interpretations and wiggle room for the massive expansion of state power. The preamble states that the Constitution was created to form “a more perfect Union,” which will “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.” In order to achieve these ends, Congress is given the powers in Article I to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” It gives Congress the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States, regulate commerce, make laws that are “necessary and proper” for carrying out these powers.270

Just a few pages in, and already the document is loaded with language that any tyrant would need—and, indeed, has already used—to justify a wide-ranging number of powers. There is not only a large amount of vague language, but the document explicitly grants the state the power to tax, go into debt, make war,

268 Ibid., 279-280. 269 Lysander Spooner, “The Constitution of No Authority.”

https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/constitution-no-authority 270 Butler Shaffer, “The Delusions of Limited Government,” May 22, 2015.

http://www.notbeinggoverned.com/the-delusion-of-limited-government/


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create a standing army, and violently suppress insurrection. This is somehow supposed to limit government power?

The same clauses that conservatives often claim are meant to limit government power are the exact same ones used by liberals to argue for a larger, expanded role for government. All that matters is who can use the most effective arguments and emotional appeals to justify their version of violent, coercive rule. What is constitutional and unconstitutional? It all depends on whom you ask. It is Who does what to Whom, writ large.

The judicial branch of the federal government, which is theoretically supposed to provide a check on excessive federal power, has unsurprisingly been an ally, not a foe, of government power. As a government agency, it would be shocking if the Supreme Court did not rubber-stamp state power. Ever since the Constitution was adopted, the Supreme Court has almost always found a very expansive definition of government powers while finding narrow definitions for individual liberties. If state power and liberty come into conflict, the Supreme Court will almost always side with its fellow expropriators than with the liberty of the public.271

The state, as an agency of institutionalized violence, cannot nor ever will be restrained by a constitution.

The Constitution was also not intended to be a document that protected liberty. Most people forget, or are even not aware of the fact, that the Constitution was not even the first written constitution of the United States. For several years before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, the far superior Articles of Confederation (AOC) governed America.

The AOC resembled the Swiss canton system of a voluntary confederation of sovereign states. The AOC had no power to tax, regulate trade, raise a standing army, and no system of federal courts. States were in charge of collecting taxes to send them to the central government, which was governed by a President with no executive power. His job was solely to preside over a single house of Congress. All 13 states were needed to amend the document, an army could be raised only by the states themselves, and an overwhelming majority of states were needed to pass legislation. If the AOC was Rothbardian, then the Constitution that took its place was Leninist by comparison.272

If the AOC was such a pro-liberty, pro-decentralized document, then why was it scrapped in favor of the Constitution?

The push for a new constitution came from men who openly complained that America’s problem lay in too little, not too much, government. “The evils suffered and feared from weakness in Government have turned the attention more toward the means of strengthening the [government] than

271 Ibid. 272 Bill Buppert, “The Constitution: The God That Failed (To Liberate Us From Big

Government),” September 18, 2014. http://zerogov.com/?p=3633

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of narrowing [it],” James Madison, father of the second constitution, wrote to Thomas Jefferson. “It has never been a complaint against Congress that they governed overmuch. The complaint has been that they have governed too little,” James Wilson added.273

The Constitutional Convention was sold to the states solely as a means of amending and altering the AOC. Behind closed doors, however, the members of the Convention scrapped the entire AOC and started from scratch. Although the consent of all thirteen states was required to make an amendment, they quickly changed it so that only nine states were needed. The AOC, which set up a confederacy of decentralized, sovereign states and a central government with no power to tax, regulate commerce, make war, or raise a standing army, was an unacceptable form of political organization for those—like James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the Federalists—who desired military expansion, protectionism, subsidies for favored businesses, and a national bank. Liberty was, at best, an entirely secondary concern.274

Before the Convention, the Federalists who were unhappy with the “weakness” of the AOC were constantly finding excuses to justify a larger, more powerful central government. We are taught at government schools—if it is even discussed at all— that the AOC, thanks to its lack of centralized power, created chaos and instability that could only be rectified by a more powerful federal government. While there were indeed societal and economic problems at the time, including issues with the state governments, there was little to no grassroots support for vast changes in the AOC. Americans were in the middle of a war with Britain, after all, so there is bound to be some instability when people are fighting off the yoke of a foreign empire.275

In the early 1780s, with a victory in the war nowhere near guaranteed, war debts and the need for foreign loans to continue financing the war served as a great excuse for the Federalists to clamor for more power. Robert Morris, a wealthy merchant whom Congress had named Superintendent of Finance, could not even manage to persuade all the states to allow the confederation government a 5 percent tariff, let alone implement the direct taxation that Hamilton craved. By 1783, with the war finally over, they lost their greatest excuse to implement a new constitution and the recently ratified AOC remained.276

The Federalists finally got their moment in 1786. The debt from the Revolutionary War was burdening the states. Most states found it wise to spread out the debt retirement, keeping tax rates in check, while the issuing of a modest amount of paper money allowed the people of the states to be slightly taxed and only indirectly. Massachusetts, however, decided to take the opposite approach 273 Sheldon Richman, “The Constitution Revisited,” January 22, 2016.

https://c4ss.org/content/42974 274 Ibid. 275 Sheldon Richman, “Conceived in Tyranny,” March 11, 2016.

https://sheldon.liberty.me/conceived-in-tyranny/ 276 Ibid.


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and instituted massive tax increases on a war-torn and exhausted public in order to pay off the war debt too soon. Massachusetts issues heavy poll and property assessments on the farmers in the western portion of the state, who often received foreclosure notices on their homes since they had the choice of either paying their taxes or their mortgages.277

Taxes quadrupled between 1782 and 1786, and by October 1787 nearly 40% of the taxes imposed by the state had not been paid or collected. Under the state’s internal revenue system, the locally elected tax collector in each town was held personally liable for his share of the collection, and after July 1786 county sheriffs became liable for quotas as well. In order to not have their own property confiscated by the state, collectors and sheriffs were forced to file suit against tax delinquents and to seize farms, crops, livestock, and other property from the farmers. The farmers had had enough; near the end of 1786, a large group of farmers closed the courthouses in several inland towns in a sustained effort to prevent further evictions and seizures of their property. Led by Daniel Shays, nearly 2,000 armed farmers stormed the federal arsenal in January 1787. Three farmers were killed and cannon fire scattered the rest, but they were determined and regrouped. After all, they were fighting for their very livelihoods and homes.278

Once again, Massachusetts did not show prudence. Rather than make conciliatory efforts that tended to ease the tensions of the public as other states had done when faced with an angry citizenry, Governor James Bowdoin dispatched 4,000 troops and quashed the uprising. Thankfully, Shays’ Rebellion was not fought in vain. In 1787, the newly elected Governor John Hancock abandoned the accelerated debt reduction program, sponsored private debt relief laws and tax reductions, and suspended the excess tax collections. The farmer's tax rebellion had won—for now.279

Shays’ Rebellion and other minor rebellions across the states, however, provided the Federalists their smoking gun. Federalists like David Humphreys, Henry Lee, Henry Knox, and General Benjamin Lincoln (who put down Shays’ Rebellion) all wrote to George Washington—himself very sympathetic to a strong, central government—and begged him to attend the new Constitutional Convention so that his unique prestige might influence the new constitution. Washington heard only hysterical accounts of angry mobs, chaos, and disorder; but farmers in Massachusetts, and all across the country, naturally did not want to replace a British taxman for an American one.280

In the midst of tax rebellions and violent protests, the U.S. Constitution was born. The AOC was scrapped entirely, even though the delegates were specifically tasked with only making amendments. A confederacy of sovereign states with no power to tax, raise armies, regulate trade, and featured no chief executive, was 277 Ibid. 278 Ibid. 279 Ibid. 280 Ibid.

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discarded in favor of a centralized, federal behemoth with explicit powers to tax, raise armies, regulate trade, and enough fuzzy and implied language to give charismatic psychopaths wiggle room to create the global Leviathan empire we live under today.

While the ink was just beginning to dry on the new Constitution, Americans began to see the bait-and-switch that had been pulled on them. By 1792, Congress passed the Militia Law, which allowed Congress to raise a militia in order to “execute the laws of the union, (and) suppress insurrections.” The new central government was short on money, and Congress passed a 25% sales tax on liquor. Not only did Americans resent such a high tax from a distant, new government (the British never imposed a tax anywhere near as high as 25%), many farmers relied on liquor as their only means of income and it was even used as barter for exchanges in the midst of a relatively unstable currency.281

There was significant frustration and numerous protests from Pennsylvania to Georgia. In areas where there were no tax collectors, the tax simply went unpaid. It was also very difficult to recruit new tax collectors. All around the country, tax collectors were harassed, tarred and feathered, and one even had his home burned down. In Western Pennsylvania, 6,000 people were camped just outside Pittsburgh and were ready to march on the town.282

President Washington was furious. He issued a proclamation commanding all “insurgents” to “disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes,” citing his authority in the Militia Act. The protestors and rebels refused, and the rebellion continued. In September 1794, Washington warned the rebellion that he was already in the midst of calling for a militia to suppress them so that the laws would be “faithfully executed” (there is that floodgate language again). Washington recruited almost 13,000 militia members from Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey. Washington personally led the troops into Bedford—the first and only time a sitting U.S. President has led troops into battle—and the rebellion was suppressed.283

A few years later, Congress passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which made it a federal crime to criticize the president. War fever was gripping the country as U.S. vessels were fighting an undeclared naval war against France (even though the Constitution technically forbids this), but many saw these Acts as attempts by the John Adams administration to stifle and suppress criticism of the Federalists. These Acts were updated in 1918 by President Woodrow Wilson, and are still on the books to this day.

The Constitutional Convention was a coup d’état against the radicalism of the American revolution and the AOC. It was a violent response to legitimate tax

281 The Bill of Rights Institute, “Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion.”

http://billofrightsinstitute.org/educate/educator-resources/lessons-plans/presidents-constitution/whiskey-rebellion/

282 Ibid. 283 Ibid.


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protests. Is it any wonder that the Constitution has given us the Leviathan we live under today?

Constitutions cannot limit governments and protect liberty. When a police officer illegally searches your property, will holding up a copy of the Fourth Amendment stop him? When he knocks on your door with the intent of seizing your firearms, will the Second Amendment prevent him from doing so? Rights are not self-enforcing. Pieces of paper will not stop bullets, batons, and badges. Rights and liberties can only be protected by people who are willing to stand up for them, defend them, and use violence if necessary against those who would violate them.

“Get back to the Constitution?” From the start, it was a centralizing, power-expanding document. Let’s get back to tarring and feathering tax collectors instead.

Why Small Governments Inevitably Grow

No matter how small or limited a state is, it is inevitable that it will continue to expand. States, as parasitic and expropriating institutions, must rely on the production of the peaceful private sector in order to acquire resources. Since they have a monopoly on the power of initiatory confiscation, they face no direct competition to the services they monopolize. Due to their inefficiencies, and without the coordination information of market prices to determine costs, their budgets will continue to expand no matter how poor of a job they are doing. In fact, if a government program is failing, this is taken as evidence that the agency in charge needs more money and power, not less.

The structural nature of the state, any state, demands that it must always be in a state of growth and command ever-increasing budgets. This is even more apparent when it comes to even the most liberal and laissez-faire states.

A relatively liberal state, like early America, allows the population to create tremendous amounts of wealth, prosperity, and innovations. With the extortion and robbery at a minimum, the long leash allows the population to be incredibly productive while the state takes a small cut. With this increased output, however, these small taxes begin to add up and the state begins to acquire large amounts of resources.

The Laffer curve demonstrates this by showing that there is an “optimal” tax rate where governments can steal from the public without harming economic output too much. If you tax income at 75%, then people are disincentivized to produce and work, there are less profits and wealth to reinvest in the capital stock to increase production, or they may find it advantageous to pay a small fee to lawyers to hide their money in ways that avoid the high tax burden. If the tax rate is, say, 10%, then there is a less of an incentive to move money to offshore “tax havens,” and people are more willing to pay a rate they feel is reasonable.

In a low-tax environment, where economic output is high and there is a steady stream of taxes being collected, governments are incentivized to spend as well as finding new programs to justify even more spending. States, being

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agencies of organized violence, also inevitably turn to foreign expansion, aggression, and war.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls this phenomenon the “paradox of imperialism.” States with a relatively free domestic market have historically been the greatest belligerents, empires, and aggressors abroad because they have a higher per-capita tax-farm to play with. Throughout history, liberal states like Great Britain, Western Europe, and the United States have used low tax burdens to become global empires.284

This paradox is even more prevalent among modern democratic states than historical monarchies.

While all states must be expected to have aggressive inclinations, the incentive structure faced by traditional kings on the one hand and modern presidents on the other is different enough to account for different kinds of war. Whereas kings viewed themselves as the private owner of the territory under their control, presidents consider themselves as temporary caretakers. The owner of a resource is concerned about the current income to be derived from the resource and the capital value embodied in it (as a reflection of expected future income). His interests are long-run, with a concern for the preservation and enhancement of the capital values embodied in “his” country. In contrast, the caretaker of a resource (viewed as public rather than private property) is concerned primarily about his current income and pays little or no attention to capital values.285

Not only are democratic states more prone to foreign aggression than monarchies, they also fight larger, more destructive wars. While monarchs generally fought limited wars over territorial disputes or inter-dynastic marriages, democratic states fight ideological wars. Under a monarch, the public rightly saw wars as the king’s private affairs, to be executed by his own money and military, and, especially compared to the warfare of today, there was a significant distinction between combatants and civilians. Because of this, only the other monarch’s estates tended to be targets for destruction. Even in the middle of wars waged by monarchs, commerce, travel, cultural exchange, and education went on almost unhindered.

In contrast to the limited warfare of the ancien regime, the era of democratic warfare—which began with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, continued during the 19th century with the American War of Southern Independence, and reached its apex during the 20th century with World War I and World War II—has been the era of total war.

284 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Paradox of Imperialism,” June 4, 2013.

https://mises.org/library/paradox-imperialism 285 Ibid.


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In blurring the distinction between the rulers and the ruled (“we all rule ourselves”), democracy strengthened the identification of the public with a particular state. Rather than dynastic property disputes which could be resolved through conquest and occupation, democratic wars became ideological battles: clashes of civilizations, which could only be resolved through cultural, linguistic, or religious domination, subjugation and, if necessary, extermination. It became increasingly difficult for members of the public to extricate themselves from personal involvement in war. Resistance against higher taxes to fund a war was considered treasonous. Because the democratic state, unlike a monarchy, was “owned” by all, conscription became the rule rather than the exception. And with mass armies of cheap and hence easily disposable conscripts fighting for national goals and ideals, backed by the economic resources of the entire nation, all distinctions between combatants and noncombatants fell by the wayside. Collateral damage was no longer an unintended side-effect but became an integral part of warfare.286

The flipside of Hoppe’s argument is true as well. States with less liberal domestic policies—with higher taxes and large amounts of socialism—are less able to afford massive foreign wars or power projection abroad. The Soviet Union and Communist China, despite having large standing armies and powerful militaries, were not able to invade and occupy countries halfway around the globe due to the lowered economic output of their totalitarian domestic economic policies.

States love war. War serves as the greatest excuse to expand their power and restrict civil liberties domestically. But in doing so, they face a paradox of their own. By expanding their power, they risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Because of this, states will resort to deficit financing, debt, money printing, or simply looting the wealth of a foreign country instead. This is why empires tend to only be dissolved through bankruptcy and exhaustion.

Since the ideology of its own subjects is the only other chief constraint on state power, and since people are chiefly concerned with their own plight, and very little with the plight of foreigners, it is often only bankruptcy that will seriously limit foreign belligerence. When was the last time an economically thriving empire voluntarily contracted? Even the British Empire’s “Splendid Isolation” phase was at best a slow-down in expansionism (if that), and not a contraction.

The Paradox of Imperialism debunks the Myth of Minarchism. Ask a Cherokee woman on the Trail of Tears or a Chinese man bleeding out in the midst of the Opium War about America’s or Britain’s “era of limited government.” With the State, it’s all something of a wash. You tend to either get relatively free Americans bombing Iraqis, or enslaved North

286 Ibid.

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Koreans leaving the Iraqis alone. The Devil will have his due, one place or another.287

Liberal states create empires, which then turn into socialist states who are not as aggressive abroad, which then lead to reforms to free up the economy, which then leads to more foreign aggression, and so on. This “Cycle of the State,”288 like Sisyphus’s eternal punishment of forever pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down each time, is why even if we could somehow manage to shrink the federal government down significantly, there is every reason to assume that it would not be very long before we saw the boulder slide right back down the hill.

States will always find excuses to grow, and unless they face significant opposition from the public, will use any measure at their disposal to expand their power. War is and always has been the health of the state. Not only does a state grow in power and authority, it uses the war as a pretext to restrict civil liberties, nationalize industries, jail dissenters, and commit mass slaughter. Wars, however, are also very expensive. Traditional monarchies, unlike democratic states, faced significant resistance from the public if their wars became too expensive or dragged on for too long; under no illusion that “we are the government,” the public understood that the state and the people were separate bodies with often-times conflicting interests.

This limiting function evaporated with the creation of modern democratic states and central banking. In the private market, capital and wealth are created by delaying consumption, saving, investing, reinvesting, and saving some more. States, especially democratic ones, face the exact opposite incentives. In order to plan any future expenditures, they have to borrow against their tax farms since the public will resist heavier direct taxes. This only delays the pain as interest rates rise and it becomes harder for both the state and the public to borrow money for future projects. Traditional hard money standards—money backed by precious metals like gold or silver—have historically provided a check against government growth by putting a limit on how much money they could borrow.

With endless money came endless war. Limited wars over territory under monarchies became “wars for democracy” and “wars to end all wars” under the regime of hyper-inclusive mass democracy. The state now had the means to create all of the money it needed to finance the types of crusades the new Progressive, bureaucratic, managerial elite had so desperately wanted, unhindered by the reactionary forces of the ancien regime and hard money.

Central banking and war reinforce each other. Wars allow the state to expand and take new powers while the central bank dumps the cost on the unborn generation, with interest. They are the heart and soul of Leviathan. It is no wonder that someone like Ron Paul, who opposed both of these state powers root-and-branch in his last two presidential runs, was the recipient of so much scorn and

287 Dan Sanchez, “The Cycle of the State,” August 18, 2015.

http://original.antiwar.com/dan_sanchez/2015/08/17/the-cycle-of-the-state/ 288 Ibid.


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venom from the political class. If we could somehow abolish the Federal Reserve and end America’s overseas empire, that would be the most effective way to kick out the legs of the state chair.

All states are parasitical expropriators and enemies of private property, free association, and liberty. But without a central bank and without endless war, the state becomes an entirely different beast to slay.

Democratic Institutions Do Not Protect Liberty

Before the creation of the Constitution or the AOC, the young American nation of English settlers closely resembled the radical libertarian ideal of a stateless society with the protection of private property, natural law, and natural rights.

[The English settlers] demonstrated how, in accordance with the views of John Locke, private property originated naturally through a person's original appropriation-his purposeful use and transformation-of previously unused land (wilderness). Furthermore, they demonstrated that, based on the recognition of private property, division of labor, and contractual exchange, men were capable of protecting themselves effectively against antisocial aggressors: first and foremost by means of self-defense (less crime existed then than exists now), and as society grew increasingly prosperous and complex, by means of specialization, i.e., by institutions and agencies such as property registries, notaries, lawyers, judges, courts, juries, sheriffs, mutual defense associations, and popular militias. Moreover, the American colonists demonstrated the fundamental sociological importance of the institution of covenants: of associations of linguistically, ethnically, religiously, and culturally homogeneous settlers led by and subject to the internal jurisdiction of a popular leader-founder to ensure peaceful human cooperation and maintain law and order.289

Contrary to the Hobbesian notion of a stateless society plunging into lawlessness, violence, and chaos, the early settlers quickly developed private and voluntary means of providing law, security, and order—functions that can supposedly only be provided by the state. Although governed nominally by the English Crown, the tax burden was almost non-existent and, on a continent thousands of miles away from London, virtually impossible to fully collect and enforce.

Still, as an expropriating institution that had claimed official sovereignty over lands it had not homesteaded and created artificial colonies, the British Empire was continuously usurping and violating the rights of the Englishmen in America who had done the actual homesteading. Guided by the Western tradition of natural rights, natural law, and private property, Americans had had enough of British rule and were willing to fight a war in order to protect and preserve these ancient liberties. Eloquently summarizing the just cause of the American Revolution,

289 Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed, 267-268.

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Thomas Jefferson penned his famous goodbye to the Crown, arguing that governments are instituted to protect life, liberty, and property, derive their powers from the consent of the governed, and if a government failed to fulfill these tasks it was the right and duty of people to alter and abolish them.290

What came next, however, destroyed these Jeffersonian principles. Instead of trying to form a centralized state to replace British rule, “it would only have been necessary for the American colonists to let the existing homegrown institutions of self-defense and private (voluntary and cooperative) protection and adjudication by specialized agents and agencies take care of law and order,” argues Hoppe.291

It is difficult, of course, to fault the Founders too much for this error. Since the 1700s, there have been incredible advances in political theory and philosophy arguing that putting a compulsory monopoly like the state in charge of society—no matter how limited it starts off as—will not protect our natural rights and will become the greatest violator of those rights. Like any monopoly—especially one that requires you to pay for its services under the threat of violence—the quality of the service will go down and the costs will inevitably rise.

Once there is no longer free entry into the business of the production of protection and adjudication, the price of protection and justice will rise and their quality will fall. Rather than being a protector and judge, a compulsory monopolist will become a protection racketeer: the destroyer and invader of the people and property that he is supposed to protect, a warmonger, and an imperialist. Indeed, the inflated price of protection and the perversion of the ancient law by the English king, both of which had led the American colonists to revolt, were the inevitable result of compulsory monopoly.292

The AOC, while technically a state, mimicked the natural order of a stateless libertarian society by decentralizing power, not granting the central government the power to tax, and strictly limiting democracy. The Constitution, on the other hand, not only granted the new central government vast new powers but also created a much more democratic institutional framework that helped to quickly unleash the state.

The Constitution did not fundamentally change the nature of the state power that the Americans had lived under and only replaced the means that this power would be implemented. Before independence, Americans were taxed by the British king. Although this was expropriation, the king’s power to tax without consent was only an assumed right of the Crown, and because of this, this power was in dispute. Under the Constitution, however, this power to tax was codified and explicitly granted. When it comes to law, even the most absolutist monarchs were never considered the creators of law. Rather, the monarch’s role was to interpret and enforce the common-law that had already been developed on the

290 Ibid., 270. 291 Ibid., 272. 292 Ibid., 271.


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market, acting more as a judge than a legislator. Under America’s brand new Constitution that was foisted on the public, Congress was granted to the power to legislate while the Executive and Judicial branches were given the power of enforcement and interpretation. Unsurprisingly, this constitutional structure enhanced, rather than limited, state power as the federal government could now both create legislation and decide for itself if it was constitutional.293

In effect, what the American Constitution did was only this: Instead of a king who regarded colonial America as his private property and the colonists as his tenants, the Constitution put temporary and interchangeable caretakers in charge of the country’s monopoly of justice and protection. These caretakers did not own the country, but as long as they were in office, they could make use of it and its residents to their own and their protégés advantage. However, as elementary economic theory predicts, this institutional setup will not eliminate the self-interest—driven tendency of a monopolist of law and order towards increased exploitation. To the contrary, it only tends to make his exploitation less calculating, more shortsighted, and wasteful.294

These new institutional incentives of the government created by the Constitution were magnified by its more democratic nature. Under a democratic state—whether through direct democracy or the representative democracy established by the Constitution—“open entry” into government positions is permitted, where anyone is allowed to become a congressman, president, or judge and thus have temporary control over the violent state apparatus. Because of this open entry, state violations of natural rights, natural law, and private property will summarily increase. Those seeking power thus find it advantageous to advocate and implement the violent transfer of private property, and as these powers expand, this attracts even more bad actors eager for this power, creating a feedback loop of ever-expanding expropriation. Additionally, those who understandably shy away from coveting other people’s property and seeking to violently transfer it to someone else are at an extreme disadvantage against those who fan the flames of envy, class warfare, egalitarianism, and socialism.295

For free entry and competition is not always good. Competition in the production of goods is good, but competition in the production of bads is not. Free competition in killing, stealing, counterfeiting, or swindling, for instance, is not good; it is worse than bad. Yet this is precisely what is instituted by open political competition, i.e., democracy.

In every society, people who covet another man's property exist, but in most cases people learn not to act on this desire or even feel ashamed for entertaining it. In an anarcho-capitalist society in particular, anyone acting on such a desire is considered a criminal and is suppressed by

293 Ibid., 272-273. 294 Ibid., 273-274. 295 Ibid., 275-276.

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physical violence. Under monarchical rule, by contrast, only one person—the king—can act on his desire for another man's property, and it is this that makes him a potential threat. However, because only he can expropriate while everyone else is forbidden to do likewise, a king’s every action will be regarded with utmost suspicion. Moreover, the selection of a king is by accident of his noble birth. His only characteristic qualification is his upbringing as a future king and preserver of the dynasty and its possessions. This does not assure that he will not be evil, of course. However, at the same time it does not preclude that a king might actually be a harmless dilettante or even a decent person.

In distinct contrast, by freeing up entry into government, the Constitution permitted anyone to openly express his desire for other men's property; indeed, owing to the constitutional guarantee of “freedom of speech,” everyone is protected in so doing. Moreover, everyone is permitted to act on this desire, provided that he gains entry into government; hence, under the Constitution everyone becomes a potential threat [emphasis added].296

By creating open entry into a power structure with the ability to tax, raise armies, regulate commerce, interpret law, invent law, make war, and “provide for the general welfare,” the Constitution gave every demagogue in society the means to infringe on liberty and private property in ways previous monarchs could have never even dreamed of. “Thus, the Constitution virtually assures· that exclusively dangerous men will rise to the pinnacle of government power and that moral behavior and ethical standards will tend to decline and deteriorate all-around,” notes Hoppe.297

The “separation of powers” also does not limit state power. Instead, this supposed check enables the state’s vast expansion as each agency works to reinforce each other.

Two or even three wrongs [branches of government] do not make a right. To the contrary, they lead to the proliferation, accumulation, reinforcement, and aggravation of error. Legislators cannot impose their will on their hapless subjects without the cooperation of the president as the head of the executive branch of government, and the president in tum will use his position and the resources at his disposal to influence legislators and legislation. And although the Supreme Court may disagree with particular acts of Congress or the president, Supreme Court judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate and remain dependent on them for funding. As an integral part of the institution of government, they have no interest in limiting but every interest in expanding the government’s, and hence their own, power.298

296 Ibid. 297 Ibid., 276. 298 Ibid., 276-277.


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That is why the Supreme Court, regardless of which side of the political spectrum the bench is currently swinging, tends to find expansive definitions for state powers and narrow ones for individual rights.

Even though the initial government created by the Constitution featured extremely limited suffrage, the incentives of democracy and open government always increase state power and decrease the protection of liberty and private property. With the eventual passage of the 17th and 19th amendments and the expansion of voting “rights” to everyone simply by virtue of them being born inside U.S. borders, our tradition of natural rights, natural law, and private property never stood a chance.

Democratic institutions and open entry into state power will always move society in a Leftward direction, both culturally and politically. While there may be the occasional brake on this Leftward trajectory, on a long enough timeline, the democratic state continuously perpetuates socialism, egalitarianism, cultural degeneracy, and empowers the worst people in society. This is why Marxists seek to expand suffrage as much as possible—especially among those who are net tax-recipients—and act like anyone who advocates the most modest of reforms—like requiring an identification to vote—wants to reinstitute slavery. Contrasting the characters and intellect of leaders of the early republic like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama demonstrates the types of rulers democratic governments eventually produce.

The massive expansion of the U.S. government, enabled by a Constitution of open entry government to an expropriation and war machine, should serve as a constant reminder that democratic institutions are incompatible with the protection of liberty and private property.299

299 For my complete libertarian critique of democracy, see Chapter 15.

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Chapter 8

Anarcho-Tyranny and the Police State

The police are tip of the state’s spear. Without the state police, the thousands upon thousands of laws imposed on the public by the legislature could not be enforced. Any citizen who does not obey these laws, and the police who enforce them, will face fines, prisons, sanctions, maiming, or murder depending on their level of resistance. Some laws should function this way, like the prohibitions on acts of aggression (murder, rape, theft, or assault). But with the rise of the modern democratic state—enacting legislation that controls virtually every aspect of our lives—police serve as agents of political power rather than enforcers of the NAP.

The job of the police is not to protect you, provide security, or keep you safe. Their job is to enforce the law, whatever the law may be. When Western common-law was created and discovered by the market,300 police served a vital role as peace officers by protecting person and property and apprehending those who violated them. Don’t initiate violence and honor your contracts was the law of the land.

Now that the state has monopolized the creation of law and the enforcement of the law, state police no longer serve the role as peace officers. As the enforcement arm of the political class, state police serve as the domestic occupying army without which the political class would have no means of expropriating the public. The most egregious and tyrannical laws would have no power whatsoever without the presence of armed police willing to enforce them.

The Police Have No Obligation to Protect You

State police do not exist to protect you, defend private property, or maintain the peaceful order of a free society. Their primary function is to make sure that the state’s exploitation of the public runs as smoothly as possible.

Once it is understood that police employed by the people who commit aggression against our property, we shouldn’t be surprised that police are of practically no value in terms of protecting property against criminal aggression. Police are properly seen as retail-level distributors of violence on behalf of the coercion cartel.

Law enforcement is a “product” we are forced to buy, and severely punished—through summary application of torture, or even by death—if we refuse. Since law enforcement operates as a monopoly, rather than

300 See Chapter 5.


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through the market, there is no legitimate pricing mechanism to guide rational allocation of resources, and no way to measure “customer” satisfaction—although using the term “customer” in this context is a bit like using the term “girlfriend” to describe a rape victim.301

State courts, through multiple cases and precedents, have continuously reaffirmed the fact that the state has no legal obligation to protect you.

In Warren v. District of Columbia in 1981, DC’s highest court affirmed the “fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.”302 In Castle Rock v. Gonzales,303 the court ruled that police employees could not be sued for failing to do the job they took an oath to do. In the case, three children were killed by the husband of a woman who had recently gotten a restraining order stipulating that he remain at least 100 yards from her and their three daughters except during specified visitation time. Despite four calls made by the woman to police after the kids were kidnapped by the husband—including one in which she informed them of the location of the husband and their children—the police still did nothing. The state court ruled in favor of the state police, arguing that the police have no legal duty to protect you.

In Balestreri v. Pacifica Police Department,304 the court stated that the police had no obligation to protect people from crime. In DeShaney v. Winnebago County,305 the court decided that the police could not be held culpable after releasing a boy into his father’s custody despite overwhelming evidence of abuse, including assaults that left the boy mentally retarded. And all the way back in 1856, in South v. Maryland,306 the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government “had no duty to protect individuals, but only a general duty to enforce the laws.”

Virtually every state in this consolidated monstrosity of a global empire has a statute reaffirming the doctrine that the police have no legal or statutory requirement to do anything other than extract taxes from the public. State legislatures and courts protect government entities and police departments from liability for failing to provide adequate police protection. Some states invoke the “sovereign immunity” defense, a re-wording of the doctrine that prevented subjects from suing the king. Other states have statutes that prevent legal

301 William N. Grigg, “Retail-Level Tyranny,” July 17, 2014.

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2014/07/retail-level-tyranny.html 302 Warren v. District of Columbia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia 303 Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzalez.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzales 304 Balestreri v. Pacifica Police Department.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12289225 305 DeShaney v. Winnebago County.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County 306 South v. Maryland. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/59/396/case.html

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challenges to police “discretionary” functions, while state courts conveniently hold that answering emergency calls or providing police protection are “discretionary” functions. Many states also evade liability by relying on the so-called “public duty” doctrine: police owe a duty to protect the public in general, but not to protect any particular individual. George Orwell could not have written it better himself.307

The “social contract” is a concept statists often employ to justify state power. Individuals supposedly give up certain rights to the state in exchange for security. But given that the police, courts, and legislatures of this country have repeatedly affirmed that the state has no legal obligation to protect you, doesn’t this make the social contract null and void?

In order to have a free society, the police must be subject to the same laws as everyone else. Exempting the authorities from the law that governs civil society—the NAP and the libertarian ethic—gives them a legal license to commit continual aggression.

This license is found in the abhorrent doctrine of “qualified immunity,” affirmed by multiple court cases308 and in the legal statutes of virtually every state-sanctioned legislative body in the country. This doctrine asserts that government agents cannot be held accountable by the public they are supposed to “serve” and are legally allowed to commit acts that would qualify as crimes if done by private citizens.

“Qualified immunity” is legal cover for the police to prey upon the same public who are forced to pay their salaries. Officers receive preferential treatment in the posting of bails and in divorce courts. When they are accused of rape, theft, or physical abuse, they are often given incredibly lenient sentences compared to those given to a mere taxpayer. Under the rare circumstance that an officer is actually held accountable for a crime, the victim’s family is rewarded with a financial settlement paid for by the taxpayers themselves. All of these factors serve as incentives for police to act as if they are above the law (which they are) while making it more difficult for victims to receive justice as the rest of the local population are the ones that are forced to subsidize the consequences. Private benefits and socialized losses lead to predictable results.309

In a response to a Reddit forum that asked to list the most disturbing thing your company gets away with, a former police officer admitted the ugly truth about the police state and why he quit his job. In an anonymous post, he admitted the police do have quotas, evidence is auctioned off and the money is put back into

307 Richard W. Stevens, “Just Dial 911? The Myth of Police Protection,” April 1, 2000.

https://fee.org/articles/just-dial-911-the-myth-of-police-protection/ 308 Most of the cases dealing with “the obligation to protect” also affirm the doctrine of

“qualified immunity.” 309 Ademo Freeman, “Killer Cops Are Treated Better Than Common Criminals,” December

9, 2015. http://www.copblock.org/148684/killer-cops-are-treated-different/


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the department, and officers are encouraged to make as many arrests as possible. He concludes:

So yeah, don’t think the police are here to protect you. We are here to put money back into the system. When I started out I was a starry eyed kid, thinking I was going to be helping out people and ‘protecting and serving’…after a few months, I realized that it was all bullshit, and we are here to use anything you say against you, and twist any facts we can against you. It was so bad (at least where I live) that I had to quit, I didn’t have the moral ‘ambiguity’ to keep on. I know not all PD’s are like this, and my hat’s off to the people who could keep on trying to change the system from the inside, but yeah, at least around here, and as far as I’m concerned for the most part, ‘justice’ is a racket.310

In a libertarian society, police serve the role as peace officers, protecting individual liberty and private property from physical aggression. State police, however, serve the exact opposite role; they exist to expropriate private property and restrict liberty for the benefit of the political class.

Other than the occasional mild punishment of a police officer for misconduct, virtually the only way to be fired from a police force is to act as an actual peace officer, cross the “thin blue line,” and stop a fellow officer from committing acts of aggression. Given how many acts of violence are committed by police officers on a daily basis—and how few officers prevent them when they have the opportunity to do so— police appear to be more interested in maintaining their status as violent enforcers of the political class than serving the traditional function of peace officers.

But can you blame them? One does not need to point to malice or corruption. It is the simple incentive structure of a monopoly, statist institution. In the rare examples of police actually acting like peace officers, they are treated with disdain from their fellow officers, and are often shunned, demoted, or even fired for daring to throw sand in the gears of their legalized expropriation racket.

Just ask former police officers Cariol Horne, Regina Tasca, and Ramon Perez. These true public servants were fired and harassed for either refusing to follow unjust orders, “obstructing” the violence a state goon who was inflicting on an unarmed citizen, or for standing in the way of an officer who was ready to inflict physical punishment on an individual who had committed the unholiest of sins—“contempt of cop.” All three of these officers were serving as peace officers dedicated to the protection of the safety and rights of the public, and because this contrasted with their official, state-sanctioned role as tax collectors for the Empire, they were quickly fired. They were undoubtedly used as an example to any police

310 Matt Agorist, “Incredibly Honest Yet, Disheartening and Infuriating, Confession from a

Cop,” May 9, 2014. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/incredibly-honest-yet-disheartening-infuriating-confession-cop/

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officer with a conscious: violate rights all you want, but don’t you dare cross the thin blue line.311

It is no wonder that police departments all across the country are intentionally seeking people with lower IQs and former members of the military.312 Those with the ability to think for themselves and unaccustomed to blindly following orders would make excellent peace officers, but poor cops. While it is a serious crime to lie to a police officer, for a cop, lying is an official and required part of their job description.313

Police are the privileged class of society, legally allowed to initiate violence against the public with no legal or statutory obligation to protect people from crime. They serve as the domestic occupation army of the ruling class.

Anarcho-Tyranny and the Managerial State

The steady Leftward shift of Western societies in both politics and cultures that has taken place in the last century has been achieved through the strategic use of coercion, social engineering, and central planning. As Progressive-Marxist ideology began to dominate the West in the early 20th century, this created the “managerial state.”

Borrowing from Old Right author James Burnham and his critiques of Progressivism, the managerial state was identified by paleoconservative and traditionalist writers as a hyper-democratic, bureaucratic regime completely hostile to the West’s traditional institutions. While a free society features a natural aristocracy and hierarchy, the managerial state—with broad new powers unleashed by mass democracy—acts in the name of abstract goals (like equality, social justice, “free” education or healthcare), requiring ever more force and controls to impose these abstractions on the public.

Marxist revolution fortunately did not gain too much ground in the United States or Europe. The immune system of Western civilization, through its traditions and institutions, combined with the success of the market economy in providing previously unheard of prosperity to millions of people, tended to prevent this. Thus, Leftism had to become an “armed doctrine” if it was to have any success at radically transforming Western societies. Leaving people alone to live out their lives in peace through their ancient liberties and private property is always unacceptable to a Progressive. Constant intervention by Leftist social engineers was needed to force both egalitarianism and socialism among the people who were, of course, too blinded by traditionalist Western cultural norms to know what was good for them. 311 William N. Grigg, “A Peace Officer Defies The ‘Blue Tribe’: The Exile of Officer

Cariol Horne,” December 18, 2014. http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2014/12/a-peace-officer-defies-blue-tribe-exile.html

312 Nick Gillespie, “Court Oks Barring Smart People From Becoming Cops (Really),” May 1, 2013. http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/01/court-oks-barring-smart-people-from-beco

313 Val Van Brocklin, “Training Cops to Lie,” November 16, 2009. http://www.officer.com/article/10233095/training-cops-to-lie-pt-1


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Bolshevik “social reconstruction” fascinated the “liberals.” They settled for John Dewey’s “experimental-scientific” approach, allegedly open-ended and rooted in “neutral” criticism of all “values.” Natural scientists, who use this method in fields where it actually works, generally know when an experiment is over. In the New State it is the lab rats who are blamed for bad outcomes (if failure is even admitted) and ordered to ride the mass transit system of Progress and quit reading that pre-scientific Constitution.

By the 1940s liberals defined their outlook as a “fighting faith” opposed to fascism (communism having somewhat escaped their attention). “Value relativity” had been a useful cudgel against existing bourgeois, Christian values—“social acids” as one Deweyite put it—but liberalism itself was exempt from inquisition. Ongoing experiment gave ever-shifting “content” to an ever-new liberalism. The welfare state was means and end, since planning and economic redistribution were keys to a rational society. Freedom, [Paul] Gottfried observes, was reduced to “what judges, public administrators, and journalists see fit to impose on other people.” Bored with handing out pottage, welfare states “also tried to shape or reshape social relations to fit particular worldviews.”

“Multiculturalism” serves as another weapon in the liberal arsenal of dirigiste weaponry: “the present regime assigns ‘ethnicity’ and other generic categories to rearrangeable groups of citizens as an exercise of power,” writes Gottfried. From the managers’ standpoint, the “behavior modification” of Americans/Mankind “must go on indefinitely.” This is Bolshevism Light, I guess. Stalin could never completely achieve a state composed of “new Soviet men” and the modern liberals will never completely achieve a state of ideally servile, collectively minded citizens, but to give up would put the entire project at risk. Liberal managerial meddling has no logical stopping point.314

The perpetual revolutionary ideology of Leftism thus found its more effective home in the managerial state: redistributive welfare, bureaucratic regimentation, control over education and children’s minds from age five until they are adults, and economic planning administered by wise Leftists. And, most importantly, under the managerial state, anything on the Right—whether it is traditionalism, Christianity, natural rights, private property (and especially the fascists and reactionaries who posed the most dangerous threat to the managerial state and the physical safety of Leftists)—was to be pathologized and opposed with as much hysteria as possible. The rabbits were to be subsidized, in both their numbers and in their cultural and sexual habits, by the very wolves that had built the civilization.

314 Joseph R. Stromberg and Paul Gottfried, “After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the

Managerial State,” October 1, 2000. https://fee.org/articles/after-liberalism-mass-democracy-in-the-managerial-state/

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After decades of the managerial state, Western societies are now plagued with “anarcho-tyranny.” Over twenty years ago, the late paleoconservative author Sam Francis used this Hegelian dialectic to describe the type of police state that the managerial state had foisted upon us:

What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.315

Francis’s theory, which is even more relevant today than it was when he first wrote on the topic in 1992, argues that legitimate state functions (like punishing real criminals who aggress against peaceful people) are generally ignored in favor of performing an unlimited number of illegitimate functions ruthlessly and efficiently (like criminalizing speech, gun ownership, political dissent, and hounding people over obscure regulations, fines, and edicts).

Anarcho-tyranny is the inevitable result of the political and cultural Marxism that was uncaged by the democratic states that came to dominate Western societies.

Anarcho-tyranny, then, is not just a deformation of the traditional system of government nor a symptom of “decadence.” The state today is perfectly capable of enforcing laws against illegal immigration and catching and deporting the illegals who are already here. It is also entirely capable of catching and imprisoning or executing the killers, rapists, and robbers who continue to haunt our streets and neighborhoods, just as it is entirely capable of catching speeders and red-light runners. The conventional conservative explanation of such “failures” on the part of the state, as the result of “weakness of will” or something, does not wash. The state and those who control it clearly have the will to enforce those laws they wish to enforce. The state does not “fail” to enforce the rest; it has no intention of enforcing them nor any desire to do so.

Anarcho-tyranny is an entirely deliberate, a calculated transformation of the function of the state from one committed to protecting the law-abiding citizenry to a state that treats the law-abiding citizen as, at best, a social pathology and, at worst, an enemy. Having captured the state

315 Samuel Francis, “Synthesizing Tyranny,” April 2005.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060928023136/http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/2005/April2005/0405Francis.html


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apparatus, the anarcho-tyrants are the real hegemonic class in contemporary society, and their function is to formulate and construct the new “culture” of the new order they envision, a culture that rejects as repressive and pathological the traditional culture and civilization.316

It is in the interests of Leftists, and those seeking to expand state power in general, to implement an anarcho-tyranny regime through the managerial state, eschewing traditional state functions like the protection of person, property, and national borders in favor of enforcing policies of mass immigration, multiculturalism, and egalitarianism at the point of a gun.

This anarcho-tyranny is epitomized in what Heather McDonald calls “the Ferguson effect.” Up until 2014, violent crimes rates in America had been steadily declining. After the protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri, however, a policy of de-policing and/or ignoring violent crime was implemented in several cities throughout the country for reasons mainly to do with “political correctness” and Leftist orthodoxy, resulting in significant spikes in violent crime rates.

2015 closed with a 17 percent increase in homicides in the 56 largest cities, a nearly unprecedented one-year spike. Twelve cities with large black populations saw murders rise anywhere from 54 percent in the case of the District to 90 percent in Cleveland. Baltimore’s per capita murder rate was the highest in its history in 2015.

Robberies also surged in the 81 largest cities in the 12 months after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

In the first quarter of 2016, homicides were up 9 percent and non-fatal shootings up 21 percent in 63 large cities, according to a Major Cities Chiefs Association survey.

Chicago is a prime example of the Ferguson effect. Stops were down nearly 90 percent in the first part of this year compared with last year. Shootings citywide through July 17 were up 50 percent compared with the same period in 2015; shootings were up 87 percent compared with the same period in 2014. In Austin, on the West Side, shootings are up 220 percent compared with 2014. Through July 19, 2,234 people have been shot in the city, averaging one an hour during some weekends. Yesterday, a 6-year-old girl was seriously wounded in her abdomen while sitting on her porch, when a violent shoot-out between three cars broke out; she is one of at least 21 children younger than 13 shot so far this year, including a 3-year-old boy shot on Father’s Day who is now paralyzed for life.

This crime increase, I argue, is due to officers’ reluctance to engage in precisely the proactive policing that has come under relentless attack as racist. For the past two years, activists, academics, the press and many politicians have charged that pedestrian stops and low-level public order

316 Ibid.

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enforcement (also known as “broken windows” policing) are little more than biased oppression of minority citizens.317

Your parking ticket will still be enforced, of course, but violent crimes and organized riots go unpunished even though the police possess the means to prevent and punish them.

Edmund Burke, the godfather of traditionalist conservative thought, argued over 200 years ago that ordered liberty cannot exist without a controlling power being placed on the appetites of men. Traditional Western ideology sought to implement these controls from within, through the restraint of Christian culture, and enforced by private, non-state institutions and customs like churches, families, art, education, and, fundamentally, the individuals themselves. The less of this control from within there is, however, the more of it there must be from without. Leftism understands this Burkean insight far better than conservatives do today. In encouraging Cultural Marxism, social engineering, and the programing of children through government schooling in Marxist abstractions, the state becomes the controlling power of society and begins to expand without limit.318

Multiculturalism is encouraged for the exact same reason. Francis argued that political freedom relies on a shared political culture and a relatively homogenous society composed of people who share the same general values and beliefs. When the common culture is disintegrated—either through Cultural Marxism or by the importation of people from vastly different cultures—the only thing that can hold a multiculturalist regime together is massive amounts of institutionalized force through the state. Burke’s internal restraints also become much more difficult, if not impossible, under a multicultural society. As if this was not enough to satisfy the Left, the managerial state then implements more and more laws restricting the rights of private property owners to discriminate and associate as they please, creating a regime of forced integration that creates ethnic hostility, advances state power, and infringes liberty.319

In response to this anarcho-tyranny of the managerial state, conservatism has been nothing but anemic. After nearly a century of Progressivism getting virtually everything it has ever wanted, the general response of conservatism has been to make peace with Leviathan. Conservatism, if it ever even did, seeks to conserve nothing (and what is there left to conserve?), and hides itself away in think tanks, policy proposals, and debates over what type of tax cuts we should give to (mostly) Leftist millionaires.

The center-right has gradually embraced most of the Left’s historical positions but has merely restated them with apparent moderation, for

317 Heather MacDonald, “The Ferguson Effect,” July 20, 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/20/the-ferguson-effect/

318 Samuel Francis, “Anarcho-Tyranny: Where Multiculturalism Leads,” December 30, 2004. http://www.vdare.com/articles/anarcho-tyranny-where-multiculturalism-leads

319 Francis, http://www.vdare.com/articles/anarcho-tyranny-where-multiculturalism-leads


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example, by rallying to the original, less radicalized form of feminism, by advocating an extensive welfare state with lower marginal tax rates, and by praising Martin Luther King while lying about his endorsement of racial quotas.... Equally important, if the "conservative movement" were as concerned about small-government as it is about waging global democratic wars, it might be influencing public opinion accordingly. Movement conservative leaders and the Republican Party have opted for big government and leftist missionary wars but not because of public demand. Rather they have worked long and hard to manufacture a demand for their interests.320

The conservatism of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk is now nothing more than Leftism-Lite, “of helping leftists achieve their goals by perpetuating the illusion right wingers should engage them in good faith.”321 Indeed, this “cuckservatism” is the only the type of conservatism acceptable in a democratic state, which is exactly what the Left wants. The Left wisely uses the methods of communist revolutionary Saul Alinsky to acquire power and move the Overton window Leftward, while the Right fights like Fred Rogers. This Alinsky-ite strategy is perfect for the divide between r and K selected animals; while the K’s prefer to obey the rules, r’s employ manipulation and fraud to advance their evolutionary strategy. Make the enemy live up to their own rules, urged Alinsky, while having none but the acquisition of power as your own.

Indeed, Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals has been the template of the Left since its publication in 1971. The ends always justify the means; never punch Left or disavow your own; your enemy is always a racist and a fascist no matter how moderate or milquetoast he really is; make your opponent hang himself with his own rigid rules and morals; ridicule is the most effective tactic; always attack and never let up; real power lies in how much of it your opponent thinks you have. Combined with the anarcho-tyranny of the democratic state, Alinsky’s rules are why the Left has consistently moved the Overton Window in their direction and always wins Culture Wars. Conservatives never move the Overton window and merely follow Overton movements, argues Lawrence Murray:

In Alinsky’s world of hyper-realism and self-rationalizing, things like principles, morals, qualms about the means used to achieve ends, and consistency are baggage and vices, not politically expedient values.

With that in mind it isn’t hard to see why the cuckservative, muh principles crowd that dominates the Republican party seems to be losing ground in our society at every turn. They cry that liberals don't fight fair. They have what French New Right author Guillaume Faye calls “mental AIDS,” no immune system against the aggressive ideology of their enemies, whom they grant moral hegemony to. But what they do have, if

320 Paul Gottfried, “They Have No Choice,” February 17, 2006.

http://archive.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried88.html 321 Gregory Hood, “The Priests of Weakness,” June 22, 2016.

http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2016/6/22/the-priests-of-weakness

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not organized defense, is what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the moral foundation of sanctity—they can be disgusted by things on the basis of their violation of core values.322

For the last fifty years, the American Right has accepted the ideological abstractions of the Left, conceding the battle to enemy as they inevitably play catch-up. The Democrats are the real racists, shouts the modern conservative, who will be called a racist anyway. Conservatism is now nothing more than what Leftism was twenty years ago. In a democratic state under anarcho-tyranny, this is the only type of right-wing dissent or European identity that is allowed; one that fits perfectly into what Richard Spencer calls “The System.” This does not just include the managerial state, argues Spencer:

…And by that I don’t just mean the government. I mean the entire corporate and economic structure...the media, entertainment, and culture industries...hegemonic discourse...the way we talk and think and breathe and dream.

Perhaps the most dominating component of “The System” is not its bombs or bureaucrats or police or taxes but its Narrative and Paradigm.

The System is most powerful when it cuts off that something else, that dream of another world and the will to bring it into being. The System, in other words, presents itself as “inevitable,” as everything you could ever want. Far from being brutal or unfeeling, The System has “thought of everything”—it has even thought of the ways in which you will oppose The System.

If you’re a White man filled with angst at your declining income and foreclosed home . . . and the fact that you don’t know your children anymore...never fear! You can vote for the greasy televangelist from Texas, named Ted or Jeb or Dubya, and make the “The Constitution” and “freedom” a cozy substitute for your existence.

Or if you’re a young White liberal with 100k in student-loan debt...so big can’t even think about getting married and having kids...never fear! You can support Bernie (and settle for Hillary) and signal that you’re one of those cool, virtuous, post-White White people...one of those who, you know, will get a place at the table in the minority America of 2050...pretty please...

The System is its own opposition, its own problem and solution, its own critique and its own redemption. The System endlessly satisfies us...and we are endlessly unhappy, always feeling empty. (Even leftists don’t really get what they want.)

The System is, in other words, inevitable.323

322 Lawrence Murray, “Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,” November 28, 2016.

http://therightstuff.biz/2016/11/28/saul-alinskys-rules-for-radicals/


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Inevitable, that is, until it is not. After decades of the political and cultural atrophy that anarcho-tyranny produces, there appears to be a broad, but incredibly strong, K-shift in Western societies not only among the populace but among The System itself. “This contradiction would eventually undermine The System...would make new things possible...things The System’s policemen and high priests were always guarding against and which they believed were no longer imaginable,” continues Spencer, speaking of Donald Trump. The System has produced one of its own who is willing to use the massive police-state apparatus that The System has erected against itself and the chaotic reign of anarcho-tyranny—a real, authentic reactionary correction to political and cultural Leftism.

The Alternative Right (Alt-Right), then, is a reactionary response to both the Left and the unwillingness of the mainstream Right to actually fight. The Alt-Right embraces Alinsky’s rules, and in less than two years (using Meme Wars, ridicule of opponents, short but catchy slogans, and showing no mercy to the sworn enemies of our civilization) has done more to move the Overton Window and scare the hell out of the Left than the mainstream Right (or libertarians!) have done in a century.

The cracks within this System (evidenced by the populist and nationalist movements sweeping across America and Europe) represent a counter-revolutionary movement—reactionary means to achieve the law, order, and stability (the opposite of what anarcho-tyranny produces) to achieve libertarian ends.

This necessary correction is simply impossible under the perpetual revolutionary ideology that guides mass democracy and cultural Marxism. Anarcho-tyranny, and the anti-libertarian managerial police state it produces, can only be fought by restricting and suppressing the r-selection that allows Leftism to grow.

Abolish the Police and Hire Private Security

The problems, abuse, and corruption inherent in the state policing are institutional. Because of this, the only solution to the problems of the police state is abolition. No amount of reform, legislation, and tweaking can alter the incentive structure of a coercive monopoly that has given itself “sovereign immunity” over the public. Public safety and order are too important for them to be controlled by a bureaucratic, coercive, monolithic monopoly like the state.

The enforcement of laws and the protection of liberty by private actors is not a utopian vision but simply the resurrection of a proud Western tradition. For virtually all of Western history, police, courts, law, and order were provided by the private market or under the very limited purview of a monarch.

Before 1829, Great Britain did not have the type of state police forces we are so accustomed to today. Sir Robert Peel, a former British Prime Minister and 323 Richard Spencer, “The Napoleon of the Current Year,” November 3, 2016.

http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2016/11/3/the-napoleon-of-the-current-year

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Conservative lawmaker, originated the idea of monopolized policing in 1812. In 1829, London’s Metropolitan Police Service was established. Peel was not interested in increasing public safety or providing a service to willing customers in the marketplace. Crime rates in England and Ireland were incredibly low. Instead, Peel’s goal was to discourage Irish separatism, quell any hints of dissent, and pacify a recalcitrant population.324

The slang terms of “bobbies” and “peelers” trace directly back to Peel. Across the pond in the U.S., with the rise of violence and slave revolts like Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion and John Brown’s raids, the cost of enforcing slavery on a private level was becoming increasingly expensive. Inspired by Peel’s model, the U.S. began implementing “public” policing with the expressed purpose of creating slave patrols to protect the interest of slave owners. After the Civil War, even though chattel slavery was abolished, this model of taxpayer funded policing began spreading across the country. Thus, police socialism was born.325

As I discussed in Chapter 3, there is an inherent calculation problem to socialist planning. Mises argued that the pricing systems in socialist economies were deficient because if a state entity owns all the means of production, no rational economic inputs could be obtained for capital goods, as they were merely internal transfers and not “objects of exchange.” Whether it is the production of food or security, the problem remains the same.

Under a state monopoly, the price of law, justice, and protection must inevitably rise and its quality fall. Even if the state was initially only limited to the protection of private property, without the coordination and feedback of market prices, the state can never rationally calculate how much security to provide, and in what form. State actors, like the rest of us, are motivated by self-interest and the disutility of labor326 but also possess the power to tax and acquire resources through expropriation rather than through exchange or homesteading. Because of this, states will tend to maximize the money spent on protection but minimize the actual production of protection. Thus, “A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms and will lead to ever more taxes and less protection,” argues Hans-Hermann Hoppe.327

In a libertarian society, private entities would compete on the open market to provide citizens with the lowest cost, highest quality service available.

324 William N. Grigg, “No, the Police Don’t Work for You,” July 19, 2014.

https://lewrockwell.com/2014/07/william-norman-grigg/no-the-police-dont-work-for-you/

325 M. David, “Police Originated From ‘Slave Catching Patrols,’” April 15, 2015. http://countercurrentnews.com/2015/04/police-originated-from-slave-catching-patrols/

326 This means that all things being equal, “Men prefer the absence of labor, i.e., leisure, to labor, or as the economists put it: they attach disutility to labor.” https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/828



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That is, every private property owner would be able to partake of the advantages of the division of labor and seek better protection of his property than that afforded through self-defense by cooperation with other owners and their property. Anyone could buy from, sell to, or otherwise contract with anyone else concerning protective and judicial services, and one could at any time unilaterally discontinue any such cooperation with others and fall back on self-reliant defense or change one’s protective affiliations.328

This would reduce police misconduct because firms that employee violent law enforcers will lose market share as customers flee to their cheaper nonviolent competitors. Private firms would have to foot the bill themselves for the abuses of their employees. In order to avoid these costly pay-outs, firms would demand their officers have rigorous ethical and moral standards as outside arbitrators would hold their employees much more accountable than the state apparatus they belonged to otherwise would.329

Insurance companies already do serve the role of “private defense agencies” against natural and social disasters (like hurricanes, floods, fraud, and theft). Unhampered by the state’s regulatory and legal restrictions, the insurance model would likely fill the vacuum left open by an absence of state police.

They are “big” and in command of the resources—physical and human—necessary to accomplish the task of dealing with the dangers, actual or imagined, of the real world. Indeed, insurers operate on a national or even international scale, and they own substantial property holdings dispersed over wide territories and beyond the borders of single states and thus have a manifest self-interest in effective protection. Furthermore, all insurance companies are connected through a complex network of contractual agreements on mutual assistance and arbitration as well as a system of international reinsurance agencies representing a combined economic power which dwarfs most if not all contemporary governments, and they have acquired this position because of their reputation as effective, reliable, and honest businesses.330

The fact that a private provision of law and order relies on the consensual and contractual exchange between its customers—rather than the violent expropriation of the taxing power—would be one of the greatest advantages of private security and provide a necessary check on abuse and corruption that cannot exist under an agency that forces you pay for its protection. Competition between private agencies will tend to lower prices and increase quality like any market good. They will also be incentivized to actually provide restitution and reparation for their clients who have been victims of violent crime.

328 Ibid., 247 329 Asa Jay, “Why Government Policing Monopolies Can Neither Serve Nor Protect You,”

August 19, 2015. http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=51959 330 Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed, 281.

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Regarding social disasters (crime) in particular, this means that the insurer must be concerned above all with effective prevention, for unless he can prevent a crime, he will have to pay up. Further, if a criminal act cannot be prevented, an insurer will still want to recover the loot, apprehend the offender, and bring him to justice, because in so doing the insurer can reduce his costs and force the criminal—rather than the victim and his insurer—to pay for the damages and cost of indemnification. In distinct contrast, because compulsory monopolists states do not indemnify victims and because they can resort to taxation as a source of funding, they have little or no incentive to prevent crime or to recover loot and capture criminals. If they do manage to apprehend a criminal, they typically force the victim to pay for the criminal's incarceration, thus adding insult to injury.331

Because of this voluntary, market relationship between customer and insurance/defense agency, there is also a far greater chance that the protection, recognition, and defense of valid private property (homesteaded/exchanged under the libertarian ethic) will be the rule and not the exception. In order to attract customers, insurance/defense agencies will have to offer contracts with detailed and specific property titles and what will happen in the event that they are broken or aggressed upon. States, on the other hand, are constantly redefining what is or is not punishable aggression (and, especially in a democratic state, punishable acts tend to move further and further away from the libertarian ethic).

Moreover, out of the steady cooperation between different insurers in mutual interagency arbitration proceedings, a tendency toward the unification of law—of a truly universal or “international” law—will emerge. Everyone, by virtue of being insured, would thus become tied into a global competitive effort to minimize conflict and aggression; and every single conflict and damage claim, regardless of where and by or against whom, would fall into the jurisdiction of exactly one or more specific and innumerable insurance agencies and their contractually agreed to arbitration procedures, thereby creating “perfect” legal certainty. In striking contrast, as tax-funded monopoly protectors states do not offer the consumers of protection anything even faintly resembling a service contract. Instead, they operate in a contractual void that allows them to make up and change the rules of the game as they go along. Most remarkably, whereas insurers must submit themselves to independent third party arbitrators and arbitration proceedings in order to attract voluntary paying clients, states, insofar as they allow for arbitration at all, assign this task to another state-funded and state-dependent judge.332

The more that private property is protected and recognized, the more libertarian that society becomes.

331 Ibid., 282. 332 Ibid., 283.


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While a state monopoly restricts individual choice, drives down quality, and increases the costs of the service, the market tends to produce the opposite. Besides economics, however, private policing has another advantage over monopoly enforcement. While the state has ruled over and over again that the police have no obligation to protect you, the free market is governed by contract and consent. Thus, in a competitive market, individuals would have the option of contractually guaranteeing that their security provider be obligated to protect them, retrieve stolen property, apprehend criminals, and the right to sue if the agency fails to do so.333

Additionally, private agencies providing protection, unlike virtually all states around the world, will encourage rather than prohibit or greatly restrict the private ownership of firearms. A private protection agency is incentivized to prevent crime (just like an insurance agency encourages its customers to take preemptive measures against accidents). States generally see an armed population as a threat to their power, so will look to increase their own security at the expense of their tax subjects. “To the contrary,” concludes Hoppe, “insurance agencies would encourage the ownership of guns and other protective devices among their clients by means of selective price cuts, because the better the private protection of their clients, the lower the insurers' protection and indemnification costs will be.”334

Without the influence of politics and bureaucracy, police would have the narrow, but essential, functions of protecting person and property. The r-selection of anarcho-tyranny would be nearly impossible to implement, and the K’s would not be forced to subsidize their own serfdom and socialize the externalities of the r’s.

Resistance

Is it moral to violently resist the state? Is it ever justifiable to shoot a police officer?

Obviously, the answer cannot be never. What if a police officer was attempting to rape someone? Or used the public trust of his uniform to walk into a bank and rob it?

While asking this question is tantamount to heresy against our civic religion, Western common-law developed the tradition that it is the right and duty of free individuals to resist unlawful arrest. In the 18th Century, two English court cases, Hopkin Huggett’s Case and Queen v. Tooley, ruled that when a police officer commits the crime of an unlawful arrest, both the individual victim and the citizens who intervene are acting as the true peace officers and are entitled to employ any necessary means—including lethal force—to liberate the victim.

In early 18th Century England, this was seen as a non-negotiable bulwark against what the heroic Algernon Sidney called “the violence of a wicked magistrate who, hav[ing] armed a crew of lewd villains,” would

333 Asa Jay, http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=51959 334 Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed, 284-285.

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otherwise inflict his will on innocent and helpless people with impunity. Sidney’s martyrdom at the hands of precisely that kind of degenerate, tyrannical magistrate underscored the vitality of the principle he expressed.

“The right to resist unlawful arrest memorializes one of the principal elements in the heritage of the English revolution: the belief that the will to resist arbitrary authority in a reasonable way is valuable and ought not to be suppressed by the criminal law,” observed Paul Chevigny in a 1969 Yale Law Journal essay. Actually, Chevigny – like many others – elides a critical distinction between “power” and “authority”: While a police officer may have the power to abduct or abuse an innocent person, citizens have the authority to prevent that crime.335

Up until the late 1960s, this common-law statute was recognized by almost every state in the U.S. Since then, without justification, the right of resisting unlawful arrest has been demoted to that of a “privilege.” In other words, null and void.336

In a free and libertarian society, individuals have the right to resist unlawful arrests—and criminal behavior on behalf of law enforcement agents—up to and including the use of lethal force. This is not only a theoretical deduction of the libertarian ethic; it is a historical one as well. Think about it this way: if we did not have this right, then what would prevent those tasked with the public order and enforcement of our rights from becoming the very agents of expropriation, theft, plunder and expropriation we task the state with preventing?

While the anarcho-tyranny of the managerial state has given us Leviathan, how effective would any of these laws, statutes, and edicts be if every individual was aware of his right to resist unlawful arrest and acted upon it? In a country with over 100 million legal gun owners, fashioning a police state would have been impossible.

Even without the common-law tradition to back up the right to resist unlawful arrests, the logic of its concept surely applies. All one has to do is imagine the litany of historical acts of mass murder committed by states to see that resisting, rather than following, unlawful orders would have produced far better results. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was imprisoned by the Soviet Union and spent years in a gulag, asked:

What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? Or, if during the periods of mass arrests ... people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang on the

335 William N. Grigg, “When the Right to Resist Becomes the ‘Duty to Submit,’” January

10, 2012. http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2012/01/when-right-to-resist-becomes-duty-to.html

336 Grigg, http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2012/01/when-right-to-resist-becomes-duty-to.html


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downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?337

What if the soldiers who carried out the orders of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and all of the other mass murderers throughout history faced violent resistance from the public? History would have taken a far different turn if there had been more “cop-killers” around. “If you do NOT have the right to forcibly resist injustice, even if the injustice is called ‘law,’” writes Larken Rose, “that logically implies that you have an obligation to allow ‘government’ agents to do absolutely anything they want to you, your home, your family, and so on. Really, there are only two choices: you are a slave, the property of the politicians, without any rights at all, or you have the right to violently resist ‘government’ attempts to oppress you. There can be no other option.”338

The practicality of using defensive violence against rogue state agents, however, is another question. In the current climate that will likely not be changing in a libertarian direction anytime soon, 98% of people will not be on the side of the justified use of defensive force against a state agent no matter how egregious his actions may be. Even if the public were sympathetic, continued resistance would undoubtedly result in the use of massive retaliatory response by the state. They have untold amounts of weaponry on their side, and if history is any guide, states have very little problem with exterminating large amounts of people if they find that it is in their interest to do so.

Police unions even want to make resisting unlawful arrest—which was once a right and a duty— a “hate crime.”339 Morally and historically, however, the right of physical and violent resistance to unlawful state action cannot be denied.

337 “The Gulag Archipelago,” Wikiquote.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago 338 Larken Rose, “When Should You Shoot a Cop,” June 28, 2011.

http://www.copblock.org/5475/when-should-you-shoot-a-cop/ 339 Matt Agorist, “‘Blue Lives Matter’ Law Grants Privileged Status to Cops—Resisting

Arrest Can Soon be a Hate Crime,” May 22, 2016. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/blue-lives-matter-law-grants-pivileged-status-cops-resisting-arrest-hate-crime/

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Chapter 9

Cobweb of Coercion

In America today, tens of thousands of pages of state regulations, restrictions, edicts, fines, taxes, prohibitions, and subsidies control nearly every facet of our lives. This regulatory state serves as a cobweb of coercion against the public that strangles the free market and props up the corporate state.

In the last six decades, federal regulations have grown so expansive and onerous that since the end of World War II, Americans are now 75% poorer than they would have been if post-war federal regulations had simply stayed the same. There were almost 20,000 pages of federal regulations in 1949; as of 2011, that number had increased to almost 170,000. Because of this increased cobweb, the average American household receives about $277,000 less annually than it would have gotten in the absence of six decades of accumulated regulations—a median household income of $330,000 instead of the $53,000 today.

Consumers and businesses spend nearly $2 trillion per year, or nearly 11% of GDP, just to comply with the labyrinth of federal regulations.340

Defenders of government regulation will often justify them by pointing to the benefits they bring, like clean air, clean water, or labor protections. Economist Henry Hazlitt, however, reminded us that we should always remember to calculate the seen and the unseen; for example, what technology or innovation was prevented from entering the market because of regulatory burdens? With better technology and wealth comes cleaner and safer environments, so we will never know. Even if you assume the best about the benefits of state regulations, wouldn’t the $330,000 median household income per year that would exist without the last 70 years of regulations buy a lot in the way of health care, schooling, art, housing, environmental protection, and other amenities without the creation of a vast bureaucracy?341

With a proper understanding of economics and the incentives of public choice theory, it becomes easier to see that the massive growth in federal regulations—and the regulatory state in general—is not a benign and benevolent program that works in the interest of the common man against the predations of the rich and the powerful. Like nearly all government programs, regulations are created, enacted, and expanded upon by corporations and industries that seek to

340 Ronald Bailey, “Federal Regulations Have Made You 75 Percent Poorer,” June 21,

2013. http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/21/federal-regulations-have-made-you-75-per 341 Bailey, http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/21/federal-regulations-have-made-you-75-

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hamper the free market and crush current competitors while preventing future ones from entering the market. The consumer is rarely, if ever, the target of their supposed benevolence.

This process is often called regulatory capture and rent-seeking. This benefits favored industries by allowing them to escape the competitive pressures of a market while granting political actors the power to increase coercive control and tell the public that they are there to serve the interests of the common good.

As I argued in Chapter 3, there is no such thing as an unregulated market. Libertarianism loves rules, just not rulers; regulations, but not regulators. It is not a matter of regulated versus unregulated, but who is doing the regulating: the people or the political class.

The Myth of the Robber Barons

One of the more prevalent myths concerning American history and economics is the notion that until the heroic progressives came along to save the day, America was dominated by a free market economy that created monopolies, robber barons, and the rise of evil corporations that dominated the economy and exploited the public. As with most historical myths, the exact opposite is true.

Early America was not the laissez-faire, free market society that Leftists condemn and many libertarians or conservatives praise. While the pre-Progressive Era was relatively freer and more laissez-faire than today’s economy, political regulations and state intervention into the economy go all the way back to the founding of the country. After the Revolutionary War, when the agrarian economy was beginning to industrialize, politicians pursued British-style mercantilism and protectionism, enacting regulations, tariffs, and subsidies in banking and manufacturing in order to protect special interests and prevent competition. Financial panics and depressions were caused by the creation of a national bank in 1792 and 1819 and state-regulated banks from 1837–43 and 1857–59. One of the biggest causes of the Civil War, in fact, was Southern frustration over incredibly high and ever-increasing tariffs that the North-dominated federal government implemented, protecting the industrializing North against the free trade interests of the Southern plantation owners.342

After the Civil War, the ideologies of corporatism and protectionism were victorious. “In the nineteenth century,” writes Anthony Gregory, “monopolists and politicians pushed for privilege and corporate welfare. They especially wanted subsidies financed through high tariffs for corporations to build canals, waterways, and railways. Henry Clay called this program the ‘American System’...Clay’s

342 Mike Holly, “The Long History of Government Meddling in the American

Marketplace,” February 29, 2016. https://mises.org/library/long-history-government-meddling-american-marketplace

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agenda finally won out in the Civil War era, particularly through the Morrill Tariff and the Pacific Railroad Acts.”343

With the creation of a vast and expansive regulatory apparatus, there soon emerged two classes of economic actors: market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs. A market entrepreneur succeeds financially by selling a newer, better, or less expensive product on the free market without any government subsidies, direct or indirect. The key to his success is his ability to please the consumer. A political entrepreneur, on the other hand, succeeds primarily by influencing the state to subsidize his business or industry, or to enact legislation or regulation that harms his competitors.344

One of the key failures of Marxism, of course, is failing to recognize the distinction between these two and group all entrepreneurs under the same class with monolithic interests.

This phenomenon of market versus political entrepreneurship was most evident in the burgeoning railroad industry. Leland Stanford, for example, a former governor and U.S. senator from California, used his political connections to have the state pass laws prohibiting competition against his Central Pacific railroad, and he and his business partners profited immensely from this monopoly scheme.345 Steamship pioneer Robert Fulton and railroad mogul Henry Villard relied on monopoly grants, subsidies, and privileged loans in order to amass their fortunes. Government support created perverse incentives, such as the reckless and failed railway construction by the politically favored Union Pacific and Stanford’s Central Pacific Railroad.346

Market entrepreneurs, in contrast, not only succeeded without state welfare or regulatory restrictions, but they were also vigorously opposed by the state and the industries receiving state assistance. James J. Hill built the Pacific Northwest, a railroad that was far more efficient, durable, and cheaper than his crony competitors, by buying land peacefully from American Indians rather than having the socialist power of the U.S. Army seize it for him.347

It is truly a shame that a heroic entrepreneur like Hill is not widely known and celebrated and that the Marxist dogma that permeates the culture lumps all capitalists together as “robber barons.” Hill hated government intervention into the economy, arguing that “...the government should not furnish capital to these companies, in addition to their enormous land subsidies, to enable them to conduct their business in competition with enterprises that have received no aid from the

343 Anthony Gregory, “Then, Who DID Build It, Mr. President,” September 23, 2012.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-gregory/obama-business_b_1687374.html 344 Thomas DiLorenzo, “The Truth About ‘Robber Barons,’” September 23, 2006.

https://mises.org/library/truth-about-robber-barons 345 Ibid. 346 Gregory, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-gregory/obama-

business_b_1687374.html 347 DiLorenzo, https://mises.org/library/truth-about-robber-barons


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public treasury.”348 Hill was a humble and honest entrepreneur, as Thomas DiLorenzo explains:

James J. Hill was hardly a “baron” or aristocrat. His father died when he was fourteen, so he dropped out of school to work in a grocery store for four dollars a month to help support his widowed mother. As a young adult he worked in the farming, shipping, steamship, fur-trading, and railroad industries. He learned the ways of business in these settings, saved his money, and eventually became an investor and manager of his own enterprises. (It was much easier to accomplish such things in the days before income taxation.)

Hill got his start in the railroad business when he and several partners purchased a bankrupted Minnesota railroad that had been run into the ground by the government-subsidized Northern Pacific (NP). The NP had been a patronage “reward” to financier Jay Cooke, who in the War Between the States had been one of the Union's leading financiers. But Cooke and his NP associates built recklessly; the government's subsidies and land grants were issued on a per-mile-of-track basis, so Cooke and his cohorts had strong incentives to build as quickly as possible, which only encouraged shoddy work. Consequently, by 1873 the NP developers had fallen into bankruptcy. The people of Minnesota and the Dakotas, where the railroad was being built, considered Cooke and his business associates to be “derelicts at best and thieves at worst,” writes Hill biographer Michael P. Malone.349

Hill had nothing but contempt for Cooke and the NP for their shady practices and corruption, and took this frustration out on his privileged competitors. His workers began laying rails twice as quickly as the NP crews had, and still built a higher quality line. Hill micromanaged every aspect of the work, even going so far as to spell workers so they could take much-needed coffee breaks. Obsessed with cost cutting and efficiency, he passed his cost reductions on to his customers; he knew that the farmers, miners, and timber interests who used his rail services would succeed or fail along with him. Hill, continues DiLorenzo:

Publicized his views on the importance of crop diversification to the farmers of the region. He didn't want them to become dependent on a single crop and therefore subject to the uncertainties of price fluctuation, as the southern cotton farmers were. Hill also provided free seed grain—and even cattle—to farmers who had suffered from drought and depression; stockpiled wood and other fuel near his train depots so farmers could stock up when returning from a delivery to his trains; and donated land to towns for parks, schools, and churches. He transported immigrants to the Great Plains for a mere ten dollars if they promised to farm near his railroad, and he sponsored contests for the beefiest livestock

348 Ibid. 349 Ibid.

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or the most abundant wheat. His “model farms” educated farmers on the latest developments in agricultural science. All of this generated goodwill with the local communities and was also good for business.

Hill’s rates fell steadily, and when farmers began complaining about the lack of grain storage space, he instructed his company managers to build larger storage facilities near his rail depots. He refused to join in attempts at cartel price fixing and in fact “gloried in the role of rate-slasher and disrupter of [price-fixing] pooling agreements,” writes historian Burton Folsom. After all, he knew that monopolistic pricing would have been an act of killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

In building his transcontinental railroad, from 1886 to 1893, Hill applied the same strategy that he had in building the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba: careful building of the road combined with the economic cultivation of the nearby communities. He always built for durability and efficiency, not scenery, as was sometimes the case with the government-subsidized railroads. He did not skimp on building materials, having witnessed what harsh Midwest winters could do to his facilities and how foolish it was for the NP to have ignored this lesson. (The solid granite arch bridge that Hill built across the Mississippi River was a Minneapolis landmark for many years).350

Hill’s railroad was not only the most efficient and profitable railroad, but it was the only one that never went bankrupt.

The stories of Hill’s government-subsidized competitors serve as a stark contrast to the incentives and operations of a free market entrepreneur. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads, which were given large subsidies per mile of track, often built winding and inefficient rails in order to collect as much government money as possible. While Hill insisted on using only the highest quality materials even if they were more expensive, his competitors often used fragile cottonwood to tie their tracks. They paid so many lumberjacks to cut down as many trees as possible for their socialized rails that California farmers were forced to defend their property with rifles. Hill’s motto of shared prosperity with the communities around his railroads was the exact opposite motto of the state-subsidized railroads.351

The free market capitalist went out of his way to build safer and cheaper railroads while also insisting on benefitting the industries around him, while state-subsidized railroads did the exact opposite. Isn’t this the exact opposite story we are told from popular history and modern Progressives?

John D. Rockefeller is another example of a market entrepreneur who we are told to hate and despise as an evil “robber baron.” Rockefeller insisted on creating the best possible oil refineries, realizing that spending more money upfront on

350 Ibid. 351 Ibid.


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creating a high-quality product might result in long-term profits. He also devised means of eliminating much of the incredible waste that had plagued the oil industry, hiring chemists who figured out how to produce such oil byproducts as lubricating oil, gasoline, paraffin wax, Vaseline, paint, varnish, and about three hundred other substances. He bought up many inefficient competitors and put their assets to productive use. Despite the presence of hundreds of competitors, including large international ones, the company's share of the refined petroleum market rose from 4 percent in 1870 to 25 percent in 1874 and to about 85 percent in 1880.352

Rockefeller did this by cutting the cost of refining a gallon of oil from 3 cents in 1869 to less than half a cent by 1885. Rockefeller passed these savings along to the consumer, as the price of refined oil plummeted from more than 30 cents per gallon in 1869 to 10 cents in 1874 and 8 cents in 1885. Rockefeller only survived in a competitive market and prospered because of his efficiency and his ability to please the consumer.

All of Rockefeller's savings benefited the consumer, as his low prices made kerosene readily available to Americans. Indeed, in the 1870s kerosene replaced whale oil as the primary source of fuel for light in America. It might seem trivial today, but this revolutionized the American way of life; as Burton Folsom writes, “Working and reading became after-dark activities new to most Americans in the 1870s.” In addition, by stimulating the demand for kerosene and other products, Rockefeller also created thousands upon thousands of new jobs in the oil and related industries.

Rockefeller was extremely generous with his employees, usually paying them significantly more than the competition did. Consequently, he was rarely slowed down by strikes or labor disputes. He also believed in rewarding his most innovative managers with bonuses and paid time off if they came up with good ideas for productivity improvements, a simple lesson that many modern corporations seem never to have learned.353

Naturally, the success of market entrepreneurs like Hill and Rockefeller frustrated their less efficient or government-subsidized competitors. This resulted in a huge lobbying movement by corporate interests in favor of having the state expand upon government privileges and as well as implement vast new coercive powers in order to curb the free market. Thus, the regulatory cobweb of coercion was born.

How Government Regulations Enable Corporate Concentration

It is a myth that the so-called “Age of the Robber Barons” in the late 19th Century was dominated by a lack of market competition and corporate cartels that needed to be checked by government power. Historian Gabriel Kolko, a self-

352 Ibid. 353 Ibid.

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proclaimed socialist and no friend of libertarianism, actually took the time to examine this historical era and found this Progressive conventional wisdom to be incorrect. Despite the growth of both corporate mergers and the size of many corporations, there was a trend, writes Kolko:

...Toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial leaders, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reflection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible trends under control...As new competitors sprang up, and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that only the national government could [control and stabilize] the economy...Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly which caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it [Emphasis added].354

In order to avoid this competition, business leaders tried setting up “pools” and voluntary cartels in an attempt to stabilize prices and secure their profits. The first serious pooling effort began in the East Coast, sponsored by the New York Central railroad and only lasted for six months. In September 1876, a Southwestern Railroad Association was formed by seven major companies in an attempt to voluntarily enforce a pool. It did not work and collapsed less than two years later. Because of competitive pressures, each member of the pool had an incentive to break the agreements.355

The natural economic forces of the relatively free market were indicating that that centralization was inefficient and unstable, argues Roy Childs:

The push was towards decentralization, and smaller railroads often found themselves much less threatened by economic turns of events than the older, more established and larger business concerns. Thus the Marxist model finds itself seriously in jeopardy in this instance, for the smaller forms and railroads, throughout the crises of the 1870s and 1880s often were found to be making larger profits on capital invested than the giant businesses. Furthermore, much of the concentration of economic power which was apparent during the 1870s and on, was the result of massive state aid immediately before, during, and after the Civil War, not the result of free market forces. Much of the capital accumulation—particularly in the cases of the railroads and banks—was accomplished by means of government regulation and aid, not by free trade on a free market.356

354 Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History,

1900-1916 (Chicago: Quadrangle Publishing, 1967), 4-5. 355 Roy A. Childs, “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism.”

http://praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm 356 Ibid.


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Competition continued to push rates down in the 1880s, frustrating the previously successful entrepreneurs who were seeing their profits and market shares dwindle. Fortunately for them, the federal government was there to intervene on their behalf.

By 1887, with the help of corporate interests, the Interstate Commerce Act was passed with the expressed goal of having the state regulate and control rates in order to protect the interests of large railroads. But even this act failed to achieve price stabilization. Several years later, the head of a Midwestern railroad company wanted the federal government completely in charge of setting rates and fares. Businessman A.A. Walker, who spent time back and forth in between business and government agencies, was sick of the free market, and expressed his frustration what he proclaimed that, “railroad men had had enough of competition. The phrase ‘free competition’ sounds well enough as a universal regulator, but it regulates by the knife.” E. P. Ripley, the president of the Santa Fe central bank, suggested to what amounted to a Federal Reserve System for the railroads, cheerfully declaring that such a system “would do away with the enormous wastes of the competitive system, and permit business to follow the line of least resistance.” Marx would have concurred.357

Antitrust law, commonly viewed as an act of benevolent government power protecting us against evil monopolists, was another means of regulation implemented by the state at the behest of (and beneficial to) business interests, not consumers. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, consumers were enjoying massive drops in prices and increases in their standards of living, while many large corporations who had previously enjoyed profits and success were losing market share as decentralization rippled throughout the economy.

For the political entrepreneurs, this was unacceptable; they lobbied the now quite large federal government to tame this decentralized, consumer-benefiting free market for the benefit of corporate interests. The highly celebrated Sherman Antitrust Act, for example, was never intended to protect competition.

Many other groups joined the antitrust coalition: small business organizations, academics (though not economists), and journalists. They argued that the “giant monopolies” were creating a “dangerous concentration of wealth” among the capitalists of the day. Although the conspicuous wealth of entrepreneurs such as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Mellon, and Morgan added fuel to this charge, it does not appear to be true. In fact, economic historians have concluded that from 1840 to 1900, the division of national income between labor and property owners (capital and natural resource suppliers) remained in a 70-to-30 ratio. Over the same time span, both capital and developed natural resources increased faster than the labor force. This means that labor income per

357 Ibid.

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unit of labor rose compared with profit and interest per unit of property input.358

While introducing antitrust legislation, Senator Sherman and his congressional allies claimed that combinations or trusts tended to restrict output and thus drive up prices. On its face, this would seem like an odd business strategy and a terribly inefficient way to earn profits, especially in an economic environment dominated by decentralized competition. This economic intuition turned out to be correct; when actually looking at the data of the companies who were said to be “trusts” or “monopolies,” Sherman and his allies were completely wrong.

As a general rule, output in these industries expanded more rapidly than GNP during the 10 years preceding the Sherman Act. In the nine industries for which nominal output data are available, output increased on average by 62 percent; nominal GNP increased by 16 percent over the same period. Several of the industries expanded output by more than 10 times the increase in nominal GNP. Among the more rapidly expanding industries were cottonseed oil (151 percent), leather goods (133 percent), cordage and twine (166 percent), and jute (57 percent). Real GNP increased by approximately 24 percent from 1880 to 1890. Meanwhile, the allegedly monopolized industries for which a measure of real output is available grew on average by 175 percent. The more rapidly expanding industries in real terms included steel (258 percent), zinc (156 percent), coal (153 percent), steel rails (142 percent), petroleum (79 percent), and sugar (75 percent). These trends continued from 1890 to 1900 as output expanded in every industry but one for which we have data. (Castor oil was the exception.) On average, the allegedly monopolized industries continued to expand faster than the rest of the economy. Those industries for which nominal data are available expanded output by 99 percent, while nominal GNP increased by 43 percent. The industries for which we have data increased real output by 76 percent compared with a 46 percent increase in real GNP from 1890 to 1900.359

Additionally, a survey of ten mergers in the late 19th century, for instance, showed that companies earned only an average of 65 percent of their profits after consolidation than they were making before merging. Over-centralization inhibited their flexibility of action and their ability to respond to changing market conditions. Economies of scale have an advantage up to a certain point, but the market always has a way of letting a company or organization painfully aware if they are too big—as long as the state does not intervene.360

358 Thomas DiLorenzo, “The Antitrust Economists’ Paradox,” Austrian Economics

Newsletter (Auburn: The Mises Institute), 1991, 3. 359 Ibid., 4. 360 Childs, http://praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm


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So the conventional wisdom about monopolies and trusts and the need for benevolent government regulation to save us all from evil capitalists was incorrect? Shocking, just shocking, I tell you.

“One final argument could be made that the trusts were practicing predatory pricing, that is, that they were pricing below their costs to drive out competitors,” continues DiLorenzo. “But in more than a century of looking for a proven real-world monopoly actually created by predatory pricing, an example has yet to be found. Moreover, prices charged by the nineteenth-century trusts continued to fall for more than a decade. What rational businessman would continue to price below cost for more than ten years?”361

With the combination of successful propaganda and government guns, the turn of the 20th century saw an immense increase in federal regulations that directly served the interests of both large corporations and bureaucracies. Businessmen, financial leaders, and Progressive ideologues joined forces to synthesize a comprehensive ideology of interventionism to be implemented at home and abroad. By the end of World War I, decades before President Franklin Roosevelt erected his horrendous war machine, the Progressive Era had created and cemented the corporate state and the ideal of a “liberal corporate social order.” Developed consciously and purposefully as a revolution against the libertarian market order, interventionism became and has remained the dominant ideology of both the Left and mainstream Right.362

A century after the regulated, corporate state was shoved down the throats of the American public, new regulations are constantly being proposed using the exact same arguments that Sherman and his corporate cronies were using over a century ago, while old regulations still on the books continue to tip the scales in favor of corporate concentration.

Today, with an endless number of regulations, restrictions, and edicts governing virtually every aspect of economic activity, more and more Americans are being ensnared in the spider web.

Uber and Lyft drivers are being threatened, confused, and harassed by Depression-Era laws that were passed in 1938, and everywhere these ridesharing companies go they are met with hostility and even violence.363 In New York, an entrepreneur saw a market for a cheap private bus system with a fleet of vans, and at its peak was hauling 120,000 drivers a day.364 Thanks to some words on a piece of paper enforced by the armed apparatus of state power, however, these “dollar vans” are being harassed, fined and although still profitable, could easily be shut

361 DiLorenzo, “The Antitrust Economists’ Paradox,” 5. 362 Childs, http://praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm 363 Iain Murray, “Depression-Era Laws Threaten the Sharing Economy,” October 21, 2015.

https://fee.org/articles/depression-era-laws-threaten-the-sharing-economy/ 364 Lisa Margonelli, “The (Illegal) Private Bus System That Works,” October 5, 2011.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/the-illegal-private-bus-system-that-works/246166/

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down, depriving thousands of riders of a cheap, free market option of travelling across busy New York traffic. The idea of independent drivers making their own schedule and being free of the traditional corporate structure of employment is also a threat to established taxi industries and the ability of governments to use withholding to efficiently collect taxes.

The people and industries crushed by the regulatory state are endless. The Monks of Saint Joseph Abbey of St. Benedict in Louisiana were threatened and fined with jail because their unique, handcrafted coffins were not sold by “licensed funeral directors.”365 While corporate farms employ unspeakable animal cruelty, a farmer in upstate New York had his property raided and his free-range animals seized by police because, after a thorough inspection of his property, some minor and obscure regulations were broken.366

1,500 miles west of New York, the Michigan Department of Agriculture harassed and cited two farm co-ops for selling food “without a license” to hundreds of customers who bought “shares” in the animals as a credit loan to the farms. The Department agents literally stood over Joe and Brenda Golimbieski, the owners of Hill High Dairy, and Jenny Samuelson, the owner of My Family Co-op, as they were forced to dump out 248 gallons of milk, break 1,200 eggs, and destroy an undisclosed amount of fresh cream, butter, and cheese.367

Is a new and popular industry threatening to cut into your profits? You could compete and innovate in a free market, but that is very difficult. Why not lobby Leviathan instead and use them to kneecap competitors, as Big Tobacco and its Congressional allies want to do to vaping and e-cigarettes?368

Even the Amish cannot escape Leviathan’s grasp. The Food and Drug Administration has intimidated and arrested Amish farmers who were selling raw milk to willing buyers, accusing them of engaging in illegal “interstate commerce” (you can thank the precedent set by the Wickard v. Filburn case for this, which defines nearly every economic activity, including intrastate commerce, as interstate commerce and thus subject to government control).369 There is that

365 Ken White, “Monks Prevail On Appeal Over Rent-Seekers And Bureaucrats,” October

24, 2012. https://popehat.com/2012/10/24/monks-prevail-on-appeal-over-rent-seekers-and-bureaucrats/

366 John Vibes, “Police Raid Small Family Farm, Charge Family, Seize Animals Because They Were Free Range,” March 24, 2015. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/family-farm-raided-animals-seized-trumped-regulatory-charges/

367 Daisy Luther, “Farmer Forced to Dump 248 Gallons of Raw Milk & Break 1200 Free Range Eggs by Michigan Dept. of Agriculture,” July 24, 2014. http://freedomoutpost.com/farmer-forced-dump-248-gallons-raw-milk-break-1200-free-range-eggs-michigan-dept-agriculture/

368 Kit Daniels, “Unholy: Dems Join Big Tobacco to Stop Vaping Industry,” June 4, 2016. http://www.infowars.com/dems-join-big-tobacco-to-stop-vaping-industry/

369 Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, “Consumers Defend Their Farmer Against Tyrannical FDA,” May 3, 2011. http://farmtoconsumer.org/FDA-Sting-Amish-Dairy-Farmer.htm


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Constitution again, supposedly the beacon of limiting state power, being quoted verbatim to expand state power.

In the relatively free soap/cosmetic market, thanks to sites like Etsy where anyone with an Internet connection can become an entrepreneur, there are now 300,000 independent makers of cosmetics and soaps in America. Over 90% of them are women. With minimal FDA regulations, this is what a nearly free market looks like: decentralization, lots of competitors, and consumer choice. Naturally, the corporate state is having none of this. In 2015, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced the Personal Care Products Safety Act (there is that soft, unobjectionable language again—what are you, against safety?). It imposes fees, registration requirements, and reporting mandates that would devastate small businesses, all in the name of “consumer protection.” But the consumers are not the ones complaining about this free market—they never are. The Act is supported by Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Estee Lauder, L’Oréal and Revlon.370

The failure to understand how government intervention produces the exact opposite results of what was supposedly intended leads to a compounding of regulations that only make things worse. For example, although the 2008 economic crisis was caused by the Federal Reserve’s artificial manipulation of interest rates combined with government mandates to pump this new credit into the housing market, Progressives blamed—you guessed it—“deregulation.” Well, if there was not enough regulation from our wise overlords, then surely just one more layer of bureaucracy ought to fix the problem.

Well, was there actually a decrease in financial regulation leading up to the housing crisis? In between 1997 and 2008, the number of financial regulatory restrictions increased by 17.9 percent. Regulatory restrictions in Title 12 of the Code of Federal Regulations increased by 18.2 percent while the number of restrictions in Title 17—which regulates commodity futures and securities markets—increased by 17.4 percent. Total regulatory restrictions pertaining to the financial services sector grew every year between 1999 and 2008, increasing 23 percent during this time.371 As it turns out, no amount of government regulation can control or tame the chaos unleashed by the Federal Reserve’s creation of cheap money.

Despite these increases in regulations, “deregulation” was used to pass the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (you gotta love the names of these bills!) with the goal of providing stability, regulation, and confidence in financial markets. Not surprisingly, the exact opposite has happened.

370 Jeffrey Tucker, “Regulators Try to Crush 300,000 Soapmakers,” December 15, 2015.

https://fee.org/articles/regulators-try-to-crush-300-000-handmade-cosmetics-makers/ 371 The Mercatus Center, “Did Deregulation Cause the Financial Crisis? Examining a

Common Justification for Dodd-Frank.” http://regdata.org/did-deregulation-cause-the-financial-crisis-examining-a-common-justification-for-dodd-frank/

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The number of credit unions and community banks has decreased by 17%372 since Dodd-Frank was passed, larger banks’ share of the credit market has increased, and small, independent banks now need a full-time lawyer to keep up with the red tape and regulatory compliance just to make a loan.

The intellectual property (IP) racket also crushes smaller entrepreneurs and benefits larger, already established industries. As Butler Shaffer argues, the state uses IP (the creation of property rights over non-scarce goods) against actual property owners; it should be no surprise who benefits from this arrangement:

There are many other costs associated with IP that rarely get attention in cost-benefit analyses of the topic. One has to do with the fact that the patenting process, as with government regulation generally, is an expensive and time-consuming undertaking that tends to increase industrial concentration. Large firms can more readily incur the costs of both acquiring and defending a patent than can an individual or a small firm, nor is there any assurance that, once either course of action is undertaken, a successful outcome will be assured. Thus, individuals with inventive products may be more inclined to sell their creations to larger firms. With regard to many potential products, various governmental agencies (e.g., the EPA, FDA, OSHA) may have their own expensive testing and approval requirements before new products can be marketed, a practice that, once again, favors the larger and more established firms.

Increased concentration also contributes to the debilitating and destructive influences associated with organizational size. In addressing what he calls “the size theory of social misery,” Leopold Kohr observes that “wherever something is wrong, something is too big,” a dynamic as applicable to social systems as in the rest of nature. The transformation of individuals into “overconcentrated social units” contributes to the problems associated with mass size. One sees this tendency within business organizations, with increased bureaucratization, ossification, and reduced resiliency to competition often accompanying increased size. Nor do the expected benefits of economies of scale for larger firms overcome the tendencies for the decline of earnings and rates of return on investments, as well as the maintenance of market shares following mergers. The current political mantra, “too big to fail,” is a product of the dysfunctional nature of size when an organization faces energized competition to which it must adapt if it is to survive.373

This is not a bug in the system, something one can “reform” or tweak. IP was never meant to be about spreading ideas, protecting inventors, or helping artists. Since the first law of any kind related to IP was passed in 1557, copyrights and 372 Lydia Wheeler, “GAO: Dodd-Frank regs weighing on community banks, credit unions,”

December 12, 2015. http://thehill.com/regulation/finance/264475-report-dodd-frank-rules-impact-community-banks-credit-unions

373 Butler Shaffer, A Libertarian Critique of Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2013), 42-45.


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patents have been implemented with the expressed goal of restricting information, controlling messages, and crushing freedom. It was, and continues to be, another one of Leviathan’s tentacles.374

The Seen and the Unseen: Do Regulations Keep Us Safe?

State regulations, backed up by the initiatory force of police power, are often justified by the need to keep products and people safe. Without government mandates, who is to stop evil corporations from polluting the air and poisoning our water?

As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, without the addition of all the post-war regulations, Americans would be significantly wealthier and thus more likely and able to deal with any safety issues that may arise without these regulations in place. Fundamentally, however, a more important question arises: do government regulations actually make us safe? What if they are actually spider webs for the poor and the middle class and prone to regulatory capture by large corporations, thus exponentially expanding the problem they were supposed to solve?

If the study of history and economics teaches us anything, it is that government intervention and programs may actually make the situation worse or, at the very minimum, have negative unintended consequences. Like price controls or subsidies, Henry Hazlitt’s reminder about the “seen and the unseen” is especially relevant when it comes to the impact of government regulations.

When the state passes a regulation or law with the intended goal of making us safe, what is seen is immediate and powerful. What is unseen, however, is what would have resulted without the implementation of these edicts. For example, this may come as shocking to the reader, but just because the state passes a safety law does not mean that the product is now safe and in fact may mean the exact opposite. People, with a mistaken trust of governments, may be less cautious and do less research as consumers if they see a government-approved label and fall under the trap of assuming safety and quality.

Food safety comes to mind. It is hard to think of an industry that is subject to more government regulations, controls, and subsidies than farming and food. But surely these are needed, otherwise we would be at the mercy of food companies in their quest to rake in obscene profits, never sure if the food at the grocery store is safe, and constantly sick from food poisoning, right?

These questions raise issues of their own, of course. Despite all of the regulations governing our food, is what we eat really safe and healthy? One not need look around too far in any city in America to see an epidemic of obesity. We are told by the government’s food pyramid to avoid eating fat in favor of grains, which may actually make us even more overweight and unhealthy. Sugar and

374 Rick Falkvinge, “The Copyright Monopoly Was Always Intended to Prevent Freedom of

Expression,” April 14, 2013. https://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-monopoly-was-always-intended-to-prevent-freedom-of-expression-130414/

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high-fructose corn syrup are heavily subsidized by the federal government and are in virtually everything we buy at the grocery store. Healthy food that is grown locally costs more than fast food that is frozen, thawed, shipped, re-frozen, and pre-packaged from thousands of miles away. Despite the existence of a massive bureaucracy of regulations and subsidies, somehow the free market gets blamed for this.

The real culprit, of course, is government intervention. The Department of Agriculture might as well be called the Department of Corporate Welfare and Food Subsidies. While Congress and defenders of farm subsidies claim that they are always looking out for the small family farm, these forced transfers of wealth “are instead helping to accelerate their demise, economists, analysts and farmers say. That's because owners of large farms receive the largest share of government subsidies. They often use the money to acquire more land, pushing aside small and medium-size farms as well as young farmers starting out.”375

Traditional family farms now represent just over 1 percent of the population. The wealthiest 10 percent of farms, virtually all of them corporate and factory farms, receive nearly 70 percent of all government farm subsidies. 70 percent of these subsidies go to corn, wheat, cotton, rice, and soybean farmers. Peach, melon and almond growers seem to be doing fine, however, without heavy government assistance. More than $5 billion in ethanol subsidies goes to the nation's corn farmers to divert their acreage to produce transportation fuel.376

From 1995 to 2010, $16.9 billion in federal subsidies went to producers and others in the business of corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, cornstarch, and soy oils—ingredients prominent in junk food like Twinkies and candy bars.377 Healthier farmed foods like fruits and vegetables received only a fraction of the subsidy. All of these aforementioned subsidies, regulations and interventions create a distortion in the market that favors large corporations, unhealthy foods over healthy foods, punishes local farmers, and artificially lowers the price of food that makes us overweight and sick.

These distortions go back to President Franklin Roosevelt and his genius plan to subsidize farmers—paying them to destroy food while millions of Americans went hungry—in order to keep prices high and prevent them from falling to where the market was signaling them to be. The root of the problem, however, lies in the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967.

375 Gilbert M. Gaul, Sarah Cohen, and Dan Morgan, “Federal Subsidies Turn Farms Into

Big Business,” December 21, 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/20/AR2006122001591.html

376 Victor Davis Hanson, “The Department of Food Subsidies,” June 23, 2011. http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2011/06/23/the_department_of_food_subsidies

377 P.J. Huffstutter, “Report: U.S. spending billions of dollars to subsidize junk food,” September 22, 2011. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/23/business/la-fi-junk-food-subsidies-20110923


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This Act, written with the usual government-speak (what are you, against wholesome meat?), was written with the supposed goal of protecting consumers and keeping food safe while yielding us the opposite. In an interview on Dr. Thomas Woods’s podcast, John Moody explains what the meat industry looked like before the passing of the Wholesome Meat Act:

Well, imagine you're a cow before the Wholesome Meat Act. So imagine you're a cow in 1960. You could have been across tens of thousands of farms. When you went to be butchered, you could have been butchered at over 10,000 different locations. At that time, you probably would have been fed far less grain than cows are fed today. You would have lived at much lower stocking densities as a cow. It wouldn't be lie some cow frat house at a modern college, where you're all crammed into this incredibly small space. You know, you would have been spread out. You would have had distributed butchering. Meat in America used to be this highly diversified and competitive industry, and so when you went to the supermarket or you went to your local butcher and you saw all these different labels for all these different products, they really represented actual consumer choice in the marketplace.

And so after the Wholesome Meat Act, we went from having this highly diversified, incredibly competitive meat industry to now where roughly 80% of all meat in America is controlled by a handful of companies. So three to five companies control almost all the beef eaten in the nation; they control almost all the pork eaten in the nation; they control almost all the poultry eaten in the nation.378

With this consolidation of control comes the consolidation of processing. Thanks to our wise and benevolent overlords using government guns to enforce these regulations and edicts, when you buy a hamburger in this country, more often than not the meat is likely coming from thousands of different cows all grinded down together. “If there was one sick cow or one sick employee or one improperly sanitized step in that process with all those co-mingled cows,” continues Moody, “you now get the multimillion pound food safety recalls that we see is common in the American mead industry, because the only way people could keep up with the meat regulations and all the additional costs they created was by consolidating to keep up, and the consolidation made the meat supply less and less safe. It's just astoundingly sad to see in action how badly this legislation has worked out for the American people and for the American farmer.”379

It is important to note that there is not a trade-off between the supposed safety of government regulations and the Wild West of unfettered capitalism. As I argued in Chapter 3, the free market tends to provide the best incentive structure to reward socially beneficial behavior and punish behavior that directly or indirectly

378 The Tom Woods Show, Episode 656. http://tomwoods.com/ep-656-how-the-wholesome-

meat-act-gives-us-less-wholesome-meat/ 379 Ibid.

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harms third parties. But safety is undoubtedly a sliding scale, which is why governments love to use this concept to impose controls and scare us. Nothing we do is ever 100% safe; there is no such thing as a no-risk option in the world we live in. The answer to issues of safety, especially with regards to food, is to repeal government regulations, subsidies, privileges and favors, and, as Moody explains, let a decentralized free market govern safety:

[The answer to food safety] would be a decentralized meat system, a highly competitive system that's decentralized where animals are not being co-mingled, where you're not putting 3,000 chickens an hour through a multi-step chlorine batch from chickens that have been raised in their own fecal matter. There was a great study done by Consumer Reports a few years ago, where they went around the country to grocery stores and similar places, and they sampled poultry right off the shelf, in terms of its safety. So this is your USDA-inspected, FDA-approved, triple-chlorine-bathed chicken that's at your average grocery store. And the Consumer Reports results were terrifying. Something like three-quarters of the chicken they sampled tested positive for pathogenic bacteria, and over half of those samples tested positive for strains that are antibiotic-resistant.380

Thanks to the incentive structure of federal bureaucracies and regulations, American-raised chicken can be killed in America, frozen, shipped to China, then be unfrozen and processed. Then it will be refrozen and shipped back to the United States. The consumer will never know that this is Chinese-processed chicken and it will be labeled as American chicken. Even after all of this, it will still be cheaper than chicken sold by a local farmer at his town’s farmers market.381

Government regulators are generally not punished for failing to warn and protect consumers, and are often rewarded with bigger budgets (since their failures were a result of “underfunding,” of course, never of institutional incentives). But in a free market, without these government subsidies and regulations, the Chinese-processed chicken would be significantly more expensive, and private labeling agencies would lose their reputation if they stamped a Chinese-processed package with an American label. Americans could once again buy local, safe food from a decentralized network of small farmers whose animals would be less subject to the horrifying treatment of factory farming.

We see a similar result with the effects of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is not like the employees of the FDA are malicious or evil. There is no need for an elaborate conspiracy to analyze the harmful effects of state intervention; all one needs to do is understand the incentive structure. The FDA has an incentive to keep many life-saving drugs off of the market even if terminally ill people insist on making the individual choice themselves to take these drugs. The FDA faces no consequences or bad PR if a drug is kept off the

380 Ibid. 381 Ibid.


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market and thus employs ever increasing loopholes to make newer drugs more expensive or near impossible to access.

Before the FDA and other federal regulatory agencies, there was no epidemic of unsafe drugs killing or harming people. The regulations of the market governed the supply, price, access, and safety of drugs.

Before the 1938 Federal Food, Drugs and Cosmetic Act, most drug manufacturers did appropriate safety testing before they marketed the drug. A drug that killed people would kill profits as well, since consumers used trusted brand names to guide their purchases. Thus, the manufacturers’ quest for profits protected the consumer as well.

Careful manufacturers wooed the public and increased profits by linking their brand name with safety...Others pointed out that their products had been tested and approved by various outside laboratories. Brand name loyalty rewarded the drug manufacturer who always gave the customer what was promised. For the most part, manufacturers reaped what they sowed. Producers of questionable products simply had too few customers to stay in business.382

Before federal intervention, Americans decided by themselves, or through the assistance of their doctors and pharmacists, which medicines were best. Private agencies like the American Medical Association and Consumers’ Research did their own independent testing to help inform consumers. Physicians and pharmacists used journals and publications to report their own independent evaluations, while publications like Ladies’ Home Journal and Collier’s warned readers of unsafe products and recommended alternatives. As early as 1904, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs sent out letters, promoted lectures, and distributed information to inform the public about drugs and their side effects.383

This is how a free and civilized society handles regulations and consumer safety. Not through the use of government guns and threats of violence, but through a decentralized network of accountable and trusted sources that are unable to socialize their costs onto others.

How many people have died and/or suffered because they were not able to access drugs that would have cured them, helped them, or eased their chronic pain? How many drugs have harmed people despite their FDA-approval as people mistakenly assume that this stamp equals safety? What type of private, independent agencies have not been allowed to come into existence thanks to the state crowding out the market? Once again, it is the seen versus the unseen of government policy.

When it comes to the environment, once again government intervention has failed us. We generally see the usual false dichotomy proposed to the public:

382 Mary Ruwart, Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression (Sunstar Press, 2003), 77. 383 Ibid., 77-78.

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environmental concerns must be balanced against the rapacious corporate lust for profits.

Before we discuss how a free society deals with environmental protection, it is worth noting that governments have a very poor track record when it comes to environmental protection and often intensify the problem through policies of subsidies and grants of privilege. Through the tragedy of the commons, for example, when the state is actually in charge of physical resources and lands, the results have often been disastrous.

Government agencies violate their own environmental standards much more often than private companies do.384 The U.S. government is by far the biggest polluter in the world, maintaining a global gas-guzzling empire and tremendous subsidies to the oil industry. This also includes laws limiting these companies’ liability, which allows them to drill and explore in areas that no private insurance agency would find profitable to back.385 Ft. Lauderdale, Florida found itself in an ecological disaster after a local government sponsored the dumping of millions of tires in the city’s waters. Originally intended to form artificial reefs for new fish, the tires dispersed and created an untenable living space for the city’s wildlife.386

In 2015, the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) disastrously leaked millions of gallons of toxic waste into The Animas River in Colorado, with significant speculation that the EPA may have done this on purpose in order to secure superfund money.387 Once again, we see the inherent problem with state power: who watches the watchmen? How does creating a violent, centralize, largely unaccountable bureaucracy solve and not exacerbate the problem?

The libertarian answer to environmental protection lies in the proper protection of private property. When land is privately owned, there is an incentive to either preserve or expand upon the long-term value of the land as long as the owner knows that his title is legally secure and not subject to arbitrary confiscation. Public land suffers from the reverse incentives. If private property is everyone having their own glass of punch, public property is one big bowl full of hundreds of straws where everyone has the incentive to drink as much as they can before the others do the same.

Murray Rothbard argued that pollution could be seen as an act of aggression or invasion. In the 19th century, pollution was treated as a property rights violation 384 Walter Olson, “Governments Are The Worst Polluters,” November 19, 2015.

https://fee.org/articles/governments-are-the-worst-violators-of-pollution-laws/ 385 J.P. Sottile, “Mother Nature's Invisible Hand Strikes Back Against the Carbon

Economy,” January 16, 2016. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34409-mother-nature-s-invisible-hand-strikes-back-against-the-carbon-economy

386 Sam Dorman, “Florida Green Project Turned Into Eco-Disaster,” December 20, 2015. https://www.technocracy.news/index.php/2015/12/20/florida-green-project-turned-into-eco-disaster/

387 Tyler Durden, “Did The EPA Intentionally Poison Animas River To Secure SuperFund Money?” August 12, 2015. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-12/did-epa-intentionally-poison-animas-river-secure-superfund-money


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and handled through torts like an assault or theft would be. Even the largest of companies were no match for the lawsuits of small property owners who had their farms or land damaged by pollutants. Because of this, many companies went out of their way to use more environmentally friendly (although more costly) materials in order to avoid the financial and PR costs associated with lawsuits. But thanks to the abandonment of this common-law, propertarian approach, judges and governments began arguing that it was in the “public interest” to allow companies to pollute and violate property rights.388

In other words, many environmental problems we see today are a result of abandoning traditional libertarian ethics on property and law in favor of Progressive doctrines of “the public good.” Pollution went from a crime to a subsidized human right. Instead of logging companies and coal mining corporations owning the land and thus having an incentive to maintain it, they “leased” it from the state, which created privatized profits and socialized losses. Without a centralized state, and with a strict enforcement of private property, this would not occur.

For the ten billionth time in human history, governments stepped in to “fix” a problem that the market was already solving, and instead made it worse.

In the same way that the pre-FDA days saw an abundance of private groups informing the public about the safety or side-effects of drugs, absent the EPA or federal regulation laws we would see a similar effect for environmental causes. A strict enforcement of property rights alone would already make pollution and waste expensive, and environmental advocacy groups could form mutual insurance groups to conduct tests in order to find the culprits of polluters in exchange for a small portion of the tort sum or simply out of a sense of justice. Wealthy individuals are already buying up land for the sole purpose of preserving it, much like the American Prairie Reserve389, a nonprofit group which plans to buy 3.5 million acres and create a reserve double the size of Yellowstone National Park.

Property rights and a simple, honest court system solve environmental problems that would be fought about for years by politicians, environmental bureaucrats, and the corporations who lobby them. It is also harder to assess the benefits and damages in environmental disputes when these decisions are taken out of the marketplace and made by bureaucracies that have few objective ways to measure costs. Private property and liability for aggressors, not state regulation, is what protects the environment.

388 Murray Rothbard, “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,” April 22, 2006.

https://mises.org/library/law-property-rights-and-air-pollution 389 Zach Weissmueller, “Building the Largest Nature Reserve in America – With Private

Funding,” April 23, 2016. https://fee.org/articles/building-the-largest-nature-reserve-in-america-with-private-funding/

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But what about government licensing? Don’t we need the government to license and mandate standards so that people are not ripped off and exploited? In reality, state licensing, like government safety standards on products, offers the illusion of security while cartelizing that industry and erecting coercive barriers to entry.

When it comes to licensing professionals, there are two distinct considerations. First, even if the public and experts all generally agreed on standards of quality, there would be the issue of price. Milton Friedman popularized the analogy of automobiles in this context, asking readers to imagine the government mandating a “Cadillac standard” for motorists. By driving up the cost of vehicles, such a measure would obviously hurt those former motorists who couldn’t afford a Cadillac and so had to take the bus, ride a bike, or walk. Yet, even considering the Americans who could afford a Cadillac, the measure would still be harmful. Forcing such people to spend their scarce dollars on a nicer car, rather than on housing, clothes, or their children’s education, doesn’t make them better off—it just imposes the officials’ value scale.390

Like subsidies and regulations, it is almost always the industries themselves, not the general public, advocating for new or expanded government licenses under the guise of “public safety.” By artificially and coercively limiting the number of available services in a given field, and creating political rather than economic considerations for issuing licenses, this drives up the price, hampers competition, and prevents alternatives from entering the market. Licensing of doctors, for example, seems to make sense in theory; in practice, it creates a situation where nurses—who could probably do 90% of what doctors do on a daily basis, like fix broken bones—are prevented from opening up their own inexpensive medical clinics because they are unable to obtain a doctor’s license.

A free society can do a far better job at what the government attempts to do with its licensure regulations, argues Bob Murphy:

We can imagine alternative, voluntary mechanisms of telling the public which professionals are qualified, such as fraternal organizations, guilds, unions, and other private certification associations. With medical care in particular, surely hospitals and insurance companies would exercise a large degree of quality control. For example, a major hospital wouldn’t allow someone to work in the operating room without good credentials, and an insurance company wouldn’t issue malpractice coverage to a surgeon who merely had an undergrad degree in biology.

It is a paradox of our age that the interventionists think the public is too stupid to consult Angie’s List before hiring a lawyer, and so they need politicians to weed out the really bad ones by requiring law licenses. Yet, who determines whether a person (often a lawyer!) is qualified to become

390 Bob Murphy, “Do We Need the State to License Professionals?” February 11, 2015.

https://fee.org/articles/do-we-need-the-state-to-license-professionals/


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a politician? Why, the same group of citizens who were too stupid to pick their own lawyers.391

In other words, should the people or politicians decide which products are safe, how many doctors or plumbers or mechanics are needed, how much they should cost, and what types of services should be provided? Government licensing is where the political class steals your natural rights away, sells them back to you, and claims that without their benevolent power there would be chaos and anarchy.

The regulatory state survives because the public is convinced of two incorrect assertions: that the state exists to protect them and has their interests at heart, and that without government regulations private industry would pollute, loot, create products that explode in our faces, and poison our food. As is the case with virtually everything the government does, the exact opposite is true. Instead, the state subsidizes behaviors that the market tends to punish.

Most people would assume, thanks to government propaganda, that thanks to labor safety regulations like the Occupational Safety Hazard Association (OSHA) and traffic safety laws, we now have fewer workplace and traffic accidents. It is true that since these regulations were passed, we have seen a decrease in both workplace and traffic accidents; when you take a snapshot of history, however, you can always massage the facts. What is left out of this picture is that without government regulation, death and accidents at work and on the highways were already decreasing. Before the creation of OSHA, in fact, the decline in the frequency of workplace fatalities was 70 percent larger than in the quarter century that followed. Like child labor, the market was already abolishing it and improving living and safety standards before the government came in, pointed its guns, passed laws, and took the credit.392

Without governments tipping the scales, large corporations would have a much harder time competing and businesses would be held more accountable by the strict and ruthless regulation of the market. Regulation and safety are simply too important to be entrusted to the state.

391 Ibid. 392 Tom Woods, Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse

(Regnery Publishing, 2011), 150.

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Chapter 10

Mutual Aid and the Welfare State

Every libertarian has met this objection when discussing the philosophy of liberty: but without the welfare state, who would take care of the poor?

Behind this objection to libertarianism lies the assumption that the state is actually lifting people out of poverty, providing public services, and improving social welfare. The numbers tell a different story. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have created over $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities; this will never be paid off even if the federal government taxed this and future generations at 100%. Nevertheless, we will still be taxed, either directly or indirectly through even more inflation and debt, to keep this Ponzi scheme afloat for as long as possible.

After spending nearly $22 trillion393 (adjusted for inflation) on welfare programs since 1960, the U.S. has seen poverty increase (this, after an unprecedented decrease in poverty thanks to the industrial revolution).394 The stigmas once associated with not working have disappeared with welfare payments so widespread and ubiquitous; welfare recipients face a 66 to 95 percent marginal tax rate in terms of lost benefits if they quit receiving welfare and worked instead.395 The welfare state punishes and disincentives employment, so it should be no surprise that if people are paid more not to work, they will never have the incentive to actually get out of poverty. While less than 20 percent of welfare recipients move out of poverty, 45 percent of people who do not receive government welfare do.396

The welfare state, like its r-selected twin Cultural Marxism, destroys traditional family structures, decentralized communities, and the power private institutions once played in governing social order and providing charity. Since the federal welfare state began to resemble the bureaucratic Leviathan we see today in the late 1960s, out-of-wedlock births have increased by more than 400 percent, as single parenthood equals government assistance.397 Before the “war on poverty,” almost 80 percent of children were raised in traditional, two-parent families; by

393 Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, “The War on Poverty After 50 Years,” September

15, 2014. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/09/the-war-on-poverty-after-50-years

394 Thomas DiLorenzo, The Problem With Socialism (Regnery Publishing: 2016), 85. 395 Ibid. 396 Ibid. 397 Ibid., 85-86.


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2013, that number fell to 46 percent.398 The effect of this reverberates throughout the culture. Children born to single parents are three times more likely to suffer behavioral or emotional problems, girls are twice as likely to also have children out of wedlock themselves, and boys are twice as likely to be criminals.399

A free society cannot be built with the twin forces of Cultural Marxism and the welfare state creating a dysgenic environment where work, fatherhood, marriage, independence, and a low time preference are discouraged and disincentivized. Plus, the welfare state is funded through coercive expropriation of private property through taxation, inflation, and borrowing, creating an unsustainable pyramid of debt.

What if the welfare state, rather than providing a safety net for the poor, is actually a means of social control, a way for Leviathan to increase its power while promising security? What if the welfare state has done irreparable harm by displacing communities, the family structure, charities, churches, and non-state institutions that once stood as hallmarks of a free society? What if the welfare state displaced a far better and more civilized system?

Mutual-Aid Societies

Now that the modern welfare state has been around for over three generations, it is increasingly uncommon to know or meet someone who experienced an era when social welfare was provided by a decentralized network of voluntary and civic networks. These “mutual-aid societies” thrived in the West, and did a far better job of helping and assisting the poor—without violence, coercion, or a centralized bureaucracy—than any government program could ever dream of.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a staple of life in Britain, Australia, and the United States was the fraternal society. Fraternal societies (called "friendly societies" in Britain and Australia) were voluntary mutual-aid associations; now largely abandoned thanks to the crowding-out effect of the welfare state, one can still see the remnants of the societies in the Shriners, Elks, and Masons. As recently as 1920, over one-quarter of all adult Americans were members of these societies. Much to the chagrin of the corporate Progressives, these organizations were especially popular among blacks, women, and other immigrants, and the Progressives fought tooth-and-nail to displace these independent centers of aid and community in order to absorb all of society into the uniform blob and bureaucracy of the democratic welfare state.400

The principle behind these fraternal societies was simple and effective, notes Roderick Long:

398 Ibid., 86. 399 Ibid. 400 Roderick Long, “How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis: Medical Insurance

that Worked—Until Government ‘Fixed’ It.” http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html

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A group of working-class people would form an association (or join a local branch, or “lodge,” of an existing association) and pay monthly fees into the association's treasury; individual members would then be able to draw on the pooled resources in time of need. The fraternal societies thus operated as a form of self-help insurance company.

Turn-of-the-century America offered a dizzying array of fraternal societies to choose from. Some catered to a particular ethnic or religious group; others did not. Many offered entertainment and social life to their members, or engaged in community service. Some “fraternal” societies were run entirely by and for women. The kinds of services from which members could choose often varied as well, though the most commonly offered were life insurance, disability insurance, and “lodge practice.”

“Lodge practice” refers to an arrangement, reminiscent of today's HMOs, whereby a particular society or lodge would contract with a doctor to provide medical care to its members. The doctor received a regular salary on a retainer basis, rather than charging per item; members would pay a yearly fee and then call on the doctor's services as needed. If medical services were found unsatisfactory, the doctor would be penalized, and the contract might not be renewed. Lodge members reportedly enjoyed the degree of customer control this system afforded them. And the tendency to overuse the physician's services was kept in check by the fraternal society's own “self-policing”; lodge members who wanted to avoid future increases in premiums were motivated to make sure that their fellow members were not abusing the system.401

With this decentralized and voluntary structure, every individual member of the lodge had an incentive to make sure that everyone who needed help received it, but also that nobody could cheat the system or become too dependent upon it.

Mutual-aid organizations were often formed by people with the same occupation, ethnic, geographic, or religious background. The Czechoslovak Society of America, Providence Association of the Ukrainian Catholics in America, Locomotive Engineers Mutual Life and Accident Insurance Association, and the Fraternal Society of the Deaf provided essential services to their largely working class members as well as solidarity, identity, and community.402

In the Lower East Side of New York City, 500 physicians catered to Jewish societies alone. In New Orleans, there were over 600 black fraternal societies with lodge practice during the 1920s. Nationally, the two leading providers of lodge practice among native whites were the Foresters and the Fraternal Order of Eagles.

401 Ibid. 402 John Chodes, “Friendly Societies: Voluntary Social Security and More,” March 1, 1990.

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By 1910, both organizations had over 2,000 doctors under contract to provide low-cost medical care to 600,000 members.403

The Ladies Friends of Faith Benevolent Association, the Eastern Star, the Household of Ruth, the Female Union Band, Young Men of Inseparable Friends, Francs Amis, Holy Ghost, and the United Sons and Daughters; friendly societies were such a prominent feature of American life that there are literally too many of them to name (Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, was astounded at how well voluntary and market means solved problems in 19th century America). As the more general mutual-aid societies flourished, societies with a more specific aim began to develop, including deposit, burial, factory, workingmen, and building societies that tailored their services to their respective fields in the same decentralized and horizontal model.404

These fraternal societies often exhibited a very democratic way of organizing and making decisions without resorting to coercion or compulsion. This provided a check against bad doctors and gave lodge members the type of freedom that is entirely absent in today’s health care system. “Members voted in annual elections to choose a ‘society’ druggist, doctor, and undertaker who provided services at a low flat rate,” notes David Beito. “Those taken sick collected two dollars a week if they saw the lodge doctor and three dollars if they did not. To guard against false claims for cash benefits and to provide companionship, a visiting committee sat at bedside with the recipient. Those members derelict in these duties had to pay a one-dollar fine.”405

Besides its decentralized organizational structure, the most remarkable thing about these fraternal societies was the incredibly low cost at which these welfare services were provided. At the turn of the 20th century, the average cost of these lodges to an individual member was between one and two dollars a day. In other words, a year’s worth of individualized, personal, and comprehensive medical care would cost about one day’s worth of wages. The average cost of medical services outside of these lodges in the new cartelized, restricted, and centralized corporate state was one to two dollars per visit for less personalized care. Since they were paid at a fixed rate (like a Netflix subscription), lodge doctors routinely made house calls (imagine that!) and encouraged preventive medicine. Physicians competed vigorously for lodge contracts because of the security they offered and the intimate care they could provide.406

Despite the low cost of their services, these lodges did not provide poor or inferior medical care. The Independent Order of Foresters, one of the largest mutual-aid societies, frequently touted that the mortality rate of its members was

403 David Beito, “Lodge Doctors and the Poor,” May 1, 1994. https://fee.org/articles/lodge-

doctors-and-the-poor/ 404 Ibid. 405 Ibid. 406 Long, http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html

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6.66 per thousand, which was much lower than the 9.3 per thousand for the general population.407

In contrast to today’s compulsory and standardized state-run plans, these societies provided varied benefit packages tailored to different needs. Each person created his own plan. With lower dues, one could retire at 60; or with higher premiums, a worker could retire at 50 and get unemployment or illness aid equal to one’s own wages. They also insured against disability, with little distinction between accident and sickness. “This also came to mean ‘infirmity,’ i.e., insurance against old age,” explains John Chodes. “Most friendlies paid for a doctor’s services, burial expenses, annuities to widows, and educational expenses for orphans. They built old-age homes and sanitariums for members and their families. Even in their early stages, they offered unemployment benefits for those in ‘distressed circumstances’ or ‘on travel in search of employment.’ The most common pay-outs were for maternity leave and retirement pensions.”408

Friendlies served social and educational functions as well and were highly populist; donors and recipients often came from the same trade, background, and walk of life. Today’s donor was tomorrow’s recipient, and vice versa. “The social aspect of the friendlies should not be underestimated,” continues John Chodes. “Their meetings included lectures, dramatic performances, and dances both to inform and to entertain members. Their oaths of membership shared common themes, advocating values like self-reliance, thrift, self-government, civility, and mutualism. These values were enforceable, and the orders held their members accountable. Members could be refused assistance because of immorality or intemperance. But the moral standards tended not to be used adversarially, since the sense of reciprocity served to remove any stigma and patronization.”409

Mutual-aid societies also enforced moral codes, incentivizing the type of social order conducive to a free and productive society. Lodges often denied membership or benefits to anyone who was sick or disabled due to “intemperance, vicious or immoral conduct,” refused to cover the medical costs of any injuries sustained during a riot or a disturbance to public order, or anyone who manufactured explosives.410

They also founded 71 orphanages between 1890 and 1922. Perhaps the largest of these was Mooseheart, founded by the Loyal Order of Moose in 1913. Hundreds of children lived there at a time, and they had a student newspaper, two debate teams, three theatrical organizations, and a small radio station. Alumni of Mooseheart were four times more likely than the general population to have

407 Joshua Fulton, “Welfare Before the Welfare State,” June 21, 2011.

https://mises.org/library/welfare-welfare-state 408 Chodes, https://fee.org/articles/friendly-societies-voluntary-social-security-and-more/ 409 Ibid. 410 Fulton, https://mises.org/library/welfare-welfare-state


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attended institutions of higher learning and earned at least 60 percent more income than the national average.411

How Leviathan Destroyed Mutual-Aid

Despite their success and popularity, these mutual-aid societies were eventually displaced (and, sadly, virtually nobody in modern America is even aware of their existence, let alone their effectiveness) by several factors.

Increasing government control and regulation slowly eroded the viability of mutual-aid organizations, while services that were provided within the fraternal orders began to be crowded out by new government services. Mutual-life insurance programs, which thrived in fraternal organizations, were soon threatened by government-mandated compulsory old-age insurance. “Following the European example, the United States moved toward substituting ‘paternalism for fraternalism,’” writes Paul Mastin. “A growing army of social workers, social scientists, and other progressives pushed for compulsory insurance, but, in this case, the fraternal orders prevailed. However, the stage was set for later compulsory government programs that would erode the need for mutual aid.”412

The medical establishment found the success of these mutual-aid societies unacceptable. How dare these doctors be responsive to their patients in a free market and voluntary environment? They are supposed to make you wait an hour in the waiting room, fill out pages of paperwork, see you for twenty minutes, bill a third-party, and charge as much as they can like a good, Progressive system.

In America, medical lobbies like the American Medical Association (AMA) imposed sanctions on doctors who signed lodge practice contracts and quickly turned to the true enemy of social welfare—the state. “In 1912, a number of state medical boards formed the Federation of State Medical Boards which accepted the AMA's ratings of medical schools as authoritative,” explains Joshua Fulton. “The AMA quickly rated many schools as ‘unacceptable.’ Consequently, the number of medical schools in America dropped from 166 in 1904 to 81 in 1918, a 51 percent drop. The increased price of medical services made it impractical for many lodges to retain the services of a doctor. Medical boards also threatened many doctors with being stripped of their licenses if they practiced lodge medicine.”413

Mutual aid societies, continues Paul Mastin, “...suffered their worst blows as a result of government interventions. The 1942 exemption of health insurance from the income tax caused a shift from individual and mutual health plans to employment-based health coverage.”414 Thanks to this new federal law, an individual’s access to health insurance was now contingent upon their 411 Ibid. 412 Paul Mastin, “Review of From Mutual Aid to Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and

Social Services, 1890-1967, by David Beito,” The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Volume 4: No. 4 (Winter 2001), 91.

413 Fulton, https://mises.org/library/welfare-welfare-state 414 Mastin, “Review of From Mutual Aid to Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social

Services, 1890-1967, by David Beito,” 92.

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employment. If for whatever reason they found themselves unemployed, they no longer had access to health care. Combine this with the increasing level of regulations and subsidies that turned medical care into a third-party—whether insurance or governmental—payment system, and the cost of medical care quickly began to skyrocket.

Mutual-aid societies also began to suffer from laws that hindered their operation and subsidized competitors. The federal government passed laws that restricted their ability to pay out large dues to their members, barred them from providing medical care to children, put them at a competitive disadvantage against commercial companies, and mandated requirements that only larger hospitals could absorb.415 Chairmen and members began complaining that new federal laws and regulations were removing the fraternalism from their organizations, and that every minutiae and detail of their organizations were now under federal dictate.416

“The rise of the welfare state in the aftermath of the Great Depression sealed the fate of fraternal societies,” concludes Mastin. “Fraternalists decried the shifting emphasis of the federal government toward social welfare. The accountability, mutualism, and community associated with a fraternal order could not be replicated in any sort of government program.”417 Some, like Metlife and Prudential, simply incorporated and still survive today but under a far different model, but the rest vanished as providers of nearly free, voluntary social welfare.

From 1910 to 2014, there were at least two dozen federal laws or programs418 passed that sought to restrict the amount of doctors, subsidize medical costs, benefit large insurance companies over the mutual-aid model, employ monopoly protection and patents for pharmaceutical companies, and otherwise restrict and crush—through the use of government force—the voluntary, free market system of health care, social welfare, community, and insurance programs that existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Although they are thankfully experiencing a renewed growth in popularity, midwives—once an omnipresent feature of pregnancies, childbirth, and mutual-aid societies—were also legislated out of existence by the federal government. During the 1920s, the AMA and the political class once again teamed up to vanquish this threat to their monopoly. The Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921 (yet another government law with benevolent-sounding language), combined with heavily regulated training and licensure programs, contributed to a sharp decline in the use of midwives throughout the country. Midwives are now

415 Fulton, https://mises.org/library/welfare-welfare-state 416 Mastin, Ibid. 417 Ibid. 418 Mike Holly, “How Government Regulations Made Healthcare So Expensive,” December

17, 2013. https://mises.org/blog/how-government-regulations-made-healthcare-so-expensive


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allowed to practice in varying degrees in only 27 states, and are banned outright in 23 states.419

The AMA and special interests used the same arguments they employed against the lodge doctors to scare legislators, deceive the public, and lie in order to abolish and discourage the practice of midwifery. Plus, midwives were generally women and minorities (especially in lodges) and able to charge incredibly low fees while providing intimate care, so there were not very many special interest groups willing to take up their cause. So the AMA and professional doctors, unable to compete in the free market, turned to the regulatory power of the state, as Abigail R. Hall Blanco explains:

Despite the rhetoric that midwives are inferior to doctors in regard to childbirth, this doesn’t seem to be the case—when it comes to normal-risk pregnancies. In fact, infant mortality risk for such births is practically indistinguishable between home births and hospital births. Home births also offer other possible benefits. Home births and births involving a midwife are much less likely to result in C-sections. Though common, such procedures put both mother and baby at risk. Women undergoing C-sections are more likely to experience infection, hemorrhaging, and take longer to recovery from delivery. Maternal mortality for babies born this way is also higher than it is for vaginal births. Babies delivered by C-section are more likely to have breathing problems, sustain an injury due to the procedure, and have lower APGAR scores (a test given to evaluate the health of newborns).

When asked why they selected a midwife and homebirth over a hospital and doctor, women give numerous reasons. Most cite the aforementioned safety of home births and the decreased likelihood of C-sections and other medical interventions. Others stated they felt the former option offered more control over the experience, occurred in a more comfortable environment, and that they preferred their particular caregiver.420

“Ultimately,” continues Blanco, “whether a child is brought into this world with the assistance of a midwife, doctor, etc. should be about choice—the parents’ choice. Unless someone presents significant evidence that midwives and other alternative birth environments produce systematic neglect or abuse, there is no objective reason why such practices should be more regulated than doctors, much less banned.”421

The creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 was the true nail in the coffin for authentic, decentralized social welfare and healthcare. By artificially limiting the supply of doctors while simultaneously increasing the demand, the previous

419 Abigail R. Hall Blanco, “What Happened to the Midwives? (Hint: Government),” July 2,

2015. http://blog.independent.org/2015/07/02/what-happened-to-the-midwives-hint-government/

420 Ibid. 421 Ibid.

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model of individualized health care, competition, lower costs, and increased access were replaced by the bureaucracy of government power. Like Social Security, these programs are run like Ponzi schemes, where current recipients are subsidized through the debt and inflation that will eventually have to be paid for by future taxpayers.

Thanks to all of this government intervention, the supply of medical care has decreased while the costs have skyrocketed. For example, since 1970, the number of licensed doctors in the United States has almost doubled while the number of healthcare administrators has increased by nearly 3,500 percent.422

Since 1996, with even more mandates, subsidies, regulations, and Medicare expansions, the cost of medical care has risen by 105 percent. In the last two decades, industries suffering from the most amount of government intervention have seen prices skyrocket; textbooks have increased by 207 percent, college tuition by 197 percent, childcare by 122 percent, food and beverages by 64 percent, and housing by 61 percent. On the other hand, industries with the least amount of state control and the freest markets have seen prices plummet; in the last two decades, the prices of household furnishings have fallen by 2.4 percent, clothing by 4.8 percent, wireless service by 48 percent, software by 66 percent, toys by 67 percent, and televisions by 96 percent. Even with the Federal Reserve printing, borrowing, and destroying the value of the dollar, the free market is still pushing prices down while improving quality.423

The only way that the healthcare industry can be saved in America is by eliminating the government controls, subsidies, and regulations that have restricted access, raised the price, and cartelized the industry. As Ludwig von Mises reminded us, every government intervention creates a new problem, which then leads to more intervention, and so on. After a century of ruining health care, the state then resorts to the only means at its disposal: more force and more socialism. Nobody is happy with Leviathan’s model of healthcare, so now, under 2010’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (yet another beautiful name for a government law!) they will make you be a part of the corporatist healthcare system—or else.

All we need is more money, more guns, more laws, more power, and more restrictions: Progressivism and Leviathan in a nutshell.

The mutual-aid model was simply legislated out of existence by the Progressive corporate state. We have these regulations and the implementation of the welfare state to thank for the corporatist model of health care and social

422 Isaac Morehouse, “Every Industry Gets Worse When Government Gets Involved,” April

30, 2016. http://isaacmorehouse.com/2016/04/30/every-industry-gets-worse-when-government-gets-involved/

423 Mark J. Perry, “Do you hear that? It might be the growing sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut and the chickens coming home…” August 13, 2016. https://www.aei.org/publication/do-you-hear-that-it-might-be-the-growing-sounds-of-pocketbooks-snapping-shut-and-the-chickens-coming-home/


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welfare system we currently have in America. Because of this, insurance is almost unaffordable unless it is provided by our employer, combined with little consumer choice, mega-bureaucracies, and ever-increasing costs. The cold, iron fist of the state could not and will never be able to replicate the warm handclasp, fraternalism, and community of a decentralized, private model like the mutual-aid society.

Decades before Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and unemployment insurance, free people using a decentralized and voluntary network of mutual aid societies—institutions that actually fostered authentic community, fraternity, compassion, cooperation, and welfare—provided universal health care and welfare to anyone with one day’s wage, without coercion or taxes—until state intervention destroyed it.

But What About Sweden?

Many on the Left point to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and other European states as examples of countries where a heavily regulated, socialistic economy provides high standards of living and social welfare benefits that America should emulate. This argument has grown in popularity thanks to the recent success of Vermont Senator Bernie Sander’s presidential campaign. Calling himself a “democratic socialist,” he routinely praised the Scandinavian social welfare stats, while conveniently separating these countries from the ugly socialist examples of Venezuela, the Soviet Union, and Cuba.

The supposed success of Scandinavian socialism, however, is a bit more complicated than the common narrative might suggest.

Even the most enthusiastic proponent of democratic socialism, or any other type of state redistribution, has to understand that the state has no wealth of its own. It can only seize what has been produced in the private market. Without the free market, if everyone just decided to forego any type of private investments, exchange, capital accumulation, or production, there could be no wealth for the state to steal and then redistribute. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are no exceptions.

Before the creation of Sweden’s massive welfare state in the 1960s, Sweden had one of the freest economies in the world from the late 19th century on. Because of its free market economy and its ability to avoid the destruction of both world wars in the 21st century, Sweden gave rise to the some of the greatest entrepreneurs and inventors the world has ever known. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite; engineer Steve Wingquist invented the self-aligning ball bearing; Gustaf Dalen founded the gas company AGA; Baltzar von Platen invented the gas-absorption refrigerator. Sweden’s era of laissez-faire also saw the rise of Volvo, Saab, and the telecommunications company Ericsson. From 1870 to 1950, Sweden enjoyed the highest per-capita income growth in the world.424

424 DiLorenzo, The Problem With Socialism, 75.

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Yonathan Amselem explains how Sweden was transformed from a poor country of starving peasants into one of the richest countries in the world:

Some 250 years ago, the area we recognize now as “Sweden” was a frozen tundra inhabited by a huddled mass of starving peasants. Their lives were tightly controlled by a series of kings, aristocrats, and other men of artificially high esteem. As award-winning author, Johan Norberg points out...it took a series of classically-liberal minded revolutionaries to wrestle control from the elites and put Sweden on a path to prosperity.

Licensing czars, an oppressive guild system, and a litany of other onerous regulations on free exchange were dramatically reduced or eliminated. In the century from 1850–1950, the population doubled and real Swedish incomes multiplied nearly tenfold. Despite the almost non-existence of a welfare state or any major state control of economic sectors, by 1950 Sweden was the fourth richest nation in the world. Sweden’s extraordinary growth during that century rivaled even that of the United States (Sweden was not a participant in the two World Wars). As a matter of fact, capital formation and wealth creation proved so abundant in Sweden during the global depression of the 1930s that even social democrats in the legislature practiced a form of salutary neglect to ensure the prosperity would continue. As with any other country, Sweden’s impressive capital stock was built by entrepreneurs operating in a free market system.425

In other words, Sweden’s wealth was built by laissez-faire capitalism, not a redistributive social welfare state.

Generations of Swedes, in a free market economy with minimal government intervention, built an incredibly wealthy country and the traditions, work habits, and culture that fosters economic liberty. By the 1960s, however, Sweden began to transition, as most wealthy countries do, from a K-selected to an r-selected environment, where resources are abundant and work is not as difficult. Although Sweden avoided both the military combat and political ideologies of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism that dominated the European belligerents, Sweden’s wealth became a breeding ground for Progressives and collectivists to push for a large welfare state and permanent bureaucracies. “Free” healthcare and education subsidized on the backs of the K-selected wolves who worked, saved and invested? The rabbits were on board, and voted in droves for Leftist parties. Big business, seeking protection from their once free markets, colluded with union leaders in advocating for socialism, and the welfare state was born.

In just a few decades, government spending more than doubled while taxes were doubled or even tripled. What was once the fourth richest nation in the world had fallen to fourteenth by 2000. “Nordic Socialism has frozen a once

425 Yonathan Amselem, “How Modern Sweden Profits from the Success of Its Free-Market

History,” October 16, 2015. https://mises.org/library/how-modern-sweden-profits-success-its-free-market-history


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entrepreneurial and prosperous people in time,” notes Yonathan Anselem. “With few exceptions, Sweden’s large businesses have very little incentive to innovate (and they have not), and many enterprises now survive purely on government contracts whose value is impossible to ascertain without a system of free exchange to establish prices for goods and services.”426

A 2009 study by the Swedish Economic Association discovered that the Swedish economy did not create a single private sector job on net from 1950 to 2005. From 1975 through 2000, income per capita grew in the U.S. by 72 percent, in Western Europe by 64 percent, but only 42 percent in Sweden. Out of the top 23 developed countries, Swedes receive the least amount of services per tax dollar—33 percent less, for example, than Great Britain. Swedish doctors, on average, see four patients a day, down from nine in 1975, spending as much as 80 percent of their time on administration. Employee absenteeism is rampant in both the public and private sector. The government provides sick benefits equal to as much as 80 percent of a worker's wages, and economics teaches us that individuals respond to incentives: although they are one of the healthiest people in the world, Swedes now “report sick” more often than any other people. Absenteeism has doubled in the last seven years and “sick pay” now consumes nearly 20 percent of government's expenditures.427

Although immigrants make up approximately one-seventh of the labor force, most immigrants live on welfare in ghettos. The number of segregated neighborhoods continues to grow, and children grow up without ever seeing someone who goes to work in the morning. Sweden's most important companies are products of their laissez-faire, free market era—Ericsson (mentioned above), and Electrolux, the world's biggest manufacturer of household appliances, which was founded in 1910. Only one of Sweden's 50 biggest companies was founded after 1970. The only reasons Swedish businesses can stay afloat are due to their relatively low corporate tax rates and stable currency. Sweden's welfare state succeeded in the short term for four reasons: a small and homogeneous population, an efficient civil service with little corruption, a strong Protestant work ethic, and a high productivity that resulted from that work ethic. Sadly, the welfare state has nearly destroyed these features of a once free and prosperous Sweden.428

Government power does not just hollow out the economic base of a country. Socialism, by incentivizing predation and parasitism and discouraging private production, savings, and investment, also destroys cultures. Thomas DiLorenzo, citing Swedish economist Per Bylund, describes the new r-selected “socialist man” that modern Sweden has created:

426 Amselem, https://mises.org/library/how-modern-sweden-profits-success-its-free-market-

history 427 Neil Reynolds, “‘Rotting’ Sweden a Lesson in Bad Policy,” July 28, 2006.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/rotting-sweden-a-lesson-in-bad-policy/article731023/

428 Reynolds, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/rotting-sweden-a-lesson-in-bad-policy/article731023/

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As described by Swedish economist Per Bylund, “[W]hen handing out benefits and therefore taking away the individual’s responsibility for his or her own life, a new kind of individual is created—the immature, irresponsible, and dependent…[T]he welfare state has created...a population of psychological and moral children.” The children and grandchildren of the welfare state, (as opposed to earlier generations) are indoctrinated at an early age in the government schools that they have a supposed “right” to “free” education, health care, an income, and anything else they might desire. Of course, no can have a “right” to such material things unless someone else can be compelled to pay for them...The Swedish welfare state, says Bylund, has created “egotistical monsters” by “handing out privileges and benefits to everybody at ‘nobody’s’ expense.”429

In one generation, the socialists had nearly destroyed Sweden’s proud tradition of free markets, private enterprise, and entrepreneurial spirit. It is no wonder that that there was a revolt against the Leftist and socialist governments, resulting in electoral victories for parties who favored more fiscally conservative reforms. In the 1990s, Sweden sharply reduced marginal income tax rates, abolished currency controls, deregulated and/or privatized bank lending, retail, telecommunications, and airline industries, and imposed significant cuts in government spending. Thanks to these reforms, Sweden’s national debt fell from 80 percent of GDP in 1992 to 40 percent by 2008.430

As the economy is slowly being liberalized and moves in a more free market direction, the popularity of private health care and social security plans are growing. Swedes are turning to private health care plans because they are tired of year long waiting lists for cancer patients and other major surgeries. In the years following the 1990s crisis, Sweden has deregulated whole industries and encouraged the privatization of public services. One Swedish hospital is even listed on the stock exchange. Sweden’s income tax has been slashed, and is now lower than in France, Belgium and Denmark.431

In Denmark, we see a similar story to Sweden’s. On the coattails of centuries of economic liberty and secure property rights that led to unprecedented amounts of wealth, after World War II Denmark began socializing and creating the massive bureaucracy necessary to implement a welfare state.

After decades of heavy taxation and socialism, over 25 percent of its working-age population (18 to 66) now lives full-time on the backs of other taxpayers. For every one hundred full-time workers, there are sixty working-age welfare recipients. Danes have a marginal income tax rate of nearly 60 percent on incomes of $55,000 and above, a 25 percent national sales tax, and a 180 percent tax on automobiles. “Green taxes” on heating, electricity, water, and gasoline 429 DiLorenzo, The Problem With Socialism, 76. 430 Ibid., 75-76. 431 J.D. Tuccille, “‘Socialist’ Swedes Take to Private Health Insurance,” January 22, 2014.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/01/22/socialist-swedes-take-to-private-health


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increased dramatically from the 1960s through the 1990s. When factoring in all taxes and government burdens, the total tax level approaches 70 percent.432

One study, by the municipal policy research group Kora, recently found that only 3 of Denmark’s 98 municipalities will have a majority of residents working in 2013. Because of this, Denmark, like Sweden, has been at work overhauling entitlements, tinkering with the tax code, and trying to find ways to incentivize Danes into working more, working longer hours, or both. They have cut their unemployment benefits from four years to two years; not surprisingly, the average amount of time it takes a previously unemployed Dane to find work feel from just over four years to just over two years. The population is also aging, which puts an even heavier burden on the young to pay for their welfare benefits.433

In order to help mask the cost of their predation and expropriation of private property and the free market, European social welfare states also impose massive indirect taxes. Politicians love increasing spending and raising taxes in indirect ways (like printing or borrowing money), giving the illusion of increased benefits and wealth without the potential anger over a higher direct tax bill. According to Nima Sanandaji:

Over time, an increasing share of taxation has been raised through indirect taxes. The latter are less visible to those paying them, since they are either levied before the wage is formally given to the employee or are included in the listed price of goods.

Finland is worth considering as an example. The country’s tax level was 30 percent of GDP in 1965. Indirect taxes in the form of VAT and mandatory social security contributions amounted to a quarter of total taxation. In 2013, the total tax take had increased to 44 percent of GDP, half of which was hidden taxes.

Finnish governments have funded the expansion of the public sector by raising the hidden, but not the visible, tax burden. Denmark has followed a route wherein both hidden and visible taxes have been hiked.434

Despite all of their social welfare spending, taxes, and state redistribution, the poor in the United States are actually richer than the middle class in much of Europe. The poverty level in the US is still higher than the median income level in Portugal, Poland, Greece, Hungary, Estonia, and the Czech Republic, while the middle class in Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom barely beat out America’s

432 DiLorenzo, The Problem With Socialism, 78. 433 Suzanne Daley, “Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault,” April 20, 2013.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/world/europe/danes-rethink-a-welfare-state-ample-to-a-fault.html

434 Nima Sanandaji, “Scandinavian Myths: High Taxes and Big Spending Are Popular,” August 4, 2015. https://fee.org/articles/scandinavian-myths-high-taxes-and-big-spending-are-popular/

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poor.435 Sweden is still poorer on average than Mississippi, the lowest income state in the United States.436

So while socialists like Bernie Sanders make the technically correct claim that the U.S. has a higher poverty rate than many other countries, being poor in America still means you have a higher-standard of living than nearly every other country’s middle-class, including every Scandinavian country except Norway. Only in Luxembourg and Switzerland (the most libertarian states in Europe) are the poor better off than in the United States.437

Massive police states are also needed to implement a large welfare state, control public opinion, and herd the population. In Sweden, thanks to a 2010 law, it is impossible for parents to home-educate their children; in response to the growing popularity of charter and private schools, Sweden has begun to harass “independent schools,” forcing them to either teach their pro-government, multicultural agenda or be shut down. The Swedish national curriculum emphasizes abolishing “traditional gender roles.” Even in government day care—considered a form of school, where more than 90 percent of children between 18 months and 5 years old are enrolled—a “gender educator” ensures that children are not absorbing any traditional notions about the sexes. Prayer is outlawed, and children are taught to be ashamed of their Christian past.438

Here is just one family’s story:

The Grüninger family—originally from Germany, where a Nazi-era law against homeschooling is still in force—moved to Sweden under the impression that home education was legal. They tried the local government school first, anyway. But it was a disaster. Anti-Christian bigotry was overwhelming. Students constantly harassed the children, making frequent reference to Adolf Hitler, too. “It was terror for us,” explained the father, an auto-manufacturing worker.

The oldest daughter, 11 at the time, was forced to endure a “sex education” class so graphic and intense—without so much as parental consent—that she couldn't even speak when she arrived home in tears. She had to describe the “lesson” to her mother in a letter. The mom was shocked. The young girl started bathing obsessively — “wash, wash, shower, shower, wash” — a problem that persists to this day. Bernard Grüninger and his wife spoke with school officials on numerous occasions, to no avail. Instead, teachers lectured them about hugging and kissing their children goodbye when they dropped them off, saying the

435 Ryan W. McMaken, “The Poor in the US Are Richer than the Middle Class in Much of

Europe,” October 16, 2015. https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-europe

436 DiLorenzo, The Problem With Socialism, 77. 437 McMaken, https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-europe 438 Alex Newman, “Leaving Home: New Law Forces Home-Schoolers to Fight or Flee.”

http://freesweden.net/leaving_home.html


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displays of parental love were inappropriate. So the family finally decided to homeschool.439

In response, the local government sent their goons to the Grüninger’s home for multiple “inspections,” searching their entire property for anything they could find that might implicate them. The children suffered immensely, worried that at anytime the police might take them away from their parents. After several weeks of harassment, the Swedish Parliament eventually banned all non-government education altogether, and the Grüninger’s are appealing to both the U.S. and Canadian governments for refugee status so they can raise and teach their children in peace.

Even before the new law, the Swedish government brutally targeted a family escaping Sweden in search of educational freedom. In a now-infamous case that prompted a worldwide outcry and condemnation from human-rights organizations in Sweden and abroad, Domenic Johansson, a 7-year-old homeschooler at the time, was seized by armed Swedish police while waiting to take off for India with his parents. The family had clashed with local authorities that refused to permit home education. Since Sweden’s 2011 law banning all non-state schools was passed, thousands of Swedish families have moved to other European countries, Australia, and the U.S. in order to avoid Sweden’s police state.440

Harald Baldr, a Norwegian “tax-refugee,” calls his former home Europe’s worse police state. If you are caught saying something negative about the Norwegian welfare state or disparaging the government, your job, career, and reputation are on the line. Each year, Norwegians are sent a selvangivelse; this is essentially a written statement where the state tells you how much wealth it knows that you have accumulated. If all of your assets are not accounted for, the burden is on you to correct it. To ensure compliance, how much everyone earns and saves are made public online and in newspapers. Tax rates approach 80%. The state employs secret police forces at airports and other public areas, ensuring little to no personal privacy. Baldr calls Norway a “fearocracy,” and the most brainwashed people on the planet, where government schools and horizontal pressure by the public enforce a rigid conformity.441

Progressives also claim that America was prosperous in the 1950s and 1960s when the rich paid their “fair share” of taxes. While marginal tax rates were technically as high as 91 percent in the 1950s, after standard deductions and credits, there was not a single American who paid more than 45 percent of their income in taxes. Since 1950, the U.S. government has collected between 17 to 20 percent of GDP in taxes and between 7 and 9 percent on income taxes specifically, regardless of tax rates. The percentage of taxes paid by the highest bracket of income earners has actually gone up since 1980. In 1980, the top 20 percent paid about 55 percent of all income taxes. Today, it’s just shy of 70 percent. The same 439 Ibid. 440 Ibid. 441 Harald Baldr, “8 Facts About Norway: Europe’s Worst Police State,” November 1,

2015. http://haraldbaldr.com/8-facts-about-norway-europes-worst-police-state/

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goes for the top 1 percent, which went from about 15 percent in 1980 to just shy of 30 percent today.442

What is also overlooked is that despite their heavy tax burdens, countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark have large amounts of economic freedom, lower corporate tax rates than the U.S., and after decades of socialism are liberalizing their economies in response to the failures of their social welfare states. While speaking at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, responding to Bernie Sanders’s campaign rhetoric, said he was aware “that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism...Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy...The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens,” but that it is also “a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.”443

According to the Heritage Foundation’s annual Economic Freedom Index—which ranks every country based on their level of property rights protections, rule of law, regulatory and tax burdens—Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and the Netherlands all rank very high in the rule of law, property rights, and regulatory efficiency categories but low in public finance and public debt. After a decade of free market reforms, New Zealand, which used to have a high-tax social welfare state with large public debt, is now the third economically freest country in the world behind Hong Kong and Singapore. The U.S., which used to dominate this list, is now 11th (and sinking further down every year).444

Fundamentally, defenders of Scandinavian socialism ignore causation and correlation. They assume that these countries are wealthy, happy, and prosperous because they have high taxes and generous social welfare benefits; these benefits and high taxes, however, can only be implemented after a country has built a strong economic base through private property and free markets. “But, imagine if LeBron James took up smoking,” writes Yonathan Anselem. “Any success on the court would be despite his destructive habit not because of it. Sweden’s economic success has come in spite of its socialism.”445

Critiques of the European welfare state are not just meant for Progressive ears either. Among many members of the Alt-Right in the U.S. and Europe446,

442 Andrew Syrios, “The Good Ol' Days: When Tax Rates Were 90 Percent,” November 24,

2015. https://mises.org/library/good-ol-days-when-tax-rates-were-90-percent 443 Kerry Jackson, “Denmark Tells Bernie Sanders It's Had Enough Of His ‘Socialist’

Slurs,” November 9, 2015. http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/denmark-tells-bernie-sanders-to-stop-calling-it-socialist/

444 The Heritage Foundation, “2016 Index of Economic Freedom.” http://www.heritage.org/index/

445 Amselem, https://mises.org/library/how-modern-sweden-profits-success-its-free-market-history

446 Despite this minor critique, I am very sympathetic to the Alt-Right and see a lot of overlap between them and reactionary libertarianism.


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socialism unfortunately is much more popular than it should be. They argue—perhaps unaware of the real economic history of European welfare states presented above—that socialism and larger welfare states could and do work if they are implemented among a small, white, and homogenous population. “While an all-White nation won’t collapse under socialist policies as quickly as an African cesspool,” argues Matt Forney, “that doesn’t make socialism desirable or viable as an economic system.”447

A nation of culturally and ethnically homogenous whites, with high average IQs, will undoubtedly handle the negative, dysgenic, and wealth-destroying effects of socialism better than other cultures, but “saying that whites can defy the laws of economics is like saying that some men can pass for women...socialism corrupts White people as assuredly as it corrupts everyone else. Five decades of a cradle-to-grave welfare state made New Zealanders lazy and complacent. As r/K selection theory shows us, free resources inevitably breed a nation of sexually deviant layabouts. A society where success is determined not by your intelligence or ingenuity but by how well you can game the bureaucracy is one that will inevitably fall apart, regardless of its racial composition.”448

Socialism creates the same social and cultural effects that the Alt-Right and traditionalists in general oppose. Even in a purely homogenous country, there is no reconciliation between a K-selected environment and a socialistic welfare state. You can have one or the other—but not both.

447 Matt Forney, “Revolution and the Myth of White Socialism,” September 2, 2016.

https://www.righton.net/2016/09/02/revolution-and-the-myth-of-white-socialism/ 448 Forney, https://www.righton.net/2016/09/02/revolution-and-the-myth-of-white-socialism

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Chapter 11

Withdraw Consent

How long would state power last if every single citizen openly and defiantly withdrew their consent? What if 5 million people refused to file their income taxes? 10 million? 100 million?

All states, no matter how authoritarian or repressive, must rely on some form of public consent to cement their rule. It is a simple numbers game—for every one of them, there are at least one hundred of us. A good parasite knows never to overwhelm the host, and the best ones convince the hosts that this predatory relationship is in their interest.

But without consent or some form of public support, even the largest of states can fall right in front of our eyes. In 1989, after 70 years of brutal repression, gulags, famines, and mass murder, the Soviet Union just vanished. One day it was a mighty empire, and the next day Soviet flags were being pulled down from the tops of government buildings and replaced with the flags of brand new, independent nations. The central plan had failed, the top-heavy communist state was exhausted, and millions of people withdrew their consent from the regime.

In the past, the Soviets had used massive military might to quash rebellions and uprisings in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere throughout their state prisons. Finally, exhaustion set in—the tanks did not come, and soldiers did not fire. Empires fall apart, the center cannot hold.

In the 16th century, Étienne de la Boétie penned The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, one of the most radical, yet forthright, political essays in Western history. Boétie asks why so many people obey the state even though the citizenry outnumbers them—what he called the mystery of civil obedience. Grounded in the Thomistic tradition of natural law and libertarian ethics, Boétie concluded that tyranny could only rest on public consent, not fear. Attempting to shake his fellow man of his docile obedience to power, Boétie argued that if a ruler is denied consent, then he has no power or authority at all.449

In Murray Rothbard’s in depth analysis of Boétie’s essay and the conclusions Boétie reached, Rothbard explains that a tyrant’s worst fears are not protests or calls for reform, but that that he may be mocked, ridiculed, and laughed at. States will tolerate anything but mockery and the withdrawal of public consent.

449 Murray Rothbard, “The Politics of Étienne de la Boétie,” February 26, 2010.

https://mises.org/library/political-thought-%C3%A9tienne-de-la-bo%C3%A9tie


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La Boétie's celebrated and creatively original call for civil disobedience, for mass nonviolent resistance as a method for the overthrow of tyranny, stems directly from the above two premises: the fact that all rule rests on the consent of the subject masses and the great value of natural liberty. For if tyranny really rests on mass consent, then the obvious means for its overthrow is simply by mass withdrawal of that consent. The weight of tyranny would quickly and suddenly collapse under such a nonviolent revolution...

...Thus, after concluding that all tyranny rests on popular consent, La Boétie eloquently concludes that “obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement.” Tyrants need not be expropriated by force; they need only be deprived of the public's continuing supply of funds and resources. The more one yields to tyrants, La Boétie points out, the stronger and mightier they become. But if the tyrants “are simply not obeyed,” they become “undone and as nothing.”450

“Consent is also actively encouraged and engineered by the rulers; and this is another major reason for the persistence of civil obedience,” continues Rothbard. “Various devices are used by rulers to induce such consent. One method is by providing the masses with circuses, with entertaining diversions.”451 In the Roman Empire, this included the famous “bread and circus” model. In today’s world, we see this same spectacle at sporting events, where military jets fly overhead and flags the size of football fields are rolled out by men bathed in medals. Allegiance to the indivisible state is pledged every morning by millions of children in government schools. Welfare crumbs and public works projects create dependency and strings. Politicians, celebrities, and our fellow citizens remind us how important it is for us to vote and participate in the state’s holy democratic sacrament.

One of the most effective means of delegitimizing Leviathan, then, is to withdraw support in any and every way imaginable. La Boétie believed that “the spread of enlightenment among the public will not only generate refusal of consent among the mass but will also aid its course immeasurably by splitting off, by driving a wedge inside, a portion of the disaffected, privileged bureaucracy.”452

This does not mean that we should be anti-social or become hermits. The state always creates an artificial order, spreads parasitism, and undermines authentic community, civilization, and culture. Freedom of association and private property, on the other hand, create decentralized networks, and active participation in non-state institutions provides additional bulwark and increased irrelevance to the state and the artificial, lowest-common-denominator culture it breeds. 450 Rothbard, https://mises.org/library/political-thought-%C3%A9tienne-de-la-

bo%C3%A9tie 451 Ibid. 452 Ibid.

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Civil Disobedience

“The only way to realize liberty in a principled, non-backfiring fashion will rely on potential resistance,” argues Dan Sanchez. “...The more successful that libertarians are in their educational work, the less tolerant will the public be toward their own subjugation, and the more will State encroachments on liberty be nullified or precluded by potential resistance. As the peaceful libertarian educational project marches forward, so too will the buffer margin of potential public resistance advance and induce the State to reverse-march.”453

In other words, the more civil disobedience and non-compliance there are in a society, the harder it will be for the state to grow. Human beings need rules; but when the rules go beyond the scope of protecting life, liberty, and property, and become a cobweb of coercion ensnaring us all, we need rule-breakers.

There are numerous stories of famous figures throughout history peacefully and passionately resisting the state, like Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi. Civil disobedience, however, is not limited to a few, brave individuals—it has been an integral part of American history and responsible for numerous advancements in individual liberty.

Under Jim Crow laws in the South, blacks were not legally allowed to own or carry firearms. From the perspective of the Southern political class, it would make sense to disarm those who you wish to subjugate. Going all the way back to the 1850s, black civil rights leaders defied this prohibition, proudly carried guns, and advocated that other blacks do the same. Rosa Parks once described her dinner table being “covered with guns” at a typical strategy session in her home. Thurgood Marshall called Little Rock activist Daisy Bates’s home “an armed camp,” and Bates herself never went anywhere without her .45 automatic pistol. “From the time of Frederick Douglass, who called a ‘good revolver’ the ‘true remedy for the Fugitive Slave Bill,’ to that of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, who braved the worst of 20th century Jim Crow and declared, ‘I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom,’ armed self-defense has always gone hand in hand with the fight for racial equality in America,” notes Damon Root.454

John R. Salter Jr., one of the organizers behind the non-violent sit-ins against government-enforced segregated lunch counters in Mississippi, claimed that, “I'm alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms...Like a martyred friend of mine, NAACP staffer Medgar W. Evers, I, too, was on many Klan death lists and I, too, traveled armed: a .38 special Smith

453 Dan Sanchez, “Peacefully Staring Down the State,” June 7, 2014.

http://www.dansanchez.me/feed/peacefully-staring-down-the-state 454 Damon Root, “Why Civil Rights and Gun Rights Are Inseparable,” May 10, 2014.

http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/10/why-civil-rights-and-gun-rights-are-inse


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and Wesson revolver and a 44/40 Winchester carbine...The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay.”455

Although black civil rights group were openly non-violent, they understood that being armed—even though it was illegal for them to be—was the only way that their rights and dignity would be respected. Black self-defense organizations like the Deacons for Defense of Justice taught young blacks how to shoot and offered private protection to civil rights leaders. “The Deacons appeared at protests toting rifles and gained special notoriety when they aimed their guns at firemen who were preparing to unleash hoses on a group of black high school students in Jonesboro, Louisiana, as they picketed for black control of black schools,” notes Thaddeus Russell.456

“These and many other examples of black armed self-defense that the current tendency among liberals to think of gun rights as a cause championed by racists is wrong-headed,” continues Russell. “Though largely associated with the conservative white Right...there was a time when people on both sides of America's racial divide embraced their right to self-protection, and when rights were won because of it."457

In response to a Dallas ordinance which makes it illegal to serve food to the homeless without jumping through a myriad of bureaucratic hoops—including a fee, training classes, and written notices—a group calling themselves “Don’t Comply” took to the streets just outside the Austin Street Shelter in Dallas near Christmas in 2015 to intentionally commit an act of civil disobedience in order to clothe and feed the homeless. When confronted by the police who told him to file the proper paperwork, lead organizer of the event, Murdoch Pizgatti politely replied, “no.” The police, realizing that nearly of all the organizers were well-armed, promptly backed off. Thanks to their refusal to comply with this ridiculous state edict, hundreds of homeless people were clothed, fed and were able to pray together in peace.458

In honor of this civil disobedience, the rest of the country should learn the importance and necessity of firearms and open carrying. Not only will this help protect you and your family from private criminals, but it may deter public ones as well. If every citizen, regardless of whether it was legal, learned how to safely carry, store, clean, and use a firearm, gun control and violations of our rights by police would be almost impossible. What if every regulation, edict, tax, or control

455 Damon Root, “Yes, Guns Are Dangerous. But They Also Save Lives and Secure Civil

Rights,” December 8, 2012. http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/18/yes-guns-are-dangerous-but-they-also-sav

456 Thaddeus Russell, “How 'Crazy Negroes' With Guns Helped Kill Jim Crow,” July 22, 2014. http://reason.com/archives/2014/07/22/how-crazy-negroes-with-guns-he

457 Russell, http://reason.com/archives/2014/07/22/how-crazy-negroes-with-guns-he 458 Matt Agorist, “Well-Armed Activists Openly Defy Texas Law to Feed the Homeless—

Hundreds Clothed and Fed,” December 21, 2015. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/well-armed-activists-openly-defy-texas-law-feed-homeless-hundreds-clothed-fed/

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that violated our rights to private property and free association by the state was met with the barrels of privately owned guns?

Fundamentally, the only way rights and liberties will truly be protected is if those who seek to take them away from us are met with swift and overwhelming violence.

All it takes are little dominoes of defiance to start reclaiming our freedom. In Olympia, Washington, bar owner Frankie Schnarrs had his liquor license revoked by the state because he allows his patrons to smoke marijuana inside his bar. “I want them to take my license from me. They can go to Hell. Get out of here. Get off my property,” Schnarrs says. In defiance of a previous tobacco-smoking ban, Schnarrs turned his upstairs bar into a “private club,” thereby circumventing the county ordinances. He is asserting his natural private property rights and the free association of his customers with a big middle finger to the state. If more businesses operated like Schnarrs, enforcement of the regulatory state would be impossible.459

With the rise of internal checkpoints inside the U.S., individuals are being illegally pulled over by the state without cause, detained, and interrogated in violation of their constitutional liberties. Police rely on the fact that virtually nobody knows their rights and that seeing a state uniform can understandably make one timid and easy to comply. There are, however, many people who know the law and understand that you do not have to answer a single question during these checkpoints. Many of them are collected in great videos you can find on YouTube. Once again, if nobody submitted to these illegal checkpoints and refused to comply, the state would get the message and stop setting these pirating checkpoints up (like in Manchester, New Hampshire, where activists warned motorists ahead of time and launched protests, forcing the police to cancel their planned checkpoint460). There are also several radar detectors on the market that will not only help you avoid police altogether but will warn you when a checkpoint is up ahead.

Counter-recruiters are attempting to demystify the supposed honor of fighting in foreign wars overseas for government and corporate interests by openly talking to students about what life in the military really is like. It is an uphill battle; “U.S. military recruiters are teaching in public school classrooms, making presentations at school career days, coordinating with JROTC units in high schools and middle schools, volunteering as sports coaches and tutors and lunch buddies in high, middle, and elementary schools, showing up in Humvees with $9,000 stereos, bringing fifth-graders to military bases for hands-on science instruction, and generally pursuing what they call ‘total market penetration’ and

459 Keith Eldridge, “Olympia bar owner: Weed smoking is welcome, state can ‘go to Hell,’”

August 1, 2016. http://komonews.com/news/local/olympia-bar-owner-weed-smoking-is-welcome-state-can-go-to-hell

460 Joel Valenzuela, “New Hampshire Activists Cancel Police Checkpoint,” April 28, 2015. http://truthvoice.com/2015/04/new-hampshire-activists-cancel-police-checkpoint/


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‘school ownership.’”461 Counter-recruiters, often veterans themselves, are combating this propaganda by explaining to children the real human costs of war, that there are other career alternatives, and different means of obtaining honor in society.

Even in the Middle East, civil disobedience is disrupting the oppressive Islamic culture that reigns over the region. “Across the Middle East,” writes Thaddeus Russell, “[millennials] are throwing their head scarves to the wind, shooting hip-hop videos at house parties, selling bootleg satellite dishes, sporting outlawed tattoos, and watching tons of porn...a bloodless but raucous revolution led by Arab and Persian millennials is underway all over Muhammad’s empire. This is a revolution in everyday life, and it is gradually but surely subverting repressive regimes across the Middle East. No one understands this more clearly than the radical Islamists who are clinging to power against the waves of young people’s cultural subversion. Ayatollahs in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have issued fatwas against the ‘satanic instruments’ of Western pop culture. But they are losing, as more young women shed their hijabs, Islamic authorities beg for people to stop watching TV, and satanic verses fill their air.”462

Government power, through bombs and invasions, have only unleashed the most fundamental and radical Islamic reactions; while all on their own, young Arabs and Muslims are quietly liberating themselves through peaceful acts of non-compliance and civil disobedience.

Despite increasingly tougher copyright laws, including attempts to implement complex, international “trade deals” that seek to expand the corporate-copyright monopoly system, open sharing of information is pervasive. In two studies done in the last decade, “61% of 15-25-year-olds engage directly in sharing of culture. The social pressure for upholding the copyright monopoly laws is close to non-existent. The few who are deterred by harsher monopoly enforcement tend to compensate by anonymizing. These are the conclusions of a fresh study on the youths’ sharing of culture.”463

In one of the most heroic acts of civil disobedience, Ross Ulbricht, under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, founded the Silk Road in 2010, an online marketplace where users could use the digital currency Bitcoin to buy and sell illegal drugs, including life-saving prescription drugs that were only available in Canada or Mexico. Ulbricht was breaking untold amounts of laws, yet continued to operate the site anyway. Because of his efforts, thousands of people were able to peacefully access the drugs they wanted at a market price without facing the

461 David Swanson, “How to Counter Recruitment and De-Militarize Schools,” February 9,

2016. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/02/counter-recruitment-de-militarize-schools.html

462 Thaddeus Russell, “My Favorite Millennial!” August 26, 2014. http://reason.com/archives/2014/08/26/my-favorite-millennial/2

463 Rick Falkvinge, “Study: Despite Tougher Copyright Monopoly Laws, Sharing Remains Pervasive,” May 21, 2012. http://falkvinge.net/2012/05/21/study-despite-tougher-copyright-monopoly-laws-sharing-remains-pervasive/

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danger and expense of the physical black market. While the state cages innocent people for consuming drugs and artificially raises their price through prohibition, where only violent cartels can meet the demand, Ulbricht found a peaceful (yet illegal) free market option. Instead of robbing an innocent victim or stealing property to acquire the money to buy artificially expensive drugs, people could buy them peacefully and privately on his site.

Unfortunately, Ulbricht—a self-professed Rothbardian anarchist—paid the ultimate price for his civil disobedience. After finally being caught and arrested by the federal government, Ulbricht was eventually given a life sentence by a bitter and tyrant of a judge, who obviously used the opportunity to make an example out of Ulbricht and deter future Silk Roads from popping up. The state can never let any heads of independence or liberty pop up or else others may follow. “Ross Ulbricht has taken a stand against the leviathan state,” writes Ryan Calhoun. “His actions represented the greatest opposition to the Drug War in its history, and they have provided millions with the motivation and incentive for a new and subversive kind of radicalism that captures individuals’ interests directly.”464

If you want to write a letter to him in jail, he can be reached at:

Ross Ulbricht #18870-111

MCC, New York Metropolitan Correctional

150 Park Row

New York, NY 10007

In 2015, Matthew Hoh of Veterans for Peace, who served as a Marine in Iraq and as a member of the State Department resigned in protest in 2009, wrote a beautiful essay on why he willfully and intentionally will not be paying his income taxes. “No longer can I look past the reality that my annual voluntary forfeiture of money to my government pays for violence around the globe, at astounding levels, and I am not able to provide any more excuses or rationalizations that paying without protest, that being complicit in funding war without resistance, is not contradictory to my faith and to my conscience,” Hoh writes.465 Hoh has no problem paying the taxes that go to general government services, but he intentionally apportioned out the part that funds the U.S. war machine and refuses to pay them. Willing to face the consequences, Hoh believes that if you want peace, then stop paying for war.

What if all of us did this? How long would the U.S. government be able to wage war across the globe, commit mass murder, prop up dictators, drop bombs, impose sanctions, subsidize terrorism, and spread death and destruction if we all refused to pay for it? 464 Ryan Calhoun, “The Significance of Ross and Lyn Ulbricht,” March 1, 2016.

https://c4ss.org/content/43700 465 Matthew Hoh, “I Will No Longer Pay Taxes for War,” April 15, 2015.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hoh/i-will-no-longer-pay-taxes-for-war_b_7051962.html


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Although tax law is incredibly complicated and intricate, tax protester David Gross uses a legal way to avoid paying as much tax as possible to Leviathan. Calling it the “DON” method (Don’t Owe Nothin’), it works by removing as much of your income as possible from the “taxable income” category, since the federal income tax isn’t designed to tax all of your income, but just your “taxable income.” Once you have done this, you will end up with a certain amount of “taxable income” and a certain amount of tax owed on it. You can offset or eliminate this tax, or even reverse it into a “refund,” by using various credits. Then, once you run the numbers and figure out how much money you can earn and spend without owing income tax, you adjust your lifestyle if necessary so that you can live within your means at this income level.466 Gross provides a tremendous amount of detail, insight, and information about the potential consequences, and you can check out his entire website at the previous footnote or just Google “How to Resist the Federal Income Tax by Getting Under the Tax Line.”

Like the citizens who refused to comply with illegal checkpoints, one of the most important strategies for achieving more liberty is to know your rights, especially when dealing with the state. You are only required to show identification if you are driving. If a police officer asks for your I.D. while you are not driving, you are only required to show I.D. if he says you are being detained. At checkpoints, you have no obligation to answer questions and ask for a supervisor if necessary. It is legal to film the police in public and when you have been pulled over. Never consent to a search. You have the right not to incriminate yourself. Police are trained to let people try to and talk themselves out of a ticket or an alleged infraction, and more often than not this can only harm you. Remember, anything you can and say will be used against you in court, but never for you. Never talk to the police without a lawyer present.

“If you’re going to use the road, it’s important to know your rights,” argues Fay Niselbaum. “Exercising them appropriately can save you a lot of hassle later. On the other hand, the most important thing is remembering to drive safely and obey the laws of the road, including staying off the road when you’re under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Driving safely is the best way to stay on the road and keep driving right on past the police officer at the side of the road.”467

The best option, of course, is to avoid the police altogether if you can.

Civil disobedience, however, can have its downsides. If you are the only one in a geographic area willing to assert your rights or not pay your taxes, then you will probably end up in a jail cell with little sympathy. We have families, wives, husbands, and children who need us, so I would never blame anyone for complying or submitting even when they know it is wrong. Flexing your rights is important because our rights only exist if we exercise them, but this can 466 David Gross, “How to Resist the Federal Income Tax by Getting Under the Tax Line.”

https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=howto 467 Ademo Freeman, “What Are My Rights During a Traffic Stop?” March 1, 2016.

http://www.copblock.org/154665/what-are-my-rights-during-a-traffic-stop/

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occasionally cause more hassle, especially at traffic stops. Open and public acts of civil disobedience can easily get you caged or killed, which is why we should take great care in how we engage in them while also showing as much support as possible for those who do risk everything to assert their rights.

Blow Whistles and Refuse Orders

This category is similar to civil disobedience, but with a different intended target. While civil disobedience is for the citizen, one government agent who refuses to follow unlawful or immoral orders or decides to blow whistles on state corruption is worth a thousand civil disobedience activists. As the Milgram and Stanford experiments showed, private individuals are extremely susceptible to being influenced by people in uniforms, even if they hold no actual political power. Thus, it is up to the good guys in government to bear the brunt of the burden and begin to withdraw their consent from the regime as well.

If the mythology of state power rests on the public’s willingness to consent to their servitude, then the state’s continuation relies on the compliance of its officers to carry out orders. Without those willing to follow the commands of the legislature, the state’s enforcement mechanism, and thus its highest power, vanishes. “Just doing my job” or “just following orders” are not legitimate excuses to participate in mass murder or the institutional violation of people’s rights and liberties.

It is understandable why there are so few whistleblowers despite the presence of horrific crimes committed by the state. Government employees have comfortable jobs, high salaries, great pension plans, and power over others. Plus, the consequences of disobeying orders or leaking information to the public are even worse than against private citizens who protest or disobey the state. Who would want to give all of this up, and risk life in prison, or worse, for some lofty ideal?

Yet despite these disincentives, many brave souls have indeed risked it all for no glory or wealth whatsoever, and often at the protest of fools who call them traitors or cowards. In order to encourage future whistleblowers and honor those who have been maligned, ignored, or forgotten, some of their stories need to be told.

In the very early morning hours of October 28, 1962, at the very height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, then-Air Force airman John Bordne was serving at one the four secret missile launch sites on U.S.-occupied Okinawa. In response to the secret Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba, all U.S. strategic forces had been raised to DEFCON2, meaning they were prepared to move to DEFCON1 within a matter of minutes. Once at DEFCON1, a missile could be launched within minutes. There were two launch control centers at each site, each manned by seven-member crews responsible for four nuclear cruise missiles. Each warhead possessed a yield equivalent to 1.1 megatons of TNT—70 times more powerful than the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan—with 35.2 megatons of destructive


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power altogether. With a range of 1,400 miles, the nukes on Okinawa could reach Hanoi, Beijing, Pyongyang, and the Soviet military facilities at Vladivostok.468

Several hours after Bordne's shift began, the crew received a customary radio transmission. Usually the string of code did not match the numbers the crew had, but this time the alphanumeric code matched which told them that a special instruction was to follow. At this point, the launch officer of Bordne's crew, Capt. William Bassett, opened up his pouch to reveal a new code; if the code in the pouch matched the third part of the code that had been radioed, Basset was supposed to open an envelope in the pouch that contained targeting information and launch keys. All the codes matched, authenticating the instruction to launch all the crew’s 32 nuclear missiles. Bordne recalls Bassett frantically phoning anyone he could to get a correct answer; why were some of the targets not Russian? Is there a pre-emptive attack? Bassett phoned the Missile Operations Center for clarification, and the same radio codes were given: launch all the nukes.469

Unwilling to start a nuclear war under so much confusion, Bassett called one of the other launch crews. Its launch officer, a lieutenant, had ordered his crew to proceed with the launch of their missiles and did not recognize the authority of Bassett to override the launch orders. In response, Bassett immediately ordered the other launch officer, as Bordne remembers it, “to send two airmen over with weapons and shoot the [lieutenant] if he tries to launch without [either] verbal authorization from the ‘senior officer in the field’ or the upgrade to DEFCON 1 by Missile Operations Center.” Bassett immediately called his major to ask for a raise to DEFCON1 level first, or a stand-down order. The major finally responded with a stand-down order, and miraculously no missiles were launched. Thanks to the prudence of Bassett, Bordne, and the rest of the crew in not immediately and blindly following orders, a nuclear war was averted. To this day, the U.S. government refused to release the records of what happened that day and why launch codes were given.470

Three weeks before Bassett saved the world by refusing to obey an order, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, a Soviet Navy officer, also kept the world from being covered in radiation. As flotilla commander and second-in-command of the nuclear-armed submarine B-59, Arkhipov refused to authorize the use of nuclear torpedoes against the U.S. Navy, a decision requiring the agreement of all three senior officers aboard. His refusal alone prevented the strike and an eventual nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.471

As the former head of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), retired British Army officer General Sir Michael David Jackson refused to obey an order 468 Aaron Tovish, “The Okinawa missiles of October,” October 25, 2015.

http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826 469 Tovish, http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826 470 Ibid. 471 Marion Lloyd, “Soviets Close to Using A-Bomb in 1962 Crisis, Forum is Told,” October

13, 2002. http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cold-war/sovietsbomb.htm

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from U.S. General Wesley Clark, his immediate superior in command, to block the runways of Pristina Airport and isolate the Russian troops that were stationed there. He reportedly told Clark, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.”472

Michael Haas, Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland and Stephen Lewis, who all served as drone operators in the US Air Force, went public with how the U.S. government’s drone program was riddled with corruption and a cold, callous indifference to civilian casualties. They even wrote an open letter to President Obama, The Defense Department, and the CIA. Despite not being charged with a crime, the U.S. government threatened them with criminal prosecution and tried to intimidate their families, to no avail. Finally, all four of them had their credit cards and bank accounts frozen.473

Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was arrested for leaking over 90,000 secret U.S. military reports about the war in Afghanistan, and over 250,000 diplomatic cables from the State Department. Included in these leaks was a classified airstrike video, called “Collateral Murder,” showing U.S. Apache helicopters killing eleven civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists. Manning exposed war crimes, diplomatic misconduct, corruption, and cover-ups. He tried to appeal to his superiors, who ignored him; mainstream U.S. newspapers also wanted nothing to do with the information. He had the opportunity to sell or transfer these documents to foreign governments and profit from the leak, but instead released them to Wikileaks so that the American and global public could see firsthand some of the vast crimes committed by the U.S. government.474

After being arrested, tortured, and kept in solitary confinement, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison. Despite Manning’s noble intentions, he received a similar sentence as Bryan Martin, a Navy intelligence specialist, who in 2011 plead guilty to selling classified information to an undercover FBI agent Martin thought was a Chinese spy. Former CIA Director General David Petreaus pled guilty to disclosing highly classified information to his former mistress and biographer, admitting that he disclosed the information for sex. His sentence? One misdemeanor and two years of probation. FBI director James Comey admitted that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied and “acted reckless” in her handling

472 “Mike Jackson (British Army Officer),” Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Jackson_(British_Army_officer) 473 William N. Grigg, “Drone Pilots have Bank Accounts and Credit Cards Frozen by Feds

for Exposing US Murder,” November 25, 2015. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/drone-pilots-bank-accounts-credit-cards-frozen-feds-exposing-murder/

474 Julie Tate, “Bradley Manning sentenced to 35 years in WikiLeaks case,” August 21, 2013. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/judge-to-sentence-bradley-manning-today/2013/08/20/85bee184-09d0-11e3-b87c-476db8ac34cd_story.html


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of classified information, yet because she seeks power and likely sold that information for personal profit, she goes free.475

Peter Van Buren, a veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department and author of We Meant Well, exposed massive fraud while serving as the leader of two Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq from 2009-2010. Van Buren documented how the U.S. wasted more than $44 billion in reconstruction efforts and was forced to retire in 2012. Former CIA counterterrorism agent John Kiriakou organized the team operation that captured suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, but refused to be trained in torture tactics. In 2007, Kiriakou was the first CIA officer to publicly admit that the CIA’s torture program was not the part of rogue agents and bad apples, but policy that came down all the way from the president. Even though he refused to torture people, by exposing it, he is to this day still the only person involved with the illegal torture program to be punished. Former NSA Senior Executive Thomas Drake identified a massively wasteful, ineffective, and unconstitutional surveillance program, reported it through all proper internal channels, then finally to a reporter in 2005. Prosecuted under the Espionage Act, the case was eventually dropped in 2011, but not after the expense and exhaustion of massive legal battles.476

Edward Snowden. Julian Assange. Daniel Ellsberg. Colleen Rowley. Aaron Swartz. Barrett Brown. Conscientious objectors who refused to kill and die for the state. There are so many brave individuals, too many to name here, who risked their careers, reputation, and paychecks to expose corruption and tell the truth in hopes that the public will get fed up, angry, and demand change. As the U.S. government seeks news ways to clamp down on whistleblowers, the public needs to prove to future whistleblowers that risking everything they have is actually worth it—because as of now, it has not been.

Private Alternatives to Leviathan

It is completely understandable that many, if not most, of us have no desire to go to jail or risk our lives protesting the state head on. But there are still countless numbers of ways we can gain more freedom in our lives, without exposing ourselves to too much risk, while undermining state power at the same time.

Most of our food is produced and supplied by a handful of large corporations, usually subsidized by the state, who practice gross and inhumane treatment of animals or spray their crops with potentially dangerous chemicals. Plus, this food is shipped thousands of miles on government roads. Like political structures, our food should be as local and decentralized as possible.

All over the country, people are signing up for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs. When joining or subscribing to a CSA, people are 475 Kevin Gosztola, “Chelsea Manning Received Same Sentence as Soldier Who Tried to

Sell Information,” May 31, 2016. https://shadowproof.com/2016/05/31/chelsea-manning-received-sentence-soldier-tried-sell-information/

476 “A Timeline of US Whistleblowers.” https://www.whistleblower.org/timeline-us-whistleblowers

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directly participating in the localization and decentralization of their food, as well as gaining access to fresher and healthier meals. How it usually works is that an individual will purchase a “share” of a farmer’s good (like vegetables or meat), and in return for this subscription, they receive a box of seasonal produce each week throughout the farming season. This arrangement creates several rewards for both the farmer and the consumer. For the farmer, he gets to spend time marketing the food earlier in the year, receives payment early in the season (also avoiding a loan from a bank), and becomes integrated with the community. The consumers receive the freshest food possible, get exposed to new products and new ways of cooking, the opportunity to visit the farm, and develop a more personal and intimate relationship with the person providing their sustenance and nutrition.477

In New Hampshire, I am part of a CSA that works with local fishermen as well as farmers, so every week during the fishing season we have access to the freshest fish imaginable while directly helping local fishermen. Many restaurants, responding to market demand, also participate in “farm to table” meals where everything on their menu comes directly from a local farmer. When something is in season, it is on the menu; globalized trade is great for many products, but when it comes to fresh produce, perhaps it is not the wisest policy in the world to expect tomatoes and blueberries all year round, especially since it takes massive amounts of corporate and state power for this to be achieved.

There is also freedom and security in becoming more independent in how you acquire food. A simple garden with a few vegetables is a great way to start. Rainwater can be collected on your property as an extra water source. Planting fruit trees in your backyard can produce delicious fruit while adding beauty to your property. A small pen with a couple of chickens, small goats, or rabbits can provide fresh meat, eggs, and dairy. If you live in the suburbs, plant every square inch of your yard and grow things vertically. Use your front yard to grow vegetable beds. Extend your growing seasons by using greenhouses. If you live in the city or in an apartment, look into ways to adapt to your situation such as growing a container garden on a sunny balcony or use hanging baskets. It is really easy to grow herbs and lettuce in a bright window.478

Short of buying 20 acres of land and becoming full-time farmers, there are countless numbers of little things we can do to become more food independent, more aware of where our food comes from, and encourage the cultivation of local communities and markets. This brings us closer to the soil, creates a less sedentary lifestyle for parents and children to instill work and discipline, and you will also be better prepared for any type of emergency that may occur to our massively centralized food supply system.

Government schools are one of the biggest threats to liberty and an educated population. As I documented in Chapter 6, government schools were inaugurated 477 “Community Supported Agriculture.” http://www.localharvest.org/csa/ 478 Daisy Luther, “Garden Rebels: 10 Ways to Sow Revolution in Your Backyard,” May 17,

2013. http://www.theorganicprepper.ca/garden-rebels-10-ways-to-sow-revolution-in-your-back-yard-05072013


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in order to create compliant children and obedient workers, while the level and rigor of actual education at these schools has been plummeting dramatically. One of the best things a parent can do for their children, then, is to avoid sending their children to these prisons by either opting for a good private school or, even more radically, home educating them.

“Is there an idea more radical,” asks John Taylor Gatto, “in the history of the human race, than turning your children over to total strangers, who you know nothing about? And, having those strangers work on your child’s mind, out of your sight, for a period of twelve years? Could there be a more radical idea than that?”479

Contrary to what is generally assumed, there are many private options for students to avoid government schooling. The Praxis Program480 is like a trade school for the 21st century; with a 98% graduation rate in their one-year program, students apprentice with companies in the field they are interested in while receiving formal training in the subject. On average, students graduate with a $50,000 per year job with little to no debt. As companies used to do, many of them will pay your tuition if you promise to work for them in the future.

Khan Academy is an online resource offering classes in math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, and history for free.

Pauline Dixon, a Professor of International Development and Education at Newcastle University in England, and James Tooley, director of the E.G. West Centre, actually took the time to travel around some of the poorest parts in the world in Africa, China, and India. They found that low-cost private schools are thriving in these areas in response to the utter failure of government schools. Even in areas of these countries where the average citizen makes less than three dollars per day, they are still able to afford (and, indeed, go out of their way to send their children to) private schools. All over the developing world, private schools make up a large and growing percentage of schools. It seems as though the market, rather than the state, is helping the poorest of the poor around the world improve their lives.481

If parents in these extremely poor countries can afford private schools, then surely Americans can.

Home-education is unfortunately shrouded by a myriad of myths, some of which I hope to address here (though this topic alone is worth an entire book). In the past, home-education—“schooling” is what the government does—has the reputation of only being favored by hyper-Christian and/or isolated families being 479 John Taylor Gatto, “The Scientific Management of Children.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KZvOWrT9h4 480 Praxis, https://discoverpraxis.com/ 481 The Tom Woods Show, episodes 71 and 238. http://tomwoods.com/ep-71-low-cost-

private-schools-in-the-developing-world/ http://tomwoods.com/ep-238-how-private-schools-educate-the-poor/

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taught by their parents alone in their homes. While this model is still used today, there are a growing number of home-education “co-ops” that function somewhat like traditional schools but offer parents an alternative to government schooling. In the last decade alone, there has been a 61 percent increase482 in the amount of parents “opting-out” of government schools.

While American taxpayers spend an average of $11,732 per student in government schools, taxpayers spend nothing on most home-educated students, while their parents spend an average of $600 per student per year for their education. The home-educated typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above their government school counterparts on standardized academic achievement tests, while black home-educated students score 23 to 42 percentage points above black government school students; regardless of their parents’ income or formal education, home-educated kids outperform government school kids.483

Thanks to both the increase in popularity and success of home-education, colleges are actively recruiting them. Admissions exams, like the ACT or SAT, can easily be taken at any time, so even if your child is home-educated they will still have access to the top universities in the country. In fact, when looking at their test scores, it will be easier for them to be accepted into an elite university than the average government school graduate.484

The most common objection to home-education usually involves “socialization.” How will a child become properly socialized in a home environment? This question entirely misses the point; are children in government schools, surrounded by peer pressure, bullying, drugs, and values their parents may not hold, being socialized? As B.K. Marcus argues:

If your goal for your children is a lifetime of government work, then by all means send them to public school: the bigger, the better. But if, by “socialization,” you mean ensuring that a child becomes sociable, that he or she develops the intelligence and social reflexes that promote peaceful and pleasurable interactions with larger groups of friends and strangers, then the irony of the what-about-socialization question is that it gets the situation precisely backwards. It is schooled kids, segregated by age and habituated to the static and artificial restrictions of the schooling environment, who demonstrate more behavioral problems while in school and greater difficulty adjusting to the post-school world.

While homeschooled kids learn to interact daily with people of all ages, schools teach their students to think of adults primarily in terms of

482 Amy Edmonds, “Homeschooling on the rise nationally,” June 23, 2015.

http://watchdog.org/225510/homeschooling-rise-nationally/ 483 Brian D. Ray, “Research Facts on Homeschooling,” March 23, 2016.

http://www.nheri.org/research/research-facts-on-homeschooling.html 484 Ray, http://www.nheri.org/research/research-facts-on-homeschooling.html


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avoiding trouble (or sometimes seeking it). That leaves the social lessons to their peers, narrowly defined as schoolmates roughly their own age.485

“In the public school system, children are socialized horizontally, and temporarily, into conformity with their immediate peers,” writes Thomas Smedley. “Home educators seek to socialize their children vertically, toward responsibility, service, and adulthood, with an eye on eternity.”486

According to psychology professor Richard G. Medlin, “Homeschooling parents expect their children to respect and get along with people of diverse backgrounds…Compared to children attending conventional schools…research suggest that they have higher quality friendships and better relationships with their parents and other adults.”487 Are we really supposed to believe that children did not develop social skills before the rise of mass government education?

In home-education environments—through co-ops, study groups, playgroups, and à la carte classes—a child spends plenty of time with other kids, including conventionally schooled kids, while providing a more individually-directed studying environment. The structure of government schools teaches children to be passive and compliant, which means they are more likely to take abuse, whether from horrible bosses, spouses, or friends. Researcher John Wesley Taylor used the Piers-Harris Children’s Self-Concept Scale to evaluate 224 home-educated children for self-esteem levels. “On the global scale,” writes Taylor, “half of the homeschoolers scored at or above the 91st percentile. This condition may be due to higher achievement and mastery levels, independent study characteristics, or one-on-one tutoring situations in the homeschool environment.”488

Despite this increased level of self-esteem, this does not lead to self-centered behavior. Home-educated children are more likely to exhibit unselfish behavior, are more independent, and are less likely to be followers. According to a study by the University of Michigan, home-educated students are ten times more likely than their government school counterparts to be self-employed. Yes, it is true—home-educated children are not socialized in the same way that kids in government schools are, which is exactly the point. The former tends to create independent, freethinking, and responsible adults while the latter incentivizes conformity and obedience.489

Homeschool.com is an excellent resource for those interested in home education, with the list of the top curriculum and the different methods of home education. There are bound to be home education co-ops springing up in your community or city, offering a great education and schedule flexibility. For those interested in a pro-libertarian, pro-Western, K-12 curriculum taught by some of the

485 B.K. Marcus, “Homeschooling, Socialization, and the New Groupthink,” February 9,

2016. https://fee.org/articles/homeschooling-socialization-and-the-new-groupthink/ 486 Marcus, https://fee.org/articles/homeschooling-socialization-and-the-new-groupthink/ 487 Ibid. 488 Ibid. 489 Ibid.

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best and most accredited professors in the libertarian community, then the Ron Paul Home School Curriculum490 is also a great option. And perhaps the best resource for alternative educational information and resources is Brett Veinotte’s “School Sucks Project”491 and his indispensable podcast.

If education truly begins at home, then so does liberty. Proponents of “peaceful parenting” argue that parents should not resort to physical violence (like spanking) in order to discipline their kids because it is immoral and tends to create an environment where children see violence as the answer to problems.

According to a meta-analysis of 50 years of research on spanking by experts at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan, the more children are spanked, the more likely they are to defy their parents and to experience increased antisocial behavior, aggression, mental health problems, and cognitive difficulties.492 Spanking or hitting young children tends to lead to a decrease in moral internalization, the strength of the parental relationship, and the mental health of the child while increasing aggression, delinquent and antisocial behavior, adult criminal behavior, and the risk of abusing their own children or spouse.493

Children who are spanked less than twice a month at age 3 are 17 percent more likely to be aggressive at age 5, while children who are spanked more than twice a month are 50 percent more likely to be aggressive. Spanked children become more delinquent and less verbal with much higher rates of addiction, depression, and suicidal behavior. This is because being hit as a child causes significant reductions in the production of gray matter in the brain responsible for empathy, reasoning, self-control and impulse control, memory retention, and the ability to pay attention. This also leads to higher rates of obesity, arthritis, and cardiovascular disease. Spanked children also score lower on IQ tests.494

Just because we do not use physical violence against our children does not mean we avoid discipline, structure, and proper parental authority. In order to reinforce good behavior, give children opportunities to make choices and to understand the consequences of their choices, reward good behavior with frequent praise and ignore trivial missteps, and create orderly, predictive behavior, respectful communication, and conflict resolution. When it comes to punishment, be consistent with time-out or removal of privileges, which tends to vastly increase compliance. Be clear about what the bad behavior is and what the consequences will be and provide a strong and immediate consequence when the bad behavior first occurs. Listening, negotiating, and involving the child in decision-making

490 Ron Paul Home School Curriculum, http://www.ronpaulhomeschool.com/ 491 Schools Sucks Project, http://schoolsucksproject.com/ 492 “Risks of Harm From Spanking Confirmed by Analysis of Five Decades of Research,”

April 25, 2016. http://news.utexas.edu/2016/04/25/risks-of-harm-from-spanking-confirmed-by-researchers

493 “The Psychology of Spanking,” http://www.online-psychology-degrees.org/psychology-of-spanking/

494 Ibid.


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has been associated with long- term enhancement in moral judgment. If a parent delivers their instruction and corrections calmly, with empathy, and gives a reason for the consequence, this helps children learn the appropriate behavior.495

Be authoritative, not authoritarian. Authoritative parents encourage children to be independent but still place necessary limits on their actions. Children, especially in this age of television and smartphones, should be encouraged to explore more freely, thus having them make their own decisions based upon their own reasoning while learning positive and negative consequences themselves. Long leashes should be met with equally demanding responsibility. Authoritative parents set clear and understood standards for their children while monitoring the limits that they set based on the child’s behavior and responsiveness, giving their child an environment to develop their autonomy while simultaneously respecting legitimate authority.496

How can we possibly build a free society if we are permanently damaging the minds and bodies of our children by hitting them as punishment for disobedience and then shipping them off to government schools?

One of the few silver linings of the failures of corporatized and socialized healthcare is that it has opened up a brand new market for entrepreneurs to fill.

Dr. Josh Umbehr operates a concierge family practice in Wichita, Kansas that, by bypassing insurance companies and government programs, uses a “direct care” model to offer high quality healthcare at an incredibly low cost to his patients. Instead of billing a third-party, which incentivizes higher pricing, Umbehr removes the middleman and charges a flat monthly rate based on age like a gym membership or Netflix subscription. With this subscription, a patient has access to unlimited home, work, and office visits and access through email, texting, phone calls, Twitter, Facebook, or Skype because his office is not restricted by what insurance or Medicare will or will not pay for. There are no copays; any procedure they can do in their office is covered by the monthly subscription, just like any equipment in the gym is included when you sign up. Stitches, biopsies, joint injections, ultrasounds, bone scans, lung scans, urine testing, and minor surgical procedures are all free with the subscription.497

In an interview with Dr. Thomas Woods, Umbehr elaborates on another unique aspect of his practice:

Then something else we do that makes us very unique and valuable is wholesale medications, labs, imaging, and pathology. So I can get—we had a perfect example recently. We ordered some blood work, we have our negotiated cash discounts of usually 95%, and a patient's blood work was accidentally billed through the insurance rate, because of a computer

495 Ibid. 496 Steven Horwitz, “What is ‘Libertarian Parenting?’” July 8, 2015.

https://fee.org/articles/what-is-libertarian-parenting/ 497 The Tom Woods Show, episode 481. http://tomwoods.com/podcast/ep-481-how-

capitalism-can-fix-health-care/

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mistake at the lab, and the price that they were quoted was $1,028. We ran that back through our system; it cost $39, a 97% savings by just cutting out the middleman. And it's an amazing opportunity; it’s far past the 10x improvement that most entrepreneurs are looking for.

We can do the same things with medications. We out-compete the Wal-Marts, the CVSs, the Targets of the world, because we have a different business model. We can dispense medications in Kansas just like a pharmacist. 44 states allow physicians to function like this, and so I can order the medications wholesale from the same places the pharmacies do, but I can get 1,000 blood pressure pills for $8.33. Even after my 10% markup, they’re under a penny a pill. Wal-Mart would literally have to give them away to outcompete us, and if they do, great; we still win. It's not a value that’s a revenue generator for us; we're adding to the value of the membership, very Costcoesque. So we could drastically reduce the costs of people's healthcare by 80 to 90%.

We can take all of the value; we can go to your employer; we can restructure their insurance plan, decrease the premiums by 30 to 60% year one. We had an example of a company in town here in Wichita, Kansas, 18 employees. Long story short: from 2013 to the end of 2014, decreased their out of pocket costs for insurance from 98,000 to 47,000, year one. Now, employees had unlimited access 24/7 to their doctor—call, text, email, visits, hour-long appointments if necessary, free stitches instead of going to the ER—but none of that was claimed toward the insurance. Even the insurance company loves us now, because they realize their in the business of insuring rare catastrophic events, not the daily things.

So in a lot of ways, we haven't done anything different—this is regular medicine, regular blood pressure, regular stitches, regular doctors—but then in other ways, we’ve done everything different. The exciting part but maybe the sad part too is all these pieces were in place for the last 20 years. Any doctor could be doing this going back a long ways. We didn't create a new way of dispensing medications, of dispensing labs. Those discounts were already available inside the system. It just took doctors who were willing to say the system’s broken, and I'm going to take a very logical business approach to this.498

Umbehr also mentions how in medical school, him and his fellow students were taught that business or entrepreneurship in the market was beneath a doctor—but he openly rejected this idea. Umbehr does not reject the concept of insurance per se, only that it is being used entirely incorrectly. If car insurance covered gasoline fill-ups, oil changes, tune-ups, and new wiper blades, how much more expensive would these services be? Insurance should be for emergencies and catastrophic care, not to pay for your basic medical needs. Economics teaches us that scarce goods need markets, the price system, and competition in order to

498 Ibid.


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coordinate production and provide the best service at the most reasonable price to consumers. We see that this makes sense in the production and distribution of chairs, cars, and televisions, but why not medicine?

The healthcare industry in America and the rest of the world needs the influence of markets desperately, and thankfully we now have more option with entrepreneurs like Umbehr. Heal, a startup out of Los Angeles, offers on-demand house calls by “ubering” a doctor to your door for $15-$25. Doctors Making Housecalls operates in North Carolina on a similar model. The startup Pager will send a doctor to your door in the Manhattan area of New York City, and Medicast, another Los Angeles startup, works with hospitals and established physician practices to provide scheduled house calls to patients.499

Dr. G. Keith Smith's Surgery Center of Oklahoma is revolutionizing medicine by offering care with transparent, direct, and package pricing, allowing consumers to know what they are receiving as well as keeping costs and overhead low. People from across the country, as well as Canada and Europe, travel to the Center for the type of medical care where you have the freedom and choice of a grocery store or Best Buy rather than a DMV or TSA-filled airport.500

Liberty HealthShare is another great private option.501 It is a national, non-profit community of Americans who share each other’s medical costs. Without insurance or government, monthly dues create the closest thing to a mutual-aid society we have seen since Leviathan regulated them out of existence. For over three decades, Liberty HealthShare has been in operation, working to be as dependable and transparent as possible while employing cost-cutting methods that only private actors can employ.

With a very affordable package, members simply have their bill from any doctor sent to Liberty HealthShare, and because of their lean model, low overhead, and quick payment processing, are able to negotiate the lowest rates possible and use the pool of all other members to pay the healthcare costs. This allows you the freedom and flexibility to choose any doctor you want and you do not have to be stuck with whatever your insurance or government program mandates or covers. Because of this mutual-aid model, they offer three programs that cover all expenses up to a million dollars, with no deductibles or copays after the first $1,000 in expenses. They also offer significant discounts on prescription medication, eye exams, and dental visits.

As a Mennonite Christian foundation, they take the Christian duty to be your brother’s keeper and bear each other’s burden seriously (and voluntarily, without government coercion, of course). One not need be a Christian to be a member either, but they do, like the old mutual-aid societies, encourage traditional

499 Sarah Buhr, “Heal Wants To Be The ‘Uber’ For Doctors Making House Calls,” April 19,

2015. https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/19/heal-wants-to-be-the-uber-for-doctors-making-house-calls/

500 Surgery Center of Oklahoma, http://surgerycenterok.com/ 501 Liberty Health Share, https://www.libertyhealthshare.org/

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Christian ethics upon their members for both spiritual and financial reasons: abstinence from tobacco and illegal drugs is required, and medical bills occurred from aggressive or reckless behavior (like a bar fight) are not covered, and neither are abortions. Thanks to exemptions in Obamacare for “healthcare sharing ministries,” membership in Liberty HealthShare also exempts you from any fines or penalties for not having insurance.

The more of us that opt-out of Leviathan’s system, the more independent and free we become while creating even more demand for new markets and private alternatives. Withdraw consent—without it, the state begins to lose control and power over our life, liberty, property, traditions, culture, and communities.


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Chapter 12

Bitcoin, Crypto-Anarchy, and the P2P Revolution

For almost all of human history, Leviathan has been two steps ahead of us. People should be free to own their own property, keep the fruits of their labor, and build communities—but the state, with its overwhelming weapons and technology, could and would stand in the way. The best, most logical libertarian argument in the world matters little to a firing squad.

In the last decade, however, things have changed in our favor. Since the rise of the Internet, a market in decentralized, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has emerged to begin satisfying the demand for more freedom, independence, and privacy. This demand for liberty has existed for thousands of years, and for the first time in human history there are suppliers willing and able to give it to us.

Bitcoin

The big, black beating heart of Leviathan is its monopoly on the money supply. Central banking allows the state to grow at an ever-expanding rate, finance the welfare-warfare state, dilute the value of the money, and give privileges to big banks and corporations at the expense of the rest of us. Thanks to Bitcoin, however, we now have a private, decentralized medium of exchange that gives us the opportunity to underthrow Leviathan’s monopoly on the issuance of money and create our own free markets.

Created by Satoshi Nakamoto, a still anonymous individual (or individuals), in 2009, Nakamoto released the first bitcoin software and created a network of cryptocurrency units called bitcoins. Bitcoin describes both a digital currency unit and it is the global payment network where you can send and receive these currency units. The network is usually referred to as bitcoin (lowercased), while the currency itself is usually capitalized.

As a currency, Bitcoin has several features that distinguish it from the inflationary, top-down model of government money. It is decentralized and deflationary; there will never, ever be more than 21 million bitcoins in existence, and they are released over time at an ever-declining rate on a fixed schedule. New coins are distributed at random to those who contribute computing power to securing the network (called “bitcoin mining”). Inflation is pre-determined ahead of time, and once the network has released all 21 million bitcoins, there will never be another one added to the supply. Since each bitcoin is divisible by one hundred

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million, even if the price of one bitcoin skyrockets the smallest of transactions can still take place. Each Bitcoin is fungible and is exactly like all other Bitcoins.502

Each transaction is listed and “confirmed” by miners, usually within seconds, on what is called “the blockchain.” The blockchain is a public ledger consisting of all the Bitcoin transactions that have ever taken place; you can go to blockchain.info to see this ledger and at any given moment watch bitcoin transactions confirmed in real time. Like a dictionary company that codifies words and grammar but does not actually create language, the blockchain is not controlled, owned, or regulated by any central agency—it simply records all of the decentralized transactions taking place. Bitcoin, as a distributed network relying on the information of million dispersed signals, is impossible to control, defraud, or manipulate. It is the free market, uncaged by any of Leviathan’s tentacles.

Thanks to the cryptography and highly advanced mathematics built into its software, it is theoretically impossible to make a fake Bitcoin. There is no need for advanced watermarks and expensive counterfeiting enforcement mechanisms; fraud protection is simply written into the code. Since its inception, it has always had a market price, and like any national currency, it is traded on exchanges like BitStamp. Unlike national currencies, its price is set by the people through the price discovery processes of a free market, not by the guns of politicians.

“As a payment network,” writes Erik Voorhees, “Bitcoin replaces the function of banks (especially the Federal Reserve as money creation is not at the whim of any person nor group), inter-bank funding networks (like SWIFT and SEPA), payment processors (like PayPal) and remitters (such as Western Union). The entirety of these massive industries as they relate to the creation, storage, accounting, and transfer of money has been usurped by Bitcoin. If Bitcoin succeeds, it is likely that PayPal and Western Union would be removed from the marketplace. The Federal Reserve (and every central bank) would be made redundant. ‘Disruptive technology’ is thus an understatement.”503

Once you understand the basics of Bitcoin and the network, it is incredibly easy to use. Even if you have no idea how the internal mechanics of a car’s engine or a computer works, you can still drive to work and browse the Internet. As a private, free market network, there are virtually no barriers to entry; no government red tape, mandates, taxes, regulations, Social Security numbers, names, home addresses, or credit scores are needed. All you need to do is download a Bitcoin “wallet” on your smartphone or computer. For a smart phone, I personally use and recommend Mycelium, while websites like Coinbase and Circle offer both mobile and desktop options, as well as the ability to buy and sell Bitcoins instantly.

Your “wallet” is like your bank account number, where you, and only you, authorize the sending of Bitcoins, and you can also receive them from others.

502 Erick Voorhees, “Bitcoin—The Libertarian Introduction,” April 13, 2012.

http://moneyandstate.com/bitcoin-libertarian-introduction-used-care/ 503 Voorhees, http://moneyandstate.com/bitcoin-libertarian-introduction-used-care/


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Transactions are sent and accounts are secured using “public key cryptography.” Every account has a public key and a private key, both of which are long strings of numbers and letters. Your wallet software knows your private key, and this allows it to send money. To send money to someone, you merely need to know their public key. These keys start with a 1 or a 3, are anywhere from 26-35 characters in length, and usually come in the form of a QR code that your phone’s camera can easily read. Thus, your account has no personal information attached to it. You do not need to divulge any information whatsoever in order to obtain a Bitcoin account. This means you can receive, store, and spend Bitcoins with relative anonymity. With the desire for increased privacy in this world of surveillance, virtually every wallet now comes with a standard feature where every time you make a transaction, a new public key is created from your private key (the old ones can still receive Bitcoins into the same account indefinitely). The only way this anonymity is lost is if one chooses to do so, like posting your Bitcoin address on your blog, website, store or social media.504

For “cold storage,” like a savings account where you can keep Bitcoins for a later date, there is no better product than the Trezor (I own one myself). It is a small device, slightly larger than a USB drive, where you can send your Bitcoins and know that they will be safe as long as you follow the basic security protocols. If the simple steps are followed, your Bitcoins will never be stolen. Even if the Trezor device itself is stolen, your Bitcoins are still safe. As long as you have your password and security information, then you can re-upload your wallet onto a new Trezor device and the thief will have nothing. The most important thing to remember about Bitcoin security is to never give away or lose your private key. If someone gains access to this, then they have access to all of your Bitcoins.

While traditional debit/credit cards operate through a “pull” system—where you have to give up all of your personal information and trust that the banks or card companies will properly pull from your accounts—Bitcoin uses a “push” system where transactions can only occur if the user personally sends Bitcoins out of his wallet. Bitcoin provides greater freedom, but that comes with responsibility. Thankfully, every Bitcoin wallet that I am aware of comes with standard safety features that everyone using Bitcoin should follow. All Bitcoin apps allow you to password protect your wallet, while “two factor authentication” protects you whenever you want to send Bitcoins (the wallet will ask for another verification sent to your phone or email address to verify the transaction).

Bitcoin has suffered due to price fluctuations and bad press; however, given that it is a technology that is not even a decade old, these are relatively minor problems. Up until 2015, Bitcoin did experience wild highs and lows in price, but in the last year, the roller coaster has largely vanished and has remained stable or at a gradual, steady incline.

As money, Bitcoin gains its value from its utility (security, independence, privacy) and its scarcity. The more people and businesses that begin to use it and

504 Ibid.

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accept it, the more valuable it will become. But libertarians are not necessarily interested in creating a more efficient medium of exchange. Bitcoin, since it is not widely used and accepted, is not as practical as traditional fiat money. Bitcoin’s importance, argues Erik Voorhees, lies in its ability to empower individuals, build alternative and decentralized platforms, and undercut the state’s power over our livelihood:

Financial privacy has long been symbolized by the notorious “Swiss bank account.” Yet, anyone with a Swiss bank account has to trust that bank, and as we’ve seen in the last couple years, “bank privacy” even in Switzerland is a myth – banks there have been bending over for the US government and divulging customer information. So imagine having a private, numbered Swiss bank account, but without having to bother with the Swiss bank itself. That is Bitcoin. Instead of placing your trust in a regulated bank governed by fallible humans, Bitcoin enables you to place your trust in an unregulated cryptographic environment governed by infallible mathematics. 2+2 will always equal 4, no matter how many guns the government points at the equation.

Bitcoin is thus the only currency and money system in the world which has no counter-party risk to hold and to transfer. This is absolutely revolutionary and you should read the preceding sentence again. Gold advocates will point out that physical gold bullion has no counter-party risk, but that is only true for storage in your own home. Store it in a vault or bank and you have counter-party risk. And sending gold? You have to trust all sorts of people if you wish to transfer your gold somewhere else or spend it across distance.

Bitcoin means complete ownership of money both in storage and transfer. Nobody can prevent you from having it. Nobody can prevent you from spending it. Even if one’s home is broken into, or even if the government issues a “confiscation order” (as they did with gold in 1933), one’s Bitcoins are perfectly safe. Try fleeing a country with $1,000,000 in bullion without the government knowing about it. Easier said than done. With Bitcoin, it’s almost easier done than said—you could put $1,000,000 of Bitcoin on a USB drive, or even write the private key on a piece of paper, or just email the wallet file to yourself to be retrieved outside the country.505

Bitcoin is one of the most revolutionary tools we have ever had at our disposal, and the implications and uses of this technology have still not yet even been realized.

Crypto-Anarchy

The currency of Bitcoin, backed by its decentralized network, gives us the power to be anonymous insurrectionists—building new platforms, subverting

505 Ibid.


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Leviathan, creating new markets, and slowly but surely gaining more individual freedom with or without the permission of the state.

Bitcoin is, in the words of Nozomi Hayase, the “currency of resistance.”506 The state not only threatens our financial privacy and freedom, but with its ever-expanding surveillance state there are few legal barriers preventing the crackdown of dissidents and whistleblowers. By targeting their ability to transfer money through traditional, regulated, controlled, and “pull” systems like credit cards, PayPal or Western Union, many people would think twice about rattling too many cages.

Thanks to Bitcoin, this has all changed. The top-heavy, bureaucratic state, despite all of its cameras and guns, is no match for the decentralized network of “crypto-anarchy” that governs Bitcoin’s rules, network, and price.

Following a massive release of secret U.S. diplomatic cables in November 2010, donations to WikiLeaks were blocked by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and Western Union under pressure from the U.S. government, destroying over 95 percent of their revenue stream. Thanks to Bitcoin, however, Wikileaks was not only able to survive but thrive. After posting their public Bitcoin address, they were flooded with nearly untraceable and anonymous donations from those who supported their efforts. Short of shutting down the Internet, there is literally nothing the U.S. government could have done to stop this.507

Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, has been branded as a fugitive by the U.S. Department of Justice because he operates a platform where non-scarce resources can be shared openly and freely without the tyranny of the intellectual monopoly racket. Although he lives in New Zealand, the U.S. government sent a fleet of helicopters and armed agents to raid his house and seize his property despite the fact that he had never set foot in, let alone been tried in, the U.S. After the seizure, Dotcom shared his strategy on Twitter, tweeting “It’s time for Plan B. #Bitcoin.”508

What would you do if the U.S. government suddenly announced a bank holiday, limits or bans on ATM withdrawals, or mandated other types of cash and capital controls? Or implemented a “bail-in” where part of your bank deposits were used to further pyramid debt and save an oligarchical financial system?

506 Nozomi Hayase, “With Looming Financial War, Bitcoin Ushers in Peaceful

Insurrection,” April 10, 2015. http://original.antiwar.com/nozomi_hayase/2015/04/09/with-looming-financial-war-bitcoin-ushers-in-peaceful-insurrection/

507 Jon Matonis, “WikiLeaks Bypasses Financial Blockade With Bitcoin,” August 20, 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/08/20/wikileaks-bypasses-financial-blockade-with-bitcoin/#13520f2a66c4

508 Hayase, http://original.antiwar.com/nozomi_hayase/2015/04/09/with-looming-financial-war-bitcoin-ushers-in-peaceful-insurrection/

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This is exactly what happened in Greece in 2015. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced that all banks and the stock market would be closed as the Greek Financial Stability Council (another Orwellian name) recommended that these closures should last a week before a bailout referendum is finalized. The Greek government then imposed 60 Euro limits on ATM withdrawals and capital controls in an economy that was suffering through a 25 percent unemployment rate. Greeks were also restricted or banned from using their credit or debit cards on online payment networks.509

In 2013, the gang of thieves ruling the island country of Cyprus simply expropriated the money that people had put into banks. A “haircut,” as they called it. A few wealthy and influential cronies were notified ahead of time and got their money out, while the rest of the tax-farm simply had their bank deposits looted and transferred to the political class.

And all of this was done by simple edict.

Civil forfeiture—where law enforcement can seize your cash or property without ever being charged of a crime, and the burden is on you to prove your innocence—is a highly effective way for governments to boost their budgets and intimidate the citizenry. Now, we could lobby or petition our local governments and beg them to stop stealing from us, pass some fluffy sounding legislation, pray for reform...and nothing will happen. Or, we could all start using Bitcoin and make it essentially impossible for governments to seize your hard-earned money.

With Bitcoin, governments, no matter how bad they wanted to, would not be able to impose these types of controls and confiscations. Unless they tortured the Bitcoin passcodes and private keys out of every single person, those holding their wealth inside of Bitcoin wallets would be safe. As governments around the world search for ever more means of stealing wealth, people should be “de-banking” and holding some of your savings in a safe, secure, Bitcoin wallet like the Trezor.

Bitcoin has the potential to usher in a peaceful, digital anarchic order. “Now we have a small piece of pure, incorruptible mathematics enshrined in computer code that will allow people to solve the thorniest problems without reference to ‘the authorities,’” writes Matthew Sparkes. “The benefits of decentralised systems will be huge: slashed overheads, improved security and (in many circumstances) the removal of the weakest link of all—greedy, corruptible, fallible humans.”510

Bitcoin advocate and entrepreneur Roger Ver believes the power of Bitcoin lies in its ability to spread peace and undermine the violence of states. Bitcoin has radicalized Ver; he has used Bitcoin to donate to charities and nonprofit groups, like Antiwar.com, who provide indispensable journalism about the bloody lies of 509 Tyler Durden, “For Greeks The Nightmare Is Just Beginning: Here Come The Depositor

Haircuts,” June 30, 2015. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-30/greeks-nightmare-just-beginning-here-come-depositor-haircuts

510 Matthew Sparkes, “The Coming Digital Anarchy,” June 9, 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10881213/The-coming-digital-anarchy.html


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American foreign policy. “Every time you use Bitcoin, you are helping to undermine the war machines around the world, and the power of those who would use violence to control others,” Ver remarked in an interview with CoinTelegraph.511

Bitcoin can be used as a great way to fund charities or activist groups anywhere around the world, without anyone’s permission, especially groups that governments do not like. Jason King, founder of Sean’s Outpost Homeless Outreach, used donations from the Bitcoin community to feed and house the homeless in Pensacola, FL.512 The nonprofit BitGive used charitably donated Bitcoins to build water wells in Kenya.513 Citizens in poor countries may not have a lot, but inexpensive cell phones are widely available in Africa and South America; rather than jumping through the legal hoops and red tape in order to open a bank account regulated by corrupt governments, they could instead use Bitcoin as a virtually cost free way of acquiring capital.514 Bitcoin is accepted, and often preferred, as donations to groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, BitHope Foundation, Students for Life, and FreeSnowden.515

BitTorrent allows users to share files without a central server, manager, or controller. LBRY516 is a sharing platform that uses blockchain technology to enable users to publish material and get paid for doing so. People using LBRY’s service can monetize their published material with its built-in payment system, melding together the great technical advantages of both Bitcoin and BitTorrent services for people looking to share content. LBRY also hopes to use this decentralized platform so that publishers can sell their content directly to consumers without a middleman and host itself across hundreds of users instead of a few central servers, something that could rival services like Netflix or Spotify.517 A company called Ascribe utilizes the blockchain to “enable you to share your digital creations without worrying about losing ownership rights,” where owners

511 Amanda B. Johnson, “‘Every Time You Use Bitcoin, You Undermine Violence’—Roger

Ver on War Funding,” December 3, 2014. https://cointelegraph.com/news/every-time-you-use-bitcoin-you-undermine-violence-roger-ver-on-war-funding

512 Meghan, “Feeding and Housing the Homeless With Bitcoin,” August 16, 2013. http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/feeding-and-housing-the-homeless-with-bitcoin/

513 Melissa Wylie, “Meet the women using bitcoin to change the world—but not in the way you think,” November 4, 2015. http://www.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/news/profiles-strategies/2015/11/how-women-in-bitcoin-are-using-digital-currency.html

514 Brian Doherty, “Bitcoin: If It Ain't Dead, It Should Be Because It's All About ‘White Privilege,’” February 27, 2014. http://reason.com/blog/2014/02/27/bitcoin-if-it-aint-dead-it-should-be-bec

515 “Donation-accepting organizations and projects,” BitcoinWiki. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Donation-accepting_organizations_and_projects>

516 Jamie Redman, “LBRY: The Decentralized Sharing Platform,” November 1, 2015. https://news.bitcoin.com/lbry-decentralized-sharing-platform/

517 Dylan Martin, “This New Hampshire Startup's Plan to Fight Netflix is Equal Parts BitTorrent and Bitcoin,” September 18, 2015. http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2015/09/18/bitcoin-startups-lbry-combines-bittorrent-and-bitcoin-to-fight-netflix/

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and creators of art or music could have their works protected, stamped, authenticated, and monetized without the bureaucracy and monopoly of IP law.518

OpenBazaar has created a decentralized, P2P ecommerce network using an open source model and Bitcoin. OpenBazaar provides an online platform for people to trade directly with each other, anywhere around the world. Because the network has no central point of control, there are no governments, corporations, or banks to collect fees, monitor data, or restrict trade. It runs on an open source code, allowing for innovation from anyone who can improve the software. Its market is governed by its open-source, decentralized network and the rules of the protocol built into the software. Dispute resolution and fraud prevention are not controlled from the top-down like Amazon or eBay, but through an “escrow” of Bitcoin through a moderator that is rated by the network.519

It is no wonder that the RAND Corporation called Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and the crypto-libertarian order they encourage as threats to national security.520

By facilitating voluntary, market transactions that are not interfered with by the state, the Bitcoin network helps build a freer world, freer markets, and peace with every addition to the blockchain’s public ledger. It can starve the beast by denying taxable funds to the state, while depriving governments of the ability to use our labor, property, and wealth as collateral to borrow and increase debt to fund their welfare-warfare states.

Bitcoin is also a catalyst for the peaceful anarchy envisioned by previous cypherpunks and radical techno-libertarians. Over twenty years ago, crypto-anarchist Timothy May believed that cryptography, cryptocurrencies, and decentralized P2P networks would have the potential to revolutionize both markets and political institutions, making the former more free and the latter obsolete. “The combination of strong, unbreakable public key cryptography and virtual network communities in cyberspace will produce interesting and profound changes in the nature of economic and social systems,” prophesied May. “Crypto anarchy is the cyberspatial realization of anarcho-capitalism, transcending national boundaries and freeing individuals to make the economic arrangements they wish to make consensually.”521

518 George Howard, “The Bitcoin Blockchain Just Might Save The Music Industry...If Only

We Could Understand It,” May 17, 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgehoward/2015/05/17/the-bitcoin-blockchain-just-might-save-the-music-industry-if-only-we-could-understand-it/

519 William Mougayar, “OpenBazaar’s Peer-to-Peer eCommerce Vision,” June 11, 2015. http://startupmanagement.org/2015/06/11/openbazaars-peer-to-peer-ecommerce-vision/

520 Giulio Prisco, “The RAND Corporation Report: National Security Implications of Virtual Currency,” January 11, 2016. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-rand-corporation-report-national-security-implications-of-virtual-currency-1452528204

521 Timothy May, “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities.” http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/may-virtual-comm.html


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Two decades later, we now have Bitcoin and the libertarian social order it threatens to unleash. Pass any law you want, Leviathan; you are ultimately powerless against Bitcoin and the most radical experiment in a true free market the world has ever seen.

The P2P Revolution

Technology has finally caught up to libertarianism. In our increasingly digital world with constant technological advancements, we are witnessing a decentralized, P2P revolution. Or, rather, call it the P2P counter-revolution; against the perpetual destruction and upheaval of state power and rootless modernity and materialism, the creation of P2P technology gives individuals the power to undermine the state and build new, decentralized communities of common interests.

P2P, whether in computing or networking, describes a distributed and decentralized architecture that divides tasks or work loads between peers or individuals. Every peer has equal power, contributing their own unique, distributed information to the network. With Leviathan run from the top-down, P2P is the solution to the Mises-Hayek problem of calculation, information, and knowledge that makes socialist planning impossible.

With the potential for Bitcoin to cripple the power of central banking, a decline in the use of obsolete government services like the USPS, and apps that turn individuals into businessmen and entrepreneurs at the click of a button, P2P technology is the new enemy of the state.522 No longer do small inventors or businessmen need to rely on large loans or lots of capital; projects are now funded through decentralized crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Patreon, Smallknot, or GoFundMe.

In today’s age of mass surveillance by Big Brother’s ever-watchful eyes, the importance of P2P technology becomes increasingly vital for the expansion of liberty and privacy. The government is already spying on us through our computers, phones, cars, buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through our credit cards and smart meters, computers, and televisions. If the state had their way, every single appliance in our home, from our refrigerators to our dishwashers, would be additional eyes for Leviathan to keep tabs on us.523

But for the first time in history, we can use modern technology against the state and gain more freedom and sovereignty—whether the state likes it or not.

522 Adam Dubove, “In the New Cold War, Technology Is the Enemy of the State,” July 13,

2015. http://panampost.com/adam-dubove/2015/07/13/in-the-new-cold-war-technology-is-the-enemy-of-the-state/#.VaQPcTh3Dlw.twitter

523 WashingtonsBlog, “The Whole POINT of the Internet of Things Is So Big Brother Can Spy On You,” February 10, 2016. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/02/whole-point-internet-things-big-brother-can-spy.html

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Without directly intending to do so, and by the simple entrepreneurial and profit incentives of the market, platforms like Uber are destroying taxi cartels that have existed in nearly every city in America for the last 100 years. Before Uber came along, state and local governments had complete control over the taxi industries in most major cities. Taxi “medallions,” like the AMA’s doctor quotas, serve to restrict the supply, leaving consumers with no more than a small handful of high-priced cartelized taxi companies to choose from. Customer service, thanks to the incentive structure of an industry facing no competition, is virtually non-existent. The cab drivers are also worked into the ground, forced to sell their souls to the taxi monopolies in exchange for a medallion and the right to be a taxi driver, working for years or even decades to pay it off before they ever see any significant income themselves.

But as Uber (and competitors like Lyft) exploded in popularity, consumers were finally giving a choice. Instead of standing outside trying to hail a cab, Uber’s P2P network allows riders to simply request a ride with the touch of a button. Millions of people, with possibly 99% of them unfamiliar with the libertarian case for a free market, began to participate in one every time they took an Uber.

Now, predictably, taxi monopolies are begging city governments to crack down on their competition and are even asking for a bailout.524 While economically ignorant Progressives love to claim that free markets lead to monopolies and cartelization, the freer taxi market led by Uber (and the P2P technology that allows them to provide this service) is destroying the state-created taxi monopoly, giving thousands of people jobs and a flexible schedule, and millions of people more consumer choice.

The Uber model is now spreading into other markets to undermine traditional hotel services (AirBnb), food delivery services, and countless other industries like TaskRabbit where you can hire people for a multitude of jobs, errands, or tasks for a mutually agreed upon price. Anyone who lives in a decently-sized city knows that almost any service they desire can be provided by a P2P mechanism through an app on their phone for a lower price and higher quality than traditional methods.

P2P platforms are beginning to challenge scientific dogmas as well, providing the field of science with necessary bottom-up checks. Despite what we may think, much of what we consider to be carried out in science is dubious, irreproducible, or flat out wrong. For example, nearly half of all psychology study results could not be reproduced. Experts making social science prognostications turned out to be mostly wrong, according to political science writer Philip Tetlock’s decades-long review of expert forecasts. For decades, the government food pyramid and established science preached that you should eat a diet heavy on

524 Jeffrey Tucker, “New York’s Taxi Cartel Is Collapsing. Now They Want a Bailout,”

August 31, 2015. https://fee.org/articles/new-yorks-taxi-cartel-is-collapsing-now-they-want-a-bailout/


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bread and cereals and light on fats and proteins. As it turns out, the opposite may be closer to the truth. According to Stanford statistician John Ioannidis, most published research findings are false. In nearly every field of research, including biomedicine, genetics, and epidemiology, the research community has been terrible at weeding out the shoddy work due to peer review and confirmation bias.525

Sciences have their own holy scriptures, like psychology’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, that when combined with government funding, lobbyist influence, or insurance payouts, can protect incomes but corrupt the practice. The peer review process can perpetuate groupthink, the cartelization of knowledge, and the compounding of biases. This is all beginning to change thanks to P2P networks, argues Max Borders:

...Informal networks of checkers—“amateurs”—have started questioning expert opinion and talking to each other. And the real action is in this third catalyst, creating as it does a kind of evolutionary fitness landscape for scientific claims. In other words, for the first time, the cost of checking science is going down as the price of being wrong is going up.

When you get an army of networked people—sometimes amateurs—thinking, talking, tinkering, and toying with ideas—you can hasten a proverbial paradigm shift. And this is exactly what we are seeing.

It’s becoming harder for experts to count on the vagaries and denseness of their disciplines to keep their power. But it’s in cross-disciplinary pollination of the network that so many different good ideas can sprout and be tested.

The best thing that can happen to science is that it opens itself up to everyone, even people who are not credentialed experts. Then, let the checkers start to talk to each other. Leaders, influencers, and force-multipliers will emerge. You might think of them as communications hubs or bigger nodes in a network. Some will be cranks and hacks. But the best will emerge, and the cranks will be worked out of the system in time.

The network might include a million amateurs willing to give a pair of eyes or a different perspective. Most in this army of experimenters get results and share their experiences with others in the network. What follows is a wisdom-of-crowds phenomenon. Millions of people not only share results, but challenge the orthodoxy.526

The same process that keep claims of truth or knowledge in check and away from the dogma or orthodoxy of the elites—who tend to have financial or political interests propagating these lies or distortions—can work to apply bottom-up

525 Max Borders, “How Networks Topple Scientific Dogmas,” February 24, 2016.

https://fee.org/articles/networks-topple-scientific-dogma/ 526 Borders, https://fee.org/articles/networks-topple-scientific-dogma/

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pressure on government actors and corporations as well. Or, better yet, undermine them and make them obsolete.

Using the power of P2P networks, Kim Dotcom believes we can create our own private Internet. He calls it Meganet, and it would rely on the decentralized power of users rather than centralized command-and-control structures. “If you install the Meganet app on your smartphone in the future, what you allow Meganet to do is to use your smartphone when it is idle, to use the processing power of your smartphone,” Dotcom says. “Now if you have a hundred million smartphones that have the Meganet app installed we will have more online storage capacity, bandwidth and calculating power than the top 10 largest websites in the world combined, and that is the power of Meganet...Over the years with these new devices and capacity especially mobile bandwidth capacity, there will be no limitations.”527

Game developer and radio host Brian Sovryn has an entire page on his website dedicated to the “Dark Android” project, where you can “take an Android device and make it serve the purposes of an individual person’s desire for anonymity, privacy, and security [and some ‘decentralization’ if you like, an overarching concept of all four principles that I call DAPS (Decentralization, Anonymity, Privacy, and Security)].”528 Sovryn’s website and radio show emphasize using P2P networks, cryptocurrencies, concern for privacy, and a libertarian attitude to gain more freedom and security—without politics or permission.

According to Edward Snowden, we should all be encrypting our phone calls and text messages using the free app Signal. You should always encrypt your laptop, using BitLocker for Windows or FileVault for Macs. Password managers protect your data and allow you to create unique passwords for every site that are unbreakable without having to memorizing them. KeePassX is a great service that is free, open source, cross-platform, and never stores anything in the cloud.529

Snowden says that he is developing a cell phone case that hides its owner's locations, since governments are pretty much always and everywhere spying on us through our phones.530 Snowden also recommends using Tor, “the most important privacy-enhancing technology project being used today,” as he put it in an interview with The Intercept:

527 Josh Nicholas, “Kim Dotcom just revealed more details on his private internet plan,

which uses the tech behind Bitcoin,” October 30, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com.au/kim-dotcom-just-revealed-more-details-on-his-private-internet-plan-which-uses-the-tech-behind-bitcoin-2015-10

528 Dark Android Project, https://zomiaofflinegames.com/darkandroid/ 529 Micah Lee, “Edward Snowden Explains How To Reclaim Your Privacy,” November 12,

2015. https://theintercept.com/2015/11/12/edward-snowden-explains-how-to-reclaim-your-privacy/

530 Jose Pagliery, “Snowden designs a phone case that hides owner’s location,” July 26, 2016. http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/21/technology/edward-snowden-phone-case/index.html?iid=ob_lockedrail_bottomlarge


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I use Tor personally all the time. We know it works from at least one anecdotal case that’s fairly familiar to most people at this point. That’s not to say that Tor is bulletproof. What Tor does is it provides a measure of security and allows you to disassociate your physical location. …

But the basic idea, the concept of Tor that is so valuable, is that it’s run by volunteers. Anyone can create a new node on the network, whether it’s an entry node, a middle router, or an exit point, on the basis of their willingness to accept some risk. The voluntary nature of this network means that it is survivable, it’s resistant, it’s flexible.

[Tor Browser is a great way to selectively use Tor to look something up and not leave a trace that you did it. It can also help bypass censorship when you’re on a network where certain sites are blocked. If you want to get more involved, you can volunteer to run your own Tor node, as I do, and support the diversity of the Tor network.]531

According to the FBI, the first confirmed hacks of Hillary Clinton’s private email server were done by a Tor user, who “accessed the email account of a staffer for former Secretary Clinton on Jan. 5, 2013, using three IP addresses known to serve as Tor ‘exit nodes’—jumping-off points from the anonymity network to the public internet.”532

Former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde, using the P2P tools of a Raspberry Pi and some Python code, has created what he calls the “Kopimashin,” the ultimate piracy and copying machine. This device is able to make 100 copies of a standard song every second or over 8 million per day. “I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy. The machine is made to be very blunt and open about the fact that it’s not a danger to any industry at all,” says Sunde.533

Telegram, a messaging app created with the purpose of giving users the ability to send encrypted messages and enhance their privacy, was actually blocked by Facebook in 2015 without any notice or warning. Facebook wrote it into their code that any Telegram link would not be allowed. Facebook and other mega-corporations, almost always aligned with the state, often justify their bans or hostility to encryption because of “terrorism” concerns (even though the ISIS attacks they cited as justification were coordinated without encryption). “ [Facebook does not] want an encrypted, open-source, pro-privacy world, and they don’t want people to even think that it’s possible. They don’t want services that exist that give people actual control of their data, and thus, their lives,” writes

531 Lee, https://theintercept.com/2015/11/12/edward-snowden-explains-how-to-reclaim-

your-privacy/ 532 Eric Geller, “Someone using Tor breached email account on Clinton server,” September

2, 2016. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/clinton-email-server-tor-227697 533 Ernesto, “Pirate Bay Founder Builds The Ultimate Piracy Machine,” December 19,

2015. https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-builds-the-ultimate-piracy-machine-151219/

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Brian Sovryn, which is why you should join the 60 million other people using Telegram to communicate.534

Waze is an app that allows drivers to report where police and/or speed traps are hidden (with the ability to confirm or deny this information) while providing mapping, driving directions, and crowdsources information to make the trip more efficient and safer than it otherwise would be. In big cities, Waze can help you avoid high-traffic areas, and makes roads safer by alerting you to accidents, roadblocks, and debris on the road.535

Former UC Berkeley student Komal Ahmad, after spending time with a homeless veteran and buying him lunch, noticed just how much food is wasted in America. She then began an initiative at Berkeley to donate uneaten food from the university’s dining halls to local homeless shelters. The program was so successful that in three years, it had spread to over 140 colleges around the country. Ahmad eventually created a phone app, Feeding Forward, which allows users to arrange, whenever they want, for Feeding Forward drivers to pick up leftover food and deliver it directly to areas and people that need it most. In San Francisco, the app has helped feed over 575,000 homeless people by redistributing nearly 690,000 pounds of excess food. All of this was only possible through the power of P2P networking and organization.536

Twister is a fully decentralized P2P microblogging platform that uses the software implementations of Bitcoin and BitTorrent protocols.537 Diaspora is a social networking platform that focuses on decentralization, freedom, and privacy, putting the user in control.538 Gab is a brand new social networking site that seeks to be a free-speech friendly version of Twitter’s SJW thought police; Gab's frog mascot alone, undoubtedly a nod to Pepe, is a promising sign.539 Usenet allows you to share files without the MPAA and RIAA regulators watching your back, although it is not free and requires a paid subscription.540 Maidsafe, like Kim Dotcom’s vision cited above, is an attempt to create a decentralized, private Internet without a single point of failure using the advantages of a P2P network.541

P2P networking can also provide effective, decentralized, and low-cost policing services. While traditional state-run police play the role of historian as 534 Brian Sovryn, “Facebook is Terrified of Anarchist-run Telegram App,” December 3,

2015. https://zomiaofflinegames.com/facebook-is-terrified-of-anarchist-run-telegram-app/

535 Jeffrey Tucker, “How Waze Makes Roads Safer than the Police,” December 3, 2015. https://fee.org/articles/waze-make-roads-safer-than-the-police/

536 Colleen Curry and Peter Holslin, “Entrepreneur Komal Ahmad has a plan—and an app—to end hunger in America,” February 9, 2016. http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2016/02/09/entrepreneur-komal-ahmad-has-a-plan-and-an-app-to-end-hunger-in-america/

537 Twister, http://twister.net.co/ 538 Diaspora, https://diasporafoundation.org/ 539 Gab, https://gab.ai/ 540 “How to Use Usenet,” https://torrentfreak.com/how-to-use-usenet/ 541 Maidsafe, https://maidsafe.net/


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they jot down notes after a crime scene, Peacekeeper is an app that will alert people you have chosen beforehand to come to your aid during an emergency situation with the intention of giving you the best chances of success in a life or property threatening situation. Peacekeeper is designed to prevent and stop crime as it happens because it relies on proximity, the closeness of neighbors and communities in a mutual-aid environment, and preparation through training. The Peacekeeper model represents a far better 911 system than state socialism could ever possibly provide.542

Cell 411 operates on a similar platform to Peacekeeper. When you download the app, you have the ability to send notifications—either in emergency situations or in the presence of state law enforcement—to your family members, neighbors, friends, or anyone you trust. Cell 411 also allows you to immediately live stream video at any time, something that should come in handy to either activists or anyone in an emergency situation.543 On the apps section of their site, Copblock.org lists over a dozen apps you can download that can help you protect and know your rights, livestream and record interactions, and alert family and friends if you are in trouble.544

Have you ever received one of those annoying telemarketing calls or been the victim of a scammer over the phone? Thankfully, we have a wise and benevolent government agency like the Federal Trade Commission to protect us. All you need to do is go to donotcall.gov, file a complaint with the Do Not Call Registry, fill out a three-page form with your personal information and everything you know about who has been calling you. Or, thanks to the P2P revolution, you can call Mr. Number, a free phone app that has been downloaded over ten million times, and block potential scam calls based on user reports (like how Waze uses customer feedback to paint an accurate picture of traffic). Mr. Number, argue Jonathan Newman and Tate Fegley, is just one of countless free and low-cost ways the private sector is making the state obsolete:

Mr. Number is also a great example of the effectiveness of private enforcement of rules. If the government finds that people are not following its rules, and it’s a priority that those rules are enforced, it almost invariably responds by 1) increasing law enforcement resources dedicated to detecting and arresting people, and/or 2) increasing the severity of punishment through higher fines and longer prison sentences. If it’s not a priority, as the Do Not Call Registry appears to be, then the government does little to nothing…

...This is another area where private efforts, especially mobile apps, have made use of decentralized knowledge to enforce rules in a far more effective way than brute enforcement ever could. Creative app designers have found innovative ways to solve problems, and have rendered a range

542 Matt Agorist, “What if the Power to Police Ourselves Was in the Palm of Our Hands?”

July 11, 2014. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/power-police-palm-hand/ 543 Get Cell 411, https://getcell411.com/ 544 CopBlock apps, http://www.copblock.org/apps/

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of government services either irrelevant or obsolete. Apps like Yelp! probably have done more to ensure restaurant food quality than all government food safety inspectors combined.545

While more gun control, ammunition restrictions, or outright gun confiscations are always a possibility, new technology may make Leviathan’s attempts to disarm us irrelevant. Crypto-anarchist and gun-rights activist Cody Wilson, founder/director of Defense Distributed, has been using 3D printing technology to give people the opportunity to make and print out their own guns. After working out the kinks of their early models, Defense Distributed already created the first 3-D printed pistol—the Liberator—and is now producing high-capacity magazines with 3D printers. "I have five people now making AK-47 magazines—they’re incredibly easy to reproduce," Wilson brags to Metro World News.546

Wired’s Andy Greenberg describes how easy it was for him to build an untraceable AR-15:

I did this mostly alone. I have virtually no technical understanding of firearms and a Cro-Magnon man’s mastery of power tools. Still, I made a fully metal, functional, and accurate AR-15. To be specific, I made the rifle’s lower receiver; that’s the body of the gun, the only part that US law defines and regulates as a “firearm.” All I needed for my entirely legal DIY gunsmithing project was about six hours, a 12-year-old’s understanding of computer software, an $80 chunk of aluminum, and a nearly featureless black 1-cubic-foot desktop milling machine called the Ghost Gunner.

The Ghost Gunner is a $1,500 computer-numerical-controlled (CNC) mill sold by Defense Distributed, the gun access advocacy group that gained notoriety in 2012 and 2013 when it began creating 3-D printed gun parts and the Liberator, the world’s first fully 3-D-printed pistol. While the political controversy surrounding the notion of a lethal plastic weapon that anyone can download and print has waxed and waned, Defense Distributed’s DIY gun-making has advanced from plastic to metal. Like other CNC mills, the Ghost Gunner uses a digital file to carve objects out of aluminum. With the first shipments of this sold-out machine starting this spring, the group intends to make it vastly easier for normal people to fabricate gun parts out of a material that’s practically as strong as the stuff used in industrially manufactured weapons.547

545 Jonathan Newman, “The App Store Renders Government Irrelevant,” September 13,

2016. https://mises.org/blog/app-store-renders-government-irrelevant 546 J.D. Tuccille, “Prohibitions Don’t Work, And New Technology Makes That More

Obvious,” January 7, 2013. https://reason.com/blog/2013/01/07/prohibitions-dont-work 547 Andy Greenberg, “I Made An Untraceable AR-15 ‘Ghost Gun’ In My Office–And It

Was Easy,” June 3, 2015. https://www.wired.com/2015/06/i-made-an-untraceable-ar-15-ghost-gun/


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Pass all the laws, regulations, and edicts you want Leviathan, we will always be one step ahead. Through the use of Bitcoin, crypto-anarchy, and P2P networks, we can undermine the state, advance liberty and privacy, and build new, tangible institutions that make state power increasingly obsolete.

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Chapter 13

The Libertarian Case Against Open Borders

The libertarian case against open borders lies in the distinction between nation and state. While the state is an artificial, arbitrary, and coercive institution that preys on the citizenry, a nation and a national identity, protected by borders, are entirely healthy and natural aspects of the human condition. Murray Rothbard argued that libertarian should not ignore this crucial difference between the nation and the state when it comes to immigration:

Libertarians tend to focus on two important units of analysis: the individual and the state. And yet, one of the most dramatic and significant events of our time has been the re-emergence – with a bang – in the last few years of a third and much-neglected aspect of the real world, the “nation.” When the nation has been thought of at all, it usually comes attached to the state, as in the common word nation-state, but this concept takes a particular development in recent centuries and elaborates it into a universal maxim. In recent years, however, we have seen, as a corollary of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, a vivid and startlingly swift decomposition of the centralized state or alleged nation-state into its constituent nationalities. The genuine nation, or nationality, has made a dramatic reappearance on the world stage.

The nation, of course, is not the same thing as the state, a difference that earlier libertarians, such as Ludwig von Mises and Albert Jay Nock understood full well. Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is generally born into a country; he is always born into a specific time and place, meaning neighborhood and land area.548

A reactionary libertarian understands that culture, community, religion and tradition—the nation—are necessary components of a libertarian social order and governance should reflect these institutions. Rothbard refers to these as “nations by consent.” These consensual nations, who exist prior to and separate from the

548 Murray Rothbard, “Nations By Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State,” July 30, 2014.

https://mises.org/library/nations-consent-decomposing-nation-state-0


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state apparatus, have every right to protect and preserve their sovereignty with national borders.

Libertarians are rightfully horrified at the idea of the state taxing people in order to employ soldiers and military equipment to police and patrol the border of a country, especially one like the U.S. that is far, far too big to begin with. Immigration and adjudicating property lines are far too important to be left to the state. The irony, however, is that in the name of border control, the U.S. government has created a lawless “Constitution-free zone”549 against the 200 million Americans who live within 100 miles of a land or coastal border while not actually protecting or securing the border;550 anarcho-tyranny in a nutshell. Meanwhile, we are taxed in order to subsidize the mass importation of people from foreign cultures, many of them with little to no understanding of Western civilization or who display outright hostility to it.

Many libertarian proponents of free and open immigration argue that this increases the wealth of a country or provides certain economic benefits. Even if this were the case, this does not imply that a policy of open borders should necessarily be encouraged. “To libertarians of the Austrian School, it should be clear that what constitutes ‘wealth’ and ‘well-being’ is subjective,” argues Hans-Hermann Hoppe. “Material wealth is not the only thing that has value. Thus, even if real incomes rise due to immigration, it does not follow that immigration must be considered good, for one might prefer lower living standards and a greater distance to other people over higher living standards and a smaller distance to others.”551 Allowing a dozen people to move into your comfortable three bedroom house will definitely increase your wealth and lower your rent or mortgage payments, but would you really be better off?

Just as Cultural Marxists seek to weaken and destroy the private institutions that give Western civilization its backbone, identity, and culture of liberty, forced immigration is yet another means of chipping away at our once traditional and libertarian social order. The Soviet Union understood this, and urged Russian citizens to flood Estonia, Latvia, and other Baltic states in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples.552 Since they began occupying Tibet over fifty years ago, the Chinese government has been migrating Han Chinese into Tibet in order to demographically change the nation and weaken the unique Buddhist social order it has maintained for centuries. The Dalai Lama has

549 Todd Miller, “66 Percent of Americans Now Live in a Constitution-Free Zone,” July 15,

2014. http://www.thenation.com/article/66-percent-americans-now-live-constitution-free-zone/

550 Bob Price, “80 Percent Captures at Borders Set Free in U.S., Says Agent,” September 5, 2016. http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/09/05/80-percent-captured-border-set-free-u-s-says-agent/


552 Rothbard, https://mises.org/library/nations-consent-decomposing-nation-state-0

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correctly called this combination of forced immigration and cultural suppression a “cultural genocide.”553

Many libertarians, with anti-state instincts, understandably recoil at the thought of using government agents or tax dollars to enforce state borders; open borders, then, is the default (but incorrect) libertarian position without any consideration of the context or long-term costs of mass immigration.

Diversity is Not Our Strength

One of the most common slogans repeated by politicians in the West is the notion that “diversity is our strength.” Just like when a political parasite lauds the virtues of democracy or “our shared values,” these slogans are simply asserted, never proven, and are taken to be the a priori truth of our new modernist, Progressive dogma. Whenever politicians, regardless of political parties, and the media are spouting mushy catchphrases, you can almost guarantee that the exact opposite is true.

No, diversity is not our strength; in fact, it is one of our biggest weaknesses, creating a whole new set of problems the West has never seen before. It is important to note that when a Leftist speaks of diversity, he is not referring to intellectual or philosophical diversity, where different sides of an issue are argued in a civilized discussion or debate—if it did, college professors would look around at the political leanings of their staff and immediately start balancing them out by hiring more libertarians and conservatives. Biological or genetic diversity, since it contradicts the god of blank-slate egalitarianism, is either ignored or dismissed as (you guessed it) racist.

Diversity, in the Progressive sense, means that white, European, and Western countries are to be flooded with as many non-Western immigrants and cultures as possible, that they are the only peoples and countries not allowed to be culturally, religiously, or ethnically homogenous (that would be racist, xenophobic, and bigoted, you Nazi), and that this will be achieved through the use of media propaganda and massive amounts of state violence if necessary.554

When one actually examines the consequences of ethnic diversity and multiculturalism, especially in a democratic society, the evidence suggests that societies begin to develop less trust, altruism, public engagement, civic interest, and social cohesion the more ethnically diverse they become. Basic order and civilization, let alone liberty, also become less and less likely.

Basic kin selection helps explain why this is so. Kin selection is the evolutionary strategy that favors the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, even at the cost to the organism’s own survival and reproduction. This

553 Tory Scot, “Free Tibet —and What About Us?” April 13, 2016.

http://therightstuff.biz/2016/04/13/free-tibet-and-what-about-us/ 554 The following sources in this subsection all come from Black Pigeon Speaks’s

indispensable YouTube channel, specifically his video called “Diversity DESTROYS Social Cohesion in the West.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTROCGb5qj8


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kin-centered altruism, then, is altruistic behavior that evolves out of kin selection. Beginning with the most fundamental bonds of blood and family, kin selection and altruism extends to members of communities with shared ethnic, historical, and cultural ties. Kin selection, through similar ethnicity, language, and culture, is the basis for how modern nations have been formed. This is why there is a Japan made up of Japanese people, Sweden for the Swedes, Thailand for Thais, etc. Even the former British colonial states, like Canada, Australia, and the U.S., were created and built around ethnocentrism. Under this basic system, societies exhibit high levels of social trust, cohesion, unity, and order.555

Starting in the 1960s, under the influence of decades of Cultural Marxism, the West began to throw kin-centered selection out the window and ram through laws that sought to fundamentally alter the demographics of these nations. There were several reasons for this: the pathological altruism of European Leftism (also known as “white guilt”), a desire to destroy Western civilization by introducing ethnic and cultural conflict, and the ability to expand the state through both this increased conflict and the tendency of non-European immigrants to overwhelmingly vote to expand government power. All nations are ethno-states—until they are not, and the Cultural Marxists made sure that the peace and order that comes from kin selection and homogeneity was disrupted.

In “The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation,”556 McGill University in Montreal, Canada conducted a 2012 study that created multiple computer-modeled worlds in order to run different types of simulations on different kinds of societies. According to the study, “computer simulations suggest that ethnocentrism, often thought to rely on complex social cognition and learning, may have arisen through biological evolution. From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates [emphasis added].” From all of the random starting points they tested, the ethnocentric cooperation strategy dominated all of the others, suggesting that nations (and the borders that protect them) are not arbitrary lines in the dirt but a means of demarcating and preserving the benefits of kin selection. In the study, ethnocentrism and tribalism beat out humanitarianism by taking advantage of the non-kin altruism of the humanitarian cooperation approach.

Now doesn’t that sound familiar? All one has to do is look at the Leftist response to the rampant violent crime, non-assimilation, and outright hostility of many non-kin immigrants into Europe to see a real-life example of McGill University’s simulations.

555 Black Pigeon Speaks, Ibid. 556 Max Hartshorn, Alex Kaznatcheev, and Thomas Schultz, “The Evolutionary Dominance

of Ethnocentric Cooperation,” June 2013. http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html

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The McGill study even demonstrates that ethnocentrism is common throughout a diverse range of plants and animals (like red fire ants, who will kill their queen at birth if a certain gene is not detected); birds of a feather, flock together. This ability to distinguish and discriminate between in vs. out groups and apply different behaviors based on that distinction suggests that ethnocentrism and cultural homogeneity are not, as the Cultural Marxists claim, pathologies and icky social constructs, but realities rooted in our biological evolution that increase social harmony.

A study by the University of Cologne in Germany titled “Ethnic Diversity, Economic and Cultural Contexts, and Social Trust: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Evidence from European Regions, 2002–2010,”557 concluded that all across Europe, increases in immigration correspond directly with a decrease in the level of social trust in society. A Tilburg University study558 in the Netherlands found that the social welfare state and welfare programs, adopted in Nordic countries that at the time featured cultural and ethnic homogeneity, are undermined by mass immigration. In a study titled “The Geography of Ethnic Violence,”559 overwhelming evidence shows that violence between people of different ethnicities and cultures can be inhibited and prevented by both physical and political boundaries, proving Robert Frost’s insight that “good fences make good neighbors.” Switzerland, where multiple languages are spoken, relies on decentralized cantons and clearly defined boundaries to maximize decentralized sovereignty while making sure no culture can trample on or dominate another.560

In England’s schools, ethnic diversity has been shown to reduce trust between students and does not make white children more inclusive towards immigrants.561 In fact, the opposite tends to occur; the more ethnic diversity there is in European countries, the more nationalist people become. Using data from the registers of schools in Copenhagen, Denmark, researchers found that native Danes start to take their children out of government schools whenever immigrants make up 35 percent or more of the students. Additionally, the more ethnically diverse a school is, the more likely it is that students will choose friends of their same

557 Conrad Ziller, “Ethnic Diversity, Economic and Social Contexts, and Social Trusts:

Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Evidence from European Regions, 2002-2010,” October 2014. http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/3/1211.abstract

558 Tim Reeskens and Wim van Oorschot, “Disentangling the ‘New Liberal Dilemma’” on the relation between general welfare redistribution preferences and welfare chauvinism,” April 2012. http://cos.sagepub.com/content/53/2/120.abstract

559 Alex Rutherford, Dion Harmon, Justin Werfel, Alexander S. Gard-Murray, Shlomiya Bar-Yam, Andreas Gros, Ramon Xulvi-Brunet, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, “Good Fences: The Importance of Setting Boundaries for Peaceful Coexistence,” May 21, 2014. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0095660

560 Black Pigeon Speaks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTROCGb5qj8 561 Rebecca Wickes, Renee Zahnow, Gentry White, and Lorraine Mazerolle, “Ethnic

Diversity and its Impact on Community Social Cohesion and Neighborly Exchange,” April 2013. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/juaf.12015/abstract


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ethnicity.562 A study from the University of Michigan concluded that policies that have been implemented with the goal of creating both an integrated and socially cohesive are simply a lost cause.563 Diversity, according to a longitudinal study by Manchester University in England, makes existing residents feel unhappier and more socially isolated.564 Diverse groups living in close proximity to one another, almost without exception, tend to produce conflict and ethnic nepotism.

When ethnic minorities or non-native immigrants reach a critical mass and become culturally distant from their host culture, they begin to self-segregate, bringing more division and less cooperation and trust into society.565 In Europe, we see this phenomenon wherever there are large numbers of Muslims. As their population grows, this creates a feedback loop where Europeans voluntarily leave and more Muslims come in, carving out ethnic and cultural enclaves where even the host country’s police forces often refuse to enter. In the U.S., as millions of non-Europeans have been allowed to enter the country, neighborhoods, blocks, and entire cities are becoming increasingly segregated as tribal nationalism pushes and pulls. As diversity increases, voting patterns reflect this and tend to become more tribal among all ethnicities.

Perhaps the most telling study of all comes from Harvard University professor Robert Putnam.566 Putnam, an egalitarian Leftist, began his 2000 study on diversity and multiculturalism with the idea that his biases would be confirmed and those awful xenophobes, racists, and bigots would be proven wrong. The conclusion from the data, however, was unmistakable; Putnam’s study “found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower

562 Beatrice Schindler Rangvid, “School Choice, Universal Vouchers and Native Flight

From Local Schools,” April 2009. http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/School-Choice-Universal-Vouchers-and-Native-Flight-from-Local-Schools.pdf

563 Andy Henion and Zachary Neal, “Study Asks: Is a Better World Possible?” November 18, 2013. http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2013/study-asks-is-a-better-world-possible/

564 James Laurence and Lee Bentley, “Does Ethnic Diversity Have a Negative Effects on Attitudes towards the Community? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Causal Claims within then Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion Debate,” July 2015. https://www.academia.edu/3479330/Does_Ethnic_Diversity_Have_a_Negative_Effect_on_Attitudes_towards_the_Community_A_Longitudinal_Analysis_of_the_Causal_Claims_within_the_Ethnic_Diversity_and_Social_Cohesion_Debate

565 Arun Advani and Bryony Reich, ‘Melting pot or salad bowl: the formation of heterogeneous communities,” October 2015. http://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/wps/WP201530.pdf

566 Michael Jonas, “The downside of diversity,” August 5, 2007. http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/

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in more diverse settings.”567 The study also reveals that diversity not only decreases the general social trust in society (something that may be of slight importance to a market economy and public order) but also diminishes in-group social trust as well. People become more suspicious of each other, including their own kin.

Putnam was so shocked by his findings that he waited nearly a decade to publish his results. Even after his study, infected with the virus of Cultural Marxism, Putnam still argues that the overwhelmingly negative effects of diversity can be “overcome” and “remedied” by proper social engineering.

With the increase of “refugees,” migrants, and immigrants into the West, subsidized by the taxpayer, we are also seeing the reemergence of diseases that were once thought to be relics of the past, like tuberculosis, measles, whooping cough, mumps, scarlet fever, and the bubonic plague. In the last three decades, the number of foreign-born residents of the United States has increased by over 30 million, from 11 million in 1986 to over 40 million in 2015, especially from Middle Eastern, African, Asian, South American, and Central American countries where these diseases are prevalent.568 The Vermont Department of Health revealed that of the roughly 900 refugees tested for tuberculosis since 2013, over one-third of them tested positive for the disease.569 In Minnesota, 22 percent of Somali refugees tested positive for tuberculosis.570

Diversity does not just destroy social trust; it is a public health issue. At least most of these diseases, unlike the Cultural Marxism that encourages this, have a cure.

No matter how conclusive or overwhelming the data and evidence are against the idea that “diversity is our strength,” you just cannot cure the propensity of Progressives, Leftists, and Cultural Marxists to double down. Whether it is multiculturalism or the failures of government programs, the answer is always the same: more diversity, more money, and more social engineering. As uncomfortable or triggering as it may be, the problems of multiculturalism, mass immigration, and forced integration can be summed up by a simple equation: diversity + proximity = conflict.

Open Borders Destroy Private Property

By analyzing the concepts of free speech and free expression, libertarians can better understand the case against open borders. Leftists tend to defend free speech

567 Ibid. 568 Michael Patrick Leahy, “Six Diseases Return to US as Migration Advocates Celebrate

‘World Refugee Day,’” June 19, 2016. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/06/19/diseases-thought-eradicated-world-refugee-day/

569 Edmund Kozak, “Refugees Bringing Worldwide Diseases to U.S.,” June 9, 2016. http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/refugees-bringing-worldwide-diseases-to-u-s/

570 Michael Patrick Leahy, “22 Percent of Resettled Refugees in Minnesota Test Positive for Tuberculosis,” May 17, 2016. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/05/17/22-resettled-refugees-minnesota-tested-positive-tuberculosis/


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on ideological grounds, but for libertarians, all rights come from self-ownership and private property. As Lew Rockwell points, free speech is not an abstract right:

Do we really believe in freedom of speech as an abstract principle? That would mean I have the right to yell all during a movie, or the right to disrupt a Church service, or the right to enter your home and shout obscenities at you.

What we believe in are private property rights. No one has “freedom of speech” on my property, since I set the rules, and in the last resort I can expel someone. He can say whatever he likes on his own property, and on the property of anyone who cares to listen to him, but not on mine.

The same principle holds for freedom of movement. Libertarians do not believe in any such principle in the abstract. I do not have the right to wander into your house, or into your gated community, or into Disneyworld, or onto your private beach, or onto Jay-Z’s private island. As with “freedom of speech,” private property is the relevant factor here. I can move onto any property I myself own or whose owner wishes to have me. I cannot simply go wherever I like.571

In a pure libertarian world where all land is privately owned, immigration is not really an issue. Everyone moving or migrating somewhere would have the consent of the property owners. We do not, however, live in this anarcho-capitalist world; there are states that tax people and then claim the right to own large swaths of land. Open borders thus creates a situation where “immigrants have access to public roads, public transportation, public buildings, and so on,” continues Rockwell. “Combine this with the state’s other curtailments of private property rights, and the result is artificial demographic shifts that would not occur in a free market. Property owners are forced to associate and do business with individuals they might otherwise avoid [emphasis added].”572

Because we do not live in a libertarian country where all property is privately owned, we have to take the world as it is and make the best sense we can for what to do with all of the “public” property the state owns. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues, public property is not owned by the state—since the state, acquiring its power, wealth, and property through expropriation, can never truly own anything according to libertarian principles—nor is it unowned property. Thus, the only libertarian answer to who truly owns public property are the taxpayers themselves who had their property unjustly stolen by the state in the first place.573

In order to give the taxpayers the maximum amount of control over property that is rightfully theirs, then the decision power over immigration, movement, and how property is controlled should be delegated to the most local authority possible 571 Lew Rockwell, “Open Borders Are an Assault on Private Property,” November 16,

2015. https://mises.org/library/open-borders-are-assault-private-property 572 Rockwell, https://mises.org/library/open-borders-are-assault-private-property 573 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Immigration and Libertarianism,” August 17, 2016.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/08/hans-hermann-hoppe/open-borders-libertarian/

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so that it mimics the libertarian, private property order. Switzerland, with its decentralized system of localized, autonomous cantons, provides a great example of this.

Before the European Union got involved, the immigration policy of Switzerland approached the kind of system we are describing here. In Switzerland, localities decided on immigration, and immigrants or their employers had to pay to admit a prospective migrant. In this way, residents could better ensure that their communities would be populated by people who would add value and who would not stick them with the bill for a laundry list of “benefits.”574

There is also a significant difference between free trade and free immigration. Just because one favors open trade with other nations does not necessarily mean that this requires our borders to be flung wide open. When a good is exchanged across borders, there is always a willing recipient who pays the costs either directly or indirectly for the good. Just because an immigrant crosses a border and is hired by a corporation, however, does not make him an invited guest. The employer may desire the cheap labor, but he is externalizing the cost of hiring the immigrant across the rest of the public. The immigrant now has access from everything to roads, welfare, schools, and hospitals, while no legitimate property owner is allowed to discriminate against him in regards to housing or association.575

“We do not live in a world in which tearing down our barriers makes everyone better off,” argues Matthew Reece. “The reality is that doing this would only impoverish and endanger the domestic population while empowering foreign governments and external organized crime. If we open our borders, they will be magnetic to those who would come here to take handouts from the state at our expense. And once those people are here, we will not only be forced to associate with them, but any opposition to them or the government programs that bring them here will be condemned as racist. Since a libertarian solution is not on the table and no one seems to be willing to do what would be necessary to put it on the table, we are left with a choice between forced integration and forced segregation [emphasis added].”576

While the latter can be used to protect private property and the taxpayer from further expropriation, the former policy is guaranteed to infringe upon private property, increase the tax burdens, and expand state expropriation.

Many immigration proponents claim that because America is a “nation of immigrants,” shutting down immigration and deporting illegal aliens runs contrary to our history. The Founding Fathers and original generations of Americans would have been perplexed at the idea that the United States must have its borders wide

574 Rockwell, https://mises.org/library/open-borders-are-assault-private-property 575 Ibid. 576 The Zeroth Position, “On Libertarianism and the Alt-Right,” September 3, 2016.

http://www.zerothposition.com/2016/09/03/on-libertarianism-and-the-alt-right/


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open, or that the country possesses some type of “magic dirt” that transforms anyone who happens to have been born on U.S. soil into an American and a citizen. Just three years after the Constitution was ratified, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790, the first statute in American history to define citizenship. In the law, only “free white men of good character” who had been in the U.S. for at least two years were eligible for citizenship. Up until the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, like it or not577, America was essentially a pan-European ethnostate (and, even more specifically, for those from northern and western Europe). As Jared Taylor explains:

Since early colonial times, and until just a few decades ago, virtually all Whites believed race was a fundamental aspect of individual and group identity. They believed people of different races had different temperaments and abilities, and built markedly different societies. They believed that only people of European stock could maintain a society in which they would wish to live, and they strongly opposed miscegenation. For more than 300 years, therefore, American policy reflected a consensus on race that was the very opposite of what prevails today...homogeneity, not diversity, was the new republic’s greatest strength.578

From 1790 until 1965, nearly every generation of Congress passed a law explicitly reaffirming the first Naturalization Act. And from 1924 until 1965, after significant increases in immigration from western and southern Europe, Congress wisely sealed the borders, which resulted in almost no net immigration and time to assimilate its new immigrants.

The idea that America is a “proposition nation” which was “founded on an idea,” rather than a traditional nation united by “blood and soil,” has turned the country into a gigantic, glorified shopping mall to which increasing numbers of citizens feel little to no allegiance. This is exactly what the founders of America predicted would happen if America adopted an open borders policy. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who disagreed on virtually everything, both agreed that Americans were a distinctive people with unique values and that mass-immigration would change what made America great.579

Yes, America has always had immigration, but in the era before the welfare state, immigrants were far less of a burden on the taxpayer (many immigrants self-

577 That America was an openly pan-European country, with a government created to

preserve the traditional rights of Englishmen (and that the founders were more than skeptical of ethnic diversity) is just a historical fact. The merits of diversity versus homogeneity and issues of race can and should be debated, but the Leftist narrative on immigration and diversity is simply wrong.

578 Jared Taylor, ‘What The Founders *Really* Thought About Race,” July 26, 2016. http://www.radixjournal.com/the-red-pill/2016/7/26/what-the-founders-really-thought-about-race

579 Nathan Bedford Forrest, “The Truth About Colin Kaepernick,” September 22, 2016. http://therightstuff.biz/2016/09/22/the-truth-about-colin-kaepernick/

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deported before the welfare state). After the years where immigration restrictions were loosened, there was then a period of time where immigration was halted so that the new immigrants would assimilate. Where these new immigrants came from also matters; before the aforementioned 1965 immigration bill, the overwhelmingly majority of immigrants came from European countries with similar cultural values to the Americans already here.

The idea that America is a “nation of immigrants” and that “diversity is our strength” are Leftist slogans barely decades old. They are used as rhetorical tools to expand government power through the radical shift of the country’s demographics, argues Yonathan Amselem:

The Left has drilled the immigrant “melting pot” fantasy into our heads for so many years that most people dare not question it. They should. The United States was founded by Anglo-Saxon Protestants from Western Europe. For most of America’s history, “immigrants” meant descendants of British Common Law raised in our Western Judeo-Christian ethic. Our culture, our traditions, and most importantly, our astronomical living standards are a direct result of that particular heritage. Don’t think so? What if our founding fathers were Aztec? Or Yoruba? What prosperity did those cultures leave to their descendants? Our Republic is rich because, despite its flaws, it was founded on a set of objectively better ideas. Immigrants to the United States do not make us wealthier by virtue of looking “diverse.” Quite the opposite. They make us and themselves wealthier when they assimilate to our Western tradition – when they become “one of us.” Before the rise of fraudulent victim advocacy organizations and our massive welfare state, American immigrants that couldn’t meet our standards or disliked our values would simply pack their bags and go home. This was a delicate and humane screening test for prospective migrants. No need for reams of paperwork, a massive immigration bureaucracy, or an army of ICE agents.

Yet, where would the political Left be if they weren’t “fixing” something? Open borders are the Left’s answer to Protestant America’s rejection of socialism. Marxists suffered a humiliating intellectual defeat during the post-war era and were badly in need of new voters. Americans peeked over the Iron curtain and gasped in horror at the mountain of dead bodies piled up across socialist Europe and Asia. For at least a part of American history, Communism became a bad word. Marxist academics muttered a collective “whoops” and retreated from the battlefield of ideas. They got to work on a new scheme for pushing big government socialism on Americans. If they couldn’t convince Protestant Christians to favor statism, why not just import statists? Enter Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration bill which not only limited immigration from Western Europe but also opened America’s front door to every medieval backwater on Earth. The supposed rationale? “Diversity is our strength!” And so the multiculturalism cult was born. Acknowledging that our galaxy-exploring Western Republic probably has nothing to learn from


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people who yell at clouds to make rain is now a thought crime. Besides the new mass of sympathetic voters, progressives also effectively shielded themselves from having to know anything about the cultures they.580

After political and economic Marxism stacked tens of millions of corpses with famines and gulags, the only way to tip the scales was to begin importing people into the country who, unlike the Americans who generally resisted communism, would vote Left, expand the state, and weaken a Western culture that had once been immunized against the virus of Marxism. Destroy the culture, brand anyone a racist or a xenophobe who opposes this, and import millions of new reliably big-government voters; this became the new strategy of the Marxist Left.

Mass immigration and multiculturalism, especially combined with a large welfare state, have a poor history of creating anything other than conflict, division, and less liberty. “Politically enforced multiculturalism has an exceptionally poor track record,” concludes Rockwell:

The twentieth century affords failure after predictable failure. Whether it’s Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, or Pakistan and Bangladesh, or Malaysia and Singapore, or the countless places with ethnic and religious divides that have not yet been resolved to this day, the evidence suggests something rather different from the tale of universal brotherhood that is such a staple of leftist folklore.

No doubt some of the new arrivals will be perfectly decent people, despite the US government’s lack of interest in encouraging immigration among the skilled and capable. But some will not. The three great crime waves in US history – which began in 1850, 1900, and 1960 — coincided with periods of mass immigration.

Crime isn’t the only reason people may legitimately wish to resist mass immigration. If four million Americans showed up in Singapore, that country’s culture and society would be changed forever. And no, it is not true that libertarianism would in that case require the people of Singapore to shrug their shoulders and say it was nice having our society while it lasted but all good things must come to an end. No one in Singapore would want that outcome, and in a free society, they would actively prevent it.

In other words, it’s bad enough we have to be looted, spied on, and kicked around by the state. Should we also have to pay for the privilege of cultural destructionism, an outcome the vast majority of the state’s

580 Yonathan Amselem,” We Are Not a Melting Pot. Diversity is Not Our Strength,”

September 10, 2016. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/09/yonathan-amselem/diversity-not-strength/

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taxpaying subjects do not want and would actively prevent if they lived in a free society and were allowed to do so?581

A policy of open borders, then, is not “anti-state”; if anything, it helps the state grow. Open borders are, as Peter Brimelow argues, “viagra to the state.”582 Mass immigration is a government welfare program that has no connection to the reality of a private property, libertarian social order. A policy of unrestricted mass immigration is the Cultural Marxist wet dream, a taxpayer funded hammer that has been used and will continue to be used to destroy unique cultures and traditions (especially those that tend to be hostile to state power) and the high-trust societies these homogenous culture provide, sew conflict through forced association and forced integration, violate private property, expand the welfare state and the voting bloc of Leftist political parties, and create resentment by dispensing government subsidies and privileges among a multicultural, heterogeneous population.

The chaos in Europe as a result of the current migrant crisis serves as a live case study in government-funded open borders. These wounds are somewhat self-inflicted thanks to the Cultural Marxism and r-selection that has softened Europe up, but political centralization through the European Union and government policies of encouraging and subsidizing immigration are perhaps the biggest culprits.

Some libertarians may argue that it is the welfare state, not immigration, that is the problem. Welfare benefits incentivize immigrants, and thus all we have to do is ban welfare for illegal immigrants and the problem is solved. This situation, however, still produces unlibertarian results.

Just imagine again that the United States and Switzerland threw their borders open to whoever wanted to come, provided only that immigrants be excluded from all welfare entitlements (which would be reserved for United States and Swiss citizens respectively). Apart from the sociological problem of thereby creating two distinct classes of domestic residents and thus causing severe social tensions, there is little doubt about the outcome of this experiment in the present world. The result would be less drastic and less immediate than under the scenario of unconditional free immigration, but it would also amount to a massive foreign invasion and ultimately lead to the destruction of American and Swiss civilization. Even if no welfare handouts were available to immigrants, this does not mean that they would actually have to work, since even life on and off the public streets and parks in the United States and Switzerland is comfortable as compared to “real” life in many other areas of the world. Thus, in order to fulfill its primary function as the protector of its citizens and their domestic property, a high-wage area

581 Rockwell, https://mises.org/library/open-borders-are-assault-private-property 582 Peter Brimelow, “Immigration is the Viagra of the State—A Libertarian Case Against

Immigration,” June 4, 2008. http://www.vdare.com/articles/immigration-is-the-viagra-of-the-state-a-libertarian-case-against-immigration


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government cannot follow an immigration policy of laissez-passer, but must engage in restrictive measures [emphasis added].583

Nations, governed by decentralized polities, have every right to include and exclude anyone they want from their territory through the libertarian concepts of free association and respect for private property. A policy of open borders is national and cultural suicide; a man cannot be free if he is not allowed to have jurisdiction over his own property, and neither can a nation.

Nations Can Survive Socialism, But Not Open Borders

The “celebrate diversity,” multicultural obsessed Progressives—who idolize Scandinavian socialism and point to it as a model for America— tend to ignore or overlook the fact that Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are all culturally and ethnically homogenous nations with histories and traditions that go back a thousand years. Because of this, they have developed the high-trust societies that come with kin selection, small political units, and cultural homogeneity.

Norway’s average IQ is 100; Finland and Sweden have 99 average IQ’s, while Denmark’s is 98. If Progressives really wanted America to look like Sweden, then the border would be sealed and those dreaded deportation forces would be quite busy deported non-whites. Yet European socialists, and the Leftists who praise Scandinavian socialism, however, are encouraging the taxpayer subsidized importation of millions of people from parts of the world with no history of liberalism, individualism, or rights, and vastly lower IQ’s. Many, if not most, of these immigrants/refugees are openly hostile to Western countries, seek little more than welfare handouts, form “no-go zones” and refuse to assimilate, spit in the faces of their hosts, and commit heinous sexual and violent crimes as European “leaders” go out of their way to downplay, cover-up, and apologize for them.

Documentation of these horrendous crimes is necessary to both demonstrate the negative consequences of mass immigration and multiculturalism and wake European peoples up to the reality of the situations they now face.

On New Year’s Day 2016, over 1,000 drunk and aggressive African and Arab migrants committed organized sexual and violent crimes against German women. Only 80 police officers were deployed and not a single arrest was made. German women responded to this savagery by arming themselves and publicly denouncing Islamic rape culture. Nope, wait, actually they went around the city handing flowers to Arab and African migrants, apologizing to them for any “xenophobia.”584 Pakistani gangs in Rotherham, London were allowed to kidnap and molest over 1,400 young British girls for over a decade because the police 583 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics

of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (Transaction Publishers, 2001), 161-162. 584 Paul Joseph Watson, “Cologne Women Apologize For ‘Xenophobia’ By Giving

Migrants Roses Following Mass Molestation,” January 26, 2016. http://www.infowars.com/cologne-women-apologize-for-xenophobia-by-giving-migrants-roses-following-mass-molestation/

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were afraid too afraid to pursue the suspects or raise concerns.585 Some of them were raped with broken glass bottles, while others were doused in gasoline and threatened to be lit on fire. Several girls even had their tongues nailed to tables, ostensibly to prevent them from speaking to the police. In Oxford, social workers and police turned a blind eye to groups of Muslim men “grooming” nearly 400 girls and sexually exploiting them, with some girls as young as 11-years-old, over a 16-year period.586

The media here in the U.S. did the same thing when several Iraqi and Sudanese refugees brutally raped a 5-year-old girl in Idaho.587 Reporting this, let alone condemning it, would be Islamophobic and bigoted, you see, and an assault on the secular gods of multiculturalism and diversity.

As if the attacks in a Bataclan, France concert hall were not horrific enough, French police covered-up the fact that many of the dozens of victims that were killed by Muslim jihadists were gruesomely tortured; victims were beheaded, had their eyes gouged out, and some men had their testicles cut off and placed in their own mouths.588

In Sweden, thanks to the subsidized mass immigration of Arab and Africans into a once homogeneous society, violent crime has increased by 300 percent and rapes by 1,472 percent; Sweden is now the rape capital of the West.589 In Austria, over half of all “asylum seekers” have committed violent or sexual crimes.590 In Germany, a 19-year-old Moroccan man raped a 90-year-old grandmother as she was on her way home from church.591 After asking to use the bathroom at an

585 Roger Scruton, “Why Did British Police Ignore Pakistani Gangs Abusing 1,400

Rotherham Children? Political Correctness,” August 30, 2014. www.forbes.com 586 John Bingham, “Oxford grooming: social workers and police ‘turned blind-eye to

sexualized culture,” March 3, 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11446312/Oxford-grooming-social-workers-and-police-turned-blind-eye-to-sexualised-culture.html

587 Daniel Greenfield, “Media Trying to Cover Up Muslim Refugee Assault of 5-Year-Old Girl in Idaho,” June 22, 2016. http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/263262/media-trying-cover-muslim-refugee-rape-5-year-old-daniel-greenfield

588 Douglas Ernst, “French Terror Cover-Up: Bataclan Attack Included ‘Gruesome Torture,’” July 15, 2016. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/15/french-terror-cover-up-bataclan-attack-included-gr/

589 Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard, “Sweden: Rape Capital of the West,” February 14, 2015. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape

590 Chris Menahan, “Norwegian Police Chief Says 'Xenophobia Is Highly Rational and Justified,' Cites Crime Stats,” August 17, 2016. https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=55348

591 Jon Rogers, “Migrant arrested in Germany after 90-year-old grandmother raped while returning from church,” October 17, 2016. http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/722188/Migrant-arrested-Germany-90-year-old-grandmother-raped-church


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asylum center in Visby, Sweden, a wheelchair-bound Swedish woman was gang-raped by six Muslim migrants.592

In what Swedish author Ingrid Carlqvist calls the “summer inferno of sexual assaults,” Swedish women at the Putte I Parken music festival were sexually assaulted, groped, harassed, and beat by groups of men— all of them from Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Somalia. Many of the women who had been assaulted had been wearing the “Don’t Grope” bracelets that the Swedish police had handed out to the women prior to the festival. At the Trästocksfestivalen music festival in Skellefteå, the oh-so-progressive organizers had decided to arrange free bus rides to the festival for the local “unaccompanied refugee children,” boasting that they were “proud to be the first music festival in Sweden that encourages a significant increase of newly arrived migrants in the audience.” By the time the festival had ended, at least twelve incidents of sexual assaults by groups of migrant men had been reported. 593

This should have surprised no one in Sweden; at multiple summer concerts in 2014 and 2015, brutal sexual assaults committed by North African migrants were covered up by the police. The Cologne attacks finally broke the dam, and it became impossible to hide this many incidents of violence and assault. There have been sexual assaults at public swimming pools, schools, grocery stores, sidewalks, and parks, many of them committed in the style that is now commonplace in many European cities: taharrush gamea (Arabic for “collective harassment”), where large groups of men surround European women and assault them while the other men form a protective barrier.594

The response from the Swedish leadership has been sad but predictable, concludes Carlqvist:

The clear and frightening facts stated by the police reports, however, have not left even the tiniest impression on Swedish public debate. Feminists still talk about “men” committing sexual assaults. In January, for example, Karen Austin, former head of a government work group on young men and violence, wrote an article on Swedish public television's debate website on why culture and religion have (almost) no significance when it comes to sexual assaults…

...Apparently, Swedish girls and women should learn to live with being groped and raped—or leave the public space altogether. The latter seems quite in line with what Islamic sharia law prescribes.595

592 Julian Robinson, “Wheelchair-bound woman is gang-raped by six migrants at Swedish

asylum centre after asking if she could use their toilet,” October 11, 2016. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3831991/Wheelchair-bound-woman-gang-raped-six-migrants-Swedish-asylum-centre-asking-use-toilet.html

593 Ingrid Carlqvist, “Sweden: Summer Inferno of Sexual Assaults,” August 13, 2016. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8579/sweden-sexual-assaults

594 Carlqvist, https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8579/sweden-sexual-assaults 595 Ibid.

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As these same migrants burn their temporary housing centers to the ground, the Swedish government is now mandating that Swedes give up their summer homes to these ungrateful guests.596 The Bishop of Stockholm, the world’s first lesbian bishop, has called for a church in her diocese to remove all crosses and Christian symbols in order to please Muslims and give them a room to pray.597

Despite the appeasement, tolerance, and virtue signaling, Europe’s new Muslim guests are not returning the favor. There have been countless cases of Muslims going into Christian churches and shouting, cursing, and smashing sacred objects. Bishops in Catholic countries with a strong Muslim immigrant presence have ordered their parish priests to hide the Consecrated Hosts to at least prevent the Blessed Sacrament from being desecrated. In Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, over 3,500 acts of desecration have been recorded—usually committed in a hit-and-run raid style—including spitting on sacred images, defecating on the altars, urinating in the Holy Water fount, desecrating the Eucharist, insulting those attending Mass, and the burning and shattering of bookstands, images, and statues.598

In late July 2016, 84-year-old French priest Jacques Hamel and more than a dozen others were terrorized by two Muslim migrants claiming loyalty to ISIS; one of them had tried twice to go to Syria to fight alongside ISIS, had been arrested by French authorities previously, and yet was still walking the streets of Normandy. In the middle of morning Mass—one of, if not the, defining tradition of Christendom—the two men forced Hamel to his knees and then slit his throat while holding nuns hostage. Before he was murdered (and martyred), in front of the Real Presence, Father Hamel’s last words were “Satan, go!”599

Draw cartoons of Muhammad? Riots and violence from the Muslim world. Savagely murder a priest? Silence. Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if two Christians had done this to an Imam in a mosque?

Since Europe’s borders were swung wide open, hardly a day goes by without some non-European migrant committing acts of terrorism or violence. Airport bombings, theatre shootings, truck attacks, machete and knife attacks, and sexual assaults are “the new normal” for Europe. Obviously, only a racist or a bigot would voice concern about a tremendous spike in crime due to mass immigration

596 Chris Menahan, “Swedes Urged to Hand Over Their Houses to Migrants,” August 8,

2016. https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=55313 597 Oliver J.J. Lane, “World’s First Lesbian Bishop Calls for Church to Remove Crosses, to

Install Muslim Prayer Space,” October 5, 2015. http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/10/05/worlds-first-lesbian-bishop-calls-church-remove-crosses-install-muslim-prayer-space/

598 Rorate Caeli, “What Muslims are doing in our churches: Thousands of raids every year,” August 31, 2016. http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2016/09/what-muslims-are-doing-in-our-churches.html?m=1#more

599 Ines San Martin, “Pope calls French priest murdered by ISIS loyalists a ‘martyr,’” September 14, 2016. https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2016/09/14/pope-calls-french-priest-murdered-isis-loyalists-martyr/


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and be opposed to being forced, through law and taxes, to subsidize the radical cultural and demographic transformation of your country.

A few days after Cologne, when 1,700 “far right” protesters in Cologne marched against these attacks and Germany’s open-door migration policy in general, over 1,500 police were deployed, equipped with riot gear and water cannons.600 Anti-migrant and nationalist protesters throughout Europe have met been met with overwhelming force by the state while the crimes committed by foreign migrants go unpunished, ignored, or covered up. Anarcho-tyranny is even worse in Europe than it is in the U.S.

Kneeling before their altars of tolerance and anti-bigotry, European politicians have declared a crusade against “intolerance”—not those who are intolerant of traditional Western culture, but those who dare to oppose subsidized migration, Cultural Marxism, and the Islamification of their countries. While Britain welcomes millions of migrants and does nothing while thousands march through London calling for sharia law and submitting all of Britain to Islam, the U.K. imprisoned former English Defense League leader Tommy Robinson for holding an English flag with the words “Fuck ISIS” written on it while watching a soccer game in France.601 Robinson was accused of “inciting racial hatred.” Conservative and staunchly pro-Western politicians and media figures like Michael Savage, Geert Wilders, and Robert Spencer are all banned from entering Britain for their supposed “hate speech.”

As morally opposed to state power and socialism as I am, countries can survive bad economic programs; despite suffering under horrendous communist regimes, Russia and Eastern Europe—who have largely resisted the cult of open borders and multiculturalism— are still unique peoples and nations who have retained their Orthodox and Catholic traditionalism, are picking up the pieces, and re-building.

What nations can’t survive, however, is demographic displacement. For the sake of the survival of Western civilization, I would much rather deal with the problems of a little bit of socialism, and have strong borders protected by armed men and physical barriers, than try to fix the mess created by the subsidized migration of hostile and barbaric cultures.

Thankfully, there may be a silver lining. The West is beginning to see a rise in traditionalist, nationalist, and populist movements that seek to inject some white-blood cells into a r-selected, weakened, Marxist-infested bloodstream. Even a Norwegian police chief, Thomas Utne Pettersen—citing the violent crime statistics that have risen dramatically since they opened their borders—admits that

600 Mark Yuray, “Right-Wing Activism Always Fails,” April 5, 2016.

http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/05/right-wing-activism-always-fails/ 601 Paul Wright, “Tommy Robinson Accused By Police of Inciting Racial Hatred Over

‘F**k Isis’ England Flag,” June 29, 2016. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tommy-robinson-ex-edl-leader-accused-by-police-inciting-racial-hatred-over-fk-isis-england-1568153

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opposing mass immigration is “highly rational and justified.”602 Here is hoping that the rise of nationalist and populist movements throughout Europe and America begins to stop and eventually reverse the disastrous effects of mass third-world immigration and multiculturalism.

Private citizens are also sick of taxpayer-subsidized migrations and cultural Marxism. Groups like the Sons of Odin, a private, nationalist “vigilante group” opposed to mass immigration, have begun patrolling the streets of Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Estonia since the police are unable or unwilling to do so, carrying whatever weapons they can to protect their cities, streets, women, and property.603 Sick of being disarmed and defenseless, there has been a tremendous surge in demand for handgun permits in Austria and Germany.604 The leader of Germany’s traditionalist-populist Alternative for Germany party, Frauke Petry, has spoken out in favor of Germans arming themselves with guns and other self-defense devices.605

Open borders are, and always have been, a Leftist program. Libertarians are knowingly or unknowingly advancing the goals of Cultural Marxists, anti-capitalists, and those who want to watch the West burn when they advocate for open borders or oppose immigration restrictions. George Soros, the billionaire responsible for funding Marxist agitators and organizations like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, admits that national borders are an obstacle to communist, globalist, and Cultural Marxist goals.606 Open borders are an assault on private property, create conflicts and division, decrease social trust, and make a free society even more difficult to create than it already is.

Libertarians who advocate for open borders, like the Leftists who support tolerance, advance arguments that eventually collapse in on themselves. Progressives want a tolerant, secular society; yet their support for importing Muslim refugees or migrants threatens both of these values. Libertarians value individualism, yet see the subsidized importations of millions of people who come from largely socialist and/or collectivist cultures (who overwhelmingly vote in favor of expanding the welfare state and government power in general) as somehow advancing the cause of freedom.

602 Menahan, https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=55348 603 “Sons Of Odin Lands In Sweden As Muslims Riot In Stockholm,” March 29, 2016.

http://www.europeancivilwar.com/4gw-sons-of-odin-lands-in-sweden-as-muslims-riot-in-stockholm/

604 Sarkis Zeronian, “Migrant Terror Prompts Huge Demand For Handguns,” January 13, 2016. http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/13/huge-demand-austria-handgun-permits/

605 Reuters, “German right-wing leader backs citizens' right to arm themselves,” August 20, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-attacks-germany-afd-idUSKCN10V0A5

606 Nick Hallett, “Soros Admits Involvement in Migrant Crisis: ‘National Borders are the Obstacle,’” November 2, 2015. http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/02/soros-admits-involvement-in-migrant-crisis-national-borders-are-the-obstacle/


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Economics teaches us about incentives and why government intervention almost always fails, but man is not Homo Economicus. Individuals can and do make rational choices outside of a market setting; as countless studies on diversity and multiculturalism demonstrate, no matter how hard you beat them over the head with Leftist slogans, people are tribal and prefer to live in Rothbard’s “nations by consent,” protected by strong borders and property lines. This reality not only reflects the subjective nature of praxeology and value—and is thus entirely consistent with libertarianism—but also tends to create more trust, order, and altruism within society, which makes a libertarian society far more attainable.

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Chapter 14

Secession, Nullification, and Voting With Your Feet

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, asserting the Western tradition of natural rights, argued that “it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish” any government that refused to recognize and protect our rights to life, liberty, and property. After a “long train of abuses and usurpations,” Americans waged a defensive, secessionist war against the British Empire. America was created and built upon the principle of secession, that it was a free society’s right and duty “to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Although the principle of secession has been tainted and smeared by those on both the Left and the Right who seek to centralize power and impose Leviathan on over 300 million people, decentralizing authority into smaller political units has historically been one of the best ways for liberty to spread. As I argued in Chapter 5, one of the most important factors in the development of liberty, natural law, private property, and free markets in Western Civilization was due to the fact that Europe was relatively decentralized after the fall of the Roman Empire. Liberty has a higher chance of flourishing among sovereign borders and smaller, decentralized authorities than under the thumb of a global empire.

Besides secession, there are other ways local control can reign over the rule of Leviathan. Nullification, where states refuse to enforce illegal or unconstitutional edicts passed by the federal government, could cripple federal power overnight if implemented by enough states. America still has some remnants of its federalist structure in place; because of this, the level of freedom, taxes, and cultures differ from state to state, and “voting with your feet” by moving to a more libertarian state can yield you more liberty and a safe haven from today’s rampant consumerism, materialism, and Cultural Marxism.

No matter how unrealistic or impractical it may seem, decentralization and subsidiarity should always be a goal of libertarianism. Local authority, free markets, and a traditionalist ethos are the antidote to giant governments, mega corporations, and a monolithic, lowest-common-denominator culture.

Secession

What right does the United States federal government have to prevent a state from leaving the Union? The feds obviously have the means and the firepower, but where does the U.S. supposedly have the authority to rule nearly one-third of a billion people?


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The answer does not seem to matter because the question is never asked. Of course states cannot secede; our allegiance and loyalty, despite the dozens of unique cultures and subcultures that exist in this large landmass, all belong to a distant bureaucracy thousands of miles away. Besides, President Abraham Lincoln settled the question of secession when he violently suppressed the Confederacy from leaving the Union over 150 years ago. One can only wonder why former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who brutally crushed a Hungarian independence and secessionist uprising in 1956 with tanks and troops, is not heralded in the same manner as Lincoln.

The case against secession is made by those who wish to see society run by a centralized Leviathan implementing one-size-fits-all “solutions” on a population with diverse and divergent interests. Why, if Texas secedes, then they may pass laws Progressives disagree with, run things how Texans want, and deprive our beloved federal government of tax revenue. States who secede may even oppress their citizens by bringing back Jim Crow, slavery, or some other Leftist bogeyman. Historically, however, which types of political units have been more deadly, oppressive, and destructive of minority rights: small, decentralized states or large, centralized ones?607

The case for secession rests on our tradition of liberty and self-government. As free men, we theoretically delegate the protection of our rights to the state and form political organizations to represent our interests. In other words, we come first, not the state; individuals form families, families build communities, communities create cities, and these institutions then delegate certain authority to a political body in exchange for the protection of police, military, the law, etc. We created the state to serve our ends, not the other way around, and as free people, we have the right to change how, where, and to whom we organize the protection of our rights. Maybe, just maybe, there might be a more humane political organization than a population of over 300 million people being governed, regulated, taxed, controlled, and expropriated by one city?

Secession, or even the threat of it, also keeps state power in check by reminding those in charge that we have the right to leave anytime we want. Without this threat, then the political class knows that it can and will get away with expanding power and increasing expropriation.

Because we are ruled by a monstrous Leviathan with the power to inflate, tax, regulate, and start wars, this naturally attracts people who love power, want more power, and to use violence to seize other people’s property and transfer it to themselves and others. There is no reforming an empire. Centralized states become too top-heavy and vampiric to fix from the inside; this is why states who are interested in freedom, independence, and financial security—remember, Leviathan has over $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities and they will squeeze every penny out of you that they can—must secede and separate from the American Empire.

607 Thomas Woods, “Secession: The Reasonable Option Everyone Resists.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXOEdvfMeIY

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With the power of secession—and smaller, decentralized political units asserting their control and sovereignty—power, wealth, and authority begin to dissolve back to the people where it belongs. Political bodies become more transparent and responsive. Different types of laws could be experimented with and would more closely resemble the unique cultures, traditions, and attitudes of the people who live there. Should Des Moines, Iowa really be subject to the same rules as Portland, Oregon? Does Albany, New York need to be run by the same system as Brooklyn, New York?

“With independent states and no central power, the people’s right to control their own retirement savings and their medical matters would not be infringed, and neither would their right to bear arms,” argues Scott Lazarowitz. “In the case of any one state in which a government violates such rights of its population, the people have the freedom to move to a better, freer state. Currently, with all Americans under the compulsory authority of the federal government, it is difficult or impossible for people even to actually move to a different country to escape from the U.S. government’s further intrusions and tyranny.”608

In order to maintain a global empire, impose central banking, globalist corporatism, and the strip-mallification of local markets upon the public, then a centralized political system is absolutely necessary. Under a decentralized system of independent states and diverse political units, however, economic, corporate, and political centralization becomes increasingly difficult. If states seceded, they would no longer be under the jurisdiction of federal bureaucracies like the Federal Reserve, the IRS, FDA, HHS, EPA, TSA, DHS, the Pentagon, etc., all of which syphon away money from the productive members of society and the communities they reside in and transfers it to political cronies, connected corporations, and the black hole of bureaucracy. The people of the states would have the freedom to discover and make use of natural resources that exist within their own territories, and not be compelled to be dependent on the foreign oil of Saudi kleptocrats.609

“There would be no federal raw milk raids, no drug raids, and no S.W.A.T. teams breaking into homes and murdering people for student loan defaults,” continues Lazarowitz. “And no Big Farms would get any special privileges at the expense of smaller family farms.”610 Our schools, borders, and hospitals would be under our control, not subject to the central planning of the federal government. With enough secession, it would become increasingly difficult for Leviathan to impose its bureaucracies and regimentation.

If secession were to spread, “The world would consist of tens of thousands of distinct countries, regions and cantons, and of hundreds of thousands of independent free cities such as the present-day ‘oddities’ of Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Singapore,” argues Hans-Hermann 608 Scott Lazarowitz, “Decentralization and Secession As A Viable Alternative To The

Tyrannical Status Quo,” August 14, 2011. http://www.activistpost.com/2011/08/decentralization-and-secession-as.html

609 Lazarowitz, http://www.activistpost.com/2011/08/decentralization-and-secession-as.html 610 Ibid.


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Hoppe. “Greatly increased opportunities for economically motivated migration would result, and the world would be one of small liberal governments economically integrated through free trade and an international commodity money such as gold. It would be a world of unheard of prosperity, economic growth, and cultural advancement.”611

In the U.S., outside of the Civil War, secession is never mentioned. Case closed. But before and after that horrific war, there have been numerous secessionist movements inside the U.S., all of which should be either encouraged or revitalized today. In Bill Kauffman’s excellent book, Bye Bye Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America’s Political Map, Kauffman documents the long history of secessionist and breakaway movements in American history. New York City wanted to be its own state; West Kansas wanted to break away from Kansas; Texas and Vermont have always had small but passionate supporters of independence; the city of Jefferson, on the border of Oregon and California, lobbied to become a state in 1941 until Pearl Harbor struck. Northern, rural New York does not have much in common with Manhattan or the boroughs, which is why there has always been secessionist agitation among the gun-friendly farmers in the north. New Hampshire could easily be its own nation. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula argues that it can govern itself just fine. The Republic of Alaska sure has a nice ring to it. And why shouldn’t the Lakota Indians have their own territory and nation?

In Vermont specifically, even a libertarian can be on board for a rural, socialistic state going its own way and becoming an independent, self-governing republic. The Montpelier Manifesto, a statement of grievances against the American Empire and the corporate state, reads like a modern Jeffersonian declaration of independence. “Let us therefore consider ways peaceably to withdraw from the American Empire,” reads the Manifesto, “by (1) regaining control of our lives from big government, big business, big cities, big schools, and big computer networks; (2) relearning how to take care of ourselves by decentralizing, downsizing, localizing, demilitarizing, simplifying, and humanizing our lives; and (3) providing democratic and human-scale self-government at those local and regional levels most likely to affect our safety and happiness.”612

Vermont independence activist Ronald Jacobson argues that secession is the only way to preserve local control and preserve values that are unique to his state:

If we are to cultivate our own traditions—to let thrive those things that make Vermont unique—we need to detach from the national system. So long as decisions about our schools, forests, and water are being made by


of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (Transaction Publishers, 2001), 118. 612 “The Montpelier Manifesto.” http://vermontrepublic.org/the-montpelier-manifesto/

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senators from South Carolina, presidents from Texas, and judges from Chicago, Vermont’s best interests are not going to be kept in mind…

There’s no question that the things that make Vermont Vermont are under increasing pressure from a variety of external sources. The question is what to do about it. Does Vermont make more sense, does it become more itself somehow by going its own way? A simple test helps answer this. If Vermont had been an independent republic all along, would you now vote for it to join the United States? Of course not. It would be unthinkable.613

Now replace Vermont in those paragraphs with any other state, your state. Would they really be worse off not being part of a global empire and federal Leviathan?

“Three hundred million can not be ruled by a single city,” concludes Kauffman:

The center, or rather central authority, cannot hold. Something’s gotta give. Smug liberals and chickenhawk conservatives will mock and threaten, bluster and bluff, but scorn stings only if you let it, and remember: The dipshits sneering and jeering at those citizens who actually believe in self-government are voice of the empire. You gonna take orders from them?

...From the Green Mountains of Vermont to the redwood forests of California to the waters of blue Hawaii, agitated patriots have sounded a tocsin to which localist rebels across America are responding. We can see the gathering secessionist movements as a harbinger, a warning—or a blessed sign of hope. I choose hope. What say you, friend?614

Secession has also helped create brand new countries and dissolve political power all over the world. Countries like Latvia and Estonia were once former Soviet client states under the thumb of a brutal empire that are now small, independent nations. In Barcelona, over half a million people rallied in support of a referendum that would codify Catalonian independence.615 In 2014, a staggering 89 percent of Venetians voted in favor of independence from the central government of Italy.616 Liberland, created out of disputed territory between Croatia

613 Kirkpatrick Sale, “The Rise of Nullification,” June 6, 2013.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-rise-of-nullification/ 614 Bill Kauffman, Bye Bye, Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry

Rebels, and their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America’s Political Map (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010), 240.

615 Marisol Medina, “Catalan Separatists Rally in Barcelona to Support Secession,” September 11, 2016. https://www.yahoo.com/news/catalan-separatists-rally-barcelona-support-secession-184039253.html

616 Hannah Roberts, “Venice votes to split from Italy as 89% of the city’s residents opt to form a new independent state,” March 21, 2014.


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and Serbia, was founded by Vit Jedlicka as a stateless, free market libertarian nation whose political functions would be funded by crowdfunding mechanisms.617

Although Scotland’s secession vote narrowly lost in 2014, this does not mean that it will not gain further support in the future. Just the idea that peoples could form their own sovereign nation scares the hell out of political parasites, globalists, and Cultural Marxists who wish to see nations and their borders eroded, favor centralization or decentralization, and dependence over independence.

“...The breaking up not only of the United Kingdom but of Great Britain itself means that large governments, maybe the State itself, could lose power at any moment,” argues Daniel Hawkins. “It’s no surprise to anyone that the idea of secession is gaining legitimacy around the world. Kurdish secession, Ukrainian/Russian secession, Venetian secession, Texan secession, the successful South Sudanese secession—even the corporatist propaganda outlets are taking notice. The question posed by these movements is: ‘If Scotland can successfully break away after 1,000 years of attempted and successful English rule, why can’t we?’”618

Creating smaller political units through secession can also help solve the problems created by mass immigration by giving diverse cultures and ethnicities their own sovereign territories, argues Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

Secessionism, and the growth of separatist and regionalist movements throughout the world represent not an anachronism, but potentially the most progressive historical forces, especially in light of the fact that with the fall of the Soviet Union we have moved closer than ever to the establishment of a “new world order.” Secession increases ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity, while centuries of centralization have stamped out hundreds of distinct cultures. Secession will end the forced integration brought about by centralization, and rather than stimulating social strife and cultural leveling, it will promote the peaceful, cooperative competition of different, territorially separate cultures. In particular, it eliminates the immigration problem increasingly plaguing the countries of Western Europe as well as the U.S. Presently, whenever the central government permits immigration, it allows foreigners to proceed—literally on government-owned roads—to any of its residents' doorsteps, regardless of whether or not these residents desire such proximity to foreigners. Thus, to a large extent “free immigration” is

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2586531/Venice-votes-split-Italy-89-citys-residents-opt-form-

617 Adam Withnall, “Liberland: How one man plans to build a new libertarian paradise in Europe,” April 17, 2016. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-libertarian-about-to-launch-a-hostile-takeover-of-europes-newest-country-a6988741.html

618 Daniel Hawkins, “What Scottish Independence Means for Anarchism,” September 17, 2014. http://www.notbeinggoverned.com/scottish-liberty-means-anarchism/

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forced integration. Secession solves this problem by letting smaller territories each have their own admission standards and determine independently with whom they will associate on their own territory and with whom they prefer to cooperate from a distance.619

Channeling Hoppe, Lawrence Murray proposes an Amerikaner Free State, a pan-European ethnostate carved out of current U.S. territory. Like secession and political separation in general, Murray’s Free State encourages decentralization and offers a peaceful solution to the inherent conflicts of ethnic diversity, multiculturalism, democracy, and world empire.

I hesitate to call it inevitable, but taking a historical perspective it seems that our multi-ethnic country is destined to fall, and probable that it will break along lines of tribal identity. The United States—as a transcontinental and contiguous state encompassing multitudes of people, having sizable and distinct ethnic and/or racial groups, possessing a large and powerful military, being governed by a strong centralized bureaucracy and maintaining a hegemonic position over other states—is an Empire. And as an Empire, it will fall. The United States has become the Austria-Hungary of the 21st century, a polyglot Empire of diverse populations that do not see eye to eye politically, socially, culturally, etc. Or maybe it is more akin to the Ottoman Empire, with our elite following a hostile creed and being completely alien to us in culture and manners, even if they share some of our genes from years of co-habitation. And are we not rewarded for serving them and betraying our own ethnic interests, like janissaries of the post-modern world?

I believe that partition of the United States is a likely outcome, and moreover a beneficial outcome. Much of the political gridlock and culture war in this country is derived from ethnic or racial differences and divergent ideologies. Whether it’s social policies, media representation, interactions with the police, ideas about government size, or any number of contemporary issues, they are all rooted in identities in some way, shape or form. And that's only the cold aspects of this conflict—a haphazard post-1970s resegregation has prevented larger-scale interracial violence.

The division—or collapse—of the United States into several successor states along nationalist principles would help solve this issue.620

Even the ultra-liberal Huffington Post agrees (albeit for very different reasons). Terrified of “white nationalism” and the thought of being subject to a political institution governed by scary right-wingers, Dana Beyer proposes essentially the exact same idea that Murray does. Beyer argues that her brand of egalitarian, multiculturalism can only be protected and preserved if conservative

619 Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed, 117. 620 Lawrence Murray, “Amerikaner Free State,” November 23, 2016.

http://therightstuff.biz/2016/11/23/amerikaner-free-state/


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and/or nationalist whites are given a “safe space.” Beyer also notes that there is precedence for this type of separation, citing the break up of the Soviet Union, where several small, ethnically homogenous, and independent nations were formed that had been previously held (forced) together by a large empire.621

It is painfully obvious that America is incredibly polarized between culture and politics, Left and Right. The 2016 presidential election helped illuminate this bitter cultural divide, which has existed for longer than the political class wants to admit. Why should either side be forced to live under the thumb of the other? Why can’t liberal states form their own jurisdictions with legal marijuana and socialized medicine while conservative states have lower taxes, abortion restrictions, and no gun control? The only answer to the division between Left and Right in America is for a peaceful and amicable separation.

Nullification

Nearly every federal program requires the cooperation of the states in order to be implemented. The federal government steals our money, sends the states a percentage of it back, and then commands them to operate massive welfare programs and enforce regulations. What if the governor of a state or its legislative bodies simply decided that they would not enforce any of the laws, regulations, or programs not specifically authorized by the U.S. Constitution?

This concept of state nullification is not some new theory invented by libertarians upset about the size and scope of federal authority. The arguments for nullification date back to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which were authored by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively. Madison and Jefferson argued that since the people and the states created the federal government in the first place, then they both naturally and logically had defense mechanisms they could employ should their creation overstep the bounds of the authority granted to it by the new constitution. Jefferson and Madison believed that this mechanism—nullification—meant that the state had the right, power, and duty to refuse to allow an unconstitutional federal law enforced within its borders. The idea that all powers that are not delegated to the federal government belong to the states and the people is enshrined in the Tenth Amendment.622

Critics of nullification argue that states re-asserting their natural and moral powers to resist federal encroachment may use it for undesirable ends. Yes, all political power can be used to repress people, but this is far more likely to occur under a federal and centralized government than a smaller state. Besides, nullification historically has been used to advance liberty, not government power.

621 Dana Beyer, “A ‘Safe Space’ for White People, otherwise known as ‘The Two-State

Solution’, or ‘Disunion as Solution,’” November 25, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-beyer/a-safe-space-for-white-pe_b_13227466.html

622 Thomas Woods, “Nullification: Answering the Objections.” https://www.libertyclassroom.com/objections/

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Madison and Jefferson wrote their original justifications for nullification in opposition to President John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts, which criminalized criticism of the government. In an ironic twist, during President Thomas Jefferson’s federal embargo of British goods in 1807, northern states nullified the unconstitutional searches and seizures that were used to enforce it. Daniel Webster, and the Connecticut legislature, urged states to protect their citizens against military conscription during the War of 1812. Thanks to nullification, northern states obstructed the enforcement of federal fugitive-slave laws that would have required them to send escaped slaves back to their masters. Citing the Resolutions of 1798, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court declared the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional and refused to enforce it within its borders.623

Nullification, like secession, would increase the level of state and local control over important issues, restrict federal power, and diversify governance. Like secession, nullification frightens our political elites, Progressives, and warmongers whose power to enforce their agendas down our throats and wage war all across the globe would be vastly diminished. This is why, as Dr. Thomas Woods argues, any form of decentralization, whether nullification or secession, is so hated:

If the various states should have different policies, so what? That is precisely what the United States was supposed to look like. As usual, alleged supporters of “diversity” are the ones who most insist on national uniformity. It says quite a bit about what people are learning in school that they are terrified at the prospect that their country might actually be organized the way Americans were originally assured it would be. Local self-government was what the American Revolution was fought over, yet we’re told this very principle, and the defense mechanisms necessary to preserve it, are unthinkable.

Part of the reason the idea of nullification elicits such a visceral response from establishment opinion is that most people have unthinkingly absorbed the logic of the modern state, whereby a single, irresistible authority issuing infallible commands is the only way society can be organized. Most people do not subject their unstated assumptions to close scrutiny, particularly since the more deeply embedded the assumption, the less people are aware it exists. And it is this modern assumption, dating back to Thomas Hobbes, that – whether people realize it or not – lies at the root of nearly everyone’s political thought. Not only is this assumption false, but...the modern state to which it gave rise has been the most irresponsible and even lethal institution in history, racking up debts and carrying out atrocities that the decentralized polities that preceded them could scarcely have imagined. Why it should be given the

623 Woods, https://www.libertyclassroom.com/objections/


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moral benefit of the doubt, to the point that all skeptics are to be viciously denounced, is unclear.624

The Tenth Amendment Center (TAC), started by libertarian activist Michael Boldin less than a decade ago, is a small non-profit that has done more to advance the cause of liberty than all of the Washington, D.C. think tanks, with their millions of dollars, combined. TAC offers state legislatures model legislation on how to advance nullification, resources on the history behind nullification, and argues that using the Tenth Amendment and nullification in order to empower states is one of the most effective ways to gain more liberty and actually shrink the federal government.

In just a few years, Boldin and the TAC have won state battles against federal encroachment on gun rights in twenty-five states, marijuana laws in fifteen states, and right to try (which allows dying patients to take non-FDA approved medication), surveillance, hemp, police militarization, Obamacare, asset forfeiture, and Common Core in others.625 The TAC has also been instrumental in the “Off Now” movement, which provides model legislation any state can use to prevent the NSA from using their territory to install data centers. Since these data centers run on water—1.7 million gallons per day, to be precise—shutting off state water supplies to the feds makes NSA spying and surveillance immensely more difficult.626

As TAC has shown, all it takes is for one or two states to start nullifying and others begin to follow. In 2015, Wyoming passed the Food Freedom Act, which essentially nullified all federal food regulations in Wyoming for farmers participating in direct-to-consumer food sales, like farmer’s markets and local restaurants.627 Utah and New Hampshire have recently followed suit, introducing similar legislations in their respective legislative bodies; although they both failed, proponents vow to keep introducing similar bills that would benefit local farmers, consumers, and incentivize more decentralized food production.628 In July 2016, North Carolina passed a bill “aimed at weeding out illegal immigrants and ensuring that jobs go to citizens rather than paving the way further for lawbreakers, while putting penalties in place for any nascent ‘sanctuary cities’ that don’t comply,”629 which could encourage other states to do the same.

624 Ibid. 625 “State of the Nullification Movement Report.” http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/report/ 626 Off Now: Shut Down the Surveillance State. https://offnow.org/ 627 Baylen Linnekin, “Food Freedom Spreading Across States,” December 12, 2015.

https://reason.com/archives/2015/12/12/food-freedom-spreading-across-states 628 Dan Flynn, “State Food Freedom Bills Goes Down to Defeat Again,” March 16, 2012.

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/03/state-food-freedom-bills-go-down-again/#.V9XlxNArKRt

629 James Fulford, “Trump Effect: North Carolina Taking Action Against Sanctuary Cities,” July 6, 2016. http://www.vdare.com/posts/trump-effect-north-carolina-taking-action-against-sanctuary-cities

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In a unanimous 7-0 vote, Waterford Township trustees in Oakland County, Michigan, passed a resolution in 2016 telling the federal government that they will not resettle any refugees, including those from Syria, within the township’s boundaries, until the program “has been significantly reformed.”630

States are not the only actors who can use the power of nullification to expand liberty. Jury nullification is a largely unknown yet extremely effective method individuals can employ to nullify unjust laws and restrict state power.

Jury nullification is a concept that has been part of Western tradition for at least 500 years. It represents another check and balance to government power by giving juries in criminal cases the ability to find a defendant not guilty even if he is guilty of the crime the state is charging him with. Most of us are not even aware of this important legal restraint on the state because in virtually all cases, judges are encouraged or required to not inform the jury of this power.

A few years ago, activist Julian Heicklen631 handed out pamphlets on jury nullification to people outside of a federal courthouse. While Heicklen was merely attempting to educate people about jury nullification, he was charged with jury tampering. The prosecution labeled Heicklen a significant and important threat to the judicial system, but thankfully the judge ultimately disagreed and dismissed the case. In 2013, New Hampshire became the only state in the country to sign jury nullification into law, allowing the defense in any case the right to inform the jury to judge not only the facts of the case but also the constitutionality of the law in question.632

Jury nullification has been used to restrict the power of medieval kings, stop witch trials, defend freedom of speech, nullify fugitive-slave laws, and helped end prohibition; the rich history of jury trials being used to protect rights and restrict governments is why the right to a jury trial is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment.633 In the famous trial of the “Camden 28,” 28 students, workers, and clergy broke into a draft office in Camden, New Jersey during the Vietnam War and destroyed draft records. Although they were clearly guilty of a crime against the state, the jury found every single of them not guilty. Thanks to New

630 Michael Patrick Leahy, “Michigan Township Defies Feds: ‘Will Not Actively

Participate in the Refugee Resettlement Program,’” October 25, 2016. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/25/michigan-township-feds-will-not-actively-participate-refugee-resettlement-program/

631 Benjamin Weiser, “Jury Statute Not Violated by Protestor, Judge Rules,” April 19, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/nyregion/indictment-against-julian-heicklen-jury-nullification-advocate-is-dismissed.html?_r=0

632 Tim Lynch, “Jury Nullification Law Signed by New Hampshire Governor,” June 27, 2012. http://www.policemisconduct.net/jury-nullification-law-signed-new-hampshire-governor/

633 Frank Parlato, “Jury Has Long History of Righting Wrong Laws,” August 19, 2014. http://niagarafallsreporter.com/Stories/2014/AUG19/jury.html


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Hampshire’s jury nullification law, marijuana grower Doug Darrell was not prosecuted for felony charges as the jury unanimously declared him not guilty.634

In 2016, jury nullification prevented from the state from exacting revenge on activists who dared to defy their overlords.

...An Oregon jury rejected the government’s attempts to prosecute seven activists who staged a six-week, armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

In finding the defendants not guilty—of conspiracy to impede federal officers, of possession of firearms in a federal facility, and of stealing a government-owned truck—the jury sent its own message to the government and those following the case: justice matters.

The Malheur occupiers were found not guilty despite the fact that they had guns in a federal facility (their lawyers argued the guns were “as much a statement of their rural culture as a cowboy hat or a pair of jeans”). They were found not guilty despite the fact that they used government vehicles (although they would argue that government property is public property available to all taxpayers). They were found not guilty despite the fact that they succeeded in occupying a government facility for six weeks, thereby preventing workers from performing their duties (as the Washington Post points out, this charge has also been used to prosecute extremist left-wingers and Earth First protesters).635

Since nearly all jurors are unaware of this power, jury nullification has not yet spread across the country. It should be pretty obvious why judges, police, and the state have no interest in informing juries of this precious right. Just imagine what would happen to the myriad of regulations, laws, edicts, controls, and dictates governing our every move if juries refused to prosecute those who violated them? In a free society, only acts that harm or aggress against others should be subject to the power of law enforcement. All other “crimes” without victims, with informed juries who cared about liberty, would be nullified.

Voting With Your Feet

Secession, nullification, or any method of decentralizing political power will be absolutely necessary if we are to move in the direction of a free society. On an individual level, one of the easiest and most effective ways of gaining more personal freedom and drowning out the Cultural Marxist racket is to vote with your feet.

634 Liberty Upward, “7 Bad Laws Undone by Good Jurors,” June 12, 2015.

http://libertyupward.com/bad-laws-undone-by-good-jurors/ 635 John W. Whitehead, “Not Guilty: The Power of Nullification to Counteract Government

Tyranny,” October 31, 2016. https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/not_guilty_the_power_of_nullification_to_counter_government_tyranny

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Thanks to what little federalism is left in our political system, the states actually do have significant differences in public policy. Because of this, rather than fight a corrupt political system head on in your own state—especially in larger states, with entrenched bureaucracies and little representation—we can simply pack up our bags and move to a different state that is friendlier to our ideals and values. I understand that certain issues may prevent people from moving; great jobs that are tied to a certain geographic area, proximity to family, or familiarity with the local culture and scenery can be difficult to give up. Home is home, and humans, especially now more than ever, need roots. But if it is at all possible, and you believe in liberty and are sick of having large chunks of your income taken away, intrusive regulations, or high crime, than voting with your feet can be a personal act of secession.

The Cato Institute recently put out a study called “Freedom in the Fifty States,”636 which ranks each state on their level of freedom in multiple categories, including taxes, regulations, gun laws, drug laws, education, healthcare, and incarceration rates. According to their study, New Hampshire topped the list as the freest, followed by Oklahoma, Indiana, South Dakota, Alaska, Tennessee, Idaho, and Florida. Rounding out at the bottom we have Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, California, and, coming in at dead last, New York. Coincidentally, the freer states tend to be more rural, have low unemployment rates, and smaller governments. So if you are currently living in one of the more unfree states and can afford to do so, why not move to a state with, in many cases, vastly more freedom?

In a study of the best and worst states to raise a family, GOBanking Rates factored in several key aspects current or prospective parents most desire: stability and a good standard of living, jobs and income, housing, child care costs, school districts, healthcare, and safety. Once again, New Hampshire tops the list, followed by North Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota. According to their metrics, the worst places to raise a family are the District of Columbia, California, Illinois, Connecticut, Nevada, and Washington.637

Even without ideologically libertarian motives, Americans are already voting with their feet. According to a United Van Lines study on where Americans are moving inside the country, they are leaving big cities and large states and into more rural areas governed by smaller states. Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, Idaho, and North Carolina saw the most new inbound population, while people are fleeing New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Connecticut, and Ohio.638 According to the most recent census data, California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and the Great Lakes area in general have attracted relatively

636 “Freedom in the 50 States.” http://www.freedominthe50states.org/ 637 Andrew DePietro, “The Best and Worst States for Families to Live a Richer Life,”

August 15, 2016. https://www.gobankingrates.com/personal-finance/best-worst-states-families-live-richer-life/

638 “United National Movers Study,” January 1, 2016. http://www.unitedvanlines.com/about-united/news/movers-study-2015


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few migrants from other states while the most attractive areas for those switching states have been the more rural areas of New England, the Carolinas, and the West (excluding California and Texas).639 Simply put, Americans are moving from heavily regulated, bureaucratic, high cost-of-living states to more affordable states that tend to have more personal freedom.

Migrating to a different state is a far more impactful way of voting than trying to change the current political system you happen to live under from the inside. Especially for libertarians, who make up no more than 5 percent of the U.S. population, trying to push your local or state government in a more libertarian direction, when you are surrounded by those who have no qualms about voting away your liberty and your property, is a nearly impossible task. Most states are just beyond saving, bankrupt, and are moving solely in the direction of more government. But what if libertarians could move to one state, concentrate geographically, and use their strength in numbers to actually build a free society?

In 2001, Jason Sorens, a Yale University graduate student with an interest in historical secessionist and independence movements, published an essay introducing the idea behind what would eventually be called the Free State Project (FSP). Sorens argued that if 20,000 libertarians moved to a low-population state with a relatively small government, low tax burden, and few restrictions on personal freedoms, then a libertarian society could be created. After the idea gained some interest, New Hampshire—which, as mentioned above, consistently ranks near the top in every freedom index—was chosen as the state. The FSP began asking for “signers” who pledged to move to New Hampshire within five years of reaching 20,000 signers and agreed to the Statement of Intent: “I hereby state my solemn intent to move to the state of New Hampshire. Once there, I will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of civil government is the protection of life, liberty, and property.”

As of this writing, the 20,000 number has been reached, the move within five years has already been triggered, and there are already 2,000 “early movers” who have moved to New Hampshire already.

It is easy to see why the FSP chose New Hampshire. Although New Hampshire has a relatively high property tax, there is no state income tax, no state sales tax, virtually no gun control, beautiful scenery, a small population, and a tradition of liberty. The state government is small and unintrusive. Despite having the smallest tax burden in the country, New Hampshire residents receive the highest Return on Investment for their tax dollars; as it turns out, a smaller government is a far more efficient one.640 The local political structure is also very friendly to libertarianism and decentralized government. With just over 1.2 million residents, there are 400 state representatives, which works out to about 3,000 people per representative. This not only makes radical change very difficult, since 639 Ryan McMaken, “Census Data Shows People Are Fleeing High-Tax States,” January 6,

2016. https://mises.org/blog/census-data-shows-people-are-fleeing-high-tax-states 640 John S. Kiernan, “2016’s States With the Best and Worst taxpayer ROI,” April 5, 2016.

https://wallethub.com/edu/state-taxpayer-roi-report/3283/

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it takes over 200 representatives to agree on any bill, it is far easier to win a local election, even as a radical libertarian, then virtually anywhere in the Western world.

The FSP also has incredible resources and large communities that will help you adjust when you arrive. Those who have already moved here help new movers unload their stuff into a new apartment, there are several real estate agents always looking for new apartments and houses to rent or sell to Free Staters, and parties and meet-ups. You can move to Manchester, Concord, or Keene and get politically active or participate in local activism, or you can move to more rural and family-friendly parts of the state to simply live with more freedom and enjoy a low cost of living. If you can afford to move, and are sick and tired of high taxes, high crime, living on top of people in crowded cities, and genuinely want more freedom in your life, then I highly recommend looking into the FSP and making the move. The FSP website641 has great resources on jobs, housing, and networking.

The FSP will also hopefully help create copycats all around the country. In Asheville, North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Liberty Project is building a community of libertarians and anarchists.642 James Wesley, Rawles, a former army intelligence officer, urges “libertarian-leaning Christians and Jews to move to Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and a strip of eastern Oregon and Washington states, a haven he called the ‘American Redoubt;’” with wide-open spaces, few gun restrictions, mountainous terrain, and a tradition of independence, many are answering Rawles’s call.643

The Benedict Option

Voting with your feet is a realistic step each of us can take to separate ourselves as much as we can from Leviathan. This is also a viable strategy to combat the near omnipresence of Cultural Marxism, and multiculturalism. This can be seen in the institutionalization of instant gratification seen in our current culture of promiscuity, divorce, materialism, consumerism, bland mega-churches instead of awe-inspiring cathedrals, and centralization over the “little platoons” of a decentralized order. In order to combat this, there is the “Benedict Option.”644

St. Benedict of Nursia (circa 480-537) was a young Christian who left Rome, the capital of a dying empire, out of disgust with its decadence. He travelled alone in order to live as a hermit and to pray. Eventually, like-minded men began to join him and they formed monasteries. Benedict wrote his famous Rule, which became the guiding constitution of virtually all monasteries in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. These served as incubators and preservers of Christian and classical

641 Free State Project. https://freestateproject.org/ 642 Blue Ridge Liberty Project. http://www.blueridgelibertyproject.com/ 643 The Economist, “The last big frontier,” August 6, 2016.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21703411-movement-staunch-conservatives-and-doomsday-watchers-inland-north-west

644 Rod Dreher, “Benedict Option FAQ,” October 6, 2015. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-faq/


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culture, and outposts of evangelization in the barbarian kingdoms. Benedict found the world—physical, social, and spiritual—in ruins; his mission was a restoration rather than a visitation, correction, or conversion.645

In today’s world, the “Benedict Option” does not mean that those of us who wish to preserve traditional Western culture and its legacy of liberty have to become monks. It simply means that, in an age where cultural traditionalists are the minority where they used to be the majority, Benedict’s principles of restoration and preservation can be employed in order to strengthen what is left of Christian ethics and culture. The Benedict Option is a neoreactionary project, a way for orthodox Christians to protect what they have against those who wish to strip it all away from them. Traditionalism, contrary to what Leftists claim, does not seek a mystical or mythical “Golden Age.” It is, rather, “a recovery of the metaphysical vision the premodern Christians had, a vision that would give them the resources to resist and repair the kind of fragmentation through which we are living—a fragmentation that, among other things, is leading to the demise of Christianity in the West,” argues Rod Dreher.646

Dreher lists six Benedictine principles that should serve as guides for a counter-cultural backstop to the onslaught of Cultural Marxism:

1. Order. Benedict described the monastery as a “school for the service of the Lord.” The entire way of life of the monastic community was ordered by this telos, or end. The primary purpose of Christian community life is to form Christians. The Benedict Option must teach us to make every other goal in our lives secondary to serving God. Christianity is not simply a “worldview” or an add-on to our lives, as it is in modernity; it must be our lives, or it is something less than Christianity.

2. Prayer and work. Life as a Christian requires both contemplation and action. Both depend on the other. There is a reason Jesus retired to the desert after teaching the crowds. Work is as sacred as prayer. Ordinary life can and should be hallowed.

3. Stability. The Rule ordinarily requires monks to stay put in the monastery where they professed their vows. The idea is that moving around constantly, following our own desires, prevents us from becoming faithful to our calling. True, we must be prepared to follow God’s calling, even if He leads us away from home. But the far greater challenge for us in the 21st century is learning how to stay put — literally and metaphorically — and to bind ourselves to a place, a tradition, a people. Only within the limits of stability can we find true freedom.

4. Community. It really does take a village to raise a child. That is, we learn who we are and who we are called to be in large part through our

645 Dreher, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-faq/ 646 Rod Dreher, “Reactionaries in Our Time,” September 9, 2016.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/reactionaries-in-our-time/

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communities and their institutions. We Americans have to unlearn some of the ways of individualism that we absorb uncritically, and must relearn the craft of community living.

Not every community is equally capable of forming Christians. Communities must have boundaries, and must build these metaphorical walls because, as the New Monastic pioneer Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove writes, “we cannot become the gift to others we are called to be until we embrace the limits that are necessary to our vocation.” In other words, we must withdraw behind some communal boundaries not for the sake of our own purity, but so we can first become who God wants us to be, precisely for the sake of the world. Beliefs and practices that are antithetical to achieving the community’s telos must be excluded.

5. Hospitality. That said, we must be open to outsiders, and receive them “as Christ,” according to the Rule. For Benedictine monks, this had a specific meaning, with regard to welcoming visitors to the monastery. For modern laypersons, this will likely have to do with their relationship to people outside the community. The Benedictines are instructed to welcome outsiders so long as they don’t interrupt communal life. It should be that way with us, too. We should always be open to others, in charity, to share what we have with them, including our faith.

6. Balance. The Rule of St. Benedict is marked by a sense of balance, of common sense. As Ben Oppers experiment with building and/or reforming communities and institutions in a more intentional way, we must be vigilant against the temptations to fall into rigid legalism, cults of personality, and other distortions that have been the ruin of intentional communities. There must be workable forms of accountability for leadership, and the cultivation of an anti-utopian sensibility among the faithful. A community that is too lax will dissolve, or at least be ineffective, but one that is too strict will also produce disorder. A Benedict Option community must be joyful and confident, not dour and fearful.647

Already we are seeing the Benedict Option in practice, with communities being centered around churches that have not caved or altered their message to appease the gods of egalitarianism, political correctness, and multiculturalism. Schools are also one of the best means of employing the Benedict Option. “Consider St. Jerome’s, a classical school in the Catholic tradition, in Hyattsville, Maryland, or the Scuola G.K. Chesterton in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, which is run by Catholics for Catholic children, following the vision of the late Stratford Caldecott...Homeschool groups can be motivated by the [Benedict Option],” continues Dreher.648

647 Dreher, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-faq/ 648 Ibid.


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While there is certainly an element of separation in the Benedict Option, it is by no means limited to isolation. Fundamentally, a cultural restoration will come down to the willingness of individuals to recognize and reassert their traditions, build roots, and strengthen the institutions—marriage, art, music, the family, mutual-aid societies—that foster liberty. Personally, although I was raised Catholic, I left the Church for over a decade, embracing a nihilistic atheism. Now, as I witness the West gasping for air, I have found myself returning to the Church. Surrounded by the enemies of liberty and a culture hostile to our traditions, the traditional Mass serves as a “safe space,” if you will, against the noise of the modern world, offering peace and quiet, discipline, and roots that trace back to the Apostles.

Libertarianism should be an open tent for anyone who believes in liberty and private property, but libertarians must recognize that the liberty we seek is rooted in our unique Christian tradition, specifically the Christian philosophers who synthesized their theology with Greco-Roman philosophy. Even Stefan Molyneux—a libertarian atheist and one of the most important philosophers of our era—admits that the Church built Western civilization.649

“St. Benedict didn’t set out to Save Western Civilization™; all he wanted to do was create a space within which he could pray and worship God away from the chaos and decadence of the city,” concludes Dreher. “What he and his followers did, without knowing it, was to lay the foundation for the birth of a new civilization out of the ruins of the old.”650

The Benedict Option represents a cultural counter-revolution and a return to roots in rebellion of a rootless age, firing daily shots against Cultural Marxism and Leviathan.

649 Stefan Molyneux, “The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization,” September 6,

2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-eUnj1ATMc 650 Dreher, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-faq/

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Chapter 15

Down With Democracy

If we are ever going to achieve a libertarian society, then democracy must be taken off of its pedestal. A political system where everyone has the “right” to elect a leader and coercively decide what other individuals can and cannot do with their private property is today generally assumed to be the optimal system of government. Like “diversity is our strength” and a dedication to “equality,” faith in democracy is simply accepted as an axiomatic, progressive, and a priori truth, an evolution from our archaic past that must never be questioned.

Every state, no matter how it is organized, is an expropriator of private property; but not all governments are created equal. Traditional monarchies, for example, have been far better than democracies at protecting liberty and private property. Monarchical governments have historically represented the closest political order conducive to a private property, libertarian society that the West has ever seen. Under monarchy, taxes and government spending remained incredibly low relative to today’s standards, low time preferences were encouraged, and it provided stability and predictably in law. Democracy, on the other hand, has turned the minimal state of the traditional monarchy into the Leviathan we see today.

This is because democracy is synonymous with socialism. Under a democratic government, society slowly moves—both culturally and politically—in a Leftward trajectory. Under mass democracy, private property is not protected but auctioned off. Government budgets explode, bureaucracy expands, and a libertarian social order is replaced with an egalitarian collectivism. This is not a bug of democracy, where corruption just needs to be fixed with reforms, but a feature inherent to the democratic system itself. Even in small, homogeneous societies like Switzerland, government is never shrunk under democracy, only expanded.

“Although the crisis of democracy is widely acknowledged, there is virtually no criticism of the democratic system itself,” argue Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman. “There is virtually no one who blames democracy as such for the problems we are experiencing. Invariably political leaders—whether left, right, or in-between—promise to tackle our problems with more democracy, not less.”651 The Leftist answer to any problem created by government programs—whether it is

651 Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman, Beyond Democracy: Why democracy does not lead

to solidarity, prosperity and liberty but to social conflict, runaway spending and a tyrannical government (2012), 8-9.


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welfare or multiculturalism—is always to double down. Democracy is no exception.

“In light of elementary economic theory, the conduct of government and the effects of government policy on civil society can be expected to be systematically different, depending on whether the government apparatus is owned privately or publicly,” notes Hans Hermann Hoppe.652 “These two forms of government—private or public ownership of government (monarchy or democracy)—have systematically different effects on social time preference and the attendant process of civilization, and with the transition from personal (monarchical) to democratic (public) rule in particular, contrary to conventional wisdom, the decivilizing forces inherent in any form of government are systematically strengthened.”653

From a libertarian perspective, the spread of democracy has not been friendly to traditional liberty and Western culture. It is nothing more than socialism through the backdoor. “From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above shortsightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline,” continues Hoppe. “...In addition to increased exploitation and social decay, the transition from monarchy to democracy has brought a change from limited warfare to total war, and the twentieth century, the age of democracy, must be ranked also among the most murderous periods in all of history.”654

All governments are territorial monopolists using initiatory violence to expropriate private property and violate liberty. Taken to its logical conclusion, the NAP leads necessarily to anarchism. Our pure libertarian society, however, cannot exist under a democratic government and the Cultural Marxism it enables and subsidizes. This is why some intermediary, anti-democratic steps need to be taken before a libertarian social order can be established.

The NAP, like the Constitution, has no built-in enforcement mechanism. The reactionary libertarian understands this, which is why we must create one—through an anti-democratic counter-revolution—that will demystify the God of democracy, restore the orderly protection of liberty and property, and remove Cultural Marxism from our society.

The Libertarian Case Against Democracy

The fundamental feature of democracy is that government is “publicly owned.” Under this public ownership, the state apparatus is considered public property, controlled and administered by elected officials who do not have any personal or private ownership of the state. They are, instead, only temporary caretakers or trustees for a short period of time. In terms of property ownership,


of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (Transaction Publishers, 2001), 45. 653 Ibid., 17. 654 Ibid., 69.

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land that is not privately owned suffers from “the tragedy of the commons” problem; resources are exhausted because there is no private incentive to maintain the long-term care of the property.

Democracy is “the tragedy of the commons” approach to government, which creates certain incentives for decivilization, growth of government power, increased expropriation of private property, and violations of liberty. A ruler in a democratic system can use the state for his personal advantage but he does not own it; his benefits are privatized, while his costs are socialized among the general public. A democratic leader has an incentive to maximize current income, regardless of the costs this imposes on the future capital stock of the country. It is thus unavoidable that public government ownership results in continual capital consumption, since the current caretaker of the democratic state will want to use up as much of the government resources as quickly as possible. Whatever power or spending he does not accumulate in his term will never be able to be grabbed once he is out of power. Why not borrow money and inflate the currency to pay for the implementation of welfare programs today? In four or eight years, he will be out of power and will not have to face the costs of these decisions.655

Public government not only incentivizes the growth of government spending but also makes it less likely that the state will face opposition from the general public to this expansion of power. Under a democracy, anyone in theory may become a member of the political class or the president. The distinction between ruler and ruled is thus blurred, and even creates the illusion that this distinction no longer exists. Resistance to government power and increased spending is weakened as people begin to believe that because we chose our leaders, expropriation does not occur. Under democracy, the state is not viewed as the separate, parasitic institution that it is, but one that we all own together. Consequently, taxes will rise, whether through increased tax rates, public debt, or monetary inflation. The ratio of government employees (“public servants”) to private employees will also rise, as public government attracts those with higher time preferences and lower concerns for the future.656

This trend is seen in the steady growth of public spending and taxes in the 20th century in the democratic West. Prior to the horrors of World War I—which, besides unleashing massive death and destruction, also dismantled the European monarchies—under a system of government with far less democracy than we have today, no European government (including the U.S.) spent more than 16.5 percent of their respective GDPs, with the average around 10 percent. With every passing decade since monarchies were dismantled, government spending as a percentage of GDP has done nothing but increase. After 100 years of increasingly democratic rule, government budgets have exploded to around 50 percent of GDP.657

655 Ibid., 24. 656 Ibid., 25-26. 657 Karsten and Beckman, Beyond Democracy, 24-26.


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Taxes, public debt, and bureaucracy have followed the same trajectory. Before the implementation of democracy, from the 11th century to the beginning of the 20th century, both tax rates and government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 5 to 8 percent. Before 1850, no Western nation even had an income tax. Until 1900, the number of government employees rarely exceeded 3 percent of the total labor force. “Royal ministers and parliamentarians typically did not receive publicly funded salaries but were expected to support themselves out of their private incomes,” notes Hoppe. “In contrast, with the advances of the process of democratization, they became salaried officials; and since then government employment has continually increased.”658

Predictably, debt and inflation have also increased exponentially. While European monarchs undoubtedly created debt, these were almost always war debts and were generally paid off during peacetime. Western democracies have accumulated staggering amounts of debts in barely a century during war and in peacetime—more debt than could ever be conceivably paid off—since there is public, rather than private, ownership of these government debts. While the monarchical age was dominated by a generally stable monetary system based on gold or silver, today’s democracies are synonymous with tremendous monetary inflation and the ever-depreciating value of their currencies.659

Democracy also creates law, legislation, and regulation that are not conducive to a libertarian social order. Under a monarch, the pre-existing private property law is generally respected, since a king holds the state apparatus as his own private property as well. He does not create new, artificial law, but merely holds a privileged position with an already existing private law system. Under a democratic government, a new type of law emerges. Public law, through legislative decree (which exempts government agents from personal liability), begins to expand, ultimately displacing private law (like the common-law system that evolved in Europe over centuries through a decentralized market). 660

With a clear distinction between the ruler and the ruled, the monarch and his parliament or court were held to be under the law, existing to apply pre-existing law as judge or jury. Under democracy, presidents and legislative bodies soon became to be above the law, creating new and ever-expanding controls, regulations, edicts, and decrees with little regard to traditional rights or private property. Unsurprisingly, “the democratization of law and law administration has led to a steadily growing flood of legislation,” notes Hoppe. “Presently, the number of legislative acts and regulations passed by parliaments in the course of a single year is in the tens of thousands, filling hundreds of thousands of pages, affecting all aspects of civil and commercial life, and resulting in a steady depreciation of all law and heightened legal uncertainty.”661

658 Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed, 56. 659 Ibid., 56-59. 660 Ibid., 28. 661 Ibid., 62.

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Under democratic rule, private property is never secure and is always up for grabs. In order to get elected, a prospective leader has the incentive to promise his subjects “free” goods, which ultimately require the forcible transfer of property from its rightful owner to somebody else. Additionally, it becomes increasingly difficult to plan for the future as one can not anticipate what types of laws, regulations, taxes, or distribution plans the current government in charge may implement. This makes the delicate process of saving, investment, and capital accumulation even more difficult than it already is. A monarch, on the other hand, since he will have his entire life to manage the country and make sure it is in good shape for his heir, has the incentive to protect private property (since this creates wealth, cooperation, and peace) as much as possible. “Even though a prince ranks above everyone else, his rights, too, are private rights, albeit of a somewhat elevated kind,” adds Hoppe. “If a prince takes the property of one person and distributes it to another, he undermines the principle on which his own position and security vis-a-vis other princes rests.”662

Whether it is politics, economics, or culture, a lower time preference signifies a willingness to forgo current gratification in exchange for benefits in the future, while a higher time preference indicates poor impulse control and a desire to seek immediate gains at the expense of future ones. In order to advance a libertarian society, a lower time preference should always be encouraged; savings and thrift over debt, restraint and discipline over hedonism. This ignites a “process of civilization” that generates a falling rate of time preference where individuals mature from childhood to adulthood and societies mature from barbarism to civilization.663

This falling rate of time preference necessary to build capital, increase standards of living, and raise families is severely distorted by democracy, and both the political climate and culture as a whole suffer because of it. In a free market economy, interest rates reflect time preference. If the interest rate is high, then this sends a signal that savings are needed. If interest rates fall, then this tells the rest of society that people have been saving money and that there is now capital to borrow and produce long-term projects that might not pay off for years (like factories and bridges). Without government intervention, interest rates coordinate production across time. Because this free market process takes so much time, however, democratic governments do not want to wait that long since the current rulers will not be able to see these benefits. They now have an incentive to artificially lower the interest rates; this sends false signals to entrepreneurs and consumers that there is a lot of savings in the economy, while granting the government the ability to borrow at a lower price. This results in predictable boom-and-bust cycles, most recently seen in the 2008 housing bubble.

This same process can be applied to culture. It is no coincidence that as democracies encourage a high economic time preference, social institutions face the same pressures. Since the advent of mass democracy, the institutions of

662 Ibid., 85. 663 Ibid., 7.


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marriage and family have been increasingly weakened and birthrates have plummeted, while divorce, illegitimacy, single motherhood, and abortion have all increased. Before democracies, around 50 percent of government spending went to finance the military, police, courts and services generally needed to maintain public order and protect person and property; since expenditures were also smaller in total, this spending represented about 2.5 percent of GDP, and the remainder went to government administration. Welfare, charity, insurance, and poverty relief all fell under the realm of the private and voluntary sector. Mutual-aid societies were organized, private hospitals, universities, and charities were built, and, most importantly, this stressed the importance of strong families, traditional morals, healthy communities, and vast voluntary organizations and networks to maintain social order.664

“As a reflection of the egalitarianism inherent in democracy, from the beginning of the democratization in the late nineteenth century onward came the collectivization of individual responsibility [emphasis added],” argues Hoppe.665 If everyone is in charge of raising children and caring for the sick, then no one is in charge. With the rise of democracy, and the ability of some to vote for a living, the welfare state exploded, incentivizing the breakdown of traditional family structures. Being a father and provider, like the planning, patience, and sacrifice is takes to build capital and earn income, is tough work; but if the government begins subsidizing mothers to have children without fathers, it should surprise no one when single motherhood explodes. The productive are taxed and the unproductive are subsidized, which disincentives a lower time preference and rewards a higher one. Why save money and build for the future when the democratic state has inflated away the value of your dollar? What is the point in having a stable, monogamous relationship and a traditionalist temperament when you will just be subsidizing those who do not?

In a free society, anyone is free to encourage irresponsible promiscuity or egalitarianism, but there are natural market factors that internalize the costs of these behaviors. In the democratic society, however, there is not only no cost but everything to gain from advocating non-traditional social norms as the ultimate costs of these behaviors are subsidized by the taxpayer. A democratic society thus has no problem encouraging the breakdown of marriage, family, and private institutions that care for the poor since this only invigorates and strengthens the state; anything that raises the time preference of the public benefits a democratic ruler.

Under a monarchy, only the king is a threat to liberty, while under a democracy—with a public government open to any and everyone for a limited amount of time, elected by gullible voters—everyone is a threat. While the public rightfully views the crown as an institution entirely separate from civil society and is thus more suspicious of a monarch’s encroachments, democracy produces the

664 Ibid., 65. 665 Ibid., 66.

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exact opposite desires, encouraging predation, expropriation, and greed, explains Hoppe:

Under democratic conditions the popular, if immoral and antisocial, desire for other men's property is systematically strengthened. Every demand is legitimate, if it is proclaimed publicly under the special protection of “freedom of speech.” Everything can be said and claimed, and everything is up for grabs. Not even the seemingly most secure private property right is exempt from redistributive demands. Worse, subject to mass elections, those members of society with little or no moral inhibition against taking another man's property, habitual amoralists who are most talented in assembling majorities from a multitude of morally uninhibited and mutually incompatible popular demands, efficient demagogues, will tend to gain entrance in and rise to the top of government. Hence, a bad situation becomes even worse.666

If the ownership of government is public and subject to a popular vote, then it is inevitable that the worst will rise to the top. In order to get elected, the politician is incentivized to promise as much expropriation, redistribution, and spending as possible since he will only be in charge for a few years. “The democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans,” argues Friedrich Hayek. “It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending towards totalitarianism...the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tenderhearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation.”667

Democracy creates bureaucracy, parasitism, megalomania, mediocrity and lower standards, welfarism, the breakdown of traditional culture, higher time preferences, property expropriation, and the socialization of everything. Just apply the logic of democracy to some of the important features of our daily lives. Instead of going to the music store and picking the album you want out of dozens of categories, whatever type of music the will of the majority prefers is now your only choice. What if whom you married, what job you had, or what church you went to were subject to a popular vote?

If all of these critiques of democracy are true, then why is democracy idolized, like a god, as the natural progression of mankind? Just as the Marxists knew that undermining traditional Western culture would help make the public more sympathetic to communism, democracy has been encouraged by the Progressive Left for the exact same reason. Democracy is synonymous with Marxism (in both its cultural and economic components); while advocating for the

666 Ibid., 87-88. 667 F.A. Hayek, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” December 16, 2015.

https://fee.org/resources/the-road-to-serfdom-chapter-10-why-the-worst-get-on-top/


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public control of property, production, and the state apparatus, both push society and the state Leftward. Democracy, like Marxism, unleashes and subsidizes the rabbits at the expense of the wolves, and is simply incompatible with a libertarian society.

The Libertarian Case for Monarchy

The ideal government of a libertarian society is none at all. If it always immoral to initiate physical violence against person and property, then no state can be justified through libertarian principles because all states, by their very nature, hold a monopoly power to initiate violence in a given geographical area. The libertarian case for monarchy, then, rests not on the fact that it is a perfect form of government or that it is 100 percent consistent with the NAP, but that it is the system of government most conducive to the protection of private property, encourages healthy cultural and economic conditions while discouraging parasitic ones, and whose implementation would give us the best chance of pursuing a free society.

Monarchy, or “private government,” incentivizes a lower degree of time preference compared to public, democratic governments because both the current and future resources expropriated by the state are privately owned by the monarch. These resources are added to the king’s private estate and treated as if they were his own justly-acquired property, while he, and only he, has the monopoly claim over these and future expropriated resources and any value or profit that is gained from them over time. As the private owner of the state, he will eventually pass on this property to his heir, incentivizing a lower time preference so that the king makes sure that his property is well taken care of. There is no confusion between ruler and ruled; nobody but the king and his family has the right to rule, which automatically increases suspicion and skepticism concerning government overreach. If a democratic government, which is publicly owned, resembles a socialistic ideology and the “tragedy of the commons” of public property, then monarchy mimics the libertarian incentives of private property and will thus produce outcomes more beneficial to libertarianism.668

Private government ownership, then, forces certain incentive structures on the ruler. Even if we assume that the king is only motivated by self-interest, and has been taught no history, economics, political theory, or philosophy, he will try to maximize the amount of wealth his private government controls now and in the future. Given that all states are parasitical and can have no revenue to expropriate which is not first created by individuals in the market investing, exchanging, or saving their private property, he will be incentivized to create an economic climate where this free market activity can occur as smoothly as possible. Therefore, a king would try to avoid taxing and regulating his subjects too much or in such a way that that the future value of his kingdom is threatened. In order to preserve and eventually increase the value of his personal property, a monarch will prefer low taxes; the more productive the population is, the higher the value of the ruler’s

668 Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed, 17-18.

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monopoly of expropriation will be. “He will use his monopolistic privilege, of course,” argues Hoppe. “He will not not tax. But as the government's private owner, it is in his interest to draw—parasitically—on a growing, increasingly productive and prosperous nongovernment economy, as this would—always and without any effort on his part—also increase his own wealth and prosperity. Tax rates would thus tend to be low.”669

This is why the age of monarchy in Europe featured incredibly low taxes and government spending relative to the modern, democratic era. As mentioned above, taxes and government spending as a percentage of GDP almost never went higher than ten percent. Even the government of King George III, one in which thousands of Americans were willing to kill and die to secede from, imposed taxes equivalent to roughly 1-3% as a percentage of total income. While a temporary renter of a public government wants to get in and get out, a monarch, with nothing other than self-interest in the preservation of his “property,” or kingdom, will be incentivized to pursue policies that are beneficial for long-term economic growth.

A monarchy also tends to provide libertarian standards of law and the most effective protection of private property. With the sole exception of himself, it is in the interest of a king to enforce, through his courts and police, the principle that all property, wealth, and income should be acquired productively through libertarian means—through either homesteading or voluntary exchange in the free market—because this increases the wealth of society (and, thus, the value of the king’s property). Accordingly, crime will be better prosecuted and less likely to occur as this private predation directly threatens the king’s property and rule.670

A monarchy’s legal system, while not perfectly libertarian, protects natural rights and private property far better than a democratic one.

To be sure, the monopolization of law administration led to higher prices and/or lower product quality than those that would have prevailed under competitive conditions, and in the course of time kings employed their monopoly increasingly to their own advantage. For instance, in the course of time kings had increasingly employed their monopoly of law and order for a perversion of the idea of punishment. The primary objective of punishment originally had been the restitution and compensation of the victim of a rights violation by the offender. Under monarchical rule, the objective of punishment had increasingly shifted to compensating the king, instead. However, while this practice implied an expansion of government power, it did not involve any redistribution of wealth and income within civil society, nor did it imply that the king himself was exempt from the standard provisions of private law. Private law was still supreme. And indeed, as late as the beginning of the twentieth century, A.V. Dicey could still maintain that as for Great Britain, for instance, legislative law—public law—as distinct from pre-existing law—private

669 Ibid., 19. 670 Ibid.


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law—did not exist. The law governing the relationships between private citizens was still considered fixed and immutable, and government agents in their relationship with private citizens were regarded as bound by the same laws as any private citizen.671

While democratic governments run up almost inconceivable amounts of debt, a monarch, when taking on debt, is assuming liability against his own private property, and thus government debt will tend to remain minimal and be paid off as soon as possible. Democratic rulers, on the other hand, are incentivized to inflate the money supply, as this provides short-term gain at the expense of the long-term. If a monarch creates monetary inflation, then the future production of his subjects and the value of the taxes he expropriates are diminished.672

Wealth redistribution also becomes far less likely under a monarch. Engaging in wealth redistribution undermines the monarch’s legitimacy as well as harms his ability to improve the future value of his privately held government (since wealth redistribution severely hinders economic growth and production). On the other hand, it is in the democratic ruler’s interest to redistribute private property. His legitimacy rests not on the private property ownership structure of a king but on the public property incentives of socialism; what good is electing a temporary caretaker of a public government if he will not use this power to take what belongs to someone else and give it to me? Since all property, in a democratic society, is public property, all rights are only provisionally valid and subject to the whims of voting majorities, the legislature, or whichever democratic caretaker is currently in charge.673

All governments, thanks to their parasitic nature, heighten time preferences among the public. However, under the durable, stable, predictable, and non-democratic rule of a monarch—using his monopoly on violence to protect private property and increase the future value of his country—time preferences remain far lower than they would be in a democratic society, parasitism is reduced, and the public is incentivized to adopt traditionalist morals. Since monarchy fundamentally originated from the monopolization of law and power by a single member of a voluntarily recognized elite, it encourages a highly anti-egalitarian, aristocratic culture and order. “The maintenance and preservation of a private property based exchange economy requires as its sociological presupposition the existence of a voluntarily acknowledged natural elite—a nobilitas naturalis,” notes Hoppe.674

While democratic governments tend to create corrupt and sociopathic elites who are interested in using the public nature of the state apparatus for personal, short-term profit, a monarchic system conserves the natural, voluntary elite that is produced by the nexus of market exchange; private property and private authority versus public property and public authority. Monarchies and their natural elites 671 Ibid., 60. 672 Ibid., 84. 673 Ibid., 84-85. 674 Ibid., 71.

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encourage an aristocratic conservatism conducive to a libertarian social order, while democracies and their oligarchic elites push egalitarianism, Cultural Marxism, and increasingly falling standards of cultural norms.

The suicidal policy of open borders, multiculturalism, and forced integration would also be far more difficult, if not impossible, for Cultural Marxists to implement under the rule of a sovereign king and a privately held government. The monarch will tend to choose immigration policies that enhance the current and future value of his property rather than be guided by egalitarian ideology. He would want to simultaneously prevent the emigration of productive citizens while expelling the nonproductive and destructive members of society. When it comes to immigration, a king would only want to allow productive people who would increase the value of his kingdom. Under any state, complete libertarian free association is impossible; but under a monarchy, “[although] a king might not entirely avoid all cases of forced exclusion or forced integration, such policies would by and large do the same as what private property owners would do, if they could decide whom to admit and whom to exclude. That is, the king would be highly selective and very much concerned about improving the quality of the resident human capital so as to drive property values up rather than down.”675

Additionally, as I discussed in Chapter 7, the owners of private governments tend to be far more restrained in conducting foreign affairs than democratic leaders. While monarchs fought shorter wars over political boundaries or dynastic rivalries that ended in a negotiated peace, democratic countries have waged ideological and total wars, demanding unconditional surrender. Contrary to the progressive orthodoxy, the spread of democracy represents a step backwards for liberty and human flourishing.

Since 1918, practically all indicators of high or rising time preferences have exhibited a systematic upward tendency: as far as government is concerned, democratic republicanism produced communism (and with this public slavery and government sponsored mass murder even in peacetime), fascism, national socialism and, lastly and most enduringly, social democracy (“liberalism”). Compulsory military service has become almost universal, foreign and civil wars have increased in frequency and in brutality, and the process of political centralization has advanced further than ever. Internally, democratic republicanism has led to permanently rising taxes, debts, and public employment. It has led to the destruction of the gold standard, unparalleled paper-money inflation, and increased protectionism and migration controls. Even the most fundamental private law provisions have been perverted by an unabating flood of legislation and regulation. Simultaneously, as regards civil society, the institutions of marriage and family have been increasingly weakened, the number of children has declined, and the rates of divorce, illegitimacy, single parenthood, singledom, and abortion have increased. Rather than rising with rising incomes, savings rates have been stagnating

675 Ibid., 144.


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or even falling. In comparison to the nineteenth century, the cognitive prowess of the political and intellectual elites and the quality of public education have declined. And the rates of crime, structural unemployment, welfare dependency, parasitism, negligence, recklessness, incivility, psychopathy, and hedonism have increased.676

There is no such thing as a truly libertarian state. All states are parasitical expropriators on the productive class of society and subsidize parasitism. Recognizing the important distinctions between democracy and monarchy, while simultaneously dismantling the Left’s fetish for democracy, however, is fundamental to creating a libertarian society because the first step in going in the right direction is to immediately stop going in the wrong one. The idea of democracy, majority rule, and the supposed “right” of anyone, regardless of their knowledge of politics or economics, to control other people’s liberty and property through the voting booth must be delegitimized. History, contrary to what the Marxists argue, is not an inevitable force moving in one Progressive direction. We are shaped by ideas; both monarchies and democracies gained legitimacy because a majority of the public accepted them as such. Without public support, any state is doomed.

No matter how much more conducive to libertarianism monarchies are than democracies, they are still states that use initiatory violence, predation, and expropriation to violate our natural rights. The alternative to democracy is not necessarily monarchy; “it is not exploitation, either monarchical or democratic, but private property, production, and voluntary exchange that are the ultimate sources of human civilization,” explains Hoppe.677

One not need wear a crown or sit on a throne, however, to create the same incentives of a monarchy. What is most important is that if we are truly serious about achieving a free society, than democracy needs to be all but repealed. An anarchic social order built on the free market and the protection of private property is the fundamental goal of libertarianism. While the idea of restoring legitimacy to monarchical rule is probably a lost cause, the idea of a non-democratic, sovereign head of state that mimics a monarch represents a necessary step in the path to a truly free society.

The PRP and the Pinochet Option

The democratic, Leviathan state, and its Cultural Marxist enablers, deny individuals either wholly or partially the fundamental right to control their private property as they see fit. This includes the right to exchange our property peacefully with others, the right to discriminate against those we do not wish exchange or interact with, the right to expel those who invade our person and property, and the right to use physical, defensive violence against those who aggress against, or threaten to aggress against, us. Without these rights, we are not free; if these rights are protected and respected, then we are living in a libertarian 676 Ibid., 42. 677 Ibid., 71.

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society. The democratic welfare state, as Hoppe argues, has all but abolished property rights, the cornerstone of libertarianism:

Discrimination is outlawed. Employers cannot hire whom they want. Landlords cannot rent to whom they want. Sellers cannot sell to whomever they wish; buyers cannot buy from whomever they wish to buy. And groups of private property owners are not permitted to enter in whatever restrictive covenant they believe to be mutually beneficial. The state has thus robbed the people of much of their personal and physical protection. Not to be able to exclude others means not to be able to protect oneself. The result of this erosion of private property rights under the democratic welfare state is forced integration. Forced integration is ubiquitous. Americans must accept immigrants they do not want. Teachers cannot get rid of lousy or ill-behaved students, employers are stuck with poor or destructive employees, landlords are forced to live with bad renters, banks and insurance companies are not allowed to avoid bad risks, restaurants and bars must accommodate unwelcome customers, and private clubs and covenants are compelled to accept members and actions in violation of their very own rules and restrictions. Moreover, on public, i.e., government property in particular, forced integration has taken on a dangerous form: of norm and lawlessness.678

These restrictions on private property also create severe moral hazards and incentives. Thanks to the democratic state, dangerous and risky decisions or cultural norms that were once discouraged are now elevated and subsidized, while one is also completely free (and even encouraged) to advocate economic policies that threaten private property. In a civilized society, parasitic and criminal behavior is regulated by the ability of individuals to expel bad actors from their property and/or by refusing to engage in market exchanges with them, attaching high costs to delinquent and antisocial behavior. If property owners are restricted in this ability to regulate social order, then non-productive behavior becomes subsidized and encouraged. Thus, a private property social order would be highly unegalitarian, intolerant, and discriminatory.679

In a fully libertarian society, Leftist notions of “tolerance” and “diversity” would be nearly impossible to foist upon on the rest of society. Without the subsidization of parasitism, where the consequences of an individual’s choices are socialized among the general public, social and cultural conservatism is encouraged while cultural Leftism and parasitism is discouraged; the responsible are rewarded by the market, while the irresponsible are punished by it. It is no wonder why Marxists hate private property; in a democratic society, there are absolutely no social consequences for advocating Cultural Marxism or political socialism, despite the fact these positions represent direct and open threats against the person and property of those who disagree. Thus, in order to establish a

678 Ibid., 210. 679 Ibid., 211.


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libertarian society, there will need to be immediate and swift consequences for those who advocate cultural or political Marxism.

In a libertarian society, property owners organize with others to build neighborhoods, communities, cities, and nations—“covenant communities” of differing sizes. The owners, through whatever types of leadership and organization they see fit, “must be willing to defend themselves by means of physical force and punishment against external invaders and domestic criminals,” argues Hoppe. “But second and equally important, they must also be willing to defend themselves, by means of ostracism, exclusion and ultimately expulsion, against those community members who advocate, advertise or propagandize actions incompatible with the very purpose of the covenant: to protect property and family.”680 Since egalitarianism, Cultural Marxism, democracy, and socialism/communism would be incompatible with this covenant, property owners have every right to exclude and physically remove them.

One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society [emphasis added].681

“Every social order, including a libertarian or conservative one, requires a self-enforcement mechanism,” concludes Hoppe. “More precisely, social orders (unlike mechanical or biological systems) are not maintained automatically; they require conscious effort and purposeful action on the part of the members of society to prevent them from disintegrating.”682 Thus, in order to create, protect, and maintain a libertarian society, the Physical-Removal-Principle (PRP)683 becomes the necessary enforcement mechanism.

With the PRP, no longer will we have to be sitting ducks as we wait for Leviathan and Cultural Marxists to destroy our civilization. The PRP represents an antiviral boost to the society’s immune system. Instead of shouting “NAP! NAP!” at those who would not think twice about voting for Bernie Sanders to send in government agents to confiscate your property, or Cultural Marxists who want to teach sex education to kindergarteners, the PRP gives us a defensive tool to eliminate these threats to a libertarian society. There is no reasoning and arguing with an r-selected animal who is biologically incentivized to expand the welfare

680 Ibid., 216. 681 Ibid., 218. 682 Ibid., 213. 683 Thanks to the radio host and blogger Christopher Cantwell for this broader interpretation

of physical removal. Hoppe defends the PRP in the context of a private covenant community. The reactionary libertarian, however, takes Hoppe’s arguments a few steps further, especially in a society rotting from the influence of cultural Marxism.

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state and attack traditionalist culture; they will have to be physically removed from our civilization if we are to maintain a libertarian social order.

In 1970, Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile with just 36.3 percent of the vote. Posing as a “moderate” socialist, and backed both financially and militarily by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea, Allende’s government began immediately imposing totalitarian communism upon the Chilean people. They began seizing private property—including farms, mines, and factories—intimidating and murdering people, and importing weapons and training paramilitary forces to further impose communism. Chile was soon reduced to poverty and starvation. As a result, over one million people begin striking and protesting in the capital of Santiago, which brought further crackdowns and violence from Allende’s government. Chile’s Supreme Court declared Allende’s government illegal for their massive crimes. 63 percent of the parliament voted in protest of Allende, just shy of the 66 percent required for an official impeachment.684

“Democratically elected Allende’s actions eventually led to a situation wherein the men of the Chilean military could no longer look aside as their leader led the country towards a dehumanizing, totalitarian system of control that would plunge Chile into darkness,” writes August J. Rush. “Many were looking to one another, pleading internally for some, anyone, to do something. However, many were not; Allende was a democratically elected President, after all. The right circumstances, in this case, were a sizable minority unable to work within the system to fend off the rising Leftism and the inevitable social decay that accompanies Communism.”685

Chile’s relatively independent military could no longer sit on the sidelines and finally stepped in, removing Allende’s government on September 11, 1973. The coup was led by Augusto Pinochet, a reluctant, but patriotic, military general. Allende was eventually killed by a Cuban communist “advisor” that was initially sent by Fidel Castro to assist Allende; he was most likely shot by this same advisor in order to make Allende appear as a martyr and a hero for the communist cause. After seizing control of the state and deposing the communist government, Pinochet became the new president and quickly began the one of the most effective anti-Marxist counter-revolution of the 20th century (and perhaps all of history).686

Recognizing that the Marxism inflicted upon Chile was a virus, Pinochet strengthened his country’s immune system through the ruthless defense violence of the PRP. Pinochet and his military targeted violent communist revolutionaries, socialist politicians, and anyone vocally advocating the Marxist virus and had them tortured, executed—or both. Perhaps most famously, Pinochet’s Caravana 684 Cybernethics, “Remembering 9/11,” September 11, 2011.

http://fare.livejournal.com/163990.html 685 August J. Rush, “Social Entropy and Authoritarianism,” May 5, 2016.

https://dissidentright.com/2016/05/05/social-entropy-authoritarianism/ 686 Cybernethics, http://fare.livejournal.com/163990.html


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de la Muerte (or Caravan of Death) was a death squad that captured and killed government officials and other prominent communists. Pinochet’s military, most famously, also threw Marxists out of helicopters and airplanes without parachutes, many of them into lakes, rivers, and the Pacific Ocean.687 The flare of these executions was not unintentional; these “free helicopter rides” were meant to instill terror among the communists that had previously done so much harm to Chile in just a few short years. An estimated 3,000 communists (the large majority of them armed revolutionaries) were physically removed from Chile by Pinochet, and thousands more fled the country in fear of Chile’s Pinochet-led K-shift.

The Left, of course, demonizes Pinochet as a ruthless dictator who committed unspeakable war crimes. Undoubtedly, Pinochet did use massive amount of defensive measures against the communist violence that had already been inflicted upon Chile, violence that would have only continued and escalated if left unchecked. The irony behind the Left’s opposition to Chile is that while Pinochet murdered just 3,000 people (some of whom, undoubtedly, may have been innocent bystanders in the fog of war), the overwhelming majority of them were revolutionaries and government officials seeking to confiscate private property and redistribute wealth. Even if we assume that all of Pinochet’s victims were all innocent civilians, the intentional murder of 3,000 people was the average week or month for leaders and governments that the Left has defended and praised in the past, like the Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China. The Left despises Pinochet because he represented the ultimate K-shift, where the wolves began to hunt rabbits, and an example, that if followed by other countries, would represent a direct threat to their lives and safety. The Right is supposed to be meek and spineless, not willing to do what is necessary to preserve order and defend the people against the starvation and plunder that communists inevitably bring.

If all Pinochet had done was physically remove Marxists from Chile, he would still be a hero. After his free helicopter rides had restored order, however, Pinochet began implementing incredibly market-friendly economic reforms while at the same time continuing to violently suppress any Marxist political speech. Pinochet increased economic freedom, protected private property, and liberalized the economy, using the force of his military government (like a monarch) to make sure that a relatively free market economy was allowed to grow.

Thanks to Pinochet’s physical removal program and the implementation of free market reforms, Chile is now by far the wealthiest and freest country in South America. “Ever since the early 1980s, workers have been allowed to put 10 percent of their income into a personal retirement account,” notes Daniel J. Mitchell, which has been “remarkably successful, reducing the burden of taxes and spending and increasing saving and investment, while also producing a 50-100 percent increase in retirement benefits. Chile is now a nation of capitalists.”688

687 Jonathan Franklin, “Chilean army admits to 120 thrown into sea,” January 8, 2001.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/09/chile.pinochet 688 Daniel J. Mitchell and Julia Morriss, “The Remarkable Story of Chile’s Economic

Renaissance,” July 18, 2012.

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Taxes and regulatory burdens were slashed, a strong currency was encouraged, and thanks to the protection of private property, businesses began producing, saving, investing, and creating employment without fear of expropriation. Special-interest tax loopholes were also closed, which decreased tax evasion and the black market in a continent where the inherently dangerous and lawless underground economy is rampant.

All one has to do is compare Chile to its northern neighbor Venezuela to see the impact and necessity of Pinochet’s coup. With similar demographics, culture, and climate, Venezuela is what Chile would look like had Marxists not been physically removed. Since 1975, Chile’s income per capita rose from 31 percent to 138 percent of Venezuela’s, while Chile’s economy grew by 287 percent and Venezuela’s shrunk by 12 percent. In the same time span, Chile’s infant mortality rate went from 33 percent higher to half of Venezuela’s. Venezuelans used to have a higher life expectancy, but now Chileans live on average seven years longer than their neighbors. Thanks to their largely private social security system, Chileans enjoy an average annual return of 10 percent on their savings and pensions.689

As Chile grew free and wealthy, Venezuela, which sits on one of the largest oil reserves in the world, is witnessing a disastrous economic collapse thanks to its socialist government. Without private property and prices to allocate resources, shortages and inflation have crippled economic production. Venezuelans have resorted to hunting pigeons, stray dogs, and even breaking into zoos and butchering the animals inside in order to avoid starvation.690 As they wait long hours in lines outside of whatever grocery stores are left open, only to encounter empty shelves, the Venezuelan military deployed troops outside of these supermarkets in order to prevent people from taking photographs and sharing them for the whole world to see.691 Caracas, the capital, is now the murder capital of the world.692 Since the only thing socialist governments know how to do is double down, instead of freeing up the market and abolishing economic controls the state

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/remarkable-story-chiles-economic-renaissance

689 Marian L. Tupy, “5 Ways Capitalist Chile is Much Better Than Socialist Venezuela,” May 24, 2016. http://humanprogress.org/blog/5-ways-capitalist-chile-is-much-better-than-socialist-venezuela/

690 Manuel Reda, “Hungry Venezuelans break into zoo and butcher animal for meat,” July 27, 2016. http://fusion.net/story/330834/hungry-venezuelans-break-into-zoo-and-butcher-animal-for-meat/

691 Dan from Squirrel Hill, “Venezuelan military tells supermarket customers not to take pictures of empty shelves,” January 10, 2015. https://danfromsquirrelhill.wordpress.com/2015/01/10/empty-shelves/

692 Simeon Tegel, “Venezuela’s capital is world’s most dangerous city,” January 29, 2016. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/01/29/venezuelas-capital-worlds-most-murderous-city/79508586/


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began implementing a slave-labor program where all citizens would be required, at the state’s discretion, to work in agricultural fields on demand.693

Despite Venezuela’s collapse, many prominent media, academic, and Hollywood figures have continuously praised their socialist regime.694 Being a Leftist, of course, means never having to apologize while socializing the consequences of your economic ignorance among the rest of the population.

With a physical removal program and a ruthless attitude toward civilization-destroying Bolsheviks, Pinochet saved his country from the starvation, slave labor, and massive poverty that would have resulted if Allende’s government were allowed to loot and plunder at will. In my mind, the deaths of 3,000 communists were an incredibly small (and necessary) price to pay to protect that society from the horrors of communism. It would not be difficult to assume that Venezuelans eating sewer rats in the street might agree. Perhaps the only mistake Pinochet made was voluntarily stepping down in 1988 after fifteen years of rule and giving democracy back to Chile; he should have crowned himself king and transferred power to his heir upon his death.

Pinochet is not the only example of an undemocratic, authoritarian leader physically removing and/or suppressing communists and moving their country in a far more libertarian direction. Singapore, a small city-state with no natural resources, was transformed into an economic powerhouse thanks to the wise leadership of Lee Kuan Yew695. As prime minister from its 1959 founding to 1990, Yew—a graduate of Cambridge University and educated in British political traditions—violently restricted communist organizers, activists, and journalists, imposed harsh corporal penalties for violent crime, and vastly liberalized the economy. Singapore residents pay unbelievably low taxes and, because there is no withholding or loopholes, simply receive a small “bill” from the government every year. There is little political “freedom” but lots of economic freedom in Singapore, mimicking a monarchical system. Thanks to Yew, GDP per capita increased from $500 in 1965 to over $55,000 today.696

One of the more underrated and underappreciated political figures of the 20th century is Francisco Franco. In the 1930s, after agitating and organizing, the

693 Tyler Durden, “From Socialist Utopia to Slave-Nation—Venezuela Unveils Shocking

‘Forced Labor’ Law,” July 29, 2016. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-29/socialist-utopia-slave-nation-venezuela-unveils-shocking-forced-labor-law

694 J.P. Carroll, ‘Flashback: All Those People Who Praised Chavez’s Socialism,” May 22, 2016. http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/22/flashback-to-all-the-people-who-praised-chavezs-socialism/

695 Singapore is also an interesting model since, like the U.S., it is a multicultural country where several languages are spoken. The only way a system like this can be held together is through the strict suppression of political freedoms (speech, press, voting, etc.) and the enforcement of the NAP and private property by an undemocratic state.

696 Ryan McMaken, “The Man Behind Singapore’s Transition to Economic Powerhouse, Lee Kuan Yew, Dead at 91,” May 23, 2015. https://mises.org/blog/man-behind-singapores-transition-economic-powerhouse-lee-kuan-yew-dead-91

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Spanish communists eventually seized power and began nationalizing industry, stealing property (including going door-to-door with rifles and confiscating homes), burning churches, destroying Catholic relics, and murdering clergymen. The new constitution could serve as a Leftist handbook: universal suffrage, liberalized divorce law, the nationalization of every school, and the ability of the state to seize property at will.697

Like the French Revolution, the revolutionaries aimed to cleanse Christianity from Spain, seeing it (correctly) as a bulwark against implementing their Marxism. Public displays of Spain’s historic Catholicism, including crucifixes, statues, and the recognition of feasts and holy days, were outlawed. They even patrolled cemeteries to make sure no crosses were erected. The Leftist prime minister of Spain, Manuel Azana, referring to the political arm of the revolution (the Republicans), did not mind murdering Catholics by the thousands since “all the convents in Spain were not worth the life of a single Republican.” The revolutionary government, writes Silas Reynolds:

...Ensured that more than 6,800 Catholic clergy were slaughtered, including 13 bishops, more than 2,360 monks and friars, and 4,172 diocesan priests and seminarians, as well as 283 nuns. Thousands of churches were devastated. Most of the intense Red Terror (or Terror Rojo) killings occurred in the first six months of the conflict, but by the end of the war about 20% of Spain’s Catholic clergy was dead. Journalist and historian César Vidal comes to a nationwide total of 110,965 victims of Republican repression; 11,705 people being killed in Madrid alone.698

Dead nuns were also dug out of their graves and propped up outside walls with offensive placards hung around their necks, while an estimated 10 percent of Madrid’s population was murdered by Spain’s Bolsheviks. But no, you see, Pinochet (who killed 3,000 people, a large majority of them armed insurrectionists who had already seized property and were ready to seize more) was the real bad guy because he did not want the same thing to happen to his beloved Chile.

By 1936, the Republican government had begin to fully consolidate power, forming a coalition of Leftist parties where any hint of Spain’s traditionalist or monarchist elements was entirely absent.

[The Republican government] relied on the Popular Front alliance with the communist revolutionaries for the votes that kept a Republican minority in power, the goal being to “fundamentally transform” (heard that phrase before) Spanish institutions in such a way as to consolidate a completely leftist Republic. The speed and escalation of the transformation was incredible and increased as the country marched

697 Silas Reynolds, “Communist Revolution and Fascist Revenge—Spain’s Cautionary

Tale,” August 8, 2016. http://therightstuff.biz/2016/08/08/communist-revolution-and-fascist-revenge-spains-cautionary-tale/

698 Reynolds, http://therightstuff.biz/2016/08/08/communist-revolution-and-fascist-revenge-spains-cautionary-tale/


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closer to civil war—which, in turn, would produce an uncompromising and merciless form of Spanish fascism as a rational response. Fascism was only natural—you can’t systematically destroy a people’s culture and civilization without an appropriate backlash.699

The Spanish revolution of the 1930s that overthrew the weak Alfonso XIII is the perfect representation of what happens when r-selection and communism is allowed to flourish without resistance: political, cultural, and social destruction.

After years of this communist rule, General Franco responded with a reactionary and traditionalist counter-revolution virtually unrivaled in its effectiveness. Spain was looking for a way out of the hell that was being unleashed by the Left, and Franco provided an anti-ideological, anti-democratic restoration of order and tradition; Franco was guided by a “fascism,” which as he describes it, “wherever it manifests itself, characteristics which are varied to the extent that countries and national temperaments vary. It is essentially a defensive reaction of the organism, a manifestation of the desire to live, of the desire not to die, which at certain times seizes a whole people. So each people reacts in its own way, according to its conception of life [emphasis added].”700

After years of bloody battles during the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s Nationalist forces were finally able to seize power and restore order. Although the Left showed no mercy to enemies of their godless revolution, Franco’s government saved their scourge only for the most extreme communists and to those who were proven to have committed the most extreme atrocities. Franco, understanding that you cannot continuously play communist whack-a-mole, was convinced that the horrors that the Left imposed on his country (and in the Soviet Union) were the cause of some biological disorder or disease and sought to eradicate it (r/K selection theory suggests that the Spanish Nationalists were correct in their diagnosis).

But more importantly, the Nationalists eradicated any and every single trace of “leftism” in Spain. The notion of a limpieza (cleansing) was an essential part of the right-wing strategy, and the process of “physical removal” began immediately after the nationalists liberated an area formerly under the control of the communists. Poetic justice was served though; the orphaned children of Reds were taught, in orphanages run by priests and nuns that "their parents had committed great sins that they could help expiate, for which many were incited to serve the Church."

The Left tried to destroy Spain—her culture, her faith and her people. Once the Right realized that only the black flag could save their country order, peace and honor were restored. Spain’s fate should not be ours, but

699 Ibid. 700 Ibid.

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if we are destined to repeat history, be warned, leftists, and take heed of the Republicans’ fate and failure.701

Franco, like Pinochet, is demonized by the Left, and the Spanish Civil War is almost always portrayed in movies and throughout popular history as a group of Big, Bad, Fascist Meanies preventing open-minded, egalitarian progressives from instituting social welfare reforms and working for the common good. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Franco’s counter-revolution and the heroism of both him and his troops serve as a reminder of the white-blood cells that will be necessary if the Marxist Left is not physically removed from the West’s immune system.

The Libertarian Counter-Revolution

The paradox of libertarianism is that—other than a few writers who understand that real libertarianism is part of the K-selected Right—the NAP does not have a self-enforcement mechanism that automatically begins to govern society in the absence of the state. “There is a political hierarchy of needs,” argues Darth Stirner. “Starting with peace, you move to security, then law, and finally freedom. The libertarian wants to skip all the other steps (and the dirty work required in them) and hop right to freedom. We are currently engaged in a type of civil war, so we need to tackle the objective of ‘peace’ first.”702 This “civil war” is the inevitable clash every four to eight years of democratic elections, where each side seeks to win a popularity contest for the right to expropriate, legislate, control, and redistribute property.

A libertarian society is impossible under this low-level civil war inherent in the democratic state. The creation of a reactionary counter-weight—whether it is called nationalist, fascist, or monarchist—is the only way a libertarian social order can be achieved in a society dominated by a cult of democracy, egalitarianism, welfare redistribution, and Cultural Marxism.

Although libertarianism is inherently anti-state and, thus, anti-police, the Left has absolutely no qualms about enforcing its egalitarianism and Cultural Marxism down our throats through the use of massive amounts of state power; therefore, we should have no problem about using the state to enforce our interests: protecting people, property, and borders from criminal aggressors. Until our anarcho-capitalist paradise can be created out of thin air by convincing every single person in society of the validity of the NAP, then, as Murray Rothbard urged before he died, “Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.”703 This can only be done if the soft socialism and anarcho-tyranny of the democratic state are replaced with the libertarian force of a reactionary state.

701 Ibid. 702 Darth Stirner, “Fascist Libertarianism: For a Better World,” January 23, 2013.

http://therightstuff.biz/2013/01/23/fascist-libertarianism-for-a-better-world/ 703 Murray Rothbard, “Right-Wing Populism,” January 1992.

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This is why libertarians, continues Stirner, must become reactionaries:

Recognizing the need for the state doesn’t necessarily make you a milquetoast movement libertarian that wants to vote for Rand Paul. Be anti-democratic. A fascist libertarian is a rebel and an anarchist in this society, because it is beyond reform and undeserving of redemption. Besides, take a look at the current voting public, they want nothing to do with the theories of Mises or Rothbard. Elections favor the doltish generic man and libertarians are exceptional. Libertarianism will never become popular enough to win elections. Our current crop of people will not be organically converted to libertarianism. We should realize this. Libertarians are unfashionable weirdos. Other people think them insane, and yet they expect to persuade these same people. Talk can only get you so far…

...The libertarian’s respect for individualism combined with the reactionary’s understanding of humanity’s limitations will enable us to build a society that brings the best out of human nature, where the hand of government is lightly felt. Laissez-faire has its place and time, but we must set a deliberate direction for our culture and society with State action [emphasis added].704

Thus, the PRP and a reactionary counter-revolution become the enforcement mechanisms of the NAP. While libertarians endlessly theorize about the moral and ethical principles of natural rights, historically, argues Sir James the Good, these have only been acquired and kept by the use of force:

Indeed, the very existence of natural rights depends upon the ability of a people to defend them—with violence, if necessary. In a very real and literal sense, might makes right. Perhaps not moral right in some metaphysical sense, but legal rights are certainly acquired and maintained by might…

…the alt-right are the real laissez-faire because we believe in letting the natural order assert itself without injecting futile utopian schemes of social engineering. The success of such schemes relies upon Jewish sociology and anthropology being true, and not merely part of a group evolutionary strategy, pursued consciously or unconsciously—to subvert gentile society and make it more welcoming for the chosen.

The libertarian strawman of authoritarianism as an instrument of chaotic violence interfering with peaceful market order is a revision of thousands of years of political thought in which right-wing politics represent order, and liberalism represents a gateway for parasitic foreigners to subvert and destroy everything a people holds sacred…Flawed enlightenment ideas going back to John Locke's tabula rasa will either be supplanted with traditional, hierarchical, authoritarian institutions (three adjectives sure to

704 Stirner, http://therightstuff.biz/2013/01/23/fascist-libertarianism-for-a-better-world/

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send any lolbertarian into a paroxysm) or our people are doomed to go the way of the Neanderthal.705

What libertarians must also understand is that the Marxist Left, as r-selected animals, cannot be reasoned with. If left unchecked, they will continue to use their virus to attack the West’s immune system and threaten to take your property and your liberty by force. One can almost hear the helicopter blades revving up as Dr. Thomas Woods dissects the Left:

[The Left sees] no problem with demanding that their opponents accept election results with dignity and grace, while protesting and rioting when they themselves face an unhappy election result.

No principles. Just whatever benefits them.

They have made up stories of a wave of hate crimes sweeping the nation. Even Reason magazine, which despises Trump, published a piece this week exposing this as fake.

Again, no principles. Lies are acceptable if they advance the revolution.

Or: let’s demand that everyone accept the existence of 70 “gender identities” — for which precisely zero scientific evidence exists — and (as is happening in New York City) punish them if they do not go along.

Do these seem like nice people who simply have mistaken views of government? Are we dealing with debatable matters of “public policy” here?

No, it isn’t metaphysically impossible for a committed leftist to have a change of heart, and I’m delighted when it happens. But in my experience it’s vastly less common for leftists than it is for conservatives to become libertarians. I think there is a reason for that.

The longer these leftist antics go on, whether on the streets or the campuses, the more the public will be educated on the precise nature of the totalitarian impulse behind leftism.

So do your worst, snowflakes.706

Reactionary liberty—the libertarian ethic combined with an unapologetic anti-egalitarianism—thus becomes the philosophical and cultural threat to the Regime of r-selected, mass democracy that creates the perpetual revolution and perpetual expropriation of Cultural Marxism and Leviathan. Like Frank Miller’s Batman—an explicitly reactionary hero who uses brutal methods to impose order, restoration, and save Gotham—he “exists so that he can create a world where will

705 sirjamesthegood, “The Alt-Right are the Real Laissez-Faire,” November 29, 2016.

http://therightstuff.biz/2016/11/29/the-alt-right-are-the-real-laissez-faire/ 706 Thomas Woods, “Trying to Reason With the Left? Have Fun,” November 12, 2016.

http://tomwoods.com/blog/trying-to-reason-with-the-left-have-fun/


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he will not have to exist.”707 Reactionary libertarianism becomes a necessary counterweight to the Leftist forces that threaten our civilization and our liberty—an iron libertarian fist to create a world where one is no longer needed.

Libertarians, so the stereotype goes, just want to be left alone. We have begged, pleaded, reasoned, and philosophized for liberty, and yet the more we ask for it, the more our enemies double down and call for further expropriation. If you do not agree that there are fifty genders or reject their abstract god of Equality, you will be financially or legally punished, harassed, and have your reputation ruined. We have asked for peace, and have been met with the barrel of a gun every single time. If we want our rights, our liberties, our history, our traditions, and our right to be left alone to live our lives as we see fit, then we must recognize the need for the PRP as the logical extension of the NAP.

Economics teaches us that there is no such thing as a free lunch. But in order to achieve and maintain a libertarian social order, there will be free helicopter rides.

707 Zachary O. Ray, “The Dark Right,” September 17, 2016.

http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2016/9/16/the-dark-right

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reactionary liberty - the libertarian counter-revolution

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