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Anarcho-Monarchism Insula Qui
Table of Contents 0. What is Anarcho-Monarchism? 1. The Contradiction of Freedom 2. Final Arbiter 3. The Centralization of Defence 4. Pro-War, Anti-Nation 5. The Necessity of Force 6. Brutal Freedom 7. All Men are Created Equal 8. Social Darwinism 9. The Rule of Law 10. Against Taxes 11. High Trust 12. Liberty, Property, Society 13. The Family in Capitalism 14. The Case for Tradition 15. Community, Tradition, Liberty 16. The Two Laws of Nature 17. National Socialism and Libertarianism 18. Authoritarianism Versus Libertarianism 19. Strong and Small 20. Libertarianism and Fascism 21. Producerism 22. Communitarian Libertarianism 23. The Final Solution to the Banking Question 24. Familism
25. Neo-Feudalism 26. The Case for Guilds 27. Greatness 28. Kings by Merit 29. For an Anarchist Monarchy 30. On Libertarianism and Statecraft
Introduction The interplay between authoritarian and libertarian philosophies is one of the most fascinating things, most people imagine this to be a set of contradictory philosophies that are in total opposition to one another. However, the way in which these views interact demonstrates that this is not the case. It is easy to say that in social organization a meaningful distinction is the degree of authority, but I don’t see that being the case at all. The degree of authority is scarcely relevant to the philosophical underpinnings of different schools of thought. Some may say that they want liberty for the sake of liberty but then get stuck arguing over what it means to have liberty. This should not be the way in which we approach any political subject as it inherently causes problems. No person thinks that the more authority there is, the more inherently better a society becomes, the same with liberty. People have their own moral values and as such their values render the questions of liberty and authority mostly meaningless. Furthermore, when we break down this opposition we find ourselves in analyzing a composite of ideas that are no longer in contradiction, we can imagine something with aspects of both libertarianism and authoritarianism without being caught in a logical contradiction. This is how I arrived at the anarcho-monarchist worldview. A world with kings and without state authority may seem absurd but this absurdity is only apparent as long as you only approach kings from the perspective of state authority and not a more nuanced analysis of the social role of kings. Despite the title,
this collection of essays does not focus mainly on anarchomonarchism but rather focuses on the interplay of liberty and authority in general. Included in this interplay is my personal ideology of an anarchist monarchy, however, there are also notions of freedom that have largely been lost in favour of some that sound freer. The point of this work is to demonstrate a conception of liberty and authority that completely subverts the expectation that is set when liberty and authority are discussed. And finally, I aim to introduce the possibility of a synthesis of libertarianism and authoritarianism which can produce a philosophy that seems contradictory with the established premises, but with this sort of breakdown, the philosophy can seem to make more sense than previously expected. For further information on the subject of an anarchist monarchy, you can read “The Antistatist Case for Monarchial Government” which is available on both my website: InsulaQui.com and in my previous collection of essays: “Libertarian Reaction”. I decided to forgo including that essay here as I had already published it in the other collection and also because the tone of that essay was not suited for the thematic exploration in this work.
The Usual Apology I owe an apology to any reader who has an expectation of a professionally edited book. I do not have the status nor the wealth to have access to an editor and thus I am relegated to self-edited and self-published books. I have tried my best as I always do and I have created the best product that I am able to. Furthermore, there are a few seemingly contradictory ideas as the essays are different explorations of different thoughts. For example, I often appeal to individualism while the collection includes an essay that makes a case for redefining individualism. But this does not mean that the contents of the essays are in disharmony or in disagreement. Rather, it is a matter of using different language to accommodate different frameworks for each particular subject. All readers are expected to use their own intelligence to distinguish what the purpose of each essay is and how everything interacts in a beautiful and consistent manner. Alternatively, you can read the essays in the following order to alleviate the esoteric nature of this book: 27, 0, 18, 19, 21, 24, 13, 28, 29, 25, 26, 15, 22, 14, 16, 20, 17, 12, 11, 1, 6, 8, 3, 9, 5, 2, 7, 10, 4, 23.
0 – What is Anarcho-Monarchism? One of the biggest reasons why you are probably reading this book is the seeming absurdity of anarcho-monarchism. Unless this odd idea was at the forefront of this book, it would be likely that the book itself would be far less intriguing. Because anarcho-monarchism drives interest, I have decided to include an essay exclusively for this book detailing what anarcho-monarchism is. Usually, building a political philosophy from a set of first principles is not something that I am interested in, but I do feel that I owe the reader an explanation provided that I am going to dedicate a book to anarcho-monarchism. This essay is completely different from my usual style as I am tackling a topic which is in itself unusual for me. The purpose of this essay is to serve as an elongated introduction to the rest of the book and should not be read in any other context. When we look at the history of political thought, there have been no doctrines that conflict more than anarchism and monarchism. Monarchism is the rule of one king over a society, whether absolute or constrained by a constitution. Anarchism is the abolition of social hierarchies and an egalitarian social order that eliminates both the state and any other class division. But the poorly named anarchocapitalism emerged from the branch of anglophone individualist anarchism. Anarcho-capitalism simply states that anarchism, as an existence without the state, is fully possible while retaining hierarchies. This redefinition of anarchism as an ideology was imprecise and unwarranted, however, due to the popularity of anarcho-capitalism, it has not been redefined.
When anarchism can be interpreted as a society without a state, anarchism can also be interpreted as going alongside any social system, provided that the social system is followed on a voluntary basis. Thus, any social system that does not require a state can be anarchist. No matter if the social order retains a significant degree of hierarchy, anarchism can still be realized. This is an absurd way to phrase anarchism and historically untrue. However, due to the success of anarcho-capitalism, there has emerged a radical fringe that has always been on the fringes of various movements. These are people that can call themselves anarcho-monarchists without any internal conflict. In this manner, there can be support for an order of stateless monarchy, and I happen to be one of the radical fringe who supports both anarchy and monarchy. In western thought, this ideal has always been grasped at, but almost never fully embraced. However, with libertarianism as a movement growing, a lot of people who are inclined to accept the rational arguments of libertarianism and are also inclined to accept the social reasoning for a monarchy. These people know how the monarch, provided he is benevolent, can cause an increase of virtue in society and can guide a society to the right path. These people also know how the state is always inherently destructive and how there is no way to fix the state or to make the state less destructive. Thus these people are willing to embrace the anarcho-monarchist doctrine which seemingly is more absurd than the notion of capitalist communism or globalist nationalism. But the conclusions of anarcho-monarchism can easily be reached from a purely principled and ordered approach:
1. All violence against other people is destructive, provided that it is not preventative. As long as there is no self-defence required, violence is inherently a moral, economic and social evil and should be avoided. 2. To prevent violence and conflict in society, there is a need to accept property rights and a need to recognize those property rights universally. Thus, violence is not only an interpersonal issue but an issue between various people over various properties. Violence against property is violence of a different kind, we need to recognize how theft is destructive and how property is owned justly. 3. The only way in which we can own property justly is when that property was not appropriated by violence. This means that the ownership of property requires that it is appropriated from nature or from peaceful trade. Voluntary trade and natural resources are then the only ways in which it is appropriate to gain resources. 4. The state ought to be abolished as the state owns only property due to the unjust appropriation as the property owned by the state can only be owned due to involuntary transfers of money. People are obligated to pay taxes to the state and cannot reasonably revoke their consent, thus the state owns no property rightfully and is an entirely negative institution. Most anarcho-capitalists stop at this point in the reasoning and never move further. It seems as if it is wholly sufficient to stop here and to think that all problems are now solved. However, I immensely disagree with that assessment and think that this reasoning needs a few more steps. 5. The abolition of the state cannot solve all problems that people can have in their lives. A society without coercion has no recourse to
conflicts that are not predicated on coercion and problems that pertain to personal virtue. Thus, to have an effective stateless and non-violent society, it can be useful to incorporate governance. 6. The monarch is the natural head of such a stateless order. People have a natural tendency towards monarchy and autocracy has historically been an effective doctrine of governance. Furthermore, democracy and centralized aristocracy cause more social conflict than a singular leader. 7. If we accept the previous assumptions, we are left with the ideal political philosophy that combines autocratic governance with voluntaryism. Thus the king has no right to rule, but the king is accepted as providing a service to the rest of society. Volition is the only basis for the rule of the king and merit is the only reason why this king rules. Even though in abstraction from these assumptions we can construe that it would be ideal to combine monarchy with anarchy, as defined by Rothbard, it may still seem like a vacuous ideal. Reducing a monarch to what amounts to any other business and creating a government when the state has been abolished can both seem contrary to reason. But the society of the anarchic monarchy is completely unlike the state or a business. The monarch does not demand to be followed, but ultimately most people would choose to follow a monarch of one sort or another. This is because the monarchs of the world would demonstrate how effective they are at providing the services of resolving non-violent conflicts and encouraging virtue. Thus the world would be separated into thousands of kingdoms with each having a monarch that can cater to the distinct needs of his subjects. The monarch would not have any
inherent right to the money of his people or any territory, but rather would be bestowed dominion and wealth in accordance to how well he functions. Thus, we would have decentralized monarchies in competition with one another, but not in competition by war as was the classical standard of monarchy. This competition would rather be through persuasion and a monarch would only be able to get a larger kingdom by providing a better standard of care for his people. The monarch cannot pursue expansion at the cost to the people who are in his care. The monarch is faced with the limited extent of his own capacity if he tries to expand beyond that which he personally can handle. This means that each monarch will have subjects proportionally to his own value to his subjects. In practice, it is likely that people will tend to form aristocratic or democratic associations and not purely monarchic associations. There will be radicals who will appreciate their total freedom without any form of obligation or governance, these people will have to be fully responsible for advancing their own virtue and will have to be fully able to negotiate whenever there are conflicts that do not involve coercion. This is all possible, but very inconvenient. The sort of governance that is possible without the state is only purely benevolent governance, any form of governance that is not worth personally contributing to is not acceptable. This means that there could not be any tyranny, oligarchy or mob rule. The sizes of all these constituencies would also probably be extremely small, most likely never numbering over a few thousand or organized into confederate structures where every semi-independent region is never large. These miniature governments can fill the productive
roles that are currently performed by the large governments while not employing any coercion or other destructive forces.
I – The Contradiction of Freedom I have personally been pursuing philosophical freedom for a long time, however, during this time I realized that freedom in itself is contradictory. No matter what tricks are done with definitions and what nuances are brought into freedom, freedom qua freedom is an ideal that is impossible for humans. Here I will explain why. Freedom is simply the ability to do what you wish you could do, thus everything can be defined as freedom if interpreted in the correct semantic context. You may take instead of freedom the concept of liberty, yet that falls into the same pitfalls. Liberty is being able to do what you want without restriction. Liberty self-regulates to some degree as there is some fix for the inherent contradiction in the search for freedom. However, in the case of liberty, the contradiction still is present just to a lesser degree. The fundamental question we need to ask ourselves about freedom is who is supposed to be freed and what is he supposed to be free to do. If we take freedom as a sovereign ideal, we must say that every person is supposed to be able to do anything they want to do and that any restrictions to personal will are in violation of freedom. However, when people are allowed to do everything, they are allowed to restrict the freedom of others. No matter what degree of freedom a person is given, within that freedom is a way to restrict the freedom of others. If we talk about political freedom, people can be free from dictatorship, yet they are still bound by a different dictatorship by the other free people who participate in politics. Necessarily, political
freedom can only apply to a stateless society, as then no person is bound by the will of the state which is bound by the decision of a group of people. But yet here there is another issue. The leftist anarchists want simply to decentralize democracy and to subjugate everyone to their will, just in a manner which does not require a state. Thus, even an anarchist does not allow for freedom that is contradictory to the anarchist freedom. The leftist anarchists want to democratically and locally restrict the freedom of others. No matter how much you have freedom in an anarchist society, you are still subject to the anarchists. The libertarians too want political freedom, but in reality, the libertarians simply want to replace the institution of politics with the institution of markets. In a libertarian society, you aren’t free insofar as you aren’t free to go contrary to property and voluntary interactions. There are libertarian ideals that are defined as freedom in themselves and if they are violated you will be punished in some way. Even the libertarians cannot claim that you are free in a libertarian social order, as you aren’t free to violate property rights. The libertarian freedom is simply complete and absolute control over your own property. The leftist anarchists and libertarians reading this will be confused, they think that their interpretation of freedom is what freedom really is, that their specific freedom is the only freedom that is real. The other philosophy might be incorrect in its assessment of freedom, but there’s nothing involuntary or coercive about being forced to follow your own ideals. Each of these ideals is freedom for the person who holds these ideals as to them their concept of
freedom is what freedom means. If the world is functioning according to anyone’s concrete ideology, that person is then free. The fascists also have their freedom, yet their freedom is the freedom to own your country and the freedom to not have your people be trifled with by outside forces. Almost no one else would see an ethnocentric police state as an epitome of freedom, yet to the fascists, this is what freedom is. To fascist freedom is control over their own society. The authoritarian communists also think that they’re fighting for freedom, they’re fighting so that the worker would be free to own his own labour and that the worker would not be subjugated to the capitalist. The conservatives think that freedom is having to pay slightly less in taxes, but still enough so that the state would provide limited services. The classical liberals think that freedom is a lot less taxes with the state only providing the bare minimum. The progressives think that real freedom comes from never having to face the harsh realities of the world and from always being taken care of. The freedom the progressives seek is always having the ability to fall back to the state. It seems as if each person defines freedom as the epitome of their moral judgements. If only their personal value judgements would be realized, then every person would be free. Restrictions to freedom are the things that contradict their own personal, political, or social ideals and that everything that is opposed to them politically makes them less free. Furthermore, the concept of freedom has been tied together with democracy and so most people think of democracy as freedom. But still only insofar as it produces the society they themselves want the most, if democracy goes against what they perceive to be freedom, it becomes undemocratic. You can see the
conservatives touting that whenever democratic decisions unconstitutional or in violation of a conservative principle, that decisions are undemocratic. You see the progressives accuse conservatives of being undemocratic because they are
are the the not
progressives. We can come out with one conclusion, freedom is pure, raw power, but only power held by yourself. To fight for freedom qua freedom is to fight for other people to be able to impose their vision of freedom onto you. To fight for freedom is simply to fight for the dominance of an unspecified party, and as such if you fight for freedom you fight for subjugation. However, there is still the slight hope that you will be the one doing the subjugating. And you may hide this all beneath the covers of the search for truth or objective reality, or dialectics, but the philosophical truth still stands. If you fight for freedom you fight for subjugation, you just think that your particular subjugation is what freedom is. Thus any fight for freedom must necessarily trample upon someone else with a different concept of freedom, freedom at its core is pure, raw, unbridled might. Freedom is the simple instinct present in every human, the desire to subjugate. But freedom is wrapped in a civil concept within the realm of acceptability in the comfortable democratic government. Freedom is nothing more than presentable tyranny. When you say that you want to ensure that people are free, what you mean to say is that you want to ensure that people live in accordance to what you yourself want to experience in your life. This allows you and the people with similar values to feel as if what you want is objective, altruistic, and kind. You can feel that you want to provide everyone with the freedom to act as you yourself want to act.
And this makes sense. If a person does not face resistance, he thinks he is free, thus he thinks that if the same resistance is removed from others, then they would then be free. But this removal of resistance must result in getting rid of the freedom of those creating the resistance. You must also assert that the freedom you seek is the true freedom and will make everyone prosper more than ever, even if others don’t desire what you consider freedom. Upon hearing this, you might likely rush to defend what your personal conception of freedom is and how you’re not like that. How you, and only you, don’t wish to subjugate anyone and how your freedom is simply what’s proper, humane and natural. That the freedom you advocate for, unlike all the other freedoms, is the freedom that will bring prosperity and will bring justice and will do away with everything bad in society. But yet the others who have their own different notion of freedom come to oppose any particular freedom by saying that this freedom is instead tyranny, that it violates their freedoms, that they should be the tyrants instead of the person who is the tyrant right now. Freedom is nothing more than a boot on your throat and the person wearing that boot exclaiming that he’s a liberator to the entire society by the virtue of his boot. There is ultimately no such thing as freedom, as every concept of freedom must include restrictions. From the realization that freedom as a goal necessarily contradicts itself there are only two logical positions for further reasoning. First there is imposition, the unleashing of all the brutal might you can accumulate and creating the world which you wish to see, and accepting that there is no such thing as freedom without contradicting itself. You can give up on freedom altogether and
simply seek power for yourself and strive for what you wish to achieve. This is the simple idea that people are not allowed to make decisions for themselves. When it’s established that people are not allowed to make these decisions for themselves and that you should strive to be the dictator or advocate for dictatorship, you have transcended freedom by the love of your personal freedom. You advocate for tyranny for the sake of your personal freedom. Secondly, there is the search for autonomy, that is letting each person have the freedom they wish to have and letting people practice what they themselves think to be freedom. This is the position I have relegated myself to, I don’t wish any freedom upon any person, but rather only wish that any person would be allowed to choose what restrictions he takes upon himself and interact with people who have made similar choices. This is not out of a love of freedom, but simply a pragmatic issue of having my personal freedom respected, being able to take up what I wish to do and having the autonomy to do so. And certainly, if this perspective is to expand to more people, they will claim that autonomy is all about real true freedom and that the purpose of that perspective is to bring about personal liberty. That being autonomous is truly the greatest form of freedom in itself and that this is the true freedom that each person should experience. Being able to restrict yourself in ways that you think are proper is now the correct definition of freedom, by doing this you must realize that the boot of freedom will now be on the throat of everyone and that you simply named that boot autonomy and again force people into what you perceive to be freedom.
It might be said that the stirnerite egoism indeed is pure freedom, egoism is unbridled universal will and that this can’t be contested. However, egoism in itself allows for people to restrict any freedom of other people if they have the might to do so, egoism as the freest ideology is also the most tyrannical. It exemplifies the conflict between freedom and itself. When people are allowed full freedom they are allowed full freedom to damage others in any way they wish to do so. In essence, egoism is simply the imposition of yourself on others but universalized as a principle, it is neither autonomy or imposition, but rather a depraved combination of both.
II – Final Arbiter From the beginning of political thought, it has been said that there can be no such thing as a stateless society that avoids becoming chaos as there is no distinctive final arbiter over legal matters in a stateless society. This means that the law conflicts with itself in such a manner that makes social cohesion impossible. Even if it is possible that there is a functional law system without the state, this law system would be greatly restrained in function as it could not have the final say over the law in a society and would only serve as an unenforceable ideal. Thus, it must be that there has to be one entity that has ultimate control over law and that can make all law within a society enforceable, market law or decentralized natural law is absurd as it has no final arbiter. This ignores that the final arbiter could be created and retain form and function without there being any state coercion, the answer to the problem is extremely simple. Any law court on the market that would want to be of repute would be interested in making sure that their decrees are ultimately enforceable and recognized by security agencies. Security agencies would want to make sure that they can trust law courts and that they will not be held responsible themselves for rights violations enforcing decrees could consist of. This does not mean that law enforcement should be able to violate rights, rather that if the judgements that they enforce violate rights, they do not want to be held responsible for that. Thus, each reputable court would have to ensure that the following appeals courts are not caught in a never-ending loop of back and forth claims being filed
and courts would have to ensure that there is a final arbiter. The ultimate worry with lacking a final arbiter is the possibility of a case that can never be settled, this would have to be fixed by any law court aiming to do business on the market. Police agencies would also need ultimate confirmation from a final arbiter to ensure that they are not enforcing claims made by law courts of ill repute. There could even be an establishment of a central agency beyond the final appeals court. This court could deal with determining the ultimate form of the legal code in a society. This central structure would be comprised of the most learned judges and would serve as an appeals court and a nexus of legal theory. This agency could not become a legislative entity. When cases cannot be easily solved and when there can be no definitive judgement as it relates to the facts of a case, this central agency will be appealed to. The number of appeals before reaching the final court would be determined by the original court that took the contested case. It only makes sense within the context of market law that the final arbiter is contracted to ensure that the law is just and not biased and to also serve as the final appeals court to prevent unsolved disputes. The notion that there couldn’t be a final arbiter that legitimizes the judgements of market courts should be completely put to rest. But here we run into a problem in which this central entity could be described as a state itself because it serves as the foundation of law, but this issue can be easily solved. This central entity is only in a position of supremacy since market actors patronize this entity, if there was a superior competitor, this entity would become displaced from its position, unlike the state. The state holds a perceived legitimate force that can be used to secure compliance, any
voluntarily established supreme agency of law would not have the same stranglehold on all law in society as the state does. Any system of law could still be utilized and there is no inherent necessity for a central agency. However, for the sake of enforceability and security, deferring to an ultimate court that can adjudicate differences when they cannot be done otherwise is a sensible strategy. There is also the notion of the Lockean social contract in which all persons within society give up their right to judge cases in order to have all cases fairly judged by a central agency. But this assumes that people need to give up their right to judge cases when they want an orderly society. Sensible individuals will simply not judge the cases in which they are involved in. But surrendering the ability to judge cases ought not to be involuntary or centralized. It is completely possible and feasible that in surrendering the ability to serve as your own judge, legal cases would be judged by market courts contracted by both parties within a legal dispute. The assumption that the only choices are personal enforcement of law and central enforcement of law is in error and the notion that civilized society ought to be coerced is self-contradictory. Furthermore, the concept of a final arbiter is different in case it is monopolized by the state and is not subject to competition and voluntary contracts. The state as a final arbiter is a completely independent entity. With the state there can be no appeal against the central agency of law, the state becomes above the law as it can determine law. This also means that objective law is incompatible with centralized law as the agencies who provide central law must be above the law in order to create the law. When law is decentralized wholly, no person or group of persons is fully in control of the law.
When the market is completely free and human interactions depend on consent and not on involuntary acts of subjugation, the central agent of law is only central insofar as people choose to handle their disputes in accordance to the courts who follow this central agent. This means that there could be two or more supreme courts or law systems that do not have a final arbiter between them. If there is any conflict between the law systems, they would rather use collaborative methods in order to resolve the disputes that would otherwise be unresolved when there is no one to further appeal to. This means that the central arbiter in the system of decentralized law is not above the law but rather an agent who is also subject to that law the same as all other individuals in a society are. This retains the benefits of final arbiters but removes the institutional domination and the state, which is above its own law, from the legal system. The law becomes determined by what is socially desirable as that is what the people who seek law will themselves choose to use as their law. But if this central agent is not a monopolist, then that could erase the reason why a central agent was established in the first place as there would not be a cohesive law within the society. And this is partially correct, there would not be one single cohesive law within society and it is possible that there would be multiple different law systems that could have differing perspectives on the philosophy of law. However, all these distinct systems would be wholly internally consistent and cases would only be subject to singular legal systems and not multiple ones. Furthermore, the law would be handled by consent as far as that is possible and the persons involved would need to agree on methods of resolving disputes. This is unless they want to go completely unrepresented as they deny any opportunity
to fairly judge the case and the case must be judged only with the perspective of the person who is willing to go to court. Involuntary court summons could not exist within a libertarian society, this is only to the detriment of the person who does not arrive at court. And this is a good thing as there is no express necessity for one legal system in society, social cohesion does not require for all people to be under the same legal system. Furthermore, this competition forces all legal systems to improve their quality and to improve the perfection of the law that they provide instead of just being completely insulated from the consequences of their judgements. This creates a perpetual increase in the quality and amount of justice within the society that has a market law system. Furthermore, when no law entity is above the law, they will be themselves responsible for all misjudgements and missentences that they gave out. Market courts would hold a personal interest in strengthening the quality of law, lest they be held accountable for their own failures. This does not forbid the use of impartial juries as they could simply be consultants to the active agency which is responsible for giving out the sentence. When entrepreneurship and other market activities are introduced into law, there must be by necessity a law system that incentivizes justice. This is contrary to state courts which take the law as a system with no regard for what the consequences are. Thus the market systems of law that do not hold a monopoly over law must be systems from which all people can expect justice with positive results or expect the least bad results for the persons who were of no fault in the case. This means that the legal system would be better at incentivizing and enforcing stronger property rights and as such
providing more justice. If we take property rights as our ultimate ideal and if we take natural law as the manifestation of those property rights, the practical system of decentralized law is the proper system to use. This is because stronger property rights will always tend to give better results than weaker property rights to the parties who were wronged. Since property rights are respected, there will be an overall better system within society when it comes to creating better results using the legal system. A legal system without having an innate respect for property rights and consent will create a deterioration in property rights comparatively to the agencies who need voluntary consent. As such agencies will at least be partially judged in accordance with their ability to provide property rights in a stronger fashion. As such, the statist law system must inherently weaken property rights when it comes to the law itself and the market law system must strengthen property rights. This is ignoring the possibility of there being a legal system that in itself is completely based on property rights outside the system where the law is implemented by the state using coercion. There could be courts that function solely on the basis of natural law and courts that judge cases only depending on who violated whose rights to property with no other consideration and courts that offer recourse to the extent that the property was violated. This is a completely possible scenario even without the state and decentralized entities could be in charge of determining who is right and wrong on the basis of property rights. Furthermore, property rights will be assaulted if people cannot have a choice where they will take their legal cases as legal cases
within the state are subject to various jurisdictions. Individuals will lose control of their property insofar as the enforcement of that property is subject to the jurisdiction of the legal system which claims that person and his property. When there are no such systems which claim people and their property, there must inherently be an increase in the rights to property by the people who are no longer subject to the whims of the system which places them in jurisdictions based on arbitrary distinctions.
III – The Centralization of Defence Nozick’s critique of market anarchy was largely focused on the notion that the centralization of defence agencies would eventually end up establishing another state. Thus people would be forced to patronize a monopolistic company and follow the rules of that company and, effectively, start paying taxes again. This would eventually lead to a government organically forming out of a stateless society. I will here go into why that is wrong. It can’t be disputed that there are forces at work that ensure that defence would always be more or less monopolized in any given area, no matter how much the free market is in effect. When everyone follows the same law system, interactions become a lot easier and transaction costs are greatly reduced. It becomes easier to perform market transactions provided that all people follow the same law. And furthermore, when everyone is secured by the same defence agency, that agency has a much easier time solving cases and making sure that the criminal party gets prosecuted. This is because there would be a larger degree of social cooperation, provided that all people were secured by the same company. Without active competition in the field of law, you also do not have to pursue the costly endeavour of mitigating the conflicts between different law systems and distinct defence agencies. There will almost never be a war between these systems but there is certainly friction when the interests served by systems are different, provided that they have to operate within the same society. This friction is both a social and an economic cost. There are great advantages to
handling defence in a way that is centralized and that isn’t competitive defence on the free market. The question now becomes whether we should give up the free market in the area of defence. Furthermore, the optimal size for defence agencies can be extremely large. The local branch of the police dealing solely with property crime has a small optimal size, the solving of theft cases does not need a lot of equipment and infrastructure. However, no matter how free the market is, there is always demand for intelligence agencies, militarized policing, and so on. Because of this, there are agencies with large optimal sizes that would take up large territories as no one is properly able to compete with them due to the extent of the optimal size. Some portion of the society could hypothetically subscribe to a smaller service, but it would be lesser in quality to the service that is larger and as such closer to its optimal size. Lesser response times and more homogeneity coupled with other local infrastructure would win out in the vast majority of cases. There may be “contested” areas where no significant provider has been established. There could be areas in which there is no one defence agency that has a localized centre and in which people contract multiple agencies. But other than these areas that are between the spheres of influence of market agencies, most areas would have one provider of defence and most areas would have one major provider of law. The largest fault of this logic as a critique of market defence is that competition does not need to be active, people do not constantly need viable alternatives. Rather, what is necessary is the possibility of alternatives emerging and any good that can serve as a substitute will be in direct competition with the dominant company. Since most
needs can be replaced by fulfilling other needs, there is always competition as people can simply change their consumption habits. For example, it may be more efficient to buy a gun when the local defence agency is inefficient. Thus, defence agencies are always in strict competition with guns. To a more limited degree, this is also the case with insurance. And to an even lesser degree, with food, entertainment, and any other consumer good. Economic law still applies to defence companies and they cannot compel anyone to pay for them other than by providing a good service that people wish to voluntarily patronize. If people think that these companies are not doing a good job, they will limit the services they purchase from these companies and the total amount of defence that they consume. They may decide to not use defence services and instead carry a gun at all times and set up a dedicated alarm system in their house, removing any legitimate claim by the agency that provides defence. If enough people stop using that agency or reduce their use of that agency, the profits of that firm will decrease. Provided that there is demand left, there is a great possibility of profit by some other defence initiative. Furthermore, competition does not need to be multiple companies actively outbidding each other and trying to obtain the largest number of customers. Whenever decisions made in economic areas are made by the people with money to spend, that economy is competitive. The companies, even if they think they are unbeatable and even if they think they have a firm grasp on the perceived constituents, may fall to market forces if the quality of their services decreases. Without a perpetual increase in quality and decrease in price that characterizes the free market, these companies would be
taken over by other more ambitious and innovative agencies. We can see this in every industry, perceived giants fall to newcomers who are better at doing what the old companies did. There is no reason why this should not apply to the provision of defence. Even if the agencies that provide defence would be able to gain from monopoly privileges and even if the smaller companies in the same industry would never have a chance of being dominant, the entire system would still be thousands of times more decentralized than the current system could ever hope to be. First off, the system of law enforced by the agencies of defence is independent from those agencies that provide physical protection. There is no one agency that should have control over both law and force and these industries would always be separate. If these industries are not provided by different agencies, the defence agency would become a dictator and would become what it was supposed to defend against. If any company became a dictatorship, it would be disposed of in one way or another. This is plausible as we assume that the state has already been abolished. Because the so-called executive and legislative branches of government are completely separate under marketization, the market system provides a much more just structure of defence. Furthermore, the tasks of interpreting the law and judging the law would remain separate under a market system. This, in large part, erases most threats of judicial tyranny. The separation of powers in the functions formerly taken care of by the state would be enough to ensure that no cohesive state could ever be formed and that liberty will
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Market
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decentralization and the improvement of services are comparatively a small benefit. Furthermore, the powers of central agencies are heavily restricted. As I mentioned above, different functions of defence agencies have different optimal sizes. Due to managerial costs and due to economic calculation this means that optimally all functions would be split up into different companies altogether. It is hard to maintain resource allocation in a large enterprise. The same is true with managerial functions. Thus, enterprises have pressures to decentralize, provided that they have reached or exceeded their optimal size. One agency could manage simple property crime and specialize in that, another could simply deal with detective work, the third may just be a large intelligence agency that helps with solving crimes by the former agencies. There is no need for a centralization of the current functions of the police. The additional separation incentivized by the market will ensure that there is no single agency that is ever in charge of solving all crime. Even though there may be defence agencies that have large swaths of territory, they will be internally contested by smaller defence agencies that deal with more local and lesser issues. The final argument against a market provision of defence is that the large defence agencies would simply have the raw power to make sure that people comply with them. Let’s say that the separation of powers is not enough, let’s say that the pressure to form natural monopoly ends up being incredibly immense and that competition has barely any chance to actually function. In this case, when the previous assumptions were wrong, the defence agency
could expand without any restrictions and become totalitarian in a way The first argument against this is that this could theoretically be the case, but it’s not certain and even the most totalitarian defence agency can never rival the totalitarianism of the state. The costs of securing the population and the costs of self-indulgence are large, so even if the company can heavily bloat prices and heavily reduce quality, it will be nothing other than an ineffective necessity. It can never take 40% of your income and spend it on shooting your dogs, it still must conform to some degree of reason, unless it wants to wage an all-out war. And this seems to be a possibility, an agency with a large amount of weaponry and trained personnel would obviously reinforce its own power with brutal might. In reality, this agency can never fully disarm the populous and can never convince them of being anything other than a parasite. It must also try to maintain the loyalty of its agents who can freely leave and even fight the agency itself. If they are to engage in war and if they are to try and conquer the area they are supposed to protect, they will simply lose that territory. There is seemingly no way in which these agencies can profitably assume the position of the state. Defence agencies lack the centuries of brainwashing required for the state to reach its degree of totalitarianism.
IV – Pro-War, Anti-Nation One of the most absurd trends that has increased in prominence after world war I is nationalist support of foreign wars. This has been an odd situation since the early 20th century and should be irreconcilable with nationalist beliefs. The sensible idea that anti-war ideology is complementary to nationalism has somehow been lost to the large amount of support there is for war among nationalists. And this is not only an American topic either. Nationalists from all around the world have been showing more covert pro-war leanings. This is not because of any moral superiority of non-American nationalists, but rather because their nations do not have the immense war apparatus that the US does. This is even more absurd with any group of far-right nationalists who base their ideology largely around genetics. There should be a wider realization of the detrimental effect of war on the gene pool. The people who will go to war are the healthiest and strongest men in any given nation, a part of them will die in that war and will be removed from the gene pool. In effect, every war feminizes the gene pool of a nation as it culls the most healthy and valorous individuals in society. The men who are willing to work hard and the men who have classical martial virtues will be replaced by men too cowardly or meek to go to war. Thus, the focus on war is incompatible with the focus on the internal genetic structure of the nation, if the best men inside a nation are sent to be slaughtered in war, the nation will experience dysgenic effects.
Furthermore, this will diminish the future strength of the military as the noblest men no longer have and raise children. The nation will be weaker as the offspring of the generation engaged in war will not be ready for war. This means that not only does the war leave the nation desolate when it comes to the genetics, but war also leaves the nation desolate when it comes to future military strength. It should be completely irreconcilable to well-meaning and rational nationalists to favour war in any scenario where war is not necessary. Furthermore, wars are times of great distress and great pressure upon any nation. Nations are often unable to withstand the moral pressures inherent in war without having the values of the nation end up corrupted. Nations are also unable to retain their previous moral foundations that support the national ethos throughout the war. Thus, nations will lose their previous values when they are engaged in war, war will always be detrimental to the values the nation previously had. The principles of the nation will be subjugated by the principles which are necessary to adopt during the time of war. This may seemingly drive nationalism and thus could end up being beneficial to the nation. However, in reality, moral injury makes the nation hollow and defines the nation entirely by war. The nation loses all identity it might have previously had in favour of creating a national identity based on the wars the nation is in and the nation will be completely subsumed by the military. Thus, a war culture is created, war culture is inherently incompatible with civilized society as war culture is by nature antagonistic to any long-term production and a warped culture is a devastating force upon any nation. The people of the nation will also
lose those skills that facilitate critical thinking in order to aid the internalization of war propaganda. All people must accept war propaganda if they are to retain their sanity through the war. This is because without war propaganda, people would realize the futility of the wars they are involved in. This is true at least if the war is abroad. Furthermore, these people will also lose their empathy and compassion when it comes to foreign populations. This must drive a support for internationalism in the form of imperialism. Thus, it may be nationalist in a very narrow sense, but it is ultimately internationalist to create a culture based on war when it descends into empire. However, defensive wars could promote the good qualities within the population as there is no need to engage in a dehumanization of the enemy and there is no need for war propaganda as the people themselves are under attack. When people are directly threatened, the defending that they will have to do to protect themselves will unite the nation. But this is the only context within which war can actually serve so as to improve the value system of the nation. Any offensive war will not have these qualities of spurring extreme nationalism but rather will increase the drive towards empire. Furthermore, the nation is also deprived of its own resources when it engages in interventionist wars, there is no way to war without expropriating a great deal of funds from the population and as such the population will have to pay for that war. When that war is not fought for the defence of the nation but rather as an offensive war, the only way war can be characterized is as a redistribution of wealth from the warring nation to other nations. These other nations are the nations within which the interventionist war is fought in, the
native population of your nation will have to pay for a war that they gain nothing from. All interventionist wars require putting aside the interests of the native population in favour of foreign interests of one sort or another. Interventionist war cannot ever economically benefit a nation. Thus interventionist wars are anti-nationalist wars, it would be absurd to say that a completely foreign war could ever be beneficial to your nation in any other way than diplomacy. Since this war is only useful within a strictly diplomatic context, it is only useful for the government of a nation and not that nation itself. As long as foreign wars are fought, the government will increase in influence while the population will never actually benefit from diplomatic gains. For the population of any nation, the international political order is only important insofar as it threatens their own nation with war and not in any wider capacity. This means that the only ever possible interventionist war that could be justified is to stop a future war. However, when it comes to stopping future wars it’s much harder than it may seem and it is also most often impossible to predict which nation will go to war with which other nation. Furthermore, initiating a war to prevent future wars is absurd in itself as that war will be the war that people are afraid of in the first place, warring in order to prevent war is a completely ridiculous principle. The only way to prevent war is to build up the defence of the nation without expending it in war and to ensure that the nation does not increase foreign enmity by other forms of internationalism. This form of isolationism is the only way in which there can be a true nationalist policy manifested when it comes to war. When nations do not involve themselves in the actions of other nations there is an
increase in the sovereignty of nations and as such noninterventionism should be an incredibly nationalist position. And empire always goes against the interests of the nation for the sake of the interests of the empire, all historical empires go contrary to their host nations. It may seem as if empires build glorious structures through having the ability to control vast swaths of land, but in reality, the costs of maintaining empire are far greater than any benefits. The host nation may benefit from the empire in the moment, but the costs of an empire will catch up to the host nation. The only real benefit of an empire is having easier access to various goods and services provided by other nations within that empire, but the same can be done with a regime of free trade without the costs of maintaining the empire. Thus the price of empire will be a burden to the nation from which the empire spawns from and the money expropriated must be used to keep down other nations. This needs to be done so that the other nations would not be able to assert their own national identity and their own national structures. An empire is both detrimental to the nation from which it spawns and the nations which it encompasses. Thus, the empire goes contrary to any value system with favours the nation in one way or another as imperialism is the furthest thing from any form of consistent nationalism. It may easily be construed that the preservation of nations is somehow aided by forms of empire, but this is absurd as the empire in itself destroys the nations that are a part of the empire. The empire has interests directly against all nations that comprise the empire. Furthermore, the interests of the empire become directly distinct from the interests of the nations which make up the empire. The
empire is a sovereign entity on its own and not an entity that is constrained by the common rules of decency and morality. The empire holds power far beyond what anyone can challenge and thus will seldom be challenged. The empire will be an all-consuming entity getting rid of everything that is good and proper in favour of that which favours the empire. Imperialism is never something that can be reconciled with nationalism. Any person advocating for true nationalist principles must be opposed to every kind of imperialism, no matter if it is cultural, economic, or political. Some also say that because war creates jobs it means that it is desirable or that war has some other economic benefits that are not included within the simple conception of war being a cost to the nation. However, this view is complete nonsense because of one very concrete reason, the resources used for war come from the taxpayers and are not added simply to the economy by any outside force. This means that war is only redistributive from the popular class of the nation to those who manufacture weapons for war and those who benefit from wars. Thus, wars are beneficial for the war industry but only at the expense of every other party within society who are not benefitted from the war and yet still have to pay for the war. Thus, since the public needs to pay for the war, the war must be worth it multiple times over when we factor in the opportunity cost, destruction, and lives lost. When there is no decent return on investment with war, it must follow that the war is directly detrimental to the economy of the nation as war requires resources from the economy without in itself giving anything back to the nation. This is because the war only destroys structures that are abroad and does
not increase or create domestic capital. If war was not paid for by taxation, there could be an argument that it has one benefit to the economy or another. However, the opportunity costs for war are all the productive ventures that could have been accomplished with the money that was spent on the war. And these possibilities are truly creative endeavours and not the purely destructive outcomes of war. And on the question of going to war to appropriate resources, the answer is the same as with the question of imperialism. The benefits of appropriating resources can be replicated by simply engaging in free trade and lowering transaction costs when it comes to the transfer of resources across national boundaries. Thus, free trade is in all ways preferable to war when it comes to gaining access to scarce foreign resources.
V – The Necessity of Force The most prevalent criticism of all stateless social orders pertains to the notion that statelessness would quickly devolve into a chaotic disorder where might makes right. Furthermore, this chaos could be easily avoided if you create an objectively ethical legal system and have the state enforce that system. The people who espouse this point of view have completely caught themselves in a scenario where their argument goes against itself and as such have dismissed their own point. Furthermore, force is necessary for backing any social order and ultimately creating the conditions that are necessary for the flourishing of human society. The proper use of force is also ultimately the only thing preventing misused force from taking the society over. Both of these points now need to be justified. When talking about models of decentralized, market-based legal systems the most common objection is that in such a system, the people with the biggest guns would always reach the outcome they desire. This ignores absolutely everything about every realistic situation one may expect to find themselves in while living in a human society. First off, the same holds true for the state and in a much more pronounced fashion. The state is the mightiest entity in a statist society and the state is also that which decides what is right and what is not. In essence, the state is best thought of as a monopoly on might and right. This means that any situation where law is decentralized cannot be as bad as the situation where both force and law are monopolized. Even if it were the case that the people with the biggest guns always win, it would doubly apply to the
situation where the biggest guns are all owned by the same group of persons. Furthermore, these people assume that conflicts between systems of laws are beneficially solved by force, this is completely and utterly mistaken. The person with the biggest guns may go around coercing everyone but that mode of acting is very expensive. You have to pay soldiers willing to do your bidding and who agree to going around and killing innocent people. You have to equip soldiers and provide them with benefits, while the soldiers know full well that they might die in combat. And with the combined might of all your victims going against your scheme, it’s only a matter of time until you run out of people to make into your soldiers. This is different with a state which has made itself perceivedly legitimate, very few people are willing to resist an armed force that they see as being just. This means that these people who are acting in an unjust manner have the faith of others that allows them to pretend to be acting in an entirely just manner. There arises a situation where might always makes right and contrary to the same situation on the market where might loses a bunch of money if prolonged for a significant amount of time. And this ignores that the person who hires soldiers must first be rich enough and thus have in the past undertaken productive labour to be able to bear the giant costs of hiring people who will be going to their death for a cause they don’t believe in. This means that the person who hires the soldiers has some degree of assets that he must use. This implies that every person who was doing business with the conqueror would cut their economic ties unless they shared the desire for creating an oppressive dictatorship. If, for example, the
man who tries to wage war stores his gold at a respectable bank, he may not get his gold out as he is actively waging a war and thus has become a criminal. If he holds his gold in a disreputable facility this may not be the case, but he stands at a much greater risk of losing his gold to fraud or deceit, as no one will enforce contracts on behalf of a public enemy. And if the conqueror has businesses, they would all fall under a general boycott and would not be patronized by reputable individuals and any people who have any sense of morality. No matter how much a person could stand to gain from this sort of aggression, he stands to lose much more. And if the conqueror then tries to go against the great mass of people, he stands no chance as a lone warlord. If these warlords are plenty and if they are ideologically motivated, they may succeed in waging a prolonged war. But the opposition to any person who initiates violence is initially always much greater than the people who manage to initiate that violence. It takes much less to defend what you rightfully have than to try to take what others rightfully claim. This means that even groups that aim to create violence and bloodshed would eventually fail, even if there are plenty of those who seek to increase their own territory. Although there are always cases where the ideological cause is so immense that a great many people are willing to contribute to conquest to an extent where it overpowers the people who are victimized. This only means that there is general social acceptance of the goal and thus the system that is being fought for could also be incorporated into the most prevalent law systems available. This avoids the notion that
private law makes might always right, but rather that private law can back might with seeming right. We may dream of a utopian civilization where there is no need to use force and each person is in voluntary compliance with objective law systems, however, that civilization will never come. There will always be people who use force and there will always be people who need to respond to force with force to ensure that the original initiator of violence can be brought to justice. Since the original person was the initiator of violence, we can see the reactive force as ethically cancelling out the original force and as such being a just response. Thus defencive force is legitimate while initiatory violence is not, but we must acknowledge the necessity of force. If there are no people who are willing to use force to secure relative peace for people who do not want to use force, then people who are willing to use violence for personal gains would always achieve unjust outcomes for the sake of themselves. Due to this fact, in order ensure the stability within a society there must be a way to use force as a last appeal to get rid of people who would use force as a first appeal. All societies must be eventually backed by force if peaceful methods have failed. Due to this, nothing can ever be truly voluntary, even if that may be the ideal. It is not voluntary to have a gun pointed at you for violating the objective law. When there is a good law system, this is not a problem at all. But for people with conflicting systems of morality, there will always be points of contention within law. These people must then remove themselves from the society that has a disagreeable law system and establish some other society. That society must then also be backed by some
degree of force for the people who would aim to violate the law system of that society. If there was absolutely no legal system, the world would be one of perpetual conflict, perpetual conflict is not a feasible solution to this problem of force. The only way to ensure that the law system is just and that people have the liberty to decide what they do with themselves is to simply allow free exit from the law system as long as you do not interact with the people in that system of law. But there still must be that original degree of force in the original law system. Without the world being fundamentally backed by force, it will be fundamentally run by force.
VI – Brutal Freedom The representation of freedom within libertarian discussion is often toned down to appeal to people with a leftist sense of morality. Freedom qua freedom is represented as some sort of ultimate ideal state, where each person is free to do what he wants. This is coupled with the implication that this would lead to a generally happy coexistence of all people. While this view may have some merit to it, it’s only one side of the story. Freedom itself is not only concerned with that which make people happy, there are two perspectives from which to approach freedom from. Both perspectives are as valuable and one extremely brutal. The main determinant of a free society is that each person in a free society is able to exert their will without undue interference as long as they don’t come into conflict with the will of another person. Here we would define due interference as stopping any actions that violate other people’s rights to their property. That means that the particular freedom is only applied in cases where it doesn’t interfere with the freedom of any other person or group of persons. We may look at systems of unequal freedom where freedom only applies to workers or states, in that case, it’s both freedom and tyranny, an anarcho-tyranny of sorts. However, that is not the freedom as defined in this essay, it is solely dealing with the prospect of all people being equally free. To enter into a society where each man is free to do as he wishes within the scope of his own property, one must first renounce his claim to the property of others. He must forsake any claim he has to
the aid of others while he is in need and he must deal with the consequences of whatever actions that he takes, without any guaranteed bailout. Claiming his property as absolute extinguishes any hope for anyone funding his bankruptcy if he cannot pay what he is obligated to pay. He cannot even expect to use a poorhouse without paying for his stay in that poorhouse. Furthermore, he cannot even expect to use a street, he cannot expect to live in a house and he cannot expect to be defended if he is threatened. When one is a free man that has no interference in his life on behalf of others in society, he must also be abstaining from interfering with those others. By having for himself freedom, a man also has the freedom to fail and has to be himself responsible for whatever failures he has as a person. A free man is a man who is very unfree from consequence, freedom must necessarily include that a man takes some restrictions to his will. Left-libertarians and leftist anarchists would point to a sort of human decency that obliges society to take care of the people within, this is supposed to be an argument. No matter how much a person may fail, there is a need to restrict the freedom of people to not take care of failures. In every case (unless you’re a completely consistent egoist), freedom is limited. A man cannot be free to everything and if a man wishes to live in a stateless society he must live according to some restrictions to freedom. The freedom of libertarians is the freedom to succeed and to fail, this freedom necessarily includes the absolute responsibility over everything that a man does. A free man is not entitled to another free man and a free man is only free as long as he takes responsibility for what his freedom causes to him and imposes on others.
A man that is free cannot expect compassion to be the norm, by declaring himself as a free man he declares himself to have absolute moral agency. If a man is not ready to have absolute moral agency for his own actions, then a man is not ready to be free. If each and every person was only responsible for what they do and was completely responsible for whatever actions they take, then they cannot expect others to view them as misguided or victims. If a person wants to expect care, they need to give up their liberty. A free robber is a robber that will be prosecuted fully and with the absolute force of the law. This is because by being free he has declared that no other man has any moral responsibility over him. By choosing to rob, the freeman made clear that he himself doesn’t have moral responsibility over his actions either. A free robber can expect absolutely no help and nothing other than being forced to repay his debts in the most efficient manner while being penalized to the full extent possible. The same goes for the drug culture that’s hallowed more and more within some libertarian circles. It’s even often stated by libertarians that the ideal solution to the drug problem is to take people who do drugs and provide careful rehabilitation so that they would stop. This might be the case in an unfree society, but a free man takes upon himself the responsibility of drug use when he decides to use drugs. If he then becomes addicted, he can not think that any person will come to his aid in any capacity other than what he himself has deserved. If this drug user wishes to be rehabilitated and wishes to be able to live a decent life again, then he must himself take the obligation of paying for his own rehabilitation. Of course, some people would freely decide to ease whatever burdens others may suffer due to one
reason or another, but this is not the expectation in freedom. However, when free men decide that some cause within the brutal and free society is worthy of their help, they may take up that cause. This is because the free men view the cause as a good cause and as being worth the resources they will put into solving that problem. If these free men do this, the brutal nature of freedom is eased, but this comes alongside a similarly brutal caveat. Even though others might help you, they will discriminate immensely when it comes to who exactly they help. If some Christian organization decided that they were to help the poor and downtrodden as is prescribed by the Bible, they would certainly ease the troubles of the people who are impoverished. These Christians are free to believe whatever they want to and as it imposes no cost on others, we can have no objection to this sort of behaviour. However, this would seemingly contradict the entire premise of freedom being brutal. And it is true that the existence of charitable organizations reduces the amount of brutality in freedom, but it doesn’t completely do away with it. A charitable organization is able to provide funds to a limited amount of people as funds are always limited. In a techno-futuristic utopia, this might not be the case, but the current economic laws do not operate with an assumption of a post-scarcity economy. This means that these people would only give aid to the people they think they can help the most. We can take the example of poor people, this charity would ensure that those who are helped would actually be those who will cease being poor and who are receptive to help. This means that the Christians wouldn’t pay for single mothers to remain in unhealthy situations as it relates to their poor lifestyle.
However, if there were single mothers who were actively seeking to live a Christian lifestyle in a newfound strong marriage and who were unable to procure the time to seek out a suitable husband, the Christian organization may see it beneficial to lift these people out of poverty so they can live in a way they deem is proper and healthy. The woman will have to give up her own freedom and bind herself to those who give her aid. This goes for anything, those who expect aid will have to give up their liberty and only those who give up their liberty receive aid. And this goes even further, the person who is the object of charity becomes tied down to a responsibility, as this charity is not the base condition of their lives. They must seek to live a better life after they have been provided resources and the betterment of their life is defined by the people who contribute to them charitably and not by themselves. In this regard, the free men who fail with their freedom become unfree and have to act according to the wishes and desires of people who have managed to succeed while free. This is at least if they are to receive any aid to resume their life in a manner that is not miserable. When one fails as a free man, he will not be given another chance for a similar failure.
VII – All Men are Created Equal The historical notion of all men being created equal is greatly misunderstood, this is alongside the entire historical notion of equality. Definitions change and juxtaposing a modern notion with a classical one results in a misunderstanding of much thought in the classical tradition. Even more so, it results in the abolition of concepts that are important to use as the terms used for those concepts become opted by concepts that are not accurate or even may be opposing. In the liberal movement of the pre-progressive era, you often found calls for an increased equality of men and philosophical concepts founded upon a supposed equality of men. With modern concepts of equality it might seem that these people were directly in support of having guaranteed minimum standards of living and a multicultural nation. One is then shocked to find the advocacy of free market capitalism by the liberals and as much common-sense racialism among liberals as there was in most of the classical world. So we must now admit that the equality promoted by these people was some sort of equality that we don’t even consider as equality nowadays. It seems as if it would be a completely antiquated concept. Firstly, we must look at the historical condition, which was a monarchical, feudalist system based on the serfdom of the vast majority of people. The radicals intent on dismantling this system wanted to dismantle privileges, that is unearned powers and properties held by those who have no other merit than simply the fact of their birth. This is the main notion of equality if we are to look
at the liberal philosophy, however, there is more to classical equality than this. Of course there were European republicans like Rousseau who were against property and other such concepts in favour of direct democracy and majority will. However, these people were only really present within the French revolution and the other liberal principles were more oriented around trying to get rid of special rights by birth. In this sense, the liberal rendition of equality is pointless in a world where there are few things achieved by right of birth. Of course, there is inheritance and other riches imbued by the family one is born into, but these are not rights or detriments to others. To understand the relevance of the notion of equality we must look at the origin of the idea and the philosophical ground it is laid upon. The concept is in essence that when a person comes into the world, he has nothing other than his common humanity. The potential of growth is different between every person, but the people before their growth have no discernable differences. The artistic phenomena of the dances of death that predated liberal movements also shared a similar essence, however, rather than emphazising birth they emphazised death. What it means to be a human is the same among every person, no person is by birth superior or inferior in moral standing. Furthermore, the liberty of the liberals was simply a notion of meritocracy, that each man should be allowed what is in his ability. The meritocracy of the liberals is sharply contrasted by the counter-merit sentiment held by the modern progressives, socialists and some post-revolutionary liberals. These people view equality as something to be achieved and not something that is fundamental to the condition of the human. Rather than having a system based on
individual ability, their equality is a system that runs contradictory to what the individual can do. The modern notion of equality is the condition in which no person has achieved for himself a different position than others. This is even worse when confronted with it’s premise, if it assumes that equality is something that needs to be reached and not something that is inherent to man, it would imply that the special condition of one’s birth is now the determining factor of their position. When liberals tried to eradicate the privilege brought forth by birth, the socialists and progressives must instate a privilege on those who are born to a class they deem to be unequal. They must impose equality on those who have, with their own merit, achieved great things and thus their equality presupposes that all men are not created equal. If all men are not created equal, then the equality must in itself be a mystical good, something to strive for. This means that modern equality becomes something that is artificially and in a contradictory manner instated by an institution upon the people in a society. Equality no longer becomes something that is achieved by eliminating constraints upon humans but a value that justifies constraining humans by itself. Thus equality becomes contrary to any and all notions of human liberty. When the classical concept is contrasted to the modern concept one truth becomes obvious. The only way to fight modern equality is with classical equality. If we are to aim at an increase in human freedom we must be for equality in the sense of the liberals and against equality as supported by the progressives.
VIII – Social Darwinism From the critics of libertarianism, you often hear accusations of social darwinism. It is supposedly a very negative and even evil position to hold and social darwinism is bad enough that the person who is espousing libertarian views would be shut down by his own consciousness upon being accused of being a social darwinist. But social darwinism might be a desirable condition for life and even something that could be highly positive. I will here explain the benefits of social darwinism and how it should not be used as a meaningless word to shut down disagreeable perspectives. The main criticism of social darwinism is that it would leave those who are not well-suited to survival to fend for themselves while they are not able to do so. This is considered to be negative as every person is supposedly entitled to life, not just in the way of being entitled to be not killed, but rather entitled to not die until their life would have come to its natural end. Removing what should be guaranteed survival is seen as equivalent to murder, this is because all persons are seemingly entitled to the act of surviving. If a person is deprived of survival, it is then a moral affront. However, this notion is founded upon absolutely nothing, at no point in history other than the modern era has survival been an expectation. There is absolutely no basis to claim that it is inherent to the nature of humanity to have a guarantee of survival. There is no proof that this is something other than a fanciful and fashionable opinion held by those who promote systems that are designed to secure survival for those who have not earned it. And this is the only
relevant basis for the criticism of the socially darwinist system, it allows people to die if they have not put forth the effort in order to survive. Without this crucial point, there can be no way in which the social darwinist approach is consistently criticised. This is not to say that people do not try to criticise the social darwinist system in other ways, one of which is that it supposedly allows for the strong to predate upon the weak, this is false. If a system allows people to gain unearned advantages, that system ceases to be a social darwinist one. This is because it starts to encourage parasitism and negative qualities instead of the advancement of all individuals. Thus, a system that gives special privileges to the perceived strong is no more social darwinist than a system that gives special privileges to the perceived weak. The essence of the social darwinist perception is that the world is a place where each person must struggle for themselves and the world is not some utopia where one can just idly sit by and survive. The selection of the fittest by socio-economic means is simply abstaining from giving any specific benefit to those unfit for survival. Social darwinism does not determine who deserves what station in life. If you do not have the capacity to rightfully earn any given thing, you do not have the right to demand ownership of what you desire. The social darwinists assert by appropriating what is not yours, you are not a humanitarian, but only a parasite. Social darwinism is derivative from simply applying the principles of natural selection first brought to public attention by Darwin to the scope of society. This does not mean some sort of contest of raw might or a brutal culling of everyone incapable of providing some concrete service. Rather social darwinism is letting society develop
and letting the strong outcompete the weak. However, there’s a very large facet that you must ignore if you are to construe this as an evil position that just prioritizes might. In a capitalistic society with the division of labour, the darwinist principles are consistently applied in areas more than just strength. Famously Darwin noted that the existence of a specific flower would imply the existence of an insect that could harvest it. This turned out to be correct, however, it was not seen by Darwin himself as he had died when that insect was found, this is the essence of capitalistic social darwinism. It is not that people with the most money should rule society or there should be some violent contest to ensure that people can secure a mate or whatever misconception one can have. Since every area of society requires different skills, in the social darwinist vision, all parts of society should be contested to prove who is worthy of control in that part of society. We must admit that the natural selection this would create would be diverse. Both a weak man with masterful skills in craftmanship and a strong man without other distinguishing features would be those benefited by an order based on the survival of the fittest. They are the metaphorical insects for their own metaphorical flowers. This means that the underclass in an order predicated upon the selection of the most fit would not be of any concrete quality but simply those who excel in nothing, people who have nothing to contribute in any area. The generalized education and the insignificant lifestyle of many people is obviously directly contrary to this. Should a modern man not know enough about every facet of life and should that man not be able to hold skills in as many areas as possible? Of course, universal knowledge may all seem fine in
theory, but in practice, it only serves to erase human excellence and replace it with a meager order that completely lacks the great men of history and instead is based upon the rule of the average. Those slandered as social darwinists are most often those who espouse a system of raw capitalism, where there is no safety, where there is no socialization of losses, but also where man keeps the fruits of his labour. This pure, unbridled capitalism is the way to ensure that the best in society are selected to fulfil their roles and to incentivize those great enough to have influence. This sort of economic system where the weak are not protected and the strong are not punished will inevitably lead to an increase in the population of the strong and the decrease in the population of the weak. People would either have to relegate themselves to a meager subsistence or acquire valuable skills that they can use to survive. And it is often the advocates of this sort of brutalistic capitalism that try to argue against these claims. They argue that charity would protect the weak and that mutual aid societies would ensure the survival of all. However, this would not be the case nor should it be the case. People naturally want to ensure that members of their tribe do not die off, thus they aim to secure the existence of people they may not intimately know. However, these people who are subsidized must still provide some amount of value in creating empathy or showing promise. This means that the social darwinist principle would also apply to beggars who rely on the kind-heartedness of the strong. Those seeking subsidy would have to themselves prove that they are worthy of aid. If the market for charity decides that they are not deserving of any help, they cannot expect this help from anyone.
And we, as libertarians, should not promote charity as an ultimate ideal, this is catching yourself within the contradiction of altruism where everything done for the sake of another is good. This philosophy, if not held privately, leads to a society where there is no good possible, as each person is forbidden from enjoying their personal life and must only look out for the general welfare of the many. Or we could catch ourselves in the socialist notion that those with wealth should uphold those without wealth. However, if a person is lacking wealth, that doesn’t bestow upon them any sort of virtue in itself, but rather, if anything, serves as an indicator for a lack of virtue within the character of that specific person. If that person had any virtue or ability, that person would not be completely lacking in any and all wealth. Those who relegate material wealth for the pursuit of higher goals, only lack that wealth of their own accord. Thus, undesirable social traits are removed from the social order leaving the general quality of the society and the members of society morally higher than they were before. Now there is still the claim that this mode of thinking is cruel and brutal, something that people are supposedly meant to avoid. However, why should we willfully ignore the basis of humanity? The world is characterized by the struggle of a man against the world itself, a man has to toil to survive, a man has to labour to get shelter, a man has to prove himself to appropriate resources from others. This does not necessarily imply violence, for avoiding which there are many moral and philosophical reasons. However, struggle is still the nature of man no matter how violent or not he is. Man is designed to compete and to work to make his own life worth living, men are not supposed to live a life of complete ease
where there is nothing to be gained or lost. Such a condition of universal prosperity would not leave any person with any inherent individual virtue. A lack of all struggle would ensure that people would all become fit for a fruitless life. It would be guaranteed that these people living in ease would be devoid of the personal virtue and ability that could have let them become fit to hold property. When it is bad to have virtue, those with the least virtue would rule. And this is the greatest point, the defining characteristic that would erase the entire argument against social darwinism. The people with the most ability should have the most ways to exercise that ability. Those who prove themselves capable of handling large amounts of resources and those who prove themselves worthy of those resources should have those resources if the natural order was to work itself out. This is not evil or discriminatory towards the weak or the unfit, but rather the simple acknowledgement that if you were to give resources to those without ability or strength, then those resources are wasted, at least from a social standpoint. It may make you feel good inside, but the raw nature of man can never let those without virtue be valued highly.
IX – The Rule of Law The basic premise of the rule of law is that there is no higher authority than the objectively defined law. Neither a monarch nor a democratic mass can change valid legal systems and thus the supreme agency within government is law. But how are you to have a government where no person is able to make a change in law? That would only mean that the government with the rule of law must only have an executive and a judicial body. There can be no actual further legislation as that would deviate from consistent and foreseen rules. This requires that any government under the rule of law must be in a consistent stasis, but how can you determine the members of this government? Democratic elections become completely pointless, they cannot ever change anything so there is no reason to use them for anything. However, democracy is the only system of government where privileged persons do not exist. If there is democracy, there will fundamentally be people who want to get elected. When there are people who want to get elected, they have to promise some sort of betterment of life. If they promise a betterment of life, they must change the law. Thus, it is impossible to see how a democracy could ever secure the supremacy of law. If there were a group of privileged persons who had their constant stay in the state, then there could not be a consistent law that rules equally over every person. This is because those people must be specifically designated as above the rest within the law. For there to be a system with a consistent rule of law, it cannot be democratic in the form that people ever have an
actual choice. It also cannot be autocratic in the form that there are any privileged persons to whom the law applies differently than the rest of mankind. Thus there must be a combination of democracy and autocracy, no person can be specifically privileged over any other person and no person can change the law system that is based on objective principles. The only way to accomplish this is to separate law from the state, in doing so you achieve a scenario where no person controls the state with a mandate and is excluded from law by doing so. Each person would be equal under a law that never changes. There are no elections and no choice when it comes to the contents of the law can only really rule when it is static. Furthermore, within the state, there are always people who are in privileged positions, that means that they are people who control the state and who can use the state for their own gain in one way or the other. If they couldn’t use the state for their own gain, they couldn’t use the state for the gain of any others. Thus, they would not be in a privileged position, but they also wouldn’t be in a governing position. There is no solution to this problem either than to create a situation where those who are in a governing position are not in a privileged position. That is, the people who are in charge of the law and the enforcement of the law have no special privileges over any person who is not in a managerial position over the law. The only solution to this is to remove the managerial position when it comes to law from being legitimized by the coercive use of force and to put law on the same level as every other industry. We can have the managerial position of law be put onto the free market where each person is able to patronize the providers of law and
where each person is also free to not do so. Thus the people who are in the position that is traditionally one of governance become reduced to the level of every person who is not within the system of governance. In that manner, it is possible to create a situation where there are no privileged positions and there is real equality before the law. In any other system where law is exclusively controlled by a designated group of people, that law will not have any effect on those people as long as they remain in control of the law. The only way to create a truly fair and just system is with the abolition of the state and thus the abolition of any central monopoly over law. The only way there can ever be a rule of law is if there is a real supremacy of law in which there is no institutional privilege. The society without the state is both a democracy and also an autocracy, it’s a government but it’s also the market. It makes everyone equally subject to law without any exception. It synthesises the lack of privilege inherent in democracy and the lack of pressure groups inherent in autocracy. It also makes the government the subject of the law like any other person without exceptions. The law will reign supreme over any person who is the custodian of law, law cannot be tainted by the will of the masses and law cannot be corrupted by the strength of the few. This liberty and this real rule of law eliminate everything wrong with every other system of governance as they eliminate the fundamental problem in the systemization of governance. This form constructs an organic structure based consistently on the law and a structure where there are no exceptions to the law. People can choose to ignore the law, but only when no one else wants to follow
the law, when they come into a society with people who are ruled under the law, they become subject to that same rule as every other person within society. Thus this stateless society cannot be described as an anarchy, it’s not based on purely voluntary principles of co-operation. The lack of the state would create a ruthless despotism, an iron-fisted rule of the objective law, the most consistent law will be the dominant power without the state. The folly of men will always sway the state to pursue paths other than the rule of law and the state inherently cannot secure that law will rule. The state is war, the law is order.
X – Against Taxes The arguments against taxation libertarians make are usually moralistic in nature and lack proper economic evidence. Here, I aim to make a compelling economic case against taxation and against all taxes. We, as libertarians, may make a lot of noise about taxation being theft and talk big about how much more moral it would be if people weren’t stolen from. But this doesn’t help us make a case against the moral relativists and pragmatists. Here I will present multiple economic arguments against taxation. You cannot create value out of thin air. Even with inflation, there is a limited amount of goods in a given economy and those goods are valued at different amounts. Money in every situation can only serve to represent the things the money could buy. Money can represent the assumed value that the economy has for the percentage of the total monetary reserves embodied in the money unit. This is more complicated in reality as money itself has some degree of inherent value due to speculation and wide acceptance, however, this framework serves well for making the following point. When there is a limited amount of goods in the economy, and money comes from people within the economy, it must represent some degree of goods. Included within those goods is the supply of labour in the economy and everything else that can be said to have any degree of value. This means that the money taxed can come from two real sources, physical goods or the labour of someone who sells it in the economy. In a less contrived way, all units of money taxed are units of money that would otherwise have been spent on
real goods or real labour and that represent real goods and real labour. “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” is a good principle to keep in mind while exploring this, money comes from people’s pockets, even when the state appropriates that money. This means that when money is taxed, that money would otherwise have gone to the owners of goods and labour. Money doesn’t come without cost from a source of infinite wealth, but directly from the people who sell goods and labour. These people who produce goods and provide labour are directly hurt by being taxed, as taxation is not an exchange. Even though they may get some degree of benefits from being taxed, it is only tangential due to the lack of consent. If there were no taxes, it then follows that private individuals within the economy would have a larger supply of goods and a larger supply of labour to spend on themselves. From this, we can conclude that even if taxation is not theft, it has certain victims. When there are victims, there are benefactors, and those benefactors are the people within the government and the groups that ensure that the people within the government have their power. The government is then the benefactor of all taxation either directly by the officials in the government getting paid, or indirectly by the government paying people who keep the officials of the government paid. This means using government influence for votes or government collaboration with people who are wealthy enough to pay for the use of government force. The government could spend money on the people who pay the taxes, but there is no real reason to do so. This is unless the people taxes are spent on vote for the current government and keep the government officials paid.
We may say that economically it’s better if the government and the favoured groups of that government have more money than the private individuals within the economy. We may explain this with some sort of mystical explanation that makes the government different from any other economic actor or that gives government as government some degree of inherent virtue, but doing so would be extremely uneconomic. We may then say that the pressure groups favoured by the government are the groups that should be favoured and that the government is good as long as it provides for those groups. But if those groups are supposed to be favoured, we may drop all pretence of markets, property and the rule of law. However, most every person even casually interested in economics knows the incredible significance of these three factors. There can be an argument for taxation on the basis that people would not spend their money as they should spend their money. Without taxes and the government, there could be an underproduction of many vital services. Common examples of this include police, health inspection, military, and welfare services. However, to assume that there would be an underproduction of these things would be greatly erroneous. People on the market allocate their resources in a fashion that they think will benefit them. When a great amount of people think that some service at a given price will benefit them, they allocate their money towards that service. They may be mistaken in their decision and they may allocate their resources in an inefficient manner, but by allocating their own money they have demonstrated the preference towards what they think should be produced.
The government has no such mechanism, so when we assume that there will be less of some service without the state, we may say that the service is currently overproduced. This is because people themselves are not allocating their money towards the service[1]. If it is true that when these goods are released to the market they will be underproduced, we will still see the economy eventually reach an equilibrium and we will see these goods being produced at levels that we would consider normal or proper. This is simply the supply and demand within the market working together to get the price level to a point where the market clears and there are no people willing to pay who are left unsatisfied. Underproduction can really only take hold when we assume that supply and demand have no effect on the level of production. The important part here is the fact that the people who have to spend their money on goods and thus ensure that they have sufficient goods are the only victims if there is insufficient demand. Without taxation, no one else has to subsidize their use of goods and they will be left without these goods and have to themselves pay for whatever costs they previously imposed. With the government, there is no such punishment or reward, the government gets rewarded when the people under that government think the government is doing a good job. This belief of whether the government is doing a good job or not is not founded on anything other than how much the government benefits a person at the cost of some other person. This is where we again can use the economic logic laid out above to demonstrate why this is so. When people vote, they do that, economically speaking, in order to allocate the wealth of the government to issues that the voters think are important. Since there
are limited amounts of resources within the economy and all resources of the state are taken from productive economic actors, the state can spend its money for a limited amount of purposes. These purposes should be those that ensure a re-election for the people within the government or job retention for bureaucrats. Thus, the government will spend money to the benefit of those who vote for it and to the detriment of those who do not. The people who judge the success of any government will judge it by how much it benefits them at the expense of other people. This makes it much easier for there to be inefficiencies within the state, the state doesn’t care about how people would have used their money if they had to put their money where their vote is. The government allocates the wealth of people according to the votes of other people, it even appeases people who don’t themselves contribute money to the government. Even if this is not a moral ill, it is undoubtedly a tremendous economic inefficiency. The government can have no way of knowing in which way the money they have would be spent in order to make the most efficient decisions on the market. People who have to use their money for things they want will be more acutely aware of what will affect them positively or negatively. And it has been the case empirically. There is a lot of fraud and inefficiency within any government. When we look at anything the government does, we see massive amounts of waste. There are always massive costs that have need to materialize, it is common for the government to have extremely bloated budgets for services that people don’t even want. We see the government bailing out private
businesses and unions so that they will continue wasting other people’s money after being bailed out. One of the best examples of inefficiency is taxation itself. Contrary to what people may think if they have never had any experience in the industry of taxation, there are a lot of transaction costs involved, taxation itself isn’t free. Even if we assumed that the government spends tax money more wisely than the individuals who otherwise would have had the money, the money that goes to collecting taxes could be its own tax. A fifth of the money spent on taxes a year in the US goes to hiring people who figure out how to pay those taxes. The state also has thousands of bureaucrats on hand that they need to pay to support taxation. Furthermore, there is constant change in tax laws created by different local, state and federal entities, all of which cost money to maintain and all have employees who collect salaries to change the laws pertaining to taxes. Trillions of dollars are wasted on these things, it’s utterly ridiculous just how expensive complying with taxes is and this is all money that could have gone to productive uses. This is just the money that the state costs people beyond taxes. The state would have to be many times more efficient than individuals who currently handle the money to be worth the cost it takes to pay taxes. The state could severely simplify the tax code, but this is politically undesirable because undoubtedly the unemployment caused by reducing the costs of taxation will create a nominal recession and drive down wages. The state can’t cut back the costs associated with taxation without collapsing in on itself, wanting to eliminate most of this waste will eliminate most of the state. Politically, this question is unsolvable, most money will be wasted until taxes cease to exist.
And whenever there are taxes, there are people who don’t comply with taxes, these people need to be persecuted by the state to not have everyone become tax avoiders. This will always be a cost no matter how easy paying taxes is, there have to be audits, records and thousands of people working on things that don’t really benefit anyone. Obviously, this helps collect the taxes, but in itself, this does not produce any material goods, as taxes can only allocate resources in a different manner than they were before and do not create any additional value within the economy. Allocating money can be useful when done carefully, but this is not how the state does it. And as previously discussed, there is no such major increase in efficiency that would make this transaction productive. The efficiency of the state is lesser than the efficiency of private individuals. In other terms, people have to pay the government so the government can collect more taxes. And again, this is not to make any concrete moral argument, but rather simply to point out that collecting taxes requires first that people pay the government enough to manage doing so. This means that whenever there are taxes, there will always be people who are taxed in order to collect taxes. I touched upon this above when talking about bailouts, but all taxes have the effect of allocating money to people who will waste the money. This is not implying that poor people are all spenders who have no skills in money management whatsoever. But rather taxes aid the lifestyles of the people who can’t be productive and can’t manage their own funds. First, we can take any service the government provides to the population. Since people are not taxed the exact same amount[2], the richer will pay more taxes in real terms
under every politically viable tax scheme. When the government uses the money from the wealthier population to provide services to everyone, the government allows for the existence of bums and other similar people who would otherwise have to take responsibility over themselves. Furthermore, there are giant amounts of personal and corporate welfare programs by the state, the state pays for the people who can’t pay for themselves. For some reason, not being able to take care of yourself is such a virtue that the people who have no actual skills and don’t bother to increase their human capital deserve money taken from other people. For some reason, business-owners who can only make money using political methods are entitled to the money of the people who actually worked for it. Furthermore, bankers who have squandered money entrusted to them have a right to the wealth of those people who had to pay that money to the state. All business-owners, bankers and poor people don’t have these traits, there are people working to get themselves out of poverty and developing their human capital. There are businesses that actually profit from benefiting consumers and there are even bankers who are honest. However, when the state helps people who don’t have good traits, there will be a reduction in the cost of having negative traits. People without good characteristics will not have to develop good characteristics, they can be miserable and unproductive as long as the state pays them because they are miserable and unproductive. A lot of the people who these taxes are collected from are people who are not productive and who get their wealth via the state. The
state taxes the people who it privileges so a portion of the people taxed are people who are privileged. But this is all made up for by the money collected from people who are not privileged by the state. And when honest people have to pay for people who are subsidized by the state, there is certainly waste in the economy. When people get money for not being worth anything, more people will cease being worth something and there will be more people who get money from the state. In this way, the state separates the best private citizens from the worst private citizens and punishes the best. But this is not even the end of the problems caused by taxation, bureaucrats who can’t get jobs in the private sector can get higher paying jobs in the government. These have much less responsibility because bureaucrats are heavily regulated to make them able to do as little as possible in order to have the most bureaucrats possible. There are thousands of functionaries who do nothing and get paid more for it than if they were to do productive labour on the free market. Furthermore, the state pays politicians, who are known to deceive for their own benefit while actually not being productive members of society. And no matter what the state does, this will be the case, the state cannot selectively provide a service to only the people who are net tax-payers unless the state charges a head tax. Even in that case, the people with larger assets will get more of a benefit from the state defending those assets, this will still lead to a problem. Since the state cannot accurately discriminate in the provision of services, it must provide services to people who otherwise would not have gotten those services at the price the state charges. The
redistributive effect of the government applies even when there is no welfare. There are many cases where workers can’t survive because they need to pay taxes. For people who aren’t working class, this is rarely an issue, they have enough money to pay for their necessities. However, for people who are not wealthy, taxation poses a huge problem. We could remove all taxation from low-income individuals, but then we would have to also remove all taxes on capital, sales, imports, and employment. If we try to shift the tax burden to anything other than a higher income tax for the richest, the workers will still be the ones that are hurt. And if you raise taxes on rich people, they can leave the country and leave the others completely stranded. This will also hurt the poor. First, there are the taxes on capital, this would seem odd because working people are unlikely to own a lot of capital. Thus, workers are unlikely to be the ones who need to pay the cost of capital. However, there are three factors that go into this, the first is that the people who employ workers are those who have capital. Taxing capital will certainly take away work from the people who don’t provide value worth the additional tax on capital. Secondly, with reduced investment in capital, there is a reduced amount of actual economic growth, which reflects poorly on the people in society who most need growth to live a decent life. And finally, workers benefit from there being more capital. When there is more capital, there is more demand for workers. This is already implied by the first point but is important enough to mention separately. Next, there are sales taxes and employment taxes, sales or consumption taxes are commonly known to be regressive, they
affect the poorest people the most. This is because the poorest people buy the most things while the richer members of society invest more. This is bad for poor people, employment taxes are all additional costs of hiring people, they can only be paid from the wage of the taxed person. This is because the value produced by the worker is limited and the employer is unable to pay more than the worker produces profit. All taxes on employment are taxes on wages. And finally, there are taxes on imports, these benefit domestic producers of goods and allow them to pay their workers higher wages or take more profits. However, these workers and every other worker will also be negatively affected by the lack of affordable foreign goods. They can’t use the goods that other people produce for cheaper somewhere else. For wealthier members of society, paying a premium for domestic goods isn’t bad, and the additional cost is mitigated for the workers in protected industries. However, these protected industries will be the least efficient industries, since they need protection. Thus it’s unlikely that this effect will be significant on the economy as a whole. In any case, workers will be hurt by any and all taxation on imports. There is no need to twist words or come up with tax schemes that actually benefit workers, workers are the main victim of taxation proportionally. Even though they are net tax consumers, it is in large part for services that they don’t personally need. Poor people can’t afford to pay for imperialism, they want cheaper and less regulated goods so they wouldn’t have to starve. Furthermore, welfare only reduces the character of poor people within a society. The best way
to help poor people using taxes is to get rid of taxes, however, this says nothing about the way capital relations ought to be organized. There is still an argument that some amount of services need to be provided by the government and thus there have to be taxed for these services. The goods that necessitate government are public goods. To be a public good, a good has to be both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. To be non-rivalrous, the consumption of a good can’t impose a cost on another person who uses the good, that means that the good is not limited to a certain amount of users. To be non-excludable there has to be no easy way to exclude people from consuming that good. If both of these conditions are met, a good is considered to be a public good and public goods are supposed to be provided by the government, or they will not be provided at all. But this theory doesn’t hold up, when a good is non-rivalrous it means that there is no cost imposed upon another person in the consumption of that good. But if that were the case, there would be no resources required to provide this good. People could sit on an empty train and not cost anyone anything, but the builder of that train would still have to pay for the train that these people are using. Furthermore, there aren’t infinitely many people who can sit on this empty train, there is at some point a limit at which more people can’t sit on an empty train and the good becomes rivalrous. A better example is the notion that police is not rivalrous. When an additional person is under police protection, there is no extra cost. However, if this was true, one police department could police an entire country, since this is not true and there are additional costs for providing services to additional people, we must say that all goods are rivalrous.
The second notion is that of excludability, there are two actual ways of approaching this, first is how it’s used with law and order, that is the positive effects would spread to the entirety of the society. This means that people can’t be limited and prevented from getting the benefits of a service. This notion is defeated simply by pointing out that everything that creates wealth has some degree of positive externalities from that wealth. Living in a wealthier community benefits the people within that community, yet people don’t stop creating wealth. This is because there may not be a way to internalize these positive externalities, but the primary benefactors are benefitted enough to make up for it. The second argument is used often with roads, it would cost more to prevent people from entering the road than would otherwise be earned, thus making it pointless to exclude anyone from the road. This is defeated by the notion of public goods themselves, when people aren’t excluded from these places, they will not be produced, thus making it more valuable to produce roads and exclude people from roads unless they pay. I find it hard to believe that the logic of public goods applies in the face of all of these objections.
XI – High Trust Many would have libertarians believe that individualism is contrary to creating a society built on trust. There’s a widespread notion that individualism will erase any social order and that individualism will incentivize behaviour that creates negative externalities. However, empirically this has not been the case and there is evidence that has connected individualistic attitudes to higher trust societies[3]. But here we need to differentiate between multiple different types of individualism before we can go forward. The individualism I’m talking about is ethical individualism, that is putting yourself at a higher standing than any other person, even if you value their lives above yours. This may seem like a contradiction to an ordinary onlooker, but this chapter is not the place to discuss that. The second type of individualism is social individualism, that is avoiding any and all social dependence and pursuing independence without any regard to the society, this is destructive to any given society. Furthermore, there is the strawman individualism, where critics presuppose that individualism means wanting to reduce the living conditions of others for your own good, this is plainly false. This is not to say that independence cannot be conducive to society, however, one cannot build societies while being divorced from them. With ethical individualism, you find the strongest social bonds forming, provided that there aren’t social or institutional obstacles to those bonds. Immoralism and other such attitudes in society will weaken and destroy this effect of increased social bonding. But whenever there is a society that encourages virtue more than it
encourages vice, the social conditions of individualism will create the strongest ties. This is because they are formed out of each person’s own free will and they make each person depend on social conditions as much as possible. Since people pursue what they perceive will make them the best off and since people often are accurate in their assessments, these connections formed in an individualistic society will not be weak. Because these connections formed are formed for a mutual benefit, one can expect there to be a great amount of trust. This is if no one thinks he owes anyone else anything and knows that others are trustworthy people. However, when connections are formed in other ways, you can’t expect them to have the same sort of interpersonal connectedness. This is because these ties are not formed by mutual benefit in the relationship. Furthermore, individualism allows each person to fully benefit from the social connections he has. If each person is not allowed to internalize the benefits he gets from socializing, then he is disincentivized from socializing. An important part of trust is homogeneity and there are two aspects in the notion of homogeneity as it relates to creating a high trust society. The less controversial one is that of cultural similarities. This should be fairly obvious, when people share similar values, they find it easier to interact and they can trust others, provided that they are in a culture that prioritizes trust. The second, far more controversial part ties into the first. All cultures aren’t characterized by trust and the cultures that facilitate trust are usually white, western cultures[4].
If you can’t understand the language another person is speaking, you obviously cannot ever trust them, if you can’t understand the cultural standards of that person, you will never share the same view of right and wrong. Even more so when your own culture clashes with another culture in terms of judging virtue and value in humans, this means that the society will be divided and not cohesive, facilitating an environment of greatly reduced trust. When two cultures are combined in one society, there is no chance that they will not be incompatible in one or more ways, multiculturalism at its premise is completely unworkable if we aim to create a society where there can be trust. And the second reason why this is true is that cultures are formulated in conjunction and because of different genetic influences. Due to evolutionary pressures in different ecosystems and climates, genes change in humans when they are in different areas of the world, these genes affect the culture and they create the basis for culture. Furthermore, even if a member of a genetic group comes into contact with the culture of another, they still have the genetic incentives of their original culture. This means that it is important to have both cultural and ethnic homogeneity within a society to allow people to have a high trust society. When there are different ethnic groups within a society there are not only clashes in their incentive structures, but political clashes because of their differing group affiliation. The same applies when there are different cultures, but is not limited to only cultural conflicts. In the history of humanity, whenever there has been a cohabitation of different ethnic groups, there has been some scale of ethnic friction if not outright conflict. This in itself reduces inter-ethnic trust
and ensures that having multiple ethnic groups will always reduce the general trust in a society. Not only do we want a society that is monocultural, we want an ethnically separated society, at least if we aim to incentivize higher trust. The last important aspect of a high trust society is the virtue embodied within the character of the people within that society. If the people in a society are prone to theft, lies, fraud, or other forms of destructive behaviour, the society can’t be expected to have any degree of trust within itself. This means that to increase trust in society you must first create a society that incentivizes virtuous behaviour in that society. There must be some degree of persecution for people who don’t conform to the standards of virtue expected within the social order. This persecution can’t be one of force, but rather of universal exclusion and social shunning, this is necessary to purge the society of all undesirables in a non-violent manner. In this way, you can greatly increase the trust in your society. When people know that their neighbours are generally upstanding and honest people who have no desire to cause any harm, people will know that it is safe to interact with their neighbours and other people within their society. Furthermore, this decreases the amount of vice in society, which leads to people themselves being of a higher caliber and being able to form stronger social bonds than they could before. Virtuous behaviour also tends to greatly decrease the time preference within a society, the people within that society will prefer present goods over future goods to a smaller extent. By doing so, people are more willing to invest in themselves and their society and they are able to create additional opportunity for social bonding and
then use social bonds in a healthy manner. When there is more investment in a society, there are more opportunities for connectedness. But why is it so important to have a high trust society? It may seem intuitively obvious that trust is a good thing, but it may be hard to grasp at first. The main point usually raised is that an increase in trust greatly reduces transaction costs; the need for law, defence, and other such services to ease transactions is greatly decreased. This is because there is less crime as people are more trustworthy. Furthermore, agreements and contracts are made with better outcomes as people who trust others are less likely to break contracts. However, there are more ways high trust societies increase prosperity. When people have support networks, which will be created when people are more trusting, they are more connected to other members of their society. This will also ensure easier access to economic opportunities. Since a lot of economic opportunities are reliant on risks that other people take for you, you will need someone else to ensure that there is some guarantee that you will be effective at what you will be paid to do. In a society where there is higher trust, this is countless times more likely to happen, as the people within that society will rely on the judgement of others more easily. Furthermore, the others who can give that judgement will interact with people and not just keep to themselves, this creates not only the realization but also the creation of these economic opportunities. And as a final point, an increase in trust will ensure stronger property rights, people have less risk of having their property violated. When people create the conditions for a high trust society,
they will be less inclined to steal and those who are not fit for the high trust society will be excluded. This would create the atmosphere of “leaving your front door open at night” and countless other conveniences that the people within any given society greatly benefit from when it comes to strong property rights.
XII – Liberty, Property, Society An accusation against libertarians is that they’re anti-social because they do not want the state to be a coercive agency for the groupcollective. Since libertarians prefer voluntary means to coercive means, the assumption that people make is that libertarians are antisocial. This is because libertarians oppose violence without exceptions even if it is on the behalf of a society. The fiction of the progressive era stating that society has to be formalized and curated by the state still affects the way people view the world. Furthermore, it is implied there is no reason why someone could prioritize his own interests or want to protect his property unless he simply hated all other people within his society. However, contrary to what these people may believe, we can formulate a simple causal relation between liberty, property, and society. This relation follows from liberty and will create a system that is consistently able to demonstrate why libertarianism results in the production of society. Libertarian societies must have increasing social interaction and strength, libertarianism is not something that goes against society. The ability of each person to make their own decisions strengthens the right to own property, which increases the quality of social organization. Liberty and society are not contradictory principles but rather complementary moral foundations. And when we have established the causal relations that link liberty to society, we can also establish why statism is detrimental to society. First, we have to define what we mean by liberty, the libertarian answer to this is that liberty is the ability to make choices that do not
impose a cost on anyone else without being restrained from making those choices by force. Since liberty is not the capacity to make these choices nor the ability to impose costs on anyone, it is not to be confused with other conceptions of human freedom. In other words, we can say that liberty is the ability for all to self-determine. This does not imply having an ability to make negative choices without having anyone interfere with you through non-violent means, but simply the capacity for each person to do with his life what he wants to do without being stopped violently. Simply put, liberty means that each person holds the power over what he himself will try to accomplish in life. Since each person decides what he will accomplish in life there arises the question of mediating disputes when different persons want to do similar things when they are constrained by limited resources. Since resources cannot be duplicated without cost and resources are not superabundant, there is a necessity for there to be some rational way to allocate limited resources to individuals in the form of property. This is necessary so that individuals would have the power to actually make those decisions that allow them to control their own lives. First, there must be a consensus that each person owns themselves. No person can really control the actions of another person as each person is able to mentally resist any command. There may be great costs imposed on those who resist commands, but this does not negate the fundamental selfownership. This means that each person can fundamentally only own themselves, at least if we wish to avoid conflict within the structures of property that could otherwise arise. When each person owns themselves, they logically also own whatever they themselves
can acquire without imposing any costs on anyone else. This is the notion of private property. Since each person is fundamentally in control over their own lives and their own property, they will use their own life and property in such a way that they find to be the most beneficial. Humans are social, to a large extent personal fulfilment is heavily tied to the social interactions that each person engages in. Since people would be able to completely self-determine, they are able to allocate their resources in ways that best advance their own well-being. This does not mean withdrawing from society for most sane people but rather increased engagement in society. People do not work to increase the size of their gold reserves, but rather to provide for their families or to be able to engage in social interaction. This may be having personal social connection or engaging in larger acts of social entertainment. And the notion of entertainment is, more often than not, a social phenomenon in itself. Most people will always only properly enjoy entertainment in a social context. This means that when each person is given a right to their property, there would only be more wealth invested into societies and the wealth would be invested without inefficiency. This is contrary to investment by the state where funds are allocated to whatever the state feels it is important to invest into. Liberty would create a free, thriving society like none other simply because people are free to choose how they behave and what is done with their resources. Since humans are social beings, this must result in an increase of social behaviour. The notion that individualism results in social isolation and the notion that property rights commodify relationships are functionally myths. People highly value having
relationships and engaging in social interaction and are willing to do what they can to achieve a satisfactory level of social interaction and to engage with their groups and communities. To say that liberty and property go against society is to ignore the basic fact of what it means to be free and to own what you rightfully should own. Furthermore, economic relations are also a part of society as much as other relationships are, these may not be the pure relationships many idealize, but they are still important relationships. With the growth of corporate culture, we ignore the fact that there is actually more to economic relations than just unfeeling corporate structures. For most people, workplaces are conducive to socialization. Local economic transactions lead to favourable interactions. When economic transactions are more formalized and are removed from the local community, social effects from economic actions are greatly reduced. When additional centralization affects the structure of businesses, socialization is less prone to happen. But even despite this alienation, economic relations are important parts of peoples’ lives. And this is ignoring the tremendous personal gain people get from mutually beneficial exchange. We need resources to survive and getting access to resources in such is vital if we are to have a society at all. It’s easy to paint a picture of how furthering capitalism and increasing property rights will also create worse corporate structures, but this is founded in myth like most other anti-capitalist claims. When each person has a chance to assert themselves and to fully control their lives without privileges or handicaps, they will not live in such a way that results in them belonging to corporate structures. The centralization of capital is wholly or partially the result of some
form of government interference or another. Free people never benefit from centralizing capital without significantly higher material profits. People, if given a choice, benefit from thriving local businesses and decentralized economic relations. When there is no institutional violence that centralizes the economy, these free people are completely able to organize economy along the lines that are the most favourable to them. Furthermore, clearly defined property averts the conflict that arises from ambiguous and conflicting rights to property, when each person has a full right to their property, there is no friction over the issues within the system where negative externalities are not internalized and where the state can infringe upon private property. A good example of this would be the fact that people would not need to be afraid of the police if the police did not hold an extralegal position. The police can currently do things that would be illegal for any other person. If the police were to be bound to the same constraints as the rest of us are, then the police would be parts of society and not outside the society. In this fashion, no one would have to fear the people who are supposedly protecting them unless they themselves were criminals. This is the western ideal of law enforcement being subject to the law and being impartial actors within the legal system. This sort of freedom can only result in a better life for everyone. Even from a swift examination, we are able to establish that when it comes to society, liberty is beneficial. We could possibly say that there are other economic and political problems which make libertarianism unsustainable, but we cannot assert that libertarian societies are not desirable. I see no way to make a logically coherent
argument that could imply that a lack of liberty and a lack of property could create a better society. However, there is still the issue of how coercion must create a reduction in society and how there must be a causal relation from a lack of liberty to a lack of property from which we can derive lack of society. And this in itself holds up if we use the inverse of the logic to what we used to demonstrate how liberty has a direct causal relation to creating society. When people do not have liberty, they cannot self-determine and this also means that they must not have complete control over their property. Whenever people are not able to selfdetermine, they must first lack the ability to control their property, otherwise, there would be no problem with that self-determination. In this manner, property in itself creates liberty and it is not that only liberty creates property. Ambiguity in property rights must result in social ills. First, the members of a society will be unable to agree on how property is to be used and imprecise property norms must imply that multiple people have claim to some property owned by a person. This, by necessity, creates conflict which in itself causes the society to deteriorate. Furthermore, people themselves are not allowed to allocate their resources in such a way that generates society. That allocation of resources must be anti-social as any other entity who tries to engineer a society must rely on the individuals engaging in that society. Since the individuals themselves are not in control of that society, there is no way in which those individuals can contribute to that society as much as they would have previously. Centrally planned societies can never replicate authentic societies.
Anti-social safety nets and spending on supposedly strengthening communities by the government must be distinctly anti-social and must ultimately go against communities. If the government had not spent money as it did and had the people who own the property been able to control where their resources go, they themselves would have undertaken this by charity and community investment. The state must always destroy society when it takes away the ability of people to create a society. A society is fundamentally created by individuals interacting and not by the state investing money by sheer guesswork. People are brought together if they themselves can undertake projects and when they can self-determine as a society. People need to have the ability to decide the fate of themselves and their posterity.
XIII – The Family in Capitalism For some reason, there is a notion in far-right circles that capitalism supposedly destroys family. We have seen the quality of family decline in a capitalist society, so capitalism must be to blame for the decline of the family. This doesn’t logically hold up and I will combat every aspect of this notion in the following pages. This hopefully serves to make a convincing point that capitalism strengthens and does not weaken the family structure. When a person is born, he is born with nothing other than the genetic potential within him, he is completely propertyless. This means that any person must be taken care of by his family, children too young to work need adults who can provide them with the resources to survive. A child doesn’t begin to accumulate his own property until he’s quite a bit older. This means that if there are welldefined property norms and a lack of guaranteed social assistance, as would be the case in a libertarian social order, the child would have to rely on the family. If the state took care of the child or if the community did, the family would begin to break down since the child does not rely on his family. When the state takes care of children, children become dependent on the state. If you replace free exchange and familial autonomy with statism in the rearing of children, you will not see a flourishing of family, but rather the breakdown of family. The familial structures that you would otherwise have cultivated by the need for family by each party will now be replaced by ties to the state and increased state control. You may view this as a positive outcome, but if you are to then complain
about the breakdown of family under capitalism, you will be caught in a contradiction. By taking this position, you want a breakdown of family under statism. Furthermore, when the child becomes an adult, it’s extremely hard to live life without any support from parents or other initial capital. The child will need to be on a good standing with his parents if he wants to find himself in a position of moderate wealth and opportunity when he becomes an adult. This further strengthens the family and reinforces the need for familial relations. If these opportunities were provided to the child by the state, he would have no reason to cultivate a proper relationship with his parents and would instead be dependent on the state. And as a final point, when adults retire, they need to have children to provide for them and to take care of them. They could amass large pension funds, but no matter what happens, pension by itself is unlikely to provide a proper living condition if they were not extremely wealthy. Furthermore, when old people are left alone, they will be faced with the threat of being sent into an eldercare facility. This is always a fear if they have not cultivated a good relationship with their children. When the state is involved and aids people who have no children or who are on a bad standing with their children, it will end up being easier to be on bad terms with your children. So not only are children economically reliant on their parents in the system of capitalism, but the elders are reliant on their children to provide for them when they are too old to take care of themselves. To do that, they must first have a good relationship with the children. If you want the state to support the elders in the society and take care of the retired, then you are actively undermining the family. It should be the
role of no one else other than the children and grandchildren of old people to take care of the elders. There are still supposedly three behaviours that capitalism supposedly incentivizes that are destructive to family. These are childlessness, hedonist lifestyles, and women in the workforce. I will break down how capitalism punishes and does not reward these paths in life and how it’s absurd to suggest that capitalism is the cause of these problems. First, we can look at childlessness, this seems obvious, children cost money, under capitalism you need to provide for your own children, thus people will have fewer children and rather spend their money on themselves. The first point is countered by the fact that someone has to pay at some point under every system, so if it was a direct correlation between low wealth and childlessness, then it would be reflected empirically. What we see instead is that people who have a low income are the most fertile and have the most children, so this notion is countered. Furthermore, capitalism ensures that most everyone has enough money to not have their children starve, provided that they seek gainful employment. We can easily demonstrate this by looking at historically capitalist and less capitalist countries. The second point is that somehow capitalism directs people to use their money for themselves and not for their children, this is half true, capitalism lets people use their money in any way they want to. However, this doesn’t mean that it incentivizes any particular use of money. In a healthy civilization, people have a great desire to have children and to propagate their own genes. This means that capitalism will result in people having as many children as they please if the society itself is healthy. However, when a population is
propagandized and infiltrated, it will not be healthy and will not even produce the children that are required for population replacement. This is not to say that “unsustainable” birthrates are inherently bad. The only reason for why that is so is the welfare state and mass migration, both of which are programs of the state. But here it would seem like the far-righters have one argument, if we want to incentivize having children shouldn’t we make people poorer? Furthermore, shouldn’t we provide incentives to eliminate childlessness? But this is just fixing a symptom of the problem while creating more problems, if you wish to actually fix the problem itself, you must target the cause of the problem and not the effects of the problem. The causes of the destruction of the family are those cultural attitudes which result in degenerate lifestyles. Furthermore, capitalism supposedly creates a sort of hedonist selfishness that will lead people to focus on their physical well-being and happiness and to never have children. I have seen no proof for this being the case. There is no compelling argument to explain this other than that capitalism does not actively prevent hedonist lifestyles. Capitalism itself is supposedly responsible for people living in a hedonist manner due to the lack of prevention. But this would mean that capitalism is also responsible for any virtuous life that people could lead. And I would simply answer that if you aim to fix these attitudes, you need overarching social change. It is necessary to ensure that the society itself does not become corrupted, using the state is a temporary solution for a deep, underlying problem. And finally, there is the more compelling point that capitalism pushes women into the workforce and that so there is a need for fascist economics to avoid this phenomenon. This argument has a
compelling point. Capitalists are directly benefited by there being a surplus of labour to make those who own capital able to lower wages in the economy. This would eventually correct itself and, given enough time, the supply of capital would reach the demand for capital. But capitalists hold political power in an unfree market. We can say that when the capitalists hold both political and economic power, capitalism has inherent forces that destroy the family. This cannot be achieved with economic power alone. There would be no way to force women into the workforce and keep profits from increasing the size of the workforce. However, in a free market, the capitalists cannot prevent additional capital from entering the market and cannot alter the amount of labour in the economy by incentive structures. Furthermore, it is simply profitable due to the division of labour for women to stay home and take care of the children while the father works. This is for multiple reasons, usually men earn more since they are more productive and more willing to work longer hours. Women are more apt at taking care of children and more emotionally attached to the process of child-rearing. Thus, if a couple aims to produce healthy children in a good family with enough wealth, that couple needs a division of labour that would fit the strengths of all people in the family.
XIV – The Case for Tradition Libertarians often shy away from tradition in order to retreat into libertine hedonihilism. This is the sort of mindset the modern left thrives in and is the most comfortable with. These fundamentally leftist moral foundations lead the libertarians to ignore what benefits tradition could potentially bring. Here I will present why we need tradition from a strictly libertarian context. This is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of tradition, as I am not even nearly qualified to undertake an endeavour like that. The first important part of tradition is how tradition is the only sustainable way of creating functional familial structures. Healthy families are necessary for a free society to prosper. Making the assumption that a free and prosperous society is possible while there are no familial structures to embed people with virtue and ensure the stability and emotional maturity of all people within a libertarian society is misguided. To completely ignore the positive role family plays in the lives of the people within any society is to ignore what creates a functional society. A counter-family framework is unworkable as a basis for any philosophy. If you want people to be emotionally and mentally healthy, the greatest basis for that is to have strong and healthy families. And this is only possible if you cultivate healthy family structures within society. All other structures in society are derived from the family. This means that if you have a society without the individuals in it having a healthy childhood with proper socialization through their family, you have a society where individuals are highly dysfunctional and unable
to have social relationships. Any society must have order and all societies must have virtuous behaviour to be competitive and function. We may aim for anarchy politically, but anarchy socially is nothing other than a detriment to the people within a society. If we define anarchy by the abolition of the state, it doesn’t mean that we need to abolish all hierarchies and that we can’t support strong institutions that ensure that people within a society have values and principles that go above personal lives. If we aim to create a society that values creation over destruction and which creates liberty and enforces property, we need to first create a strong and beneficial institution of family. This institution cannot be created by promoting the recreational use of heroin or asking questions about children consenting. Degeneracy might be ideologically justified, but ultimately it should be absolutely irrelevant for libertarianism. When there are healthy families children won’t consent and most people won’t consume heroin. If our goal is to create a world full of heroin-addicted child prostitutes, we may want to destroy family and tradition, however, this would be misguided. Every society is organized along some lines, even a society with no coercive power system creates a system of exclusion, rules of interaction, and other norms to stabilize social life under the system. These social foundations may be implicit or explicit, however, they will always exist and thus we should make sure that the everpresent organizational principles result in a society that produces the best quality of life for the people involved. The libertine recoils at this statement as he firmly believes that all people should be left alone to be as degenerate as they want to be and no person should be bothered by any sort of moralism. But even the libertine must
function within a society and that society will have organizational principles. We can see how even the most anti-authoritarian and individualistic systems have these principles and create norms of purity and expected contexts for social interaction. We cannot have an expectation that this is not going to happen in a free society and we cannot expect everyone to stop caring about society. This means that we need some guidelines for organizing ourselves within society, preferably on a completely voluntary and individualistic basis so each person is able to maximize their own happiness and satisfaction with life. If this takes place, then the society will be organized in such a manner as to be the most useful for all people involved. And here we must differentiate between the two types of individualism that people may fall into. One is more accurately described as isolation and the other is described as independence. By individualism, I don’t mean isolation, but rather independence, each person making decisions that primarily are for their own benefit and the entirety of society functioning according to the lines where people benefit the most themselves. Since each person benefits from a healthy society, the independent individuals will encourage other independent individuals to form a society that is organized in a way to provide beneficial institutions. Tradition is able to organize societies according to principles that secure the best conditions for the people to whom the traditions apply to. Culture and patterns of behaviour are fundamentally influenced by the way that children have been brought up so society naturally trends towards ways of life that are traditional. Thus it is only beneficial to adopt the local system of tradition for any
unique group of people who have their own history. Having an intergenerational exchange of wisdom is important and needs foreign interference to be stopped. And tradition is not to be understood as the corrupted American concept of tradition. So-called family values, military histories, and constitutions do not constitute a historical basis for organizing society. Rather, tradition is the all-encompassing concept of the cultural heritage and the knowledge of all people involved in those traditions. Tradition is the manifestation of the cultural group that created the traditions. No matter what some young conservative may try to tell you, homosexuality and other such non-traditional lifestyles are relatively small issues. When you consider the entire nation, the centuries of history within that nation, all the events, customs, and unique norms that civilization has developed for itself, contemporary issues pale in comparison. Simply put, tradition is the spontaneous historical order of a nation and to not respect tradition would be to not respect proper social structures. I will leave the most important point as last, but before that, I would like to mention that tradition is appealing to the actual people who we should be trying to appeal to. We don’t need to pander to virulent leftists who don’t want to live in a libertarian world. The people who currently share most of our values also have more traditional values than libertarians currently do. The liberals in Europe and the constitutional conservatives in the United States, both the most mainstream libertarian demographics, hold national and traditional values as being important. We may have our intellectual echo-chamber, but this is not the same as having actual appeal. If we want to ever get anything done we need to appeal to
people who have more values and more aspirations than doing cocaine and not paying taxes. Rothbard touched on this in right-wing populism, he implicitly stated that a platform built to attract the white working class based on right-wing ideas would be a good way to create a libertarian movement. And this will include a lot of traditionalism, nativism, and chauvinism there’s no way around this if we are ever going to appeal to the white working classes. Libertarianism cannot be an ideology created exclusively in think tanks by people who have no energy to actually campaign or cause meaningful change. If we want to get rid tradition and all parts of society that the working class appreciates, then we need to get used to never winning and always being in a complete lull. What makes this even worse is that the few energetic parts will be too busy trying to distance themselves from traditionalists to have any energy left to create a movement. The only way around this is to at least begrudgingly accept traditionalism. Furthermore, the laws of property are only the bare minimum for life, no one wants to get old and be alone with a wealth of material goods. No one thinks they lived a good life because they saw economic growth and were able to accumulate money without being taxed for it. Human beings are not this materialistic, trying to remove everything that makes us human and replacing it with simply property has no actual basis in human society and will not do anything other than secure a loss for libertarian ideas due to them being counter-human. There’s no reason why we should avoid the human parts of humanity and only focus on the narrow economy. The final point that I need to make is that there is no way any individual can justifiably be so arrogant as to say that they can
contend with the centuries of wisdom on how to live your life and how to achieve meaning and happiness. Of course, people can have their ideas and people can know things better than people before them did. But centuries worth of accumulated knowledge and guidance on how to live your life will most often be better than what you yourself can come up with. It may be true that there are some parts of tradition that are completely wrong, which means that those areas need to be changed. But this does not invalidate the entirety of tradition. Furthermore, we can directly see how straying from tradition most often increases unhappiness in people. It may seem as if traditions constrain. And to some libertarians constraints are always to be avoided since these libertarians can’t see the value of generalized rule systems other than the nonaggression principle. However, when a person follows tradition, he is simultaneously following the advice of all of his long-dead relatives and every other person who ever lived in his society through history. All traditions in all societies are vaguely similar in certain aspects. Obviously, there are giant differences between the traditions of different continents and different races, but still, we see similar threads woven between them. It would have to be a complete coincidence if all of these places came up with similar arbitrary systems. If tradition had no basis in reality, there could be no way to explain why traditions also tend to make people happy. And traditional lifestyles do not make people unhappy as the progressives would like to believe. Housewives were a lot more satisfied with their life than businesswomen are now. Heterosexual relationships where the couple waits until marriage are some of the happiest relationships. This list goes on and on and we can see
demonstrably how following the advice of thousands of years of social evolution leads people to happiness and leads people to lifestyles that are prosperous. This applies to every area and it is a transcendent reality in human life. Tradition as a whole is an allencompassing system, to reduce it to a few issues is to reduce tradition to a shell of itself. To treat tradition as oppression and to act as if humans should sacrifice their own satisfaction for social liberalism is to destroy society.
XV – Community, Tradition, Liberty Over the past few decades, the Overton window has shifted heavily towards progressivism. Even conservatives are shifting to the left and adjusting their ideas to whatever is the current acceptable opinion. Liberals and progressives are getting more and more antitraditionalist as they complete their previous agendas and feel as if their communist plans could go even further. Libertarians ceaselessly pander to leftists, so much so that even the libertarians who are personally very conservative feel the need to hide their beliefs behind a veneer of ethics and objectivity. The libertarian intellectual who goes against this trend the most is Hans-Hermann Hoppe and he is constantly chastised for his outspoken traditionalism. In Democracy he makes the claim that conservatism (as simply the return to a natural order, and not a political philosophy) and libertarianism are naturally fit for each other, yet doesn’t elaborate on it much, rather assuming it to be obvious to others. Here I will make the case for why tradition should be integral to liberty. Furthermore, this essay will also focus on why libertarians ought to care more about communities. It should be obvious to everyone that libertarianism is based on individual liberty which further means that every individual is free to do as he himself pleases if he does so without affecting others. However, this in itself has a problem which many correctly point out. When people are not bound to a social system, then those people are in danger of forming loose and low-quality associations. This can lead to degeneracy and a downhill trajectory for the entire society
these people are in. In contrast, when there is a set of values and a set of principles that are above people, these people can be as free as they themselves wish to be within the confines of this system and they will not fall victim to this degeneracy. To demonstrate this we can assume two different orders that different libertarian societies could produce and then contrast them with each other. In the first society, there are no societal incentive structures, the relations between individuals are fairly loose. The individuals choose in which form and with which people they associate without any external influence. When there are no pressures to follow any particular paths in life and when there are no societal roles imposed upon people then we can expect these people to be socially disconnected. They will not have a regard for how they impact other people within a society. This social individualism isn’t contrasted necessarily with social collectivism, which is as poisonous if not worse. Individualism should rather be contrasted to social communitarianism, in which individuals relate to each other as communities. The society which subscribes to social individualism will not have social support networks emotionally nor economically. This is because the people in that society have no regard for what the other members of their society are doing. This implies that opportunities are heavily limited. Libertarians may mistakenly view isolated social actors as an ideal, but social capital is necessary for people to have economic opportunity. If libertarians actually want to increase real economic growth, they must admit that there needs to be some degree of interdependence in society to create opportunities. Furthermore, when there is social cohesion, all members of the
society can relate to other members and have larger social circles. This is a positive factor for mental health and personal satisfaction with life. Furthermore, even if we assume that there are perfect property norms, the problems with transaction costs will not disappear. People are not able to transact without obstacles and inherent costs. With less social cohesion, property rights are constantly violated. This results in a society that tends to be illibertarian. Property norms are, in many ways, created by trust and community and we need to not be social individualists to achieve these things. To this miserable form of society we may contrast a libertarian society that follows the principles of social communitarianism. Social communitarianism does not imply that each person should pursue the happiness of his fellow man to his own detriment. This sort of communitarianism does not even mean that all persons should relate to each other as social class-entities. communitarianism simply states that communities are parts of identity. There is an intermediary construct of the community when people relate to each other. Each person considers themselves subject to his communities to some degree. These communities should, of course, be voluntary and not imposed upon the people who exist within the society. But whilst being in these communities, individuals would be subject to the norms of these communities. First, since people live under rules born out of a general social consensus of acceptability, they will not relate to each other as independent entities. People will rather interact as social and interdependent entities. Since people in the same community have similar patterns of behaviour, they can form stronger and higher
quality social bonds with more ease. They are not subject to social individualism. This makes it easier for people to get better and more fulfilling social experiences and bond with people more intensely and intimately. Furthermore, since people use community as a way of relating to one another, they have a basic network of people that are a part of their social capital. Since they have people who can aid them and since people are a part of a community, they are more likely to find economic opportunities and support. In essence, people can prosper more because they have support and they will find compassionate or interested individuals who are ready to aid them in their endeavours. And this is only the beginning of the benefits that come with community. When there is social cohesion within a society, that society will have people with similar norms and similar patterns of behaviour, and this is not only limited to the community. When people behave similarly and norms are universal within a whole society, there can be more predictability. When virtuous behaviour is incentivized, there can be more trust within society. When there is more predictability and when there is more trust, economic calculation becomes much easier than it would have otherwise been. People reach a more perfect level of information and people reach a more perfect level of property rights. And as we know from neoclassical or austrian economic theory, this increases efficiency in the market. People need moral values, there are no people who can function on purely pragmatic grounds in their personal life. Moral values help people strive for the goals they themselves choose, when people aim to reach something, they need to create a moral ruleset that
would aid them in that struggle. Even more so, people need morality in order to simply be able to feel as if the world does not lack meaning. When people have higher ideals, they are more likely to have a degree of purpose in life. Without moral values, the only real outcome can be a ruthless nihilism that leaves everyone in a state of personal disrepair. This applies to any society, all societies need some sort of values or they will become broken. When the individuals in a society hold very conflicting values or no values at all, the society will be in perpetual turmoil. Thus, for any society to function it must not only be united by economic and personal connections, but also ideological uniformity to some degree. Without these general social principles that are accepted as good and valid, there is no chance that the society itself will not be degenerate. The members of the society must be members of a society and not simply people who benefit from some people. Virtue requires some restriction on shallow individualism so as to maintain a society, this is to each individual’s ultimate benefit. But social values should not be just any values, they must be values that in themselves increase virtue. When these values are neutral or create vice, the people in that society would benefit more than if these beliefs were held separately and not socially. To really increase the prosperity in any society there must be an increase of virtuous behaviour. All societies are organically built for virtue unless they are usurped by foreign entities. This is because people who increase vice will be selectively discriminated against, as most people aim to achieve a greater state of virtue.
This is why tradition is one of the greatest tools available to humanity. In the span of thousands of years, the dialectics of tradition have reached a state of increased perfection. Traditions are not simply born out of some random events or random conditions, but rather created to increase behaviour that is considered virtuous. This is not the case with all traditions. Some traditions are created by institutions and premises that themselves take vice as a virtue. Traditions can be faulty when the social conditions that created them are not conducive to virtue. Here we can take for example the traditions of islam. The islamic religion has stunted the development of non-white caucasians and islam has created parasitic traditions upon these people. And more than just tradition, the people of a nation are united by their shared history. Because of different political and social events in different areas of the world, the people who live in those areas are united with other people in their geographical areas. Historical conditions create social attitudes and traditions that only other people within the same ethnocultural area understand. We must also remember that tradition is not some static entity, everything involved in what it means to have tradition is fluid to some degree. It is highly possible that institutions of the past created traditions that are imperfect or that the changing economic or political conditions change the premises of what is virtue or what is vice. It’s also possible that in the process of creating tradition, there was some degree of error which the current generation could fix. However, this doesn’t mean that traditionalists should be more like modernists or progressives. There is no need to abandon previous values to appease some minority within the population, the change
of tradition is not to create better conditions for a few. Tradition ought to be changed to free many of some oppression or past mistake. It is completely possible that the subjugation of a group can benefit the rest of society. This is not in any way illibertarian as long as force is not involved. If we want to create a libertarian society, we don’t want to create something that will collapse. Freeing people is much more beneficial when these people can be virtuous and healthy when they are free. When people get to choose what paths they will take in life and when there is no actual force used upon people, they will create what is described above. Because of this, any society that strives to seek liberty in the libertarian sense must also have other principles to increase virtue and improve society. This is not being an interventionist or a busybody, but simply a common sense way in which people interact with each other. This doesn’t necessitate a state imposing these values, but rather the society itself being organized around them. The reverse goes with traditionalism, in order for people to be able to find happiness and prosper within a traditionalist system they must be allowed liberty. When people are forced under a strict social system in which they have no real choice or liberty, they are unlikely to function in a way that doesn’t involve some sort of subversion of the social order. When people are not free to do as they wish and when morality is imposed institutionally and not socially, they are unable to pursue the paths that would make them satisfied with their own life. This causes conflict, these people can subvert the entire social order and function within the anti-social realms that are kept
away from all knowledge, or they can be miserable for the entirety of their lives. Furthermore, these institutions themselves will by necessity subvert tradition if it ever turns out that tradition is not the most beneficial to the institution. When institutions don’t allow liberty, these institutions themselves will do whatever is best for themselves and will not follow any solid principles. This is because when people in power can decide what other people will do, they are usually unable to choose principles over the narcotic effects of power. They also can’t ever accurately know the values of those people who are not in power, this is simply because humans don’t have the ability to know the minds of other people. This will eventually corrupt power as such. If we want a virtuous society that stays libertarian and prospers, we must take up some degree of traditionalism in our ideology. This should not be a simple matter of personal beliefs and choices and we should not only be united by our beliefs in property. We need discrimination to create virtue and tradition to ensure that we succeed in doing so. There are countless other spiritual and social benefits to tradition but I will not go into them, as they don’t directly relate to liberty. A complaint that we could face is that this approach is impractical, libertarians already tend to be socially left and we need moral leftists to achieve a libertarian society. But using hedonists to create libertarianism will only result in a wreck, they will infiltrate our movement and will destroy every attempt at a libertarian society if we let them in. There can be no libertarianism that’s combined with progressivism and which will actually work in any meaningful
manner. It may succeed in creating a degenerate, hyper-sexual and perpetually drugged social condition, but if that’s really what libertarians want in their society, then libertarianism is undesirable. If you aim to transform the world into a giant orgy you can embrace both libertarianism and progressivism. If you want decay and degeneracy within your culture, there is no better way to reach it than to embrace both libertarianism and progressivism. If you wish to have a world where people have confidence in their property, where people have economic opportunity and where people are satisfied with their lives, you need tradition, you need virtue, and you need history. You can’t let people be free to indulge in every vice they have, by doing so you will have undermined the entire purpose of capitalistic liberty, you will have gotten rid of the best reasons to be libertarian. If you can’t guarantee prosperity and if the only explanation for how you will benefit people are theoretical economic arguments that ignore how voluntary actions may have negative externalities even whilst being non-violent, you can guarantee nothing. Liberty by itself is an empty concept and needs virtue to create an aristocratic society
XVI – The Two Laws of Nature In the niche sphere of radical politics, you find two very contrasting American intellectual traditions with their own notions of what is the natural law. American white nationalists and fascists occasionally claim that the law of nature forms a brutal order of self-defence and racial animosity. Radical libertarians interpret the law of nature as something that guarantees rights to each person. I would propose a synthesis of these two laws of nature to combine them into a proper set of moral values. This could form a social order that is a combination of libertarian and extreme traditionalist-nationalist values. Furthermore, this synthesis is highly similar to classical concepts of natural law which combine both personal morality and rights. This is largely a thought experiment although I do sincerely believe that both sides have their own merits when it comes to interpreting what is the law of nature. All parts of this essay do not reflect my personal beliefs. The small far-right tradition of natural law fascism starts by examining basic human urges and the behaviours of animals. Animals capture territory, act as a tribe, are ruled by the strongest, and relate to one another hierarchically. The fascists then assert that man is nothing more than an animal himself and from these laws, you can determine what each man ought to do in a society. If men act according to natural law, the society is healthy and follows the nature of man. A man should be allowed to capture private property like all other animals do, as that property is the territory of the man. And since a man is an animal like any other, we can’t expect there to
be a fair allocation of resources as such a thing does not exist in nature and goes contrary to nature. Instead, as with any animal, a man will act in order to benefit himself. But a man will also look out for his own tribe, the people who he himself is connected to through genetic relations and social organization. This tribe has extended, the fascists say, to the race and the nation and any healthy society would act as a tribe consisting of an entire race and nation. The tribe would have unitary goals to an extent and form a network of social organization that benefits the good of everyone within the tribe. Man then forms an organization in the form of the state that can take care of the tribe and aggregate the tribe into one entity. The state created to unite the tribe should not be ruled democratically as democracy is in opposition to nature, it is not natural for each person to get a say when it comes to politics. The state that controls the tribe ought to be lead by a dictator, a man who can command the entirety of the tribe through his own fortitude and his own good character. The strong dictator is simply the way in which it is natural to organize and thus if we were to institute mass democracy, it would only be in opposition to the nature of man. Democracy is not just and any form of popular government is a perversion of human society as it excludes the strongest from rule. And finally, each person has their own position within the tribe, we should not all be free to do as we want and we should not be able to self-determine without restrictions. Our choices should be limited to what best contributes to the social hierarchy. If we can’t contribute to the hierarchy, then we should not expect the ability to do as we please and we should go back to the status which is the best suited
for us. And this is not a bad thing, it’s not like any status is worse than another even though the relations between all social roles are hierarchical. Each class of people in the hierarchy have their own vital roles and should stick to those roles if they are unable to relate to each other in any other way. The worker should not tell the boss what to do and the child should be subject to their mother and the mother of that child should be subject to the father of the child. But this ethos goes further than describing a fascist state, it goes on to examine the metaethical nature of human existence through other moral values. First, these ethics assert that it is natural for each person to sire families and that going against the drive to reproduce is an immense violation of the fundamental nature of man. Secondly, these ethics go on to describe that the rights one has in society are not given to that person by any other person, but rather obtained only through force and conquest. Natural law does not imply natural rights but rather natural duties, one of them being the duty to defend your own rights. And as such this system of natural law concludes that not only should each race and nation function as a tribe, all races and nations are opposed to one another on the basis that they are different tribes and need to function as such. Libertarians take a diametrically opposed view of the nature of man. Libertarians deny that the animal nature of man is what is natural. Instead, libertarians aim to construct their natural law from the rational parts of man as reason is the distinctive part of man. This will spawn a system of law as men are reasonable beings and can relate to each other on a level deeper than just the animal. This specific ability to reason is then integrated into the social system in which each man can be rational and relate to one another as
reasonable beings. Usually, these ethics manifest in different proofs with the end goal of demonstrating that when we use reason, we create the best possible organizational structures. We can determine by reason how violence is not a rational mode of organization and how each person should own the property they manage to improve. And we can determine from the nature of reason that these behavioural principles are not subject to personal opinion. What we find is an eternal and unchanging natural law that can lead us to the greatest legal systems. This natural law is not derived from the animalistic part of man, but rather the part of man that transcends the animal. No matter whether natural law is derived from God or evolution, the capacity of men to reason can be the only thing that determines the law of nature. Libertarians don’t say that there is any such thing as a natural duty[5], the libertarian natural law exclusively grants rights. These rights cannot demand that any person does anything for anyone else, as that goes against the right of property. This law ensures that each person is entitled to not be interfered with by other persons. Thus, these natural rights demonstrate how all coercive actions are against the very nature of man and how each person should be allowed to live peacefully. Anything which goes against reason goes against the nature of man and reason can demonstrate how each man is entitled to hold property over his body and how each man has property over his improvement of the world. Since each man rightfully owns his property, he can defend this property and not be in the wrong. This means that, in an ethical sense, any person who tries to go against rightfully owned property is always wrong.
It can seem as there is no compromise between these two radically different systems of categorizing natural law. However, they both descend from a similar line of reasoning and from that we can find a compromise between both ideas. What we need to recognize is that the arbitrary step in the fascist logic was the conclusion that the tribe translates into a state. We also need to acknowledge that the libertarian logic saying that because aggressors are morally wrong, property is a right is an empty tautology. It does not matter whether or not an aggressor is morally right or wrong if the aggressor is able to overpower you. In the same way, a human society does not imply a state unless we descend into moral relativism. When we get rid of these two concepts we have a synthesis that combines the rational nature of man and the animal nature of man, creating both a moral and a legal system. Of course, the animal nature of man cannot create rational laws and we cannot rely on instinct for an organization of society beyond the moral. However, we also cannot rely on the rational parts of man for more than the legal. This means that we can combine the morality of the fascistic natural law with the rational legal system of the libertarian natural law. And if we presume that both of these are grounded in reality, we will find a system which should fit both the animal and moral nature of man. First, since we can’t use the moralistic tautologies of libertarianism we cannot say that this law system can necessarily be based on selfownership or full ownership of property. Rather, natural law can then only be a pragmatic system of law which deals accurately with dispute resolution. This eliminates a lot of the conflict many people have with the system as it doesn’t immediately presume that the
state is unjust or that some forms of organization are preferable to others. Rather all it states is that people should be able to secede from larger political entities and forms an outline for dealing with crime on the basis of compensating the victim. The fascistic natural law no longer requires a state but rather says that each person should act by what is moral in accordance with the nature of man. Each person ought to value their tribe, know their place in society, attempt to form a family, and defend themselves. This is not to say that each person can succeed at all of these, there are certain inherent limitations, however, these things should be required for living a perfectly moral life. The tribe does not have to be a race or a nation, the tribe would rather be the community in which you find yourself. It does not matter if the community is organized around the nation or around an apartment complex, it boils down to individual attachments or the lack thereof. One may object to this morality on the basis of the fascist origin of it, however, that would not be a valid objection as it ignores the content of both of these moral systems which solve a lot of the inherent problems in fascistic and libertarian thought. First, the libertarian legal system has the ability to solve disputes in an optimal way with the least amount of violence and the most amount of justice. The libertarian system is based on rationality and not any other consideration, resulting in the closest thing to an objective legal system. This greatly increases economic efficiency and allows for a society of individuals to flourish without fearing corrupt systems. The fascistic moral system is complementary to the amoral legal system of libertarianism. However, while integrated with the libertarian legal theory, it doesn’t fall into the trap of creating a
system based on violence with rulers that are unable to practice good statecraft. Fascistic morality is based completely on filling the urges of man and does not regard any other consideration. Fascists do not value the filthy or depraved urges or pretend that those are worthwhile, they rather strive for those desires that lead men to greatness. Fascism doesn’t consider any other factors than simply inspiring virtue and creating a society where each person can participate without fearing social exploitation or displacement. We cannot say that caring for your community and accepting your rank in the social hierarchy won’t lead to greater social satisfaction. When people know where they belong they tend to be much more satisfied as they don’t feel a compulsive need to change. Furthermore, the characterization of man in the fascistic moral system helps each to go beyond their life into something great.
XVII – National Socialism and Libertarianism The national socialists or fascists and libertarians are often seen to be the most antagonistic of all ideological positions, yet we see libertarians and fascists intermingling more and more in recent times. There is even a prevalent notion that libertarians are specifically prone to becoming fascists. This means that there must be something that could drive a person who used to believe in propertarian freedom to move towards an ultranationalist position with no seeming regard for any freedom at all. I would like to propose that when it comes to premises, a lot of national socialists and libertarians share the same principles and ideas, which allow for a substitution of one ideology by the other without a significant change in perspective. The first value shared by both fascists and libertarians is the notion that society is supposed to be organic. Any outside interference in society only serves as to deteriorate society. However, the outside influence the libertarian is concerned with is the state while the fascist is concerned with corporations and jewry. But these are just organizational structures and have no relevance to the basic form of the society. It doesn’t matter, sociologically speaking, whether the highest economic actor is the individual businessman or the fascist leader, both embody different kinds of organic societies. The fascists assume that the state is a manifestation of the society and thus should interweave itself with society to maintain it and to ensure that the society is properly functional. To the fascist,
the state is an organic construct if rightly understood. However, from the fascist point of view, the state has been usurped by democracy, jews, or communism and thus has ceased to be representative of the people and of the organic society. A subverted state is instead directly contradictory to the society they wish was to be not interfered with. As a reaction to this interference, their policy is to replace the current state and institute an organic state. This will supposedly undo the decay caused by the previous order and to create a condition where society can organically thrive without democracy, jewry, and communism. The libertarian wants a similar organic society, but the organizational practice of the libertarian is the opposite of the fascist. Instead of trying to establish a reactionary state in place of the progressive state, the libertarian wants to establish a social order that is itself built upon the natural order embodied by the free market. In the free market, the libertarian finds similar value as the fascist finds in his total state. The market can selectively eliminate all parasitic entities in a society making the state unnecessary. The market defeats parasitism by allowing free association. If any such association becomes value-destructive, people are similarly free to disassociate. In this form, the underlying premises are the same in both cases. However, the organizational structure seems to be contradictory and thus people assume that the fascist and libertarian positions must have more fundamental differences. However, the national socialist position is simply spontaneous order as manifested through the state. Some national socialists even acknowledge the natural order and subscribe to their own natural law philosophy. This too is
reminiscent of the way libertarians want to take people at their nature and not create a new form of human[6]. Libertarians would prosper in a fascist society and vice versa. The difference is in the fundamental methodology. Both nazis and libertarians share a complete opposition to parasitism. However, the innate differences in ideological methods of examination have led them to different conclusions about who the parasites are. The choice of this methodology is influenced by various different premises. However, the differences are contrary to our current purpose if we aim to establish why there are commonalities and why there seems to be this much ideological fluidity between the positions. An opposition to parasitism is fundamentally the demand that no person gets out of the system more than he puts in, this is the fundamental fact that both libertarians and national socialists hold in common. Where it begins to diverge is in the different examination. The libertarians examine the state and deem it to be contradictory to the principle of reciprocity. The national socialists think that the state rightfully sets the boundaries and laws of the nation. Furthermore, both national socialists and libertarians know that the state is pure, naked force. However, the libertarians think that this makes the state inherently parasitic. The fascists counter by asserting that the state may be a pure manifestation of force, but it is state-force that allows for society to exist. The fascists then point to the capitalist system which currently allows for worker exploitation and jewish control over national populations. According to them, this is the real parasitism.
Thus, coming from the same premise, these two positions end up at two different conclusions, neither of which is directly exclusive of the other. Once might theoretically acknowledge jewish, corporate, and state parasitism. However, there are now two radically different ways to rid ourselves of parasitism. One can aim for increasing the rights of each individual man, make men more free so they can shed the shackles of parasitism. The other way to resolve the issue of parasitism is to change the role the state plays in managing society. One can aim to take control of the industry and society of a nation in order to violently purge parasites. The fascists think that changing the nature of the state so that it combats parasitism would allow for the state to theoretically not become parasitic. The hypothetical fascist state is fundamentally created only from the base interest of the nation. Since both philosophies aim to eliminate parasitism, it doesn’t take much for a libertarian to become a fascist or a fascist to become a libertarian. The only important thing is a change in the nature of the examination with no different base assumptions for examination. Another shared commonality due to an opposition to parasitism is a total intolerance of communism and communists. This very strong common thread leads both ideological positions to be able to intermingle using their opposition to leftism. However, this does not mean that libertarians are similar to fascists or that it is necessarily libertarian to intermingle with fascists. The fundamental principle of libertarianism is one of property. Libertarians regard all systems that go against property as being antithetical to life. The national socialists and the fascists assume that the nation is or should be the most important value held by each
person and thus each person should be responsible for their nation. These premises are in no way contradictory and one could easily adopt the premises above and be some sort of mix of a libertarian and a fascist. This is at least if he adopted a form of examination fit for both positions. However, since both sides reject that the other can share their premise I will herein include a reasoning for why the fascists are not necessarily against property and the libertarians are not necessarily against the nation. First, no fascist regime has ever done away with private property. Fascists understand the importance of having property management in private hands and having people gain the benefits of their selves and their labour. What the fascists don’t do is assume that the theft committed by the state is contrary to this principle. And make no mistake, the fascists often acknowledge that taxation is fundamentally the same as theft. However, this taxation that would otherwise be plain theft is used to increase the splendor of nation which otherwise would not have been invested into. This is ultimately for the benefit of the people. Thus, fascists don’t oppose property but simply subjugate property to the nation and are more concerned about the nation than about property. Libertarians take the exact opposite approach since they take property as a premise, they don’t think that nationalism can be an excuse for removing property from private individuals. This means that libertarians are opposed to property being taken even if it improves the nation, which goes against the fundamental premise of the fascists. However, this doesn’t mean that libertarians are opposed to the nation, they often still understand the importance of nations and culture. Libertarians are not opposed to the nation being
taken care of by the people who the nation benefits. However, libertarians are more concerned about rights when it comes to property and are against the nation insofar as the nation threatens individual rights to property. And of course, there are national socialists who are opposed to property and there are libertarians who can’t stand nations. However, these both are fringe sub-movements and not sentiments shared by the majority of the movement. I would still wager that the vast majority of real-world libertarians have more conservative than progressive values. And national socialists are usually not socialists in the proper sense. They are rather socialists in the sense that the nation should come first and thus that there should be a socialism of the nation and not of private property. This doesn’t mean redistribution or seizing the means of production, but rather ensuring that the means of production create a better nation and that the nation will not decay and will be in a state of improvement. And as a final note, it is very easy to become disillusioned with freedom when one realizes for which purposes freedom is used. Because there are overlaps in the general worldview of fascists and libertarians, it becomes easy to simply remove the seemingly problematic aspect of freedom that leads to various ills within libertarianism. Thus, national socialism could be considered as being in the same branch as libertarian philosophy, just originating from a premise that has completely abandoned liberty and has placed the nation above property.
XVIII – Authoritarianism Versus Libertarianism It is fashionable to act as if there is a distinct and exclusive dichotomy between supporting authority and increasing liberty. I hold this view to be thoroughly mistaken in every imaginable way. To pretend as if political conflict is ever between liberty and authority is to completely misunderstand political conflict. Furthermore, to say that liberty and authority are mutually exclusive is ignoring what it means to have liberty and what it means to have authority. When we look at the meaning behind the words authority and liberty, we may see that some sources do define them as contradictory forms of social organization. However, when we look deeper into the linguistic implications and historical context, we see a different story. The definition of liberty becomes the ability to do what one wishes to do without restraint, this is simple and agreeable enough. The definition of authority becomes the ability to force other people to do what you wish them to do and the ability to hold some degree of control over an area of society. This means that there is a conflict between authority and liberty only in the shallowest sense, authority seemingly prohibits one from doing as he wishes, so it must be something that is contradictory to liberty. But we are able to find ourselves in a social order where there is a coexistence of both authority and liberty. This is the social order in which authority furthers liberty, the authority enables an elimination of worse restriction and heightens the state of liberty. There is also the case where people of their own volition choose to follow some sort of authority, there is no contradiction between authority and
liberty in either social orders. If these orders were to materialize, there can be a question whether authority and liberty are in conflict. The debate is only in the hypothetical realm as these philosophies are seldom practically applied. However, we must also admit that political liberty and political authority are contradictory by nature. Political liberty and political authority are unable to coexist within any area of the state. Whenever a sphere of society is political, it must be completely one of authority, the only perfect political liberty there exists is a complete abolition of politics. There is no consistent political liberty when the state is involved no matter if the political system is democratic or autocratic. This is since each person needs to involve the state in their lives to some extent. The difference lies in the structure of the state. Since there is no conflict between liberty and authority in a nonpolitical sense and since liberty and authority are completely compatible outside politics, there must be some other conflict that is not just this dichotomy. There is no inherent dissonance between being able to give commands and being able to act out of your own free will without restraint. However, we must then consider what conflict there exists and why commands could be objectionable. And this is the conflict between self-determination and violence, the conflict whether a person can decide what he wants to do or if others will force that person to do what he does not want to do. There is only liberty in authority when people are forced to do that which they would have wanted to done had they not been commanded to do it. The problem is not whether or not someone commands a person, but rather whether that person can choose to be commanded. The
problem is completely a matter of whether the person is free from violence or if that person is coerced in some way or another. This also applies to political liberty and authority, it becomes a conflict between coercion and self-determination. We can now say that self-determination is vital to liberty and that liberty is vital to self-determination. One cannot properly exist without the other, they are both integral to one another. We can combine the concepts as a wide notion of liberty. Thus we find liberty in conflict with coercion and not in conflict with authority. Furthermore, if authority helps defeat coercion we must then support the authority in order to advance liberty. We find ourselves with two potential forms of organization that would have seemed contradictory without adjusting our framework. When we move into the sphere of politics, there is a form of freemarket fascism and autocratic libertarianism advocated for by a select few people, this is the libertarian authoritarianism. Some say that it is desirable to have an authoritarian government which increases liberty for the population, at the very least in the sense of economic liberty. This may seem odd to many and perverse to others, but it is not at all contradictory with a proper view of liberty. It is easy to be misled by the enlightenment era, as we see a rise of philosophies that are libertarian insofar as they are anti-royalist. From the historical fantasy of this era, we find ourselves confined to linear thought where liberty and democracy are intertwined. There is no logical 21st-century theory to actually demonstrate how liberty and democracy can actually complement one another or how they do complement one another. Rather liberty and democracy are simply
assumed to be complementary due to the fiction of the enlightenment revolutions. If we support liberty, we must support any authoritarian system that advances liberty. To oppose authoritarianism because it is authoritarian is to completely miss every point when it comes to libertarianism as liberty is not an opposition to authority as established before. When strong command structures and a social order predicated upon a strong focus on authority can defeat coercion at large in society, then authoritarianism is more libertarian than perceivedly unauthoritarian structures. This may seem impossible. After all, when there are strong structures of command it seems like there could not be any room to exercise liberty. But this ignores human action and psychology. These strong command structures do not liberate people from command structures but rather give them the liberty to decide what they do outside authority. The scope of the authority of a highly hierarchical authoritarian regime may be significantly lesser than a more egalitarian or democratic regime is. Having an incredibly strong and hierarchical government does not imply that a government must be all-encompassing or that the government must be large. If an authoritarian regime can establish a military state which reduces coercion, the authoritarian state is advancing the cause of liberty. But the people who want to be left alone to practice their liberty are also the people who are viscerally opposed to being constrained by command structures. This means that they often overlook how these seemingly oppressive structures can actually benefit the ability to exercise control over your own life. A government that makes a few demands in a very authoritative manner should always be
preferable to a government that makes many demands in a democratic manner. Thus, this sort of libertarian authoritarianism is neither a contradiction or an inconsistent position to hold, although I personally do not believe that this is the optimal social order. The most fascinating part in this reconciliation of authority and liberty is the possibility of an authoritarian libertarianism, which is the philosophy I advocate for. A society where everyone can be fully in charge of themselves, yet a society that forms strong and steep hierarchical structures. These structures do not need to be based off traditional sources of power or traditional hierarchies. Rather, the division of labour and human organization will create hierarchical structures in order to properly organize society. The transformation from hierarchy to authority is simply a matter of hierarchy being institutionalized in order to form a proper system of authority instead of an order of temporary command. Many may now see this as somehow more unsavoury than traditional libertarianism, why should anyone go through the trouble of establishing liberty in the first place if it results in authority. But this still lies in the mistaken notion that authority is somehow an enemy of liberty and that liberty is incompatible with authority. Humans naturally follow authority, this is simply the way we work as a species and to try to counter-act this would be extremely naive. Because humans are a species that follow authority, it would be foolish to try to get rid of authority as that contradicts with the nature of humans who even respect authority to such an extent that they actively seek out authority. It must be recognized that all human society, if allowed to thrive, will be organized along authoritarian lines and not seemingly more libertarian lines. But this does not mean that
libertarian organization is contrary to the systems of authority. As established above, the various advantages of liberty can be combined with the innate authority in human society. All societies will have natural elites, people who are of a higher quality than the rest of society, these people will gain deserved authority over the fields that they have demonstrated merit over. And this brings us back to the division of labour, there is a subset of people who are naturally also fit to lead and to, in a sense, rule. However, this rule should not be state rule based on ruthless force and the exercise of power through violent means, this rule is entirely the rule by them as they have the status and the ability to exercise power. The authority within a libertarian system is not derived from force but from exceptional ability and a capacity to exercise control. And whether we want to admit it or not, capitalism itself is an incredibly authoritarian system. Contractual relations are nearabsolute and command structures must be followed if we are to have industrial production. It is true that with increased liberty, these command structures would become less centralized and less oppressive, but that does not mean that increased liberty would make these command structures any weaker. With an increase of liberty, all economic command structures would be significantly healthier and better maintained and even stronger than they are currently. They would be less degenerate and much more beneficial to those in the structures. Command structures are a part of the capitalist economy and we should be not ashamed of it. Furthermore, when in a libertarian society people are allowed to organize in such a way that they themselves benefit from, we will see organization that is extremely authoritarian in local communities.
Whether it be the authority of exceptionally wise people or whether it is around the church or a monarch who only has power through merit, there will be a large degree of authority within libertarianism. We may pretend that most people do not have a demand for authority, but in any real-world libertarian society, we would see a reformation and increase of command structures. This is still an incredibly worthwhile task to pursue as these reforged command structures will be much more benevolent than the command structures we have at the present moment. There is another concept, this sort of authoritarian liberty is not only inevitable when we achieve liberty, but also desirable. The Rothbardian or agorist method of organizing society along the lines of personal business relations is not the ideal form of social organization. It would be better if we were able to establish strong hierarchical and authoritarian communities within a framework of non-aggression and self-ownership. It is time to become disillusioned with the notion that there is no social need for rule and accept that it is proper and it is healthy to have persons who are respected and in managerial positions over the rest of a society. It could be more consistent in one form or another to favour the complete abolition of all of these structures and it could be more within the old paradigm to reject these structures, but we need a new paradigm. We do not need to follow the guidelines set by our intellectual predecessors when they promoted something that is idealistic and possibly wrong. This is not to endorse statism or to go against the principle of non-aggression, but rather only serves to reconstruct authority and governance within a framework of nonaggression and a framework without the state. Using institutional
structures that do not allow for the use of violence in any nondefensive capacity we are able to have a consistent theory that stands in opposition to any gratuitous use of force while endorsing very authoritarian positions.
XIX – Strong and Small Libertarians often act as if there is a correlation between the power of the state and the size of the state. The mistake they then make is assuming that this supposedly implies that the larger a state is, the more powerful it will be and the less powerful a state is, the smaller it will be. But this is a complete myth not based in reality and leads to a great deal of folly when it comes to political theory. First, a purely historical analysis leads us to see that the emergence of totalitarianism was only born out of weak states. Furthermore, there can be little argument that monarchism is one of the strongest arrangements when it comes to state power, but yet the monarchial states were smaller than the democratic states grew to be. Furthermore, fascism can be seen as the outgrowth of democracy as it tries to incorporate the monarchial era into a new paradigm where the weak state is seen as the leader of the people. There are four possible configurations when it comes to the state. Strong states could be small as they were in the classical era or large as they are in the totalitarian ideal. Weak states could be small as they are in the libertarian ideal or large as they are in current practice. Note how I describe the seemingly ideologically pure configurations of state reach and state power as only ideals. This is as they have never actually manifested in reality insofar as they have never been stable enough to keep existing. The totalitarian states could not actually control their population and experienced great internal strife whenever they went against the people. Totalitarianism has always created black markets. The political pressures put onto
small and weak states likewise force them to grow. Thus, a weak state corresponds with a large state and a strong state corresponds with a small state. This inverse relation would seem wholly unpredictable and it would seem to be a completely alien concept when we look at history and the state from a libertarian perspective. However, when we analyse this further we can see the reasons why this may be. Here I would like to define terms to prevent potential confusion, a strong state is a state which exercises hegemonic control and which has an increased amount of political authority over the people it governs. A weak state is one that has more democratic institutions and does not exercise authoritarian control over the people being governed. This is the sort of liberal state that the modern state should be modelled after. A large state is a state that encompasses many facets of personal and public life. A small state is only a state that has only control over a minimal amount of things within society. When we analyse the state, the most useful tool is the theory of public choice. This theory assumes that the state is as irrational and selfish as everyone else and that the state is not a hallowed institution without any faults. The people within the state have their interests and the people who influence the state do so out of some selfish interest or another, this means that the state can be represented as a confluence of various conflicting interests and not a monolithic entity. Since the state is in itself a coalition of multiple non-cohesive political entities, we must assume that the state will be a functionary of these different entities. However, when employing public choice, two things should become clear when we look at the state, the first is that when there
is a great multitude of interests, the state will expand. Second, the desire to increase the power of the state will either manifest as a strong state or a large state. In theory, the state itself would want complete domination to benefit its own interests, but this is untenable as discussed below. This is a shocking perspective when we consider traditional libertarian policy proposals which strive to reduce state power and to weaken the state at the same time. When a lot of people can aim to benefit from the state, they will do everything they can to have the state act so that the state will be beneficial to these people. And the state will seek to do the most it can for the greatest amount of interest groups that can contribute to the people within the state. The manifestation of this role as functionary is what determines the policy of the state. The people within the state want to increase their personal power and wealth. Thus, the more interest groups have access to the state, the more the state will expand. Catering to interest groups will always be a good excuse to increase the size of the state. Whenever given a choice, the people embedded within the state will always strive to expand the state as the state expanding will increase their own personal power. When a state is weak, the greatest amount of interest groups have access to the state, the strongest state is subject to the least amount of foreign interests or group interests as the state is an authority in itself. The state has hegemonic authority and as such is not subject to increase the welfare of pressure groups and as a result will not grow in size and scope. When a state is weak and has more democratic control over the population, it is far more vulnerable to interest groups as the state in itself is not an entity that has great
amounts of power. This means that the weak state will look to interest groups to increase its own power, the stronger the state is, the less it will be subject to any other interest than the interest of the state. When the state only looks out for the state, it will not expand as it does when it looks out for various interest groups. The state does not directly benefit from expansion. This is the second point, when the state tries to retain and gain power it has a choice of whether to make the bonds it has more hegemonic or whether to increase the amount of people subject to the state and to integrate the state into personal lives. This means that the state will either expand or the state will increase its strength. When the state has hegemonic power it will function as a smaller state for the reasons described below. When it comes to control, we must realize two things. First, when a person is fully in control of himself, he will have the strongest possible form of control. The more decentralized control is, the stronger that control is. However, when some people have control over a vast amount of people, they can only exercise weak control as they have no direct way to compulse all these people. Furthermore, because the state seeks control over even more facets of life, it will be even worse at actually controlling the people under its jurisdiction. When the state has a lot of power, the state can only have that power over a few areas until the power begins to weaken and the authority of the state begins to diminish. Liberal states must be strong or they will cease to be liberal. This leaves two potential forms of the state in the real world, the first is the familiar modern state that functions as a casually totalitarian anarcho-tyranny, it exercises no law over itself and it does
not protect the population. However, the state still creates giant amounts of legislative law and tries to expand into all facets of life. People go along with this state not because they are threatened in reality, but rather insofar as they would be exposing themselves to risk. The other condition of the state is liberal autocracy, an extremely powerful state that has domain over very few areas of life. Thus, the state will ensure that the law is properly enforced and that the population is defended alongside the few other duties it might have taken upon itself. As such there are two types of states, a tyrannical state that functions within an anarchy and a liberal state that functions within a structure of autocracy. This is heartbreaking for the libertarians who seek to approximate libertarian philosophy within the framework of the state and are not radically opposed to the state. Any libertarian who seeks to reduce state power and reduce state size must favour a complete abolition of the state. Furthermore, the authoritarians who advocate for a more libertarian order are holding the more sensible position when it comes to what the state ought to do. The state cannot ever be a fully constitutional libertarian republic and can only be a liberal autocracy or a lawless despotism.
XX – Libertarianism and Fascism[7] This essay was originally published on ZerothPostion.com in the form of an article. There has been a great amount of error in the way that libertarians handle their analysis of fascism. The first mistake that many libertarians make is assuming that the combination of different ideological perspectives is dependent on policy and not the fundamentals of philosophy. From this, libertarians often imply that fascism is about centralization and boundless idealism, while libertarians accept people as they are and favor decentralization. Some more simple-minded people also think that fascism is about authority and state power while libertarianism is the complete opposite. This may be true when we look at policy proposals, but policy cannot be the arbiter of ideological coherence or ideologies themselves. We need to analyze the premises of different ideologies if we are to analyze how compatible these ideologies are. This is necessary because ideologies are fundamentally systems of thought and analysis flowing from basic premises. A person using an ideology is a person looking at the world in a certain way and proposing policy positions from that set of value judgments. To illustrate this, let us consider the example of Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman is claimed by both libertarians and neoliberals as representing their ideologies. This means that both libertarians and neoliberals see Friedman as using their methods of analysis and looking at the world in the same manner that they do. But here we
find a contradiction; there appears to be a problem if we are to place neoliberalism and libertarianism on a scale of politics. First, we have to establish that there is a connection between Rothbard and Friedman when it comes to libertarianism. That is, that one could draw a straight line from Rothbard to Friedman on a political scale and it would naturally follow from their ideological positions. This may be done, one can see that both men respect property rights, advocate for reducing the size of the state, and wish to increase the freedom of the market. But one must also draw a line from Hillary Clinton to Friedman, as they are both neoliberals. Both are cosmopolitan, fairly progressive, and advocate for a sort of economy that is not only free but also open. Although they differ in their degree of state intervention, one can ideologically connect Friedman and Clinton. But there is a problem, in that no such connection is present between Rothbard and Clinton. There is no consistent line that could connect Rothbardian thought with Clintonian thought. Their philosophies and perspectives are mutually exclusive. There is no principled alliance or synthesis between them, only alliances of convenience may exist. However, when it comes to Friedman, there may be a synthesis between these ideologies. Both Rothbardians and Clintonians will have their criticisms of Friedmanites, but Friedman’s position is palatable for both neoliberals and libertarians. This is because Friedman used both the premises of neoliberalism and the premises of libertarianism. He analyzed the world in a way that followed from the neoliberal desire for openness and personal freedom and the libertarian desire for self-determination and liberty.
We can boil down these two positions to this: the neoliberals want looseness while libertarians want property. Neoliberals tend to favor whatever makes national identity, economic policy, or social cohesion looser. Libertarians tend to favor whatever makes property rights stronger, whether it be selfownership, non-aggression, or property rights in external objects. Coming from both perspectives, one would both appreciate property rights and self-determination but also a loose society without national identity or strong social norms, and this explains the desires of leftlibertarians. Friedman was first and foremost an economist, so we see more of the propertarian side of him, but he was also a neoliberal. We have already established that the libertarian premises are selfownership, non-aggression, and property rights. Libertarians tend to favor whatever increases the power of the property owner over his justly owned property. But what do the fascists take as their premises? Contrary to popular belief, it is not opposition to property or to personal liberty. No fascist regime has ever gotten rid of property and the personal liberty question has only been a policy proposal, not something most fascists believe in strongly. There are some fascists who are against property, but they are few and far between and have never had a strong presence in a notable fascist government. In fact, most fascist governments suppress these leftwing variants. In fiction, some fascists are opposed to personal liberty on principle, but these are not reflected in reality; the closest real approximation are people who believe that control is necessary for virtue. But in that case, the premise is virtue rather than control,
as the fascist does not want control for the sake of control. To really understand the fascists, we need to look at fascist movements. In Italy, there were the national syndicalists that eventually became the fascists. They believed in creating a pseudo-syndicalist economy that combines worker interests and business interests to reduce class conflict. They also believed in strengthening Italian society and creating an incredibly traditionalist social order. The Nazis shared the second point, but they wanted an economy where there is comparatively stronger property and there are more capitalistic structures, but on the condition that these structures benefit the nation. In this form, national socialists treat property owners as trustees given property by the nation to take care of the wealth and resources of the nation. We can see many other movements that hold themselves to be both anti-communist and anti-capitalist, but eventually, end up with what we would call a fascist economic policy. Other movements were somewhat different. The Francoists come from the more orthodox Falangist position, they are outliers because Franco eventually liberalized the economy and created a more free market than many people would have favored originally. Though Hitler privatized multiple industries, this was nothing compared to the Spanish miracle. The Greek military coup lead by Papadopoulos constantly referred to their movement as being explicitly temporary, however, the attempts of liberalization by Papadopoulos were shut down by other people within the government. It is impossible to know how Greece would have developed if these liberalizations had occurred, but the government was overthrown and Greece eventually became a leftist mess.
One could include Pinochet and use the Chilean miracle as another example of success, but fascists often consider Pinochet to be a sellout, and it is not entirely clear whether Pinochet was actually a fascist or simply a paid CIA operative. Finally, one can look at the American Nazi party. They are certainly fascists, but they are also constitutionalists. They wanted to return to the founding documents of the United States, and support sound money and free markets. This contradicts the common image of fascism, and thus may befuddle any libertarian who has not analyzed the premises of fascism. What all these movements had in common was the ultimate goal of creating a better nation. This meant removing the Jews, communists, and any other anti-nationalist force. All fascists wanted a society and an economy based around the nation, which they believed would create a better life for the people within that nation. One can see how the policies of all these movements actually follow from the nationalism that fascists take as their ultimate premise. Many say that fascists have no coherent economic policy, but this is untrue. The economic policy of fascists is and always has been to strengthen the nation. The 20th century was marked by a struggle between Marxist world socialism and liberal world capitalism. The Marxists agitated the workers while the liberals agitated the middle and upper classes, creating an immense class conflict that fueled revolution and chaos. A lot of fascist anti-semitism is derived from this era as the prominent Marxists have always been Jews, and Jews have always had influence over the major monetary institutions.
The fascists in the early 20th century came along and attempted to create an economy that would work both for the upper and the lower classes, an economy where the workers would get what they think they deserve while the capitalists could keep their capital and use it productively. To do this, they wanted the state to have control of the economy to make sure that no one is exploited and proposed that everyone work for the nation to ensure a lack of parasitism for greedy or materialistic purposes. When this was shown to be unsustainable, the smart fascists shifted to a policy of privatization. This happened under Hitler and Franco to various degrees; they ultimately let go of some state property and handed it to people who used it productively. The Nazis were not ready to give up their desires for the aesthetic advancement of the German people, so they needed to expand their empire to fuel their faulty economy, but some privatization still took place. The social policy of fascist regimes has always been to make sure that the nation is sustainable and that the nation does not slide into degeneracy. From this follow positions against promiscuity, homosexuality, drug use, and whatever else people do in order to derive hedonistic pleasure at the expense of a healthy society. It also has a strong connection to the view that traditional family structures should be the basis of society, meaning that incentivizing motherhood and the creation of strong men to take care of the women is proper for sustaining the nation. This explains the ethnic element of fascism, as all nations are ultimately determined by the genetic stock of their people and the historical condition where the people have developed. Furthermore, this is an additional cause of fascist anti-semitism as the Jews have often been at the root of this
degeneracy. The leading figures of the sexual revolution in the Weimar republic, who were later imported into the US, were mostly all Jews. First, from the premises of libertarianism, fascism is better than left-wing socialism. Fascism undoubtedly preserves property more than left-wing socialism does, thus fascist sympathies cannot be construed as completely anti-libertarian. But one cannot take both nation and property as ultimate goals. This is because the conflicts between these goals would have to be solved by means of arbitrary decision. This means that libertarianism and fascism cannot be combined as ideologies because their premises are different. One may combine republicanism, minarchism, monarchism, anarchocapitalism, etc. into a broad political movement, as the premises of these positions are sufficiently similar. But there is no way to create a big tent movement that can accurately represent the interests of both fascists and libertarians; the premises come into too much conflict. Second, there is some value in the notion of being a fascist politically while being a libertarian philosophically. This is a position that some people are becoming more and more sympathetic towards. Left-libertarians like to refer to these people as “helicopterists,” so we can use that term to describe this position. What these people tend to believe is that a military dictatorship is necessary or beneficial if we are to establish a libertarian social order and that we cannot simply transition to absolute liberty without first making sure that policies are implemented to push society toward that goal. These people often argue for violent suppression of leftists, which is not what libertarians traditionally favor, and for a
general purge within society that would result in favorable conditions for the formation of a libertarian society. Third, libertarians may take nationalism as a premise and fascists may take property as a premise, even thought these cannot be their ultimate premises due to the aforementioned conflicts. Fascists may advocate for free-market economics insofar as it increases the health of the nation, while libertarians may advocate for nationalism insofar as it strengthens self-ownership, private property, and nonaggression. In this manner, libertarians and fascists can find common ground by using common premises, and they can create a compromise that is palatable for both fascists and libertarians. We touched upon Milton Friedman earlier to show that it is theoretically and practically possible to embrace different premises even though the policy proposals may contradict themselves. Although there can be a degree of collaboration between libertarians who value the nation and fascists who value property, they will still ultimately be fascists and libertarians, respectively. The priority between property and nation determines with which camp people identify.
XXI – Producerism The common view of the political spectrum splits philosophies into leftist and rightist positions on social and economic issues. This scale doesn’t judge politics in accordance to personal values, personal philosophies are determined by political tribes. However, individuals tend to hold their own moral values. And all moral values eventually come down to life and death, there is an objective truth and different systems of morality must either deviate from that truth or function in accordance to that truth. This means that we can either increase creativity, integrity, industry, virtue, and all general good or we can destroy that which enables life. And politics must always either relate to society or civilization. Society encompasses the entirety of economics, interpersonal relations, and hierarchies in communities. Civilization is the combination of the social system, national culture, and the moral suppositions of communities. These two values are fundamentally interlinked and interdependent. Thus, politics can either cause a destruction of society and culture or a production of society and culture. All ideologies must start with a premise, a point where they find an ultimate expression of a moral value toward which struggle is directed. For libertarians this is efficiency, for communists this is equality, for fascists it’s the nation. Producerism has parallels with multiple of those core values but instead of taking a more surface level value, producerism tries to increase production qua production. And this is not material production, but rather the production of all
values and the production of everything that people can strive for. The production producerism strives to create is the production of all the spiritual, social, and material goods that humans need to increase the quality of the life they live. Production as such differs from the moral values of most ideological positions in that the value of production is not derived from personal preference. production is rather a premise based on a fundamental valuation of life over death. It is the only metaphysically consistent form of political philosophy. This is not to say any follower of any other ideology cannot choose life over death, their ideological position is just founded on having other principles beneath the fundamental question of life and death. Only metaphysical subjectivism and relativism can justify ideologies other than producerism. If we accept the simple question of whether we should, as a society, be more focused on creating life or destroying it, we must accept producerism. The expressions of virtue that result in other moral principles are outside the value of life itself. Production encompasses every act that increases good in the world as production encompasses the production of all virtue. The value of production is less abstracted from reality and is thus irreverent of any fundamental moral positions. However, this simple valuation is able to create a political theory that can form an entirely new direction in philosophy. This philosophy could be aligned somewhere between radical libertarianism and traditionalist fascism. Producerism takes fusionism beyond its logical conclusion by accepting the logical conclusions of the premises of fusionism. This is because it shares characteristics with both and acknowledges that both libertarians and fascists strive to produce one of the values necessary for life. Libertarians strive to produce society in its purest
form and fascists strive to produce civilization in its purest form. This is also the conflict between libertarians and fascists as the libertarians fear that advancing civilization will subsume society and vice versa. Producerism is then the focus on producing both society and civilization, it is the ultimate expression of a consistent preference of life over death in matters pertaining to individual relations and larger social systems. Society can best be understood as the framework of interpersonal relations between individuals. Society as a category pertains to all that which is involved in people relating to one another. Whether these relations are economic, romantic, or communal is of little concern as all these relations create the overarching network of society as a concept. Since society is created through the way different individuals relate to one another, sustaining society is a matter of ensuring that the relations between different individuals are productive. Furthermore, it needs to be guaranteed that the overarching framework of society makes engaging in society a worthwhile endeavour. This is because when people are more deeply engaged in society, more society is produced. Since for there to a metaphysical increase in life, there needs to be both society and civilization, we need to ensure that society is kept and maintained. Firstly, this implies a market that is totally left free from state intervention, but also a market which still functions according to set rules when it comes to property and relations between individuals. The first principle of the market has to be the fact that individuals can fully and completely determine what is to be done with their own property. Imposing costs is unacceptable. Individual uses of property cannot be interfered with by the state via unjustified taxation or
regulation. We can debate whether there is a need for taxation, but we need to establish that unlimited liability is the best form of regulation as it allows people to themselves prosecute fraud and damages. This is the logical extension of the right to own property and self-determine in society. Furthermore, since each person fully owns their property, there can be no lessening of liability through favourable deregulation and corporate structures. The state cannot specifically protect certain interest groups and the costs that they impose. And an opposition to corporations is necessary as the property managed by corporations is still fully owned by the owners of the corporation. There should be no legal protection for individuals if they commit actions under the guise of corporations. People need to take full responsibility for all the damage the companies they own or manage do. Furthermore, since each person has a full right over their own property, there can be no such economic configuration where a person gets more out of the economy than they put in. This means that what each person has they must earn and what each person earns they must have. This is a simple principle, but through legal fiction, it doesn’t exist in the modern economy. The principle of reciprocity is vital for any degree of sensible economic operation. When people can get more out of the economy than they deserve, the resources in the economy will be redistributed to incapable owners. When no person can be coerced into exchanges unless they profit from these exchanges, they will never be stuck in a situation where they have less than they earn. Furthermore, if all costs can be prosecuted, it will also become impossible to impose costs.
Furthermore, having full rights in property implies having full rights in yourself, which means that when it comes to any sort of social interaction, it has to be voluntary. This does not mean that social interaction needs to be contained to the material or hedonistic, but rather that each person should interact socially in such a manner that benefits themselves and everyone else involved. Since each party benefits from social interaction, each party can derive value from being social, this creates strong social bonds. Without mutual benefit, we must see an erosion in society as all people involved do not see being social as an improvement to their lives and thus are more likely to leave society altogether. And finally, there are personal and hierarchical values when it comes to social interaction, this too must not be disturbed by the state. Each person relates to other persons in the way that is the most suitable for that interaction. This means that for there to be society, there can be no artificial reduction in hierarchy or a depersonalization of relations by the state. For there to be a society, we must leave the control of society to the people within the society. Society can’t be controlled by the people who desire to command and control the society in which they have power. This also means that to maintain society, we must also condemn and exclude those who desire to subvert the society from the inside. This perspective is not explicitly libertarian but it is derived from similar values as the rest of the libertarian philosophy, it is fundamentally privatizing a society. This means that the people who want to make interaction degenerate must be excluded from the society by the members of that society. This is vital. When some agent strives to corrupt interpersonal relations, no matter if economic
or not, they must not be allowed to do so. All persons who strive to use the economy for their own gain through economic fiction without any productive results are as parasitic as those who strive to steal. Those who invade spaces they don’t belong in and those who strive to impose costs on being social are also social parasites. This is always true unless the actions of these people result in more civilization. Where the libertarians aim to produce society, the fascists aim to produce civilization. Society might be that which is relevant to each person’s solitary life, however, civilization is that which unites thousands of disparate lives into a cohesive whole. Civilization is a process of taming nature and taming man and creating something better as a whole. When we consider civilization, we do not consider the interactions between distinct individuals in society but rather the growth and development of these societies and what unites people in society. We can encourage society, but it does not necessarily mean that the society will be civilized or that the society will produce anything other than momentary pleasure. This wider notion of civilization creates the possibility for there to be smaller societies in which individuals can engage, without civilization, there is no society. And the same applies the other way around too, without society there is no civilization, these two must coexist and reinforce each other. What producerism holds true is that we need to not only focus on the individual interactions, but also the larger scope of what individual interaction creates. This does not imply collectivism, but rather analyzing and promoting those civilizational values which create life. When we look at civilization, we see that that which aids in furthering civilization must produce civilization and thus produce
life. Furthermore, that which causes the downfall of civilization must then also destroy life. We must take an approach to civilization to find out what produces civilization and what opposes it. We need to do this instead of overlaying our own moral values onto civilization or trying to create moral values out of something that we perceive to be greater than humans. And we must again concede that civilization too is ultimately created by societies, but not by solitary individuals but general beliefs and trends in societies. Civilization is created by the spontaneous order formed in social organization of all forms. Whenever interactions define hierarchy, norms, and acceptable values, they produce civilization. That which goes against defining civilization goes against civilization. Thus, everything that tries to destroy good and proper morals and the fruits of this spontaneous order is destructive to civilization. This does not mean that all forms civilization are good and proper; this has to tie back into society. When a civilization imposes itself on the society and imposes costs on being social, that civilization becomes decivilizing. When the moral values of a civilization or systems of organization prevent individuals from relating to each other in societies, we must realize that the civilization is perverted. All civilization is an echo of the underlying society, to have a civilization without a society is impossible. Furthermore, when, on a civilizational level, there is a promotion of decay and death, it will result in the destruction of that civilization. We now have to understand what principles cause a decay in civilization and which values are those that outright destroy civilization. We must go after all values that increase death at the
cost of life and the principles that create a social order which serves the filthy instead of the virtuous. To determine what causes death, we need to realize that for these norms to be in place, there must be an interaction between multiple groups of people, there must be different hierarchies in society. When there are no hierarchical relations, there can be no norms developed other than those norms which relate to an increase of hedonism. This is due to the fact that egalitarian relations do not pressure participants to be better. This is unlike the interaction where one side submits to another, there is no way to enforce virtue in relations that are equal. Duty, honour, and responsibility are required for all virtue. This means that the first vital component to increasing civilizational life is preserving hierarchy, but it can’t be any hierarchy and must be those hierarchies that benefit those who are both lower and higher. Parasitic command structures go contrary to civilization more than egalitarianism ever could. This means that to increase civilization, it is necessary to increase mutually beneficial command structures and enable all participants to create their own virtues. And we can see this taking shape in different hierarchical and class relations within society. In healthy families, the children can improve themselves by getting access to more knowledge and resources than they could have gotten on their own. This is combined with support and social structures. The parents exercise a capacity to bring life into society and are thus themselves elevated. In the relationship between the upper and lower economic classes of society, each class benefits from the other class. The capitalist class has access to the labour of the working class and is able to use that labour to produce value and
gain the associated virtues necessary to organize labour. The bourgeoisie class has to learn how to use money wisely and how to achieve the point in their own life where they can get access to capital and how to properly distribute their own wealth. These are the values of prudence, perseverance,
and
purposefulness. The upper-class values are those that allow for individuals to find their place in the world when they have to create and maintain their position in the world. These values are vital to creating any sort of civilizational improvement on a systematic level. When we look at the working class we see that the values embodied in that side of the relation create the ability to fulfil one’s own social role, being close to your family, and being able to relate to the society in which one is. The upper class may be conducive to creating grandiose civilization, but lower class values must maintain civilization. The values of duty, family, and tradition are better maintained in the way of life undertaken by the working class. Without the preceding social relations, these classes would not be incentivized to produce these values, there would be no pressure to create virtue. There is still a fundamental conflict between the production of society and the production of civilization, but only due to the codependence between the two productions. If civilization is not produced, society cannot be produced as there are no overarching values and structures that societies can be formed around. If society is not produced, civilization cannot form as there are no attitudes that people relate to on a societal scale which can result in the creation of civilization. We must maintain both productions without allowing them to infringe on the other form of production.
But this leaves us in a fundamental contradiction, in a perfect world, the different virtues of civilization would shape efficient organization, but what if society itself is infringing on civilization or civilization is infringing on society? In that case, it seems as if we must further try to reshape society or reshape civilization to prevent the destruction of either. However, this would go against the relationship that organically forms between society and civilization that reinforces one another. But this reinforcement can also reinforce mutual deterioration. When we see civilization decay, we will see society follow and vice versa. This is a mutual pattern of production and destruction, society and civilization are heavily linked. However, we cannot solve social issues if we try to change civilizational issues and the same goes the other way around. If we need to change civilization, we cannot change the way that people relate to one another, but we have to change the attitudes in society. If we need to change society we cannot change the overarching social norms, but rather need to build up communities and different societies to foster interaction inside societies. We have to work on society from the inside and we have to work on civilization from the inside. The only way to solve social problems is to become more deeply entrenched in society and the only way to solve civilizational problems is to work to increase and improve civilization. Producerism is not a political ideology as such since it does not see the state as anything more than either a nuisance or a reflection of the civilization and society. The politics of producerism cannot become a debate on how to manage some land area, but rather it must be a personal desire to seek the eternal values of life in the face of adversity through becoming a person capable of increasing
life. Producerism is then a synthesis of libertarian and fascist tendencies as the libertarians strive to maximize society and fascists strive to increase civilization. Producerism acknowledges that both society and civilization are linked and that we need to produce both in order to produce either. There is no reason to have a completely stateless capitalist society without a civilizational ethos that allows for a generalized creation of life over death. There is no reason to have a reactionary nationalist society without social organization that allows for the civilization to benefit individuals. Civilization and society are simply parts of a whole, this being the creation of life. It is not enough to try to create virtue on a civilizational scale or efficiency on a social scale, both are of the utmost necessity. The state cannot be seen fully as either a complete nuisance or of the perfect manifestation of a nation, we must acknowledge that the state is a perverse reflection of a nation. In coming to terms with being potentially wrong, we can open up a debate on rational terms over the size and scope of the state in different relations without getting into moralistic issues with the state. If there is to be a producerist philosophy, it would require a focus on both reactionary social values alongside economic values focusing on enterprise. However, the traditional terms of politics are only tangentially applicable to producerism as the traditional terms arise from a vision of politics that goes against the nature of politics and the nature of humans. We can categorize politics into different competing tribes and we can try to create ideological positions founded on different moral values, but ultimately the only meaningful debate to be had is whether we should choose life or death on a personal level.
XXII – Communitarian Libertarianism A possibility that makes a lot of sense and has received disproportionately
little
attention
is
the
combination
of
communitarianism and libertarianism. This is a completely sensical position to hold and it ought to be the focus of a vast majority of libertarians if we ever want to make progress in advancing liberty. Somehow, communitarianism has gotten lost in different measures of federalism, universalism and anti-social individualism. I will make the case for why we need to combine a focus on community and a focus on liberty. Due to the intellectual errors of Hayek, a lot of the libertarian mainstream has adopted the view that we need to convert the most capable in society to libertarianism and then have the values of liberty trickle down to the masses. If libertarianism started within the political and intellectual classes as marxism did, it could easily be a philosophy that could spread in this manner. But this ignores that even though libertarian philosophy might have to start from the top down, we cannot assume that there will ever be a great intellectual movement that spawns a libertarian society. There was definitely such a movement as happened with classical liberalism, but it resulted in completely illiberal societies in the form of the french revolution and the American constitution. These revolutions created some of the most despotic states that have been unparalleled in the sheer amount of statism. This paved the way for even more despotic states and even worse political arrangements. Classical liberalism itself caused a movement
that annihilated liberalism as the tradition that it once was. We may romanticize the french revolution and the American constitution, but the effects of those systems are certainly the worst political systems that were imaginable at the time. We can look at the historical aberration of marxism and imagine that it was a to- down strategy that truly worked in creating a revolutionary working class. But when we look how it actually developed we see the same results. The wellintentioned communists lead the way to marxism-leninism which used the tenets of communism in the same manner as the liberal revolutions and constitutions shaped themselves historically. The only difference is that libertarianism has the capacity to function while marxism does not. The one thorough and effective popular movement in recent history is the progressive movement, this was notably a bottom-up movement which caused some of the most sweeping reforms in western history and completely reworked the nature and role of the state. This movement was completely locally organized and grew out of the cities and communities and not from the intellectual classes. This is the only strategy sweeping enough to facilitate the growth of libertarian ideals, it is also a possibility that libertarianism must be facilitated by warfare in one form or another. At some point, we have to ask if we want despotic states or piles of dead men who fought against the regime. The naive notion of a peaceful transition to create liberty will never work and the intellectual classes are extremely unreliable in actually willing to fight for what they believe in. It is extremely important to have a mass of people who are willing to fight for what is just and what is right. If we do not believe that ending taxation and imperialism are worth our lives and a great
revolution of the masses, then we should not promote these ideals as they will result in death and civil war. Furthermore, we should not romanticize revolution as anything beyond a bare necessity and a way to prevent deaths from state policy and state war. The only way in which we can transform libertarianism from a topdown intellectual movement to a bottom-up popular movement is if we actually started to organize around communities. This requires that we actually focus on voluntarily interacting with our communities and teaching libertarian principles while we demonstrate our personal value. Libertarianism must have a communitarian focus in the short term, at the very least. This is not to abuse common people and this is not to exploit people for the sake of fighting against their own beliefs. This is rather an indignation of the intellectual classes for their lack of courage and bravery. The intellectuals may create and analyse ideals, but very rarely are they willing to consider that they would themselves have to fight for what they believe in. This is a great fault with the intellectual classes and this is why it is optimal to organize around regular people along a populist strategy. If we do not reintroduce the notion that liberty means local co-operation and voluntary social aid, we cannot reintroduce liberty to the popular masses. Libertarianism is regarded as an anti-social system for a good reason as libertarianism largely ignores the voluntary social organization that could be undertaken to replace what the state does. Instead, libertarians like to offer critiques of the state without any additional substance other than a vague notion of voluntary charity. It is true that charity can replace the sort of statist anti-social support system we have right now, but by nature, charity is
disorganized and sporadic. To ensure that people have their wellbeing taken care of, there is a need for a deeper communitarianism within libertarian theory. This is simply because there is a market demand for organized social aid. Libertarians need to focus on how communities can take care of different issues themselves and how structures that foster community can replace the state. We ought to show how voluntary fraternal societies ensured that each person had access to a personal doctor if there was a need for one. We need to show how voluntary societies were much more capable of protecting people than the state is right now[8]. We ought to focus on how the early 20th century and late 19th century damaged community organization by handing it over to the state. It is of the utmost importance to demonstrate that there had previously been voluntary organization in absence of the state. Communities have always prospered when the state does not involve itself in what communities ought to do. A person’s church, town, or neighbourhood should be their recourse against personal troubles. Libertarianism should not strive to eliminate the capacity for societies to aid individual problems, rather, libertarians need to create the proper means by which to do so. But libertarians are often driven by a desire to be generally left alone and thus are in opposition to communitarianism on principle since they themselves are not social individuals. But personal deficits should not be guides for ideological positions. And a lack of community is a personal deficit of a person who has not managed to surround themselves with people who care for them in a communal manner. Furthermore, communal property and communal agreements are solutions to many problems within libertarian theory.
If libertarians focused on the community and not on a vague personal responsibility and individual liberty, libertarians may actually get the support of social people who care about their local communities. Communities ought to be integral to libertarianism and not seen as in any way contradictory to the libertarian message. Furthermore, if libertarianism were to be the only ideology that actually manages to strive for voluntary communities outside the state, we could gain the political high ground over any people who claim that libertarianism is anti-social. Without doing this, we will be forever subject to the claim that libertarianism aims to alienate all people from the societies into which they are born and strives to break down the very essence of what it means to be a human in a human society. We must demonstrate that our societies are beyond the state and that libertarians are not in opposition to the civilized nature of man. We must also show that libertarians do want to foster social interaction. Libertarianism must be communitarian if it will not be anti-social. Libertarianism ought to be against political authority and against coercive rule and not against local self-management and communities which foster improvement in the lives of people within those communities. And finally, a libertarian society without communitarianism would itself break down. This is because libertarianism in itself does nothing to create virtue and libertarianism is value-free insofar as it does not strive to impose moral values on any person. This means that libertarian organization without communitarian organization can result in the worst forms of degeneracy and corporatocracy. These are not desirable results and we should strive for a communitarian society to conform with the libertarian ideal in a healthy society.
The local farm and the local store should be cornerstones in libertarian philosophy. The community garden and the community centre ought to be important parts of voluntary social life when it comes to libertarian societies. Without these important facilities in life, it could be that people would be reduced to pawns in capitalist economies and degenerates without any connection to their blood or their soil. We do not want to replicate and create a society filled entirely of condescending urbanites in think tanks and offices. We should want to foster the rural communities and all communities beyond the corrupted modern city life. Having an entire society organized along the lines of libertarian circles is not productive. Libertarians should not strive to destroy morality but rather try to foster it. When people have freedom they will either use it responsibly or irresponsibly, freedom itself has no mechanism to prevent irresponsibility. This is aside from the personal dissatisfaction one feels when he acts in a way that is irresponsible. This personal dissatisfaction is not a perfect way to prevent an entire society from becoming personally dissatisfied if they use freedom in such a selfdestructive manner. If we want to make freedom into something inherently productive, we must ensure that not only is there freedom, but also that this freedom is not used in an improper manner which could foster social decay or general nihilism. We should want freedom to be used in ways which are conducive to happiness and personal satisfaction in life. Communitarianism provides an excellent way to do exactly this. Having responsibility to local communities is a powerful counterweight to all destructive urges within people. When subjected to
social pressures, shame, and public interest, people are encouraged to behave in ways which are socially desirable and which are good for themselves and others. These pressures may be restrictive in the narrow sense, but true freedom does not only consist in the ability to make mistakes and cause self-suffering. Freedom should predominantly be the ability to do the right thing for the right reasons. Having general social pressures will result in people having the pressure to do the things which advance themselves and which are understood to advance persons morally and materially. Drunkards, hedonists, gamblers, sodomites, fornicators, and all other degenerates are best rehabilitated into lifestyles conducive to happiness and social behaviour with the help of their local community and good-willed moral teaching.
XXIII – The Final Solution to the Banking Question[9] Everyone that has ever looked into how contemporary banks work knows that they don’t. Quite simply put, there is currently an international cabal backed by every state due to economic necessity. This international cabal has provoked just reactions from people both on the left and on the right, but it has lead to a denouncement of banking in general. Here I will argue for a very specific kind of banking and demonstrate how the current banking system is completely unsustainable. Governments create debt out of nothing, they don’t really owe this debt to anyone other than other governments through international banking schemes. At this point in time, almost every government is operating far above its means, it is easier to resist tax collection than the creation of debt (which has to be paid by future taxes). This means that the governments only fiscal responsibility is to the banking cabal and the central banks within the governments. It’s true that a lot of government debt is nominally owed to private individuals and companies, however, each individual and company has very limited input when it comes to the debt. Thus, these people are liabilities that can be dealt with by state policy. A large portion of the bonds and liabilities created by the government are taken care of by the World Bank and the IMF, both of which ensure that states and individuals have constant debt. These banks constantly ensure that the socialist-keynesian policy can continue to be built under capitalist terms. Both of these organizations operate under pretences that may seem virtuous. They
are supposedly in the business of reducing poverty, increasing stability, and conforming to every other progressive platitude. These utopian premises are just a narrow shell to cover up the real purpose of these institutions, which is to continually enforce the status quo and to ensure the de facto poverty of all nations of the world. To do this, they accrue money from developed nations and give that money to the nations that are not suited for handling such money. Furthermore, they do so explicitly to reach leftist goals. To add to this burden they maintain floating fiat currencies and ensure that each country continues loaning their money in a complex structure that is completely unsustainable at every level. To increase the burden more there is the relatively new EMF, which takes on the same scheme in the scope of Europe. All of these banks and institutions serve no other purpose than to keep the nations of the world under one global control and to override whatever market decisions or local political decisions people would have made. These serve as immense agencies of destruction. In modern international trade, those who negotiate trade are not the people who do trade, but rather the governments who set agreements for the trade. Since trade is negotiated by the governments, there will always be a deficit in trade, one party will import more than the other party, thus one party must borrow enough money to continue importing more than it produces. Without the government in the way, this would not happen as the people outside the government would not care about aggregates and cannot spend far beyond their means. They have to eventually pay off their debts, so there can be no actual deficits in trade as a long-term issue.
However, whenever there are states handling trade, there are deficits, whenever there are deficits there is money that has to be borrowed. Whenever money has to be borrowed, the banks are there to facilitate that borrowing of money. Since there are always deficits and there are always international banks, there are always great profits to be made for those banks by simply involving themselves in the process of government bonds and other borrowing. There are perpetual discrepancies in trade between countries and these are not fixed by the individuals who do trade and thus are seen as a problem. Unsustainable trade can be only facilitated by relentless borrowing, so eventually, the bank gets its share of the spoils. This is true no matter which particular nation has a deficit to another nation, it doesn’t matter what form of disequilibrium is present. The international banks will always get their cut as long as there are these issues within international trade. This means that there is a perpetual, reliable stream of income for the banks, the only thing they have to ensure is that the governments create discrepancies and subsequently create debts that need to be eventually paid off, at least on paper. These banks can then use debt as collateral to create even more debt. This brings us to the organized form of debt-slavery in the 21st century. Many market-minded people are appalled by the notion that willing people accumulating debt are somehow slaves, however, this is not plain socialist conjecture. Banks intentionally misrepresent information to get people to acquire liabilities that are not guaranteed to provide them with any profit. These liabilities still guarantee that the banks get their maintenance fees. This is purposive and
perpetual fraudulence. Furthermore, the system of credit which punishes people no matter how wisely they handle their money accumulates perpetual interest for the banks. This is because it is very easy to fool people into overspending if it is made routine. And these are not the voluntary, conscious decisions made by people, but rather institutions designed to benefit the banks at the expense of the people. These banks and institutions are further reinforced by the state that secures that they cannot be prosecuted for their unreliable schemes or their misrepresentations or unjust fees. Furthermore, due to state legislation, banks have a special status as money lenders, changers, and holders. Thus the banks will receive any additional protections the state wants to institute. And the banks have their fair share of charging people unjustly. It’s a common occurrence that a bank creates debt intentionally in order to keep the interest of the debt present as a continuous source of income so that the people who have that debt will always be under the control of the bank. This may be achieved via massive over-draft fees caused by the up-keep fees, or they may be caused by a person not having enough money, resulting in the bank deciding that the person must pay for the privilege of having to hold their money in a bank in order to do business and pay tax. The great schemes and machinations of the banks are always present to keep people within their grasp and to never let anyone handle their money independently of the bank. The state helps secure that this always happens and that people have no choices by creating a universal standard of money. After doing so, the state monopolizes the industry of money by only letting certain banks handle money and using legislation to destroy any
competitive banking. Without a system of banking that relies on the state mandate, predatory banks could never manage to charge fees upon fees from people that don’t have the money and are economically forced to use the bank. Furthermore, the state expects the banks to increase state power and as such is willing to provide them subsidy. This allows the state to further control and manipulate the people within its territory. The state accomplishes its goal of expansion when people are under the control of the banks which are under the control of the state. The state also relies on banks to inflate the currency more than the state itself can. When the central bank prints money, the state can only distribute the money to select groups and cannot ensure that this unfunded liability will be at the basis of the economy as a whole. The state accomplishes its goals better if it lets banks have completely digital and fiat money in exchange for some token guarantee to the federal reserve. Then, as the banks are not required to keep full reserves, they may convert these virtual assets into debt and loan it to another bank, creating interest out of nothing and having an additional liability in their portfolio. Thus, the digital representation of money will be a greater amount than even the printed money in the economy. From here, the other bank can lend its money out, using the credit to back it’s other liabilities. At the end of the day, the banks manage to perpetually create more debt than there is actual money. This is because both banks use the same money to back their liabilities, even though neither bank actually has this money and this money is used in the economic actions of a third party.
The former part of the essay may seem completely compatible with leftism, and we do need to acknowledge that leftists can be right about the banking system as it currently stands. Our approach to banking should not be about turning a blind eye to unethical action, rather it should wholly be a method of critique and instituting a market solution to a state problem. And there are plenty of people who critique banks from an anti-market perspective. They propose different solutions as they feel that banks are unethical by nature and not by circumstance. One of the most important things to defend here is the practice of interest. Whether or not the anti-capitalists favour any degree of interest usually comes down to the form of the institution that gives out that interest. One cannot pursue great projects without promising compensation beyond the simple risk inherent. The return on investment would then be in the future and have the same value as it did when it was lent. This means that if one is to undertake any project that requires a degree of investment, he must promise interest equivalent to the social time preference. The social time preference is the point of equilibrium where the valuation of time balances out with the demand for time. Of course, as we cannot actually trade time, this becomes a matter of trading future goods against present goods. To bring this to a more comprehensible level we can take the case of persons A, B, C, D and E. Persons D and E both want to embark on their projects building different things. Both projects will take around a year to complete and both projects have the same amount of risk. D and E both profit from other people having low valuations of time. That means that they want to have to pay back the least after they have
loaned money. A, B and C all have money to loan, however, A wants 8% interest per year, B wants 6% interest per year and C wants 5% interest per year. Otherwise, these parties think that the return is too far in the future. They are unwilling to trade their present goods for future goods without increasing the price by those amounts. D promises that he can provide 5% interest in return for funding his project, thus he can only get person C to invest in his endeavour. Persons A and B are not willing to trade their present goods for a future value of only 5% of the investment. Since E also wants investors, he now promises a 6% annual return on investment, getting both B and C on board, C being more happy with this arrangement than the previous one. D decides that he can go up to 7% interest and still profit, thus he offers 7% interest, both B and C would invest in D rather than E, as D promises a better deal. E cannot take his own rate higher than 6%, as he doesn’t expect to profit above that, so D manages to secure the clients and the social demonstrated time preference is 6%. A is excluded from this as he values present goods so much that no one can offer him a good enough deal. In the real world, there are millions of actors and all of them help determine the social time preference. This is integral to decentralized planning as time needs to be evaluated. But we can say that interest is excessive when it does not make up for material factors or time. However, on a competitive free market people who charge excessive interest will not be done business with. This is demonstrated in the example as person A not finding investments. We can envision a world where there is no charging interest for lending money. Because there is no interest, lending money
becomes functionally gambling, money-lending will be unreliable even if it happens at all. If money is not lent, economic actors cannot achieve their goals before the time when the debt would have already been paid off. Because of that, for example, young couples could not get homes and entrepreneurs would need to earn money by working in the established order, aging past their prime while doing so. The entire economic system would be in complete ruins. Banks are also necessary to make economic transactions easier. Whenever people trade goods, there is an inherent degree of friction simply due to the fact that those who trade goods need to set up a physical or digital transfer of goods. Furthermore, there is an inherent friction whenever money needs to be changed to facilitate transacting or when terms need to be negotiated. Banks can greatly ease this by providing ledgers that make transporting money a nonissue as they keep track of the titles to money. But how can we fix banking? We have to admit that lending money is important, and so is the reduction of transaction costs that reliable third parties produce. The solution to this is very simple, banks cannot all be the same institution, the banks that serve to reduce transaction costs cannot be the same banks that lend money. When a person uses a bank to reduce the costs of their transactions, they want to have that money in reality and not as a figment that can be inflated to any unsustainable point. These banks are useless if the title to money becomes worthless. Thus, the banks that aim to facilitate trade must keep money in reserve and not create more money than there is. The banks that manage investments need to be completely different banks, they would obviously very closely co-operate with
banks as they do now, but they would then be transferred the title of the money. That means that these agencies can decide how the money is managed, and the person who owns the money will see the gains and losses accordingly. It won’t be hidden in a complicated network of debt and credit coupled with interest, but rather simply a person giving his money to another person for management. Thus, the person who is managing the money would display how much he has in store, and that amount would be a fixed sum in the economy. Since the amount of money in existence, if there was a concrete amount, would always result in zero-sum outcomes when it comes to investment, a uniform rate of return would be impossible, investing would again be about making the right investments, and not collaborating in a corrupt system. However, when money is deflationary, as it naturally is, money is an investment. Because of this, even when there are nominal losses, investment is a general increase in social wealth. Investing into money will bring a profit, thus, even if investments result in minor losses, they will be made irrelevant by the deflation. Even though it ignores all factors of the loan market, this logic demonstrates how it’s at least not just reshuffling money.
XXIV – Familism Most libertarians are very tied to the notion of individual primacy. This means that individuals must be the base unit of society, and decision-making must then also be a matter of individual choices. When society is anti-individualist it must also not be libertarian. But this logic has two problems. First, individualism is easily conflated with materialism and base self-interest instead of more mindful attitudes. Secondly, individualism is a very modern and anglo-centric concept. When we look at economic decision-making we do not look at individuals acting as we cannot see individuals within the family. Since we cannot analyze the actions of individuals within the family and as the family has shared resources, we must concede that the family that can act economically. This is very controversial since the family is made of individuals, but there is a degree of connectedness between these individuals so that their actions cannot be distinguished when looking at the family from the outside. We cannot properly represent the family as separate economic units due to the way income streams and spending is organized within the family. From the perspective of an observer, it would be far too convoluted to boil down the decision-making process of the family to individuals within the family. The same argument cannot be made for enterprise as there is no degree of intimacy within business relations that make one able to make decisions for multiple people. The unique circumstance of the family can only lead us to conclude that the family should be, at least economically, the base
unit of society and not the individual who acts separately from the family. An analysis of the economy using families and is able to better represent the actual conditions within the economy and would remove a degree of abstraction. And it is abstraction as the people within a family do not fully act as individuals since their interests are bonded in a unique fashion. Within your own particular family, it is possible to deconstruct the actions of individuals, but it is only so due to sharing a bond with your family that leads you to recognize actions as individual. If the family was an alienated unit without any change in behaviour, there would be no person who can understand the decision-making of the family. Since understanding individual actions within the family requires that one is a part of that family, it is pointless to say that it is possible to know that there are individuals acting within families. The family unit cannot be properly dissected in the same way that the sole individual cannot be analyzed. The science of economics must take the family as one single unit[10]. In cultures that have not been subject to American cultural imperialism, there is often no such thing as individualism divorced from the family. In most of the world, individualism does not imply that the individual should be independent from the constraints of the family, but rather that individuals should be focused on their own family. However, due to the increasingly westernized nature of the world, this is not a commonplace meaning. True liberty implies that the family should be the most important thing for the individual and not that the individual should disregard their family. It is useful to employ a more family-centered approach when we talk about the benefits of individualism.
Furthermore, the rugged individualist era of America was also defined by a focus on families and not by a focus on solitary individuals. The individualism of the Old West was oriented around family like most societies are. The individualist myth that historical actions are individual is a very recent phenomenon. There has never been a historical period where people acted as they do in modernity, individualism was always tied to the family. The base social condition of humanity is not individualistic in the sense that all people alienate themselves and become independent entities, it is rather the primacy of the family over the tribe. When we look at individualism from a purely social perspective, we must concede that the merits of individualism are more accurately described as the merits of familism. Decentralization stands in opposition to defining the worth of individuals by the state, the tribe, or the collective. Decentralization leads to the natural primacy of the family. But this means that the worth of the individual is partially replaced by the family. This may be unsavoury to some, but provided that the familial structure is healthy, this is how humans naturally function. Counter-familial individualism is a utopian misconception with no root in reality. The only argument against this is the possibility that the family becomes detrimental to the individual or is alienated from the individual. In these cases, we must concede that alienated individualism is an acceptable philosophy. However, in most human societies, the family is a highly beneficial and intimate institution. The possibility that the family is more of an impediment or a nuisance does not defeat the purpose of changing our perspective in favour of
families instead of individuals. My arguments do not work only if the family has broken down in one way or another. Not only is the family a cohesive entity socially and economically, the family is also the building block of the philosophical individual. We can understand the growth of the individual in terms of their change in family and their familial structures. Much of the development of each individual is precisely defined by their relation to their family. Whether this is early childhood bonding or having children of your own. Individuals are defined by the family. Other collectives are created by the co-operation of individuals, however, families are created by the natural state of individuals. Any collective aside from the family is not a natural collection of individuals, but rather individuals who function together by the virtue of sharing common characteristics. It is in no shape natural that the people who share common features should function together, no matter how beneficial it is. The larger allegiances to collectives can only be understood as historical events and not primordial events. Even though some nationalists like to push the narrative that an allegiance to a nation is natural, this is defeated by a basic understanding of history. However, there has been no such historical event, aside from the depths of modernity, where people forsook the family. Since the family is such an important part of the lives of everyone and since the family is the fundamental duty and allegiance of humans as natural entities, it becomes ludicrous to deny the importance of family. We have to admit that individuals are not only defined by themselves but also defined as individuals by their family. If people lack healthy family ties, they must also be defined by their lack of
these ties. Furthermore, it is impossible to claim that any child could function properly without their parents. The conditions of forming a family define an individual from their own birth to the time in which they have grandchildren. Individual growth and progression cannot be separated from the natural process of rearing children and forming families. Even though the process of defining oneself as an individual separate from the family is important, we cannot say that this individuation is conducive to erasing the importance of family. A person establishing oneself as his own person is conducive to rearranging familial ties and not to erasing family. When one is defined as an individual, they do not stop being defined by their family, but rather themselves redefine their family through active participation in defining themselves. The family is fundamentally defined by the individuals within the family. But due to the natural connection of these individuals, the family still remains an entity that encompasses all individuals within the family. The same logic cannot be used to argue for collectivism as the family is the only entity with such ties by nature. Whether accurately or not, individualism has become defined by the worship of the self and the alienation from larger social structures. The term is fundamentally tainted and pure individualism clashes with healthy familism, thus individualism becomes less popular. When employing the lens of a society formed by families and having the family as the base unit of a society, we can avoid the problems which individualism has in the public conscience. No one can object to the notion that their family is a more supreme duty than the state. Furthermore, it is easier to accept that economic decisions
should be oriented around the family and not around the larger collective than to accept that individuals should only be responsible to themselves. By making issues more intimate instead of trying to erase the intimacy within our philosophy, we find a way in which the very principles of individualism can be properly reintroduced into public consciousness. Familism is the form implemented individualism will always take even if we approach individualism from the perspective that all individuals should have self-determination. Most people still pursue self-actualization as tied to their families and most people naturally focus on their families when they are the most individualistic. Because people focus on their family when they are pursuing their self-interest, people must focus on their family at the base level. Since people focus on their family in order to find happiness, it becomes nonsensical to try to remove the fact of the family from our philosophy. Even though familism could be inaccurate, it is still representative of human societies beyond the implications of individualism.
XXV – Neo-Feudalism Stateless libertarianism is often accused of wanting to create a new form of feudalism, most libertarians deflect these claims, but there is no reason to do so. It is true that libertarianism has roots in antifeudalist politics, but there is no reason to deny that there are parallels between stateless libertarianism and feudalism. However, it is also true that this is not a bad thing and having similarities to an outdated system does not make a current system worse. If we have sound arguments, we may even use nostalgia for times which many perceive to have more purpose as a way to entice people to our cause. The first thing that strikes close is the notion of a new landed gentry if the state stopped managing land. If this were to happen, these people would not need to add anything into the economy and could functionally leech off of those who work the land. The state supposedly ensures that land use will never result in a new form of feudalism. In pre-capitalist times, feudalism was possible because land was granted by the king. Only families tied to the existing system had territory. And with the advancement of capitalism, nominally feudal property was redistributed in markets, by government ordinance, or through an uprising. If there were to be a libertarian social order the people who first appropriate land will be the owners of that land. To get this title, they have to improve land as contrasted to nature or be in possession of land that was improved and given to them. This means that at some point the best land becomes owned and the people who own that
land can rent it out and live off rents. As long as that land is in some use and is not abandoned to rot, the people who own the land can collect the rents they want. The most prime land will have the highest rents as there are no governmental restrictions to the distribution of land. This means that a large amount of land will eventually be owned by a select group of wealthy individuals who then can become a landed gentry and not need to work. However, even in theory, this is not a bad feature of stateless capitalism. Land-owners benefit from being able to determine which land is important and the ability acquire this land by legitimate means. This means that they serve the social role of allocating the best land or bearing the cost of misallocating land. Secondly, the landed gentry had a positive impact on culture and wealthy people with leisure time will likely still patronize the arts more than anyone else. People need to find things to do and the upper land-owning class must focus on honourable culture. This is contrary to the communist notion of leisure as the land-owners do not become land-owners by default, they need to first own the land to collect rents. Finally, since these people don’t necessarily have a mandate from a king, they can fail at having the best land and they can lose their wealth. Land itself does not bring profits, someone has to rent and use land for it to increase wealth. Social conditions can shift and land elsewhere could become more valuable, so the land-owners would perpetually have to make sure that they charge rents optimally to not be usurped by other market participants. This leisure class will be integral in the allocation of land to the best users and it should not be shameful that these people are able to enjoy leisure. This leisure doesn’t impose a cost on anyone that wouldn’t have experienced this
cost and distributes wealth to those who produce art. The value of land-owners is precisely the regulation of scarcity in land, they serve their role by not allowing land to be in free use and reap profits if they do so efficiently. The second area where stateless capitalism is likened to feudalism is the notion that the centralization of defence forces would eventually create autocratic structures of defence, which resemble the kings of the feudalist period. These may be things like businesses taking over vast amounts of land or some rich people buying a lot of land and asserting their control. This could just be caused by the natural tendency for some defence services to have a large optimal size and limited competition. The problem some have with this is that this would functionally cause a return of kings and would somehow debunk our entire system of thought. First, none of this could happen violently or unjustly, it must all be done by market relations to be a proper criticism of a pure market system. If this is not met, it becomes a debate of general violence and the prevention thereof. Second, this doesn’t pose any sort of a problem and this doesn’t in itself erase the benefits of markets and statelessness. Even if there are autocratic law systems, they have no legitimacy other than the volition of the people under these systems. Every private business would go bankrupt if people refuse to do business with it. The business then would have to get rid of its land to confer profits onto the stockholder, this means that kings would have to be socially beneficial. Furthermore, as there is no inherent right to tax without the state, anyone who tries to forcefully levy a tax will be met with armed resistance.
Monarchy is the best form of social and political organization. The king makes good decisions out of his own profit as he owns the land he controls. The king can provide defence and law with no additional cost as those functions maintain the value of his property. The people under the command of the king would be generally taken care of as they are valuable to the land-owner since they serve to increase the value of land. This may repulse some libertarians, as libertarians tend to not value care as a moral value, but land-owners can increase profits by offering amenities. We could expect voluntary programs that resemble fascism where people are generally taken care of by the land-owner, receive plentiful job opportunities, healthcare benefits, and subsidized communities. Even though this will never work on a large scale, there is nothing inherently wrong with a social economy in a free market. In this form, the socialists are right when they call anarchocapitalism just more convoluted fascism. There would be some form of king whenever there is a supposedly anarcho-capitalist society and the concept of the fascist dictator is only a modernized version of the king, alongside various dilutions and sub-par pagan mysticism. But no matter if you want to call this form of organization feudalist or fascist, it is the way in which the profit motive would lead market actors to behave and it would more resemble fascism than a leftlibertarian utopia. The final point is that the military structure under a stateless libertarian society would resemble the military structure of the feudalist societies, and again I fail to see the points made by this critique. The feudalist society may have been flawed in many parts and the feudal economy was devastated by the inefficient allocation
of resources, however, the wars in feudalist societies were honourable. They were primarily to settle disputes and handled largely in a civil fashion, which some have referred to as a gentlemen’s warfare[11]. The solider didn’t engage in any war out of spite or malice, but simply because that is the honourable and profitable thing to do. Why is this worse when compared to the total war we see within the liberal capitalist system? In the 20th century and before during the current era of liberal imperialism[12], we saw massive acts of war, unlike anything that ever happened between feudalist powers. There may have been sieges and there may have been crusades, but they were never devastating campaigns that destroyed multiple countries. However, I think it is proper to here detail the similarities between stateless capitalist and feudalist systems of defence. In both cases, the primary providers of defence are people who are hired into armies to be kept in reserve and guard the nation. These will not be people who serve out of some meaningless patriotism to the empire they reside in. This means that, to the horror of many nationalists, war and the military cannot just exist to send young men to their deaths. Both systems allow the use of mercenaries, private individuals who have not joined the military but are used for concrete and limited campaigns. Mercenaries are no more dishonourable than regular soldiers, the employment of these people is just more loose and irregular, which results in them being a lower quality participant in war. However, when the alternative is conscripted slave labour, mercenaries become much more enticing. In this sense, a lot of stateless capitalist and feudalist wars are both fought by people
whose distinct purpose is the victory of some concrete campaign and who are not allegiant to specific nations. And finally, in both of these systems, there is an immense role of the wealthy members of society to defend the rest of the society. During feudalism, the knights were the nobility who had a duty to their kings to fight in wars. In stateless capitalism, the bourgeoisie would certainly be one of the main driving parties for national defence. The wealthy members of society would be expected to pay for war as they are more at risk whenever there is war due to having more resources.
XXVI – The Case for Guilds Guilds are a forgotten way of organizing industries and workers, mostly because it’s seemingly not applicable to the industrial age. And it’s true that when production as art was replaced by production as industry, unions were the better way of organizing for the working class. However, now that we have reached a new type of economy, we can learn from guilds. This is not to support the guild system as the restrictive monopolization of industry, but rather the internal workings of the guild as an example for future organization. Within contemporary unions, the most important factor in internal hierarchy is the time spent in the union and not the economic worth of the individual. This is because of the ideological connection between unions and socialism, which would often lead unions to be socialist organizations instead of serving the economic needs of the working class. But since the union is still a selfish economic entity, the people within the union want additional benefits and the union wants the members to keep paying dues. Because of this, a lot of unions rank members by how long they have been in the union and not by any other metric, fundamentally ensuring that people stay in the union for the longest possible time. The guild was completely hierarchical and the hierarchy was determined by the expertise of those within the guild. This means that the people who were the best at whatever they did were at the top of the guild while the people who were less able and less capable didn’t enjoy such high positions. This put a tremendous incentive for people to improve their craft and to create better
products to improve their status. Compared to unions which only care about people staying in the union, this organizational structure is of a great social benefit to the people involved in relevant interactions. Furthermore, the hierarchy allocates the resources of the guild to the people who are most capable of spending wisely as demonstrated by their ability to master some craft. Mastery requires a high degree of dedication and focus and is only achieved in old age, the masters of crafts can be expected to have low time preferences and great reserves of wisdom. This becomes a selfreinforcing mechanism where the people who best use resources get on top of the guild where they can best use a larger amount of resources. Compared to unions where the leaders allocate resources on the basis of negotiation with the employers and create centralized wealth based on who can promise and swindle the most. This will become a more parasitic institution the further it evolves as it rewards neither action nor craft, but rather the ability to convince people of the necessity of the union. Unions claim to stand for the working class, but the reality of the union is that they stand for unionized workers and no one else. Since the unions stand for the workers that are unionized, they will attempt to make the lives of non-unionized workers as miserable as possible until they join their union and start paying dues. The same is true with guilds, however, the guild serves a socially useful purpose in centralizing production within the guild and by discriminating against the people who are not in the guild. The workforce in a guild is expected to be better than the nonguild workforce due to the quality controls imposed by the guild. This
helps regulate the market in a decentralized voluntary manner and increases quality whenever people are seeking quality. And since the guild is based on ensuring that work is done well and not that workers get the most money they can get for the least they do, the guild is able to ensure a better quality of worker. This can largely mitigate the necessity for many regulatory burdens on private businesses and other such public safety measures as the guild itself is able to increase quality. Furthermore, guilds, unlike unions, have an upper limit to membership or at least a strong drive to localize, this is because unions function based on negotiating power while guilds aim to increase the personal value of the workers within the guild. This means that workers need personal attention, the guild cannot have so many members as to make improving individuals impossible for the guild, if a guild had too many people, it would lose the purpose of its existence. This mitigates the negative effects that otherwise could have been present with the continuous drive for unions to expand. Instead, guilds increase the value in local industry. This is not to say that the guild doesn’t benefit greatly from the prestige it can accumulate, that no superstructures can form within guilds, or that guilds can’t gain negotiating power. Using connections or other methods the guild will have some way of providing its members a favourable position in the market beyond making them more valuable. This is still not the main purpose of the guild and doesn’t create the egalitarian swindling we often see with unions. And we need to address the concept of the guild increasing the value of the worker and creating better quality workers as this is a fundamental reason for why guilds were formed. The premise is that
some person who wants to practice a craft joins a guild, the guild then teaches that person the craft and ensures that he does work of sufficient quality. When that has been established, the guild certifies the member and allows him to practice this craft using the guild. This involves a lot of training and hard work for the prospects who join the guild and ensures that the people who are guild-certified are people of great quality. The other side of the coin is equally as important, if not more. The people who want training in some area are able to join a guild and use the experience of the people who are working within some concrete market. Guilds are based on the interaction of the members and not schooling. This means that there are opportunities for actual job experience, there are opportunities to master all different aspects required for a certain field of work, and new members can be taught by people who know how to do the work. These qualities are often lacking in formal schooling, people don’t know the practice of some field even if they went through trade school and will never have opportunities to use the wisdom they have in a guild. This is compounded by the fact that trade schools have been drifting more towards generalized education from their previous area of teaching a certain field. Since the trade school isn’t focusing on trade and is more focused on the school, the technical experience that it is supposed to provide becomes even lesser and the people who wish to enter the honest laborious workforce are barred from doing so by being bogged down by additional busywork. Not everyone needs to receive an academic education and guilds serve as a great opportunity for those who don’t need an academic education to be able to find work and do that work well.
Because guilds have actual prestige, respect, and are able to train people and form connections, they are much better at securing employment than any school or union would be on its own. This means that if people are ready to go through the effort it takes to become a member of a guild and a trained professional within the field they want to work in, they will be able to find work through the connections of the guild. When guilds acted as explicitly monopolistic and restrictive, this employment was guaranteed. However, a free market prohibits this kind of parasitic and exploitative behaviour and thus allows guilds to promote themselves in the market, but makes them compete for that position. Due to this, guilds would help people who are the most productive in society and would not thrust young people into the world with an education and no connections. The guild itself would form social capital that members can exploit. Furthermore, the guild could keep track of job offers and have companies only contract with the guild. Thus, it’s possible to keep jobs lined up for everyone who enters the guild. If the guild did so, it could retain the value of an industry without using any coercion. There are many overtrained individuals with no work, who would benefit from guilds that can prevent entry. If this turns out to not be economically efficient, private non-guild entities are able to outcompete the guilds, thus avoiding the biggest problems with each approach. And this could mean that hundreds of thousands of ambitious young people who are not fit for higher education could get jobs without being stuck in education. This is highly desirable for young people who have to face a poor climate when it comes to work and education. This also makes economic calculation easier by providing
relative security and ensuring that the people within the guild are more accurately able to determine their economic potential. There’s a final point to be made for guilds, this is simply that guilds provide a community for the people involved. The fraternal society that guilds create will be beneficial to many young men who otherwise would not have had productive older male influences. The union may have some faux solidarity and other symbolism, but that pales in comparison to the authentic society of the guild.
XXVII – Greatness The single largest problem with modernity is a fundamental opposition to great things and greatness in general. Our focus is not that which is great but that which is mundane, ordinary and relatable. Our culture is nothing more than the lowest common denominator and we don’t want to focus on what our society could be, but rather embrace what our society already is. This lack of care about what is great and what is not is at the root of modernity. This lack of reverence for those things above us, the lack of care for eternal values or greater goals, and the perception that these are no more than an antiquated set of values defines the modern. Furthermore, among those who do want to bring back this greatness, there are some unable to rise above modernity as they are unable to see what caused the greatness of man and want to force greatness on man. They want to create a false greatness, a fictitious reconstruction of a traditional society. It is easy to blame this on cultural marxism and post-modernism as these are the ultimate manifestations of this attitude. But in reality, an opposition to the great is entirely derivative from enlightenment attitudes and has continued to permeate the entirety of culture since. Even though a lot of people tend to fetishize the enlightenment and even the descriptor for the time period is indicative of this fetishism, the enlightenment was nothing other than a movement away from the greatness, a turn away from God and towards the human and the pathetic. Although the turn from greatness was not an intellectual or an artistic movement, abandoning the great was created entirely
by the masses. The egalitarian parts of the enlightenment were mostly created by the revolutionaries and not the thinkers. The great liberal philosophers and historians would never have penned a single word if they saw the atrocities of republicanism, liberal reform, and the sheer lack of backbone among most anti-republican movements. These were the precursors of the modern political and social order, this is not to say that the pre-enlightenment era was one of great liberty and prosperity, but rather that the enlightenment abandoned everything great about the preceding era. The popular movement of the enlightenment strived to individuate everything from the church and the state and then reconstruct them as one great citizenry instead of those subject to the king and to the church. The enlightenment era was also marked by the abandonment of an inherent respect for everything traditional. No longer was it enough that something had worked for centuries, personal judgements based on faux science were now to be the guide to how each and every person lived their lives. Furthermore, the enlightenment strived to create a government and a society that were based on the individual and not on greater values. Ironically, these enlightenment attitudes were created from the philosophies of great thinkers who strived to find the most eternal values of them all, values that are completely derived from God and values that are beyond every man. But since all these values are equal to each person, the movement quickly turned to strive against those persons who are beyond the rest in terms of ability or status. Since there was no clear hierarchy among the people as all were now beholden to the same morality, it was assumed that the people
were now beholden to the popular opinion and not greater values. Even though the enlightenment philosophy was a turn towards reason, the movement sparked by the enlightenment was one against reason, a movement that aimed to replace eternal values by passing opinions. Thus, we find the conflicting images of the enlightenment philosopher examining the world with empiricism and rationalism to create a philosophical tradition not rivaled by any other tradition to this day. The other image of the enlightenment is the crowd rallying behind the guillotine. Rationalism became replaced by populism, religious tolerance became replaced by institutional secularism, human advancement became replaced by anti-traditionalism, and an opposition to absolute and tyrannical monarchs became an opposition to monarchy. This was not helped by the opponents of the enlightenment as they were not staunch traditionalists, but rather simply anti-rationalists and similarly opposed to greatness. They only helped create the monsters of the enlightenment and the popular philosophy that started the downfall of the world. We can now say that the enlightenment movements appeared relativistic only because they were after justice beyond anything else. The only reason they seem to bend to popular will is that eternal justice requires a democratic state and society. But this is an inherent contradiction, if there are eternal values then what is popular no longer matters and if what is popular matters, there are no eternal values. If there is one objective way to conduct society and the state, there can be no debate about how to conduct them. The only reactionary answer to this was to say that there is a single way to conduct every separate state and that universal values are
thus invalid. There was no movement which strived to preserve greatness against enlightenment populism without falling to the same path that would ultimately erase greatness by virtue of defining what is great by what is desirable by some people. There was nothing that opposed the democratization of society, but rather simply said that some societies are better off less democratic, there was and still has been no cohesive philosophical movement since the enlightenment that reveres the great without sacrificing the eternal. There has been no philosophical movement that has been able to simply put that there is no need to abandon what has always been great and there is no need to focus on personal experience if we want to find values that are eternal. There has been no worship of what is eternally great. Very few people have had the capacity to concisely formulate a theory that both values the nature of man and the potential of man, the ones that have been able to say this have followed the statement with qualifications. There has been no cry loud enough to make people listen, we need the eternal and we need the great, we need culture and we don’t need to sacrifice human society to achieve it. Very few have said that selfdetermination and greatness are not in opposition and that we can both use reason and revere everything larger than us. We can now pretend as if the enlightenment was a perfect blend of reason and tradition, that it neither abandoned tradition or forsook reason. But this is simply not the case, the enlightenment philosophy did not care for pre-established tradition, it may incidentally not have opposed it but it didn’t utilize it in any capacity. The attitude of the enlightenment was that the eternal scientific justice is more important
than any tradition of any country. This led to the movements that eventually ended in modernism and post-modernism, which actively shun greatness. Modernism by focusing on what is human and postmodernism by focusing on what is personal. We can now say that the real problems are only caused by modernism and enlightenment philosophy is largely blameless, but without the preceding enlightenment, there could have been no modernism. Without equality, liberty, fraternity we would have never reached egality, entitlement, collectivity. It is a logical progression from wanting to abolish institutional privilege to wanting to abolish every kind of privilege. The same is true with wanting the ability to be undisturbed by other people and the ability to be undisturbed by the fundamental realities of the world. Respect for your fellow man can easily lead to demanding that the focus of each person be on their fellow man. These all started off as fine moral tenets, but without any solidity to the morality we have, by necessity, reached modernist morality. In this sense, because the enlightenment abandoned the meaning of everything that came before, it opened up the logical path to being consumed by itself. If the enlightenment had kept the greatness and not only the eternal, then there would have been no demand for the advancement of enlightenment moods. By replacing the monarchy with the republic, the French revolution managed to replace the great with the popular while trying to introduce eternal values to the world. The same happened on a larger scale, the strive to create something eternal only resulted in the abolition of that which was already great. There is no need for this to be the case.
XXVIII – Kings by Merit It is a seemingly preposterous claim that there could be rule and authority, especially monarchistic rule, without there being state force to guarantee the existence of the monarchy. However, it is fully consistent and possible that there is a system of monarchy in which the king is chosen by what he has to offer and not by what he commands, this is voluntary monarchism. The reason why this system is optimal is the method by which voluntary self-selection increases virtue. Authority does not exist only to fulfil the goals of the authority, for authority to be justified and valid, the authority must conform to the reason why people would submit themselves under an authority in the first place. With modern libertarian theory, we have properly provided ways in which decentralized societies can guarantee order, security, and prosperity. It seems that this invalidates any need for any authority as goals that would otherwise have been the responsibility of an authority are better accomplished if authority is left to the people themselves and not concentrated in one person. However, freedom in itself cannot solve the problem of virtue, there is no way in which libertarianism in its purest form can demonstrate how we can create virtue without authority. Having authority is thus inherently useful for increasing the virtue in society and nothing more than increasing virtue in society. When we can increase virtue using authority, we can create a society in which we can combine the benefits of authority and liberty.
This relegates the authority exclusively into the domain of the social and removes authority from economics or politics in the modern sense of the word. The governance by the authority would be governance inherently only related entirely to social cohesion and increased virtue. I will not be making the case for monarchy over other types of authority, but I will assume that monarchy is the optimal form of authority and a king is the best manifestation of monarchy. These are not necessarily statements that are completely accurate and the points I make do not hinge on these assumptions, however, they make the language I use much more convenient. Thus, the libertarian purpose of the king is not to guarantee a good life for the people within a society but rather impose a degree of cost to unvirtuous behaviour. This may be anything from banning pornography to edicts concerning public intoxication. This is not because those watching pornography or intoxicated in public are committing violence, but rather that these people are obnoxious and harmful to the moral and personal safety of the community in which they reside. The king has no authority aside from that which the people have personally conferred to him, this means that the king cannot impose costs on anyone who has not previously agreed to be governed and does not reside on land owned by those who are governed. And it is a natural desire for people to protect their communities and themselves be more virtuous. This is true even when they are not capable of being perfect. This means that imposing costs to lacking virtue is a great personal aid for people who are not constantly virtuous and who wish to protect themselves and their families.
Thus, it is not like the king is a restrictive entity oppressing the people who voluntarily have agreed to be governed by the king and it is not true that the king punishes the people. Rather the king serves as the patriarch of the entire society and ensures that the society is at the greatest degree of virtue that it can be. The king is then a benevolent ruler without having more authority than that which people have given to the king and the king can create a more virtuous society using the powers conferred upon him. This is beneficial to the people within the society as they have demonstrated their preference by trusting the king to wisely use his power. Unlike the classical king, this sort of king is confined entirely to the people who are willing to accept his rule. The king ought to amass a kingdom around him if he wishes his edicts to be heard and if he can perform the social duty of rule. Since the king has his kingdom by volition and not by having inherited a territory of land, the authority of the king cannot extend beyond those who feel as if they are benefited by the king. The king can never become oppressive as he is confined to his kingdom, the kingdom can only expand insofar as the king can demonstrate the value that he can provide. This means that the monarch is not an oppressive entity and can never become a state as the monarch needs to constantly demonstrate that he is the proper and rightful leader of the people. The king cannot claim that he is entitled to what the people produce. The libertarian kingdom is a voluntary association of people within a libertarian framework, the kingdom is not a forceful entity, but rather an organization that can ensure and enshrine virtue. In this regard, the kingdom becomes a sort of market entity. This is not reducing the king to providing a materialistic conception of rule, but
rather that the spiritual and social value of the king is reflected by the willingness of people to follow that king and not be independent or associated with other political entities. This does not mean that people are materialistically attracted to a king or that they have no loyalty to their king. Rather, on a large scale, people will be loyal to the king only if the king can provide for them and does not go against the kingdom. And the kingdom is a natural part of humanity, the king ruling a certain set of people is the way in which people operate and is a natural desire within all people. This may not be immediately obvious, but there is a reason why we gravitate towards charismatic leaders and why we concern ourselves with politics, statecraft, and governance as a species, we fundamentally need to be governed, lead, and guided. Having moral and personal freedom when it comes to action means that we want to reduce our freedom to reduce our responsibility. There are a select few individuals who are outside this, they are the radical libertarians and they are the individualist anarchists, they are the only people who want to rule themselves. This makes them abnormal and does not imply that they are right, they should be given the freedom to act as they please in the confines of natural law, but this freedom should also apply to those who wish to be governed. The kingdom is the natural form of human society and the king is a necessary agency when it comes to the kingdom. This means that we need to optimize the relation between the king and the kingdom and this is only possible when the king governs with the consent of the kingdom. Having an agreement from the kingdom which gives the king a right to govern is the most vital thing when it comes to
stopping parasitism in a society. People do not consent to parasitism when they are given a choice to exit. The king would be held in the constraints of the society and would have to serve the needs of the people in ensuring a proper and functional political society for those who have entrusted their society to the king. The king is a social agent as long as he is serving his kingdom and not himself. The king has to demonstrate that he has the merit required to govern an entire society and that he has the capacity that would qualify him to a certain position within a society. As long as the king is responsible to his kingdom and as far as the king is bound by the consent of his subjects, this will always be true. If the king could overstep his boundaries, he could become tyrannical. Furthermore, the king could be overthrown without force by having his subjects reject his rule on the basis that there are other kings that can offer better rule and who are more qualified to govern than the particular king is. This means that the king must maintain his exceptional character and ability. The king must be the best manifestation of a leader and the king must be in a position of elevated and perfect virtue. Thus, the king can guarantee the virtue within a society if the king himself can demonstrate that he is already a virtuous person and that he deserves to have the position of leadership by his merit alone. When kings cannot demand to be followed, their following will be a reflection of their merit, the best king will be followed by the most people. This means that the quality of monarchy is perpetually increasing and the people who are in opposition to virtue and morality would be barred from becoming monarchs. The people who rule over a society would also be the people who have the rightful
place in rule based on their personal capacity as rulers and not on an unbacked claim to land. Kings are then required to demonstrate incredible skill when it comes to personal improvement, social matters, religion, and whatever other source of moral decency is commonly accepted within the kingdom. When the king can only rule when he himself can demonstrate his virtue, there could be no other possible outcome than the entirety of society improving and moving in the footsteps of the king and becoming a more virtuous society. The king is a wholly benevolent entity and not an enemy of the people as far as the king has merit. The king would logically then be the person in society who has the highest degree of virtue and the highest degree of merit, voluntary monarchy is the ultimate meritocracy as the most qualified person would have the most power. The king would be a king because he is righteous and capable and the person who is the most righteous and most capable would be the king. This form of governance necessarily results in the king being the exemplar of society and the most shining example of what humans can be. The glory that the king would embody in himself and the greatness of his magnificence would be well deserved. Classical kings are revered even when they are parasites, kings by merit will be revered because they are in polar opposition to parasites, nothing will connect kings by merit with parasitism as they are the best individuals. Monarchy in any other way and democracy in all ways results in situations in which the rulers are people who do not embody virtue, although this happens far more with democracy than with monarchy. It does not mean that involuntary rule will always necessarily be against virtue, but we
need exemplary kings to embody virtue and we only get exemplary kings through voluntary monarchy.
XXIX – For an Anarchist Monarchy It may seem contradictory to combine the terms anarchism and monarchism, and to a certain extent it is, an anarchist monarchy sounds like an even more absurd concept beyond what it implies at face value. Anarchism, the rule of none should be the furthest thing from monarchism, the rule of one, but upon a closer examination, we see that this is not so. After all, the rule of one is a rule of fewer people than the rule of many. When left unrestrained, monarchy may be the best political system or worst political system, there is nothing better than a good king and nothing worse than a bad king. The question is if the merits of good kings outweigh the problems caused by bad kings. And this seems to be a fundamental problem in monarchism that cannot be fixed, and this is true insofar as classical theory is true. Monarchism will always have this problem unless the monarchy has a counterbalancing force. This force was assumed to be democracy by the liberals before the spread of mass republicanism within the liberal movement. The monarchy was still regarded as useful, however, the monarchy needed the voice of the people to not become oppressive and the monarch could only act in accordance to what is best for the people and in the public interest. To do this, the monarch needed a parliament to constrain his powers. However, this is still insufficient as people will now not be ruled by one king, but two kings, both of which want to increase their power. This is the problem when monarchy and democracy are combined, and to a lesser extent with degenerate aristocracies. Monarchy and
democracy are both systems of rule which aim to subjugate the interest of the population to the interest of the rulers, those rulers are the monarch and the democratic process. This is because the democratic process has legal power over any decision any individual makes whenever individual choices come into conflict with mass choices. Democracy within monarchy fails at producing a system where the monarch can be accountable to the people and a system where bad kings are averted. It seems like an impossible situation and the only apparent solution is the complete abolition of monarchy. But although good governance is possible without a king, a good king is unmatched when it comes to the quality of governance. If there could be a solution to this problem, there could be a system of governance that ascends beyond traditional political philosophy. Anarchism, in the classical sense, is a society without any rulers or other class distinctions. Anarchism, in the Rothbardian sense, is a society where there may be rulers, but those rulers must be chosen by consent and there may be class distinctions insofar as they naturally emerge without force. Both of these theories are radically opposed to the state since the state is in opposition to both human equality and human property, the state is in opposition to the freedom of man and the liberty of man. Thus, even though both of these perspectives fundamentally differ as they have different conceptions of freedom, they retain their characteristic opposition to the state. However, since these systems are opposed to the state, they are also seemingly opposed to governance. The Rothbardians present various methods of conducting affairs without governance and these
systems are completely adequate. But with freedom there is always the risk of moral folly, people don’t always use freedom in a productive manner and can use freedom destructively. People with freedom must be allowed to use it destructively, however, that has destructive consequences on the entire society. There are also structural incentives which do not always produce the best results whenever a society is uncontrolled by structures of governance. As the social order decays, the society itself becomes increasingly perverse. There is also the problem of a law system that is swiftly and easily enforceable. This is possible without a final arbiter but is much easier when there is an ultimate law system within a society. How would it be possible to have the liberty of moral men without having the freedom of immoral men? How can we retain our individual liberty, but also have a law that can be easily judged, enforced, and generally accepted? If we were to solve these problems, we could create a more perfect political theory. The ultimate solution for the production of positive effects by moral freemen and good kings is the combination of the principles of anarchy and monarchy. There are three defining factors which separate this from monarchy and anarchy in their traditional sense. The first and most important factor is allowing free exit in the form of migration or secession whenever a king becomes tyrannical. As long as the king is good, the king will retain his territory and rule, when the king becomes tyrannical, the king loses all right to rule. This has no other substitute and there is no other way in which it is possible to fix the inherent problem of not having a recourse against a bad king in a monarchy. As previously said, introducing democracy will only
lead to a power struggle between two structures of governance, which will inevitably result in a worse system altogether. The other distinct factor is that, unlike in pure anarchism, the people are morally responsible to their king and are not free actors when it comes to public morality. This means that immorality within freemen is discouraged insofar as they themselves are bound to their king by their own volition. They willingly give up destructive liberty for public morality. This means that under the conditions of monarchy, unlike traditional anarchism, there is a way in which to incentivize morality. The king serves as to not infringe on the people when they are being just and productive, but serves as to stop people in their destructive habits. Thus, a monarch can stop those things deemed generally destructive by the people who choose to follow that monarch. And any system other than monarchy would leave room for people to legislate their own personal vices into social acceptance. Only a monarch can prevent people from exercising their inborn desire for a limited degree of self-destruction in exchange for temporal pleasures. An aristocratic government could serve the same role, but the aristocracy would then be caught in a conflict of their own interests if any one of them were to try to introduce vice into the socially accepted system. Thus, the only way to sustain morality is to have an agent in a society who people use to limit their own destructive liberty. The final thing that differs both from traditional monarchy and traditional anarchy is that there remains a system of law that is generally accepted yet remains voluntaristic. The anarchic system of law in which compact determines legal judgement would be backed
by the monarchic system of law where the legitimacy of the king is tied to the legitimacy of the law. Centralized law can thus coexist with decentralized law. The “final arbiter problem” and all other similar issues could be solved by simply introducing a final arbiter that is generally and voluntarily socially accepted to be a final arbiter in disputes that cannot otherwise be solved. Thus, the king is the final judge over matters that would create conflict if they were decentralized. These proposals are probably repulsive to those who are currently in support of philosophical anarchism or political monarchism as they think that they can fix these problems. These people think that the solution to problems in monarchy is more monarchy and the answer to the failures of anarchy is more anarchy, this is a respectable position, but a woefully insufficient one. It is true that these problems can, to a limited extent, be rectified within the systems themselves. There could be methods within monarchy that can ideally prevent the failures of bad kings. There could be methods within anarchy which incentivize those behaviours that are virtuous. There are also numerous solutions to the problem of final arbiters. But there is no definitive solution to the problem of bad kings. There is no fool-proof way to prevent immorality in anarchy. There is no way to solve the final arbiter problem in such a way that would not be problematic to social planning. The perfect solutions to these problems are only achieved with a combination of anarchism and monarchy.
XXX – On Libertarianism and Statecraft Read the articles first published in Zeroth Position that expand upon what this work started at www.InsulaQui.com/Statecraft. That series includes far more theory on what voluntary governance would look like and provides a more thorough explanation for the structure of anarcho-monarchism. Furthermore, the series provides an intellectually thrilling look at why property rights imply governance.
Anarcho-Monarchism by Insula Qui ©2018 Insula Qui No Rights Reserved Author: Insula Qui Contact: [email protected] The author of this book hereby waives all claim of copyright (economic and moral) in this work and immediately places it in the public domain; it may be used, distorted or destroyed in any manner whatsoever without further attribution or notice to the creator. [1]
There is a case to be made that some goods are public goods and would be underproduced on the market. I address this claim below. [2]
This would mean a head tax or, suboptimally, a flat tax.
[3]
A tangentially relevant study that I highly recommend is by Jüri Allik and Anu Realo titled “Individualism-Collectivism and Social Capital”. [4]
This is not to say that members of other cultures cannot be trusted, but rather that those cultures themselves are less characterized by trust than European cultures. [5]
This does not mean that there is no such thing as contractual duty, but rather that all duty has to be contractual. [6]
One may here point at the nazi übermensch as some sort of contradiction to this, however, the eugenic desires of Hitler were not to create a new man, but a better version of the existing man, an improved genetic variant of the nordic-germanic races. [7]
Parts of this chapter that were never published or that I removed have expanded into
“Producerism” and “Authoritarianism Versus Libertarianism”. Furthermore, this chapter has been re-edited and as such is not perfectly representative of views espoused by Zeroth Position. [8]
Robert Taylor’s magnificent work, “Reactionary Liberty” elaborates on this topic.
[9]
The chapter “Banking” in my previous book, “Capitalism Works” elaborates further on
the issue of banks.
[10]
In more economic terms, within the family, all persons are both principal and agent.
This means that economic imperatives are not individual within the family as all members serve the needs of all others. [11]
“Monarchy and War” by Erik von Kuehnel-Leddihn in “The Myth of National Defence”
edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. [12]
We must admit that a lot of the fiction about the World Wars was mainly war
propaganda. Both wars were heavily driven by the expansionary dreams of liberal America and liberal England. This continues on to this day throughout the wars in the far east during the Cold War and contemporary wars in the middle east. There is even an argument that Napoleon was the earliest exemplar of liberal imperialism.