Núñez: “Flagpole Libertarianism: A Refutation of the Suicide Pact”

by Stephan Kinsella on September 29, 2025

Thoughtful new article, Juan I. Núñez, “Flagpole Libertarianism: A Refutation of the Suicide Pact,” Libertarian Alliance [UK] Blog (Sep. 29, 2025):

The Enemy Within

Every libertarian would refuse to steal a ladder to save their mom from a burning building, and refuse to steal a penny to stop aliens from destroying the world, because every libertarian is a libertarian.

The moment this statement appeared on my X feed, I wasn’t so much at a loss for words as I was struck by a familiar, wearying conclusion: this person believes libertarianism to be a death cult. And sadly, they are not alone. It would seem that for a growing number of people, libertarian ethics have been flattened into a binary matter, where a strict, Spartan adherence is demanded of a “true” libertarian, even if the price is one’s own life.

For decades, it has been a perennial sport among our critics to elaborate the most absurd and specific hypotheticals designed to portray libertarianism as a cold, robotic, and inhuman philosophy. Yet, in a perverse twist, these same strawmen have become the favored litmus tests for a faction of libertarians themselves, used to police the boundaries of an already fragmented movement. The weapon once wielded against us has been repurposed by our own adherents, seemingly for our own suicide.

Murray Rothbard had a name for this mindset: the “modal libertarian.” He identified them as culturally-alienated people, detached from reality, who cloaked childish rebellion in the language of high principle. They were, in his estimation, crankish extremists who disdained all strategy for a “holier than thou” posture, quick to brand even the movement’s titans as “socialists”, for the terrible crime of engaging with the world as it is, in the absence of what it ought to be. Rothbard perfectly captured their level of seriousness with a dry assessment of their humor: