StephanKinsella.com

An LRC search yields several entries in this series:

1. My Libertarian Life by Roderick T. Long

   Jan 4, 2003 … The following story is part of Walter Block’s Autobiography Archive. My Libertarian Life. by Roderick T. Long. I’ve been fortunate enough to …
   www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long2.html – Cached

2. It All Began With Fred Schwarz by Gary North

   Dec 16, 2002 … The following story is part of Walter Block’s Autobiography Archive. It All Began With Fred Schwarz. by Gary North …
   www.lewrockwell.com/north/north145.html – Cached – Similar [continue reading…]

From my comment to my post Machanarchy:

“Incidentally, I see in David Miller’s lengthy review of the Machan/Long book on Amazon, he highly recommends Hasnas’s and Long’s contributions to the book, which are: John Hasnas, The Obviousness of Anarchy (2); and Roderick Long, Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism. These papers are really good.”

[Update: See also Hasnas: Common Law, Anarchy, etc.: Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society]

Hasnas is also author of the fantastic paper The Myth of the Rule of Law.

Tibor Machan in Essay on “Government” v. “State” distinguishes between state and government, and says:

Labeling an allegedly “near pure” libertarian opponent a “supporter of the state” or “a statist” does carry a painful sting. One would hope, however, that just this temptation is resisted by serious scholars.

Now, sure, if you distinguish government from state, it’s unfair to call an advocate of government a statist, just as it’s unfair to call anarchist pro-chaos. However, anarchism is anti-state, not anti-government–if we are keeping these distinctions in mind. So if you carefully distinguish government from state, so that you are advocating only government but not advocating the state, it seems to me this makes you an anarchist. That is, unless you are advocating government and the state, in which case the charge of “statism” is more accurate.

So are anarchists in favor of “government,” as distinct from the state? well, I suppose it comes down to a question of what you mean by “government”. If we all agree that libertarians should be against “the state,” and we all agree that even anarchists favor some institutions regarding justice, defense, law, then the question now is: is the government you advocate a state, or merely a private institution?

And I think we can answer this not by engaging in continually nuanced semantics but in looking at the fundamentals of libertarianism: the anarchists oppose the state because they oppose aggression (see my What It Means to be an Anarcho-Capitalist and What Libertarianism Is). If there is an agency that commits institutionalized aggression then they (we) oppose it because it commits aggression. And they have to give a name to this “agency that commits institutionalized aggression”: we call it “state”. Hoppe, in my mind, accurately defines “state” as follows:

Let me begin with the definition of a state. What must an agent be able to do to qualify as a state? This agent must be able to insist that all conflicts among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by him or his agent. And implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as ultimate judge, as the second defining characteristic of a state, is the agent’s power to tax: to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services.

Based on this definition of a state, it is easy to understand why a desire to control a state might exist. For whoever is a monopolist of final arbitration within a given territory can make laws. And he who can legislate can also tax. Surely, this is an enviable position. [See Hoppe, Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State.]

So when you talk about government, the question is not how we classify it or what the best words are for state, government, etc., semantically: but rather: the question is: does the “government” that “minarchists” (?) favor engage in institutionalized aggression, or not? If not, it’s not a state, and it’s not unlibertarian. If it does, it’s merely a type of state.

Now the anarchists believe you can have private institutions provide law, justice, defense, without necessarily engaging in systematic and institutionalized aggression–that is, without being a state. Whether you want to call such institutions “government” or not seems to me to be purely semantic, esp. if we grant there is a distinction between state and government. The remaining question is simply what type of government the “minarchists” (?) favor: do they favor a government that has the authority to commit institutionalized aggression, or not? If they do, then they are pro-state, since such a government is a state. If they do not, they are anarchists, it seems to me, since private, non-state, non-aggressive institutions of law, justice, and defense is exactly what we anarchists favor.

[Mises crosspost]

Early in Atlas Shrugged there is a scene of Dagny Taggart on a train, dozing; she hears some guy whistling a tune she knows must be from the composer Halley; she asks him what it is, he says it’s Halley’s 5th Concerto. “But he didn’t write one,” she says; the boy realizes he’s let the cat out the bag and clams up. Later on she finds herself whistling or humming the tune too.

Now this is a perfect example of IP theft. It’s a derivative work or public performance–stealing the guy’s pattern without his permission! Yet Rand portrays the young guy and Dagny as good, virtuous. Therefore, she sees no problem with this IP theft.

Who to side with on this issue: left-libertarians, who advance the confused hypothesis that “left” is better than “right”; or the great Henry Hazlitt? Here is what he wrote in the preface to his wonderful novel, Time Will Run Back: “as ‘capitalism’ is merely a name for freedom in the economic sphere, the theme of my novel might be stated more broadly: the will to freedom can never be permanently stamped out.”

Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1937:

“Ser de la izquierda es, como ser de la derecha, una de las infinitas maneras que el hombre puede elegir para ser un imbécil: ambas, en efecto, son formas de la hemiplejia moral.”

(“To be of the Left is, as to be of the Right, one of the infinte number of ways available to people for choose how to become an idiot; both are, actually, forms of moral hemiplegia”).”

Leonard Read: “Neither Left Nor Right: There is No Simplified Term to Distinguish Libertarians,” The Freeman, 1956.

Walter Block: “Libertarianism is unique; it belongs neither to the right nor the left: a critique of the views of Long, Holcombe, and Baden on the left, Hoppe, Feser and Paul on the right,” Journal of Libertarian Studies (Forthcoming, 2010)

“Political Correctness”

Re: In Case You Were Wondering

Uh oh!

From Shenandoah with Jimmy Stewart (see also Grigg’s great piece The Draft-Nappers Are Stirring):

Stewart plays Anderson, a Virginian farmer with six sons, whose land is surrounded on all sides by Union armies.  He refuses to participate in the war, at least at he beginning of the movie.  Johnson, a Confederate soldier comes to him to recruit Anderson’s sons.

Johnson: There’s a Yankee army breathing down your neck, Mr. Anderson. I don’t think you realize —
Anderson: You’re town-bred aren’t you?
Johnson: I don’t see what that has to do with —
Anderson: I’ve got five hundred acres of good, rich dirt here.  As long as the rains come and the sun shines it’ll grow grow anything I have a mind to plant.  And we pulled every stump.  We’ve cleared every field.  We’ve done it ourselves without the sweat of one slave.
Johnson: So?
Anderson: So?!  So, can you give me one good reason why I should send my family that took me a lifetime to raise down that road like a bunch of damn fools to do somebody else’s fighting?
Johnson: Virginia needs all of her sons, Mr. Anderson.
Anderson: That might be so, Johnson, but these are my sons!  They don’t belong to the state.  When they were babies I never saw the state coming around with a spare tit.  We never asked anything of the state and never expected anything.  We do our own living — and thanks to no man for the right.

***

The Patron Saint of the “Leave Us the Hell Alone” Caucus: Charlie Anderson (James Stewart), the Individualist hero of the film Shenandoah.

In The Unidirectionality of Conversions, I noted that most political conversions regarding libertarianism are toward it, and rarely away from it–an indication that it’s a basically sound, correct doctrine. Of course, there are exceptions that prove the rule, especially among libertarians who fall prey to leftism and nihilism. Left-libertarians have done some good work in pointing out the perils of corporatism (which standard libertarians are already aware of, of course), but ultra-leftist ideas about egalitarianism, labor, alienation, class battles, workers and capitalists, land, property, and associated kooky economics can lead to error and confusion. Case in point is a leftist, former libertarian (if he ever was one) who thinks he’s scoring points by … accusing me of believing in self-ownership. Uh, guilty as charged. I … confess. He writes:

“Self-ownership” is nonsense, but let us be clear on the goal of such a concept. Self-ownership is a capitalist attempt to justify individual freedom in a world where property reigns.

Self-ownership is not nonsense at all. It means that you have the right to control your body, not someone else. What else could be more simple, intuitively obvious, or libertarian?

What is striking here is that we have a former libertarian, taken in by leftist delusions and confusions, proclaiming that only capitalists believe in self-ownership. In arguing that only capitalists believe in self-ownership, he’s making a damn good case for why people should be capitalist! I dunno. Maybe he’s a capitalist double agent. More likely he’s just confused.

Then he accuses me of favoring self-ownership so that I “can promote the repulsive and unjust doctrine of parental privilege? What utter nonsense from Kinsella, the king of the Misesian dunces.” Let me get this straight: I argue for the right of people to own their bodies, to be sovereigns; and for children to become adults and own themselves … in order to justify the “repulsive and unjust doctrine of parental privilege”? Say what? I have to say it’s a bit embarrassing to have such pathetic critics.