Chris–quite right about charity being voluntary. And not only that, as far as I know, the Holy See is the only state in the world that does not tax–it’s supported by voluntary donations of a billion Catholics around the globe. It’s the most libertarian state in the world.
As mentioned by Jeff Tucker, in the Pope’s new encyclical, Caritas in veritate, he writes:
On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care.
As Jeff writes, “I wish it had gone further to reject the whole idea of a IP but this is an excellent statement as far as it goes.”
[Against Monopoly cross-post]
Lew, great post. Anti-state, and anti-war. The Zinn piece has some other great lines that should be of interest to libertarians, especially constitutional sentimentalists and those who desperately cling to the notion that the American Revolution was some thoroughly libertarian event:
Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. … That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs ….
Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line-in the Proclamation of 1763-that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.
Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution? … Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it
… Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.
[LRC Cross-post]
ABSOLUTELY HEROIC post by Lew Rockwell! Yes, it’s time to take the gloves off, my fellow libertarians. No more excuses for the state! No more state worship! Down with constitutional sentimentalism!
‘Untold Truths About the American Revolution’
Posted by Lew Rockwell on July 7, 2009 08:49 AM
Thanks to Laurence Vance for sending me this most interesting article by Howard Zinn. Zinn, one of my favorite left-wing historians, is always interesting, and sometimes right. He says:
We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.
It took me a while, despite my Loyalist ancestors, to come to the same conclusion about the Revolutionary War. It was unecessary, like the rest of our wars. For example, the king–a sweetheart compared to almost any US president–would have conceded internal independence to the 13 colonies, so long as they remained officially British. And as the examples of Australia and Canada show, with British colonies that became peacefully independent, there is far more decentralism than in the US, and far less militarism and belligerent nationalism. Of course, may they remain monarchies, and never become republics, for all the reasons Hans Hoppe demonstrates.
My response:
Lew, great post. Anti-state, and anti-war. The Zinn piece has some other great lines that should be of interest to libertarians, especially constitutional sentimentalists and those who desperately cling to the notion that the American Revolution was some thoroughly libertarian event:
Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. … That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs ….
Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line-in the Proclamation of 1763-that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.
Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution? … Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it
… Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.
If you are interested in volunteering to provide occasional copyediting work for Libertarian Papers articles, please contact me.
Wow. This is astonishing–Lew’s blog has huge reach.
Thanks to NoTreason.com for this nice post about a classic anarcho-Kinsellan article and LRC’s reach.
Lew, you are so right, and here is more evidence: Judge Says Blogs Not Legitimate News Source; No Shield Protections.
[LRC cross-post]
This report quotes Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole on what policies TSA ought to adopt:
among large and midsize airports, only Omaha and Colorado Springs, Colo., still use swabbing machines as the only means of screening checked baggage for explosives.
“I didn’t realize that any of the airports in that size category were still doing trace detection,” said Robert Poole, a transportation expert with the Reason Foundation, a nonprofit free-market policy group based in Los Angeles. “It’s long overdue for an airport the size of Omaha” to have scanning machines.
… Poole said Omaha should temporarily place the luggage scanning equipment in the lobby, sacrificing customer space in order to use superior security technology sooner.Scanning equipment, he said, can reveal timing devices or other suspicious details, while swabbing is meant only to detect explosive materials.
We’re from the government, and we’re here to help!
[LRC crosspost]
An interesting, fiery comment by Bob Kaercher to my post Happy We-Should-Restore-The-Monarchy-And-Rejoin-Britain Day!:
Bob Kaercher
I would never propose rejoining the Brits nor would I ever favor a monarchy, but I think I can appreciate what’s illustrated by the comparison being made here, which is that the vote-for-your-favorite-dictator democracy celebrated every 4th of July was hardly an improvement. As much as that may rankle the feathers of some American libertarians who have still not quite totally detoxed from the years of brainwashing by the media, popular culture, hearing family and neighbors spouting widely held assumptions with no or little basis in fact, and/or government schooling, the founding of the United States is hardly an historical event to be cheered by libertarians. Something good may be said for the secession from the British Empire, sure, but we should ask ourselves: To what did we secede?
“The revolution was betrayed!” This seems to be the view of the American War for Independence held by a lot of American libertarians. But on closer examination I think it’s more accurate to conclude that the rotten fruits we’re choking on today—endless war on bureaucratically defined vices at home and whatever country Uncle Sam feels like targeting abroad, increasing debt and taxation, the trampling of individual freedom, etc., etc., etc.—are what any libertarian should fully expect to have evolved out of the political arrangement established by the sacrosanct and hallowed founders.
The whole thing was corrupt from the get-go. As Stephan mentioned, really think about what’s written in the Declaration of Independence. Okay, there’s some great language about equality, which I take to mean equality of individual rights, not material or physical “equality,” i.e., no person may treat any other as their own personal property. Ah, but this did not apply to the slaves–no, no, no, no! A horrible compromise was made with southern slaveholding interests to strike Jefferson’s original language that was critical of slavery for the sake of unity. Remember, these new States with a capital S must be United with a capital U. Unity trumps principle! And we know what happened to a lot of Indians who weren’t exactly thrilled with going along with Uncle Sam’s Program.
So, okay, then as you proceed through the document there’s some great stuff about King George’s abuses of power. But then you get to the founders’ answer to this tyranny: A different brand of tyranny, one that’s homegrown! Those passages smack of collectivism through and through! There’s all this “We” being the “Representatives” of “the People” of the Colonies, and acting on the “Authority” of “the People” these purported “Representatives” declare that these Colonies are now independent of the King, sure, but as STATES that are UNITED. Lysander Spooner was right about the BS of such language. It’s the language of power.
Why not declare secession from the King as free and sovereign individuals with each person being free to secede (or maybe even not to secede for those colonists who didn’t mind staying under the King’s rule) by their own lights, entering into various associations by purely voluntary choice? Why did they have to secede as “United States”? Because that was the only way that the political elites who spearheaded that “American Revolution” could maintain any power.
So considering that this political unit called the “United States of America” was founded on the ideas of unity trumping principle and freedom, on the ideas of collectivism, we probably should conclude that it wasn’t that the founders’ principles were admirable but imperfectly implemented, or just a little flawed here and there, or were simply misinterpreted or misunderstood by succeeding generations, but that their principles were far less than libertarian to begin with and we are now tragically stuck with the bitter consequences of such principles.
Update: Hurrah for King George!, by John Attarian.
[LRC crosspost]
(From an old LRC post)
A thought: nothing is wrong with slavery per se–a criminal who is imprisoned as a result of a crime is in essence enslaved. The problem with slavery–e.g., of Africans in the antebellum US–is that the slave is enslaved not as punishment for a crime but because of some other irrelevant action or status (e.g., being black). But this is the same problem with all positive laws that outlaw peaceful behavior, e.g. tax laws, drug laws, and so on.
Yet most opponents of African slavery do not oppose all victimless crime laws. That is, they are not against slavery. They are happy with actual criminals (aggressors) being enslaved (as are we libertarians); and they have no problem with enslaving other non-aggressors, who happen to violate whatever arbitrary positive laws are on the books. They are not anti-slavery at all. They simply seem to oppose one narrow ground for slavery–that is, they are against enslaving people based on the blackness of skin, but don’t seem to have a problem with other arbitrary and unfair “grounds”.
Lucy Lovejoy, Gospel Clown
(From an old LRC post.)
On the one hand, I love this. On the other hand, it frightens and confuses me. First saw this a couple years ago–a friend saw a flyer stuck on the wall of a Chinese restaurant. Ever since it’s been on the ledge of the whiteboard in my office. Every day… Lucy stares at me.
Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and retired patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020), and The Universal Principles of Liberty (2025).
My Failed Libertarian Speaking Hiatus; Memories of Mises Institute and Other Events, 1988–20192025
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