Fifty years ago, Mises came to South America and delivered six historic lectures. Today, there is a great international revival of Misesian ideas — including in Brazil — which show the benefits that consumers and workers derive when they are free to venture, to chart their course, and to fulfill their desires. FULL ARTICLE by Helio Beltrao
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/12659/the-sovereign-individual/
The Sovereign Individual
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Truly inspiring, possibly the best article I have read on this site, and there have been many great ones.
If one enslaves another, this is considered a heinous crime. [...] However, in the case of government, they will draft you to “serve your nation” for a year, call this conscription “military service,” and serfdom becomes perfectly legal. If one kills a neighbor, this is murder. However, if he is an agent of the government — particularly that of the United States — using an olive-green uniform, and invoking a “preventive” war or similar excuse, suddenly it becomes permissible to murder — legally.
I love the above passage. I love when rhetoric is dialed all the way up to “consistent” rather than “popular.”
I believe this statement to be incorrect. “…Therefore, we may achieve freedom to a large extent during our lifetimes, independently of any eventual failure to end the serfdom perpetrated by the state” Many people try living this way in spite of the state and they fail. Hence, this is what makes people realize libertarianism is needed. The state is is just about everywhere. You cannot escape the consequences to the extent described by the quoted statement. The rest of the speech was decent. I wish the Mises Institute of Brazil much success.
“Sovereignty” is another one of modernity’s hornet’s nests into which the libertarian should be wary of wandering. The ascription of a divine attribute to the modern state merely secularized the divine right of kings. The healthy libertarian should not be jealous of such prerogatives. I am not the supreme law-making authority, and neither are you. Let the State take the myth of “sovereignty” with it to its grave.
Tony, Helio proclaimed that he is a sovereign. You and everyone else, too, so far as I can tell, are sovereigns according to standard. But he didn’t proclaim an entitlement to decree or to enforce positive law, much less to coerce individuals into association with one another.
What should go to the grave, then, is not sovereignty, per se, but the statists’ (whether kingly or democratic) flawed notion thereof. The doctrine of sovereign immunity, by which agents of the state assert a right to an ethical double standard under the state’s laws, also should go to the grave.
Now, if you refuse any and all concepts of sovereignty, by what right would you exercise dominion over the matter of your own body? or over water from a well or a lake or a stream as you must if you are to live in the material world?
Oh, hello, I haven’t been checking here for a reply.
“Sovereignty” has historically been a mark demarcating some persons from others as ruler to ruled. The sovereign is a law unto himself, a notion hard to reconcile with that of conforming to the natural law, the lodestar, in my view, of a sound ethics.
Now, if one wishes to stipulate in advance — idiosyncratically, in my opinion — that by “sovereign” one means something universally true of human persons (e.g., everyone’s moral dominion over his or her own body), fine.
I don’t “refuse any and all concepts of sovereignty.” I just don’t think using that loaded term to refer to something like “self-ownership” aids in the development of a libertarian theory of the person. It’s an anachronistic borrowing that bears a risk of equivocation greater than any advantage I can see.
I love the ideas espoused in this fine article, but the reality is that those who rule over us DO RULE OVER US,
I love the ideas espoused in this fine article, but the reality is that those who rule over us DO RULE OVER US, and do it ever more so everyday. I wish we could just declare ourselves sovereigns, and not have our money confiscated any longer, but that is not possible.
So, I was rather disappointed with the conclusion of the article. Positive thinking will not break the governments chains, no matter how much we wish otherwise.
I agree. There is a huge problem when talking about freedom. I came across it in a book I tried to read last week, which was an old-fashioned trialogue between Jefferson, Lenin and Socrates. Socrates kept seemingly rebutting the points of both Jefferson and Lenin. Of course, this is what Socrates is supposed to do, being a philosophical gadfly. The only problem is that this Socrates’ arguments were really quite sophistic, because he kept conflating two different uses of the word “freedom”, the political sense of the word, and the metaphysical sense of the word. One can be metaphysically free (as in free will) and not be politically free in the slightest. Sometimes authors even make a protagonist exercise their metaphysical freedom to choose between different forms of political unfreedom (such as where Evie in “V” chooses to be taken behind the chemical shed.) Saying that we are free because we can choose slavery or the chemical shed is the worst sort of happy crap.
I think part of the author’s here is that the state does have many, if not most, people mentally enslaved.
Progressives, socialists, Communists, neoconservatives, and fascists see the state as a necessary and good institution–it just needs to be run “their” way.
Minarchists, of the conservative or libertarian variety, see the state as a necessary evil.
When you see the state as an unnecessary evil, all its propaganda falls away and you recognize that it really is no different from a typical criminal gang. If there’s a criminal gang roaming your neighborhood, you recognize them for what they are. No part of your mind believes that they are necessary or beneficial. You mind can become very clear and calm on political issues, instead of twisting into knots trying to reconcile the statist myths we learned in government school (reinforced by the media and by lots of people around us, most of whom also learned these myths in school) with the actual reality of what we perceive.
Most of the state’s power is ideological. It would collapsed if most people believed it was unnecessary. We can conjecture about specific consequences that might result if most people understood this–what if nearly everyone refused to vote, for example? How would the government claim its legitimacy? What if everyone refused to pay taxes, confident that everyone else was refusing, too? Nonviolent resistance works because it is just a large number of people calling the state’s bluff. It doesn’t have nearly enough power to make everybody comply against their will.
But the specific actions aren’t as important as the understanding and the mindset that would make the actions possible. Ideas shape human action. The most important step in liberating the world is liberating your own mind.
Exactly! “What if everyone refused to pay taxes?”. The problem is how do you persuade the rest of the people not to pay taxes. If only 100 million or so of “tax-payers” decided and stopped paying any taxes… Oh well, keep dreaming
Good comment Mr. Bryan. The first step in gaining some freedom is, I think, to come to the realization that you have, mentally at least, enslaved yourself.
But our present government is dependent not merely on our belief that it is necessary. This is the basis of its power, but the underlying assumption is that I have to become party to its crimes. For example, a robber might threaten me with a gun and I might or might not give him my wallet – compliance might be the better part of valor. But if the robber commanded me to rob someone else and give him the money, he has in my thinking asked me to cross a moral line. I refuse to do so, to sell out my neighbors for my benefit.
I’ll pay my taxes to avoid getting shot, but I will not withhold taxes from someone else. How many business people withhold wages? All of them.
The moral issue is not refusing to pay taxes, but refusing to collect them. There are innumerable areas where government co-opts us into being its police. I refuse.
I agree that the beauty of human mind is that it can be free at its own will. This, of course, does not mean that human mind does not have physical limitations. It simply means that one human cannot that easily enslave another human’s mind.
This is an excellent article and begins to get to the heart of the very practical problem we have in our wordl. How can so few cause so much havoc for so many? Democracy is just another spin on what Ayn Rand called seeking the sanction of the victim. Our global political “leaders” are engaged in so much evil -theft, violence and murder- that holding on to power is impossible without the sanction of the victims of their evil. Why is there such a campaign to get out the vote in the lead up to an election? We hear over and over it does not matter for whom you vote – just vote. Why? Without votes and without voters there is no sanctioning of the evil by the victims.
How do you know it’s a minority screwing a majority?
It’s more about the timing; once the majority realizes that they were mistaken in believing the minority knows what’s “best for everyone”, it is already too late to fix the damage.
Agree with Tom Franc. Sovereignty, like freedom and ugly, is an internal, mental, concept that has no connection to the external, physical world. As long as one can think “Screw you, I am sovereign and free,” you are sovereign and free. A person is free as long as he can say to his master, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Then he might discover there are worse conditions than death. No one ever says, “Give me liberty or give me pain.” There is a point where it is no longer possible to say, “Screw you, pain,” where the person blows his brains out if it is still possible. (If I ever came down with ALS I would consider eating my gun before I got to the point where I couldn’t pull the trigger)
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