Comments (15)

• Dave Franklin

• With deep admiration, respect and agreement with the principles of Liberty established in this forum, it is my judgment that after sixty years on planet Earth, Libertarians will not succeed so long as the will of men in power continues to be purchased by a Central Bank that has acquired a 100% Interest in all real and personal property of WE THE PEOPLE.

  As long as there exists a Central Bank which continues to exercise the unconstitutional power to hypothecate and monetize the property of WE THE PEOPLE for the benefit of themselves and those who serve their will:

  A. It will remain impossible to ever achieve a libertarian victory because libertarians will never be able to financially compete against a fractional reserve banking system that has available to it, unlimited monetary access to the property of WE THE PEOPLE.

  B. Through the exercise of the power of hypothecation and monetization of the property of WE THE PEOPLE, the will of the People is purchased and secured (via subsidies, grants, Social Security, MediCare, Medicaid, etc., ) using their own property against their own natural interests of LIFE, LIBERTY, and the PURSUIT of HAPPINESS, as originally intended in that Great Document.

  Respectfully Summitted,

  David W. Franklin, an independent & vociferious Libertarian
  dfranklin01@comcast.net

• Published: February 9, 2007 10:35 AM

• RogerM

• David, I'm pessimistic, but you make me look like an optimist! Small but good changes are taking place. Look at the recent article on this site about Japan privatizing its postal service, which is also a bank, and a portion of the railroad. Also, Europe is backpedaling on some of its welfare state because finances have forced it to do so.

  We can get rid of the Fed only by consistently voting into office the right people, who then make small incremental changes. The 1970's and 1980's saw government regulation rolled back in the financial services, energy and airline sectors. We've made some progress in agriculture, too. Sometimes progress gets erased. But never give up!

• Published: February 9, 2007 10:50 AM

• Adam Knott

• I disagree that the primary reason liberty does not emerge is due to other people. It is primarily due to the conflicting and self-defeating aims of libertarians themselves.

  Case in point is the idea that liberty will emerge via a series of votes--the idea that by accepting the fundamental assumptions and institutions of democracy, and by acting in accord with them, this will produce liberty.

  Liberty is it's own paradigm, and can't be achieved through democratic institutions and concepts.

• Published: February 9, 2007 11:10 AM

• Roger

• Thanks for posting this treasure!Once again,I am reminded of how Rothbard would not recognize the movement he helped create."Mainstream" libertarianism,has drifted so far to the right,since Rothbard's death,that I believe Rothbard would want nothing to do with it,were he around.I think he would have continued to align himself,with those of us on the MLL side of the spectrum,given what SEK3 said here http://www.spaz.org/~dan/individualist-anarchist/software/konkin-interview.html

  I also think Murray would be one of those who would recognize that the current imperialistic, colonial police state America has become is hastening its Soviet-style decline,and would be rubbing his hands with glee over the prospect of same.In stark contrast to many of the rightist minarchists,who account for far too much of libertarianism,today.

• Published: February 9, 2007 12:15 PM

• Bernard

• While I agree with Dave about whoever controls the purse controls the property I also believe that the fiat US dollar has a limited lifespan, and we will hopefully soon see it expire. The resulting world wide chaos should be the brewing spewing cauldron of reformation. Without their dollar bills many mandarins world wide should abandon their posts and let entropy start it's leveling. The inevitable I think would see the sale for gold and silver of all sellable government properties and the proceeds split evenly between the various populaces in the form of a wallet fitting gold leaf plastic coated note of a known weight and finess. During the dismantling of all the edifices the gold should start to collect towards the free market entrepreneurs.
  The amount of gold available is probably not important, just its perceived value.
  
  A lot of the world's currencies should follow the FRB dollar down the drain forcing the return of the world wide gold standard I would have thought. So in my mind there is great hope that the day is almost upon us. The return of gold should bring about a world liberty which we all so much crave and obviously deserve. Socialism can probably only survive in a fiat currency environment. The collapse of the American Empire should precipitate the collapse of Socialism world wide and hopefully through a world gold curency free us all of despotic governments forever. For a while anyway.

• Published: February 9, 2007 1:14 PM

• RogerM

• Adam: "Liberty is it's own paradigm, and can't be achieved through democratic institutions and concepts."

  So how do we achieve it?

  Bernard:"The return of gold should bring about a world liberty which we all so much crave and obviously deserve."

  We had a gold standard once. Why didn't it issue in liberty? Oppressive monarchies thrived under the gold standard.

  You guys who are waiting for a worldwide collapse of the financial system to change things may be sadly disappointed. I think history shows that brutal authoritarianism usually follows chaos, not more freedom. Besides, a collapse won't come without hyperinflation first, which doesn't exist.

• Published: February 9, 2007 1:56 PM

• Axel Riemer

• Freedom can never be won from tyranny with words or votes. It is an impossibility.

  http://libertyonline.hypermall.com/henry-liberty.html

  As president of the Massachusetts Congress, Major General Joseph Warren said, "Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of.... On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important questions upon which rests the happiness and the liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves."

  Jefferson wrote, "What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms ... The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants."

  However much reasonable men may desire peace, no peaceful solution will ever be found to break the bonds of the state.

  The recent discussion on Ed Brown's steps to avoid oppression by the state highlights the point to which we must go to become free.

  Actions speak louder than words. Right now, the actions that speak loudest and most convincingly are the actions of the state.

  However, I agree, while the state holds the purse, we are all at its tender mercies. Unfortunate that.

• Published: February 9, 2007 3:14 PM

• RogerM

• Axel: "...no peaceful solution will ever be found to break the bonds of the state."

  I doubt anarchists could muster an army large enough to take on the US military. I guess this is the time for all anarchists to try out their pet theory that a guerrilla army can defeat a standing army. Best of luck, guys!
  

• Published: February 9, 2007 3:24 PM

• David White

• Axel and RogerM, a peaceful solution has already been found, and the users of it were recently named Time's Person of the Year:

  http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/garris3.html

• Published: February 9, 2007 3:30 PM

• averros

• I agree with David White that the Internet is the most important tool for the advancement of liberty world-wide.

  It already played significant role in downfall of the Soviet Union, and many of its splinter socialist regimes.

  Internet users are exposed to alternative points of view, and cannot be controlled en mass by the TV programmers and such. It should come as no surprise that the longer someone uses the Internet the more he or she is inclined to adopt the libertarian views.

  And the Internet allows people to conduct commerce in ways which is not easily controlled by the State. In fact, nearly every eBay user is engaged in civil disobedience - by "forgetting" to pay taxes on what they buy and sell.

  My prediction is that eventually the Internet will become the direct cause of the downfall of the social-democratic empires by offering people convenient and easy way to transfer and keep money invisibly to the government snoops - thus reducing the ability of governments to tax, and precipitating the financial collapse of the modern welfare-warfare states.

• Published: February 9, 2007 10:43 PM

• Jim Stewart

• We may agree or not that "the masses, as well as themselves, were the victims of the state, and hence they only needed to be educated and aroused" holds as true today as in the 18th Century.

  My 1st concern is that by the end of the 20th Century we [the masses] had all been "educated" [by state or church] sponsored institutions. Instead of being aroused we were subdued by propaganda that constantly told us and tells our children that we have both democracy and liberty.

  I "voted" for 30 years before I realised that we have neither.

  My 2nd concern is that while it would be simple for any major publisher or broacaster to exercise their hard-won freedom to arouse the masses against the abuse of "ballots to defeat the franchise", none does. In fact the opposite is true. In one instance we got a [News Ltd]political reporter to report on a systematic vote counting fraud [called the two-candidate-preferred count]. Even though he knew the ploice had filed a crime report, his misleading report was headlined 'Thumbs up for counting system'!

• Published: February 9, 2007 11:21 PM

• T.G.G.P

• The internet did not cause the downfall of the Soviet Union, there were only about 50 websites back then.

  To all the optimistic libertarians: specify conditions that you would consider "achieving liberty" and a date by which you believe it will occur, and I will bet you it won't. We are a tiny minority that do not matter no matter how strongly we believe. The best you can hope for is for some of the parties to throw scraps to the 15% "libertarian-leaning vote" identified by the Cato Institute (not that I advocate voting, as it is irrational on an individual level). You aren't going to get the masses on your side because the masses are statist. Libertarianism and populism are incompatible, no matter how much Rothbard wishes it were otherwise.

  Rothbard also exaggerates the popularity of Paine's radicalism and plays down the conservative nature of the American revolution (actually a secession, since they did not seek to control England). The following is from Thomas Woods' "Politically Incorrect Guide to American History":

  In 1842, Judge Mellen Chamberlain interviewed ninety-one-year-old Captain Preston, a veteran of the Battle of Concord in 1775, to understand why Preston fought against the British.
  Judge Chamberlain: Did you take up arms against intolerable oppressions?
  Captain Preston replied that he had never felt any oppressions.
  Judge Chamberlain: Was it the Stamp Act?
  Captain Preston: No, I never saw one of those stamps.
  Judge Chamberlain: Was it the tea tax?
  Captain Preston said no again.
  Judge Chamberlain: Were you reading John Locke and other theorists of liberty?
  Captain Preston: Never heard of 'em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts' Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanac.
  Judge Chamberlain: Why, then, did you fight?
  Captain Preston: Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should.

  Paine himself, after his release from prison in France (real radical revolutions rarely go well), found himself despised by the common people for his radical writings and took to drinking. After his stroke he was kicked out of every boarding house he stayed in and after he died the Quaker cemetery he had wished to be buried in refused his corpse. His bones were sold to a furniture dealer at auction and were not seen since.

  Rothbard is too much of a moralist to be relied on for any sort of analysis of strategy. He blames every failure on the "statist" way of war and credits guerrilla war with every victory in the American War of Independence. Nevermind that no serious historian considers guerrilla warfare to be the primary form of war in the southern theatre or a significant one anywhere else, any of the victories by Washington or the rest of the Continental Army (especially the siege of Yorktown) or that numerous victories by American militias can only be considered conventional warfare. Like Chad Chaney in his recent piece at LewRockwell he cares nothing for history and everything for ideology. They never have the thought "What are the odds that military strategy is 100% congruent with my political philosophy?", because they have a preference for ignorance. The plucky rebel against the state must always be succesful, except that numerous ones that never came close to attempting to form a state were crushed in antebellum America. Robert E. Lee (and Napoleon and Frederick the Great and von Molkte with him) is regarded as a great general by everyone including his opponents, but to Chaney this just indicates that he is a statist. I'm not going to attempt to justify his support for the Confederate States of America, but what I am going to justify is his surrender when the odds were too great rather than attempting to go guerrilla. Lee was not as comfortable with chucking men into the meat grinder as Grant, and did not want the people of the south to suffer further. The inevitable result of going guerrilla is to cause the civilian population to come to be considered targets by the enemy, which is why it is a form of warfare generally pursued by those with the fewest moran inhibitions. After the defeat of the south and during reconstruction there was a movement of resistance to the military occupation: the Ku Klux Klan. It of course degenerated into deplorable violence and terrorizing the civilian population (most especially the more defenseless freedmen, whom the Klan sought to keep more defensive by depriving them of firearms), which is why its own founder shut it down. Perhaps a few people will say that just goes to show that the Klan's deviations from natural law or whatnot are what caused them to be unsuccesful. It misses the point that they had never been libertarians in the first place and no war has been libertarian. The elites may entertain libertarian ideas, but the grass-roots do not. If anything the Klan's persecution of the freedmen made them more popular with the people. If you think you can succeed where countless others failed with your guerrilla band of anarchists that will eliminate the state on the force of the sheer rightness of your cause, be my guest. It isn't going to happen becuase we both now it's a bunch of nonsense used as pep-talk rather than seriously believed in.

• Published: February 10, 2007 2:32 AM

• Paul Marks

• "Left" and "right" have been used to mean so many different things (for example Bastiat sat on the left side of the French Assembly - but ardent collectivists sat on the same side and the same time) that it is perhaps best to leave the terms alone.

  As for Thomas "Tom" Paine - he was not "more radical" (if one means more antistatist) than other people involved in the war (he was a lot more statist than many of them). And he certainly was not really in favour of "laissez faire".

  Actually Tom Paine favoured a strong central government and also favoured it doing lots of things. He even supported fiat money - as long as it was issued by a democratically government (the idea that X action is acceptable if it is done by a democratically elected government owes a lot to Paine).

  It is true that in his "Rights of Man" Paine claimed that getting rid of the Monarchy and hangers on would pay for all his health, education and welfare projects. However, his calculations were soon shown to be nonsense - which is why (in "Agrarian Justice") he comes with a plan to tax the incomes of landowners (going up to a 100% tax for big landowners).

  Even when Paine does come out with an idea that looks free market it often is not (in the context of the time). For example, his idea of education vouchers might indeed be better than the systems in place in the several States now - but back in the 18th anc early 19th centuries many (indeed most) American States spent very little taxpayers (even local taxpayers money) on education - so Paines idea would have been a move to greater statism (not less statism).

  Murry Rothbard was a great man, but the fact that he gets Paine so wrong makes me wonder how many other "laisser faire" people he mentions in the speech were not laisser faire people (perhaps they all were - but I could not be confident of it till I checked them).

  That is one of the problems with Rothbard's work. I say again that he was a great man, he reasoned out conclusions that someone like me would never get to on their own, and he uncovered more information (by careful research) than any other libertarian historian has ever done. But one has to fact check him (i.e. be careful that he has not let his spirit, his desire that certain things be true, carry him too far) - and that is irritating.

  The Tom Paine stuff reminds me of the view so many libertarians have of John Stuart Mill (although Murry Rothbard, to his credit, did not fall in line with the worship of J.S. Mill - in fact he detested the man). A lot of libertarians take a few pro liberty words - and ignore the statist reasoning and policy positions.

  It is the same with Paine - sort of a "Paine said a lot of nice things about liberty", "Paine is famous and it would be a nice thing if he were one of us", "Paine is one of us - he was a libertarian" train of thought.

  It is not dishonest really - it is a sort of wishfull thinking.

• Published: February 10, 2007 3:18 PM

• averros

• T.G.G.P. -

  do you seriously think that there were no Internet before websites and blogs? Ever heard of USENET and e-mail, and mailing lists?

  Back then long-haul networks in the USSR didn't even use TCP/IP - they were UUCP-based. But by 1991 every large city had one or more commercial network service provider, with diverse customer base including academia, research institutions (including military-oriented "post office boxes"), banks, businesses, and various media outlets.

  The August communist hardliner coup of 1991 was planned exactly like the coup which brought Khrushev down - i.e. isolate the leader, seize control of the media, and then wait for the regional leaders to offer loaylty to the new gang. Only that time around they got control of TV, radio and newspapers - and overlooked the broadcast facilities (USENET newsgroups) of the Internet. Which provided the regional leaders (both civilian and military) with the eyewitness reports which were quite different from the "official" line. The Internet reports also were the primary source for the regional and samizdat press - there were coup-time newspapers explicitlty crediting the net as the primary source.

  This conflicting information caused the regional bosses to delay offering the allegiance to the coup leaders, which after three-day stalemate broke their resolve - and brought Yeltsin into power (he was the only opposition politican who made himself heard in the net, incidentally, - his proclamations were rushed directly to the office of the largest ISP in Moscow with couriers - and delivered all over country in a matter of minutes).

  The direct result of the failed coup was dissolution of the Soviet Union and declaration of illegality of the communist party in Russia.

  Of course, the Internet on its own didn't cause the collapse of the communist regime - just like Mises predicted, the regime collapsed due to economic calculation problem inherent in collectivist economies. But it was important as a trigger of the final collapse, and as a mechanism for organizing coherent popular resistance to the attempt to regain slipping control by the communist establishment (the result would've been the new wave of terror).

  The lesson was learned - and the recent string of "colored" revolutions in the splinter countries had used Internet as the primary tool for organizing the non-violent protests.

  Before the Internet, the only way to remove a well-established regime from power was to seize control of mass media - by force - which guaranteed escalation into an armed conflict.

• Published: February 11, 2007 1:31 AM

• Michael A. Clem

• Lots of classical liberal philosophers said good things and not so good things. Part of the problem with the classical liberal view is that, while they all generally agreed on the goals, they failed to iron out the inherent contradictions of their means to the goals. Even more modern, libertarian-oriented types had their flaws. Mises and Rand were both minarchists. Nonetheless, their contributions are still significant and worthwhile.
  
  Libertarianism is a successor to classical liberal philosophy, and the next step towards individual liberty and the free society. While closer to the goal than previous political views, it remains imperfect and has its own problems to be worked out. If libertarian philosophers are unable to work them out, then maybe there will be something that succeeds libertarianism, and gets us even closer to the goal. But libertarianism will still be a significant and valuable contribution towards the cause of liberty.

• Published: February 11, 2007 12:24 PM