-
AGORISM
-
From "agora" -- the Greek word meaning "open marketplace" -- agorism is both a
free-market
anarchist ideology and advocacy of a peaceful black market (a "counter-economy") as the means of
non-aggressive
libertarian
revolution.
(See agorist.org for more agorist definitions.)
(See also New Libertarian Manifesto, by Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3), father of Agorism.)
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
Where anarcho-capitalists see no distinction between
capitalism and
the free market,
agorists make the following 3-part distinction:
- entrepreneur:
- (good)
- innovator, risk-taker, producer -- the strength of a free market
- non-statist capitalist:
- (neutral)
- holders of capital, not necessarily ideologically aware
- "relatively drone-like non-innovators"
- pro-statist capitalist:
- (bad)
- "the main Evil in the political realm"
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
The "Anarcho-capitalists" tend to conflate the Innovator (Entrepreneur) and Capitalist, much as the Marxoids and cruder collectivists do....
It's interesting that the gradual victory of Austrian Economics, particularly in Europe, has led ... some New Leftists at least to take our claim seriously that the Capitalist and Entrepreneur are very different classes requiring different analyses ...
Agorists are strict
Rothbardians, and, I would argue in this case, even more Rothbardian than
Rothbard, who still had some of the older confusion in his thinking.
SEK3
[sek3]
-
ANARCHISM
-
That organization of society in which the
Free Market
operates freely, without
taxes,
usury,
landlordism,
tariffs,
or other forms of
coercion
or
privilege.
RIGHT ANARCHISTS predict that in the
Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate.
LEFT ANARCHISTS predict that in the
Free Market
people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
[celine]
-
Anarchism is a negative; it holds that one thing, namely government, is bad and should be abolished. Aside from this defining tenet, it would be difficult to list any belief that all anarchists hold. Just as atheists might support or oppose any viewpoint consistent with the non-existence of God, anarchists might and indeed do hold the entire range of viewpoints consistent with the non-existence of
the state.
Anarchist Theory FAQ
or
Instead of a FAQ, by a Man Too Busy to Write One
by
Bryan Caplan
Version 5.2
[caplan]
-
This brings us to Anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.
Individual Liberty by Benjamin Tucker,
"State Socialism and Anarchism: How far they agree, and wherein they differ."
[tucker]
-
The philosophy of a new social order based on
liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government
rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.
Emma Goldman,
"What is Anarchy?"
[redEmma]
-
ANARCHISM, the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.
Prince Peter Kropotkin, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910
[kropotkin]
-
(an·ar·chism
Pronunciation: 'a-n&r-"ki-z&m, -"när-)
- a political theory holding all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary
[merriamWebster]
-
Anarchists believe that the highest attainment of humanity is the freedom
of the individual to express himself, unhindered by any form of repression
or control from without. The belief that all governments rest on violence
to control their subjects.
1984 Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia
[funk]
-
Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite social-psychological hypothesis: that forceful, graceful and intelligent behaviour occurs only when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the physical and social environment; that in most human affairs, more harm than good results from compulsion, top-down direction, bureaucratic planning, pre-ordained curricula, jails, conscription, states.
Paul Goodman,
Like A Conquered Province, 1965
Chapter 6: "Is American democracy viable?"
[goodman]
-
ATOMISM
-
Individualists
have always been accused by
their enemies
of being "atomistic" -- of postulating that each individual lives in a kind of vacuum, thinking and choosing without relation to anyone else in society. This, however, is an
authoritarian
straw man; few, if any, individualists have ever been "atomists." On the contrary, it is evident that individuals always learn from each other, cooperate and interact with each other; and that this, too, is required for man's survival. But the point is that each individual makes the final choice of which influences to adopt and which to reject, or of which to adopt first and which afterwards. The libertarian welcomes the process of voluntary exchange and cooperation between freely acting individuals; what he abhors is the use of violence to cripple such voluntary cooperation and force someone to choose and act in ways different from what his own mind dictates.
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[rothbard]
-
A common defense of the State holds that man is a "social animal," that he must live in society, and that individualists and libertarians believe in the existence of "atomistic individuals" uninfluenced by and unrelated to their fellow men. But no libertarians have ever held individuals to be isolated atoms; on the contrary, all libertarians have recognized the necessity and the enormous advantages of living in society, and of participating in the social division of labor. The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.
Murray Rothbard,
"The Moral Status of Relations to the State," The Ethics of Liberty
[rothbard]
-
Libertarians are generally what might be called simplistic and "vulgar" individualists.
[...] While only individuals exist individuals do not exist as isolated and hermetically sealed atoms. Statists traditionally charge libertarians and individualists with being "atomistic individualists," and the charge, one hopes, has always been incorrect and misconceived. Individuals may be the only reality, but they influence each other, past and present, and all individuals grow up in a common culture and language. (This does not imply that they may not, as adults, rebel and challenge and exchange that culture for another.)
[...] It is almost embarrassingly banal to emphasize that point, but apparently many libertarians aggressively overlook the obvious.
Murray Rothbard,
"The Nationalities Question"
[rothbard]
-
Liberty as I have defined it does not preclude as guidance for one's acts any form or degree of advice and influence, if voluntarily accepted, which, originates elsewhere than within himself. This guidance might be religious influences, evidence from historical records, scientific knowledge, the advice of another person, or even processes of mental telepathy or clairvoyance or insight from mystical origins, to whatever extent these may occur. If willingly accepted, the act resulting from such influences is as much an act of liberty as would be any other.
So liberty as I have defined it is not limited to self-willed conduct arising from total isolation. All these other forces can operate to influence one's acts as a free man. I would even argue that such influences operate at their best and their fullest only under liberty.
F.A. "Baldy" Harper, in an address given before the Mont Pelerin Society at St. Moritz, Switzerland, on September 4, 1957
[harper]
-
CLASSICAL LIBERALISM
-
The 19th-century liberal held the same principles as the 20th-century individualist
libertarian
-- freedom from
coercion on both personal and economic matters.
As
the term
'liberal'
changed in the 20th century, from designating an
individualist
philosophy to something more
collectivist
(and influenced significantly by
moderate forms
of
state socialism), the term Classical Liberalism was used to indicate the pre-collectivist liberalism of the previous century.
Unfortunately, contemporary use of the term Classical Liberalism seems to emphasize economic freedom over civil liberties.
Even more unfortunate is the common association of Classical Liberalism with
conservative politics.
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
First, I employ the term "liberal" in the sense attached to it every-where in the nineteenth century and still today in the countries of continental Europe. This usage is imperative because there is simply no other term available to signify the great political and intellectual movement that substituted free enterprise and the market economy for the precapitalistic methods of production; constitutional representative government for the absolutism of kings or oligarchies; and freedom of all individuals for slavery, serfdom, and other forms of bondage.
Ludwig von Mises,
Human Action,
Introduction to the 3rd Edition
[available online]
[mises]
-
The fact that
this book
was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affected its intelligibility for the American reader. But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term
"liberal"
in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that "liberal" has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as
conservatives.
It is true, of course, that in the struggle against the believers in the
all-powerful state
the true liberal must sometimes make common cause with the convservative, and in some circumstances, as in contemporary Britain, he has hardly any other way of actively working for his ideals. But
true liberalism
is still distinct from conservatism, and there is danger in the two being confused. Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to
socialism
than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desireable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of estblished
privilege
and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of
the state
granting and protecting
rights
to some which are not available on
equal terms
to others.
F. A. Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
(from the preface to the 1956 American paperback edition)
[hayek]
-
COLLECTIVISM
-
As a moral philosophy, collectivism recognizes groups as potential moral agents.
(Contrast with individualism.)
In politics, collectivism is an emphasis on the
rights and responsibilities
of different classes or groups, and proposes collective strategies for improving the conditions of those classes and groups considered to be disadvantaged.
Collectivism does not necessarily deny individual rights, but it considers group rights primary.
(Compare with communitarianism.)
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
In collectivism, the "collective is the ultimate value, to which individual goals are subordinate."
R.W. Grant,
The Incredible Bread Machine
[rwGrant]
-
'Collectivism' is defined as the theory and practice which make a collective or collectives rather than individuals the ultimate and fundamental unit of political, social, and economic concern.
[...]
Presumably it is on present usage correct to characterize all socialists as being, as such, collectivists: while the nearest approach in our time to any actual realization of Bakunin's ideal of a collective would seem to be the self-managing 'associations of labour' in Yugoslavia, Israeli kibbutzim, or the collectives set up by the Spanish anarchists during the Civil War.
[...]
Collectivists in theorizing insist that the claims of collectives must, in general and normally, if not always and without exception, override the claims of individual members.
www.Anarchy-Movement.org
[krauth]
-
It seems to me that one thing all forms of collectivism share is that individual choice is always subordinate to The Group, be it the fascist volk or a local soviet or an anarcho-syndicalist people's council or whatever other fiction of 'society'
the state
decides to use.
[...]
Fascist
collectivists try to prevent mixed race sex,
socialist
collectivists try to prevent 'undemocratic'
private trade,
but the principle of collectivism is always the same.
If an individual does something he wants to do in a collectivist 'society', it is because the political collective allows him to do it, not because it is his right to do as he pleases with those who are willing participants.
Perry de Havilland,
Liberarian Alliance
[libertarianAlliance]
-
COMMUNISM
-
Communism is the position that
property
can only be legitimately owned by the community and never by individuals.
Much confusion, disagreement, stupidity, and bloodshed resulted from conflating The Community with
The State.
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
(Contrast with
PROPERTARIANISM
and
IDEOLOGICAL CAPITALISM.)
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
In the 20th century, the term 'communism' came to mean
communitarian
statism.
As implemented at a national level, 20th-century communism was exclusively
authoritarian.
An
anarchist
or anti-Statist conception of communism is of a free society of equals without
private property.
In anarchist communism (a.k.a. 'anarcho-communism'), all property is owned by the community or
collective, freeing "the workers" from the
exploitation of
capitalism and the
coercion of
the State.
Karl Marx shared this definition of communism with the anarchists, but believed that the ultimate goal of an anarchist communism had to be preceded by
state socialism -- a "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Vladimir Lenin called the
Russian anarchists
"Left-Wing Communists" and described their stance against state centralization as
"an infantile disorder".
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
Anarcho-communists, in contrast with their
mutualist
comrades, reject the market because they reject all forms of competition,
and see all forms of trade as
exploitative:
someone wins and someone loses.
To a communist anarchist, the very term
'free market'
is self-contradictory.
bkMarcus,
Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
-
CONSERVATISM
-
That school of
capitalist
philosophy which claims allegiance to the
Free Market
while actually supporting
usury,
landlordism,
tariff,
and sometimes
taxation.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
[celine]
-
Right-Conservatives prefer self-government on economic issues, but want official standards in personal matters. They want the government to defend the community from threats to its moral fiber.
World's Smallest Political Quiz
[quiz]
-
The essence of conservatism is "its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom that goes beyond what can be demonstrated or even explicitly stated."
Conservatism FAQ
[conservatismFAQ]
-
Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to
socialism
than
true liberalism;
and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desireable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established
privilege
and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege.
The
essence of the liberal position,
however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of
the state
granting and protecting
rights
to some which are not available on
equal terms
to others.
F. A. Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
(from the preface to the 1956 American paperback edition)
[hayek]
-
Because
liberalism,
socialism
and leftism have become nearly universally identified with
statism,
it should not be surprising that many contemporary opponents of the state regard themselves as "conservative".
However, the historical meaning of conservatism is not
individual
liberty
and greater freedom from government but an emphasis on maintaining a static hierarchical, stratified order,
tradition-based
collectivism,
subservience of the individual to elite
privilege, theocracy, and
nationalistic statism.
Conservatism Is Not Enough: Reclaiming the Legacy of the Anti-State Left
[attackthesystem]
-
In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not
object to
coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what
he regards as the right purposes.
He believes that if
government
is
in the hands of decent men, it ought not to be too much restricted by
rigid rules. Since he is essentially opportunist and lacks principles,
his main hope must be that the wise and the good will rule -- not merely
by example, as we all must wish, but by authority given to them and
enforced by them.
Like the
socialist, he is less concerned with the
problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with
that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself
as entitled to
force
the value he holds on other people.
F. A. Hayek,
Why I Am Not a Conservative
[hayek]
-
It was European conservatives who, apparently fearful of the openness of the Industrial Revolution (why, anyone could get rich!), struck the first blows at
capitalism
by encouraging and accepting laws that made the disruptions of innovation and competition less frequent and eased the way for the comforts and collusions of cartelization.
[...]
The States' rights lapse is simply that conservatives who would deny to the Federal government certain controls over people, eagerly cede exactly the same controls to smaller administrative units. They say that the smaller units are more effective. This means that conservatives support the
coercion
of individuals at the most effective level. It certainly doesn't mean that they
oppose coercion.
[...]
In failing to resist state segregation and miscegenation laws, in failing to resist laws maintaining racially inequitable spending of tax money, simply because these laws were passed by states, conservatives have failed to fight the very bureaucracy that they supposedly hate -- at the very level where they might have stopped it first.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
-
There are no right-wing Utopias, either, no novels of the colorful Buckleyite future. The conservative view of heaven is the status quo ante -- a dead, flat, black-&-white daguerreotype of a past that never existed. Any status quo will do, as long as it ain't Red. If people are tortured in banana republic jails, it's acceptable as long as they're not Communist jails. If a long train of abuses & usurpations are visited upon individual freedom in this country, it's fine, as long as they're not left-wing abuses & usurpations, & even better, if they're in the name of National Security.
L. Neil Smith,
"Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision"
[elNeil]
-
DIVERSITARIANISM
-
... if a proponent of liberty is a
libertarian, then it seems to follow that a proponent of diversity is a diversitarian.
Let's call the practical, strategy-based position 'diversitarianism' -- the advocacy of decentralized, diverse strategies, solutions, services, cultures, etc. This is what I now understand many to mean by "the market" -- although I think the idea applies to all biological, ecological, social, organizational, negotiated exchange-based relationships, and not just what most people understand by the term 'economic'.
bkMarcus, Email Essay:
'diversitarian'
[bk]
-
It is more than passing curious that those in the university community who are most heavily addicted to diversity cannot tolerate it when it comes to divergence of opinions, conclusions, public policy prescriptions, etc.
Walter Block,
Social Justice
[block]
-
ECONOMIC CAPITALISM
-
Economic capitalism is a
free market
in privately held
property
titles, including titles for "infrastructural capital" (technology) and "natural capital" (land).
It is often called 'laissez-faire capitalism' or sometimes 'pure capitalism' or even 'true capitalism' by those who want to tie the economic concept back to the ethical position of
ideological capitalism.
(Contrast with
POLITICAL CAPITALISM.)
bkMarcus,
Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
-
Your
property
is that which you control the use of.
If most things are controlled by individuals, individually or in voluntary association, a society is capitalist.
If such control is spread fairly evenly among a large number of people, the society approximates competitive free enterprise -- better than ours does.
If its members call it socialist,
why should I object?
Socialism is dead.
Long live socialism.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom:
Guide to a Radical Capitalism
[friedman]
-
If commercial activity were unregulated and absolutely unsubsidized, it could depend upon only one factor for success -- pleasing customers.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
-
The
market
economy is the social system of the division of labor under
private ownership
of
the means of production.
Everybody acts on his own behalf; but everybody's actions aim at the satisfaction of other people's needs as well as at the satisfaction of his own. Everybody in acting serves his fellow citizens. Everybody, on the other hand, is served by his fellow citizens. Everybody is both a means and an end in himself, an ultimate end for himself and a means to other people in their endeavors to attain their own ends.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
[mises]
-
EXPLOITATION
-
Taking advantage of a
person.
Simply put, exploitation should be impossible between equals. To exploit persons is to use an advantage over them -- to their disadvantage.
An
uncoerced
transaction can still be exploitation if the terms of contract are dictated to someone's disadvantage. The exploitation
lies in the "conditions of compulsory restriction and limitation under which such contract" is made.
[quoting from
Benjamin Tucker's essay,
The Aboliton of Interest]
Individualist Anarchism sees the exploitation of certain groups or classes as the visible symptom of a deeper problem whose root cause is coercive monopoly.
The
individualist
does not sanction the use of force to fight the symptom, but only to fight the coercive root cause itself.
bkMarcus,
The Aboliton of Exploitation
[bk]
-
... the allegation that an exchange has unduly favoured one of the parties ...
Anthony de Jasay, "Your Dog Owns Your House"
[deJasay]
-
'Exploitation' is a word often used but rarely defined.
In its most literal meaning -- I "exploit" you if I in some way benefit from your existence -- it is the reason human society exists.
We all benefit from one another's existence.
We all exploit each other.
That is why we associate with each other.
But as the word is usually used, it carries the implication of one person benefiting from harming another, or at least of one person's benefitting unfairly, at
the expense of another.
This usage we derive from Marx's theory of the exploitation of labor.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
[friedman]
-
The illusion persists that those with much are villains. With it as a necessary corollary goes the illusion that those who have little or nothing are the heroes who are deserving of every good thing in life.
This is the Marxist argument. It assumes that those who are capable of producing abundance, in some way exploit those who are incapable of producing much of anything. How does one "exploit" the impoverished? The concept is nonsense. One does not take from those who have nothing worth taking.
Robert LeFevre,
Capitalism
[leFevre]
-
FABIANISM or FABIAN SOCIALISM
-
Toward the end of the 19th century, a group of Brits, decided that they were in favor of
socialism
in the original sense of a planned economy, but that they were opposed to the revolutionary socialism of the Marxists and the
communist anarchists.
They called themselves "Fabians" after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, whose tactics involved harassment and attrition rather than head-on battles. Instead of revolution, the Fabians advocated evolution toward socialism.
Like Marx, they believed in class struggle and like Marx, they believed that "progress" meant moving away from
private property
and toward central administration.
The most famous Fabians were H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and later, Bertrand Russell.
bkMarcus, "why I am not a leftist"
[bk]
-
It is commonly asserted that Fabianism and Leninism differ only in method and pace: that the former believes in gradual change and the latter in revolution.
But this completely misses the real point: that Fabianism, which is basically Social Democracy, believes in blending into
the State
apparatus, whereas Leninism believes in its destruction.
Murray Rothbard, "Liberty and the New Left"
[rothbard]
-
FASCISM
-
An
authoritarian
form of
statism that advocates
- private property
-
State-centralized economy
- militarism
- nationalism
(Notice that between the first 2 criteria, fascism promotes
political capitalism
without any pretense of a
free market.)
Socialists
and
left-liberals often refer to any form of fervent
conservatism as fascism, but they are incorrect in doing so.
Many people use the term to refer to any form of
authoritarianism.
This usage is less incorrect, but strictly speaking, fascism requires all 4 of the above criteria.
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, refers to the authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy in 1922-1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. The name comes from fascio, which may mean "bundle", as in a political group, but also fasces, the Roman authority symbol of a bundle of rods and axe-head.
The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that exalts nation and often race above the individual and uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition, engages in severe economic and social regimentation, and espouses violent nationalism and racism (ethnic nationalism).
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[wikipedia]
-
It has become customary among
libertarians,
as indeed among the Establishment of the West, to regard
Fascism
and
Communism
as fundamentally identical.
But while both systems were indubitably
collectivist,
they differed greatly in their socio-economic content.
For Communism was a genuine revolutionary movement that ruthlessly displaced and overthrew the old ruling elites; while Fascism, on the contrary, cemented into power the old ruling classes.
Hence, Fascism was a counter-revolutionary movement that froze a set of monopoly
privileges
upon society; in short, Fascism was the apotheosis of
modern State monopoly capitalism.
Here was the reason that Fascism proved so attractive
(which Communism, of course, never did) to
big business
interests in the West -- openly and unabashedly so in the 1920's and early 1930's.
Murray N. Rothbard,
"Why Conservatives Love War and the State"
(originally appeared in Left and Right, Spring 1965, pp. 4-22,
as "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty.")
[rothbard]
-
[Wilhelm]
Ropke recognized that as a social and economic system fascism is not a third way between the
free market
and
communism.
It is merely another form of
totalitarianism
that sought to "combine its general totalitarianism with the individualistic character of society."
Such a
middle-of-the-road
policy created an extreme
interventionist
state whose chief production agent was the government-created monopolist.
Fascism has a grave moral defect, Ropke argued: it fails to recognize the
individual
as the key social unit. Right economic reasoning, he said, begins not with the nation but with
human action,
and right social policy begins with the recognition that society is made up of
individuals with souls.
Fascism, on the other hand, by ignoring the individual soul, is
socialism's
close cousin because it exults in the idolatry of
the state.
Mises.org: Biography of Wilhelm Ropke (1899-1966)
[mises.org]
-
If you study the domestic policies of the Herbert Hoover and Franklin
Delano Roosevelt Administrations, and compare them with the policies of
Adolf Hitler and his mentor, Benito Mussolini, you will eventually come
-- however reluctantly -- to the conclusion that World War II was not a
conflict between fascism and something else, as advertised, but a
conflict between competing brands of fascism.
L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
[elNeil]
-
definition of the economy of fascism: an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses
Murray N. Rothbard,
"Nixonian Socialism"
[rothbard]
-
FREE MARKET
-
That condition of society in which all economic transactions result from voluntary choice without
coercion.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
[celine]
-
If a 'market' is a system of exchange, and 'free' means that it is voluntary, that is to say,
uncoerced,
then a 'free market' is a system in which all voluntary exchanges are permissible and all involuntary exchanges are impermissible.
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
The Market is the sum of all voluntary human action. If one acts non-coercively, one is part of the Market.
New Libertarian Manifesto by Samuel Edward Konkin III
[sek3]
-
The free market is the name for the array of all the voluntary exchanges that take place in the world.
Murray N. Rothbard,
"Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics" (1956)
[rothbard]
-
Free market is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society. Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services.
[...]
Both parties undertake the exchange because each expects to gain from it. Also, each will repeat the exchange next time (or refuse to) because his expectation has proved correct (or incorrect) in the recent past. Trade, or exchange, is engaged in precisely because both parties benefit; if they did not expect to gain, they would not agree to the exchange.
[...]
In modern game-theory jargon, trade is a win-win situation, a "positive-sum" rather than a "zero-sum" or "negative-sum" game.
[...]
But exchanges are not necessarily free. Many are coerced. If a robber threatens you with "Your money or your life," your payment to him is coerced and not voluntary, and he benefits at your expense. It is robbery, not free markets, that actually follows the mercantilist model: the robber benefits at the expense of the coerced. Exploitation occurs not in the free market, but where the coercer exploits his victim. In the long run, coercion is a negative-sum game that leads to reduced production, saving, and investment, a depleted stock of capital, and reduced productivity and living standards for all, perhaps even for the coercers themselves.
Murray N. Rothbard, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
[rothbard]
-
A "free market" can represent a spectrum of things to a variety of people. For some, the free market may provide justification for government-issued license to favored corporations to ride roughshod over the common market. To others it may imply "free and fair trade," proponents of which naively expect government to reign in corporate depredations. Somewhere betwixt these two poles fall those who realize that government is to business what steroids are to cattle. Given an injection of big government, corporations grow unnaturally large and aggressive. A market free of help or hindrance by government is the solution least likely to be tried. Too many hands in the tills at either end of the buffet; whether good intentions or self-serving motives run the registers, the results are similar. Policies that protect individual rights can and should also protect corporate rights.
Protectionist policies thwart the action of corrective forces by removing companies from the judgment of the open market. Not judgment by a prescient elite or majority, or by market experts, but by the cumulative force of each freely made individual economic choice acting as the sand in the hourglass.
Reflections on Orwell and Political Language
by
Cat Farmer
[catfarmer]
-
First, there is no free market when government artificially restricts the supply of something, be it oil or sugar. In fact, because the U.S. government restricts the importation of sugar into this country in order to protect politically connected domestic sugar producers, we see a two-tiered pricing system: a world price and a U.S. price. While the U.S. price is determined in an open market setting, there is nothing free about it. The political classes have decreed that U.S. residents are going to pay higher prices for sugar than people do elsewhere.
The Oil Dependency Myth, by Willliam L. Anderson
[williamAnderson]
-
GRANFALLOON
-
A granfalloon is any large bureaucratic figment of people's imagination. For instance, there's really no such thing as the Feds or the General Veeblefeltzer Corporation. There are a bunch of people out there that relate to each other, and there's some structures, and some paper. In fact, there's lots and lots of paper. The people sit in the structures and pass paper back and forth to each other and charge you to do so.
All these people, structures, and paper are real. But nowhere can you point to the larger concept of "government" or "corporation" and say, "There it is, kiddies!" The monolithic, big "they" is all in your mind.
Kurt Vonnegut, who coined the term
[vonnegut]
-
A granfalloon is the lumping together of many diverse elements into an abstract collection, and to then think and speak as if the abstract collection is one single entity capable of performing actions. This phenomenon leads people to say things like "the government runs the country." I hope you realize (or will soon) just how absurd the previous sentence is.
Frederick Mann,
THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT, Version 2 - October, 1998
[frederickMann]
-
(Compare to collectivism.
Contrast with individualism.)
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
INDIVIDUALISM
-
As a moral philosophy, individualism holds that only individual persons can be
moral agents.
It holds that
rights and responsibilities
are only relevant to individuals.
Individualism denies that there are any
collective
moral agents, and therefore denies rights or responsibilities to groups (but not to the individuals within those groups).
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
Straw-man "individualism": The position that individual rights always supersede group rights.
Stated this way, individualism seems unreasonable -- seems in fact like a call for dogmatically privileging one entity over another. True individualism is both far more reasonable and far more radical for it
denies the very existence
of such a thing as "group rights".
According to individualism, no one's rights ever supersede anyone else's rights because all
rights are equal
and compatible.
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
In individualism, the "collective is not the ultimate value, but rather a vehicle for the realization of individual goals".
R.W. Grant,
The Incredible Bread Machine
[rwGrant]
-
'Individualism' has a great variety of meanings in social and political philosophy. Three important types can be distinguished: ontological individualism, methodological individualism, and moral and political individualism. These three are often confused by highly reputable liberal and conservative philosophers [...]
Ontological individualism is the uncontroversial metaphysical doctrine that social reality consists, ultimately, only of persons who act and choose. Collectivities, such as a social class, a state, or a group, cannot act. It is more easily understood in contrast to ontological collectivism, which does suppose that such collectivities have a reality independent of the actions of persons.
www.Anarchy-Movement.org
[krauth]
-
We have talked at length of individual rights; but what, it may be asked, of the "rights of society"? Don't they supersede the rights of the mere individual? The libertarian, however, is an individualist; he believes that one of the prime errors in social theory is to treat "society" as if it were an actually existing entity. "Society" is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding "rights" of its own; at other times as an existing evil which can be blamed for all the ills of the world. The individualist holds that only individuals exist, think, feel, choose, and act; and that "society" is not a living entity but simply a label for a set of interacting individuals. Treating society as a thing that chooses and acts, then, serves to obscure the real forces at work.
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[available online]
[rothbard]
-
The word 'individualist' had little of the idea of the abstracted self that the word today conjures.
Rather, it was a dense concept suggesting an alternative to the
collectivism
of
socialism
and
communism,
certainly, but also remaining open to the interaction between the individual and his society and culture that crafts distinctive personality.
Individualists, in this sense, belong to societies in ways they couldn't possibly belong to
states,
any more than theory could be wholly self-created.
analysis, a blog for individualists
(citing The Intercollegiate Review on Lee Edward's Educating for Liberty)
[analysis]
-
ISOLATIONISM
-
"Isolationism" was coined as a smear term to apply to opponents of American entry into World War II. Since the word was often applied through guilt-by-association to mean pro-Nazi, "isolationist" took on a "right wing" as well as a generally negative flavor. If not actively pro-Nazi, "isolationists" were at the very least narrow-minded ignoramuses ignorant of the world around them, in contrast to the sophisticated, worldly, caring "internationalists" who favored American crusading around the globe. In the last decade, of course, antiwar forces have been considered "leftists," and interventionists from Lyndon Johnson to Jimmy Carter and their followers have constantly tried to pin the "isolationist" or at least "neoisolationist" label on today's left wing.
Left or right? During World War I, opponents of the war were bitterly attacked, just as now, as "leftists," even though they included in their ranks libertarians and advocates of laissez-faire capitalism. In fact, the major center of opposition to the American war with Spain and the American war to crush the Philippine rebellion at the turn of the century was laissez-faire liberals, men like the sociologist and economist William Graham Sumner, and the Boston merchant Edward Atkinson, who founded the "Anti-Imperialist League." Furthermore, Atkinson and Sumner were squarely in the great tradition of the classical English liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in particular such laissez-faire "extremists" as Richard Cobden and John Bright of the "Manchester School." Cobden and Bright took the lead in vigorously opposing every British war and foreign political intervention of their era, and for his pains Cobden was known not as an "isolationist" but as the "International Man." Until the smear campaign of the late 1938, opponents of war were considered the true "internationalists," men who opposed the aggrandizement of the nation-state and favored peace, free trade, free migration, and peaceful cultural exchanges among peoples of all nations. Foreign intervention is "international" only in the sense that war is international: coercion, whether the threat of force or the outright movement of troops, will always cross frontiers between one nation and another.
"Isolationism" has a right-wing sound; "neutralism" and "peaceful coexistence" sound leftish. But their essence is the same: opposition to war and political intervention between countries. This has been the position of antiwar forces for two centuries, whether they were the classical liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the "leftists" of World War I and the Cold War, or the "rightists" of World War II. In very few cases have these antiinterventionists favored literal "isolation": what they have generally favored is political nonintervention in the affairs of other countries, coupled with economic and cultural internationalism in the sense of peaceful freedom of trade, investment, and interchange between the citizens of all countries. And this is the essence of the libertarian position as well.
Chapter 14: War and Foreign Policy
"Isolationism" Left and Right
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[available online]
[rothbard]
-
LIBERALISM
-
That school of
capitalist
philosophy which attempts to correct the injustices of
capitalism
by adding new laws to existing laws.
Each time
conservatives
pass a law creating
privilege,
liberals pass another law modifying
privilege, leading
conservatives
to pass a more subtle law recreating
privilege, etc., until "everything not forbidden is compulsory" and "everything not compulsory is forbidden."
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
[celine]
-
Left-Liberals prefer self-government in personal matters and central decision-making on economics. They want government to serve the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Leftists tolerate social diversity, but work for economic equality.
World's Smallest Political Quiz
[quiz]
-
[Contrast with
CLASSICAl LIBERALISM.]
[Compare to
FABIAN SOCIALISM.]
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
To lay a
ghost
at the outset and to dismiss semantics, a liberal is here defined as one who believes in utilizing the full force of government for the advancement of social, political, and economic justice at the municipal, state, national, and international levels....
A liberal believes government is a proper tool to use in the development of a society which attempts to carry Christian principles of conduct into practical effect.
Former US Senator Joseph S. Clark, Jr., when he was Mayor of Philadelphia, Atlantic, July 1953
[clark]
-
Most on the left think of themselves, and probably sincerely, as
"democratic socialists,"
as believers in a blend of
socialism. with democracy and freedom of speech and opinion.
Libertarians hold that vision to be self-contradictory, and democracy, freedom of speech, and socialism to be ultimately incompatible.
Murray Rothbard,
"Where the Left Goes Wrong on Foreign Policy"
[rothbard]
-
This is perhaps the most ambiguous word in the political vocabulary.
[...]
American liberals are not hostile to the market and individualism; it is rather that they demand constant corrections of its apparently random processes by a benevolent state if the traditional value of freedom can be realized.
[...]
European liberalism is perhaps better known as
classical liberalism.
[...]
The basic tenets of liberalism were formulated in this period [in eighteenth-century Europe]. They may be summarized as follows. The individual is the source of his own moral values; the process of trade and exchange between individuals has both efficiency and freedom-enhancing properties; the market is a spontaneous order for the allocation of resources; exchange between nations will not only maximize wealth through the international division of labour, but also tends to reduce war and political tension; and public policy should be limited to the few common concerns of individuals.
www.Anarchy-Movement.org
[krauth]
-
As the word liberty is ambiguous, however, so is the word liberal. A liberal may believe that freedom is a matter for the individual alone and that the role of the state should be minimal, or he may believe that freedom is a matter for the state and that the state can and should be used as an instrument to promote it. The former view in its extreme tends toward
anarchism,
while the latter in its extreme tends toward
socialism,
called social, or welfare, liberalism. In between are myriad gradations. Rarely has a liberal movement been unaffected by this ambiguity; some have even collapsed because of it.
The Greek Catalog - History Directory
[omhros]
-
One of the effective tactics of creeping
socialism,
especially in America,
has been the annexation of words with favorable connotations.
The best example is the word 'liberal'.
In the
nineteenth century, a liberal
supported laissez-faire economic policy, free trade, broadly based democracy, and civil liberties.
The word had strong positive connotations;
even today, while 'conservative' is sometimes used favorably, 'illiberal' is always pejorative.
The socialists opposed liberal economic policies.
The more successful socialists, instead of saything that liberalism was bad and socialism good, called themselves liberals (or progressives, another "good" word) and their opponents conservatives.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
[friedman]
-
The Old Left, flourishing in the United States in the 1930's and 40's, may best be summed up as Social Democracy... Essentially what this means is an accommodation to and admiration for
the State, and a willingness to settle down in cozy alliance with
Big Business
and other power groups to parcel out
perquisites and privileges
in the mixed economy of welfare-warfare
State Monopoly Capitalism.
Murray Rothbard, "Liberty and the New Left"
(PDF)
[rothbard]
-
LIBERTARIANISM
-
The principled rejection of all proactive
coercion, whether by individuals or by groups.
(See also: Non-Aggression Principle.)
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
The libertarian position is that there is no legitimate initiation of force.
Whether or not there is justification for reactive force is outside the definition of libertarianism, but do note that the
pacifist position presumes the libertarian position: you cannot oppose all use of force without also opposing the initiation of force. To be true therefore to pacifist principles requires an acceptance of the libertarian position ...
bkMarcus, A Brief Introduction to Philosophical Anarchism
[bk]
-
Libertarian Partisans (a.k.a. minarchists) "are self-governors in both personal and economic matters. They believe government's only purpose is to protect people from coercion and violence. They value individual responsibility, and tolerate economic and social diversity."
World's Smallest Political Quiz
[quiz]
-
A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.
L. Neil Smith
[elNeil]
-
Libertarianism is a direct attack upon the mystique of
the state.
It recognizes that the state is
only an abstraction
and reduces it to the actions of
individuals.
It applies the same standard of morality to the state as it would to a next-door neighbor. If it is not proper for a neighbor to tax or pass laws regulating your private life, then it cannot be proper for the state to do so. Only by elevating itself above the standards of personal morality can the state make these claims on your life. . . .
Wendy McElroy,
Demystifying the State
[mac]
-
Libertarianism has become a descriptive term for the
individualist
political doctrine in recent years largely because the nineteenth-century word 'liberalism' has been used by semi-collectivist creeds, especially in America.
www.Anarchy-Movement.org
[krauth]
-
The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it is only a
political
theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life.
Murray N. Rothbard,
Six Myths About Libertarianism
[rothbard]
-
Libertarians favor the abolition of all States everywhere, and the provision of legitimate functions now supplied poorly by
governments
(police, courts, etc.) by means of the
free market.
Libertarians favor liberty as a natural human right, and advocate it not only for Americans but for all peoples.
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[available online]
[rothbard]
-
'Libertarian' is another term for
Free-Market
Anarchist, though it often includes softer-core fellow travelers such as
minarchists.
The word originally was used by free-thinkers in relation to religion to mean those who believed in free-will over determinism (which is not all that bad an association for us) and then became a euphemism for anarchist in Europe in the 19th Century.
It was revived by Leonard Read in the 1940s to mean those
Classical Liberals
who refused to join the rest of the
Liberal Movement
into becoming soft-Left
statists, and who had largely joined the U.S.
Old Right coalition against that kind of Liberal, bordering on
fascist, New Deal.
With the election of Eisenhower and death of Robert Taft, the Old Right coalition disintegrated. Buckley pulled the pro-State
conservatives
into his New Right while
Murray Rothbard
rallied the Isolationist (non-interventionist in foreign policy) Libertarians into alliance with the New Left.
New York-based Rothbard became an anarchist in 1950 and defined the hard-core position accordingly.
Robert LeFevre accomplished the same in the Western U.S.
SEK3
[sek3]
-
Libertarianism elaborates an entire philosophy from one simple premise: initiatory violence or its threat
(coercion)
is wrong (immoral, evil, bad, supremely impractical, etc) and is forbidden; nothing else is.
Samuel Edward Konkin III,
New Libertarian Manifesto
[sek3]
-
In its broadest meaning, the word libertarian applies to anything that is
for Liberty and not against it. Many American libertarians in particular
wish to limit the label to people who believe the
free market
is essential to Liberty, leaving out the (mostly European) libertarians who just as
fervently believe in some form of
socialism
and
collective
property. And
while some Libertarians cling to
the State
as somehow capable of defending Liberty
if only kept small enough,
the modern Libertarian Movement that
we know and love (or not) considers the State (involuntary government)
a necessary or unnecessary Evil but definitely an Evil. In fact, the
State is generally perceived as the institutional opposite of Liberty.
SEK3
[sek3]
-
MERCANTILISM
-
The mercantilists wrongly assumed that gold and silver were the real wealth of a nation, not goods and services.
The Trade Deficit: Much Ado About Nothing, by Lawrence W. Reed.
[fee]
-
Mercantilism, which reached its height in the Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a system of statism which employed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state. Thus, mercantilism held that exports should be encouraged by the government and imports discouraged.
Murray Rothbard, "Mercantilism: A Lesson for Our Times" in his The Logic of Action II (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 1997), p. 43.
[rothbard]
-
Mercantilism is economic nationalism for the purpose of building a wealthy and powerful state. Adam Smith coined the term "mercantile system" to describe the system of political economy that sought to enrich the country by restraining imports and encouraging exports. This system dominated western European economic thought and policies from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. The goal of these policies was, supposedly, to achieve a "favorable" balance of trade that would bring gold and silver into the country. In contrast to the agricultural system of the physiocrats, or the laissez-faire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mercantile system served the interests of merchants and producers such as the British East India Company, whose activities were protected or encouraged by the state.
The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
[econlib]
-
MINARCHISM
-
Term coined in 1971 by SEK3 to substitute for the clumsy phrase, "limited-government Libertarian."
The Agorist Institute
[agorist]
-
"[Minarchists] ... believe government's only purpose is to protect people from coercion and violence."
(See libertarianism.)
World's Smallest Political Quiz
[quiz]
-
The minarchist position was summarized by Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who said, "That government is best which governs least."
bkMarcus, A Brief Introduction to Philosophical Anarchism
[bk]
-
Minarchism, sometimes clumsily called minimal statism, is the view that government should be as small as possible. Supporters argue that it continues the tradition of classical liberal philosophy in its original form.
Radical minarchists usually agree that government should be restricted to its "minimal" or "night-watchman" state functions of government (courts, police, prisons, defence forces). Some other minarchists include in the role of government the management of essential common infrastructure (roads, money); some, by what is sometimes reproached to them as a slippery slope, include quite a lot in such essential infrastructure (schools, hospitals, social security). Actually, these minarchists often accept (in a conservative rather than principled way) as valid some of current government's domain, and consider it more urgent to stop the expansion of government than to reduce its domain to any particular size. Minarchists are generally opposed to government programs which transfer wealth or which subsidize certain sectors of the economy.
Minarchists usually justify their vision of the state by referring to basic principles rather than arguing in terms of pragmatic results. For example, in his book
Anarchy, State and Utopia,
Robert Nozick
defines the role of a minimal state as follows:
"Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons'
rights not to be forced to do certain things,
and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. Two noteworthy implications are that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection."
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[wikipedia]
-
Another point: in my view, we are about as likely to achieve minarchy as we are to achieve anarchy. I.e., both are remote possibilities. What is striking is that almost every criticism of "impracticality" that minarchist hurl at anarchy is also true of minarchy itself. Both are exceedingly unlikely. Both require massive changes in views among millions of people. Both rest on presumptions that most people simply don't care much about.
N. Stephan Kinsella,
"What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist"
[kinsella]
-
MORAL AGENT
-
a.k.a. 'person'
Moral Agency is a concept in moral philosophy and the discussion of ethics.
A Moral Agent is anything that can be held responsible -- credited or blamed -- for decisions or behavior. It is moral agents who have
rights and responsibilities, because it is moral agents whom we take to have choices and the power to choose.
If you do not think anyone or anything should ever be blamed, then you are denying the concept of moral agency -- as well as the concept of rights and of responsibilities. (See EGOISM.)
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
Being a Moral Agent does not mean that you are successfully making moral decisions or that you are intelligent or that you are righteous. It means that you belong to that category of being that can be blamed. If we can't blame you, you have no rights. If you have no rights, we can't blame you. It means that we get to hold you responsible for the decisions you make, no matter how well or poorly you make them.
If the guy who beats me up isn't a moral agent, then I can't blame him for what he did -- I have to treat him as a force of nature. Blaming someone MEANS that you are treating him as a moral agent. Without the concept of moral agency -- the idea of choice -- there can be no SHOULD or SHOULDN'T.
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
The number 4 is not a physical agent. It cannot do anything in the physical world.
A tornado is a physical agent because it can and does do things in the physical world.
But a tornado can't do anything in the moral world. It can destroy my house, but it can't rob me of my
property
in the same sense that a person can.
A person is a moral agent.
I care differently if my house is destroyed by a tornado than I do if it's destroyed by a terrorist. The terrorist robbed me of my house, because, unlike the tornado, the terrorist can do things in the moral world, and 'to rob' is a morally-defined term.
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
NATURAL LAW
-
Legal theory (and moral philosophy) of
Lysander Spooner
-- also called
the Science of Justice -- wherein acts of coercion
against individuals are considered "illegal" but the so-called criminal acts that violate only man-made legislation are not.
According to Natural Law theory, an individual has a natural "right" to be free from
coercion.
According to Spoonerian Natural Law, all legislation is itself illegal.
(Contrast with
Philosophical Egoism.)
bkMarcus, A Brief Biography of Lysander Spooner
[bk]
-
In the controversy over man's nature, and over the broader and more controversial concept of "natural law," both sides have repeatedly proclaimed that natural law and theology are inextricably intertwined. As a result, many champions of natural law, in scientific or philosophic circles, have gravely weakened their case by implying that rational, philosophical methods alone cannot establish such law: that theological faith is necessary to maintain the concept. On the other hand, the opponents of natural law have gleefully agreed; since faith in the supernatural is deemed necessary to belief in natural law, the latter concept must be tossed out of scientific, secular discourse, and be consigned to the arcane sphere of the divine studies. In consequence, the idea of a natural law founded on reason and rational inquiry has been virtually lost.[2]
[2] And yet, Black's Law Dictionary defines the natural law in a purely rationalistic and non-theological manner:
Jus Naturale, the natural law, or law of nature; law, or legal principles, supposed to be discoverable by the light of nature or abstract reasoning, or to be taught by nature to all nations and men alike, or law supposed to govern men and peoples in a state of nature, i.e., in advance of organized governments or enacted laws (3rd ed., p. 1044).
Professor Patterson, in Jurisprudence: Men and Ideas of the Law (Brooklyn: Foundation Press, 1953), p. 333, defines the natural law cogently and concisely as:
Principles of human conduct that are discoverable by "reason" from the basic inclinations of human nature, and that are absolute, immutable and of universal validity for all times and places. This is the basic conception of scholastic natural law ... and most natural law philosophers.
Murray N. Rothbard,
The Ethics of Liberty,
"Natural Law and Reason"
[rothbard]
-
PACIFISM
-
"The pacifist position is that there is no legitimate use of force."
bkMarcus, A Brief Introduction to Philosophical Anarchism
[bk]
-
In theory, the term 'anarcho-pacifist' should be considered redundant.
In practice ... well, you'll have to ask the individuals who are calling themselves pacifists.
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
Whether or not there is justification for reactive force is outside the
definition of libertarianism, but do note that the pacifist position presumes the libertarian position: you cannot oppose all use of force without also opposing the initiation of force. To be true therefore to pacifist principles requires an acceptance of the libertarian position, as was recognized by Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist and Christian anarchist.
bkMarcus, A Brief Introduction to Philosophical Anarchism
[bk]
-
There are some libertarians who would go even further and say that no one should employ violence even in defending himself against violence. However, even such Tolstoyans, or 'absolutist pacifists,' would concede the defender's right to employ defensive violence and would merely urge him not to exercise that right. They, therefore, do not disagree with our proposition. In the same way, a libertarian temperance advocate would not challenge a man's right to drink liquor, only his wisdom in exercising that right.
Murray N. Rothbard,
The Myth of National Defense
[rothbard]
-
PATRIOTISM
-
Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
George Bernard Shaw
[shaw]
-
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
[shaw]
-
Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.
The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course ...
Emma Goldman
Patriotism: A Menace To Liberty
Anarchism and Other Essays
[redEmma]
-
I of patriotism brag,
And wave the striped rag;
At the numb-heads I am laughing in my sleeves.
I am always for myself,
For office and for pelf;
I'm a member of the "Brotherhood of Thieves."
Anna K. - The Politician (poem)
Liberty, Vol. 10, No. 21, February 23, 1895, Whole No. 307
[annaK]
-
I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel.
G.K. Chesterton, The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, Act III
[gkChesterton]
-
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel.
With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[ambroseBierce]
-
PATRIOT, n.
The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[ambroseBierce]
-
Conservatives
and
liberals
alike hold in common the mystical notion that nations really mean something, probably something permanent. Both ascribe to lines drawn on maps -- or in the dirt or in the air -- the magical creation of communities of men that require sovereignty and sanction.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
-
POLITICAL CAPITALISM
-
That organization of society, incorporating elements of
tax,
usury,
landlordism, and
tariff, which thus denies the
Free Market
while pretending to exemplify it.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
[celine]
-
Political capitalism is my term for what anarcho-capitalists call "State Capitalism"
-- government run for the benefit of private capitalists.
(I use the term 'political capitalism' in part to contrast
political
means with economic means, and in part to avoid confusion with the term 'State Capitalism' as it was used by anti-Soviet leftists, who claimed that the Soviet Union could not properly be seen as communist or even anti-capitalist because the state monopoly had taken over the role of the capitalist in exploiting the proletariat, rather than abolishing the role and liberating the proletariat.)
Political capitalism is anti-competitive because established capitalists use the
coercive power
of
the State
to curtail entrepreneurial competition.
Notice that political capitalism is incompatible with a
free market.
bkMarcus,
Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
-
(Contrast with
IDEOLOGICAL CAPITALISM.)
(Contrast with
ECONOMIC CAPITALISM.)
(Imperialism,
mercantilism,
protectionism, and
statist,
so-called "free trade" treaties
(e.g., NAFTA)
are all examples of political capitalism.
So is "Corporate Capitalism":
the State-sanctioned corporation is a legal fiction created to shield individual persons from responsibility for the actions of the entity that generates their profits.)
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
Thatcherism is all too similar to Reaganism: free-market rhetoric masking statist content.
Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 62:Mrs. Thatcher's Poll Tax
[rothbard]
-
Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with
laissez-faire capitalism.
Big business supports a form of
state capitalism
in which government and big business act as partners.
[...]
This is not to say that economic bigness is bad. It isn't, if it results from economic efficiency. But it is bad if it results from collusion with political, rather than with economic power.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
-
POLITICS
-
The control of the collective means of violence-backed coercion.
Perry de Havilland,
Libertarian Alliance
[libertarianAlliance]
-
Politics is about how we should decide whom to
coerce about what.
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
- POLITICS, n.
- A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
- The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[ambroseBierce]
-
The fact is that
libertarianism
is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it is only a
political
theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life.
Murray N. Rothbard,
Six Myths About Libertarianism
[rothbard]
-
Politics has always been the institutionalized and established way in which some men have exercised the power to live off the output of other men.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
-
... politics is just another form of residual magic in our culture -- a belief that somehow things come from nothing; that things may be given to some without first taking them from others; that all the tools of man's survival are his by accident or divine right and not by pure and simple inventiveness and work.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
-
Politics consists of 100,000 pressure groups trying to get their hands on the loot.
Lew Rockwell,
Speaking of Liberty, p. 261
[lewRockwell]
-
PROPERTY
-
Appendix Zain -- Property and
Privilege
Property is theft. -- P.J. Proudhon
Property is liberty. -- P.J. Proudhon
Property is impossible. -- P.J. Proudhon
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Proudhon, by piling up his contradictions this way, was not merely being French; he was trying to indicate that the abstraction "property" covers a variety of phenomena, some pernicious and some beneficial. Let us borrow a device from the semanticists and examine his triad with the subscripts attached for maximum clarity.
"Property1 is theft" means that property1 created by the artificial laws of feudal,
capitalist, and other
authoritarian
societies, is based on armed robbery.
Land titles, for instance, are clear examples of property1;
swords and shot
were the original coins of transaction.
"Property2 is liberty" means that property2, that which will be voluntarily honored in a voluntary
(anarchist)
society, is the foundation of the liberty in that society. The more people's interests are co-mingled and confused, as in
collectivism,
the more they will be stepping on each other's toes; only when the rules of the game declare clearly "This is mine and this is thine," and the game is voluntarily accepted as worthwhile by the parties to it, can true independence be achieved.
"Property3 is impossible" means that property3 (=property1) creates so much conflict of interest that society is in perpetual undeclared civil war and must eventually devour itself (and properties 1 and 3 as well). In short, Proudhon, in his own way, foresaw the Snafu Principle. He also foresaw that
communism
would only perpetuate and aggravate the conflicts, and that anarchy is the only viable alternative to this chaos.
It is averred, of course, that property2 will come into existence only in a totally voluntary society; many forms of it already exist. The error of most alleged
libertarians
-- especially the followers (!) of the egregious Ayn Rand -- is to assume that all property1 is property2. The distinction can be made by any IQ above 70 and is absurdly simple. The test is to ask, of any title of ownership you are asked to accept or which you ask others to accept, "Would this be honored in a free society of rationalists, or does it require the armed might of
a State
to force people to honor it?" If it be the former, it is property2 and represents liberty; if it be the latter, it is property1 and represents theft.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
[celine]
-
The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.
The usual solution is for the use of each thing to be decided by a person or by some group of persons organized under some set of rules.
Such things are called property.
If each thing is controlled by an individual who has the power to transfer that control to any other individual, we call the institution private property.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
[friedman]
-
Among free-market anarchists, the divisive issue is the recognition of
land as de jure private property.
Mutualist anarchists, following
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and
Benjamin Tucker,
claim land cannot be bought and sold.
Land can be legitimately possessed through occupation and use (e.g., "squatting"), but cannot be purchased, cannot be sold or otherwise transferred, and cannot therefore be used as collateral in a loan or investment. Under mutualist anarchism, land cannot be willed or inherited,
since such transfers involve de jure property titles.
If you want to give your land to your children, they'll just have to occupy it after you're gone.
[Contrast with
PROPERTARIANISM.]
bkMarcus,
Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
-
RIGHTS
-
We shall be speaking throughout this work of "rights," in particular the rights of individuals to property in their persons and in material objects. But how do we define "rights"? "Right" has cogently and trenchantly been defined by Professor Sadowsky:
When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral use.[53]
Sadowsky's definition highlights the crucial distinction we shall make throughout this work between a man's right and the morality or immorality of his exercise of that right. We will contend that it is a man's right to do whatever he wishes with his person; it is his right not to be molested or interfered with by violence from exercising that right. But what may be the moral or immoral ways of exercising that right is a question of personal ethics rather than of political philosophy -- which is concerned solely with matters of right, and of the proper or improper exercise of physical violence in human relations. The importance of this crucial distinction cannot be overemphasized. Or, as Elisha Hurlbut concisely put it: "The exercise of a faculty [by an individual] is its only use. The manner of its exercise is one thing; that involves a question of morals. The right to its exercise is another thing."[54]
[53] James A. Sadowsky, S.J., "Private Property and Collective Ownership," in Tibor Machan, ed., The Libertarian Alternative (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974), pp. 120-21.
[54] Hurlbut, cited in Wright, American Interpretations, pp. 257 ff.
[See also OBLIGATIONS.]
Murray N. Rothbard,
The Ethics of Liberty,
"Natural Law and Natural Rights"
[rothbard]
-
SOCIAL CONTRACT
-
Social contract is a phrase used in philosophy, political science, and sociology to denote a hypothetical agreement within a state regarding the
rights and responsibility
of the state and its citizens, or more generally a similar concord between a group and its members. All members within a society are assumed to agree to the terms of the social contract by their choice to stay within the society. The term "social contract" was coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his influential 1762 treatise The Social Contract.
(See
STATISM.)
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[wikipedia]
-
Social Contract Theory is an attempt to justify
coercion by claiming that certain involuntary arrangements are actually voluntary after all.
Individualism
rejects any hypothetical contract with any hypothetical
collective identity.
Contracts exist only between and among individuals.
(See
MORAL AGENT.)
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
Most modern theories of how society ought to work rest on some idea of agreement. Almost invariably, however, the agreement is fictitious, hypothetical, one that would be concluded if all men had equal "bargaining power," or saw things through the same "veil" of ignorance or uncertainty about their future. Or felt the same need for a central authority. The social contract, in its many versions, is perhaps the best known of these alleged agreements. All are designed to suit the normative views of their inventors and to justify the kind of social arrangements they should like to see adopted. Yet the only agreement that is not hypothetical, alleged, invented is the system of voluntary exchanges where all parties give visible, objective proof by their actions that they have found the unique common ground that everybody accepts, albeit grumblingly, but without anyone being forced to give up something he had within his reach and would have preferred. The set of voluntary exchanges, in one word, is the only one that does not impose an immorality in pursuit of a moral objective.
Anthony de Jasay, "Your Dog Owns Your House"
[deJasay]
-
SOCIALISM
-
The attempted abolition of all
privilege by restoring power entirely to the coercive agent behind
privilege,
the State,
thereby converting capitalist oligarchy into Statist monopoly. Whitewashing a wall by painting it black.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
[celine]
-
Is Socialism state-centralization of the economy, or is it any system that levels out the society?
From
what I've been reading, it seems that for the early 19th-century intellectual, Sociology was any description of how the society did work, and Socialism was any prescription about how the society should work.
By that definition, all anarchists were (and still are) socialists -- even the so-called Anarcho-Capitalists.
bkMarcus,
Is anarchism a socialist philosophy or is it libertarian?
[bk]
-
Under socialism all the means of production are the property of the
community. It is the community alone which can dispose of them and which
determines their use in production.
Ludwig von Mises,
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
[mises]
-
Private property
is eliminated,
individualism
goes by the board, individuality is flattened, all
property
is owned and controlled
communally,
and the individual units of the new
collective organism
are in some vague way equal to one another.
Murray N. Rothbard,
Classical Economics, volume II,
An Austrian perspective on the History of Economic Thought
(Aldershot-Brookfield: Edward Elgar, 1995), p. 318.
[rothbard]
-
It may mean, and is often used to describe, merely the ideals of social justice, greater equality, and security, which are the ultimate aims of socialism. But it means also the particular method by which most socialists hope to attain these ends and which many competent people regard as the only methods by which they can be fully and quickly attained. In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of "planned economy" in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.
F. A. Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
(from the preface to the 1956 American paperback edition)
[hayek]
-
In fact, socialism must be the most ironic use of language in the history of human linguistics: it is the advocacy of the complete replacement of social interaction with
political
interaction, the very negation of civil society itself.
Perry de Havilland,
Liberarian Alliance
[libertarianAlliance]
-
In its earlier and heady days, socialism was supposed to substitute "rational policies" for the supposed chaos of the market. Instead of having individuals competing with each other to produce and sell goods in the market, socialism instead would create a process by which planners could rationally determine the needs of individuals in society, then direct production and distribution toward those ends. Moreover, because planning was to be placed in the hands of economic "experts," there would be no need to deal with the interference from politicians and the special interests that they represent.
Energy Bills and Central Planning by William L. Anderson
[williamAnderson]
-
The point here is not simply that laws, policies, and programs can have counterproductive results.
The point is that, when social processes are described in terms of their hoped-for results, this obscures the more fundamental question as to just what they actually do ....
Therefore socialism, for example, is defined in this book not in terms of such goals as equality, security, economic planning, or "social justice," but as a system in which property rights in agriculture, commerce, and industry may be assigned and re-assigned only by political authorities, rather than through transactions in the marketplace.
Thomas Sowell,
Knowledge and Decisions,
Preface to the 1996 Edition
[sowell]
-
'Socialism', in a less-strict, but nevertheless accurate and simple form means: OPPOSITION TO
CAPITALISM.
bkMarcus,
Capitalism v. Socialism v. Anarchism
[bk]
-
'Socialism' has become a word with positive connotations and no content.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
[friedman]
-
TAX
-
That form of
coercion
or interference with the
Free Market
in which
the State
collects tribute (the tax), allowing it to hire armed forces to practice
coercion
in defense of
privilege,
and also to engage in such wars, adventures, experiments, "reforms," etc., as it pleases not at its own cost, but at the cost of "its" subjects.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
[celine]
-
In a barter economy, government officials can only expropriate resources in one way: by seizing goods in kind.
In a monetary economy they will find it easier to seize monetary assets, and then use the money to acquire goods and services for government, or else pay the money as susidies to favored groups.
Such sezure is called taxation.
Murray N. Rothbard,
What Has Government Done to Our Money?
[rothbard]
-
At first, of course, it is startling for someone to consider taxation as robbery, and therefore government as a band of robbers. But anyone who persists in thinking of taxation as in some sense a "voluntary" payment can see what happens if he chooses not to pay. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter, himself by no means a libertarian, wrote that "the state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind."
[Joseph A Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York Harper & Bros , 1942), pp 198 and 1980]
The eminent Viennese "legal positivist" Hans Kelsen attempted, in his treatise, The General Theory of Law and the State, to establish a political theory and justification of the State, on a strictly "scientific" and value-free basis. What happened is that early in the book, he came to the crucial sticking-point, the pons asinorum of political philosophy: What distinguishes the edicts of the State from the commands of a bandit gang? Kelsen's answer was simply to say that the decrees of the State are "valid," and to proceed happily from there, without bothering to define or explain this concept of "validity." Indeed, it would be a useful exercise for nonlibertarians to ponder this question: How can you define taxation in a way which makes it different from robbery?
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[rothbard]
-
Taxation transfers resources from the private sector, where they are used in accordance with individual preferences, to the government, where they are used in accordance with political preferences. A good text will make this point clear, and proceed to discuss three important issues in the economics of taxation.
The incidence of taxation. Taxes are frequently levied on an entity that will not bear the ultimate burden of the taxes. "Who really pays this tax?" is an important question, one that also helps the student to "think like an economist."
Tax incentives and disincentives. Taxes alter the payoff for taking or not taking certain actions. Many times taxation can make activities that are profitable -- and beneficial -- no longer profitable. The student should learn to consider the long-term impact of tax changes after individuals and businesses have adjusted to them.
The cost of taxation. Taxes do not collect themselves. And tax avoidance costs billions of dollars each year. Economic texts should explain to students that the economic resources devoted to tax collection -- as well as those devoted to tax avoidance -- are substantial, and not available for other purposes.
How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
[mackinac]
-
THE STATE
-
That institution which interferes with the
Free Market
through the direct exercise of
coercion
or the granting of
privileges (backed by
coercion).
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
[celine]
-
That organization that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given territory.
bkMarcus
[bk]
-
A compulsory territorial monopoly on final judgments.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
[hoppe]
-
The state is "the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an
individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives
or masters of the entire people within a given area."
Government is "the subjection of the noninvasive individual to an external will."
Joseph A. Labadie
(summarizing Tucker)
Anarchism: What It Is and What It Is Not
[labadie]
-
Anarchists have no quarrel with any institution that contents itself with enforcing the law of
equal freedom,
and ... they oppose the State only after first defining it as an institution that claims authority over the non-aggressive individual and enforces that authority by physical force or by means that are effective only because they can and will be backed by physical force if necessary.
Individual Liberty by Benjamin Tucker,
"Liberty and Politics"
[tucker]
-
(involuntary government)
SEK3
[sek3]
-
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone expects to live at the expense of everyone else.
Frederic Bastiat
[bastiat]
-
The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet. Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects.
Murray Rothbard,
"The Anatomy of the State"
[rothbard]
-
There will always be those who claim to have special rights over the rest of society, and the state is the most organized attempt to get away with it.
Lew Rockwell, "Why the State Is Different"
[rockwell]
-
... while some Libertarians cling to the State as somehow capable of defending Liberty if only kept small enough, the modern Libertarian Movement ... considers the State ... a necessary or unnecessary Evil but definitely an Evil. In fact, the State is generally perceived as the institutional opposite of Liberty.
SEK3
[sek3]
-
Nowhere has the coercive and parasitic nature of the State been more clearly limned than by the great late nineteenth-century German sociologist, Franz Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two and only two mutually exclusive means for man to obtain wealth. One, the method of production and voluntary exchange, the method of the free market, Oppenheimer termed the "economic means"; the other, the method of robbery by the use of violence, he called the "political means." The political means is clearly parasitic, for it requires previous production for the exploiters to confiscate, and it subtracts from instead of adding to the total production in society. Oppenheimer then proceeded to define the State as the "organization of the political means" -- the systematization of the predatory process over a given territorial area.
[Franz Oppenheimer, The State (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926), pp. 24-27 and passim.]
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[rothbard]
-
I would define government as a group of men who sell retributive justice to the inhabitants of a limited geographic area at monopolist prices.
Robert LeFevre, Commentaries
[lefevre]
-
Let me begin with the definition of government: A government is a compulsory
territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a
compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate
arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and
it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or
arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this
service.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe,
"Government, Money, and International Politics" [PDF]
[hoppe]
-
The State is a group of people who have managed to acquire a virtual monopoly of the use of violence throughout a given territorial area.
In particular, it has acquired a monopoly of
aggressive
violence, for States generally recognize the right of individuals to use violence (though not against States, of course) in self defense.
The State then uses this monopoly to wield power over the inhabitants of the area and to enjoy the material fruits of that power.
The State, then, is the only organization in society that regularly and openly obtains its monetary revenues by the use of aggressive violence;
all other individuals and organizations (except if delegated that right by the State) can obtain wealth only by peaceful production and by voluntary exchange of their respective products.
This use of violence to obtain its revenue
(called 'taxation')
is the keystone of State power.
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[rothbard]
