I’m done with my two-week libertarathon – tiring but fun. Now just two weeks before fall classes begin!
I notice that the Mises Institute has a lot of good pamphlets out, suitable for tabling – including Fréderic Bastiat’s The Law, Gustave de Molinari’s Production of Security, Étienne de la Boétie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Carl Menger’s Origins of Money, and Murray Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State and Left & Right: The Prospects for Liberty. (Now they just need to publish this baby.)
In other news, check out Kevin Carson on a day in the life under the corporate state.
Regarding Spooner, why do libertarians always cite him on political obligation, rather than modern philosophical anarchists like John Simmons, Leslie Green, Joseph Raz, etc.? And more generally, why have libertarians failed to engage with the literature on political obligation? This is odd, given that this issue is at the heart of libertarian theory.
Probably because he makes the inference from (misnamed) “philosophical” anarchism to actual anarchism and they don’t.
The way I read them, the philosophical anarchists have the moral argument against government, but they’re missing the economic argument. In other words, they’re halfway there. So if you add in some public choice analysis, you can easily draw the inference yourself. Or: philosophical anarchism + public choice = market anarchism.
Moreover, if libertarians engaged the political obligation literature, they could introduce the philosophical anarchists to the economic arguments, and convert them to political anarchism.
For example, Christopher Wellman writes: “I must confess, though, that if someone could generate conclusive evidence that peace and security could be secured in the state of nature, I would reject descriptive statism and endorse both descriptive and normative anarchism.”
This is an opportunity to get into the mainstream that libertarians should not miss.