Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian

Sam Konkin Endorses Ron Paul!

Okay, not really. But Konkin does appear as one of the “long-standing tradition of voluntaryist thinkers” listed in this Ron Paul video – along with such folks as Molinari, Spooner, Tucker, Mises, Rothbard, and even your humble correspondent.


Statism for Kids

Biggest Ever Book of Questions and Answers Yesterday while waiting in the barber shop I took a look at a children’s book they had amongst the magazines, titled Biggest Ever Book of Questions and Answers. One of the entries read as follows:

Why Are Some Lands Richer Than Others?
Some lands have good soil, where crops can grow. Some have oil, which is worth a lot of money. But other countries have poor soil, little rain, and no minerals. However hard people work there, they struggle to survive.

Well, sure, variation in the supply of natural resources is certainly one reason why some lands are richer than others. But to omit political factors entirely is hardly honest. Is superiority of natural resources really the reason why, say, Luxembourg and Hong Kong are so much richer than Honduras or Angola? It does children no service to teach them that poverty is due solely to the arbitrary favours of nature rather than to the remediable wickedness of political institutions.

Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Windsor But it soon transpires that the Biggest Ever Book of Questions and Answers is no disrespecter of governments. Reading a little further, under “What Is A Head Of State?,” I learned that “The most important person in a country is the head of state.”

Really? So for example in 1936, in an England that included Francis Crick, Paul Dirac, J. B. S. Haldane, F. A. Hayek, Aldous Huxley, John Maynard Keynes, C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Alan Turing, Frank Whittle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Virginia Woolf, the most important person in England was the blithering nonentity named Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Windsor?

By that time the barber was ready for me, so I was spared further inanity.


Beat Your Swords Into Thetans

I just saw a commercial in which a girl acting in a school play suddenly breaks from the script and asks why soldiers should obey an unjust ruler’s order to go into battle, and why government should be allowed to serve only a few rather than everybody. Radical stuff, especially the former. (The latter is a pipe dream, though a well-intentioned one.)

So I went to the advertised website and discovered it’s some L. Ron Hubbard outfit. Does that mean the Scientologists are pushing military civil disobedience now? I didn’t know they swung that way.

Still, on said website one of the listed 21 Ethical Precepts is “Don’t Do Anything Illegal,” which would seem to conflict with the aforementioned suggestion of endorsing civil disobedience. Of course on a Socratic-Scholastic-Spoonerite understanding of law there’s no conflict, but is that what they mean?

I suppose I could satisfy my curiosity by shelling out 18 bucks for a bundle of booklets; but the last Hubbard tract I read did not awaken within me any desire to tackle another.


Easy Rider

I’m not entirely sure what I think about this issue, but I lean toward Walter’s position – not because I agree that “libertarianism abhors a property vacuum,” but because Walter’s position seems like a natural extension of what I already believe about easements. I’ve long argued that one property owner cannot legitimately buy up all the land around another’s property and thereby either keep the latter prisoner (if she was on the property at the time) or bar the latter from her own home (if she was away) – since one cannot legitimately use one’s own property to interfere with the liberty and property of others. (And why should we count this kind of action as “interference”? Well, that’s where thick libertarianism and unity of virtue come in. And yes, I recognise the irony of invoking those sorts of considerations on Walter’s side in a debate!) And I’ve recently extended that argument to a defense of open borders, on the grounds that even if the government were the legitimate owner of the nation’s borders, it would not have the right to prevent immigrants from moving freely on to property where they are welcome.

Well, then, let A be a circular plot of land owned and resided within by you; let B be a doughnut-shaped plot of land owned by me and completely surrounding plot A; and let C be the rest of the planet, ex hypothesi unowned. I have no right to imprison you within A by denying you an easement across B allowing you to travel between A and C.

Now let the boundaries of A and B gradually expand until they surpass the circumference of the planet and begin to decrease on the other side:

globe seen from vertical perspective above pole

The result is that, from the perspective of the other side of the globe, unowned territory C is now a small circular area surrounded by doughnut B, while A comprises most of the earth’s surface. But does this shifting of boundaries obviate the obligation of B’s owner to allow access from A to C? I can’t see why it should. Surely mere relative size is not a decisive consideration; and what counts as imprisoning has little to do with which boundary is “inside” or “outside” the other. Recall the marvelous image that opens Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed:

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. … The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

So anyway, those are my initial reactions.


Six Years After

Today is the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and the fifth anniversary of both the Molinari Institute and this blog. Re 9/11, I have little to say that I haven’t said previously. Re the Molinari Institute, to those still patiently waiting for the appearance of the Industrial Radical, apologies for the delay (owing to illness and various kinds of hecticity) – it is coming! Re this blog, it’s been an amazing success – thank you! I now get the kind of stats in a month I used to get in a year.


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