Each individual should have the freest possible scope for the development of his faculties and his personality. In order to have this scope, he must have freedom from violence against himself. Violence can only repress and destroy human growth and endeavor, and neither can reason and creativity function under an atmosphere of coercion. If each person has equal defense against violence, this “equality before the law” will permit him to maximize his potentialities.
… I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
– Murray N. Rothbard, Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 535
For example, consider slavery. Slavery is a system in which a nonviolent human being must labor for another under the threat of aggressive violence. For Rothbard, slavery is unjust because it violates the non-aggression principle. Therefore, slavery must be illegal. Now consider the case of drinking alcohol. Although it may be morally reprehensible and bad for one’s health, drinking alcohol does not involve the use of violence against a nonviolent human being. Therefore, drinking alcohol must be legal. In this manner, Rothbard uses the non-aggression test to determine whether any act is just or unjust and must be legal or illegal.
Although the non-aggression principle itself has never been controversial in the history of thought, its implications can be shocking for the uninitiated. For example, consider the case of taxation. A tax is a payment that government extracts from a human being under the threat of aggressive violence. To Rothbard, taxation is unjust because it violates the non-aggression principle. Any logically consistent thinker who accepts the principle must reject taxation.
Since the nature of man is such that each individual must use his mind to learn about himself and the world, to select values, and to choose ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives each man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation.
The state cannot be fought by simply boycotting it, as a private business could, because an aggressor does not respect the negative judgement revealed by boycotts. But it also simply cannot be fought by countering its aggression with defensive violence, because the state’s aggression is supported by public opinion. Thus, everything depends on a change in public opinion………In order for the state to fail in reaching its objective, no more and no less than a change in general public opinion must take place: state-supportive action must come to be regarded and branded as immoral because it is support given to an organization of institutionalized crime.
Despite what some people suggest, our choice today is not between black lives and private property. Quite the contrary: respect for black lives logically entails respect for all persons, their possessions, and their peaceful projects. The first property right is self-ownership: one’s property in oneself. (The abolitionists called slave traders and owners man-stealers. Get it?) Do the rioters not know that black people also own shops and other businesses? Or are those owners considered acceptable casualties in the struggle? And have those owners been asked to consent to that demeaning status?
Further, no one has spelled out the practical connection between rioting and looting on the one hand and the achievement of respect for black people by the police on the other. Far from an obvious connection, the disconnect is clear. If society faces a choice between civil unrest and Hobbes’s Leviathan, I have no doubt which one most people, including most black people, will choose. That situation will hardly usher in a blissful time of respect for black people’s or anyone else’s lives by the police.
… in a world of voluntary social cooperation through mutually beneficial exchanges, where one man’s gain is another man’s gain, it is obvious that great scope is provided for the development of social sympathy and human friendships. It is the peaceful, cooperative society that creates favorable conditions for feelings of friendship among men.… the social relations formed by the division of labor tend to be permanent as individuals specialize in different tasks and continue to produce in those fields.
Murray N. Rothbard Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 101
People on the big-government left who are distraught over the condition of black lives in America are logically committed to opposing the police and teachers unions — whether or not they realize it. That is because the first indispensable steps in the direction of justice and decency lie in changing the poisonous dynamic between cops and communities on the one hand and bringing competition, entrepreneurship, and parental choice to education on the other. The police and teachers unions, which make it exceedingly hard to fire bad cops and bad teachers, inevitably oppose changing those practices or supporting those key reforms out of sheer institutional self-preservation.
Thus activists, who typically sympathize with government-employee unions, are in fundamental conflict with two of the most powerful government-employee unions in America, again, whether or not those activists get it.
Ryan Bunting is a newly published author of the dystopian novel Project Manticore. Tommy invited him on to discuss the book, his writing process, and his future endeavors. The conversation progresses into policing in the US, and how the left and right are missing the big picture of how communities could better provide security.
Defunding the police is only a small part of only one side of the equation. All anti-vice laws must be erased, and the people, individually and in voluntary combination, must be freed — including freed from taxation — to see to their own security, their own education, their own health care, their own this, their own that, and their own the other. When that stuff enters the discussion, it will have gotten serious.
US News A large GOP House caucus is against the waiver Gen. Lloyd Austin will need to become Secretary of Defense. The post is meant for a civilian, for a soldier to sit in the position they must get a waiver from Congress. [Link] Laura Poitras says she was fired from...
Zachary Christensen is far less than a man. But Judge Curtis Gurley is less than a damned dog. His name is shit forever. His family's honor destroyed permanently. All of human history will remember his disgrace. May he bang his knee on something really really hard and...
Autistic boy having a temper tantrum. His security force suffocates him to death. No harm. No foul. Government employees can murder whoever they want. That's the law.
Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausevitz famously said that "war is a continuation of politics by other means." I think we can reverse this: politics is war by other means. The ultimate aim of politics (in the narrow sense of the word; there's a more...
If we wish to understand what's wrong with today's politics, we ought to consider something F. A. Hayek pointed out long ago. It should have been obvious, but it escapes many people: namely, the more power government officials have over our lives, the more people will...
Scott talks to Kelley Vlahos about America's 30-year nonstop bombing campaign of Iraq, and the prospects for ending it. The destruction of Iraq, says Vlahos, has followed a familiar trend: American politicians sell the public on the need to get involved in some...
Kalmen Barkin discusses the deplorable situation of Palestinians in Israel today, a people whose lands and rights are being slowly taken away from them by the Israeli government, while the delusive promise of a two-state solution vanishes along with them. Barkin...
Scott talks to Bob Murphy about the economic side of all the covid policies this past year. Most obvious are the huge spending bills, which dwarf even the stimulus measures taken after the 2008 recession. Murphy reminds us that this kind of rampant spending really...
Peter Van Buren discusses Hunter Biden's lost laptop and the shocking documents it contains. He begins by pointing out that many American voters never heard about this story at all: the mainstream media refused to cover it, the tech companies silenced almost anyone...
100 Minutes PG-13 Bird is one-fourth of the hosts of the Timeline Earth podcast. Bird joins Pete to go over the foundation of Marxism, dialectical materialism. They then launch into a look at Lenin's main work, "State and Revolution." Episode 521: Myth and the 'Terror...
44 Minutes Not Safe for Work J Flintlock is the host of the Flintlock Faction Podcast. He served in the military and is a former prison guard J joins Pete to give him an inside look into the bureaucracy that is the US prison system and to give insight into just who is...
73 Minutes Not Safe for Work Luke and Typo are the hosts of the "Biting the Bullet" podcast and two Marine Corps vets. Pete asked them to come on the show to talk about a change in messaging and why they are joining the Libertarian Party to back the Mises Caucus....
68 Minutes PG-13 Bird is one-fourth of the hosts of the Timeline Earth podcast. Bird joins Pete to go over the work of religious historian and "modernist" Mircea Eilade. Episode 516: Max Stirner's 'The Ego and His Own' w/ Bird From 'Timeline Earth' Episode 502: Pete...
On COI#58, Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.) joins Kyle Anzalone to break down Ethiopia, Mali, and Biden's foreign policy team. Danny gives a brief history of Ethiopia and explains how the country's conflicts with its neighbors. Danny explains how the Ethiopian Prime...
Connor Freeman, writer at The Libertarian Institute, returns to the show to discuss the Trump administration's decision to name the Houthi a terrorist organization. The Houthi govern most of Yemen's population. The designation will make it extremely difficult to bring...
On COI #56, Dave DeCamp, assistant news editor at antiwar.com, returns to the show. Dave and Kyle discuss the reaction to the violent protests at the capital. The establishment labeled the violent mob a coup attempt as a coup, insurrection, and domestic terrorism....
On COI #55, Connor Freeman returns to the show to talk about the unrest at the US Capitol and Biden's Iran policy. Yesterday, Trump supports pushed past police lines and broke into the Capital Building as Congress was voting to affirm the Electoral College vote. The...
https://youtu.be/a-PH_SfA-kc ... it is only the libertarians who have the answer that can cut through and resolve the numerous conflicts around bussing, textbooks, religion, sex, etc., that are rife in the public schools. And that answer, of course, is to abolish the...
https://youtu.be/8mj0P_9XkVs ....people secretly hope you’re a Nazi, because then at least they’d have a real villain to rage against. Unfortunately for them, supply doesn’t meet demand, so they frequently turn to political gaslighting: a form of psychological...
https://youtu.be/zZeYsRI5UZ8 ...censorship is not a solution to bad ideas. Silencing people never reforms them-it simply pushes their bad ideas underground, where they’re allowed to fester and grow. Dave Rubin Don't Burn This Book, Pg. 53 Find The Rubin Report...
https://youtu.be/7Q1dhYX95fw The libertarian creed emerged from the “classical liberal” movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Western world, specifically, from the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. This radical libertarian movement,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJpiZ1ByEmA&t=3759s Dean is a second year law student at Zoom University, School of Law. He has just finished his Constitutional Law class. He shares his experience in law school. We discuss the SCOTUS cases that your Constitutional...
https://youtu.be/ZfBebGgBGUQ Jose Galison invited me on his show, No Way Jose! for a recap of this incredibly crazy year. We covered a host of topics and realized that we didn't get to half the stuff we wanted to talk about. I guarantee you we covered a bunch of stuff...
https://youtu.be/q5rgHrbWa7U I invited Scott Horton on to the show to talk about two chapters of history where even the established history is too crazy to believe: the Iran-Contra Affair and the CIA's support for the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan. We also discuss...
https://youtu.be/QWqhVYPafhY One morning in the early 1980s an 18 year old Carmen Alexe packed her bags for a swim meet in neighboring Yugoslavia. She said goodbye to her parents and her sister. She was the only one who knew she could be saying goodbye for the last...
Michael Harris joins Tommy to discuss the raid on the Capitol, what lead to the tensions that exploded that day, and what are the constitutional repercussions that we may see come down the pike....
Joshua Collins, a freelance journalist and photographer, joins Tommy to discuss how corporatism, civil war, and American intervention has decimated the lives of the citizens of Colombia. Joshua’s articles: https://www.murosinvisibles.com...
Tommy is joined by Navy Veteran and entrepreneur Keith Orsag. In this episode they discuss COVID, lockdowns, the election, secession, and Agorism. https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/strangerencounterspodcast/leave_me_alone.mp3
Tommy asked Michael Harris to join him to discuss Ken Paxton’s legal problems, and why he may have filed TX v PA about the 2020 election. https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/strangerencounterspodcast/michael_harris_full.mp3
