brainpolice source The point that I’m about to make has been brought up before in the context of critiquing propertarianism (or absolutist propertarianism), but I’d like to highlight it more explicitly in the context of anti-state arguments. My tone and purpose here will hopefully be less confrontational and more constructive. There is …
Mike Gogulski source Maybe it’s nothing more than a definitional quibble, but… Carl Watner, who has operated voluntyarist.com for long years, provides a definition of what a voluntaryist is, front and center: Voluntaryists are advocates of non-political, non-violent strategies to achieve a free society. Carl has done amazing work in collecting and …
brainpolice source [Note: Just because I question deontology does not necessarily mean that I support utilitarianism. I do not support utilitarianism, and I find Frederich Neitzsche’s criticisms of the pleasure/pain principle to be fairly informative. Futhermore, deontology vs. utilitarianism could be viewed as a bit of a false dichotomy. …
brainpolice source I contend that the non-aggression principle is not a contextless axoim and it requires a specific definition of the difference between genuine self-defense and the initiation of violence. There is a grave problem that thin libertarianism and plumb-line libertarianism runs into, which is that the non-aggression principle has …
brainpolice source While it is true that the derivation of the word libertarian is essentially as a code word for an anarchist after some of the more violent parts of the history of the labor movement, I think that there is a sense in which there is a distinction between …
brainpolice I’ve been a part of numerous online social networks or general social groups online that contains some amoralist anarchists, who either are former libertarian anarchists who have come to reject libertarianism or they are anarchists who rejected libertarianism from the get-go and reached the conclusion of anarchism from a …
Originally posted at LessGovernment.com. brainpolice I’ve seen it expressed in many different ways: “I hate the government, but anarchy would be even worse.” “Voting for radical reformers is one thing, but we shouldn’t just throw away our republic/democracy/whatever!” “Anarchists want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.” ”Getting rid of …
This is a response to Danny’s post. brainpolice I don’t think it’s necessary to provide a positive “proof” for the immorality of the state. To be more precise, I think of it more in terms of this: given certain nearly universal social norms (such as the shunning of murder, theft, arson, …
brainpolice source Libertarians are likely to be familiar with and annoyed by the “love it or leave it argument”, which roughly goes something like this: “If you don’t like the government, why do you live here? Why don’t you just leave?”. Not only does this shift the discussion to a …
brainpolice I recently read an essay by Adam Knott about how praxeology makes a judgment that coercion is bad. I enjoyed the essay, but was left with the feeling that his argument was not very solid, despite being very creative. Essentially, his argument is that praxeology says that happiness occurs …