O.W.

We miss you Harry Browne.

“..............................Geolibertarianism thus solves the central conundrum of minarchism: how to finance the protection of life, liberty, and property without initiating force. Its solution even offers an unanticipated bonus: a non-force-initiating libertarian safety net for the poor….....................” (END)

...volumes of hallucination!

..look, when you Republicrats finally get your spiel down pat, just a few questions..

...and SOMEWHAT MORE PRECISELY, 1st cousins of Republicrats,...

...what about INEVITABLE disputes? (dispute$?) ;o)
...with what, if any’thing,’ does ‘the judge’ ‘get paid?’
...how does that ‘thing’....with which ‘the judge’ ‘gets paid’ originate/’get issued,’ etc.? (hint: here’s where the old, ‘the market’ (a mere man-made concept/label) ‘will decide’-card is sometimes played by the fraudster$).. (btw, i certainly don’t expect you Republicrats to understand the FUTURE of ‘the money thing’..after all, and admit it, you Republicrat money dummies don’t even have an honest clue as to the PRE$ENT or PA$T!) ;o)

(i have a LOT more ‘to the root’ question$, but these three ought to deflate the voluminous ‘anarchist,’ ‘geolibertarian,’ etcetercrats ad nauseam, windbaggery..) ;o) (btw, geo’l’ism smells somewhat decent/interesting to me..something new to me)

“They work their holes about ‘illion$’ worse than ignorant as to even one!” (Unknown sage)

How are you this morning? I’m fine. My SATCOM was down the last few days and I haven’t been able to surf the net. Did you have an opportunity to visit our site and look through the careers? You can click on my alias for the link.

As I said the other day, we are actively recruiting new talent to our “private army” and you are a bright young man. It would be my honor to serve with such a patriot as you.

I’ll disclose some non-sensitive information to you; currently our employees earn upwards of $250,000 U.S. per year. That is a base pay in hazardous areas. In addition our benefits package, well, quite frankly is second to none.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes:
“Those who hammer their guns into plows, will plow for those who do not.”
Thomas Jefferson

Until next time.
JBT

It seems to me that a lot of time is wasted by libertarians who argue whether it’s possible to have a society without any government at all.

What’s the point?

Right now, we’re $2.3 trillion away from no government, and about $2.2 trillion away from limited government.

That means that until we trim $2.2 trillion from the federal budget, the issue of limited government vs. anarchy is moot.  I can only presume that both sides would be pleased as punch (and then some) to reduce the federal government by $2.2 trillion.  So that’s what we all should be working toward as the first goal.

If we can get the federal government down to $100 billion, I’ll lead a drive to raise the money necessary to rent the New Orleans SuperDome for three months — so we can all get together and argue over how much further the federal government should be reduced.

Those who want no government at all can continue working to reduce the size of government.  Those who want limited government can fight to keep the federal government at $100 billion — or work to reduce it slightly more — or even work to increase it slightly.

But none of it is relevant until we reduce the government dramatically from where it is now.

As to the question of whether a society without government is possible, today we try to answer it with limited knowledge.  If we can ever make government very small, we will undoubtedly find that plenty of people — people with more creativity and imagination than we have — will find it profitable to devise ways to do things privately and voluntarily that today seem possible only through government.  Until those creative people have an incentive to put their minds to the question, we’re contemplating the issue without knowing all the possibilities.

But so what?  The question is moot.

In the meantime, there are two things we know for sure:

• Government is force, and we want to reduce the use of force to the absolute minimum.
• Government doesn’t work, and so we want to remove as many activities as possible from government.

And no matter which side of the limited government vs. anarchy you’re on, when someone asks you what size libertarians think the government should be, you can answer:

“Libertarians want to reduce government to the absolute minimum possible, and we can’t really know what size that is until we get there.

“In the meantime, don’t you agree that government is way too big, way too powerful, way too intrusive, and way too expensive?

“If so, please help us reduce it to the absolute minimum possible.”

It seems to me that a lot of time is wasted by libertarians who argue whether it’s possible to have a society without any government at all.What’s the point?Right now, we’re $2.3 trillion away from no government, and about $2.2 trillion away from limited government.That means that until we trim $2.2 trillion from the federal budget, the issue of limited government vs. anarchy is moot.  I can only presume that both sides would be pleased as punch (and then some) to reduce the federal government by $2.2 trillion.  So that’s what we all should be working toward as the first goal.If we can get the federal government down to $100 billion, I’ll lead a drive to raise the money necessary to rent the New Orleans SuperDome for three months — so we can all get together and argue over how much further the federal government should be reduced.Those who want no government at all can continue working to reduce the size of government.  Those who want limited government can fight to keep the federal government at $100 billion — or work to reduce it slightly more — or even work to increase it slightly.But none of it is relevant until we reduce the government dramatically from where it is now.As to the question of whether a society without government is possible, today we try to answer it with limited knowledge.  If we can ever make government very small, we will undoubtedly find that plenty of people — people with more creativity and imagination than we have — will find it profitable to devise ways to do things privately and voluntarily that today seem possible only through government.  Until those creative people have an incentive to put their minds to the question, we’re contemplating the issue without knowing all the possibilities.But so what?  The question is moot.In the meantime, there are two things we know for sure:• Government is force, and we want to reduce the use of force to the absolute minimum.• Government doesn’t work, and so we want to remove as many activities as possible from government.And no matter which side of the limited government vs. anarchy you’re on, when someone asks you what size libertarians think the government should be, you can answer:“Libertarians want to reduce government to the absolute minimum possible, and we can’t really know what size that is until we get there.“In the meantime, don’t you agree that government is way too big, way too powerful, way too intrusive, and way too expensive?“If so, please help us reduce it to the absolute minimum possible.”

I am a libertarian first, Mr. Holtz, and anything else second. Quite frankly, if we were to sucessfully get the government down to $100,000 dollars, I might very well retire from ever speaking about politics again. The question of anarchism v. minarchism really is much, much less important to me than the question of status quo statism v. extremely limited government.

Moreover, what is the point of an anarchist campaigning on anarchism when he or she knows very well that all he or she will actually be able to achieve, if elected, is, at most, limiting the power, scope, and size of government? If that’s all you can achieve as an elected official, and if it’s generally agreed that it’s bad policy to make promises one can’t keep, then why should anyone ever even think of promising anarchism? The whole notion seems ridiculous.

Here’s what I would promise voters if I were running for an office: I will not accept as pay even a cent of your tax dollars. There’s a principled position and a promise one can keep.

Sincerely yours,
Alex Peak

Maybe that will get me booted from the Reform Caucus, but I have a theory that goes like this: you can lead an anarchist to a general audience, but you can’t make them preach anarchism to it. I offer a challenge to every radical Libertarian reading this: nominate for us a YouTube video of an anarchist/radical LP candidate giving the most radical pitch you’ve ever seen offered to a general-voter audience. It’s easy to be an anarchist in the cozy little confines of Third Party Watch, but I advocate exactly the same sized government in PlatCom debates as I do in local League of Women Voters debates. How many anarchist Libertarian candidates can offer video evidence that they do too?

I agree with you that each of Phillies, Root, Kubby, and Ruwart have proven that they are very good at communicating our shared Libertarian values to general audiences. But I give Phillies and Root extra credit for having more of a full-disclosure pitch, with less detective work required of voters who want know how little government the candidate actually wants us to end up with. I would love it if the LP Platform were just a transcript of the standard stump speech of a “plumbline” candidate like Kubby or Ruwart, because I can never detect any zero-state abolitionism in what they say to general audiences.

Then you may have been misinformed. I think we have at least six candidates who are libertarian-enough to run.

My support for Dr. Ruwart can best be summed up by the recent LP poll.

The question was, “What type of LP presidential candidate do you want?” The answer I provided was “Someone who can communicate our basic message to voters outside our party.”

That is why Dr. Ruwart is my favourite candidate. Kubby is second, Smith is third, Dr. Philies is fourth, Root is fifth, and Jingozian is sixth. (I’d factor Hess somewhere in there if he’d just get himself a website.)

Why is a good communicator a good thing? Because a good communicator, like Harry Browne, has the power to turn a liberal into a libertarian, like he did to me.

God bless Harry Browne.

None of our candidates is as good as Browne was, but then, Browne is nearly impossible to beat. He’s like that ex-girlfriend that you find yourself inadvertantly judging all your subsequent girlfriends against. There will probably never be a libertarian candidate that clear and persuasive again, but let’s hope I’m wrong.

“So far, she’s saying many of the the vague and happy things that Rothbard viciously attacked Clark about in 1980.”

From everything I’ve read, Rothbard had a nasty habit of bridge-burning. Good on philosophy and ethics, bad on bridges. (But, I also heard he had a phobia on bridges, so no wonder he’d want to burn them. )

“Why nominate a zero-state abolitionist if she’s not going to promote and defend that position?”

Answer

I’m not voting for anarchism, I’m voting for good communication.

I’ve often said there are two things in this world that, combined, cause 99% of the world’s problems. One is, of course, government; but the other, even worse, is poor communication.

“If we want a middle-of-the-libertarian-road campaign, why not nominate a middle-of-the-libertarian-road candidate, like Phillies?”

Answer

Although I will say this, Dr. Phillies’s speaking ability has definitely improved some since I first heard him. I think all six candidates I mentioned can speak well enough to defend and promote libertarian values to the American people, but I believe Dr. Ruwart is the best at this.

Cheers,
Alex Peak

Yep.

you kiddie porn gang members are all jews, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, go directly to jail, jews are are pedophiles.

1. Mike Theodore Says:
   April 29th, 2008 at 6:42 pm

copy and paste? What is this?

ah, some ahole with more time than me.

You also seem to be confusing non-production of public goods with under-production; only the latter is what we (and every economics textbook) says will occur.

See: http://libertarianmajority.net/do-markets-under-produce-public-goods

Also:

It would be untenable to deny that history provides many examples of situations in which there was no functioning monopoly on force-initiation over a significant region for a significant period of time, for any non-embarrassing standard of significance. I’ve never heard of a single case in the entire history of organized crime across hundreds of cities in scores of nations over multiple decades in which the unregulated market for protection behaved remotely like what is predicted by anarcholibertarian theory. This track record becomes even more dismal if you include all the cases in history in which there have been regions lacking effective sovereignty by a central authority. This amounts to an empirical falsification of the anarcholibertarian theory of protection markets that by the standards of social science is spectacularly conclusive.

Every single episode in which there wasn’t a monopoly on force-initiation over a region becomes a test case for anarcholibertarianism. Despite the literally hundreds of such test cases, the only purported successes advanced for the theory involve a few thousand pre-industrial farmers sprinkled sparsely across medieval Iceland and the frontier of colonial Pennsylvania. In contrast to how even bastard forms of minarchism have been so spectacularly successful compared to all other significant social experiments, the track record of anarcholibertarianism is simply embarrassing.