1. Political
libertarians legitimize the State by voting in elections; the
“libertarian” politicians they vote for are Statists, Ron Paul
and Gary Johnson included.
2. Murray Rothbard, Ron
Paul, and Gary Johnson have all associated with the Libertarian Party
since 1980; the year David Koch donated $500,000 to the party and
became its candidate for vice-president. Gary Johnson continues to
defend the Koch brothers.
3. Murray Rothbard, who
coined the term “anarcho-capitalism”, admitted
that he was not an anarchist. He wrote that “those who call us
anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being
completely unhistorical.”
4. Murray Rothbard
admitted that market-anarchist Gustave de Molinari would find the
term “anarcho-capitalism” objectionable.
5. “Anarcho-capitalists”
are not anarchists because the first person to describe himself as an
anarchist was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who opposed capitalist banking
practices and private property in the means of production.
6. “Anarcho-capitalists”
cannot be “libertarians” because the word is traditionally
associated with “libertarian socialism” in Europe; the first
person to self-describe as a libertarian was Joseph Dejacque, an
anarcho-communist associated with the Paris Commune.
7. Promoting
“voluntaryism” or “individualism” in the context of political
libertarianism is not anarchist; the voluntaryism of Lysander Spooner
and the individualism of Max Stirner make excellent anti-capitalist
anarchist substitutes for these false ideals of conservatism.
8.
“Anarcho-capitalism” and political voluntaryism imply that people
can voluntarily submit to workplace hierarchy and wage labor in a
bourgeois-capitalist system. This is incompatible with the idea of
anarchism, the lack of leadership and domination. Work is involuntary
because common lands were stolen by lords for their own financial
benefit, forcing peasants to sell their labor in industrializing
urban centers. Read about Thomas More and territorial enclosure.
9. Property rights and
the distribution of goods and services doesn't have to be controlled
or dominated by
capitalists in order to be considered capitalist; a system merely has
to feature private
property rights to qualify as capitalist.
10. Private property
rights in land require exclusion from landed property. A system of
ubiquitous private property rights would feature exclusion
from landed property as a factor of production, rather than equal
access to landed property, which is necessary to perfect and
complete the system of competitive markets.
11. The rights of
private property (of exclusion and exclusive domination) do not have
to be actively practiced in order to be retained; it is the State
and the system of rentier capitalism that require people to
demonstrate active exclusion in order to claim property as private.
People would otherwise be free to make their private property into a
sort of private commons, and let people live on their property –
and live off of its produce –
free of charge.
12. The State-controlled
monopolies on licensing, permit, charter, zoning, economic rent,
subsidy, and intellectual property are not natural monopolies;
self-described anarchists and libertarians have no business
supporting them because monopoly is the
antithesis of – rather than the inevitable result of –
competition, and because a perfect market is a competitive market.
13. A system of
ubiquitous private property rights is simply not desirable or
practical in a voluntary society featuring free and fair markets. If
you don't want the State to tell you what kind of currency to use,
what bank to invest your money in, which union to join at your
workplace, which enterprise to buy from, or which community to live
in, then you likely support various forms of social anarchism – and
therefore non-exclusive forms of possession, use, and access - and
you should learn about artificial markets, debt-free currency, social
credit, mutual and cooperative banks, syndicates, autonomous unions,
egalitarian labor-managed firms, and synthesis-anarchism (anarchy
without adjectives).
14. Private property in
land is Statism. The right of private property is the
State-sanctioned exclusive right to practice domination over a
territory, which is identical to the definition of Statism; the local
monopoly on legitimate violence. It is the unquestionable,
irresponsible, irresponsive right to exclusively dominate landed
property – to use, abuse, and even destroy it -
without being required to answer to anyone about.
15. If you have to give
people exorbitant compensation to protect your property for you (or
assist you in doing so), you are creating a mercenary system and
contributing to the regimentation and militarization of labor. You
should not have to bribe people into potentially giving their lives
to protect your person and property. You have to earn your property
by actively protecting it yourself; making sustainable improvements
to it; refusing to call the police to help protect it; and resolving
to never accept a bailout if your house collapses, your business
fails, or your property becomes blighted.
16. People do not have
the right to stockpile extravagant wealth or powerful weapons on
their property; not without being required to pay the high costs
which it would take to protect their neighbors from them (because
the status of the rich as
the rich makes them the most effective – and therefore the most
practical and likely – targets of property crime, along
with the people living near them), nor
without allowing transparency from their neighbors.
If the assessment of
risk were fair and mutual, the privileged rich would be expected to
pay the costs necessary to protect the remainder of their wealth from
the unprivileged poor. Rational companies protecting person and
property would charge the most dangerous and privileged people the
highest premiums to ensure the protection of their lives and the
remainder of their wealth, distributing those funds to its willing
customers as equal shares in the company and rights to the
security it provides.
17. Planting landmines
around one's property (“landmine homesteading”) and setting traps
on your property is no legitimate way to earn private property, and
it is especially no legitimate way to protect it while you are away
and unable to defend it (absentee ownership).
This behavior is
especially objectionable if you own and / or display a lot of very
valuable or dangerous personal property, and your neighbors know it.
This behavior creates what is called “attractive nuisance”, and
you as the property owner would be liable for injury, because you
would have attracted people to the property in order to lure them
into a trap. Consider this idea in light of the illegal immigration
issue.
18. You didn't “build
that” by yourself. Although you might have had no choice but to
allow the State to help you build your legitimate business,
and protect you and your property and assets, the State is partially
responsible for conditioning and guiding you to your current
privilege and success, due to its subsidies, tax cuts, intellectual
property, and other special favors. That is not debateable, but
whether it means we have to “give something back” to bureaucrats,
public sector union leaders, and people who are retiring, or “pay
it forward” to the next generation, is
debatable.
19. It is wrong to
disparage or blame people for taking advantage of free,
taxpayer-subsidized State assistance, such as food stamps and housing
and medical assistance (including ambulance rides and trips to
emergency rooms). It is not poor people's fault that the State has
practically monopolized the provision of charity in some places.
Unemployed and homeless
people taking advantage of all the non-public-sector charity services
in your area will not necessarily have access to the same services as
unemployed and homeless people in other areas of the country. Some
areas are more difficult for the poor to live without State
assistance than others, even if they make the most effective use of
private charity possible.
20. Not all “welfare”
and “redistribution” is Statist. “Welfare” simply means
“well-being”. “Redistribution” of wealth can occur without
the State, and in a manner consistent with “distributism”, the
idea that there are not too many
capitalists but too few
owners (or user-accessors) of the means of production. According to
Gary Chartier, radical redistribution occurs through elimination of
Stte privilege, operation of freed markets, acts of solidarity,
radical rectification of State theft, and radical homesteading.
21. Not all
“privatization” is good. The personal
element should always be emphasized over the private; do not actively
privatize retirement accounts, but allow them to be
personalized. Privatization
should be about competition between enterprise to provide high
quality goods and services ("radical privatization"), not about no-bid government contracts
through special favors. Competitive markets cannot function when the
distortions caused by the coercive pricing mechanisms of the State
and its “private-sector” beneficiaries are present.
22.
“Voluntaryist” and “individualist” libertarians and
conservatives aren't the only ones who want to maximize individual
choice in government. Austro-Marxist and social democrat Otto Bauer's
conception of “national personal autonomy” advocates a
non-territorial association of persons, with free individual
accession to the political system of one's choice. Criticize
collectivists based on their deviation from this viewpoint and you
will be successful in defending individualism without ignoring the
necessity of collectivism.
23. Communism,
socialism, and cooperativism are not flawed because they are
collectivist; they are flawed because they are capitalist.
They employ communal, social, and cooperative selective inhibition of
access to the means of production as expressions of
exclusionary private property, rather than ensuring
collaboratively managed equal freedom to access, use, possess, and
occupy the factors of production. Gustave de Molinari wrote that
“communism is an extension of monopoly”.
24.
Equal access to the factors of production (land, labor, and capital)
is a necessary condition for establishing a perfect and complete
system of competitive markets.
25.
Privilege is no less unearned because it is bestowed than because it
is unchecked. Physical force against aggressors can be justified
without appealing to a State; to a monopoly on legitimate violence.
The right to commit legitimate violence lies in the right of the
people to defend themselves against individuals who attack and
threaten others, including by limiting their access to resources
essential to providing for adequate sustenance, without which all
physical labor is taxing, difficult, inefficient, and underproductive.
Written and Originally Published on January 3rd, 2014
Image added on December 2nd, 2017
