THE DISTILLATION OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
If you would be sovereign, you must fight.
If you would be sovereign and win, you must equally confederate.
If you would be sovereign and confederate, you must equally compromise.
If you would be sovereign and equally compromise, you must equally forgo opportunities for gain at another’s loss.
If you would be sovereign and equally forgo equal opportunities to gain at another’s loss, your actions are limited to those that are productive, fully informed, warrantied, and voluntary, and limited to productive externalities.
If you limit your actions to those, then the ONLY possible rule is rule by Common, judge-discovered, Natural Law of Non Imposition of Costs, and therefore, voluntary markets in everything: association, cooperation, reproduction, production, production of commons, production of dispute resolution, production of institutions, productions of monuments, production of war, productions of generations,
This is Western Civilization: the choice of Sovereignty once made produces all that we have done. Small things in large numbers have vast consequences.
If you would be Sovereign, and reap the benefits of Sovereignty, you must fight – fight to deny others all possible alternatives.
If you will not fight you cannot be sovereign.
You may beg the Sovereigns for commercial liberty, or physical freedom, or charity, in exchange for compensation. But you may never be in fact sovereign.
by William Butchman, Eli Harman, and Curt Doolittle