Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

MI/LRC: ABANDON ROTHBARDIANISM AS A FAILED IDEOLOGY OR BEAR THE CONSEQUENCES

Dear Lou,

It must be clear to you, after more than thirty years, that the philosophical product you have been selling has been rejected by the market for ideologies as a means of obtaining political power sufficient to enact change. Even if younger generations are turning to some form of libertarianism, they are turning to the moral intuitions of classical liberalism, not to the ethical and political program of rothbardian anarcho capitalism. Despite what you seem to imply and claim credit for – with increasing frequency.

If you stated “I sold the ideology that was available to sell. Had there been a better ideology then I would have sold that product instead.” That is very different from continuing the sale of your defective product, once it has been demonstrated to fail in the market, and moreover done damage to consumers and the brand. The brand that you damaged in this case is “liberty”. The consumers you damaged were the people who desired liberty and sought public intellectuals and philosophers to help them preserve it and regain it.

But, while one is blameless in one’s ignorance, once one is made aware that Rothbarianism:

(a) advocates an immoral and unethical standard upon which to base the the law;

(b) advocates low trust societies, and that many such low trust societies have existed and continue to exist – and are all poor because of it;

(c) that high trust societies and the wealth of high trust societies is caused the the low transaction costs, the velocity of innovation, production and trade that higher ethical standards of the high trust wealthy societies make use of;

(d) that humans traded pervasive violence, theft, unethical and immoral action, for the state’s high cost – willingly and desirably. And they were wise to. They traded high transaction costs, for high costs, and benefitted from that adoption, everywhere that they did so. Albeit is always generated consequential predation they prefer it to the alternative;

(e) that it is not rational for individuals to prefer to choose to regress into lower trust, higher transaction cost societies such as those recommended by rothbard’s intersubjectively verifiable property (IVP) definition, and non aggression principle (NAP) ensconce;

(f) that rothbard’s IVP&NAP of necessity, and incontrovertibly, expressly legalize unethical and immoral actions;

(g) that it is non rational for people to abandon their use of violence to suppress unethical and immoral actions – especially given the human instinctual preference for punishment of ‘cheaters’ even at dramatic personal cost. And the biological necessity of any cooperative organism to demonstrate that punishment of ‘cheaters’ even if at high cost;

(h) that the elimination of the state, and the near elimination of the state was only accomplished by the opposite means, by northern european peoples, by the near total suppression of all free riding in all forms including within the Absolute Nuclear Family, and between families, in the form of total suppression of criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial behavior, and requiring that that all members of the polity contribute to production, rather than engage in any actions, including any trades and exchanges, that did not contribute to production. Property is the consequence of the prohibition on free-riding in all it’s forms, and the more complex the society the more opportunity for free riding is caused by expanding anonymity and ignorance. And the more opportunity the more suppression of new means of free riding is necessary.

(i) that it was only with the immoral use of credit by private sector loans to the state, that the states were able to finance state conquest of the the only free societies ever to exist;

(j) that suppression of free riding in all its forms is not, as rothbardians advocate, an entreaty to the state, as long as the definition of property as a positive assertion, and the definition of free riding as a negative assertion are sufficiently articulated as the basis of community rights under the common law, adjudicable by an independent judiciary. Quite the contrary, humans demonstrate high demand for the state wherever unethical and immoral rules are not codified in the law, and therefore open to dispute resolution by private means. Instead, the definition of property as a positive assertion and the prohibition of free riding as a negative assertion must sufficiently suppress the means of all conflict to the degree that any group of human beings will voluntarily choose an anarchic polity over that of statist polity.

… it therefore the begs the question why one would continue to advocate a failed, immoral, irrational, impossible ideology, that has demonstrably failed in the market, has harmed the brand of liberty, has damaged the brand of libertarianism, and has damaged the population by misleading them in an immoral and impossible direction, and failing to resist the expansionary state in the interim. The opportunity cost has been tragic. And if not for conservative obstructionism would would have been even worse.

So, since it is ONLY rationally, and by the evidence possible, to construct a voluntary anarchic polity by suppression of nearly all free riding in the forms of criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, actions, and requiring production in all actions open to possible dispute, the question remains why one would advocate an impossible, unethical, immoral, damaging program of ideology that had demonstrably failed in the market for moral social orders.

That is, unless one is an advocate of unethical, immoral social orders. And that would mean that one was an unethical and immoral man.

Adapt. Adapt or continue to fail, and bear the consequences of that failure.

1) Abandon Rothbard’s failed, unethical, immoral, and impossible program.

2) Adopt Ron Paul’s message of moral classical liberalism.

3) Adopt Hoppe’s Intellectual program for the construction of institutional alternatives to monopoly bureaucracy.

4) Adopt Propertarianism’s extensions of Hoppe’s ethics for the basis of the common law and an independent private judiciary.

If one does not know one’s actions are unethical and immoral he can be forgiven. We all err. But once confronted with one’s unethical and immoral actions, one must either change them or be prosecuted and persecuted as unethical and immoral by all ethical and moral individuals for the unethical and immoral ideology he advocates.

Humans are not kind to the unethical and immoral.

Neither are the fates.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine