Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

ARISTOCRACY IS THE HEIR TO THE LIBERTARIAN MOVEMENT. CONTINENTAL AND COSMOPOLITAN LIBERTARIANISM IS DEAD.

(edited and reposted for archival purposes)

The continental and cosmopolitan movements contributed to the theory of property rights and the construction of non-monopoly formal institutions. However, both the continental and more so the cosmopolitan movements, were dead ends, because they were reactionary movements in response to classical liberalism.

I see 20th century libertarianism (I think accurately) as a moralistic and philosophical, pre-scientific, neither scientific nor institutional line of inquiry. Since we know now that liberty is only in the near term interests of a minority, and that preferences for liberty are genetic, arguments to persuasion of others are immaterial. Since we know that much of libertarianism is, like progressivism, just a means of obtaining self-induced status signals, and that libertarians are measurably blind to the importance of morals and norms in a polity dependent upon one another for information. And since we know that democracy and voluntary organization of political systems are impossible, and as such justification is neither necessary nor desirable. I tend to see libertarianism as a dead movement. The means of obtaining the power necessary to deprive others of power over us is not consensual, but coercive: requiring force, or at least the threat of it.

That does not mean that the anarchic program was not a valuable research program. What we obtained from the anarchic program is:

1) All that is required for cooperation is property rights (albeit the scope of those property rights is still open to dispute – since I think the evidence mandates suppression of at least unethical if not immoral actions, but likely both in order to eliminate demand for the state.)

2) The common law is the only known means of replacing the need for authoritarian resolution of conflicts, and evolving along with the division of knowledge and labor.

3) The state (or the government) functions primarily as an insurer of last resort, so we can replace it with competing insurers, and obtain the same services, albeit competitively, without the free riding and rent seeking of a monopoly bureaucracy.

4) Should a government be necessary (or desirable) for the production of commons and defense of the common law, then a private government of long term self interest is superior to corporate government of short term self interest.

5) That with the wealth that comes from the near total suppression of free riding, and the incentives to produce that accompany that suppression of free riding, ‘left’ luxuries may be possible, even if they are not preferable. But that such incentives present a moral hazard if not constrained to ingroup members (kin).

I maintain, and I think the evidence is incontrovertible, that Aggression is a fallacy, and that the means of transgressing against property are immaterial. The question is the limit on property claims, not the means of transgressing against them. That limit is not determined by arbitrary preference, but by the need to suppress demand for the state as a means of suppressing immoral and unethical behavior, OR the means of suppressing the violence that results from immoral and unethical behavior. (States usually engage in the latter, which is where rothbard mistakenly obtained his ghetto ethics, by reverting to the ethics of the ghetto and the ghetto of crusoe’s island, where the host civilization, or the sea, constrain one’s actions.

As such, I see the only debate, discussion, worth having, is a scientific, not moral or justifications one, in which scientists (not secular theologians) discuss the means by which power is obtained to deny power to authoritarians, and to discuss the outstanding question of the limits of property rights in homogenous vs heterogeneous polities. And the means of constructing heterogeneous polities if they are possible to construct at all.

Secular theology has no more place in formal institutions than it’s predecessors. And that is what nearly all libertarians promulgate: secular theology.

So, the line of inquiry I am interested in participating in (and financing) is the one that advances Aristocracy (formal institutions) within which religious and secular theologians can do as they wish. But where all attempts at coercive transfer of property independent of fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange independent of negative externality (free riding) is prohibited under threat of violence.

The purpose of the church (whether secular or religious) is to create moral persuasion needed to construct voluntary preference for charity, and the status signals obtained by that voluntary charity. Because only voluntary charity is worthy of status. And free riders who resist such charity, worthy of loss of status, if not boycott and ostracization.

Libertarianism as an expression of both the Cosmopolitan and Continental attempts to preserve local cultural means of competition, is a dead movement as we can see from its abandonment by intellectuals, media, press, and financiers. (Myself included). Natural aristocracy, and aristocratic egalitarianism are the only logical heirs to the social order that is dependent upon voluntary organization of production, voluntary cooperation, and inviolable property rights. If democracy is dead, so is continental and cosmopolitan libertarianism.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

Kiev, Ukraine.