Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

NOTES ON THE LIBERTARIAN REFORMATION

1) Our generation’s challenge is not socialism, it’s the state religion of anti-scientific, contra-rational postmodernism. (The religion of progressivism.) The dogma, literature, and ideological bias of the libertarian movement is a generation behind.

2) Government per se, is not a ‘bad’. What’s ‘bad’ are the corporeal state, monopoly, bureaucracy, majority rule, and legislative law. When we fail to make this distinction we are in fact, ‘wrong’. A government that consists of a monopolistically articulated set of property rights and the terms of dispute resolution, operating under the common law, and a group of people whose purpose is to facilitate investments in the commons by voluntary contract, but who cannot make legislative law, is in fact, a government. It may not be necessary government among people with homogenous preferences and beliefs. But it is somewhere between necessary and beneficial government for people with heterogeneous preferences and beliefs. It is however, not a bad government.

3) Property is unnatural to man. Tribal human settlement is matrilineal, egalitarian, malthusian and poor. Mate selection is determined by sexual favors within the group, and raiding, capturing and killing for women outside the group whenever there was a shortage of women.

4) Property rights and paternalism were an innovation made possible by the domestication of animals and the ability of males to accumulate wealth outside of the matrilineal order. Property rather than sexual favors was such an advantage that it inverted the relationship between the sexes and determined mate selection. (The feminists are correct.)

5) Property rights were created by a minority who granted equality of property rights to one another in exchange for service in warfare. The source of property rights is the organized application of violence to create those property rights. Because property rights are the desire of the minority. However, property rights created such an increase in prosperity and consumption that others sought to join the ranks of property owners.

6) The redistributive state that was voted into power by women, has reversed the innovation of private property and in concert with feminists, is eroding the nuclear family, and the male ability to collect property. The institutions of marriage, nuclear family, and private property cannot survive when a democratic majority can deprive men of private property rights, and their ability to control mating and reproduction.

7 ) Rothbardian Libertarian ethics are ‘insufficient’. The high trust society forbids involuntary transfers by externality and asymmetry of information, and enforces this demand with a requirement for warranty. The ethics of the high trust society forbid all involuntary transfers except through competition in the market.

8 ) Rothbardian ethics are wrong (and bad): The market incentives alone are not high enough to overcome corruption, and create the high trust society without additional moral prohibitions: norms are a commons. They are property. Conservatives are right.

9 ) Libertarians do not exist in sufficient numbers. And it is not possible to enfranchise the conservatives (classical liberals) with Rothbardian ‘ghetto’ ethics. Without conservatives, who have a broader set of moral biases, the libertarian bias is morally objectionable to too large a population, and libertarians are too small in number to accumulate and hold the power necessary to determine property rights in a geography. It’s important to understand that rothbardian ethics are ‘wrong’ because they are insufficient.