Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

DEFINITIONS OF: LIBERTY, LIBERTARIAN, LIBERTARIANISM, ANARCHO CAPITALISM.

Hopefully I will do this subject justice.

(Although I might piss a few people off as well.)

First draft.

HISTORY:

Konkin’s History of the Libertarian Movement Is an accurate record of libertarianism. But there are many terms that derive from the root word ‘liberty’ and the preference for liberty. This is an attempt to reduce confusion by adding clarity.

DEFINITIONS:

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LIBERTY:

(1) Liberty as an instinctual preference:

A biological predisposition in favor of new stimuli expressed as freedom from constraint in obtaining new stimuli.

(2) Liberty as a stated preference:

All other things being equal, a preference for private property rights, and the grant of reciprocal freedom from coercion – of the body, actions and property.

(3) Liberty as a Political Philosophy commonly called Classical Liberalism or Constitutionalism, or the cult of the Founding Fathers. And more commonly referred to by the now appropriated and abused term “freedom”. See glossary for “appropriated term”.

An institutional model where all legal processes are fully articulated and powers balanced such that the egalitarian dependence on shared responsibility for enforcement of property rights would be perpetuated inside a government that was given the powers necessary to provide for defense of the multiple new states.

The system of ethics that they sought to embody in its enforcing political institutions is based upon the early indo-european ethics of the ritualistic enfranchisement of heroic warriors by granting them in the egalitarian rights as equals to the dispensation of violence: more accurately stated as private property rights of fellow warriors and the obligation to enforce them.

In practical terms, enfranchisement is the extension of peerage to others, in exchange for respect from others for, and the requirement to enforce, the property rights of all shareholders. This practice evolved because of early military tactics of the indo european cattle herders. It’s fascinating because this egalitarianism leads to the need to conduct debate rather than issue commands, and eventually led to logic, science, and western civilization as we know it. Small things in large numbers have vast consequences. Others in history would not likely articulate it this way but that is the contemporary translation devoid of antique sentimental loading.

As participation in the market increases, and as economies increase, and as commerce increases in value, this martial tradition, for status signal reasons, and utilitarian reasons, was adopted by and granted to, the merchant classes – many of whom were also landed classes. The english created an organizational model that we call a ‘government’ that evolved incrementally, and which provided for preservation of these rights despite great differences in power, as enfranchisement was incrementally expanded.

When the landed classes would not readily grant the new craftsman, small shop, commercial and banking classes equal protection and property rights, and instead sought rents on the merchants in the economy, as if they were still labor outside the economy, the merchants were incrementally added in order to preserve the dependence upon norms. But when, after the Thirty Years War, it became apparent that increases in wealth were both squandered and damaging to Europe as a whole, the intellectuals sought out a new order, which would justify the taking of power from the nobility and spreading it to the more ‘responsible’ classes that were productive. And from this we get the enlightenment – the english empirical version which led to positive ends, and the french moral and despotic version that had precisely the opposite ends.

This same argumentative and ideological request for power would be played out in different language when, under the new courage given intellectuals by Darwin, the church could have its vast holdings appropriated to fund the new secular states, and the equal freedom given to intellectuals by Kant and Hegel, would lead Marx to create his new secularly stated religion, as a means by which the labor classes, newly able to participate in the market, sought enfranchisement as well.

LIBERTARIAN:

1) A moral sentiment:

A moral bias giving higher preference to liberty than competing moral sentiments, the most dominant of which are (a) Harm/Care and (b) Loyalty, Respect, Proportionality and Purity. Left (communalists) are singularly biased toward (a), and right (aristocratic egalitarians) toward (a+b), and libertarians toward (c) Liberty and Proportionality. Although Proportionality is considered differently by right (paternalistic – earned) and left (maternalistic – innate) factions. (This left right divide is only a difference of where the innate ends and earned begins. In paternal societies innate is a property of the family where, and earned one of the polity. In maternal societies the family extends to the polity. This is generally a description of right and left instinctual biases – reproductive strategies. Males desiring strong tribe and females desiring their offspring get the greatest opportunity within the tribe.)

2) Libertarian as a statement of Political Preference:

A preference for the least government intervention in the economy as possible. There are many thinkers and groups that fall into this category, including most conservatives, as well as classical liberals.

The points of demarcation between social conservatives (religious right), economic conservatives (classical liberals), and institutional conservatives (libertarians) are, in no particular order:

(a) Whether we consider the written constitution, and the multi-house form of government adequate to preserve liberty, if observed, taught, and enforced by ostracization as a norm.

(b) Whether it is necessary to enforce norms by threat of law, or (as libertarians argue) the market is a sufficient means of enforcing normative ethics.)

(c) Whether we possess rights of exclusion and ostracization from a territory because of demonstrated, or stated, failure to adhere to norms.

(d) Whether we consider religion an arbitrary or required norm, and therefore membership or exclusion from the market and territory.

These are not arbitary statemetns, but estimations about the general aggregate behavior of man. The curious one is (a), since it is a demonstrated failure. It is not so much that the system of government could not be corrected, but failure to ascribe original intent, the war between north and south over the political control that would result from the expanded western territory, the failure of the south to succeed in secession, the failure to adequately constrain the judiciary when modifying the constitution, to proscribed processes, the failure to adequately protect against abuse of the 14th amendment, and perhaps, most importantly, the failure to create a house of proletarians with necessary rights in anticipation of the destruction of the family as a common reproductive interest, was such that this model as conceived resulted in a failure to protect liberty from incremental tyranny and return to the matrilineal and tyrannically homogenous society under total enfranchisement.

ALSO: Libertarians are empirically wrong on the subject of norms, and conservatives simply lack a means of articulating the conditions under which it is permissible to altern norms – such as homosexuality, now that we know it is a biological factor not a choice. They have no exit, even if they would adapt if they could. So the libertarian and conservative groups remain divided. (Which I am admittedly trying to change.)

Furthermore, the right uses an ancient, well-known and well-understood tactic of rebellion against oppression: religion, and the use of metahorical rather than secular rational language. It is the same religion that the simple people used to resist roman norms and culture while finding community in the newly mobile mediterranean world created by Rome. It is the same technique used by the germans to free themselves from mediterranean trade, tax, government and morals.

This is also the strategy in use by the Religion of Postmodernism and the institution of the Democratic Socialist State. Having demonized mystical religion in favor of the religion of ‘scientific socialism’, when Communism and Socialism were demonstrated to be failures in both theory and practice it became necessary to resort to Chomskyian ‘framing’ in order to replace religious mysticism with contra-rational falsehoods and contra-factual impossibilities that can be constantly repeatedin contradictory contexts thereby creating an alternate reality of non-rational but contextual associations by way of chanting – just as islam does through daily repetition, christianity and judaism do through rituals and prayer.

All religous systems bring people into groups to evoke the sense of spirituality, which is our pre-human desire to surrender our minds and wills to the elation of the running pack (yes, that is what spirituality is caused by), and then to repeat mantras and narratives in this circumstance.

Tribal peoples in the tropical belt do the same thing by chanting and dancing – it’s all the same process.

Western heroicism was accomplished by repeating some variation of either the prehistoric Indo-european, Homeric, Roman, Carolingian, or Arthurian legends around the feast’s fire pits. Americans repeated the narrative of the Cult of the Revolution around hearths, churches and schools, and in books, pamphlets and speeches.

It is the same process in every human society. It works. We evolved to run down game together. That is why we look different from apes, and act like wolves. We are very efficient at running and dissipating heat. We can run down any animal on earth. We do not have to fight them. Just chase them as a pack until they are exhausted. Watch a video of Masai crossing a plain. That is human biological advantage.

The process of repeating ideas within a context allows us to create intuitive associations and therefore intuitive responses, instead of depending upon our demonstrably frail reason. It is our pre-rational system of learning. We use it still today.

And because nearly all of our decisions are made intuitively. So these intuitions end up with greater expression than those of our reason. In the case of postmodernism (progressivism), and christianity (social conservatism), these narratives are irrational by false logic and fact (progressivism) or arational by mystical allegory (conservatism).

LIBERTARIANISM

1) Libertarianism as a Political Philosophy:

As articulated by Rothbard, libertarianism it is a rigorous, analytically stated ethical and political philosophy originating with natural law. The ethical system is based on very simple rules: your body and those things that you obtain by voluntary exchange or ‘homesteading’, are yours, and you have a monopoly on the use of them. Don’t steal, dont commit fraud, and don’t initiate violence, and respect the same of others.

His criticism is that the state is a corporation of shareholders who we call politicians and bureaucrats, who farm the populace by extract unwilling fees from hard working people, in order to fund their own indolence rather than do the equally hard work of taking risks in the market for goods, services and labor. Further, enforcement of norms is unnecessary because the market for competition and reputation will instill the proper commercial normative respect for property without the intervention of a government (something privately owned), or a state(something abstractly owned).

Libertarianism was designed to create an opposition religion to the Marxist, Socialist, and Postmodernist religions. It is an ideological system based upon the Jewish resistance ethics of the ghetto. The primary content of this ethical system is a very limited concept of property rights, where those property rights are absent the prohibitions on involuntary transfer by asymmetry and externality, that are necessary to fund investments in the commons of high trust norms. It is the ethics of the low trust society. This is why it is a demonstrated failure outside of a narrow niche of americans. Because the rest of americans, while they cannot articulate these ideas in rational terms, correctly intuit that rothbardian libertarianism is immoral. Because it is. It is a means of rebellion. It is a religion. And its ethics are immoral in the broader context of the western aristocratic social order, which expressly prohibits (a) profit by asymmetry – and even requires warranty to prove it, (b) profit by externality, (c) profit without contributory action, (d) profit by free-riding. (As well as other permutations outside the scope of this essay.)

2) Libertarianism as a Political Ideology : Having observed the methodology of Marxists in propagating ideas, Libertarianism has been promoted by the Mises institute into an ideology. An ideology is a set of memes that attempt to obtain power for a body of people in a political system. Ideology is different from philosophy in that the larger community relies upon representatives (intellectuals, priests, symbolic individuals) and argues by analogy, rather than making use of the precise arguments of their philosophy, if they oculd rationally master and articulate it. That these short narratives are the equivlaent of mythic narratives is not material since the purpose is to motivate people emotionally to action, not intellectually to agreement. If you understand this then you will understand the purpose of most political ideology: motivation to act.

ANARCHO-CAPITALISM

1) Anarcho-capitalist branch of libertarianism: Anarcho Capitalism is one of a number of monikers representing different factoins within the libertarian political, moral, sentimental movements. This moniker was necessary in order to distinguish those followers of rothbard and mises, from those who also used the term libertarian, and had other rationales and arguments – and leadership.

Anarcho-Capitalism is a more specific, and very thoroughly articulated, extension of libertarian philosophy to include the works of additional thinkers, the most important of which is Hans Hoppe. Hoppe’s insight was technical: that we could solve the problem of the natural behavior of monopolistic bureaucracies by replacing mandatory bureaucracies with private insurance companies, provide for defense, justice, and policing with private organizations. Since there is only one ‘law’ in anarcho capitalism – private property – then the constitution doesn’t need to be written, or modified. The common law practiced by judges is sufficient means of adapting to change.

Some intellectuals (myself included) consider Anarcho Capitalism one of the most interesting and successful political research programs. It may be the only valuable research program in the last century, if we consider economics to be outside of politics (wrongly). Others treat it like an exetension of libertarian philosophy, and others practice it as an ideology. But this is a description of the different rhetorical abilities of practitioners and little else.

– Curt Doolittle