Theme: Responsibility

https://www.biv.com/article/2015/10/economic-freedom-report-sparks-fraser-institute-bi/ON WALTER BLOCK’S IMMORALISM

Walter is an immoralist. Not an amoralist, or a moralist, but an immoralist: he is the only remaining advocate of eastern european, cosmopolitan, low-trust, ghetto ethics.

For some reason it has eluded him that any anarchic society must eliminate incentives that create demand for the state, not gossip, rally and shame people who demand the state as a means of preventing and punishing parasitism. Walther’s ethic, like Rothbards, is based upon volition and the preservation of ‘cheating’, rather than the prevention of conflict and retaliation that force people to engage in production, distribution and trade.

That it is the very ethic for which his ancestors were nearly exterminated, in every era of history, seems to be lost on him.

The only liberty that is possible is that which western high trust civilization created: rule of law applicable to all, and the requirement for productive, fully informed, voluntary, exchange free of externality of the same criteria – thereby prohibiting murder, theft, violence, fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by externality, free riding, conspiracy, conversion, immigration, conquest and war.

The western ethic evolved to prevent retaliation and preserve the peace, to allow the construction of commons and to prohibit the devolution of individuals by appealing to their base instincts, thereby distracting them from productive work.

Walter’s ethic, like Rothbard’s, is one of parasitic and predatory encouragement of hyper-consumption in order to transfer wealth that would otherwise be capitalized in the commons into the hands of those who undermine that commons.

The first principle of ethics is not volition. It is “Why do I not kill or enslave you and take your women and your property?”. The answer is, it is preferable to let you remain alive and free if and only if you give me no reason to do otherwise by engaging in productive action that causes no harm to me, my kin or our commons.

We have killed nearly all people in history who engaged in immoral actions, and until the 20th century hung one half to one percent of the population, which combined with manorialism and seasonality of nature produced the most eugenic society on earth, which was responsible in no small part for our prosperity.

Walter is of that class of men who wants to reduce people to hedonistic barbarism so he can profit from their devolution by parasitic predation upon them, while claiming he is a moral man.

That is the truth of it. That is the truth of cosmopolitanism. That is the truth of rothbardian libertinism.

Liberty can be brought into existence only under rule of law, under the total prohibition on parasitism, and insured by the community by the codification of that prohibition in property rights, and the martial requirement for productive action in order to participate in the commons produced by those who engage in productive action.

By conflating terminology as the Germans have done since Kant, Rothbard tried to achieve by appropriating the term liberty, what the left had achieved through the appropriation of the term liberal, and by telling a half truth, that allowed pathologically altruistic westerners to sympathize with the words stated, then using their intuition to supply the unstated consequences with altruistic rather than parasitic intentions.

Most of the deceits of the 19th and 20th centuries (Hayek’s imprecisely named, new era of mysticism) were accomplished by Marx, Boaz, Freud, Cantor, Mises, Rothbard, the Frankfurt School, and the Keynesians, Postmodernists, Feminists, Rawlsians and Continentals: verbal deceptions to justify theft by one means or another by a combination of conflation, obscurantism, loading, framing, and overloading, in order to cause overwhelm frail human reason, and to rely upon suggestion to achieve what science and reason could not. That this is the same technique used by the monotheists in each era is not lost on all of us. We are just now, since Pinker threw exiting the second attempt at overthrowing science and reason: the first with babylonian mysticism distributed through immigrants, slaves and women, and the second through pseudoscience, immigrants and women newly enfranchised into democracy.

End the lie. Rothbardianism is not an argument for liberty, but an argument for libertinism – not only a fraudulent attempt to escape genetic, normative-behavioral and physical payments for the commons. But an argument in favor of theft of the commons.

The closure of the Stoic schools and the forcible introduction of Christianity is one uncompensatable and profoundly immoral crime enough for all of western history to tolerate. The usurpation of the social sciences, the academy, the media, and the state was the second attempt to bring about another age of mysticism, and another dark age.

Science, Truth, Morality and Law, will succeed this time around. The only libertarianism necessary or possible is under rule of law mandating productivity for membership in the commons that we call the market. Because only under the total prohibition on parasitism is demand for the state both eliminated, and local transaction costs reduced sufficiently that it is rational to prefer an anarchic polity over a statist one.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine