Welcome to Mises Magazine, the official magazine of the Liberty Youth Coalition
Mises Magazine is the magazine for people of all ages to read editorial content written by people from all corners of the Liberty Movement. It is the home of anarchists, minarchists , and paleolibertarians. The mission of our editorial team is to select engaging pieces that will inform readers and spark debates in our community. The Liberty Movement is a young movement. We have many lessons to learn and debates to be had. We seek to facilitate these debates so we can reignite the fire of liberty in the heart of young and old.
–Emmanuel Ruiz, President of the LYC
Rise of Liberty in Argentina
By Trenton Hale
For those unaware, Javier Milei, a self-proclaimed libertarian and anarcho-capitalist, has just won the presidential primaries in Argentina. After projecting to win around 20% of the vote, he ended up winning 30% of the vote. Based on the current projections and momentum, Milei is in an excellent position to win the presidency this November. This shocking revelation had led to many asking the question of how did a self-described “philosophical anarcho-capitalist” be able to gain such significant popularity when the ideology has seemingly won nothing?
For starters, Argentina has become a trainwreck over the last several decades. The country went from one that had potential to be an economic powerhouse to a weak nation. The biggest reason for their collapse is hyperinflation. Thanks to doubling the number of pesos, inflation reached over 100%. This has come thanks to the policy of modern monetary policy (which the central bank has been using before MMT fully developed). According to Adam Fabry, a lecturer in economics at the National University of Chilectico in Cordoba, “Unfortunately Argentina has such a prolonged history of inflation that you now have generations and generations of Argentines thinking that 30 per cent inflation is the norm.”
The spending has gotten out of hand, with the public debt being at over 80% of the GDP. Top individual and corporate tax rates are at 35% while the tax burden is equivalent to 29% of GDP. Public spending is at over 7% of GDP. The economic freedom in the country is one of the poorest in the regions. Starting a business is incredibly difficult with the few able to do so having to endure ridiculous costs. The regulations and protectionism the government has been pursuing have led to inefficiency and poor growth. While trade freedom has been slowly increasing, it remains poor with a tariff rate at over 11% and over 140 non tariff measures in effect.
All of this and other measures that restrict markets have been a burden on the people. The first quarter of 2023 saw unemployment at seven percent. Labor participation is at 48% while employment rate is at 45%.
The biggest outcome of the anti-capitalist economics is its effects on poverty. As of the second half of 2022, Argentina saw its poverty rate at 40%. The children under 15 who live under poverty rate is at 54%. Many, like 76-year-old citizen Rosa Guerrera, have to rely on soup kitchens for basic food. “If it weren’t for the soup kitchen, what would become of me?”
With all of this and the many other problems the country faces, the people have gotten tired of it. They want to see an end to the corruption and anti-freedom measures. A fresh change is what they need. Enter Javier Milei. After being viewed as a nobody, he suddenly surged in the polls as his campaign became more and more popular. While the problems listed above help Milei gain popularity, his messaging has played a huge role in his popularity.
While he does soften his tone on anarchism in terms of pragmatism, he is radical in every other sense. Milei has called for an end to inflation by ending the central bank. He is a staunch critic of fractional reserve banking, planning to implement a full-reserve banking system in its place. He has called for an end to the peso and proposes shifting the economy to the U.S. dollar.
Milei wishes to reduce public spending, taxation, and tax varieties. His labor reform increases flexibility for future employment contracts. The trade freedom proposals would allow for free trade with no tariffs, quotas, or import-export restrictions. But what is arguably his most captivating reform proposals are the ones that reduce the size of government. For far too long, the government has continued to be a burden for the people, with government corruption being particularly high. Milei recognizes this and proposes reducing the size of the government to help eliminate corruption.
His plan sees the government ministries shrinking from 18 to 8. The ministries to be included are interior, foreign relations, defense, economy, justice, security, infrastructure, and human capital. He plans on removing bodyguards, drivers, and other government employee privileges, except for the ones that are deemed absolutely necessary. His judicial reforms seek to include the designation of a Minister of Justice with the consensus of the judicial branch, as well as the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice without political affiliations to fill the prevent vacancies, prohibiting members of the judicial branch from engaging in partisan politics, and promoting the budgetary independence of the judicial branch. Further, they will seek to implement jury trials and oral proceedings throughout the country.
What has led to the popularity of such a radical man is the country’s need for radical change. Protectionism, incessant corruption, the money printing press, and other measures have turned a once wealthy nation into one where 4 out of 10 people live in poverty. The socialist measures and socialists in the government have led to a distaste of socialism in the country, and Malei had capitulated on it. He refers to the policies that he opposes as socialist and calls out socialism for being anti freedom. The rise of Milei is a great example of how libertarianism is not a dead ideology by any stretch of imagination. Libertarianism can rise in a country that values freedom and liberty like the United States supposedly does. While we are admittedly a long way from reaching that point here, it is indeed possible as long as we persist and do not lose hope.
The Producer Is Not The Villain
By Ezra Wyrick, Editor-in-chief
The war on the producer is raging on, and the assault on free enterprise and the entrepreneur is hitting an all-time high. Whether it be politicians, academics, or the mainstream media, there’s a relentless effort to paint those who create wealth and prosperity as villains who exploit the masses. This is not just a misguided moral crusade but also an intellectual fraud, as it completely ignores the fundamental principles of economics and the basic human desire to succeed. It’s time to stand up and push back against this narrative, for the sake of our future and our humanity.
Put simply, the producer is the lifeblood of any economy. Without them, there would be no wealth, no innovation, and no progress. The producer takes risks, invests time and resources, and creates products and services that others will want to buy. The producer’s success is not usually a result of exploitation or of “privilege” but of hard work, ingenuity, and willingness to take risks to provide value to their fellow man. Yet, despite this fundamental truth, the producer has been subject to a barrage of attacks from those who seek to undermine the principles of free enterprise. The producer is often accused of greed, exploitation, and selfishness, while the virtues of hard work, innovation, and rational self-interest are ignored or dismissed as ‘Randian’ dogma.
The core of this dishonest attack on the producer is the belief that the accumulation of wealth is inherently immoral. This belief is rooted in a false zero-sum view of economics, in which one person’s gain necessarily comes at the expense of another’s loss. In the framework of this argument, individuals who thrive in commerce are purportedly doing so via exploitation of their labor force or via an unfair advantage, be it an inheritance, political connections, or some other form of unnatural “privilege” – of course, they conveniently ignore the entrepreneurs who came from nothing and built huge empires through decades of grueling work before finally achieving success.
This view is fundamentally mistaken. Market activity is not in fact a zero-sum game; it is a positive-sum game. When a producer creates a new product or service that meets the needs of consumers, everyone benefits. The producer profits from the sale of their product, but the consumer benefits from the product itself, and society as a whole benefit from the increased wealth and productivity that comes with innovation.
Moreover, the idea that producers are exploiting their workers is a tired myth. In a free market, both employers and employees are free to negotiate their own terms of employment. No one is forced to work for a particular wage or under particular conditions. If an employer offers terms that are unacceptable to a worker, they are free to seek employment elsewhere. Likewise, if an employee is not providing value to the employer, they are {or at least ought to be} free to terminate their employment. This is not exploitation as socialists and other denizens of the authoritarian quadrant on the ideological spectrum suggest; it is purely and simply the voluntary exchange of value.
And then there is the two-pronged claim that is often leveled by the socialists: firstly, that any profits whatsoever are theft because they literally amount to a deduction from the worker’s wages. Secondly, that the rise of the capitalists represented a departure from a previous condition in which all income was wages, and there were no profits.
Allow me to confront this second claim first. Unfortunately, even many famous capitalist writers and thinkers were not immune to this claim, which upon closer examination is revealed to be as mythical as the labor theory of value. Speaking of such, Adam Smith, known conventionally as the founder of modern capitalist economics, wrote the following in his 1776 magnum opus The Wealth of Nations:
“In that original state of things, which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock {capital}, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer. He has neither landlord nor master to share with him. Had this state continued, the wages of labour would have augmented with all those improvements in its productive powers, to which the division of labour gives occasion…”
This statement and other similar ones in The Wealth of Nations went a long way in unnecessarily lending undue credence to Marx’s exploitation theory almost a century later. So what is wrong with Smith’s claim? Well, the fundamental mistake is found in his assertion that the “original state of things” i.e. the state of the world before the rise of capital accumulation, was a state in which all income was effectively a wage because performers of manual labor would produce commodities, sell them, and then use the money earned from the sale to purchase other commodities. This condition is what Marx himself would later call “simple circulation”. This view has just one issue: sales revenue and wages are two different things entirely. As any sixth grader would tell you, wages are money paid in exchange for another’s labor. However, money paid in exchange for the products of another’s labor is sales revenue, not wages. So, in Marx’s pre-capitalistic “simple circulation” there were technically no wages at all.
Now, having dispelled this second myth, let us turn briefly to the first. This one is my personal favorite. “Profits are a deduction from wages,” say the socialists, and Smith agreed it would seem, or at the very least he could not manage a convincing enough argument to dispute the claim so he just went with it. Be that as it may, the answer to this rather absurd assertion is really quite simple. Profits are not a deduction from wages – quite the contrary. Profits themselves are what’s left after deductions. As Dr. George Reisman, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Pepperdine Univ. explains:
“In normal, everyday business and accounting practice, profits are not a deduction from anything. On the contrary, they are the result of deductions. They are what remains after the deduction of wages and all other costs from sales revenues. Nevertheless, Marx makes Smith’s gross error-Smith’s treatment of the result of deductions as though it were a deduction…”
Dr. Reisman goes on to explain that contrary to what Smith and a century later Marx believed, wages themselves – not profits – are a product of the rise of the capitalists:
“It also follows that by creating the phenomenon of costs of production, i.e. the costs that show up in business income statements, the activity of the capitalists serves to reduce the proportion of sales revenues that is profit. Capitalists do not create profit and subtract it from wages. On the contrary, they create wages and the other costs which are subtracted from sales revenues, and thus reduce the proportion of sales revenues that is profit. Of course, in creating wages and costs, capitalists not only reduce the proportion of sales revenues that is profit, but they also increase the percentage of sales revenues that equals wages, adding positive amounts to an initial amount of zero, and at the same time correspondingly increasing the ratio of wages to profits. Thus, capitalists create wages and decrease profits in terms of their respective size relative to sales revenues”
“It follows that capitalists do not impoverish wage earners, but make it possible for people to be wage earners. For, as I have shown, they are responsible not for the phenomenon of profit, but for the phenomenon of wages. They {the capitalists} are responsible for the very existence of wages in the production of products for sale.”
So, as I hope we have seen by now, both claims leveled in this two-pronged attack on capitalism are not just intentionally misleading, they are demonstrably false, i.e. lies. However, they are lies that have become widely accepted, even among allies of capitalism. In the words of G.K. Chesterton however, ‘Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.’ These intellectually dishonest attacks may be widely accepted among the best academics and scholars – even Adam Smith himself – that does not make them any less fallacious, and it is still our responsibility to confront them.
Those who attack free enterprise and the entrepreneur in particular most often do so out of a misunderstanding of the basic realities of economics. And it’s not always due solely to the fallacies that we have just repudiated. Some assume – incorrectly so – that human wealth is fixed and that any gain by one person must necessarily come at the expense of another. Naturally, they ignore the fact that more wealth can be created and the free exchange of goods and services serves to benefit all parties involved. They also conveniently fail to hold government wealth-spreading schemes such as welfare programs, which cause some to gain at the expense of others – the same charge most often leveled against the entrepreneurs – to this same severe scrutiny standard.
Those so-called “economists” who launch attacks against the producer often do so because they are seemingly incapable of seeing the “elephant in the room” in their crucifixion of profit-seeking enterprise, i.e. the role of risk in the entrepreneurial process. Producers take on significant risks when they invest their time, money, and resources into a new venture. They risk failure and the loss of their investment. But they also have the potential to reap great rewards if their venture is successful. This risk-reward tradeoff is essential to the process of innovation and progress. Without it, producers would have a sparse incentive to take on the risks of entrepreneurship.
We must reject the idea that wealth is inherently evil or the myth that it is almost always the result of exploitation. We must embrace the idea that wealth is created through voluntary exchange and that the entrepreneur drives this exchange. We must reject the notion that government intervention is necessary to correct the supposed failures of the market and recognize that such intervention only serves to distort the market and undermine individual freedom. We must embrace the idea that individuals have the right to pursue their happiness and that the free market is the best means of reducing poverty and increasing economic growth known to man. Above all, we must recognize that the demonization of the producer is an incredibly dangerous and short-sighted idea that threatens to undermine the very foundations of human existence.
The Prospects for Liberty
By Isaiah Dzhura
“For if the pure goal is never brought to the fore, there will never be any momentum developed for driving toward it. Slavery would never have been abolished at all if the abolitionists had not raised the hue and cry thirty years earlier” – Murray N Rothbard
Among those of us who value liberty and freedom there is some divide as to how liberty can and/or should be achieved as well as some disagreement as to what constitutes liberty and natural rights. There are many disingenuous actors amongst us who claim to fight for liberty as well as those who might be confused by or new to libertarianism. There are two particular camps of libertarians that I feel need to be analyzed and assessed more thoroughly as potential allies and potential threats to the liberty movement. There are many libertarians, such as myself, that fall in neither camp but seek to ally ourselves with any who are genuinely committed to the cause and are especially opposed to any who are disingenuous and in it for the wrong (selfish) reasons or are potentially controlled opposition meant to steer the movement in the wrong direction purposefully.
The two camps of libertarians that are the most controversial among the libertarian movement are Paleolibertarians who wish to ally more with the GOP and use the Republican party as a vehicle for achieving libertarian ends. They are often more focused on the local level but sometimes stray to try to influence and support the Republicans in national and state elections. These Paleos range from minarchists to Rothbardian-Hoppean anarchists who don’t believe that supporting the Libertarian Party or using counter-economics, as Agorists suggest, are effective or even viable praxis to achieve liberty.
The other controversial faction that receives attention and much criticism as being either unknowledgeable of libertarianism and its roots going back to Murray Rothbard specifically, who popularized libertarianism in America while the Libertarian Party was non-existent in the 60s and an early fledgling in the 70s up until his death in 1995. Libertines range from liberal “minarchist nots” with little difference from the Democrats to anarchists who believe that in a libertarian society “anything goes” and we should be accepting of all lifestyles as long as they’re not aggressing against anyone. Here I would like to add that there’s a difference between acceptance and tolerance whereas accepting an action or lifestyle is equivalent to sanctioning it and tolerance is merely not interfering with what someone else does on their property or on any property that you have no means of legitimate control. Tolerance does not mean you can’t object to lifestyles and actions which you deem bad and it also means you’re free to take actions such as boycotting or protesting these things so as to hope to influence others in your community or society as a whole. Some ideas that libertines tend to advocate acceptance for are sex work, unrestricted macro immigration (open state borders for millions of uninvited immigrants), abortion, and the alphabet agenda including more recently the acceptance of trans minors (as opposed to the rejection of the idea that minors can consent to transition). Now setting aside that we shouldn’t accept these ideas there are some of these ideas we shouldn’t have any tolerance for at all as I would argue they constitute aggression contrary to what some of these libertines might argue.
While once being more libertine myself, though not as libertine as some who I have come to meet in the movement as it stands today, I have come to realize that libertinism is not a realistic liberty nor a means to an end of achieving true liberty and taking back our rights and defending them. At the same time I’m not all convinced by those who call themselves Paleolibertarians. My intent here is not to solely criticize the Paleolibertarians who are hoping to create a shift towards liberty through the use of the state and political power. This is more of an argument on praxis than one concerning our values, although our values as regards our moral principles might be at odds at times and, as I’ll argue below, that constitutes an important difference.
Where the Paleos and libertarians like myself tend to agree, I believe, and where I have come to disagree with the libertines, is that the Overton window must move back towards the traditional family and the values that we know have worked for the better of mankind and for civilization for centuries (to varying degrees as they’ve competed against statist imperialism and more recently cronyism that attempts to break apart the family unit and degrade traditional values. We cannot achieve liberty by advocating for or accepting rampant degeneracy and particularly unhealthy lifestyles. It’s true that people will have to be free to harm themselves through making bad choices but that cannot be our platform and can only be tolerated as a part of life, not celebrated or accepted without a healthy stigma if we hope to achieve anything and continue to build a strong movement with a passion for liberty. This is of course not to say we should hate those who are struggling especially if they’re aware of their issues and seek to better themselves.
This brings me to the non-aggression principle as originally propounded by Murray Rothbard and elaborated on by many of his successors such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe and S. E. Konkin. This is also where I believe I’ll find disagreement amongst many Paleos and those who outright reject libertarianism but claim to fight for liberty (ie. the “post libertarians” and Republicans who have never accepted libertarianism). I believe there is a common misconception amongst many about the NAP (non aggression principle) in the way it is defined and its intended use. This likely stems from it being detached from its originator Murray Rothbard and thus its original meaning. This is apparent especially when it’s seen being used by libertarians (some of whom don’t even know who Rothbard was and haven’t read a single word that he wrote) to justify a libertine libertarianism. It originally states that the only proper use of force is in defense of person or property. Its original intention was to serve as a philosophical bulwark against the state intellectuals who argue for the use of political power as a means to an end with disregard for the people’s rights. Without going into too much detail here I’ll simply quote Hoppe on argumentation ethics as the foundation of the NAP and a reason why we can’t afford to abandon it while attempting to argue for a shift towards liberty and away from statism:
“For only if everyone is free from physical aggression by everyone else could anything be said and then agreement or disagreement on anything possibly be reached. The principle of non-aggression is thus the necessary precondition for argumentation and possible agreement and hence can be argumentatively defended as a just norm by means of a priori reasoning.” Hans Hoppe ‘Fallacies of the Public Goods Theory and the Production of Security’ p. 13
Furthermore the principle is ultimately a principle of property rights and elaborates on John Locke’s “homestead principle” as a theory of property that can be used in a court of law. We cannot afford to sacrifice such a sound theory of property rights if our movement is to mean anything and if we hope to provide a viable alternative to the statism that we see today.
“A definition and theory of property must precede the definition and establishment of all other economic terms and theorems.” – Hans Hoppe
If we hope to make radical change we can’t go about it by advocating for half-hearted, unprincipled, and gradual change as is typical of conservatism, such as settling for a halfway compromise towards some new proposed socialist policy instead of outright rejecting the state’s encroachment. We should take advice from the 19th century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison when he says:
“Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! Be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend.”
And Rothbard, in his essay ‘Why Be Libertarian?’, illuminates the abolitionist strategy of Garrison by saying “Actually, in the realm of the strategic, raising the banner of pure and radical principle is generally the fastest way of arriving at radical goals.”
What I’m most concerned with in terms of a Paleo strategy for liberty is inconsistency in principles. If you’re trying to win people over and create, reestablish, or maintain any ideal you cannot stand against any argumentative criticism while you’re unapologetically and unremittingly contradicting yourself and your arguments. I’m not going to paint the Paleo movement with such a broad brush stroke as to suggest that they all, or even a majority, are like this but I would strongly caution against advocating for any state infringement of private property rights.
At the same time I would advise libertarians not to take such a vocal stand against measures such as Desantis implemented in the state of Florida banning vaccine mandates, even for private businesses. Even though it is certainly an infringement of property rights that clearly isn’t our primary concern at the moment and the enemy during lockdowns was the COVID regime, not Desantis as the governor of one state making a comparatively unimportant infringement on the property rights of private businesses. It’s worth pointing out that it is indeed a violation of property rights because those powers could easily be expanded to whatever hot button issue comes next (and happens to be popular with Desantis’s base) but it’s at the bottom of the list of property rights infringements in the present day United States or even in Florida and it is directly opposed to the much greater evil of lockdowns.
This brings us to the question of who are our allies and who should we evangelize to? How should we structure our messaging at the present moment? I’ll refer to Hoppe in chapter one of his book ‘Getting Libertarianism Right’ where he says the following:
“The Right recognizes the existence of individual human differences not just with regard to the physical location and make-up of the human environment and of the individual human body. Most importantly, the Right also recognizes the existence of differences in the mental make-up of people, i.e. in their cognitive abilities, talents, psychological dispositions, and motivations.”
“The Left however…”
Put simply, the Left has no prospects for liberty as long as it clings to its egalitarianism and thus to redistributive measures and state sponsored discrimination. The Right is more primed for the libertarian message given its inherent rejection of egalitarianism. This doesn’t mean leftists can’t come to recognize the flaws of egalitarianism. It simply means you just can’t try to reach those on the left through egalitarian arguments. You have to dismantle their present egalitarianism if you expect them to change their positions. Then they may be open to the ideas of libertarianism on the grounds that you shouldn’t use the state and its political power to attempt to force others to live how you want them to live. After all, those on the left are more primed to oppose policies such as the drug war which has been a massive infringement on our rights and a parasite on our economy as well as a major source of fuel for gang violence in this country for decades.
The prospects for liberty among the Right seem to be more likely than amongst the Left but as we see in both cases there is no room to give up on our principles if we hope to build a movement towards liberty and to be taken seriously in a debate amongst our opposition as well as to differentiate ourselves so that we don’t help make our opposition’s arguments for them. With this I’ll leave you with a quote that I hope will illuminate the overall message I hoped to instill in writing this article.
“In order to bring about the end of statism and socialism, no more and no less must be accomplished than a change in public opinion which would lead people away from using the institutional outlets for policy participation for the satisfaction of power lust, but instead make them suppress any such desire and turn this very organizational weapon of the state against it and push uncompromisingly for an end to taxation and regulation of natural owners wherever and whenever there is a chance of influencing policy.” Hans Hoppe, ‘A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism’ p. 190
For further justification for the non-aggression principle see Murray N Rothbard ‘For A New Liberty’ Hans-Hermann Hoppe ‘A Theory of Socialism & Capitalism’ ch. 7 and ‘On the Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property’ in Hoppe ‘The Economics and Ethics of Private Property’.
The Case Against Abortion
By Isaiah Dzhura
Rothbard in his book ‘For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto’ dedicated a couple of pages to the issue of abortion arguing that from a property rights perspective, a mother was permitted to remove a fetus from her body, since she owns herself and the fetus had been “invited” to be there. He also gave this argument at the beginning of chapter 14 of ‘The Ethics of Liberty’ which discusses children’s rights. Of course we know that an abortion isn’t the same as removing somebody from the premises of a property, the fetus is killed during the act of an abortion. Comparing pregnancy to the invitation you would give to something like a dinner party is flawed and I’ll herein make the case why, from a libertarian perspective, abortion is a rights violation akin to any other murder and should be considered criminal in all cases.
First I’ll establish the libertarian principle of property rights as I intend to critique Rothbard, ironically, from a Rothbardian theory of property rights namely the Non-Aggression Principle. I still consider myself a Rothbardian and view Rothbard’s argument in favor of abortion as an inconsistency in his theory of legal ethics (this being perhaps the only one that I could actually point to). Then I’ll attempt to address some foreseen so-called “holes” in the Non-Aggression Principle. Particularly I will address an argument made by David Friedman that we’ll call the “flagpole problem.”
“Liberals generally wish to preserve the concept of ‘rights’ for such ‘human’ rights as freedom of speech, while denying the concept to private property. And yet, on the contrary, the concept of ‘rights’ only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.”
– Murray Rothbard ‘The Ethics of Liberty’
The NAP (short for Non-Aggression Principle) states that violence is only justified in the defense of person or property. It also takes into account the proportionality of punishment should any aggression against person or property occur. Although it’s subjective what’s to be considered proper proportional punishment for any crime the Rothbardian libertarian perspective is that the primary purpose of punishment is restitution for the crime committed. Say a theft or injury has been induced, the victim would be entitled to a restoration of their lost or damaged property (including their own body i.e. medical fees, etc.) and restitution for any psychological damages. This explanation is enough for our current discussion. You can read more about the libertarian theory of restitution in chapter 13 of ‘The Ethics of Liberty’ by Murray Rothbard and also ‘New Libertarian Manifesto’ by Sam Konkin.
With that being said we can move on to what David Friedman supposes to be a hole in the NAP. The supposed “flagpole problem” that’s been put forward is as follows:
Suppose you fall off of your balcony and by happenstance manage to catch yourself from falling to your death by grabbing your neighbor’s flagpole on the floor below yours. Your neighbor sees this and demands you quit trespassing on his property but you’re still hanging in peril and would die if you let go of the pole.
Now David considers this to mean that, since nobody in their right mind would choose to let go and die, the NAP is bunk. Nobody would actually abide by it in all circumstances says David. While it’s certainly true that you would be trespassing this presents no issue for the application of the NAP. Based on the principle of proportional punishment for your crime (as opposed to an unprincipled harsh punishment that’s completely unsuitable for most crimes, particularly lesser crimes) you could be taken to court by your neighbor and you could be fined for any damages plus any potential stresses that may have been induced on the property owner. This would of course go through the process of arbitration and could result in the judge, and maybe jury, deciding you don’t owe anything or next to nothing if you didn’t cause physical damage and they deem the neighbor hasn’t suffered any psychological damage in the act. Or you could indeed be fined more substantially if it’s deemed fitting to the case. Now is not the time to go into exactly how arbitration would work in a libertarian society (see Rothbard’s ‘For A New Liberty’ chapter 12 and Hans-Hermann Hoppe ‘The Economics and Ethics of Private Property’ chapter 1 for more on private arbitration in a libertarian society) what’s important is that the neighbor doesn’t have the right to murder you for simply falling by accident onto their property as, in this case, there’s no threat being posed on their life. That’s not to say there are no potentially life-threatening cases of trespassing where you might be justified in killing a trespasser but they would likely involve a lot more than simple accidental happenstance and would include an actual threat being made, implicitly or explicitly, and would likely have to be an actual case of breaking and entering.
Now to get back to the issue of abortion as it relates to the NAP I’ll give the short argument Rothbard makes as to why abortion is supposedly legally justified. His argument, put simply, (you can read it in depth in the works cited in the first paragraph) is that the mother’s right to self-ownership of her own body means she has the right to expel any unwanted trespassers. He argues that although life does begin at conception the mother’s “contract” with the fetus in question is just that, a contract. As a contract, you can see where Rothbard gets the idea that you can renege on this contract just as any other and since you have the ultimate right to self-ownership and ownership of any property you’ve justly appropriated then you can remove anyone from your rightly owned property.
There’s one problem at hand here (besides any subjective moral views you might have which, Rothbard admits, is not within the scope of his argument or the NAP in general). If you invite someone onto your property you have the right to kick them off. What about if you invite someone for a ride in your car? Do you have the right to kick someone out of your car while it’s still moving? What if you take someone for a ride in your helicopter? Assuming they’re not a communist, do you have the right to then decide, while in flight hundreds of feet above the earth, that you want to kick them off of your property (the helicopter)? This obviously presents a unique problem to the question of property rights, trespassing, and reneging on contracts as you certainly can’t murder someone you invited onto your property without giving them an actual opportunity to leave. The axiom of life argues that all who are currently living cannot argue that they don’t value life as they would be contradicting themselves by remaining alive to make their argument. Following the “golden rule” or principle of universality one can’t argue that others’ lives aren’t to be valued as well. One can’t logically apply a double standard to others’ natural rights. As regards abortion there is no way to “safely land” and evict the fetus in question. The act of an abortion is always necessarily a death sentence as is kicking someone out of a helicopter while flying hundreds of feet in the air (assuming you don’t give them a parachute they know how to use). You have the right to revoke ownership and put a baby up for adoption after birth but you don’t have the right to kill someone who you invited into your womb. I should add that in the case of a child who was “invited” into their mother’s womb, the case is even more clear-cut than that of the helicopter ride as the fetus was spawned into the womb without having any say in the matter at all.
Thus the libertarian property rights answer to the question of abortion has to be a resounding no. That no one is permitted to kill an unborn child just because they do, in fact, have a right to self-ownership of their body. Abortion could be argued to be murder in the sense that it’s not a proportional punishment even when compared to an actual case of trespass (if you can even consider the fetus in question to indeed be guilty of “trespassing”). In the case of abortion or the so-called “flagpole problem” the axiom of non-aggression is just as viable as in any clear cut and easy to understand case of a violation to person and property. The NAP remains the only moral theory of justice and law to be applied in a libertarian society.
Anti-War Activists Should
Be Anti-Cyber War As Well
By Harrison Wells
In this era of fading American hegemony that has come in the aftermath of the war on terror, our cultural elites advocate constantly for aggression and escalation which stops short of all-out war. Economic sanctions, trade wars, military aid packages, and covert action are offered to the war-weary public as a supposed alternative to violent conflict. However, anti-war activists
on both the left and right have long understood that these coercive measures are no alternative at all, but rather are ineffective and deadly mechanisms that increase the likelihood of military confrontation. In the information age, a new tool has been added to the arsenal of our national security state. Cyber war has become a key tool in the new cold wars against Russia and China. As America’s adversaries become more aggressive in cyberspace, our country responds
in kind, often making preemptive strikes against targets that blur the line between civilian and military. Libertarians, and decent people across the rest of the political spectrum, must oppose this dangerous policy for the same reasons we oppose every horrible excess of the warfare state.
Much like the “low intensity” wars that have characterized American foreign policy in the post-WWII liberal world order, cyber wars make American civilians less safe by inviting blowback and encouraging the proliferation of dangerous weapons and tactics. This is exacerbated by the fact that like all wars, cyber conflict is the domain of incompetent and inefficient government programs. There is no better example of this than the Wannacry ransomware attack of 2017, which the national security state attributed (with little direct evidence) to North Korea. The attack affected countless critical systems in the Western world, most notably the British NHS. The true scandal of the event though, was that the attack was done with a Windows exploit called Eternal Blue, which was created by the American NSA. As was revealed in the leaks by the great Edward Snowden, the NSA had made a habit of not informing major tech companies when vulnerabilities were discovered in their software, but instead creating and stockpiling exploits for future use. Eternal Blue was leaked by a group
calling themselves the Shadow Brokers, leading to Wannacry and many other attacks. By taking an aggressive posture in cyberspace, the NSA invites such attacks upon us all, while also leaving us more vulnerable to them.
Another consequence of cyberwarfare is that like all wars, this one comes home in the form of tyranny. Just as the war on terror has been viciously turned on the American right which used to be its greatest proponent, the buildup of our cyber capabilities will be used to spy on American citizens who express dissent. It has already been conclusively proven by the aforementioned Snowden leaks that the NSA spies on every living American, but despite court orders against the agency, the government violation of liberty on the internet has only gotten worse. An example of this is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is an agency under the Department of Homeland Security created under the Trump administration. The original mandate of the agency was to oversee the nation’s cybersecurity, especially concerning critical infrastructure in the face of attacks by nation-state actors. However, recent reporting from the Intercept has proven that the agency has set its sights inward, focusing on policing the actions of US citizens through the suppression of disinformation, including by strong-arming big tech companies. This was the inevitable result of an agency birthed from the lie that was Russia-gate, and the Trump administration should have known better. Anytime government power is allowed to expand, it will be turned upon the citizenry. Washington can’t even be trusted to engage in cyberspace defensively without manipulating us, allowing an increase in 1offensive capabilities to counter foreign adversaries can only end in Orwellian disaster.
Perhaps the greatest reason to be anti cyberwar, is that the entire premise is built upon a lie. The American Empire is obsessed with selling the public the idea of wars that are just, bloodless, and free. This explains the national security state’s obsession with economic sanctions and trade wars. It represents a “moderate” alternative to the bloody invasions that most Americans are tired of. The truth, of course, is that sanctions are destructive, deadly, and wrong. Cyber warfare is no different. Damaging economies and critical infrastructure is a violent act, and it isn’t the elites who suffer the consequences, but rather ordinary Iranians, Russians, and Chinese. Attacks like Stuxnet, which severely damaged the Iranian nuclear program despite no genuine evidence that it was being used for weaponry, do nothing to keep America safe. Instead, they harm foreign civilians, leave us open to blowback, and represent an aggressive escalation that makes a hot war more likely. For all those reasons, we ought to present a unified message on this issue. So don’t fall for the propaganda. Instead, be brave, be anti-cyberwar, be anti-war.
Libertarian: A Corrupted Word
Published Anonymously
The word libertarian has been abused so much that it means almost nothing nowadays. Indeed, it would be better if it actually meant nothing since it has been co-opted by people who make the word actively toxic. As someone who has considered himself a libertarian for quite some time, this fact has greatly disturbed me. Those who, like me, wish to reverse this phenomenon should try to understand it and find appropriate solutions for it. There have been two main groups with much overlap between them who are chiefly responsible for the degradation in the public eye of the term libertarian: regime libertarians and modal libertarians.
Regime “libertarians” are people who call themselves libertarians, but neither hate the state or the status quo. On paper their views might appear to be in the right direction (at least somewhat) but in practice they are not opponents of the current system but allies of it. They are afraid of radicalism and seem to be much quicker to denounce political dissidents than the newest state narrative. Indeed, in the case of some of the most extensive propaganda campaigns, regime libertarians have a habit of putting forth the “libertarian case” for it. Two recent examples are vaccine mandates and the Ukraine War. They present this support as the “real libertarian” position. These “libertarians” present a face for libertarianism that is both feckless and useless. They legitimize the state’s most pressing propaganda and help narrow the Overton Window. They present libertarianism as a movement that sits on the sidelines and “tut tuts” the actors involved without actually getting involved. This is the reputation that libertarianism has earned, especially among dissident circles.
The phenomenon of modal libertarians has been known about for quite some time. It was first identified by Rothbard himself. A modal libertarian (or ML) is, in short, a libertarian whose main focus is social egalitarianism, cultural leftism, and the promotion of degeneracy. As Rothbard put it, “The ML does not, unfortunately, hate the State because he sees it as the unique social instrument of organized aggression against person and property. Instead, the ML is an adolescent rebel against everyone around him: first, against his parents, second against his family, third against his neighbors, and finally against society itself. He is especially opposed to institutions of social and cultural authority: in particular against the bourgeoisie from whom he stemmed, against bourgeois norms and conventions, and against such institutions of social authority as churches.” Thus, modal libertarians, by making themselves the enemy of social authority, act as “useful idiots” of the state. Social authority is a check on state authority, so the ML, by attacking the former, helps bolster the strength of the latter. This leads to the strange spectacle of MLs defending and sometimes celebrating attacks on social authority by the state as long as those assaults appear to not constitute aggression (and sometimes after that line is crossed, as in the case of the Civil Rights Act). Additionally, MLs will go so far as to claim that defenders of social authority aren’t libertarians in the true sense. After all, if libertarianism is about the complete liberation of the individual (instead of a theory of property rights, as it is), what place does social authority have?
Regime libertarianism and modal libertarianism have become in many ways the faces of the libertarian movement. The Cato Institute and Reason Magazine, the two most prominent libertarian publications, are both full of those types of libertarians. They both have a history of defending regime narratives and downplaying the importance of culture and of social institutions. Additionally, your average political observer believes the line that libertarianism is “socially liberal and fiscally conservative.” This line was reinforced by then LP presidential candidate Gary Johnson in 2016 when he repeated it on a CNN Town Hall. In that town hall Johnson never even mentioned property rights, let alone their foundational nature in libertarian philosophy (although he did have much to say about “LGBT rights.”) The Johnson campaign was and is the most prominent Libertarian campaign. In this way, his views remain instrumental in the public’s perception of the LP and by extension libertarianism. The Mises Caucus is trying to change that perception, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to shake off the “fiscally conservative socially liberal” as it has been repeated so regularly (the Mises Caucus also has their own PR issues).
These undesirable factions in the libertarian movement do great harm to the libertarian “brand.” Since the libertarian movement is relatively fringe, the amount most people will know about us is small. Therefore, our brand is incredibly important. For people to even give libertarian ideas a chance they must be enticed by whatever small pieces of information they have about our ideology. For quite some time those small pieces have been from the ML and regime libertarians. Indeed, “I want a world where gay married couples can defend their marijuana fields with fully automatic machine guns” has become a relatively well-known phrase outside of libertarian circles.
This “brand” that libertarians have cultivated for themselves hurts them in two ways. Firstly, it deters those whom the libertarian movement could benefit from. Paleoconservatives, right-wing populists, and other members of the “dissident right” would all benefit the libertarian movement as they understand the need to preserve social authority in order to constrain the power of the state. Obviously, these people would have to first become libertarians, but when they do so they will become among the higher-caliber members of the movement. The presence of such former conservatives would help attract more like-minded people, giving us even more socially conservative libertarians. Unfortunately, most dissident right-wingers are understandably off put by the regime and modal libertarians. They see libertarians as unknowing accomplices at best, or allies of the left-wing at worst.
Secondly, the brand attracts exactly the wrong type of people. It draws in those looking for an intellectual excuse to justify their libertine lifestyles or their hatred of social institutions, It draws in those who support the regime in principle, but their desire to be different causes them to find a different identifier, and it draws in those who conceive of liberty as the absolute destruction of all constraints. Thus, modal libertarians and regime libertarians are able to multiply themselves by appealing to people of similar temperaments. This of course has the effect of corrupting the libertarian public image even further.
The solution is clear; liberty-minded people who care about traditional lifestyles and opposing the status quo must, at least in part, abandon the term “libertarian.” In order to make it clear that we aren’t affiliated with MLs and regime libertarians, we must adopt a new name.
The obvious name to choose would be “paleolibertarian.” That’s what Rothbard chose to differentiate himself from the MLs. However, that term still has the word ‘libertarian” in it and all the negative baggage associated with it. It makes it appear that we are still on the same side as the less desirable libertarian factions. It’s certainly a step up, but it isn’t enough.
I feel it is necessary to replace it with a name that does not include the word libertarian. There are several options for this. My preference would be renaming ourselves Hoppeans or Rothbardians, which would tie us to their remarkable work rather than contemporary libertarians. There are many more suitable monikers, such as voluntaryist, but the important thing is to separate ourselves from the unfortunate fate of “libertarian.”
Once this word is pushed to the wayside, we can successfully rebrand ourselves as a movement that, instead of fighting for libertine lifestyles and the status quo, seeks to create a peaceful and orderly society. Without the baggage of “libertarianism” people will be less skeptical when we try to make these sorts of claims. People never evaluate ideologies in a vacuum; if you say you’re a communist most people think of the USSR, similarly, if you say you’re a libertarian people will think that you “want gay married couples to protect their marijuana plants with guns.” A new name would allow us to create a better image, both with surface-level observers and longtime political junkies.
Some might respond that we don’t need to change what we call ourselves and only need “gatekeep” “libertarian” better. While I am completely in favor of the practice of gatekeeping, it is far too late. You can’t gatekeep when your city has already fallen to the enemy. This is the case with the word libertarian. Additionally, the “movement” has become too internally divergent to control our ranks. Everyone has their own definition of the term, and it seems difficult to dispel them all. In the future we must be more careful about who we associate with, and who we recognize as a part of our cause, lest we let history repeat itself.
It is certainly unfortunate that things have gotten to the point where changes like this are necessary, but we don’t have to view it as a defeat. We should think of it rather as an opportunity to build an even better and more resilient movement than the one that came before it. It’s also an opportunity to put to rest the notion that we are egalitarians of any stripe for good. Saying goodbye can be painful, but in this case, it can help lead us to an even brighter future.
