Michael, I believe it all comes down to the simple fact that you believe that “government” can have some noble, benevolent, and useful purpose(s), while I hold that “the concept of the state is the greatest criminal conspiracy ever perpetuated upon humanity.”  You see government as benign; I see the state as malignant. As Murray N. Rothbard cogently pointed out, this essential difference is the crucial dividing line among libertarians.  I have been a radical Rothbardian for forty years.  My initial views towards libertarianism and the state were shaped (and solidified) by the first three books on the subject that I read:  Jerome Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism,  Rothbard’s Power and Market, and Lysander Spooner’s No Treason.  Four decades of intense reading and concerted political activism with over a hundred thousand persons have not shaken these entrenched beliefs.  Genocide, the mass murder of war, torture, ruthlessness, assassinations, and corruption are not aberrations or breakdowns of the state, but are absolutely endemic to it.  The notion of voluntarism and government is illusion.  One hundred years of revisionist history regarding the hidden truth revealed behind wars and clandestine covert operations by the state demonstrates that most persons are clueless and unaware of what governments secretly do in their name.  The WikiLeaks controversy is just the latest example of this phenomena and why statists and their apologists in the establishment mainstream media are up in arms.  The state hates and fears truth and transparency like Dracula hates a crucifix and holy water.  It is time to put an end to it all by cutting off the sustenance that feeds this parasitical  beast.  Libertarianism must become a 21st Century Abolitionist Project regarding taxes and slavery.

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