What is an anarchist, in the correct Rothbardian sense? A person who believes it is never moral to commit aggression, that is to threaten or use force against the innocent. That seems like a truism, but it would mean the abolition of the State.
Murray coined the phrase anarcho-capitalist to differentiate us from the anti-private property, anti-free market, left-wing anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
For some time now, I’ve noticed an upsurge in the use of the word anarchist, mostly as an epithet. Julian Assange, for example, is denounced a “cyber-anarchist.” The Paulian wing of the Tea Party is called anarchist, too. Here’s yet another example (see the last paragraph), from that old CIA house organ, Time Magazine, though they reference communist anarchists like Goldman, Proudhon, and Bakunin in order to try to disguise the massive increase in the number of private-property, free-market anarchists in the Rothbardian tradition.
Among students, young academics, and libertarians of all ages, this is the booming school of thought. Even the success of LRC—the best-read anarchist publication in history—is testimony to that. BTW, Sarah Palin, as a neocon, has her roots—or, rather, her patron Bill Kristol has his roots—in Trotskyism. And Leon, when he had the chance, murdered every anarchist he could get his bloody mitts on.
2:07 pm on January 1, 2011
