Writes Bevin Chu:
Dear Lew,
Long time no see, as the Chinese say.
Just wanted to drop you a note to say that I truly enjoyed your article “The Trouble with Politics”.
I read LRC posts pretty much daily, but that article, posted on the eve of Selection Day 2016, was especially noteworthy.
I’ve noticed that even among leading edge champions of political liberty, such as those at LRC, the arguments in favor of authentic liberty in the total absence of the state, have gradually undergone evolutionary refinement.
We free market anarchists have gradually learned better how to cut to the chase and to lay out the arguments against the state in ever more pithy and succinct ways.
A case in point is your opening paragraph:
‘ Politics is of its very nature is biased in favor of intervention and planning. Even in its “minarchist” or “night-watchman” version, politics is based at root on the idea that some decisions must be made coercively and imposed on unwilling minorities – or even majorities, as the case may be. This is contrary to the principle we observe in private life every day: the consent of both parties is necessary for a transaction to take place. ‘
Right to the point. Straight to the very nature of government, an institution predicated on the trampling of the NAP.
Clear and irrefutable, at least to anyone with any respect for a priori logic and empirical fact.
I’ve also noticed libertarian, nay anarchist concepts “trickling down” to popular culture. For example the most recent episode of “The Walking Dead” TV series, including an astounding exchange that went like this:
Dwight: Keep walking.
Escapee: I can’t go back.
Dwight: You will. ‘Cause that’s the only way.
Escapee: See, that’s what he [the tyrannical character Negan] tells us. That there’s no choice, no way but his way. Thug swoops in with a baseball bat and a smile, and we’re all so scared that we gave up everything. Well, there’s only one of him and all of us, so why are we living like this?
Straight out of Etienne de la Boetie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude!
“All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.”