In this article by Frank Shostak, I think he’s made a bit of a mistake. It may be that I’m missing some subtle point, but I really do think I’m on to something here.
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Month: December 2023
I saw this post today and I feel like I had a bit of an epiphany.
As silly as it might sound, I’ve been trying to put up reasonably original stuff, without repeating myself too much. Kind of a “dissertation” attitude toward posts.
Honestly, it’s caused me more often than not, to tell myself it’s not worth saying something that’s been said before.
Section 4 of Chapter 15 of Mises’s Human Action is called “The Sovereignty of the Consumers.” Mises talks about the unhampered market economy and how that democracy, in which “every penny gives a right to cast a ballot,” might be more democratic than any government could ever hope to be. This passage got me thinking about these concepts, and how the state impedes them.
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Sources and Propaganda
For God’s sake, cite your sources and watch out for people who don’t cite theirs!
There’s a short clip of Klaus Schwab running around the libertarian social media sphere where he’s talking about the danger of libertarianism.
It’s being touted as this great proof that the totalitarians are running scared, so I tried to find the original video.
I did, and it is not what they’re telling you, as much as I hate to say it.
Link to the original video.
Link to the same speaker, same topic, one year later.
Check the video above, also available on BitChute.
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Rothbard: 1, Fuzzy Language: 0
I’ve just started reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and I found a lovely example of how fuzzy language obscures what the state is and how it differs from “society.”
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Mises’s Subtle Sarcasm
Some fun recently over on Twitter where someone was totally missing the fact that Mises was mocking Louis XIV, Mussolini, etc. when he called them “the most peace-loving of all men” in the face of their paper-thin justifications for their aggression.
It’s worth noting that this sort of very subtle sarcasm is common in Mises’s writing. Sometimes the sarcasm would go on for several sentences with no sign of it except a nagging feeling in your gut that Mises has suddenly changed his position radically and without warning.
We liberty-lovers face a powerful and dangerous foe: the modern state. Yet we seem to end up fighting each other more often and more angrily. It’s a fact that in an ideological movement, small differences are crucial, but we really should try to be smart enough to avoid infighting as much as we do.
Consider: the two major parties are split into two or three different wings, but they mostly aim their invective across the aisle–at least in public. Libertarians and other adversaries of the state aim nearly as much at each other as they do at the state and its flunkies.
After having some time to think about what I wrote about using the “freedom from fear” to justify gun control, I kind of tripped and fell into an even more interesting conclusion:
What if the gun control isn’t the end goal?
Audio/video version of my recent article over at the Tenth Amendment Center!
Also available at Bitchute!
My latest over at the Tenth Amendment Center! Today I’m debunking the idea of a right to “freedom from fear,” which has been widely used to justify mass civilian disarmament.
Turns out, #1) That’s not even what FDR was *!&^ing talking about, and #2) We’d have to give up a huge number of valuable common-law and Constitutional protections to enforce such a right!
Worth it? I think not.
I might–nah, should–do a video version of this, because I thought some parts are pretty fire. We’ll see.