It seems like everyone is talking about secession these days. Whether they call it that, or national divorce, or some other euphemism, they all have opinions about it and most of them are woefully misinformed. Setting aside the ideologues who only want to tighten their grip on their fellow man for their own benefit, there are plenty of people who argue against secession from a practical perspective, but even these people often argue from a position of ignorance, and in this case, their ignorance is definitely not our bliss.
Tag: liberty
And, right on schedule, barely a week after I say something nice about James Lindsay regarding his evaluation of Marxist offshoots as cults and his studies into Gnosticism and its modern incarnations, he decides to spout off ignorantly about secession, parroting the most absurdly weak arguments all the while maintaining a childishly mocking tone against any and all opposing voices.
So, I’m finally cracking open my copy of Ryan McMaken’s Breaking Away, and getting to work on something about secession, because apparently even reasonably intelligent people are unable to understand how the principles of secession and radical decentralization are the most promising hope we have for peace and diminution of the state’s powers.
Expect a few essays/videos soon, including a review of Breaking Away.
…This comes right as I had had a great idea for something on the absurdity of taxing unrealized economic gains that looks like it might get put on the back burner, at least for a bit. Oh, well.
I just heard that the great Yuri Maltsev has passed away this week–a huge loss for the world of liberty. Yuri was among the last to defect from the ailing Soviet Union, and the stories he told about doing research under the Iron Curtain are poignant reminders of the strangling effect that socialism and all forms of totalitarianism have on not just the economy, but free thought itself.
The Russian Revolution is one of the darkest moments in recent history. It led to millions and millions of deaths, and even more impoverished and horribly oppressed by communist governments in the twentieth century. Richard Pipes is one of the most renowned scholars of the Russian Revolution, with two long books, The Russian Revolution and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, that describe in gory detail the monstrosities of Russia around the time of its red revolution.
Categories
The Pitfalls of Cardinal Utility
A recent article by David Gordon [1] discussing What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill on utilitarian ethics got me thinking about the absurdity of cardinal utility theory. Even from a layman’s perspective, the strangeness of cardinal utility seems like a good reason to believe there is something seriously wrong with its premises. It leads to ideas such as a dictator made so happy by enslaving others that he outweighs all negatives, as well as other bizarre conclusions, including the “sadistic conclusion [2],” and the “repugnant conclusion [3],” which both involve optimizing utility in groups. However, academics persist at papering over these conclusions and justifying all kinds of horrifying policies. This suggests some kind of perverse desire that I don’t fully understand. I suppose the title “Professor of Ethical Philosophy” is more attractive than “Professor of Genocide Planning,” but aside from that I don’t see the appeal.
It’s just a little article on the history of money, but I managed to get something published on the Mises Wire!
The article is “The Rise and Fall of Good Money: A Tale of the Market and the State.”
It was originally a part of a longer essay I wrote that had to be split up to fit into the Mises Wire length requirements. I’ll put up the other two parts in separate posts:
What Makes Good Money? A Misesian Perspective
This piece goes through the first half of Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit and pulls out the qualities Mises thought were necessary for things to serve well as money.
Why Cryptocurrency Is (Still) Interesting
This one looks at cryptocurrency from the same Misesian standards and evaluates it as a potential money. Then it discusses the upcoming shift that state monetary systems are making towards Central Bank Digital Currencies and evaluates that as well.
Cryptocurrency is a contentious topic even among die-hard anarchists. Fans of gold argue that a return to the gold standard is key. Others argue that crypto has no commodity value and is therefore worthless. Crypto enthusiasts argue about which particular coin or coins are best, and even adherents to a single coin’s philosophy disagree about how its transactions should be handled.
The Libertarian Party has changed. In 2022, the Mises Caucus, a more hardcore libertarian group embracing anarchists and anarcho-capitalists as well as traditional minarchist libertarians, took over most of the Libertarian National Committee, as well as a majority of state parties.
Gun control seems to be a permanent fixture of the American authoritarian left. Despite some significant gains on the side of freedom in the last fifteen years, the forces that want to disarm and subjugate peaceful Americans have not given up. On the contrary, they have redoubled their attack on our rights from different directions, so that today we face increasingly hostile and tyrannical state action against any sort of dissidence. We must be prepared to oppose these forces every step of the way, therefore the topics of civilian arms, self-defense, and self-reliance are more important than ever. Historical perspective is valuable, but accurate evaluation of the current landscape and clear and realistic recommendations are absolutely vital.