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.
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.
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.”
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.
There’s a funny story–possibly apocryphal–about how the fuel in nuclear reactors came to be called “piles.” The way I heard it, Enrico Fermi was showing off his new, experimental reactor to some of his benefactors, and they asked him what he called it.
Fermi, lacking a cool or new name to call it, said it was a “pile,” and the name stuck.
I get the feeling that the same thing is happening with people reading Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed.
In the book, Hoppe goes over the incentives that monarchs have, compared to democratically-elected political leaders, and concludes that monarchs have better incentives that are more forward-looking. Fair enough. I think his points are solid.
The problem is that this ignores one of the implications of monarchy, namely that most monarchs in history attained their “ownership” through conquest, which political theorists began to recognize as illegitimate only in the late seventeenth century.
This implication colors people’s perception of what monarchy is, whether we like it or not. Therefore, when we say “Hoppean Monarchy,” the average member of the public thinks of a guy with a crown who claims ownership of some territory by conquest, as well as powers such as taxation, conscription, etc. of people within that territory.
It’s true that in a Hoppean Monarchy, the monarch has gained his territory by purchasing it with wealth he earned by serving consumers. It’s true that he doesn’t have plenary power over the people living on his land. But that detail is easily missed or deliberately obscured by our disingenuous detractors.
So, I’m here advocating for a different term. I like Hoppe’s “private societies” way better than “Hoppean Monarchy,” but I’m open to other ideas.
What do you think? Am I barking up the wrong tree, or am I making sense?
I stumbled into an interesting situation the other day while doing some research for a new essay on the absurdity of treating “freedom from fear” as a right (coming soon!).
I’ve seen this quote cited as from Lysander Spooner by several reasonable-looking sources:
“To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the law abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless.”
But for my essay, I wanted to track down the original source in Spooner’s writing. And guess what?
I couldn’t find it.
I found some collections of Spooner’s work and did text searches of everything I could find, and it wasn’t there.
As I continued to look, I got more suspicious. The language was oddly modern for Spooner. Could it be a misquote?
It turns out that this quote is not by Spooner at all, but was written by Jeffrey Snyder about the 1994-2004 Assault Weapons Ban.
So, if you’ve used this quote, it may be time to update your citation. Apparently this is from an article that was in the American Rifleman and the Washington Times. Neither makes archives available that far back, so the best I could find is two sites that get the citation right.
Hat tip to Joe Huffman and the Weapons Education Forum for hanging on to proper citations.
In my recent piece over at the Tenther Blog, it wasn’t the focus of the essay, but I state:
“even with the best intentions, the interpretation of a long-term compact like a constitution will drift over time, as its interpreters change and as the language changes”
It would have made the essay too long to include the detailed reasoning behind that conclusion, so I thought a small supplemental post, explaining the reasoning, might be helpful.
I will quickly cover three reasons why long-term covenants are never going to hold the same exact meaning over time:
These three reasons mean that long-term covenants, which are expected to last longer than a person’s lifetime, will always shift somewhat in how they are interpreted. In fact, these changes are often significant over the life of a single person. Therefore, it is impossible to guarantee that anyone who joined a covenant will not find fault with some later interpretation and disagree with it.
Therefore, covenants must either recognize the ability of members to leave at-will or provide terms for exiting the covenant. Failing to provide terms implies that the covenant is at-will.