The New Libertarian

The early anarchists - the first anarchists, were undeniably leftists. In fact, the Father of Anarchy , William Godwin, sought the abolition of the state only insofar as it served as a means of achieving his true end, the elimination of private property. Godwin’s immediate ideological successors largely agreed. Pierre Joseph-Proudhon, Josiah Warren, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau & Ben Tucker - all rejected the idea of private property to a greater or lesser extent. Under the influence of these thinkers, several attempts at more "equitable" communal living were made; all of which now litter the dustbin of history. Some, like the New Harmony colony, Brook Farm, the Oneida colony, or the Amana colonies, were lucky & either closed or converted to market-friendly models. Other communes like Jamestown, tell a much darker tale. But how much blame can we assign to these early anarchists for their economic shortcomings? If it’s true contemporary anarchists can see f

Marx was right, but Marxism is stupid. Let me explain… Marx’s fundamental critique that the working class is being exploited by the upper class is true. This is so inherently obvious in the modern political climate that I find it bewildering the notion even needs defending. In fact, today, the working class has been so thoroughly exploited that they can now be more accurately termed the working poor . Go to Manhattan, the neoliberal shithole from whence I came - and try to find a worker who both lives & resides there. You can’t. There aren’t any. The elites have successfully used a combination of high taxes & a denial of civil liberties to expel the working class from their homes. Trust me, I am among the expelled. The anarcho-capitalist habit of turning a blind eye to class theory is a grave mistake, as it sweeps real concerns under the rug. In doing so they dismiss the plight of an enormous contingent of the public - labor. No, we agorists aren’t seeking an abandonment of met

A Tokambrian Explosion is unfolding before our very eyes. The NFT craze has captured the public’s attention & finally put tokenization in the mainstream spotlight. As a counter-economic operator, this moment is long overdue. Once again, it seems the agorists were the first to the table. Indeed, readers of The New Libertarian blog & listeners of The Agora podcast, have been aware of the inevitability of the Tokambrian Explosion since 2018-2019. Although the public is finally becoming familiar with tokenization, few have grasped it’s disruptive potential. Non-Fungible Tokens NFT is short for non-fungible token. A token is a digital representation of ownership that exists on a blockchain ledger. For all intents and purposes, it behaves as any other cryptocurrency does. Fungibility refers to the property of having interchangeable & indistinguishable parts. Since one gram of gold is like every other gram of gold, we say that it’s fungible. On the other hand, each diamond is un

  The Underlying Problem with Young Americans For Liberty   Derrell McIver Warning: This article includes discussion and description of sexual harassment.   “Political power is not being chummy with politicians. To effect real change, you have to threaten a politician's power.” -anonymous This is a very difficult article for me to write. Going into college, I did not know how of any political organization that shared my values of Liberty. That was until I helped in the founding of a Young Americans for Liberty chapter and became a dues-paying-member. After a brief interest in the Libertarian Party, I realized that YAL and its associated organizations were the best chance we have at seeing Liberty in politics in our lifetimes. Some people will read this article and call it “cancel culture.” That is not the intent. For that very reason, I have not included the name of the sexual harasser. Instead he will be given the name ‘John’. My goal here is to call out the leaders

Agorism has no room for politics.  The Agora & political institutions can coexist no more than a state of marriage & bachelorhood can coexist. Counter-economics & politicking are likewise mutually exclusive. Frankly, it should seem obvious that engaging in politics & anti-politics is contradictory & self-defeating. It wouldn’t make much sense to get chemo in the morning & smoke a pack of Marlboros in the evening, so why would one seek to destroy the government today, and empower it tomorrow?  Just as a chemist who tests a logically inconsistent theory will experience failure, so too will social scientists & revolutionaries experience failure when they pursue inconsistent theories.  Note that without exception - every gain made by the liberty community in the past 15 years has been produced by the counter-economy & that no other faction of our movement can claim even a small victory . Here’s a brief look at the scoreboard: Whereas the LP & small gov

Some time ago I wrote a short piece that I called " Notes on Bitcoin as a Reserve Currency " where I laid out some basic thoughts on the concept of becoming your own bank, and one of the possible side effects of that (spelled out in the title of the blog post). I then sent a link to it to Sal, because I knew I would get some great feedback on it. I was right. Sal sent me a great reply and it helped me to further flesh out the idea and this blog entry is basically that. I tried to, foolishly, jump over the fundamentals and Sal pulled me back down to the trenches. "Intrinsic" Value "To a naive observer, money made out of precious metal was 'sound money' because the piece of precious metal was an 'intrinsically' valuable object, while paper money was 'bad money' because its value was only 'artificial'. But even the layman who holds this opinion accepts the money in the course of business transactions, not for the sake of its industr