The New Libertarian

Of course cultural degeneracy shouldn’t be “normalized.” The fact is, the recent conversation propelled by some right-libertarians has been entirely fallacious from the get-go. Cultural decline is the direct result of central bankers manipulating the rate of interest & in no way justifies the initiation of force on otherwise peaceful people. It helps to understand the root causes of social phenomena. Degeneracy is a function of time preference. Those with a high time preference generally place a higher value on present conditions than future conditions. These folks are more likely to engage in risky behavior like drug use, sexual promiscuity, & binge eating - preferring present satisfaction over the long term consequences of their behavior. In contrast, those with a lower time preference place a higher value on future conditions than present conditions. Since adults with children have a vested interest in future conditions, they tend to fall in this category. Also, since consu

In March 2020 - some say earlier, but by March 2020 at latest - the banking had sector collapsed. In response, coronavirus was manufactured as a scapegoat to justify the liquidity injection necessary to keep the Federal Reserve’s ponzi scheme alive. The State’s narrative would henceforth be: ‘Since all businesses were shut down, an unprecedented amount of money must be printed and distributed to the public.’ Milton Friedman’s helicopter money had come to fruition. But like a junkie chasing his initial high, the Fed had become immune to the effects of monetary stimulus. Each injection requiring a stronger, more potent dose of cheap & easy money. Less than two years later, and the effects of that stimulus have now waned & the banksters are poised to pull off another heist. As the business cycle continues to ebb and flow until the day of final reckoning, the State can be expected to behave in an increasingly erratic fashion. Like a cornered cat, or a fish out of water, the State

The old guard built this movement. Without them, it’s unlikely any of us would be aware that a liberty movement even exists! This alone is an accomplishment. And the history books will look favorably upon them for it - & justifiably so. Their preference for a political approach however, has been ineffective at bringing about liberty (just take a look around, if you’re still permitted). Progress hasn’t just stagnated, we’ve been losing ground rapidly. It’s time for a paradigm shift. One that moves away from the old way of thinking & instead focuses on teaching people how to opt out of corrupt systems & to build competing, market-based alternatives to state institutions. Like sports teams, ideas also get tired & worn out, old players retire, & new, fresh ideas take their place. In the world of ideas, when paradigm shifts occur, the old guard resists the change at first, but eventually comes around to seeing the benefits and virtues of the new way. This is how progres

One common misconception about agorism - one that’s even held by many agorists - is that we’re natural adversaries of Hans Hoppe, or that his & Konkin’s philosophies are mutually exclusive. Nothing can be further from the truth. Agorists & Hoppeans are in fact, natural friends. True, agorists don’t advocate covenant communities or secession, and hoppeans don’t see counter-economics as the way forward - but there’s plenty of common ground nonetheless. For one, agorists & hoppeans share a common legacy rooted in logic. Agorism is born out of the application of logical consistency to the socio-economic arena. Likewise, Hoppe was and is a master logician. Argumentation ethics is a purely logical argument and perhaps the most important academic contribution to the social sciences in the past 50 years. Agorists and hoppeans also share an unparalleled mastery of economics. Whereas agorism exists exclusively in the economic sense, Hoppe’s mastery of economics imbued his followers w

  On the issues, Dave & most agorists can find agreement 99 out of 100 times, but as libertarians we have a habit, a pastime - a duty even, to seek out & argue over the 1% of things we don’t agree on. In keeping with that tradition friends, I've got to tell you, when it comes to strategy, Dave Smith seriously fumbles the ball. The fundamental issue is that @comicdavesmith is interested in creating libertarians, whereas agorists are interested in creating liberty. Dave has a classic case of @perbylund ’s Savior Complex - the irrational desire of individualists to save the collective whole of society. There are lots of problems with this, but even if creating libertarians is a worthy goal, does that mean the Libertarian Party is the best vehicle to accomplish this task? Has anything the Libertarian Party ever done caused even a slight retreat of statism? Dave rightly points to his own success at spreading the message of liberty. It's true, no one - save Ron Paul or Tom

  The following is excerpted from "The Party Once More", written by Murray N. Rothbard for the May, 1972 issue of The Libertarian Forum. "More substantially, Mr. Nolan writes that the primary purpose of the Libertarian Party is not immediate electoral victory but to educate the public in libertarian ideas. We never thought otherwise. But the problem with this approach - a long-standing objective of minor parties - is that the psychology of the mass of the public being educated is overlooked.  Let us take, for example, the poor old Socialist Labor Party, which, doggedly, every four years for nearly a century, has been nominating Presidential candidates and gettting them on the ballot. What impact on the electorate has the SLP achieved? The problem is that the party has been so small, so flagrantly unviable, that the educational impact for socialism by the SLP has ranged sternly from zero to negative.  For what is the reaction of the public? The reaction of the average cit

Like an overgrown jungle, the state has become so all encompassing that the path to reclaiming one's individual sovereignty can at times, be difficult to even see. Here is an attempt to clear the weeds.  What follows are 3 simple steps everyone can take, designed to drastically reduce dependance on the parasitical, political class... Step 1. Read Rothbard Read Rothbard & Hoppe, to know & understand freedom. This is the most difficult step, because it requires you to question everything you’ve ever been taught - from the moment of your birth up until now. Understand Rothbard’s invocation of natural law in defense of Lockean homesteading theory. Then, learn why Rothbard said Hans Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics made his natural law defense seem positively weak. When you understand this, you’re ready to move on. Step 2. Be Your Own Bank Be your own bank, because a Goldman Sachs debt slave can’t be free. Cut your shackles & release yourself from the bondage of Federal Reserve

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