The New Libertarian

When arguing for a stateless society, we often see Statists reacting as if society would divulge into chaos if our system were enacted. Now that the State is involved in steering so many activities and facets of our lives, they simply cannot fathom how things could be done without them. Arguing based on deontological ethics questioning why the people we collectively call “the State” has special privileges and “authority” to pillage and control us that no one else has thus isn’t sufficient in most cases to persuade them; consequentialist arguments must be utilized, and this can be quite challenging given the specialized knowledge of the history and technical processes of the various industries often required to provide adequate responses to. This inconvenience, however, also has a flip side, namely that we’re forced to become strong mentally, to be rigid in our thinking, to be consistent, to improve our argumentation, and to always keep learning new things. Philosophy, politi

Given the State's far-reaching involvement in various aspects of our lives today, it's clear that the absence thereof would at least to some degree have led to an alteration of the social and economic arrangements presently characterizing our societies. Anarchists all agree that a stateless society would, generally speaking, turn out better than a Statist one, but they differ on the desirability of certain modes of interpersonal interactions and the likelihood of how they would manifest themselves.  The 19th-century Anarcho-Syndicalist Dyer D. Lum (1890) argued, for instance, that " Rent, Wages, Interest, Profits, Taxation, are not natural but artificial, having no claim in equity, founded on privilege and only maintained by the denial of equal freedom," which right-wing free-market Anarchists would disagree with except for the case of taxation.  I've previously reflected a bit on the ethical justifications for voluntary hierarchies (Kløvning, 2019a), which left

So Iranian oil tankers get bombed by the Saudis. Funny how that happens to slide into your Friday morning news cycle there. Almost like it was intentional or something. Now Trump is sending 3000 troops to help the Saudis fight off Iranian threats. What threat if they were the ones who got hit?! Maybe he’s making up for removing troops from Northern Syria and leaving the Kurds high and dry? Supposedly he pulled 2000, so now maybe he’s thinking “I’ll raise you 3000!” It’s just like his economy! Cut taxes on the corporations so they can buy back their stock and artificially raise the value of their shares! Only the mal-investment in this case isn’t your devalued capital, or losing your house in the stock market, or your job in the next great recession (which if we’re being honest it just the pussy-version of saying depression), but rather the lives of 3000 Americans. If that’s what you consider “high-risk, high reward”, well that’s the Art of the Deal for ya, I guess? The

I don't think it was a coincidence that Konkin was so inclusive in describing who is acting in his counter-economic idea world - It is quite a crowd, after all [1]  - and on top of that, the actions themselves are more often than not something you didn't have to participate in all the time. You can slide in and out of the gray and white markets as the need to do so arise. Life-style Agorism is very hard to keep 100% pure the stronger and more involved the State is around your person and those you are trading with on the outside of your personal sphere of control. Every action that gives those thieves in government a slightly less lucrative payday is valuable, no matter how small. Or, to use Konkin's own word: "'Libertarian' has nothing to do with what one  says  but what one  does "  [2] My hypothesis is that Konkin understood all this and that is the reason the manual for Agorists is so open-hearted: He (consciously or subconsciously) wa

Sunset on the island of Coron Empire refers to a grouping of territories under one common authority. Although nowadays it’s more applicable than ever, the term has peculiarly disappeared from the political lexicon. The term connotes romantic images of Rome and Britain at their heights. As the Irish say, the sun never set on the British empire but that’s only because God couldn’t trust the English in the dark. So it goes with all empires... For all intents and purposes, the Philippines is such an empire - albeit, an empire of islands. Like Rome & Britain, the Filipino state struggles to maintain control of its periphery. From the relief map, we can see the state’s territory extends over three island groups. Luzon in the north, which is mainly Christian and hosts the capital, Manila. The southern island chain, Mindinao is largely Muslim & the two groups spend most of their time vying for control of the central island chain, the Visayas.  Tensions

Eighteen years after the most devastating attack on the Western world in peacetime in modern history, we can all see the destructive development against individual liberties that has been unfolding as a consequence: Never-ending wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and later Syria, Libya, and various other countries in the Middle East and Africa; the power of mass surveillance granted to the FBI and NSA through the Patriot Act ; the acceleration of the trend towards a Police State with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and police contracts with the military; and the utter humiliation of citizens having their most basic bodily autonomy violated through patdowns by the post-9/11 created Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Looking back on this development, I find it at the very least warranted to reconsider and reflect more deeply on the justification that started it all: the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. As a timely contr