Roads and other infrastructure should be provided by voluntary means, with some combo of user fees/advertising, etc. paying for them–and they would be in a free market, just as innovation would still get done without the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property paying off politically-connected rent seekers. Roads would also be better maintained in a free market, so the transportation costs incurred by Wal-Mart would fall in a free market.

It is not as if this has never been tried before.

When the First Intifada broke out, the PLO was in exile in Tunis, and in the absence of their militaristic posturing, the small-scale, freestanding popular committees that coordinated most of the anti-Occupation activism spent the first few years of the Intifada focusing overwhelmingly on nonviolent forms of resistance, among them burning identification cards, opening schools in defiance of military curfews, boycotts, general strikes, and refusal to pay taxes. The response from the IDF was relentless and punitive, with many of the committee leaders thrown in prison on sentences of up to ten years, and their money, land, and property confiscated. (Not surprisingly, the attacks on tax resisters, such as the committees based out of Beit Sahour, were especially harsh.) And, at the end of it all, here we are.

I think that the virtues of nonviolent resistance are very often underestimated or flatly ignored, while the effectiveness of violent resistance is all too often overestimated, and its terrible costs either ignored or, worse, romanticized. I think that more focus on nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action would probably make a worthwhile contribution to the Palestinian freedom struggle. But we should certainly remember that these strategies have already been used in the past, on a mass scale, and they didn’t make victory actual, let alone undeniable, then. We should not not pretend that nonviolent strategies would make even moderate success undeniable now, either.

“But in terms of the Constitution, the CSA was perhaps less evil than the North, wouldn’t you agree.”

I can’t answer for Anthony. But I certainly wouldn’t agree. Why in the world would anybody agree? The Confederate Constitution was deliberately modeled on the U.S. Constitution, and replicates nearly all of its defects. To these it adds new defects, in particular explicit new protections for “the right of property [sic] in negro slaves,” in particular explicitly forbidding any “impairment” of this so-called right by the confederate Congress (Art. I Sect. 9), explicitly protecting Confederate slaveholders’ ability to pass through or stay in other Confederate states with their slaves (Art. IV, Sect. 2), thus preventing any effective emancipation at the state level, and explicitly requiring that “the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government” in all newly-acquired territories (Art. IV, Sect. 3). Alexander Stephens, famously, described the changes (which he regarded as an improvement) as putting “to rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.”

I can find no particular at all in which the Confederate Constitution is preferable, from a libertarian standpoint, to the existing United States constitution, with the possible exception of its ban on protective tariffs (Art. I, Sect. 8). But the Confederate constitution does allow for revenue tariffs and other taxes, and the Confederates at the time happily implemented every sort of tax, cartelizaton, and nationalization during the few years of their independence. In any case, compared to the massive and obvious evil of perpetuating chattel slavery, swapping on set of taxes for another set of taxes seems like pretty small potatoes.

So what exactly is a libertaran supposed to find “perhaps less evil” in the Confederate constitution?

“And in fact the CSA Constitution banned the slave trade”

Obviously it did not; they went on trading slaves. It did forbid the transnational slave trade (except with the slaveholding states that remained in the Union), which is something different.

Nor is it something especially noble. The prohibition on the transnational slave trade in 1808 was pushed through originally by the Virginian slavers. Not out of any moral scruple about trading slaves, which they continued to do with gusto, but rather because certain powerful slavers profited greatly from the internal slave trade, even while plantation agriculture became increasingly unprofitable for the longer-settled parts of the South. The basic impetus behind both the 1808 ban and the Confederate ban was not emancipatory; it was just another damn protectionist scheme.

Less Antman: “Question: would you have lied to the judge when asked the standard voir dire question about whether you would follow the law as instructed by the judge? I’ve wrestled with this question since the first time I got dismissed for an honest answer, and would like to know the opinion of others.”

Yes. I’d also lie to the Gestapo if they asked me whether there were any Jews in my attic.

If what’s at stake is someone going to federal prison for ten years on a drug rap, I’d say that the difference between the one case and the other is only one of degree. And a smaller difference of degree than many people believe.

“You are missing the entire point whether your arguments are right or wrong does not matter the problem is that you are making them in the first place.” – Keith Halderman

In other words, Comrade Halderman, Roderick’s reasons for failing to whole-heartedly support Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution may be subjectively neutral and nuanced, but clearly his position is objectively pro-fascist.

I also hear he’s a member of the international Trotskyist-anarchist conspiracy.

Anthony,

Suppose that Prez Ron Paul decided — as Harry Browne, for example, promised to do when he ran on the LP ticket — to issue blanket presidential pardons to all nonviolent drug offenders in the United States, including both those in federal and those in state custody. In one sense, this action wouldn’t increase the net extraction of taxes against anybody (it would dramatically reduce spending by both state and federal government). But then, neither would the action of declaring all local government schools abolished. In some other sense, both actions would make use of some non-zero amount of tax money — to pay for the paper and the pens and the administrative costs of notifying the prison and so on — but that money would have been extracted whether it was used to pay for one thing or for the other thing, and neither nullifying drug laws through blanket pardons nor declaring local government schools abolished would directly increase the amount of taxes extracted in the future, either. (In fact, both actions would stand some small chance of indirectly decreasing the level of taxation.)

That said, would you make a similar argument to the effect that if even one taxpayer objected to releasing nonviolent drug offenders from state prisons, the nullification-through-blanket pardon would (1) have an identifiable victim, and (2) victimize that victim in such a way as to be fairly characterized as “an astonishing act of centralized tyranny”? If so, why? If not, what’s the difference between the one case and the other?

Stephen W. Carson: Would he abolish public schools? I hope I don’t need to remind anyone that that would be an astonishing act of centralized tyranny for a president to do.

An act of centralized tyranny against whom?

For something to count as an act of tyranny, it must have an identifiable victim. Whose individual rights would be violated by the President abolishing local government schools?

Keith wrote: “Also when I read that radical feminist literature the thought that kept going though my head was how similar it was to some KKK propaganda I had seen before. I wonder if you would be so quick to excuse pictures of people with grotesquely large lips being lynched.”

White supremacist caricatures of black men and women were forms of propaganda by the supporters and perpetrators of an actually existing pervasive system of violence (lynch law under white supremacy) that killed, maimed, and terrorized thousands of innocent people. Their purpose was to support and reinforce that system of violent domination in the name of race privilege.

Radical feminist caricatures of men are a response by the VICTIMS of an actually existing pervasive system of violence (male violence against women) that kills, maims, rapes, and otherwise terrorizes millions of innocent women. Their purpose is to PROTEST and UNDERMINE that violence in the name of sex equality.

This facile attempt to equate the two, while completely ignoring their contrary relationships to a context of actually existing violent domination, is grotesque. It also completely glosses over what should be a central issue for libertarians — whether the violence depicted is aggressive, or a defense against prior aggression.

Keith,

The fact that Roe has survived this long in spite of long-standing presidential opposition has little to do with any great security that the ruling (which is currently supported by at best a 5-4 margin) has, and a lot more to do with the fact that historical accidents — like Bush Sr.’s deicision to appoint the moderate Souter, or the counter-to-expectations behavior of Reagan appointees Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy — can profoundly influence the direction of a divided court for long periods of time, thanks to lifetime terms and the small number of justices involved. The Roberts court has already upheld substantial new federal restrictions on abortion in Gonzales v. Carhart, and several anti-abortion state legislatures are already chomping at the bit to pass state abortion laws in order to force a review of Roe v. Wade before the new court. You’ll forgive me if I’m not as sanguine as you are about the threat of new forced pregnancy laws.

As for your comments on immigration, I simply have no idea what you mean. Immigrants are wanted in the United States; they come here, in spite of great physical danger from both the law and the physical conditions that the legal situation forces them to endure in their crossing, precisely because there is ample work to find. The reason that every year there’s one or two dozen immigrants who die from exposure or dehydration in the southwestern deserts is precisely because the statist federal immigration controls, which Ron Paul wants to enforce even more aggressively and rigidly than they are currently enforced, force them to try to cross in remote desert areas where they can evade detection, rather than at urban border crossings in Tijuana, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, and similar border towns. Ron Paul has directly stated that he wants to continue, and in fact escalate, the border policies that cause these deaths. He also wants internal immigration cops to enforce immigration controls even more aggressively than they have been, which means more of the “Ihre Papiere, bitte” treatment for both non-immigrants and immigrants, more paramilitary raids on workplaces, and threatening millions of undocumented immigrants with arrest, jail, and government-imposed exile from their current homes, their livelihood, and their families.

As for feminism, you wrote: “In your comment above you laid down a laundry list of statist policies that you support in the name of radical feminism”.

Could you please list a single statist policy that I stated my support for in my comment above?

As I explicitly stated in my comments, all of the items that I listed — broad sexual harassment policies, free daycare, employer-paid maternity leave, and worker ownership of the means of production — are things that can be brought about voluntarily within a free market, without government intervention.

The issue of libertarianism or statism only arises when it comes to the question of MEANS — whether these projects are to be brought about through voluntary cooperation or through government coercion. Government-imposed sexual harassment policies (whether broad or narrow) are statist; government-funded daycare is statist; government-required paid maternity leave is statist; but in a free market employers can adopt any sexual harassment policy they want, including the kinds of policies that radical feminists favor; and community groups can provide free or sliding-scale daycare if they feel like it; and employers can offer whatever sorts of parental leave policies they like, including gender-neutral employer-paid leave benefits of the kind that liberal feminists generally advocate.

You might think that these sorts of things won’t happen on a free market, because they are impractical ideas; you might think that they oughtn’t happen on a free market, because they are foolish ideas. But you had better make sure that you understand the difference between free market principles and favoritism for your preferred business model. And, as I directly stated above, and as Roderick and I also spent quite a bit of time explaining in detail in the essay that, I’ve repeatedly referred you to, there is an existing tendency within radical feminism that has favored grassroots cooperative action rather than attempts to seize or influence state power, and it is that kind of non-statist or anti-statist activism that Roderick and I support.

It is extremely frustrating to have to repeat this point once again when I already made the same point obliquely in the post you were putatively replying to, and made it directly and in some detail in the essay linked from that post, and made it directly again in the rejoinder to your comments immediately above your most recent reply.

You wrote: “… excuse me for questioning your commitment to limited government”

I have no commitment whatsoever to limited government. But your suspicions are pointed in the wrong direction. I am an anarchist, and so I oppose both limited statism and welfare statism. Less destructive governments are preferable to more destructive governments, but given the abject failure of every single attempt in the history of the planet earth to sustain a “limited government” against mission creep and the ambitions of professional politicians, I don’t think it’s worth devoting a lot of energy to such a doomed project.

If you seriously believe that Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution is the only real shot we have to resist an ongoing slide into totalitarian hell, then I’d suggest you get out of the country as quickly as possible, because your plan has an awfully limited chance of success, and if he fails to make it past the primaries, then you have about 1-3 months before it’s all over.

Personally, I’m rather more optimistic, because I don’t think that the only way for good men and women to do something is for them to support a candidate for a government election. I prefer to spend my time on forms of activism that are more practical than the proven failure of libertarian electioneering.