I care passionately about what happens to this country, but I will not take part in its subjugation by granting the state my tacit permission to do so. … Remember that when you vote, you’re not just agreeing to your own oppression – you’re sanctioning your neighbor’s.

Are you claiming that voting in a government election constitutes consent (permission, agreement) to the actions that the victors take?

Jeremy: Alli, I would simply ask what it is about the State that makes its guarantee so convincing.

I’d answer: sheer mysticism. As Randolph Bourne put it:

“Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted. … Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither State nor Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized as a State, carries out its State functions. Government is a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be forgotten. Its glamor and its significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct its activities.”

(This may be a more belligerent answer than fits the tone you’re trying to set, but I think it has the recommendation of being true. The question is how best to disabuse people of the lingering mysticism of the State. I think part of the answer has to do with the right sorts of arguments to make and the right sorts of conversations to have, as you’ve discussed here. But I also think that a lot of the answer is as much a matter of aesthetics, imagination, etiquette, and a bunch of other stuff that needs to be addressed through means other than dialectical reasoning.)

LB: Well, I think we are all “trained” by threat of force. That’s how parents raise their children, to a certain degree. Watch how children act when there are no limits and consequences applied in the home. Its nuts.

Besides endorinsg what Jeremy said, I’d also like to add that I’m not at all convinced, at least not by the evidence that I’ve been given so far, that (1) beating children is necessary as a means to establish “limits and consequences,” or (2) that the sorts of “misbehavior” that children often engage in when they aren’t beaten are actually anything worth worrying about in the first place. (A lot of the so-called “problems” only look like problems if you take for granted what you’re trying to prove — e.g. that children need to act deferentially to their parents, need to obey every demand promptly, shouldn’t be assertive about what they want, etc. Generally speaking, people who want to prove a point by referring to the rearing of children need to do a much better job in making explicit just what sort of “problems” they have in mind when they say that rearing children too laxly causes problems.)

. . . Or are there aspects of a genuinely free market which Carson, Konkin, Rothbard, and other market anarchists would reject as unacceptable – though uncoerced?

Speaking only for myself, provided that “reject as unacceptable” means nothing more than “consider subject to moral criticism and deserving of nonviolent protest,” I’d say sure, of course there may be aspects of a genuinely free market which turn out to be something that libertarians ought to reject as unacceptable. Systematically uncoerced exchange guarantees only that transactions will be free from injustice. But while justice is a virtue, it’s not the only virtue, and if the people in a given culture tend to have despicable values they are willing to pay for (say, white supremacism, or misogyny, or irrationalism) then there will tend to emerge despicable markets that freely serve that demand (say, a market in minstrel-show iconography, or — I think — the modern pornography market, or markets in various sorts of flim-flams such as astrology or spiritualism).

That these transactions would be uncoerced does very little to defend them. It does establish that the nature of the problem has to be identified in terms other than the terms of injustice, and it also establishes that the means of trying to change the situation must not involve the use of force (e.g. boycotts, strikes, moral agitation, etc.). It may be that these sorts of protest are called for simply on their own merits — because besides being a libertarian, you also happen to be an anti-racist or feminist or whatever. But I think that in these specific cases (and in many others) there are also deeper connections between libertarianism and specific cultural and philosophical positions. It’s not that libertarianism entails them (both misogyny and feminism can exist within the boundaries of the non-aggression principle), but rather that there are various sorts of logical and causal connections between the values entailed by the positions, and the grounds for the positions (as I discussed in New York last year).

Does this clarify, or muddify?