ancap

Think what it implies when you say that a country needs leaders. In your day-to-day life, you interact with all sorts of other individuals. And that's all society is: the collective name for lots of INDIVIDUALS. But for some inexplicable reason, we're taught to believe that one huge, arbitrarily chosen assortment of individuals (the "citizens" of one human livestock farm--I mean, "country") need some control freaks acting as intermediaries in order to interact with a different arbitrarily chosen assortment of individuals (the "citizens" of some other human livestock farm--I mean, "country"). Because gee, how could I and some random person in the middle of China possibly leave each other alone if we didn't each have a gang of narcissistic sociopaths claiming to "represent" us? Oh, wait a minute. That's exactly how and why pretty much ALL wars happen: because different gangs of power-happy psychos pit their pawns against each other in violent conflict, while claiming to "represent" subsets of humanity. One more example of how "government" is a problem posing as its own solution.

A cop's JOB is to violently enforce upon the rest of us whatever arbitrary bullshit the political parasites declare to be "law." It is, therefore, impossible to be a "law enforcer" and behave morally, for the same reason one can't be a moral car-jacker.

The problems on campus life today are not about free speech. They are about how the students have absolutely nothing to do with their lives but sit and listen to lectures, find the best parties to attend, and otherwise discover first-world problems to stew about and protest. That's the root of the problem. This is not a commercial environment where people are incentivized to find value in each other. Campuses have become completely artificial 4-year holding tanks for infantilized kids with zero experience in actual life in which people find ways to get along. These students are not serving each other in a market exchange, and very few have worked at day in their lives, so their default is to find some offense and protest. It's all they've been taught to do and all they know how to do. Idle hands and parents' money = trouble.

It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles.

For the most part, people strenuously resist any redefinition of morality, because it shakes them to the very core of their being to think that in pursuing virtue they may have been feeding vice, or in fighting vice they may have in fact been fighting virtue.

Experience cannot beat logic, and interpretations of observational evidence which are not in line with the laws of logical reasoning are no refutation of these but the sign of a muddled mind (or would one accept someone__ observational report that he had seen a bird that was red and non-red all over at the same time as a refutation of the law of contradiction rather than the pronouncement of an idiot?).

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.

Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting--or even demanding--their own enslavement.

American Progressives have declared war on the sanctity and autonomy of the individual.

All atheists must examine the Non Aggression Principle.

For anyone who thinks "profit" is evil, I have a challenge for you: try NOT to get any profit in the next week. Profit simply means increasing how much valuable stuff you have, and if you don't profit, you die. Literally. For example, don't buy any food for a week, because when you buy food (or anything), it's because you value the food MORE than you value the money you trade for it. If you didn't, you wouldn't make the trade. So you PROFIT (and so does the seller) every time you buy something. And every time you sell something, or work for money, etc. So before condemning "profit" (or "greed" or "selfishness," for that matter), see if you can survive without it. Then stop repeating vague collectivist BS, and learn to distinguish between "win/win" events (voluntary exchange) where BOTH sides profit, and "win/lose" events, where one side benefits by harming the other side. By the way, "government" is ALWAYS the latter.

Government_ itself does no harm, because it is a fictional entity. But the belief in __overnment_ _ the notion that some people actually have the moral right to rule over others _ has caused immeasurable pain and suffering, injustice and oppression, enslavement and death.

No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive force and subjugation. It has evolved without contractual foundation, just like a gang of protection racketeers. And concerning the struggle of all against all: that is a myth.

The State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as __axation,_ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as __ribute._ Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State__ inhabitants, or subjects.

The government is a giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential.

No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.

As I explain in 'What It Means to be an Anarcho-Capitalist', to be an anarchist simply means you oppose aggression, and you realize the state necessarily commits aggression. If you are not an anarchist, it means you either condone aggression, or think the state does not necessarily commit aggression. As you say you are not an anarchist, can you please tell us which one describes you? Are you in favor of aggression (like socialists and criminals are)? Or, do you think the state does not commit aggression (like children brainwashed by government schools think)?

So what? Why should an a priori proof of the libertarian property theory make any difference? Why not engage in aggression anyway?_ Why indeed?! But then, why should the proof that 1+1=2 make any difference? One certainly can still act on the belief that 1+1=3. The obvious answer is __ecause a propositional justification exists for doing one thing, but not for doing another._ But why should we be reasonable, is the next come-back. Again, the answer is obvious. For one, because it would be impossible to argue against it; and further, because the proponent raising this question would already affirm the use of reason in his act of questioning it. This still might not suffice and everyone knows that it would not, for even if the libertarian ethic and argumentative reasoning must be regarded as ultimately justified, this still does not preclude that people will act on the basis of unjustified beliefs either because they don__ know, they don__ care, or they prefer not to know. I fail to see why this should be surprising or make the proof somehow defective.