Coming into 2009, I was blogging semi-regularly at NoTreason, participating at the Mises Community forums and generally trying to educate myself as much as possible on libertarian and market anarchist theory, while working on my own projects of entrepreneurship.

Since that time, I’ve had to trim back some of the time I had been using for debate and education as a matter of necessity and sanity.  Necessity that I should maximize my productive capacity during this lull in the economic storm, and sanity, to get away from petty and self-indulgent arguments which can be soul sapping.

Topics that moved me in 2009 were intellectual monopoly, capitalism, praxeology, self-awareness, performative contradiction, subjective ethics, logical fallacies, long tail marketing, capital goods, epistemology, paying it forward, low time preferences, and consent.

People I would like to thank for teaching, tolerating, and encouraging me are

• Jeffrey Tucker
• Nir Graham
• Mike Gogulski
• Grayson Lilburne
• Adam Knott

Voluntarists who asked the “right questions“, questions which prompted me to go deeper into my understanding and challenge my own dogma,

• NitroAdict
• SpideyNW
• AJ
• JackCuyler
• Zefreak

I also want to thank Stephan Kinsella for inviting me to his group and Brutus and Paul Edwards for showing my ideas respect when I was there.  Stephan was a big influence on me this year, not just for his verbose and difficult to read articles on IP and property NOK, but for being the first (and only?) member of the LRC crowd to publicly embrace Mario Rizzo’s call for more class and tolerance within the ranks of Austrian Economics and Libertarianism/libertarianism at large.  It takes a lot of courage to be accountable.

And David Friedman, who I feel gets very little respect from Austrians, and seems to get judged more for things his father stood for than what he has written about, has also been an excellent influence.  The Machinery of Freedom is anarcho-capitalism for grownups.

And Marc Stevens, whose legal arguments are fantastic for illustrating what a farce the state really is.  I think he has really expanded on Lysander Spooner’s work, adding strong arguments against constitutionalist mythology, which is a by-product of Rothbardian populism through the Ron Paul vector.

What happens with NoTreason.com going forward?  I’m not really happy with many of my past posts.  Some are important, like pointing out the hypocrisy of left-libertarians when they attacked Keith Preston, but the hypocrisy is so thick, one could run hundreds of blog posts correcting silly errors like bossism, racism, feminism wage slavery, free(d) markets etc.  Some posts are not so important, like my Alex Jones/Webster Tarpley post which never got a follow up because I simply stopped caring about Tarpley’s bad ideas about economics.  There are lots of cranks, some are high profile cranks, but they are still bit players in the market of ideas. If there is something I have learned this year, it is that the way to legitimize someone with bad ideas is to engage them and give arguments without merit undeserved attention.

Going forward, if and when I post, I want to reflect the spirit of voluntarism, and that means writing more about my journey through markets, trying to use markets, entrepreneurship.   More about ideas which I think are good, and less critical reviews of ideas I don’t agree with.

Sorry Conza, that means my critique of Rothbard’s radical libertarian political plan isn’t going to see light of day.  It’s just not rewarding to critique ideas I don’t care about and as a voluntarist, I reject the political means, even if it makes the possiblity of transitioning from slavery to liberty longer or less likely.  The ends do not justify the means and without principles, my work for honesty and principles will be for naught.

I think my readership is relatively tiny now, I haven’t done much to develop this site.  If anyone has an idea of how such a great domain name can be better utilized; combined with, separate from, or without blogging, I am all ears.  Use the contact form or post in the comments.

Thank you for reading.  My 2009 was an amazing journey which I intend to continue with greater patience and energy in 2010.  I hope you have an excellent, safe, peaceful and prosperous 2010.

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“There isn’t one of us that doesn’t wanna be someplace else.  But this is what we do, this is who we are.  Live for nothing, or die for something.”

Here is another good one, this time from Aaron Russo,

“You have to stand up for what is right in life, unless you do that, you’re a nothing.”

I believe that the calling of everyone with a conscience, is to leave the world better than they found it.  YMMV

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I don’t support Ron Paul’s candidacy, then, because my own talents, proclivities, and commitments lie with the Agorist and left-libertarian projects, and I value the promotion of those projects over the short-term benefits that Paul’s candidacy might gain at the expense of those projects. But I can’t see that this preference is compulsory for everybody. Even if every libertarian ought to be an Agorist and a cultural lefty (and so they ought! – there are limits to my Aristotelean pluralism), it seems to me that it does not follow that every libertarian ought to make the trade-off between those long-run projects and the possible short-run gains from Paul’s candidacy the same way I do.

I’m all for people changing their mind or revising their assessments, but in light of Rod Long declaring that he will run for the LP Chair in Alabama, I can’t help wondering if he no longer values agorist and left-libertarian projects over politics.

A shift in time preference may be afoot.  Perhaps the left-libertarian capital stock has been depleted, and long term projects have to be abandoned by the master builder.

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The Lomasky review is an interesting example of what is getting to be a fairly common phenomenon: Hoppephobia. Although he is an amiable man personally, Hoppe’s written work seems to have the remarkable capacity to send some readers up the wall, blood pressure soaring, muttering and chewing the carpet. It is not impolite attacks on critics that does it. Perhaps the answer is Hoppe’s logical and deductive mode of thought and writing, demonstrating the truth of his propositions and showing that those who differ are often trapped in self-contradiction and self-refutation.

Hoppe is my hero in this regard.  It’s great to win a debate on the merit of your ideas, on the clarity of your argument, and the sincerity of your values.  But it is also fun to watch your counterpart disqualify himself as he resorts to ad hominem and lies while you avoid getting dirty, and don’t break a sweat.

h/t Stephan Kinsella

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Here is the interview,

Download audio file (lew_rockwell-infowars-thurs-110609.mp3)

Download mp3

Alex mentioned he would like to have Lew back on again, perhaps regularly.  That would be wonderful.  AJ’s show desperately needs the truth about government and banking.  Not the watered down socialist nonsense some guests bring to Infowars which only leads to confusing many listeners and callers about the essential relationship between liberty and property.

Share the MP3, spread this interview far and wide!

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For almost 24 hours, for the first time ever for LRC, the blog was down. My attempt to upgrade to the latest version of Moveable Type software didn’t work. But what did I expect from a closed-source program? Now we’re on WordPress, which is open source (though I do have to admit my fingers are crossed). In any event, apologies for the missing day. I don’t quite feel like the great Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, but it was definitely a drama. If I’d had any hair, I would have pulled it out. Thanks to Chris Brunner and Aristotle Esguerra.

Three things.

One. WordPress is the best blogging platform.  It’s also arguably one of the best simple site CMSs (content management systems) available.  This is one of those instances where open source is superior to closed source.  You’ve made a great choice Lew because WordPress is the same platform Stephan Kinsella uses for the heroic journal, Libertarian Papers.

Two. When I first needed web hosting, I was doing e-commerce.  Sales were once every couple days, and I would literally climb the walls if my site was down for half a day, not because I was losing out on lots of sales, but because I could be missing the one sale I would make for several days.  7 years later, anything under 24 hours of total downtime barely phases me anymore.  That said, if you upgrade anything it’s always good to have expert help on standby and always backup *everything* first.

Three. I noticed that comments are disabled on LRC for the blog posts.  Lew, please keep it that way. You do not want to deal with arguments, flamewars, spammers and trolls.  On a low traffic volume blog like NoT, I can accept comments, and even sweeten the pot by making them dofollow, but on a high traffic blog like LRC, comments have the potential to turn the blog into a zoo and lower the quality of the postings.  The other upside of comments off, means that bloggers have to link to the LRC Blog and build authority for lewrockwell.com, instead of dropping links to their own work on your site as a form of indirect cross promotion.  It might not sound very egalitarian, but link strategies are strictly utilitarian.  Google does not smile as generously on sites which hand out links as much as sites that collect them.

Also, Stephan Kinsella has some level of management over the sites of Walter Block and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and has already upgraded the Walter Block site as well as his own from static PHP to WordPress running Chris Pearson‘s Thesis theme.

Other notable libertarian sites running WordPress (please forgive sins of omission) are,

• No State
• No Third Solution
• Austro-Athenian Empire
• Center for a Stateless Society
• Irish Liberty

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Sometimes statists or people unaware of a deeper philosophical argument will propose a strawman such as,

“But under anarchy, anyone could hurt anyone, and steal from anyone, and it would be chaos and we need a government to keep people from causing harm!”

Now on it’s face, involuntary government survives on ideology but acts through coercion. So the argument that government can stop coercion is false because it’s only tool is coercion.

But take two anarchists, in the absence of a government. If they maintain the right to sovereignty, that neither has an involuntary obligation to the other, then that principle or premise, removes any rational justification for coercion because they would be undermining the very premise they claim allows them to act in the first place.

Now certainly, some anarchist could be a hypocrite or only an anarchist because no one recognizes his authority, and he has given allegiance to no one. A statist without a state. And he could use coercion on another stateless person, but to do so, he would have to reject his right to his freedom.

Freedom is no endorsement of coercion anymore than coercion is an endorsement of freedom (lifeboat scenarios).  Life boat scenarios are frequently emotive appeals to do an end run around the non-aggression principle.

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Lew posted the Top 10 Podcast link today.

1. $2000 Gold and the Break up of the US: Gerald Celente
2. The Biggest Bubble in the History of the World: Ron Paul
3. America’s Slow-Motion Fascist Coup: Naomi Wolf
4. The Greatest Depression in History: Gerald Celente
5. Thanks for the Inflationary Depression: Peter Schiff
6. How the Government Wrecked the Economy: Peter Schiff
7. The Panic of ’08: Lew Rockwell interviews Ron Paul
8. The Crash of ’08: Lew Rockwell interviews Jim Rogers
9. Stop the Bailout!: Lew Rockwell on the Michael Reagan Show
10. There Is Hope: Ron Paul

My favorite of this lot, is the amazing Naomi Wolf interview.  Perhaps I have listened to too much Ron Paul, Peter Schiff and Gerald Celente (who are all excellent btw), but the Noami Wolf interview was a great gateway to the left, and a really special moment where it turned into a conversation between two intelligent people sharing information and ideas.

Sadly, the left-libertarian doorstops (they have to be good for something) haven’t seemed to have done much to help promote it.

Some of my other favorites include (in no particular order)

28. What is Neoconservatism?

65. A Libertarian in the USSR

32. Intellectual “Property”

13. The Old Right

15. Democracy: The God That Failed

68. Are You an Anarchist?

8. The Scam Called the State

I hope more libertarians blog about and share these around.  They appeal to all sorts of different groups, from anarchists to Reagan republicans, antiwar protestors to wall street observers.

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The one place that provides an escape from the state and the scarcity of “property” (in the loosest sense, elbow room) is space.

Sure, it might not be feasible to live generationally on space ships or stations.  Sure, there may not be many or any easily habitable planets.  But it seems to me that we’re getting closer and closer to commercial space travel.  And when that day happens, someone is going to wander off the accepted and beaten path, and attempt to blaze their own trail.  It’s quite likely many will.

My goal is to never stop looking upwards with hope no matter how much the state wants me to focus my gaze down.

I’m bringing this up because (1) I am in a sci-fi mood lately, (2) libertarians/austrians/anarchists seem to do a lot more staring backwards than forwards, and (3) a young fella on the Mises Forums inspired it.

We have the same problem in Canada.  People have no concept of what their rights are, and thus have no drive to defend them against state encroachment and exploitation. Now is the time to organize and push back against Leviathan.

Video courtesy of the Campaign for Liberty website.

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