2009 was an eventful year for me. I have been planning, for some time, to write this post to recap some of what happened, and what the outlook for 2010 looks like, with me and with NoTreason.com
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.
Continue reading 2009 in Retrospect
This article originally appeared in Liberty, Volume 3 Number 4 (March 1990), pp. 11–12.
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
Related Blogs
Got inspired to post from something I read on a list, which referenced a comment from Facebook.
This is from the June 1971 edition of The Libertarian Forum. I removed the original emphasis and added my own.
The question of whether a future free society will be “coop” or communal or capitalist brings up the most disturbing problem about the anarcho-syndicalists and communalists. This is the famous “question of Auban” – the question that “Auban”, the individualist anarchist hero of John Henry Mackay’s novel The Anarchists, put to the left-wing anarchists. In essence: would you, in your proposed anarchist society, permit those who so wished to have private property, to engage in free market transactions, to hire workers in “capitalist’ relations; etc.?[¹] The communist anarchists in Mackay’s book never answered the question clearly and lucidly, and neither do any leftwing anarchists that one may encounter today. (For the Auban speech from Mackay, see Krimerman and Perry, eds., Patterns of Anarchy (Doubleday, 1966), pp. 16-33.) Generally, the left-anarchists reply that, in their Utopian society, no one will be so base as to want to indulge in private property or in capitalist social relations. [²] But suppose they do? one persists. The answer is generally either a repeat of the Utopian answer or an evasive silence.
And when the left-anarchists can be pressed for an answer, the response is disturbing indeed. Take for example one of our most distinguished socialist-anarchists, Professor Noam Chomsky. Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our “right-wing” libertarian movement; apparently he is – I am afraid unrealistically – concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute “the greatest tyranny the world has ever known”. (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? than Ghengis Khan?) Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an “anarchist” at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an “anarchist”. And I very much fear that the same can be said for the other varieties of left-anarchists: communal, syndical, or whatever. Beneath a thin veneer of libertarian rhetoric there lies the same compulsory and coercive collectivist that we have encountered all too often in the last two centuries. Scratch a left-wing “anarchist” and you will find a coercive egalitarian despot who makes the true lover of freedom yearn even for Richard Nixon (Arghhl) in contrast.
If this analysis is correct, as I believe it is, then it makes all the more absurd the hankering by so many of our “left-wing” for an intimate comradely alliance with the anarcho-left. [³] Beneath superficial agreement in rhetoric, there is nothing in common between genuine libertarians and collectivist “anarchists”. Superficially, we both oppose the existing system – but so too do monarchists, Nazis, and those who hanker for a return to the Inquisition – scarcely enough for a warm and comradely dialogue. It is indeed fortunate for Liberty that the left-anarchists have about as much chance of victory as some of our Conservatives have to restore the Bourbon dynasty. For if they did, we would soon find that the embrace of left-anarchy is the embrace of Death.
- Left-anarchists are not anarcho-capitalist fellow travelers when it comes to non-aggression.
- Thick libero–utopian-arianism.
- The obsession with reaching out to the statist and anarcho left as superior to the statist and anarcho right alienates a great many people through false characterizations (vulgar this, vulgar that) and partisan/adolescent clique games.
Related Blogs
- Blogs Related to rothbard
