• Anarchism vs Minarchism
    • Possibly the main debate between libertarians
    • Minarchism is the belief that the function of the government should be to protect ones rights of life, liberty, and property; anarchists believe in no government and offer different ideas about what rights are and solutions on how to protect said rights.
    • Minarchists dominate all of the major libertarian organizations, including the LP and Cato
    • Anarchists made up a larger majority of the libertarian movement in the past, but minarchists became the more dominant faction as time moved on.
    • The “Ron Paul Revolution” brought in many liberty minded “Constitutionalists” that are minarchist by default, but often hold some views outside of what minarchists traditionally believe like limiting immigration
    • The RPR crowd actually appears to make up a fairly big chunk of the libertarian movement, therefore adding to the current minarchist majority
    • Anarchists are considered a more fringe group within the movement, even though one of the most influential writers within libertarian philosophy, Murray N. Rothbard, was a market anarchist
    • In fact, Sam Konkin, father of agorism (a theory that will be discussed in a later episode) coined the term minarchist as he did not like using the phrase “limited-government libertarianism”.
    • Story about how difficult it has been for me to find a group of libertarians that don’t think my ideas are crazy
  • Pragmatism vs Radicalism
    • These two ideas aren’t associated with each other often, but fundamentally I believe they are the ultimate “power struggle” within libertarian strategy
    • Pragmatism, or pragmatic thought, could be summed up as basing ones opinion or language upon ideas that would appear to be the most practical and realistic
    • Radicalism is basically a philosophy of change; the idea is to change the whole basis of how society runs and functions
    • While these ideas are not necessarily contradictory, they do sum up the basic difference in approaches that libertarians take
    • The more pragmatic practice of voting and working with the political system in general is often shunned by many anarchists that believe a more radical approach is the only way libertarians will ever achieve their goal of a society based upon voluntary interactions.
  • Pragmatism: The Libertarian Party, taking over the GOP, Cato, and the Political Establishment
    • In the context of libertarianism, the great majority of the people in the movement are still idealists, and I am using the term pragmatism in the context of strategy, not ideology
    • With that said, the idea of using politics for social change is not a radical idea
    • To an individual that is working “within the system” or trying to get into said system, they are not expecting to change things immediately; rather they are just trying to get elected or appointed (or in some cases they are policy makers and are just trying to influence those within the system)
    • The eventual goal is to shrink the state, but more radical libertarians charge that one cannot shrink the state; rather they either become corrupted by the power that is held over other individuals, or if they aren’t corrupted, they cannot change anything because of the massive amount of opposition against them.
    • The major argument against this approach by more radical libertarians is its relative ineffectiveness when it comes to cost and time of activists. No LP member has won any office bigger than state representative, and even when libertarians were in office, they were unable to shrink government (in fact, it grew)
    • The politicos (as I call them) have countered with a new strategy, one inspired by the small l libertarian Congressman Ron Paul. This new strategy is to “take over the GOP” or “take the GOP back to its roots”. Now I am planning on going into the fusionist movement in the next series, but I must scoff at the irony of taking the GOP back to its roots, when its roots are largely based in communism.
    • Probably the most synergy between these two strategies are policy centers like Cato. Their main purpose is to educate both the public (via the media) and public figures using the methods of research and publication.
  • Radicalism: Agorism, Civil Disobedience, and Education
    • A question I hear often from a lot of my libertarian friends is “if we aren’t politically active, how do you propose we will ever have a libertarian society?”
    • Of course there are many answers to this question, but the three I always respond with are agorism, civil disobedience and education
      • The most popular of the three is also the most ineffective. Education was the first strategy that was put into place in the modern libertarian movement. Even with organizations like FEE and Robert Lefevre’s “Freedom School” and “Rampart College”, libertarianism was still a very fringe ideology, even more so than today
        • Even with its relative lack of success, education is the ultimate tool in recruiting academia and others that hold influence over modern society. It also is a great tool to bring on laymen that do have an interest in a specific subject, such as monetary policy, politics, or social movements.
      • The best proven technique for social change is civil disobedience. This tactic has been used all over the world with varying effectiveness.
        • The first major example of civil disobedience in the United States was the Whiskey Rebellion, which centered around a tax that the new republic placed on alcohol production.
        • The Civil Rights Movement is probably most known for its use of civil disobedience as a tactic against unfair Jim Crow laws. They employed the use of civil disobedience in multiple fashions, like sit-ins, bus boycotts, and “illegal” marches.
        • Today, libertarians use many civil disobedience tactics like tax protests and smoking marijuana in public. The later is very popular with those living in New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project, called 420 celebrations, where the free staters will meet somewhere like a court house lawn or public park and hold and smoke pot, which sometimes ends in arrests being made. The former tactic of tax protesting usually always leads to jail time and is used more by constitutionalist types of libertarians. One more recent example is of Ed and Elane Brown, who refused to pay their income taxes and were sent to prison. They both recently received over 35 years each in relation with the stand off they had with federal agents in 2007.
      • Agorism is my strategy of choice, but is often overshadowed by the rest. Agorism is a philosophy that uses counter-economics to achieve the eventual goal of a stateless society. The basic idea is to buy and sell products and services on the untaxed black/gray market, eventually leading to the “starvation” of the state, and hopefully its eventual collapse.

This completes the series on Libertarian Basics.

You can email me at corey.moore@atlasmediaonline.com