Fear leads to BearCat

There is a specter haunting our nation — a specter of fear.

To me, and I know that in this evaluation I am not alone, it is apparent that since Sept. 11, 2001, fear has been the motivating force for change across the United States.

Where do I see fear? For the present I use but one parameter — despair, the need to arm one’s self, seek protection against the “other.” The “other” is too often an illusion than a reality but what a powerful one it is.

It is “we” against “them,” often irrational fears of the future.

For example:

New Hampshire could become only the fifth state in the country to let people carry concealed guns without a permit. The House voted 193-122 to make gun permits optional.

Members also voted 204-110 to allow loaded rifles and shotguns in motor vehicles, as long as there is not a round in the chamber.

The National Rifle Association reports that: “There are well over 250 million privately-owned firearms in the U.S., including nearly 100 million handguns and tens of millions of “assault weapons” — the types of firearms that gun-control supporters have tried the hardest to get banned — and the number of firearms typically rises about 4 million per year.

Annual numbers of new AR-15s, the most popular semiautomatic rifle that gun control supporters call an “assault weapon,” are soaring.

“In 2008, there were more than 337,000 new AR-15s configured for home defense, competition, training, recreational target practice and hunting”

Homeland Security News reports that: “At a time when officers are facing a more cold-blooded criminal element and fighting a war on terror … For the second straight year, law enforcement fatalities in the United States rose with 173 federal, state, and local officers killed in the line of duty during 2011; this represents a 13 percent increase over the 153 officers killed in 2010 and a 42 percent spike when compared to the 122 officers who lost their lives in the line of duty in 2009.”

Do you not find it rather unsettling that the Keene City Council, with one dissent, elects to purchase an armored vehicle (BearCat) that a newly elected mayor may in the future authorize the law enforcers (them) under his command to deploy it against the very people (we) that elected him? Or maybe he is not in command?

I further ask which group is the more fearful, who needs an armored bullet-fire-proof offensive device? Is it meant to be a threat – “Stay off the Central Square lawn or else?”

George Orwell, 1984: “There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Google: “The girl in the blue bra.”

ARPAD J. TOTH

11 Houghton Point South

North Swanzey

One of my earliest memories is of my mom telling me that touching the hot iron would result in burning my finger. Subsequently, I attempted to touch the iron with just my fingernail. Much to my disappointment, I got burned, but the experience didn’t dissuade my affinity for questioning the status quo and inventing innovative ways to subvert authority. My parents are both employed at institutes for “higher” education and always emphasized that earning good grades, going to a good (preferably Ivy League) college, and getting a good job is the way to achieve a good life. To them, such values are intrinsic and thus uniformly the best thing for every individual. I had different ideas.

My grandparents on my dad’s side were Holocaust survivors who met and married after each lost their respective families in the concentration camps. After my grandmother gave birth to my dad and his twin brother, they immigrated to the United States to start anew. My mom is the youngest of three daughters born to Italian immigrants. My parents are products of the sixties; not hippies but the Clinton-esque big government types which that era created. They were also atheists and raised me as such. Upon hearing my kindergarten classmates talk about God I replied indignantly that there was no God; when they asked where I thought the world came from I looked at them as if they were crazy and said “the Big Bang”. As an adult I am no longer an atheist and consider myself deeply spiritual, although I do not subscribe to any organized religion. Instead, I subscribe to my own ideas concerning morality, consistency, and the laws of nature and logic. For instance, human beings must be free to innovate and advance the human race because this is obviously our purpose here on earth, which is so apparent due to the simple fact itself that we are here on earth. Therefore, I was born free by my own nature as a human being and any attempt to take away my freedom, as long as I’m not hurting anyone else, is not only a violation of my rights but a violation of natural law itself; thus a crime against humanity.

The more obvious it became that I had the potential to do so, the better my parents expected me to perform academically. The problem was that I hated school. I hated the pressure to conform, I hated being told how to think, and I hated the fact that I was expected to excel within such narrow standards. In reality, from a very young age I saw beyond the brightly painted paper-mache world presented to me, to the steel wheels, gears, and cogs that propel the great machine of society. It caused me a great deal of unhappiness which manifested itself in various ways, including dropping out of school without even finishing the ninth grade. My parents’ frustration resulted in increasingly desperate attempts to control me, which only served to deepen my distaste for arbitrarily imposed authority. I was extremely lucky to have had wonderful people in my life who treated me like a little sister and kept me out of too much trouble. Unconventional in lifestyle and free in spirit, they encouraged my individualism and introduced me to the ideas of liberty. I read “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” and fell in love with the philosophy of Ayn Rand. After being told throughout my whole life that my outlook was wrong, it began to dawn on me that perhaps I was not as wrong as I’d been led to believe.

My parents unfortunately didn’t agree, and I had my first major run-in with the law a couple months before my 18th birthday. I don’t remember the specifics of the argument but I do remember sitting on the curb outside my house simply wanting to be left alone and my dad ordering me to come inside; when I refused he called the police. My stay in the juvenile detention facility extended the better part of a month, most of it in solitary confinement. I’m not sure if the solitary confinement was because I was defiant and uncooperative or because I was so defiant and uncooperative they thought I was suffering from some sort of psychiatric disorder, which I wasn’t. I was just very, very angry at the fact that I was in a cage. Funny that.

Finally “free” of arbitrary rules (or so I thought), I spent my 18th birthday on vacation with friends contemplating the most efficient way to remain free and out from under my parents’ thumb. Upon returning home to Phoenix I packed my things, left home, and found immediate employment as a dancer at a nude club. I was quite aware of the fact that I essentially pouring a large bucket of water on and thus forever destroying the paper-mache world, but I didn’t care; I had no desire to operate as a well-lubed component to someone else’s machine of looting, destruction, and death. Like John Galt I was on strike; today I call it the practice of counter-economics.

If voluntaryism is the social manifestation of libertarian theory consistently applied than agorism is the economic. My vision of bringing down the state consists of both mass civil disobedience and mass non-compliance. The state must be delegitimized in the eyes of the public while at the same time drained of their financial resources, which are systemically stolen from those who believe in the legitimacy of their monopoly of evil. As more people cease to believe in the religion of government, more will refuse to comply both socially and economically and the state will lose it’s power. I recently discovered the writings of Samuel Edward Konkin III and developed an immediate affinity for his work; I was a conscious practitioner of agorism far before I had ever heard the term. Although much of society considers my job immoral, I’m quite proud of the fact that at 31 years old I have never and will never work to support the state.

Unfortunately, while we may peacefully ignore the state, it doesn’t necessarily ignore us. In 2000, I had a particularly unpleasant encounter with the local masters in which I was charged with cocaine possession. Believe it or not, this topic comes up to this day when I am faced with police encounters even though my charges were dismissed without prejudice. Due to the fear ingrained in me from my negative experiences, I went out of my way to avoid the growing regulatory-industrial complex and the development of the militiant police state which is it’s direct corollary, yet the state still wouldn’t leave me alone. In 2003, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s SWAT team showed up at my house as part of an investigation they had been conducting at my job. Charges against me and dozens of others ended up getting dropped because of proven police misconduct and entrapment. The game of cat and mouse that I was forced to play with the state continued.

In 2007, I’d decided I’d had enough. The city of Scottsdale had just instituted their system of using cameras on the freeway as speed traps, and I was ticketed three times over the summer. I’d heard that if one simply ignored such tickets that the state could not prosecute, so that was what I did. What I didn’t understand was that, because I used my parents’ house as my mailing address, my dad had accepted the paperwork from the process server and I was considered served. Therefore, when I failed to appear at my court dates, warrants were issued for my arrest. In 2008, I was arrested six times, forfeited thousands in bail money, lost my drivers’ license, had my car permanently impounded, and picked up two class 4 felony charges (which were eventually dropped when I challenged them in court) . I only began to comply when my bail (blackmail) fee reached five thousand dollars cash and I had to borrow the money to pay for my freedom. By this point, I was mad as hell. My solution was to educate myself.

I learned about 9/11 truth and realized exactly how out of control the state had truly become. I wasn’t surprised, I’d always suspected something of the sort had been going on, but the more I learned the more confident I was that I’d been right all along. I learned about propaganda and developed an understanding of how certain ideas can be indoctrinated within the very roots of a nation. I learned about the violence of the police state and realized that I was only one of its many victims. As time went on I also began to realize that the state itself IS violence, and as more time went on I came to the conclusion that the state MUST be violence by it’s very own nature as the state. According to Max Weber, definition of which is held common throughout most 20th century political science, philosophical, and economic theory, the state is an entity which exercises authority on violence over a given territory. Territory was also deemed by Weber to be a prerequisite feature of a state. Such a monopoly, according to Weber, must occur via a process of legitimation, wherein a claim is laid which legitimizes the state’s use of violence (Wikipedia).

I learned about Austrian economics and free markets and decided that the economic condition in which we live in this country and call “capitalism” is most certainly not entrepreneurialism, based on free and fair competition; but corporatism or, as Mussolini himself defined it, fascism. I learned about fiat money and the fraud being conspired against all citizens of the earth by the Federal Reserve. I learned about Nazi Germany and the frightening similarities between 1930?s Germany and the United States today. I learned about the historical development of and sociological and philosophical implications behind tyranny and evil. I learned about American history and the wars fought in the name of “our” freedom, I learned about the Constitution and the carefully contrived system which has failed to protect that freedom which so many have died for. I learned about federal funding, the public/private paradigm, and the corruption pervading the fictitious entity that is “our” government. I learned about the arbitrary nature of man made “laws” and decided that the only laws I recognize are the objective laws of nature and of the universe – the true laws of God. I came to understand the truth and could no longer keep silent. I became both an anarchist and an activist.

Due to the law of consistency, the violation of one individual’s rights is equal to the violation of all individual rights. Activism became a full time project in the year of 2011, motivated partly by the egregious nature of the violations on individual rights happening in my home state; particularly the murder of Jose Guerena by the SWAT team in Tuscon and the persecution of political activists by the police and town council in Quartzsite. I worked tirelessly; I advocated, I wrote, I traveled. I had previously read about the Free State Project and became extremely interested in the civil disobedience taking place in Keene, New Hampshire when I saw video of Ian Freeman sitting in front of a police car to protest the arrest of another activist. Here, I thought to myself, are people who aren’t afraid to stand on their principles; I too feel that truth cannot be compromised. To quote John Galt: “When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.”. Without truth or consistency, one is left with nothing at all. I spent September visiting Keene and moved permanently right around the first of December. Since moving to Keene I have been caged for civil disobedience twice; once for refusing to stand for a judge, and once for chalking “Free Ademo” on the front of the Manchester District Court building in protest of my friend’s caging. I am no longer afraid of the criminal gang nor of the cage. The state has proved to me that they will most likely throw me in a cage eventually anyway, so it may as well be for something I believe in and as public as possible.

And what is it I believe? I believe all human interaction should be voluntary and I believe in doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. I believe that “an idea is a greater monument than a cathedral, and the advance of man’s knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.” (Inherit the Wind).

I believe that anything is possible. I believe that we as a people can be free.

When I started, I was already skeptical of some core libertarian arguments, due to my near-obsession with academic economics. My work with liberalism opened the floodgates. Eventually I was forced to admit that I was probably wrong in advocating free market anarchism and adopted a position awkwardly in between liberalism and libertarianism.

Since then I’ve struggled to find a way to describe my views. “Left-libertarian” was an obvious candidate, but it seems that most people using the term are anarchists, and I’m not nearly that radical. Taking a cue from Will Wilkinson, I started to use “liberaltarian“. But, in many cases, people simply interpreted that as “libertarian”, defeating the purpose.

For a while, if asked, I would just shake my head and laugh nervously. Finally I gave up and called myself a liberal.

So I was intrigued to find an essay at the Bleeding-Heart Libertarians blog by left-leaning libertarian Will Wilkinson, titled “Why I’m Not a Bleeding-Heart Libertarian“:

I’m not interested in identifying which among the many kinds of bleeding-heart libertarian I am because I’m not interested in identifying myself a libertarian. Ideological labels are mutable, but at any given time they publicly connote a certain syndrome of convictions. What “libertarian” tends to mean to most people, including most people who self-identify as libertarian, is flatly at odds with some of what I believe. So I guess I’m just a liberal; the bleeding heart goes without saying.

Here are some not-standardly-libertarian things I believe: Non-coercion fails to capture all, maybe even most, of what it means to be free. Taxation is often necessary and legitimate. The modern nation-state has been, on the whole, good for humanity. (See Steven Pinker’s new book.) Democracy is about as good as it gets. The institutions of modern capitalism are contingent arrangements that cannot be justified by an appeal to the value of liberty construed as non-interference. The specification of the legal rights that structure real-world markets have profound distributive consequences, and those are far from irrelevant to the justification of those rights. I could go on.

Given the prevailing public understanding of “libertarianism,” this ain’t it and I’m no libertarian. And it’s not at all clear to me what is to be gained by trying to get people to retrofit the label to fit my idiosyncratic politics. At any rate, that’s not a project I’m interested in. I am interested in what it means to be free, and the role of freedom in flourishing or meaningful or valuable lives.

…

“Liberaltarian,” ugly as it may be, has been useful to me because it offers a convenient label for a position that is neither standard liberalism nor a standard libertarian altenative to standard liberalism. Jason Brennan and John Tomasi’s “neo-classical liberalism” is better, in that it isn’t such a barbaric neologism and doesn’t suggest as much affinity with libertarianism, but also worse, in that it suggests something like the liberalism of neo-classical economists, which it sort of is, but needn’t be.

Labels aside, I’m more interested in arguing with standard liberals about the nature and scope of specially-protected rights and liberties within the settled context of the liberal-democratic nation-state than in arguing with standard libertarians about the justification of taxation, publicly-financed education, or welfare transfers. After all, there are many orders of magnitude more standard liberals than standard libertarians, and they possess many orders of magnitude more influence. We pick our fights, and I’d like to pick ones that stand a chance of making a real difference.

…

Anyway, I would encourage other decreasingly standard-libertarian libertarian-ish types to hasten their passage through the liminal “bleeding heart” stage and just come out as liberals. Or, better yet, to come out as inscrutably idiosyncratic. You are not alone. Well, if you’re inscrutably idiosyncratic, you are. But the similarly inscrutably idiosyncratic can be alone together. I’ve heard some good things about individualism. Maybe some of us should try it.

Join the club, Will!
But, although I’m excited to see that someone as well-known as Will Wilkinson is also struggling with this issue, what I found more helpful is the response from Timothy Lee, at Forbes:

There seems to be a bit of a double standard here. The two dominant political coalitions in American politics—”liberal” and “conservative”—encompass a broad diversity of intellectual views. David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, Reihan Salam, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, George W. Bush, Michelle Malkin, and David Frum all call themselves conservatives, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any issue on which all of them agreed. You could make a similarly eclectic list for liberals. American liberalism and American conservatism are sprawling political coalitions bound together by a cluster of shared values, assumptions, and associations. If your politics are closer to Ted Kennedy than Ronald Reagan, then you’re a liberal, and vice versa for conservatives.

In contrast, libertarianism tends to be defined much more narrowly. It’s often defined as the belief that the government should be limited to a night watchman state: police, courts, military, and nothing else. And there’s an anarchist wing of the libertarian movement that thinks even these functions can and should be provided by the competitive market.

By this definition, I’m not a libertarian. Among other things, I favor government-run roads, government-supported subways in large cities, educational subsidies for children whose parents cannot afford private tuition, safety regulation of dangerous chemical and nuclear facilities, regulation of natural monopolies, copyright protection, and so forth.

In many of these cases I can make a plausible argument that the government activities in question can be justified under a strict libertarian conception of the role of government. But in other cases (vouchers, for example) it’s more honest to admit that I simply don’t hold the most libertarian possible position on that issue.

So does that mean I’m not a libertarian? Maybe Will is right that the “prevailing public understanding” says I’m not. But I don’t think so. If someone is more conservative than the median voter on most policy issues, we call that person a conservative even if his views aren’t identical to those of Ronald Reagan. If someone is more liberal than the median voter on most policy issues, we call that person a liberal even if his views aren’t identical to those of Ted Kennedy. I’m more libertarian than the median voter on almost every policy issue. So I’m a libertarian despite the fact that my views aren’t identical to those of Ron Paul or Gary Johnson.

…

But this isn’t an either-or decision. It’s worth remembering that both F.A. Hayek or Milton Friedman, two of the libertarian movement’s most important thinkers, were self-identified liberals. This is partly for historical reasons—Friedman and Hayek were both middle-aged when the modern meaning of the term “libertarian” came into widespread usage. But it’s also because there’s substantial overlap between liberal and libertarian ideas. There are lots of Tea Party types who self-identify as both libertarians and conservatives. There’s no reason there couldn’t be an equally large number of people—like me and Will circa 2009—who identify as both libertarians and liberals. [Emphasis added.]

Thank you, Tim. I now have a name: I am a libertarian liberal.

I don’t mean that in the sense that poop is a bad word. I mean bad as in poor, suboptimal, tragically flawed – worse than useless, in fact.

The Words

Capital

The term capital refers to a store of value (like gold), or supplies and equipment that can be used to produce goods and services (like a hammer or a pile of wood). If you get stranded on a deserted island, and go find and sharpen a stick to use to spear fish with, that sharpened stick is capital, and you’re now a capitalist— congratulations!

Capitalist

Every human being, from the beggar on the street to Warren Buffet, is in this sense a capitalist, because they employ capital to produce; even the beggar uses shoes to stand on while begging. Capitalist essentially means tool user, and we all use tools — it’s one of the defining characteristics of human beings. (Honorable Mention: Beavers)

Not Gravitationlists

To call someone a capitalist is about as semantically useful as calling someone an oxygenist — because they breathe oxygen. To say we live under a system of capitalism is about as meaningful and revelatory as saying we live under a system of gravitationalism — because we all use the force of gravity to act. To criticize capitalism or capitalists is about as insane as criticizing breathing, or standing up.

It’s hardly surprising to learn that the terms were popularized by Karl Marx in Volume 1 of his book Das Kapital (1867). Even if you agree with communism, you have to admit Marx was hardly incentivized to use language clearly and accurately when characterizing his ideological opposition. The very use of the terms reveal how poor was his understanding of reality, and hence what concepts conform to reality.

The Associations

Conservatives generally use the term capitalism to mean free market (where government does not interfere in commerce). Liberals generally use the term capitalism to mean fascism or corporatism (the merging of big business and government). Same term, opposite meanings — not surprisingly, these two groups rarely seem able to communicate with each other productively.

Not the Free Market

I get the feeling sometimes that when liberals attack capitalists or capitalism, they have in mind a caricature of an evil, wealthy person who is indifferent to or even takes pleasure in benefiting himself at the expense of others, often using governmental power as a tool to that end. Certainly there are actual examples of such a caricature in real life, and it’s natural and just to despise and denounce such a person. But to lash out in righteous anger at scapegoat people and scapegoat concepts is irresponsible.

Free market simply means an absence of institutionalized coercion — of government. After all, the market is people — is us. Free market simply refers to the sum total of voluntary exchanges among free individuals. To equate free market with unbridled evil is destructive to the clarity of economic discourse, with real, negative consequences in the form of less freedom and a lower quality of life for all.

Good Words

Let’s stop using capitalist and capitalism entirely, and start saying what we mean.

If you’re referring to voluntary exchange (free of coercion) use the term free market. If you’re referring to a system of exchanges forcefully controlled by a monopoly institution of coercion (government), use the term unfree market.

If you’re referring to a person who allocates money and other capital goods (either saved or borrowed) to produce goods and services, use the term entrepreneur. If you’re referring to a person who lends or invests money or other capital goods to an entrepreneur, use the terms lender or investor. If you’re referring to a person who uses violence (government or otherwise) to benefit themselves, use the term asshole.

If you’re referring to money, say money. If you’re referring to equipment and supplies, use capital goods (or producers’ goods if you’re an Austrian economist). To refer to the category of money and capital goods combined, say capital. It’s the only etymological family member with a legitimate usage.

Relevant Links

• Zaxlebax – a four minute clip of Roderick T. Long explaining how ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ are anti-concepts that corrupt the clarity of communication

(‘According to Ofer’ is a series of weekly columns by Ofer Nave featuring his musings on liberty-related themes.)

In 2007, at 19, I was attending Texas Tech as an engineering student. But I had hated school for years, and didn’t like college any better. I also became fascinated by economics and the social sciences, and found that engineering, in comparison, was intolerable. I dropped out.

Around the same time, I decided I was an anarcho-capitalist, and, via the MySpace Libertarians group, I stumbled onto the Free State Project. I watched Ridley Report videos documenting gutsy activism by Russel Kanning and Lauren Canario (and even Dave Ridley at times), was amazed by the astonishing Porc411, and found Free Keene.

That’s all I needed. I was on board. New Hampshire presented an opportunity to exploit my new interests to the fullest, promote my new ideology, and make friends with people a lot like myself. So I saved money, and waited for a good opportunity to move.

I got it in November, 2008. A friend on MySpace (known as “AnarchoJesse” now) was moving to Keene from New York, and he’d be happy to help me move. So I did.

And it was great. Friday, my first night, I slept on the couch of that one guy who makes the cool anarcho-capitalist comics, Dale Everett. The next night I stayed in a house with Dave Ridley himself! I saw talk show host Ian Freeman at Social Sundays, and later that day I was hired on the spot by Keene Cinemas. AnarchoJesse finally got our apartment plans sorted out, and we moved in with another new mover from North Carolina, and a local socialist kid who came packaged with the apartment.

Lesson 1: Be careful about who you move in with.

The next six months were tumultuous. My roommates and I discovered that AnarchoJesse wasn’t as mentally stable as he appeared. There were periods where living with him was downright frightening. On top of that, our socialist roommate had a bad habit of inviting all of his homeless friends to party and sleep in our living room for days at a time. (Later he had a drug dealer move into his room.) I would spend my free time at Keene Cinemas just to get away from it.

But it wasn’t all bad. I met Andrew Carroll, who had recently moved to Manchester from California. He quickly became my best friend. (After I got him a job at the cinemas, he moved to Keene.) We also added a young activist from Colorado to our apartment.

Lesson 2: Watch out for sociopaths.

The tumult, however, was not limited to my apartment-mates. I began dating an attractive and surprisingly intelligent girl at work. Our relationship moved forward quickly, and I grew very attached to her. Unfortunately this girl was a sociopath. She made my life torture for months. I don’t have the words to describe the sickening depth of the pain caused by this misjudgment.

Lesson 3: Don’t surround yourself with libertarians.

In May, our lease ended. Thank God! My roommates and I (with the exception of the socialist) decided to be ambitious– we were each going to take an apartment in a 4-apartment house, and fill it up with libertarians.

To my surprise, this actually worked, and the Liberty Bunker was born. A few more of my MySpace libertarian friends moved to New Hampshire to help fill out the house, and they turned into dependable real-life friends.

I found out soon, however, that this wouldn’t work for me. Even in a separate apartment, AnarchoJesse was too close for comfort. And the sketchy drug dealing going on in another apartment made me uneasy.

The 420 events in Central Square started around this time. I had always been skeptical of the more outlandish civil disobedience that started after I moved. Russell Kanning and Lauren Canario I still admired, and Andrew Carroll’s arrest for merely holding a bud of marijuana was superb, but the newer wave of civil disobedience, promoted by AnarchoJesse and others, had a more flamboyant character that didn’t impress me. On the other hand, the alternative, the idea of being a politician, was … *shudder*. (At the time there was a rift in the activist community, between the politically active “politicos” and the civilly disobedient “anarchists”. You were usually expected to be on one side or the other. The whole thing was silly.) So I would play minor roles in civil disobedience events, never doing anything outrageous enough to get arrested or attract attention. Eventually, I decided to take a third path, which I called “outreach”, which consisted of going to events and meeting people and being respectful, in order to promote a more positive image of libertarian activists.

But 420 wasn’t like the flamboyant civil disobedience. It was just a bunch of people hanging out, some of whom were smoking marijuana. The cops obviously knew what was going on, yet they would drive around the square pretending nothing was happening. Amazing!

It was amazing for about a week, then it started fizzling. Many of the local, non-activist participants lost interest. Politically-oriented activists were worried that it would interfere with their efforts to pass a medical marijuana bill. 420 became a semi-daily scuffle with the police, with no discernible direction or purpose.

Meanwhile, Sam Dobson and Meg McClain were ratcheting up the flashy, dramatic civil disobedience, and my interest in academic economics was beginning to clash with my libertarianism. I had a sense of where my views were headed, and knew that the Keene libertarian community at the time would not approve. While my outreach had started as activism, it turned into a welcome escape from the suffocating dogma I had surrounded myself with.

I just needed to get out.

Lesson 4: Get the flu shot.

The swine flu was terrible. I could have avoided it with a cheap flu shot.

Lesson 5: Take activism advice with a grain of salt.

I finally regained my autonomy by moving into an apartment with two local, non-activist friends. I largely withdrew, Henry David Thoreau-like, from the liberty community. Spurred by isolation, my views rapidly left the Keene liberty activist mainstream. At one point, I read Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal and decided I was a liberal (albeit with libertarian leanings).

My outreach was in full swing now, and I constantly got the same message: the antagonistic civil disobedience and protests were turning people away from libertarian ideas, en masse. This style of activism had strong support among the circle of well-respected, influential Keene activists of the time. And they were all wildly, outrageously wrong.

I didn’t understand why this was so at first. After a few attempts at rectifying the situation, I found that the problem wasn’t simply that activists were ignorant of the effects of this activism. Many had a factional axe to grind– they were ideologically dedicated to proving that civil disobedience was the most effective path to liberty– and were unwilling to accept that it could backfire.

More generally, people were unwilling to criticize fellow activists. It wasn’t socially acceptable. How dare I criticize these hard-working, well-respected activists? How dare I criticize people who were just living free? It was inevitable, with this approach, that the activist community would endorse counterproductive activism.

As an amateur social scientist, I diagnosed the problem as groupthink. They had surrounded themselves with libertarians, and couldn’t think clearly.

Lesson 6: Keep at it.

If I was Henry David Thoreau, Andrew Carroll was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He got involved with my outreach because it dovetailed nicely with his political ambitions, and largely agreed with my criticisms of the high-profile civil disobedience. In fact, our approaches were so complementary that I became the campaign manager for his 2010 run for state representative.

Starting about four months before the primary, we pushed the outreach approach as far as it would go, attending all sorts of local Democratic and left-leaning events and making lots of friends. We also ran a strong campaign, knocking on the doors of hundreds of Democratic voters. He didn’t win the primary, but the effort showed– despite the coordinated opposition of a group of Democratic Party elites, and despite running in a party known for being hostile to libertarians, Andrew’s campaign set records (as Ian so nicely put it).

The liberty activist community is constantly evolving, and it didn’t stop after Andrew’s campaign.

On the one hand, Andrew decided to move back to California, which was a blow to the embryonic political activism in Keene. On the other hand, the civil disobedience that I objected to has been toned down, due to a few key people moving away, and some others changing their minds. The activist atmosphere has also become more open-minded, and I’m impressed by what I see in some new movers.

This encouraged me to get involved in the libertarian community again, so I’ve been working harder than ever to turn things around– and it’s actually happening. In the process, I’ve become something like the unofficial, voluntary political director of the Keene liberty activist community, and the future looks bright.

I look forward to the next chapters of the peaceful evolution.

1) Attracting new movers.

The Free Keene blog has attracted all sorts of liberty activists to New Hampshire. (Myself, for example!) It does an excellent job of showcasing local activism, and gives liberty-lovers elsewhere a taste of New Hampshire. In my judgment, this is the biggest reason that Keene is a hub of libertarian activism, rather than just another small NH city.

From what I’ve heard, there’s plenty of activism in Manchester– but it doesn’t seem that way to the rest of us, because there’s no good blog to present it. How many more people would move if they were aware of Manchester’s activism?

2) Exchanging ideas.

I didn’t realize this until last week, since Manchester has no blog, but apparently Manchester has the biggest, most well-organized activist community in New Hampshire. Those of us living in wimpy activist backwaters like Keene could certainly use the tactics and ideas developed by Manchesterites, in order to make our own activism better. We don’t have the manpower to reinvent all of this ourselves. Give us a hand!

3) Competition.

I like to compete. Just the knowledge that Manchester has better-organized political activism than Keene fills me with envy, and spurs me to work harder, so that one day I can one-up you Manchesterites.

It’s easy for me to forget about this vendetta, though, when there’s no blog to constantly remind me. (Manchester who?)

Of course, prospective Manchester bloggers should account for the fact that they will likely lose all competitions with Keene. Sorry, but facts are facts.

4) Influence.

There are some activists in Manchester who like to complain about those Keeniacs and their misguided civil disobedience antics. But do you know why this has been so popular in Keene?

In large part, it’s because the civil disobedience in Keene is consistently promoted on the Free Keene blog. Historically, there hasn’t been a lot of Keene political activism to promote. As a result, civil disobedience is popular here, and politics, eh, not so much.

If a more politically-oriented city had a good blog, promoting political activism, that would help to change things.

I’m working hard to promote politics in Keene, but I need help! I can’t make politics cool all by myself.

(Sometimes I hear people complain that civil disobedience is inherently easier to promote than politics. This is not true. The simple fact of the matter– and a real fact, not me boasting– is that civil disobedience activists have generally worked much harder to document and promote their activism than political activists. Don’t blame the subject matter.)

So I wish luck to aspiring Manchester bloggers.

Naturally, a Manchester blog will never be as good as Free Keene, because Keene is just better, and it always will be, and that’s all there is to it. But having the second best liberty blog in New Hampshire is nothing to be ashamed of, and it would do a lot of good.

To the people of Keene, New Hampshire:

A quick introduction—my name is Brian Anderson. I’m 21 years old and will be graduating with a bachelor’s degree in the biological sciences (concentration in human biology) in 2013. I hope to attend medical school and open a private surgery practice. I write a weekly opinion column for the university’s newspaper, and my writing is featured at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, LewRockwell.com, and a few other organizations.

I’m thrilled to think about moving to Keene after graduation, but recently the excitement hasn’t been as bright. I hear of inner-city arguments and a thick divide between the Free Staters and the pre-FSP residents of Keene. I can’t point out the real cause of this conflict seeing as I don’t live in the city yet, but it’s either (1) the rude actions of Free Staters, (2) the arrogant opinions of the other Keene residents, or (3) a troubled mixture of the two. A number of the comments made at a recent city council meeting were simply nonsensical. I don’t mean to be rude by saying that, but it’s difficult to ignore someone who promotes the idea that legislation should be based on human emotions.

One woman stated, “The crime is that what’s going on in Central Square is degrading our town. It’s causing people to be upset.” The accusations of intimidation, from what I’ve heard, include anything from smoking marijuana to cursing to real threats.

When it comes to smoking marijuana, you need to realize that the action isn’t hurting you. The only difference between a tobacco smoker and a marijuana smoker sitting on a bench in Central Square is the plant the individual is smoking. One woman at the meeting admitted that she can’t even tell the difference sometimes. You shouldn’t deem the latter an aggressive action if the former is not. In other words, please choose your battles.

Cursing is the second accusation, and it lands in the hands of the Free Staters. Legally, you can’t police language. It is a ridiculous sentiment to declare that people should be thrown into jail for saying an ‘inappropriate’ word out loud; that kind of legislation leads to an extremely slippery slope. However, as we all know, some words and phrases are culturally inappropriate in many circumstances. I certainly use a fair share of curse words throughout the day, but I would never use them in front of children. Likewise, business owners have complained that their patrons feel intimidated by the words being yelled by individuals. As a polite gesture of mending this broken relationship, I can only hope that a few Free Staters will take the lead and resolve this dispute within the community

The woman continued, “I talked to someone just today who said that they were thinking—when they retired—of buying property down here where they could walk around and shop. And they now feel so intimidated by what’s going on downtown that they would no longer consider doing that in Keene, New Hampshire.” The could-have-been residents of Keene didn’t like that people smoked outside and enjoyed listening to music late at night with their friends. That’s too bad for them. I also don’t like the amount of fast food joints in my current city but I don’t plan on contacting the city council in order to legally prohibit individuals from putting into their bodies what they desire. Quite frankly, our constitutional rights don’t end where another person’s feelings begin.

Third, if someone literally threatens you, call the police. Threatening to aggress against an individual is in direct violation of the non-aggression principle, one of the fundamental axioms of ethicality by which all voluntaryists abide. People who threaten or attack individuals cease to be true voluntaryists. As one man from the city council meeting stated, “Be proactive.” Find out the name of the individual who threatens you, or, better yet, take a picture of the person. Cameras are one of the best tools for transparency, and this tactic can be especially useful in the employment of reputation accountability. Let people in the Free State Project know exactly who threatened you; if their menacing actions continue, they may very well be shunned from the libertarian community. But don’t call the police when people are simply talking at night on a bench or smoking marijuana under the gazebo, or else you’ll end up as Aesop’s boy who cried wolf.

Another conflict was introduced by Carmelina Tonkinson, the owner of Miranda’s On Main: “I understand that these young adults have a right to sit there, but I, as a business owner, have a right to make money and have a business. I have customers that are walking out of my door, not wanting to shop, leaving [due to the troublemakers].”

There’s a little more to this situation than originally meets the eye, and it involves the definition of property. Carmelina is correct saying that she has the freedom to make money and open a business. She owns her store, capital, and entrepreneurial skills; she doesn’t, however, own her customers’ wishes or the competition in the free market.

Take Amicci’s Italian Pizza as an example. The owner, like Carmelina, owns the store, capital, and entrepreneurial skills. But to say that he owns the value of his property means that it would be legal to prohibit a competing pizza place from opening nearby for fear that the value of his own business would decrease. The same can be said if a customer were to put up a negative review of Armadillo’s Burritos. Should the owner be able to legally prohibit that reviewer from sharing an opinion about the store? The answer is no.

In essence—you own your property, not the value of the property. The solution to the ‘troublemaker conflict’ in Downtown Square will need to focus the ownership of real property. The gazebo area, as it stands, is public property and therefore the common ground belongs to all taxpayers, so unfortunately business owners around the area have no more say than the troublemakers do in terms of what happens on that property.

As Ludwig von Mises wrote, “If land is not owned by anybody, although legal formalism may call it public property, it is utilized without any regard to the disadvantages resulting. Those who are in a position to appropriate to themselves the returns—lumber and game of the forests, fish of the water areas, and mineral deposits of the subsoil—do not bother about the later effects of their mode of exploitation.” Likewise, the accusations of troublemakers hanging around the gazebo perfectly parallel the tragedy of the commons. People feel free to ‘misbehave’ on the unowned property because nobody has any stake in it. To me, the solution is quite clear: privatize the gazebo area.

One of the easiest ways to complete this transaction is through an auction. This purchase certainly has its notable libertarian detractors since it officially validates the government as the owner of the land instead of proceeding through the natural homesteading principle of ownership. However, I see this mediation as a fantastic way to refresh a friendship between the Free State Project and other Keene residents. I have one quick opinion on the contract details and one little recommendation to the local business owners.

The sale will put money into the hands of the government. This is an idea that most libertarians, including me, dislike. In order to alleviate the inevitable dispute, create a legal clarification that the deal between auctioneer and bidder will (1) allocate the transferred monies into the subsequent year’s treasury account at the local level—I cannot stress this point enough—and (2) be supplemented by a permanent decrease in taxes for the amount transferred since government maintenance is no longer required.

The recommendation to business owners on Main Street is to create a collection of money for the charity. Group together with nine other business owners, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll easily out-bid other individuals. The only exception that may compete against your attempt to purchase the land is another group of ten intelligent business owners. If you succeed in legally acquiring the land, the gazebo area can be used as you see fit without the unauthorized use and trespass by troublemakers.

Run it as a co-op organization, if you’d like. The purchase can still look exactly like public land in order to enrich the surrounding business atmosphere, but each member of your board of directors will have control over who is allowed to enter and for which reasons. Most of all, the purchase will become real property. Libertarians—more than any other political faction—respect private property, and for that reason they’ll respect the newly-owned gazebo area in a polite manner in accordance with libertarian principle.

I really do look forward to living in Keene in two years. I’ll feel extremely lucky to find a fantastic job near liberty-minded people like the individuals in the Free State Project. Until we meet, illegitimi non carborundum—don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Your friend in freedom,
Brian Anderson

Because pollution is a more widespread form of property damage, a strict liability system will go a long way on its own to prevent indiscriminate dumping. It was, historically, a breach of strict liability that allowed pollution to continue in the first place. Because each company will have to pay the full cost of any damage they may do by polluting, be it in the air, on the surface, or underground, they will tend to be much more careful about the disposal of waste products.

Insurance companies, which are hired to protect a company from high liability costs, will also want to prevent pollution. They will likely insist, as part of any liability coverage contract, on pollution controls appropriate to the business at hand. Even if a company does not purchase liability coverage, the companies which insure the property of those who may be damaged would have a strong incentive to contract with potential polluters to install such controls. Should this not be possible, the insurance company would have a motive to purchase the potentially polluting facilities and sell them to a new owner who won’t pollute.

Even properties that are today unowned can be protected in this way. Oceans will likely be homesteaded by fisheries and shipping companies. Undeveloped wilderness will either be developed, or possibly become the property of groups wishing to preserve them in their natural state. The owners of these properties would have a claim against anyone who polluted them.

Without the state, pollution can easily be prevented by market forces. With strict liability, it’s not in the interest of companies to pollute. Insurance can contractually prevent pollution both to reduce a companies liability, and to protect other clients property, and with virtually all property becoming owned, pollution can’t be done without damaging somebody, who will seek redress.

The student focus is possible because of the incredibly small class size. Two teachers, and only the students they produce. This is a great help with topics the student finds difficult, the parent/teacher can take as much time as is needed to instruct the student in the topic, as there is no worry about holding the rest of the class back. The entire curriculum can be centered around the students interests, which is the surest way to make them want to learn.

Parental involvement shouldn’t be overlooked either. While the curriculum can be centered around the student, the parent acts as a guide, directing the overall course of instruction, and helping to build new topics onto older information. School is also never quite out. Educational games, family vacations, and plain old conversation are all opportunities to instruct, and to learn.

As for cost, it’s mostly going to be the costs of raising a child anyway. Add in a few textbooks, which could be traded with other parents, bought used, or bought new then later sold. Of course homeschooling or unschooling anticipates that one parent will be home to raise and instruct the student, but there’s no reason that can’t include working from home if the income is needed. There’s also no need to pay for things like classrooms, computer labs, gyms, libraries, or the various other things that a school needs.

With a student driven curriculum, high level of parental involvement, and low cost, homeschooling or unschooling may just be the chosen method of education without the state. Again I can’t emphasize enough that there’s no need for money to be taken by force from anyone to pay for this, or any other service currently a function of the state.

There are many options for offering Education in a voluntary, stateless society. The most basic is the creation of private schools, paid for by students or their parents. Homeschooling, which is growing in popularity even in the current society, is a second clear option. I also think unschooling, which is a relatively new method of learning, is an interesting and viable option. There are of course other options, but one essay is not enough room to cover all of them.

Private schools exist even today, drawing in students who’s parents are dissatisfied with the public school system. Religious and secular schools offer a variety of educational options to students, often at less cost than the public schools. It seems that private schools are only for the rich, and today there is some truth to that. After all, the poor can only afford to pay for school once and, because of taxes, they have to pay for public schools. So those are the schools they use. It’s a given that competition benefits the consumer in every market. Better products, better prices, better service. If schools have to compete to attract students, (and their parents who foot the bill) they have to offer the best, most useful education, in the most interesting manner, at the lowest cost possible. Because schools are focused on attracting students, and on retaining those they have, they must focus on educating the student and meeting his or her needs. To do otherwise is a recipe for failure.

Homeschooling, where the parent is the primary instructor of their own children, has been increasingly popular over the last few decades. A parent can focus on his or her children, and their education, in a way a teacher in a class of 30+ students could never achieve. Think of it as the smallest class size possible. There are vast resources available to help the homeschooling parent. Books, study guides, educational software, and the whole of the Internet can be harnessed to teach. The curriculum can be adjusted to the individual student needs, without disrupting the rest of the ‘class’. If little Johnny is having difficulty with fractions in public school, he’s told to study harder, and the class goes on without him. In a home-school setting, the parent can focus on Johnny’s difficulty with fractions, and move on to more mathematics when he understands the concept.

The last option I’m covering, unschooling, is relatively new. The idea is to allow the student to direct their own learning, while the parent assists with research and guidance. Is little Sally suddenly interested in dinosaurs? Well now is the time to teach as much as she wants to learn about these fascinating animals. Sounds like lessons in Biology, Chemistry, zoology, geology, astrophysics, and climatology can all be focused around this new interest. Again the vast knowledge of the Internet, libraries full of books, and museums can all be used to increase the students knowledge. If needed, private tutors can be hired to teach difficult subjects, often at a very low cost.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the options available. What about schools offered by charities? How about commercially sponsored schools, Ronald McDonald High School anyone? Scholarships that seek out the best students and pay for them to go to the best schools. Companies that agree to pay for an older students school if they come work for the company when they finish. The possibilities are truly endless

Between private schools, homeschools and unschooling, there is a vast array of possibilities for education in a voluntary society. Best of all, nobody has to be threatened with jail to pay for it. Like all services currently provided by the state, the private market can provide education to everyone. We’ve only scratched the surface of what is available in terms of education, and that’s just what I alone can see. Imagine if you can, what will happen when every person is looking for the best way to provide education. The idea that the best method is to give a small group of people the exclusive power to force everybody to pay them to teach won’t even make the list.