1. Libertarianism

Category Archives: Libertarianism

Libertarians true identity revealed: Rich conservatives OK with gay people, basically

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The New York Times Magazine recentlywondered at lengthif the long-prophecied Libertarian Moment had finally arrived. Why, just look at the prevailing attitudes in America: openness to same-sex marriage and liberalization of drug laws, aversion to long-term overseas military deployments (wars), and um Obama is unpopular so people hate government regulation now, maybe? Sure. Well, no. As we wrote, libertarianism as a package is going to be a hard sell to the public as long as it dismisses concerns over economic insecurity and insists upon dismantling the regulatory state and large social insurance programs. But hey, its great that libertarians and liberals have common ground on and are making headway in social and criminal justice policy.

Who would be the foot soldiers in this Libertarian Moment thats not really arriving? The usual, well-funded thinkers that have given the movement a disproportionately large voice within debates in Washington, D.C., for decades Reason magazine, the Cato Institute along with a few MTV VJs from the 90s. Also: Rand Paul! Rand Paul is the son of a libertarian and is sort of a libertarian himself and is going to be the next president, after all. And then America will finally be the sexy free-market rock n roll paradise of libertarians imagination. There is a plan, folks.

But any political movement is going to need more than just a few magazines and think tanks and a scion whose political future depends on the extent to which hes willing to water down his libertarianism. Meaning: Libertarianism needs a lot more libertarians. If libertarianism is going to be the wave of the future, a significant portion of the American populace should a) know what libertarianism is and then b) subscribe to it.

Right now that portion is 11 percent not nothing, but also 11 percent. Thats the figure according to Pew of Americans who both say they are libertarian and know the definition of the term.

Youd expect, then, that those who know what libertarianism is and call themselves libertarians would be broadly in favor of the whole ideological package: social liberalism, for lack of a better term, anti-police state, anti-interventionist, and hella anti-economic regulation and so forth small government, all around.

Thats not necessarily the case among those 11 percent, Pew finds. The 11 percent are, indeed, more likely than the public overall to say government aid to the poor does more harm than good by making people too dependent on government assistance, and somewhat more likely than the public overall to say government regulation of business does more harm than good.Theyre also more likely than the public overall to support legalizing marijuana.

But on cops and foreign policy? Self-identified libertarians-who-generally-know-what-libertarianism-is are a little more supportive than the public overall of letting police do whatever the hell they want and bombing everyone all the time (although the foreign policy question is spectacularly vague):

And they are about as likely as others to favor allowing the police to stop and search anyone who fits the general description of a crime suspect (42% of libertarians, 41% of the public).

Similarly, self-described libertarians do not differ a great deal from the public in opinions about foreign policy. Libertarianism is generally associated with a less activist foreign policy, yet a greater share of self-described libertarians (43%) than the public (35%) think it is best for the future of our country to be active in world affairs.

Pew ran another math-y thing to figure out which cluster, or political type, these self-identified libertarians are most closely aligned with. Youll never guess which cluster came out on top! It rhymes with Schmusiness Schmonservatives.

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Libertarians true identity revealed: Rich conservatives OK with gay people, basically

Peter Schiff please come back to libertarianism and capitalism! – Video

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Peter Schiff please come back to libertarianism and capitalism!
Watch the full Keiser Report here: http://youtu.be/-FXKXH7gvmw In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss bitcoin converts and the dual risk of deflation and...

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Peter Schiff please come back to libertarianism and capitalism! - Video

Letter: Give Libertarians a look

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Keen, have you ever heard of a situation where a parent, no matter how good a job he's done of raising his kid, finds himself in a situation where the kid's done something really bad and it's become necessary to put your hand on the kid's shoulder to make the point just how bad this is? That little pressure of your palm next to his neck is in both your minds an extreme physical measure, compared with the talkings-to you've administered in the past and you both know it. It's as close as you'll ever come to hitting the kid but, again, in your minds, things have come to the pretty pass that made it exigent you make your point.

Now, what about the kids of people who aren't nearly the good parent you are? We're surrounded by them, other people's kids, and can you deny that it seems like many don't listen to anything but a good smack in the kisser because that's either the way they were raised or that's just the way some people seem to be.

Okay, so much, for now, for not hitting people; what about whose stuff is whose?

You were born, probably, in the '50s; you don't say and it's not really important exactly when. Presumably, you were born in this country or raised here; you don't say and, again, it's not important. It's likely, though, that some time after you started to walk, your parents told you not to play in the street. (Maybe they even smacked you one time when you didn't listen.) It wasn't until years later, maybe, that you wondered how that street got there?

It's not a natural outcropping, Keen.

Somebody put it there and that somebody was us, way back when. An integral part of our parents' parents agreeing to get together and live was fixing up the place so it was livable. Streets and roads were early on the list as were places to do the public business. Places, you know, like courts? Like the Supreme Court, where you beat Waubaunsee County when they messed with you? Streets and roads and public buildings and lots of other things situated on land that, in a large number of cases, was somebody else's stuff. It doesn't take a lawyer or nuclear physicist to figure out that somebody had to give (or get smacked) and the world's full of stories of givers who didn't take kindly to the notion. Guys just like you.

Now, instead of typing forever on what could turn into a long, philosophical rambling about all of this stuff, I'm going to stop and ask you: unless each and every person in the state thinks and acts just like you and is as smart as you are (at least), what makes you think that you'll ever get things working the way you want--short of having yourself appointed dictator?

Your libertarianism, how is getting that to work going to be any less insurmountable a problem than the one the Communists faced in Russia almost 100 years ago and how's it going to turn out any better, in practice, when you have to concede that mere changes in government form or economic form, imposed on a populace that hasn't changed an iota, are doomed?

I can guarantee you that when you come to take my stuff, I resist and you smack me, I'm not going to like it.

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Letter: Give Libertarians a look

Radio 3Fourteen – M.K. Lords – Agorism, Bitcoin, Libertarianism vs. Anarchism – Video

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Radio 3Fourteen - M.K. Lords - Agorism, Bitcoin, Libertarianism vs. Anarchism
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Radio 3Fourteen - M.K. Lords - Agorism, Bitcoin, Libertarianism vs. Anarchism - Video

Jan Lester "A Critical Commentary on the Zwolinski 2013 "Libertarianism and Liberty"" – Video

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Jan Lester "A Critical Commentary on the Zwolinski 2013 "Libertarianism and Liberty""
On Tuesday 20th May 2014, Jan Lester gave a talk on "A Critical Commentary on the Zwolinski 2013 "Libertarianism and Liberty" Essays on libertarianism.org" t...

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Jan Lester "A Critical Commentary on the Zwolinski 2013 "Libertarianism and Liberty"" - Video

How 3-D Printed Guns Evolved Into Serious Weapons in Just One Year

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Its been a full year since I watched the radical libertarian group Defense Distributed test fire the Liberator, the first fully printable gun, for the first time. Imura is one of a growing number of digital gunsmiths who saw the potential of that controversial breakthrough and have strived to improve upon the Liberators clunky, single-shot design. Motivated by a mix of libertarianism, gun rights advocacy and open-source experimentation, their innovations include rifles, derringers, multi-round handguns and the components needed to assemble semi-automatic weapons. Dozens of other designs are waiting to be tested.

The result of all this tinkering may be the first advancements that significantly move 3-D printed firearms from the realm of science fiction to practical weapons.

With the Liberator we were trying to communicate a kind of singularity, to create a moment, says Cody Wilson, who founded Defense Distributed and hand-fired the first 3-D printed gun in May, 2013. The broad recognition of this idea seemed to flip a switch in peoples mindsWe knew that people would make this their own.

Even as the DIY community has refined and remixed 3-D printed guns, its left legislators and regulators in the dust. Congressional efforts last year to place restrictions on printed, plastic weapons within the renewed Undetectable Firearms Act fell flat. That said, the legality of 3-D printing a gun in the United States remains unclear, which explains why most of the gun designers contacted by WIRED declined to comment or wished to do so anonymously.

Despite that legal ambiguity, it took only weeks for digital gunsmiths to improve upon the first fully 3-D printed gun. Defense Distributed printed the first Liberator in May, 2013, using a second-hand refrigerator-sized Stratasys 3-D printer it bought for $8,000. Later that month, a gun enthusiast in Wisconsin riffed on the Liberator to produce a working firearm for far less, using a $1,725 Lulzbot printer with less than $25 in plastic. It fired eight .38-caliber bullets without damage.

Two months later came the first fully 3-D printed rifle, built by a Canadian gunsmith identified only as Matthew. The gun, which he calls the Grizzly, fires .22-caliber bullets. In the video below, it fires three shots. Another clip, since pulled from YouTube, shows him hand-firing it 14 times. Wilson calls the Grizzly the best, first improvement on the Liberator.

The Grizzly, like the Liberator, requires removing the barrel to load a new round after each shot. But less than a month after Matthew unveiled the Grizzly, another gunsmith who calls himself Free-D or Franco test-fired a five-shot derringer revolver he calls the Reprringer. It shoots low-power .22-caliber rounds. Though the tiny revolver isnt entirely 3-D printedit uses 8mm metal tube inserts in each barrel and several screwsits metal components seem to allow for a far more compact design, making the the Reprringer the smallest working 3-D printed gun publicly tested.

The blueprint for that miniature six-shooter, along with dozens of other firearms, gun parts and even explosives like grenades and mortar rounds, are hosted online by FOSSCAD, the Free Open Source Software & Computer Aided Design. The group spun out of Cody Wilsons online gun printing community known as Defcad.

Most of FOSSCADs designs havent been publicly tested, and its loose-knit members are reluctant to reveal their identities. But one anonymous member summed up the groups motivations: First, I like guns, he wrote via instant message. And second, I think you should be able to 3-D print virtually anything you want.

Aside from the Reprringer, the anonymous FOSSCAD member noted another new, proven design that may be far more practicaland have far more serious implicationsthan fully-printed guns: a key part of a semi-automatic weapon called the lower receiver. That part, which comprises most of the body of a gun, is the most regulated element of a firearm. Print a lower receiver, and you can buy the rest of a guns components off the shelf without an ID or waiting period.

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How 3-D Printed Guns Evolved Into Serious Weapons in Just One Year

Bryan Caplan

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Bryan Caplan is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. His major fields of interest are Public Choice, Public Finance, and Monetary Economics. Currently, his primary research interest is Public Economics.

A great deal of his professional work has been devoted to the philosophies of libertarianism and free-market capitalism. He has published in notable journals such as American Economic Review, Public Choice, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, Social Science Quarterly, and Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economic, among others. He is a blogger at EconLog along with Arnold Kling, and occasionally has been a guest blogger at Marginal Revolution with two of his colleagues at George Mason, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.

Caplan is the author of the upcoming book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, which contends that the greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. The November 2006 issue of Cato Unbound tackled these controversial arguments, with Caplan providing the lead essay.

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Bryan Caplan

What Individualism Is Not

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The bottle is now labeled libertarianism. But its content is nothing new; it is what in the nineteenth century, and up to the time of Franklin Roosevelt, was called liberalism the advocacy of limited government and a free economy. (If you think of it, you will see that there is a redundancy in this formula, for a government of limited powers would have little chance of interfering with the economy.) The liberals were robbed of their time-honored name by the unprincipled socialists and near socialists, whose avidity for prestige words knows no bounds. So, forced to look for another and distinctive label for their philosophy, they came up with libertarianism good enough but somewhat difficult for the tongue.

They might have done better by adopting the older and more meaningful name of individualism, but they bypassed it because it too had been more than sullied by its opponents ...

The mudslinging started long ago, but the more recent and best-known orgy occurred in the early part of the century when the heaven-by-way-of-government muckrakers attached to individualism a value-impregnated adjective rugged. The word itself has no moral content; when applied to a mountain it is purely descriptive, when applied to an athlete it carries a favorable connotation. But, in the literary usage of the muckrakers, it designated what in plain language would be called skulduggery. It has no more to do with a philosophy than has any form of indecent behavior. Thus, the rugged individualist was the fellow who threatened to foreclose the mortgage on the old homestead if the fair damsel refused his hand in marriage; or he was the speculator who made use of the stock market to rob widows and orphans; or he was the fat and florid buccaneer who lavished diamonds on his ladylove. He was, in short, a fellow whose conscience presented no obstacle to his inclination to grab a dollar, and who recognized no code of ethics that might curb his appetites. If there is any difference between an ordinary thief and a rugged individualist, it is in the fact that the latter almost always keeps within the letter of the law, even if he has to rewrite the law to do so ...

Rugged individualism was a propaganda phrase of the first order. It was most useful in bringing the soak-the-rich urgency to a boiling point.

The phrase gained currency at the time when the leveling mania was fighting its way into the American tradition, before the government, making full use of the new power it had acquired under the income tax law, took hold of the individual by the scruff of the neck and made a mass-man out of him. It is an odd fact that the socialist is quite in agreement with the rugged individualist in advocating the use of political force to achieve ones good; the difference between them is only in determining the incidence, or the recipient, of government-given good. It is doubtful whether the robber barons (a synonym for rugged individualists) ever used the government, before the income tax, with anything like the vigor and success of the socialists. At any rate, the stigma of ruggedness has stuck, so that the collectivist intellectuals, who ought to know better, are unaware of the difference between thievery and individualism.

Original Smear Words

The besmirching of individualism, however, had a good start before the modern era. The original defamers were not socialists but solid proponents of status, the upholders of special privilege, the mercantilists of the nineteenth century. Their opposition stemmed in part from the fact that individualism leaned heavily on the burgeoning doctrine of the free market, of laissez-faire economics, and as such presented a challenge to their preferred position. So they dug into the age-old bag of semantics and came up with two smear words: selfish and materialistic. Just like the later socialists, they had no compunction about twisting the truth to suit their argument.

Laissez-faire that is to say, an economy free of political interventions and subventions holds that the instinct of self-interest is the motive power of productive effort. Nothing is produced except by human labor, and labor is something the human being is most parsimonious about; if he could satisfy his desires without effort, he would gladly dispense with it. That is why he invents labor-saving devices. But he is so constituted that every gratification gives rise to new desire, which he proceeds to satisfy by investing the labor he saved. He is insatiable. The log cabin that was palace enough in the wilderness seems quite inadequate as soon as the pioneer accumulates a surplus of necessaries, and then he begins to dream of curtains and pictures, inside plumbing, a school or a church, to say nothing of baseball or Beethoven. Self-interest overcomes his aversion to labor in his constant drive to improve his circumstances and widen his horizon ...

It is in the free market that self-interest finds its finest expression; that is a cardinal point in individualism. If the market is regularly raided, by robbers or the government, and the safety of property is impaired, the individual loses interest in production, and the abundance of things men live by shrinks. Hence, it is for the good of society that self-interest in the economic sphere be allowed to operate without hindrance.

But self-interest is not selfishness. Self-interest will impel the manufacturer to improve upon his output so as to attract trade, while selfishness will prompt him to seek the special privileges and state favor that in the end destroy the very system of economic freedom on which he depends. The worker who tries to improve his lot by rendering better service could hardly be called selfish; the description rather fits the worker who demands that he be paid for not working. The subsidy seeker is selfish, and so is every citizen who uses the law to enrich himself at the expense of other citizens.

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What Individualism Is Not

AnCap Libertarianism is Corporations Run Amok! Response to a Viewer Comment. – Video

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AnCap Libertarianism is Corporations Run Amok! Response to a Viewer Comment.
This episode is to serve as an introduction the channel, and an answer to a viewer question, submitted on this video: http://youtu.be/YNg_rgbIQZs I want to t...

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AnCap Libertarianism is Corporations Run Amok! Response to a Viewer Comment. - Video


  1. Libertarianism