This a blog I previously wrote on another platform, but frankly, this seems to be the more logical place for it!
So here, through the magic of copy and paste, is my first Steemit blog!
In my blogs, you will find a recurring pattern....
1. A fairly undisguised hatred of government and centralised power structures in general.
2. A fondness of liberty and freedom
3. Awkwardly implemented jokes.
The above (part 3 aside), can be labelled under a large number of beliefs: Libertarianism, Anarcho-Capitalism, and Anarchism are all words that I wouldn’t be ashamed of using, although I have slight issues with each of them.
Libertarian essentially means you believe in liberty, which I do, but it can be vague as many people along the political spectrum call themselves “libertarian”, and can do so as its meaning isn’t pinned down.
Anarchist (a belief in not having rulers) is also something that fits my views fairly neatly. The problem with this title is two-fold:
1. The term has unfortunately been co-opted by morons, who dress in black and who think that they’re “striking against the man” by throwing rocks through Starbucks and McDonalds windows during international meetings. They usually have no real concept of what they stand for and generally end up giving the term “anarchist” a bad name.
2. Anarchist isn’t specific enough for me, as you could be a murdering, raping monster and still technically fall under the Anarchist label, as all Anarchism means is opposing the existence of a ruling class.
The term I found that matches my views most accurately is “Voluntaryist”. A Voluntaryist is someone who opposes the initiation of violence and who believes all human interaction should be voluntary. Since government is always coercive by its very nature, a voluntaryist is also an anarchist.
I came to this realisation over a period of time.
Economics and Centralisation
Starting with studying economics in college, bit by bit I found that economies and societies tend to thrive when government interferes less in the working of said economies. That government intervention can lead to unintended consequences which make the problem they try to fix, worse.
I found that when people are allowed to spend their own money, they will invariably do so more efficiently than the government could on their behalf as only the individual knows exactly what the individual wants. In this sense, I came to see high tax rates as a negative imposition upon people.
I found that products tend to be priced more efficiently and the products themselves improve within a market system as competing companies battle to improve products and provide those products at a better price so as to gain market share. This would in turn create a better environment for the consumer.
I found that the nations that have managed to turn things around from poverty to prosperity didn’t do so by strict central planning, but by freeing up their economies. India and China while still heavily reliant on state planning have improved massively in recent decades from their liberalisation efforts. The difference between North Korea/South Korea, or even historically, East Germany/West Germany was the realisation by one side that the market can be used to create wealth and prosperity, while those on the less developed side believed almost entirely in central planning.
Involuntary Violence
So my journey towards voluntarism started as simply a realisation that freer people in freer markets tend to lead to greater prosperity and innovation.
Over time that evolved. I started to see that not only is a large, powerful government not good for the economy, but that it could be seen as an immoral entity. I came to believe that even if it was positive for the economy, that it was an institution based on violence and coercion.
I came to see that the worst evils of the world haven’t been eliminated by government, but that government was the creator of the greatest evils of the world.
I often hear about “big evil corporations” but what corporation has done anything that can compare to the Holocaust? No company dreamed up the gulags, or dropped atomic bombs, etc etc.
Wars are not waged by corporations. Apple workers aren’t going to take up arms and go slaughter the families of Dell workers.
I came to realise that government is simply a power structure that makes up its own rules to perpetuate itself. It creates rules for citizens to live by, that it, itself does not.
If I steal someone’s money and give it to charity, I’m a thief. When government takes your money without your consent and threatens you with violence if you don’t hand it over, it’s called taxes.
If I hired a hitman to kill people with that stolen money, people that I believed were bad , I would be put in prison and the hitman along with me.
When government uses your confiscated taxes to pay people to go to war with people it believes are bad people, the politicians are never put on trial and the people they hired to do the job are labelled heroes, unless they are on the losing side.
I finally realised that putting on a specific uniform or having a particular government job doesn’t change the morality of your actions. Murder is murder and theft is theft.
I began to realise that the democratic system that gives supposed legitimacy to the whole system is just a smokescreen. The majority should not have the right to take the freedom of the minority away.
It’s this same logic that kept gay marriage illegal. As long as the majority were against it, the minority could not be free.
This of course ignores the fact that it’s usually not even a majority that elects a government. In the UK the Conservative party recently came to power with less than ¼ of eligible voters voting for them.
But I digress. My belief is a simple one. I believe that the initiation of force is wrong. I believe it is wrong to coerce peaceful people into doing things against their will, when their actions are no danger to others. This belief is widely known as “The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP)” and is the building block of voluntaryist thought.
When part of your salary is taken every week, without your expressed consent, this is theft. If you try to protect your property, the state will do everything within its power to confiscate that property and depending on the level, to which you try to deny them that property, will use extreme force.
They can conceivably drag you from your home, and should they come to the conclusion that you refused to hand over your property to them, they will dictate that you broke the rules that they wrote.
You can then be put in a cell for a length of time that they choose to be adequate.
As you can see, pretty much every step in this process can be seen as a violation of the NAP.
”But who’d pick the cotton?”
The argument that roads, schools, hospitals, sunshine and happiness are paid for by these confiscated funds is irrelevant. It is a system built on the threat, and if that doesn’t work that actual initiation of violence against non-violent people.
When people ask me “But who’d build the roads”, I used to often go into a long discussion about the possibilities of private ownership, that in essence, the same people who build them now, would build them without government.
Nowadays, I don’t even feel the need to justify who’d build these roads. I don’t care who’d build the roads. If you could prove to me, beyond all reasonable doubt that we’d be living in caves, draped in loincloth if it weren’t for our current system of governance, I still would oppose it.
In the same way, if I was alive 170 years ago in America, I would disregard that anti-abolitionist who asked “but who’ll pick the cotton”….it doesn’t matter, and I don’t care. Slavery is wrong and whether or not cotton got picked is irrelevant.
This is how I feel about our system of governance.
The argument that “People can’t rule themselves, and that there must be oversight” is also illogical.
The argument is essentially, that because people can make bad decisions, and that people in general are fallible, there must be an over-arching entity that protects them from themselves….this entity being government…which is made up of people…voted in by the same people that are apparently not smart enough to run their own lives.
Genius…
Conclusion
So there you have it. A brief synopsis of how I came to be one of those people who fills his friend’s Facebook feed with extreme political views and who gets into day long YouTube arguments about government and its sinister power.
The guy who most people think is a bit of a political extremist weirdo.
It’s a good life