What insights had the biggest impact on your intellectual development?
Here's a couple of mine:
1 - Taxation is robbery (Spooner, Rothbard)
2 - Omnipresent anarchy (Cuzan's "Do we ever really get out of anarchy?")
3 - Gain vs loss orientation (Bored Zwazi)
4 - The Constitution is just a piece of paper (Spooner)
5 - Socialism/Capitalism is a false dichotomy; the ultimate dichotomy is between aggression/nonaggression.
What about you?
LibertarianAnarchy.com - Government is immoral, unnecessary, and doesn't work!
Sage:5 - Socialism/Capitalism is a false dichotomy; the ultimate dichotomy is between aggression/nonaggression.
How is it a false dichotomy. The other two dichotomies you presented are identical.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
Bob Dylan
Sage:4 - The Constitution is just a piece of paper (Spooner)
Yes, and if it were followed correctly or even at all today, the world would be a better place. Not perfect, but better.
Now, mine:
1) The highest authority on earth is not God or the State, but my reasoning mind. Everything else followed from this.
1 - The path to financial success lies not in "doing what you love/like" but on maximizing your return on time invested and doing what you like in your leisure time (resulting in more time to devote to intellectual pursuits)
2 - Financial return on time invested is maximized by pursuing entrepreneurship, not getting a fancy degree and then going to work for the man and climbing the ladder (entering the entrepreneurial mindset has been quite intellectually liberating and illuminating)
3 - Intellectuals chart the path towards the free society, but the heavy lifting must be done by entrepreneurs and politicians, i.e. intellectuals are action-averse, and change results only from action (despite the common theme that education and ideology will carry the day)
4 - Rhetoric is more important than a sound argument, in convincing others (having a sound argument helps, of course)
5 - Women want the c**k as much as men want the p***y (not really related to intellectual development but certainly life-altering and worthy of note)
"He that struggles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper." Edmund Burke
The free market solves for any over-population/over-consumption of natural resources problem.
Of course there have been many for me (as it is for others, as well), but I can certainly pinpoint the first insight that lead me down the path towards anarchism.
My lifelong wife (or, according to the government, my wife-to-be) is African-American, and I am your typical European-Native-American U.S. citizen mutt. Some friends of mine retained their behavior of making general stereotypes of the black race living within the United States, most of which are backed by statistics. I found offense to these early on, naturally, and argued that they were being "racist." Over time, they were able to defend most of their sweeping stereotypes as accurate, which I was probably aware of the entire time this was occurring... I just felt obligated to play defensively. Furthermore, they took the initiative to make many everyday statements that I would make about groups of people as "racist," signifying that I had been brainwashed in regard to what I considered racism.
Amongst these arguments, my then minarchist friends (who moved into anarchism as I did) brought to light the fact that the negative aspects of African-American society were largely due to the government, despite the actions taken to minimize the negative aspects of the largely black ghetto. The logic used to defend this was very basic and made a lot of sense--it was at this point that I slowly but surely began to second guess the choices that government made in regard to every aspect of our lives that eventually lead to my current beliefs.
Taxation is robbery (Spooner, Rothbard)
taxation is rent. the right of the government to collect it lies in virtue of the fact that they do in fact collect it.
^That insight came when i realized that most thinking about governments involves magic logic jumps rather than just seeing government for what it is, people who control the land and people of a certain area. what is "right" has had the same historical impact as flying dolphins.
A slow but sure realization that collectivism is very dangerous... not that it can't be fun in small doses, but it's quite a bit like playing with fire (only far more destructive).
Except fire has very productive and beneficial uses....
Just because I believe something, it does not make it the truth. The truth is the truth wether I believe it or not. That inspires me to question things and to allow people to share their views with me, knowing that the worst that could happen is I am proved wrong, and perhaps find the truth.
I can think of the following off the top of my head (in order of memory, not importance); some of these were fairly early insights but I didn't fully realize their consequences until later:1.) Good becomes evil when it requires so (or to rephrase: good men become evil when they think the ends justify the means). 2.) The Tyranny of Good Intentions (related to the above).3.) Reality is not subjective, but the perception of reality is.4.) Most of the puberty-ridden angry/depression in youth I experienced was morally justified, but intellectually naive. Most of it turned out to be true, one way or another, also. 5.) Taxation is theft (Rothbard &Co.)6.) "Being an intellectual & a humanist is about as rebellious as it gets nowadays".7.) Any and/or all of Bad Religion's lyrics at some point in time.8.) Observing hierarchy (in action) in real life was a real eye opener for me; the best example was high school, & if I could back in time to talk to my past self, would probably have no problem convincing him to be a libertarian and/or market-anarchist. I actually have way too many that come to mind for a simple forum post... hmm... this would be a better blog entry (or series of). Oh well
WARNING: This signature violates Rule 5. Stay classy!
The individual is the most important element on Earth. Something the state cannot create but only destroy.
nazgulnarsil:taxation is rent. the right of the government to collect it lies in virtue of the fact that they do in fact collect it.
LOL. So if A kills B, then A has the right to kill B in virtue of the fact that A killed B? Dubious reasoning, to say the least...
Here are a few that come to mind:
1) Praxeology as the philosophical foundation of social science.
2) Property rights and consent as the basis of ethics.
3) The utter vacuity of the defenses of statism (e.g. "the government ought to do this and that because it is necessary.")
Diminishing Marginal Utility - IT'S THE LAW!
Math is useless.
Microsecession as a strategy for revolution | Challenge to minarchist | How would a private road system work?
1. One no-man is worth ten yes-men.
2. The economy is not a zero-sum game.
3. The map is not the territory [Language is not the nervous functions it inevitably abstracts from].
4. "Should" should be followed with "if" if one wishes to avoid elementalism.
5. Structure characterizes the content of all knowledge.
6. Studying the arguments of one's detractors is the quickest path to clarity.
7. The Way requires internal transformation.
"Melody is a form of remembrance. It must have a quality of inevitability in our ears." - Gian Carlo Menotti
Exchange is an universal principle of our life and some more which have sense only in complexicity so,
Can anybody help me!?
I wrote an article of about 10000 words which I called "Libeval morality" Absolutely different approach to the problem of ethics (the only correct one in my opinion from the liberal point of view ) from the ones that i know of. HOw to place it so that anybody interested could read it?
would be grateful for any advice
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