(Previously posted to Patreon)
I would still rather be right- be accepting of reality- than be comfortable. I'd rather be right than be libertarian.
If reality doesn't support liberty, then I want to be aware of it and accept it and figure out what the reality is.
I don't want cognitive dissonance or compartmentalization to get in the way. Fantasies about how things are might be comforting to some people, but I don't want to coddle those fantasies.
But, the deeper I dig, the less sense statism makes to me. The more "arguments" I hear in support of "governments", "laws", "States", and initiating force and theft, the more insane they sound. The inconsistencies are simply too glaring to ignore.
But, trying to explore the possibilities to discover reality is why I read things like this: Compromising Good with Evil
Right off the bat he gets something completely wrong, which throws off the entire rest of his screed- he says libertarians think that "There simply can be no middle ground between the two fundamental philosophical opposites of freedom and slavery. Either we are a free society or a slave society, but we can't be both."
While that is a true statement, he goes on to say "This all libertarians agree upon, or they're not libertarians." So, this is the defining principle of libertarianism?
Ummm... wrong. Libertarians know that initiating force and violating private property are wrong. That's what makes them libertarians. The other things logically stem from that, but are not the foundation.
And, he goes downhill from there, just like every single criticism of Abolitionism/voluntaryism/anarchism/libertarianism I have ever encountered does- simply because they utterly fail to understand what they are trying to debunk. They argue from ignorance.
His entire article is based upon an appeal to authority- in this case, Aristotle and his "Golden Mean". The "Golden Mean" works for some things, like Goldilocks' "Not too cold or too hot- but just right". It doesn't work at all where Liberty is concerned. That's because Liberty is self-limiting. Your Liberty can't violate anyone else, or it ceases to be Liberty. And "government" always violates Liberty.
He claims, using the idea of the "Golden Mean", that good and evil are not opposites along a single axis, but good is in the middle, with evil at either extreme. With regards to Liberty, "too much" is anarchy, and too little is tyranny. As if anarchy is a bad thing. His superstitious belief in "limited government" is, of course, his "Golden Mean" of juicy goodness. He is wrong. Probably because he doesn't understand what evil is.
Evil is doing intentional harm to those who don't deserve to be harmed right now. Harm isn't on either side of good- it is the opposite of good no matter what justification you use. And, if it doesn't harm people, it isn't evil even if you think it wouldn't be the best path. Statism- the belief that governing people is a legitimate human endeavor- is evil because of the harm it inevitably causes to individual life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and property. You can't violate people "for their own good" no matter how passionately you make that silly claim.
Originally I intended to show how and why the author was wrong, bit by bit. Piece by piece. Paragraph by paragraph. Because he is wrong. In fact, either he is intentionally lying, or he's an idiot.
But the article is so incredibly long and full of fail that I realized quickly that to dissect it would require one of those multi-part blogs addressing slavery-apologists (statists) I have done in the past. I just don't feel like it. Besides, cutting through the BS of his "Golden Mean" idea of good and evil is probably all that is necessary to bring down his whole house of marked cards.
Feel free to read that article for yourself, and notice all the mistakes he makes- even if you don't get far into it, I'm confident you'll see more wrongness than you can keep up with. His flawed assumptions; his mischaracterizations; his non-sequiturs. The list is almost endless. Statism is a fail. From beginning to end. It is based on a superstition.
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