"If one takes care of the means..."
“...the end will take care of itself.”
Carl Watner is now offering a tremendous resource online; his collection I Must Speak Out: The Best of The Voluntaryist 1982-1999 is now available as an absolutely free PDF download, all 499 pages of it.
Voluntaryists, in case you’re unaware, believe that a nonviolent and stateless (totally free market) society is both moral and practical. They reject electoral politics, in theory and in practice, as irreconcilable with libertarian principles, and they work to delegitimize the State through education. They advocate withdrawal of the cooperation and tacit consent on which State power ultimately depends. And for more than two decades, Watner’s published his terrific newsletter The Voluntaryist, from which the contents of this book originate.
I Must Speak Out is a goldmine. It contains almost 80 articles, including critiques of the State, voluntaryist strategies, ethical issues, and history. Many of the pieces are written by Watner himself, but other authors include Wendy McElroy, George H. Smith, Murray Rothbard, Robert LeFevre, Harry Browne, and Walter Block.
I urge all readers of this blog to download this book and at least scan through it. It will shake you philosophically. Even spiritually. Get it from Carl’s site. You'll find lots of other great stuff there, too.
posted by Wally Conger @ 7:04 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
VOLUNTARISM: A social organization suitable for robots, creatures without ambition or knowledge of self. Mankind tends to be more messy, vicious, and aspiring.(Check out the failed social experiments of New Harmony and Oneida [the flatware makers that they became]). Asimov knew better.
Ah, Waumpy, you rascal, I can always count on you to make proclamations without first checking out the source material. Voluntaryists advocate a consistent libertarian philosophy, not repeating centuries-old "social experiments." Set aside your hatred of all mankind for a minute and read some of the Watner collection. Visit Carl's website, or browse through Wendy McElroy's blog (find the link in the sidebar).
Oh, and as fine a sci-fi writer as Asimov was, he was a full-blown, one-world/one-government statist and never a friend to liberty.
Those "consistent" social "philosophies" that refuse to learn from the social experiments of the past have caused, or contributed to, the awful miseries of the past 100 years. Men of good will can always expect to live together in some kind of harmony, FOR THE MOST PART. But the Salem Witch Hangings demonstrate that even the devout and constrained men of the Elect, can behave no better than Schutzstaffel Rassenstoltz Ubersturmbahnfuehrers. Any social theory that does not take account of the approximately 3% of human beings who are genetic sociopaths is not only a laughable exercise in futility, but a negative danger to the good order of society itself. For those citizens who choose, from cowardice or indifference, to ignore the sociopaths will be ruled by them or become the raw materials for their political vivisections. I was in Germany in 1945. I smelled the stench of the decaying corpses and gasped at the sight of the stick men in a untermenschen slave prison. I saw the shame and degradation of German civilians who were the raw materials for the demonstrations of the idiotic Socialist Herrenvolk theories. I learned that once the sociopaths achieve power, they can only be pried off the throne by an outside army. Defeat in war is an awful outcome, but for the German civilians in 1945 an ironic paradox consumed them: Victory would have been worse. Any political theory, that neglects to constrain the 3% of humanity that is psychopathic, is no better than the Moslem youth's hope of 72 VIRGINS amid fountains of wine, after the exploding plastique has atomized him. Plan for men; God has already arranged matters satisfactorily for the Angels.
So after reading that exhausting exercise, I ask once again, Waumpy -- have you read any of the Watner book, or are you just intent on bashing straw men?
You can focus all you want on your estimated 3% of humankind who are "genetic sociopaths." I think I'll focus my attention more positively on how the remaining 97% might lead better, freer lives.
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