Julie Eva Borowski has done it again with a solid video on the issue of libertarian in-flighting. The caricature has me saying something wonderful about the decision to pour milk in my cereal. “Beautiful anarchy!”

Well, it’s not entirely absurd. The decision to pour milk or not to pour milk is an illustration of human volition that is embodied in all our decisions. There is no police present at the moment of choice. There is no plan in place that makes us pour or not to pour. Even if there were a plan, it is likely to be ignored. It would be destined to fail.

Actually, as I think about it, there is something of a plan. According to the government, cereal is only part of a “nutritious breakfast.” You know, the pictures on the ads. There is a big glass of orange juice, a piece of toast with butter, probably another glass of milk, and probably a half slice of grapefruit. It’s absurd. I’ve never seen anyone eat all that on a regular basis with cereal. On the contrary, we shake the box in the bowl and eat. We are defying the plan, even that urged on us by manufacturers.

So yes, there is a core of anarchism in the decision to pour and eat.

And it doesn’t just stop with the pouring and eating. The anarchist dimension of production is illustrated in the very existence of milk and cereal.

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The Anarchism of Milk and CerealRead More »

People schooled in the libertarian idea are prepared for the thesis that freedom is productive and protective of human rights, whereas despotism is neither. Many years ago, I first glanced through Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom and assumed that it was an eloquent statement of known truths, so surely there was nothing much to learn here. Maybe it was right for beginners.

In my second reading, some ten years later, I was struck by the depth and sweep of her argument and how it goes far beyond conventions. The problem, as she sees it, is not just the state, but rather, the universal penchant for repressing the human spirit. The state is only the most egregious form of authority.

Finally, on my third reading, I got it. This is a supremely radical and challenging work, one that essentially turns the world upside down. Nearly every expert on the topic of the history of civilization will tell you that the regime is what makes the difference between whether a nation rises or falls.

Lane takes another view entirely. She says it is not the regime but the absence of the regime that sets the human spirit in flight and permits it to create and make beautiful things out of the uncivilized world of the state of nature. She pictures the whole history of humanity as a struggle to be free of authority — not just this or that authority but all authority.

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The Freedom of Rose Wilder LaneRead More »

The morning after I saw “Catching Fire,” part two of the film series based on the Hunger Games novels, I was scheduled to give a lecture on the nature and functioning of the state. I had vast notes I had prepared over the previous six months for it.

After seeing the movie, I was tempted just to toss them out; in fact, I nearly suggested that we all just leave the lecture hall and go to the movies. That’s because this one movie reveals more about the state than practically any book I could suggest.

It’s a great thing when popular culture becomes a teacher of truth, and I believe this is precisely what is happening in our time. Not every movie and not every show, but the biggest grossing of them are all centered on a theme. That theme is this: powerful people are not our friends but our enemies – so if we want to have a free and flourishing life, we are going to have to get busy and figure out how to make it happen.

The fictional government in the Hunger Games wants a static and unthinking population that is dedicated to compliance as a first principle. Everyone must stay in his or her assigned district (there are 12 remaining “districts” in Panem, the country that was once the United States); there is no social mobility; and the citizens are told to be grateful for this because, after all, there is no revolutionary threat anymore. To keep that possible, the people must be constantly punished for the last time anyone challenged the central authority. That punishment consists of an annual lottery that sends children to their death in fights that pit district against district in a highly televised gladiator event know as the Hunger Games.

In Catching Fire, we see a population beginning to discover that the real enemy is not the other districts; but the people at the top of the heap in the Capital – the capital city of Panem that belongs to no district, is disproportionately wealthy compared to the districts despite not producing anything themselves, is excluded from the Hunger Games lottery, and is where opulence prevails and whose people live without a care for the well-being of the rest of the population. The Capital sounds a lot like our non-fiction capital.

Here’s the thing: the command-and-control apparatus that was given life in the 20th century is in the process of falling apart. It can’t do anything right. As David Wiegel has pointed out in his blog on Slate.com, “Americans are rarely in love with our government, but rarely have we despised it like we do right now. A December 5-8 Gallup poll found that 72 percent of us consider ‘big government’ the greatest threat, the highest in 48 years.”

This is completely rational: the last several wars have yielded horrible body counts, but not improved lives; public services are nearly universally shabby compared with private ones; and people are starting to look at their taxes and scratch their heads, wondering what they are paying for.

The NSA spying scandal was a PR disaster for government. Did they really expect that the people would discover that all our phone calls, and emails, and even our browsing habits are being monitored and say in a collective voice “Oh thank you, big brother, for protecting us from bad things”? The nearly universal response was outrage, so much so that even the Obama administration has had to back away from responsibility.

Then there’s Obamacare. It was just last year that the now-president was bragging about having his name attached to it; after all, this was the “progressive” dream dating back many decades. The idea is that if we just let government run the system, we’ll get fabulous healthcare for next to nothing. The experts worked diligently to think through every contingency.

Finally the great day arrived where the dream could finally be translated into reality. What followed is routinely described as disaster. Fewer people are insured today than before the program was implemented. This was a mess made in D.C., but D.C. cannot and will not fix it. That’s the essence of the issue. Our problems have mostly been made by a bad idea that wasn’t ours to begin with, and now it is up to us to make the difference in our own lives and get out from under Panem’s – I mean Washington’s – control.

This is an idea that is indeed catching fire. The world of markets and the information they disseminate are breaking down the structures of power, and the great dream of Liberty.me is to push this trend further and provide a crowdsourced clearing house for chronicling and encouraging this great trend. We need this space and we are making it happen.