All this recent talk of legislating and implementing an internet “kill switch” is being hyped by statists in the name of national security. Oh, just imagine the horrors if some if some malicious internet terrorists hax0r open the Hoover Dam floodgates, possibly killing thousands!
I readily agree with this FUD; but I disagree with the implementation. In order to protect the “national security interest,” the correct solution is to put not private, but all government, resources behind an internet kill switch! This way when some script kiddies start launching NORAD missiles, Obama can blister his thumb pressing the government kill switch that Murray Rothbard could only dream about.
Anthony Gregory makes a quick list of “talking points” that libertarians should know rather well when engaging in argumentation with statists. Here it is:
The law of comparative advantage
Broken window
Socialism vs. universability
The state cannot be perfectly egalitarian — someone calls the shots
If EVEN the US government does X, is there any hope for a good govt?
The ratchet effect
History shows markets can handle health care and insurance
History shows markets can handle law
Govt. education = indoctrination by the power elite
Guns protect us from criminals, and the state
Free speech is the cornerstone of civilization
Without property rights, no other rights are possible
Libertarian property rights are, in the good sense, more “democratic” than socialist rights
The free market empowers the weak against the strong, who always grab political influence
If you don’t own your body, no liberties are possible
History shows corporations side with the regulatory state
History damns every war that has happened
Due process rights are important, because the state can never be trusted — it is that evil
You can’t have freedom without letting others have it
Political democracy is no better than any other form of govt., basically (hat tip, HHH!)
Relative freedom at home can mean more imperialism — look out! (hat tip, HHH!)
Illegal aliens are people just as much as we are
Tax victims have a right to reclaim stolen goods, it doesn’t make the stealing legitimate
Privatization is messy because socialization is the original sin
States can’t calculate without prices
Central planning fails due to information problems
Public choice theory
The butler effect (how drug wars make things worse)
Outlawing guns and drugs means only outlaws have them, and drives them underground
Blowback
Just war theory
The state as a monopoly on violence
Libertarian class analysis
Thou shalt not steal
Taxation is theft
War is murder
War is the health of the state
All states are born unjustly
All states commit aggression
Either you’re for aggression, or not
I’ve always liked the idea–which I’ve heard from Albert Jay Nock and Leonard Read–that your primary task is to improve yourself–to strive for excellence in yourself. Then you become a bright light that attracts people; they see you are good, and successful, and worth emlating or listening to–so you win people over by the power of attraction. They come to you, and then you have more success spreading the ideas of liberty than if you go around being a boor.
Albert Jay Nock was not a reformer and found offensive any society with a “monstrous itch for changing people.” He had “a great horror of every attempt to change anybody; or I should rather say, every wish to change anybody; for that is the important thing.” Whenever one “wishes to change anybody, one becomes like the socialists, vegetarians, prohibitionists; and this, as Rabelais says, ‘is a terrible thing to think upon.'” The only thing we can do to improve society, he declared, “is to present society with one improved unit.” Let each person direct his efforts at himself or herself, not others; or as Voltaire put it, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
It would appear, then, that if we want to have leaders of high quality, Presidents among them, we, the American people, shall have to increase our understanding in politics and related fields. It is fortunately not necessary that all of us should become thus educated, but only a sizable minority—the remnant that saves. But how are we to build up this sizable minority?
Begin, says Mr. Read in the document I quoted at the beginning of these remarks, by genuinely enlightening ourselves, as individuals—morally as well as socially, economically, and politically. Thereafter, if I understand him correctly, he would have us trust mainly to the power of example. “The power of attraction—of attracting others follows all self-improvement,” he says, “as faithfully as does one’s shadow.” In thus asserting this power he undoubtedly has behind him traditional wisdom. “Example,” says Burke, comprehensively, “is the school of mankind; it will learn at no other.”
The Manchester article, from a 1959 issue of The Freeman, is apparently quoting “Wake Up—It’s Tomorrow” by Leonard E. Read, Notes from FEE, January 1959, which I cannot find; similar thoughts appear to be in Read’s How To Advance Liberty: A Learning, Not a Selling, Problem, which is available in text here and in audio and video here (and below):
