Announcing the TLS Q&A Series and Libertarian FAQ

Admin Updates, Education, TLS Q&A
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You may have already noticed that we’ve launched a new feature on The Libertarian Standard: the Libertarian FAQ. We’re formally announcing it now. You may also have noticed that the FAQ is pretty much empty at the moment. That’s where you, and another new feature we’re announcing today, come in.

We will be gradually filling out the FAQ with questions and our answers to them. You can help us out by challenging and inspiring us with questions about libertarianism, in theory and in practice, be they beginner or advanced, that you or someone you know may have. We will select questions you’ve sent us and address them in a new blogpost series, TLS Q&A, approximately once per week, on Sunday.

To submit questions for us to address, you will need to

Also:

  • Please check the FAQ to see if your question has already been answered before submitting.
  • Please include your name and a link to your personal website, Twitter profile, or similar online  presence so we can give credit.

After being published in a TLS Q&A blogpost, the questions and their answers will be added to the Libertarian FAQ, with a link back to their blogposts to facilitate discussion.

Help us fill out the Libertarian FAQ! Submit questions for us to answer.

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Mises.org Available as a Torrent Download!

Anti-Statism, Education, Technology
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute has issued the second release of all of the content on their website as torrent files. This means that you can download all of the content available on Mises.org (as of June 15, 2010) by downloading various torrent files and opening them up with your torrent client (e.g., uTorrent, Vuze, or Transmission). This is great both for those who read Mises.org or listen to the media from that website. Thank you David Veksler, Jeffrey Tucker, and everyone else at the Mises Institute who made this possible!

The benefits of this are enormous. All of the information, wisdom, and knowledge on Mises.org is available for $0 to the general public, via Torrent download.1 This directly contradicts what Statists would have us believe is the nature of the free-market — people exploiting each other to succeed. How then do they explain the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a truly philanthropic organization, which helps thousands through education: education through peace and persuasion, not “education” at the barrel of a gun.

This will help the Mises Institute, its patrons, and Mises.org readers in numerous ways. Instead of having to navigate to the page or Media section of Mises.org and use browser plugins or spiders, those with a thirst for knowledge and understanding of economics and the free market can simply download everything they want through one torrent file. It also saves the Mises Institute tons of bandwidth, because people downloading torrents simultaneously share in the upload burden by seeding the file (if you download the file, please try to seed until your upload:download ratio is 1.2, this is normal Torrent etiquette). There is a dynamic carryover effect to torrenting: one person might only seed for a few weeks, but dozens of people who leeched from him might seed for a few weeks as well. Thus, there is a kind of digital compounding or interest-effect. Contrary to what you might think — and contrary to what advocates of intellectual property and particularly copyrights would tell you — this will not hurt Mises.org sales of books, but rather boost them, as explained by Jeffrey Tucker.

We can also think of this as a kind of grassroots, guerrilla intellectual resistance. The entire Mises.org media, book, journal, and PDF library will be distributed to thousands of hard drives around the world, will be shared by thousands of people. It can’t shut it down simply by shutting down the Mises Institute anymore. This has two benefits: (1) People can access Mises.org content even if the Mises.org website is down, provided they have the torrents; (2) If the US government wanted to shut down Mises.org, it would still face the distributed world-wide torrents, which would be almost impossible to shut down by a central authority.

So for those of you who are interested, please download: Help Mises.org and yourself at the same time. Download the books, pdfs, journal articles, videos, and mp3 files; listen to, watch, or read them; enjoy the overwhelming amount of knowledge you can have at your fingertips. This is truly a great example of Austrian economics at work: both parties clearly gain something from the interaction ex ante and almost certainly ex post too!

The Mises.org blog announcement:

Mises Torrents 2.0 Available

It’s been about a year early since the first public release of torrents containing all the document and media content on Mises.org. The Mises Institute staff adds new content frequently, so it is time for version 2.0.  Here are the 2010 torrents: Mises Media (132 GB), Books (8.6GB), Journals (4.1 GB), PDFs (324 MB), and ReasonPapers (1.4 GB).

For more files and details see the original announcement.  If you are new to BitTorrent, install the uTorrent client, open the links above, and you’ll be on your way.

If you downloaded an earlier version of this content, please do not re-download everything.  In both uTorrent and Vuze, you can get just the missing files.  In uTorrent,  start the download and let it create the placeholder directory, then stop it.  Overwrite the placeholder directory with your existing files, then “Force Re-Check.”  You can do the same in Vuze –  just enable the option to “Truncate existing files that are too large” under Options->Files.  Then resume.

By my best calculations, we seeded last year’s torrents to thousands of computers worldwide and served over 4 terabytes from our servers alone.  Please help us spread the word and make this release even bigger.

Join the discussion and post a comment

  1. I would like to thank Manuel Lora, Michael Barnett, and Geoffrey A. Plauche for their helpful insights and comments on this blog post. ↩

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…and this is bad because?

Education, Nanny Statism
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Over 2,400 tax-feeders-in-training are threatening to go ‘on strike’ by skipping classes today in protest over the MTA’s plan to cut NYC students’ free usage of the subway & bus system, which is an annual subsidy of at least $214 million (assuming they only use it twice a day to travel between home and school.)

Students decry the hardship and indignity of having to actually pay for something which might cut into their costly cell phone, video game and designer-jeans budgets. The strange thing is that I can’t see the downside here — in fact I’d like to think of this as a ‘win-win’ situation.

…and this is bad because? Read Post »

Was it worth it?

Democracy, Education, Finance, Vulgar Politics
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Well, as predicted (by me), in pursuit of one of Connecticut’s US Senate seats, Peter Schiff wasted a lot of time and money, and was forced to refrain from making several television appearances on financial news programs (due to campaign laws). He placed an embarrassing third:

Former professional wrestling maven Linda McMahon capped an improbable entry into politics Friday night when she captured the Republican Party endorsement for the U.S. Senate during a raucous Republican convention at the Connecticut Convention Center.

McMahon edged former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons after dozens of delegates switched their votes at the conclusion of the first ballot. She received 737 votes to 632 for Simmons and 44 for economist Peter Schiff.

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Three (very) common libertarian mistakes

Education
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While advocating for the principles of a free society, libertarians find obstacles of all sorts. Whether one sees it as a battle of ideas  or — better yet — a sales campaign, sometimes our methods of persuasion and debate become a big part of the message. Thus sometimes our mistakes become the biggest obstacle to our success. Lets review three very common ones.

1. Thinking that libertarianism is “intuitive” or “obvious”

To be sure, certain moral positions (on stealing and murdering) are universal and intuitive enough, but the whole edifice is neither obvious nor easy to grasp. The problem is, most people forget how they learned and especially, forget their previous ignorance. Thus, they project a light of knowledge over their past as if they always knew. This is easy to observe when one reads giants like Mises and Rothbard. The second after we absorb some keen insight of theirs, we internalize it and begin to think it is “obvious” and should be so to others. Well, it isn’t. We acquired it through long years of studying dozens, sometimes hundreds, of books. Every libertarian I know continues to read and debate the fundamentals of libertarianism, not only applications to current events or history. This tells me that libertarianism is an unfinished edifice with many parts, even if one can sum it up in several ways. Those essentials and summaries will never replace the whole of the doctrine.

2. Assuming common ground with everyone

The fundamental clash throughout human history, Liberty vs. Power, can only be properly understood when the basics are properly identified. Let’s begin with liberty. In ancient times, liberty was defined as the ability to participate in collective decision-making and independence from other nations. Thus, liberty was about political participation and national sovereignty. The individual was not the relevant political unit. It wasn’t until the advent of Humanism, placing the individual at the center of political and economic analysis that Liberty could start meaning what us libertarians need it to mean in order for our insights to be popular at any time and place.

Power, on the other hand, means political power for us. It springs from the use of force or the threat thereof. Education, the media, tradition and others influence human behavior but they can be either chosen or rejected if needed. That’s why any talk of commercial billboards or TV content having power over society is ultimately doomed to fail. But in the same way any talk about “oppressive bosses” or “gender oppression” are confusing. Bosses cannot deprive oneself of rights, because to have a boss (as opposed to a slave-owner, a socialist dictator, a lord or a king) requires a contract in which one has freely entered. Ergo, bosses implies rights and where there are rights there is liberty, and power is absent. A boss may be demanding, rude, etc but as long as one has “exit”, there is no oppression. Gender oppression strictly means that women are denied their (individual) political rights to personal integrity and property. But gender discrimination when those rights are fully present such as in most Western countries, on the other hand is an exercise of others’ rights. When men are preferred for a job over women, it’s the company’s loss to deprive itself of that talent. But in many professions that deal with security and force, such discrimination is not only necessary but wise. Confusing a lack of women’s rights with an exercise of men’s rights that we dislike is worse than misleading: it will invite State intervention to “fix” a non-problem. Or at best, a problem that has to be solved (if need be) through civil, pacific means.

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