Ad hominem attacks aside, YouTuber hawanja’s video on free-market anarchists seems to make the point that people “naturally organize themselves into hierarchies” that require violence to be maintained, so anarchism runs counter to the human condition. It is left unstated why violence is needed or ethically justified to maintain these hierarchies if they were so natural. He further claims that a state is the historically necessary “institution that enforces order through violence.”

The first of hawanja’s misunderstandings has to do with his definition of “state.” A key distinction I and Barack Obama would make is that a state claims a territorial monopoly on its enforcement of order through violence. The insinuation of hawanja’s definition, which ignores the territorial monopoly claim, is that any enforced order necessarily signifies the presence of a state. Throughout the entire video, viewers are presented with this false dichotomy: statism or chaos. Anarchists do not oppose order. The etymological origin of “anarchy” means no ruler (not no rules), similarly how “monarchy” means one ruler. Regardless, statists generally insist on conflating “anarchy” to mean a conflict for rulership that takes place in a failed state. Anarchism recognizes that rulers are not justified in their actions and are counter-productive to a peaceful, productive existence.

Another unfounded assertion is that “this natural hierarchical structure to human beings” is justified in using force to maintain its power. After all, just as a good majority of people naturally like ice cream, I hardly think that would justify “natural hierarchical structures” enforcing the consumption of ice cream.

The Enemy of My Enemy

Another tried and true fallback in defense of the state is the canard that a state is necessary to protect us from corporations, which hawanja rightly pointed out are creatures of plutocratic state protections and subsidies. They are granted limited liability by governments and are under a legal obligation to pursue the interests of shareholders, not employees or the environment or the public. However, should the blame rest with corporations or also with their architects (governments) that created them and shield them from accountability?

He cites laws prohibiting discrimination and child labor and food safety and consumer protections as examples of good government. Of course, governments have historically been used to promote all sorts of racial discrimination, child labor, and made food and consumer protections harder to come by and more expensive. hawanja unintentionally, I presume, confirmed this point when he showed a picture of Rosa Parks, the civil rights heroine arrested for disobeying a segregationist city ordinance that ordered she give up her seat to a white passenger, when he mentioned government laws prohibiting discrimination.

I think it is all well and good that government-enforced slavery and Jim Crow apartheid, the more overt government measures used to uphold discrimination, have been removed. However, that does not do so much to help those past victims of discrimination. All the ways that governments prohibit wealth creation has meant that past victims of government-enforced discrimination continue to suffer at the hands of government-enforced poverty. As Charles Johnson summed up in his “How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It” essay, “The poorer you are, the more you need access to informal and flexible alternatives, and the more you need opportunities to apply some creative hustling. When the state shuts that out, it shuts poor people into ghettoized poverty.”

Governments are not responsible for ending child labor. As a thought experiment, just consider what would happen if child labor was prohibited by law in Nepal. It would have the same effect as enacting California-style building codes in Haiti: absolutely none, because there is no wealth to implement those laws. The credit for the advancement of human civilization rests with the grandest form of human cooperation, the wealth-creating division of labor.

Coincidentally, I would think the issue of discrimination would create another dilemma for supporters of the state. Historically, racism, sexism and slavery would have been considered “natural hierarchical structure[s] to human beings,” just as the state is said to be. Yet, left-liberals, as I suppose hawanja is, do not propose that the enforcement of racism, sexism or slavery was just. Based on what principle though? And how would that principle not equally apply to racism, sexism and slavery?

hawanja also appears to be under the impression that governments were responsible for the abolition (or near abolition) of child labor, neglecting the fact that child labor is still legal in the United States under some circumstances. More to the point, mass child labor was an example of a problem exacerbated by the heavy hand of government. Had it not been for mercantilist and protectionist Robber Baron economic policies of the 19th century, wealth creation for the average family would have been realized much more broadly and quickly so that parents could afford to send their children to school sooner. Many social problems, including institutional discrimination, that governments are credited with fixing were largely already successfully being addressed through direct action before legislative interventions took place.

Consider consumer protections against price fixing. Historic examples of consumer protection during the Progressive Era were done at the behest of business interests. As noted liberal historical Gabriel Kolko wrote of the implementation of the Federal Trade Commission, in “The Triumph of Conservatism”:

The provisions of the new laws attacking unfair competitors and price discrimination meant that the government would now make it possible for many trade associations to stabilize, for the first time, prices within their industries, and to make effective oligopoly a new phase of the economy.

He called it a triumph of conservatism because federal intervention into the economy was able to secure the existing economic structure, what Kolko called “political capitalism” and what we know today as “crony capitalism” and “corporatism.” In Kolko’s conclusion, he said:

The varieties of rhetoric associated with progressivism were as diverse as its followers, and one form of this rhetoric involved attacks on businessmen—attacks that were often framed in a fashion that has been misunderstood by historians as being radical. But at no point did any major political tendency dealing with the problem of big business in modern society ever try to go beyond the level of high generalization and translate theory into concrete economic programs that would conflict in a fundamental way with business supremacy over the control of wealth. It was not a coincidence that the results of progressivism were precisely what many major business interests desired.

Kolko’s book is something, documenting how nearly every aspect of the Progressive Era legislation — from food inspections, environmental conservation and banking reforms, for example — were used as covers to cement the existing cartelized trusts already in power.

The book does a great job of documenting the problem with hierarchical institutions, that the people who already have the most access to the government are going to have the most influence in shaping what solutions are offered, how they are interpreted and how they would be implemented. Regulators — like all self-interested creatures — are sure to implement solutions that preserve their power and prospects for future employment, since their interests closely align with those of the regulated. If regulators or politicians are corruptible with bribes, the powerful can leverage their influence to a greater degree than they could in a freer market. For just a fraction of the cost, favorable regulations worth millions of dollars can be bought with campaign contributions. On a free market, it would be more costly to bribe someone who did not have the luxury of using taxes, as government regulators can, to pay for the enforcement of regulatory or legislative cronyism.

Making More Trouble

Next, the video documents social problems that libertarians typically attribute to government. In the past, I might have been guilty of short-changing why those problems are a consequence of government intervention, so I will take the time below to make the points clear.

1. Food prices — Yes, governments subsidize cattle and meat production at the expense of healthier, more natural forms of food, and place restrictions on the importation of those products. It is not a market phenomenon that it costs more to purchase a salad than a hamburger. All the resources devoted to feeding cows and other animals and creating bio-fuels like corn-based ethanol could have been used to produce food for organic diets. In addition, the federal government has sealed off arable land that could be used to farm, and city ordinances often place restrictions on mixed-use property, some of which could be used for home or community gardens on abandoned property.
2. Low wages — The ways in which labor organizing is discriminated against is too long to list. Just to list some examples, I would point to the ’35 Wagner Act, which was championed by business interests and conservative unions to clip the more wildcat unions like the anarchist International Workers of the World. Typical demands, like collective bargaining and calling for limited strikes, that unions are legally permitted to make today are pretty meek by comparison. Before the era of having to get government recognition, when most of the historic gains of the labor movement were actually realized, unions could call for general strikes and indirect boycotts, opened union hiring halls, signed closed-door contracts or demanded worker management of the firm. Other government interventions are through occupational licensing laws, use-restricted zoning regulations, legal tender laws, capitalization requirements and capital-favored taxation policies that mean more people have to work for wage labor in the first place.
3. College expenses — It is not a coincidence that college tuition expenses increase at the same time that governments actively encourage people to go into debt by providing low-interest loans and restricting the establishment of new higher education options. The government and the corporate credentialism fetish is also partly to blame. One major expense of college is the cost of textbooks, which are artificially marked up do to the enforcement of artificial intellectual property claims.
4. Environmental conservation — It is also no secret that common law environmental tort protections were removed from courts in the 1900s, which is how pollution problems were handled until environmental legislation that legalized greater environmental damage took power out of the hands of property owners. That is not to mention that the largest polluter in the entire world is the United States federal government.
5. Drug safety — Yes, illicit drugs are more dangerous because of government. They cannot be made under true laboratory conditions; there is no possibility of any legal redress for fraud; and every year millions of people acting consensually are terrorized by government agents and hundreds if not thousands are killed by those government agents. The crime and escalated costs associated with drugs are a consequence of prohibition.
6. Terrorism — See “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” by Chalmers Johnson.

At the beginning of the video, hawanja criticized the favoritism that governments grant corporations, only later to praise the cronyism of farm subsidies for multimillion dollar farm conglomerates. He said that government protection has led to stable food prices in the United States, which is not so true of late. However, the relative stability has only come because Americans already pay much higher prices for foods like sugar than do residents of developing nations. In terms of dollars, the average American family transfers an additional $146 to large agribusinesses every year because of these policies, which do not include the approximate $300 per family given directly to mostly multimillionaires through the federal budget. The costs of milk, butter and meat products would be deflated if trade restrictions on international markets were abolished, helping to reduce poverty overseas.

Looking at the unintended consequences of those subsidies, the abundance of corn, some of which is used to sweeten sodas, has been linked to increased obesity in Americans. There is also the problem that developing nations wanting to compete in farm production are constantly being underpriced by subsidized farmers, leading developing nations to become dependent on subsidized farmers for food. That is something developed nations hold over developing nations as part of “Open Door Imperialism,” but it is not a fact I would cheer. Without government protectionism, land use could become more environmentally friendly, as well. A Reason magazine article said:

The distortions and perverse incentives of U.S. agricultural policies have encouraged practices that damage the environment. Trade barriers and subsidies stimulate production on marginal land, leading to overuse of pesticides, fertilizers, and other effluents. A central if unstated purpose of American farm policy is to promote production of commodities that would not be economical under competitive, free market conditions. This often means emphasizing crops better grown elsewhere, requiring more chemical assistance.

The conclusion of the video makes a laundry list of mandates that hawanja thinks the free market could not provide, like affordable housing and health care, public transportation, environmental and consumer protections, expanded broadband internet coverage, protection for the homeless, protection of endangered species, food and medical safety and national security. He said that the free market cannot do these things; “we do these things because we need them to survive.” His unstated argument is that these are public goods that markets cannot provide for.

I have argued in the past that with a little creativity, public goods can be provided, assuming there is public support for those goods, which would also have to be the case in a democratic government. To quote Kevin Carson, “As always, it’s not a question of what we’ll do when the state stops solving the problem. It’s a question of how to stop the state from creating the problem.”

The problem becomes that regardless of the possibility of providing those public goods on an open market, those goods become harder to achieve with a government in place, which creates an entirely new set of obstacles for achieving those original public goods governments were purportedly created to solve in the first place. Public goods, like security and safety, are not impossible for governments to provide, just costlier and more difficult than they would be on a free market. The first new public good created by the presence of a democratic government would be an informed electorate. It is not in the average person’s economic interest to know much about the issues at hand or the candidates running for office. That is because a single individual’s vote has almost no significance in the outcome of an election, and even if a single vote could turn an election, a voter has no method of holding a politician to his or her campaign pledges. It gets worse. A single politician in Washington, D.C., is one of 535 votes in the legislature. The idea that a citizen’s vote would make any noticeable difference to the his or her life is almost inconceivable.

The second public good that must be provided for in order to solve the original public goods problems is the creation of just laws. When thinking about it, there are thousands and thousands of pages of legislation and regulation under discussion. It would be next to impossible and meaningless to read every line of every bill introduced or regulation proposed in order to find out if some special benefit is being given to this or that special interest lobbyists. Even if we could decipher what the legislation or proposed regulation meant and its impact in the future, which would be difficult enough, contacting a congressman or regulator is going to have a negligible impact on influencing policy. Even if we could change the policy, it most likely only means a savings of a few dollars or cents per voter. Special interests who stand to gain millions or billions are always going to have the time and money to devote to gaining special favors.

Since human beings are not perfect or all-knowing, market failure is possible, but as David Friedman notes, “In the political system, market failure is the norm. If you think of the political system as a marketplace, we cannot expect individual rationality to produce group-rational results.” So the idea that government would work if we could only get the right people in charge is a failed strategy in practice and beyond naïve in theory.

When a government does try to address public goods that allegedly cannot be provided by the market, policies are going to serve the powerful and wealthy. Seeing how I would actually like to see those public goods provided to people, I cannot support a government, because a government makes those products less attainable for the people who most desperately need them.

Some of the latest studies have concentrated on the “culture of poverty,” which predominantly has been the domain of conservatives for the past 40 years to rest blame for the plight of the poor. As the Times reported, today’s studies differ in that they assign blame for the “destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.”

Though I am not one to reject the historical legacy of racism that denied blacks equal opportunities and equal treatment under the law, I tend to reject both conventional liberal and conservative explanations for poverty. That is, I do not believe poverty is a result of the market, nor is it the result of laziness.

Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson said the “poverty trap” is “related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think,” again according the article. Sampson conducted a study whereby he dropped stamped, addressed envelopes in different neighborhoods to see how many were returned. The results were dramatic. In a former housing project, no envelopes were returned, but more than half were returned in another neighborhood with a similar income demographic. He said the differences were due to cynicism people had about their communities.

Others are looking into how growing up in a violent neighborhood reduces socialization and hinders the development of linguistic abilities by some six IQ points. Family structures are also an important piece to understand the persistent state of inner-city poverty. One-parent families are much more commonplace today than ever before, which reduces the level of parental development and caretaking.

I have to say that these latest studies are a blessing, even if the researchers are not yet hitting on the root of these problems — statism.

A lot of the cynicism stems from a genuine distrust of the law and the people trusted with enforcing the law. Those trapped in poverty have no alternative justice services to support, as allowing competing justice services would compromise “what essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is the monopoly on violence,” Barack Obama acknowledged.

Just in Dallas County alone, a dozen people who were serving prison time have been exonerated based on DNA evidence. These are just a few of the thousands of cases in which DNA evidence was available. Most people languishing in prison are there for petty, non-violent crimes in which no one was put in danger. The drug war has disproportionately hit black men more than any group, so of course there will be more single-parent homes in predominantly black neighborhoods. Welfare programs also incitivize mothers to stay single, according to Mary Ruwart’s book “Healing Our World.” In fact, a Heritage study said that children who recieved aid show “cognitive abilities 20 percent below those who had received no welfare, even after holding family income, race, parental IQ, and other variables constant.”

Additionally, if you do not expect to receive justice, what good is there to care about the law, particularly when the law itself if so unjust? What hope could there be?

Drug prohibition, just like alcohol prohibition, is the cause of rampant amounts of violence and corruption among the police and politicians. For instance, during alcohol prohibition, the murder rate roughly doubled from its pre-war high. Since the war on drugs began in the 1970s, murder rates have nearly doubled again. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but it does put to the rest the idea that prohibition lowers crime.

Well-intentioned welfare-statism is not helping the poor much either. Most liberals recognize the income disparities and economic distortions created by government intervention on behalf of corporate interests. Instead of focusing on doing away with those government actions, in the name pragmatism most liberals insist on creating further distortions with the hopes of balancing the playing field, heaping further counterweights on an already unsustainable system that mostly benefits the program administrators. Economic distortions like the minimum wage do little to provide a safety net, but instead place a hurdle in which young people must leap.

That attitude, though counterproductive, is somewhat forgivable. It is nearly impossible to shrink the state; people in a monopoly government are more inclined than most to expand power and deflect blame in order to amass more control. It becomes evident that two wrongs cannot make a right.

While petty handouts are contemptuously put forth as a show of compassion, the big-ticket criminals who run this cartel can waltz home with a clear conscience. That is what the state does. “It bites with stolen teeth,” as Friedrich Nietzsche explained. You might too say it gives back your bootstraps but only after taking your boots.

Richards opens that “Radical libertarians are equivalent to leftist Saul Alinskyites. Both despise government and the Constitution, seeking to destroy America.” To say something like that reveals she has never given much serious thought to either. Alinsky was a utilitarian, inside-the-system guy. Mr. Libertarian, a deontological private property natural law supporter, denounced the system and was an “Enemy of the State.” Economically, methodologically, historically, and culturally they were polar opposites. It was precisely that Rothbard insisted on practicing his radicalism, where Alinksly used more pragmatic means. Rothbard was not concerned with accumulating power; he wanted to destroy it.

So already we are off to a shaky start. Also, it is not so much that libertarians despise government — which some people connote to mean rule and order — but the state, an organization within a given territory that maintains the monopoly authority to designate the legal use of force. Nor do libertarians conflate America with the government, as Richards seems to do. Quickly, she conveniently deliniates society from government when she said Rothbardians think that society “prevented war, rape, and pillaging” prior to the development of the modern nation-state. In actuality, Rothbardian libertarians see the state as needlessly exacerbating those tragedies.

Laughingly, Richards said, “Society can’t survive and thrive without leadership and checking and balancing leaders.” As if. An organization with sovereign immunity cannot be held accountable, particularly if those checks and balances are maintained within the same organization to be rendered as consequential as costume jewelry. The founding fathers that conservatives so prize had some understanding of this, calling the constitution only for a moral people as John Adams did. It was Thomas Jefferson who said “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” John Locke called the state of nature a “state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal … .” So clearly, these classical liberals thinkers did not believe it was the government that kept order.

Richards states that libertarians do not believe people are evil, only governments. That is an odd insight to make, for who does she think libertarians believe occupy government? Libertarians like Hans-Hermann Hoppe have made the point that the incintive structure of the state lends itself toward accumulating more power and inviting conflict. That is true. More so, they argue that precisely because people are capable of committing evil, then a centralized organization with the popular legitimacy to commit acts of aggression should not stand because evil people will be attracted to that unique source of power.

Even taking at face value the conservative point that all people are to some degree evil, then the existence of a government in no way minimizes that problem. In fact, by regularizing and legitimizing the morally criminal behavior of the state, those evils are compounded because the most evil would have the most to gain from that system. Of course, any social system will work more smoothly if people tend to be more peaceful and honest, yet which of these systems encourage that behavior and punish anti-social affairs? As Rothbard himself said, “[W]hatever the mix of man’s nature may be at any given time, liberty is best.”

Later in the article, Richards again conflates government with society. For the most part, this is also the modern conservative view, which is why so many want to criminalize what they deem to be immoral acts among consenting adults instead of educating others about their mistaken ways. In that sense, they are ideological cousins of liberal authoritarians like former law professor and current Obama regulatory “czar” Cass Sunstein. They see government as the source of all technological advancement and at the root of civil society.

Richards is wrong again on a few more points, as well. While a popular myth, it is not true that war is part of human nature. While it is true that conflict will exist over (limited) resources, we have found ways to minimize those conflicts, such as through the use of property rights and arbitration. Besides, the existence of a state makes war more affordable for the war makers as the costs of building an empire can be defused over the population through taxation. As war makers have become removed from the consequences of their violence, constant war has become costlier than ever before. It is government that is civil war, according to French anarchist Anselme Bellegarrigue. While modern warfare may consume fewer actual lives, the aggregate labor stolen by the war machine is no less wasted. The life of each one of us is drained again and again day after day to fund the most successful criminal enterprise in history.

In another failure, Richards cites a Karl Marx quote from Ralph Raico’s lewrockwell.com article on Marx’s insights into the state, which she takes to mean an acceptance of Marxist political economy even as Raico makes explicit that he is “far from being a Marxist.” The point of Raico’s quote was to reveal Marx’s own dualistic view of the state as first, continuously under the exploitative hand of the capitalist class, and at other times as an organ of exploitation of whatever party in control.

In fact, some of the very few accurate protrayals she offered was calling radical libertrians leftists who believe we can “endure without states and central leadership.”

Looking back, Richards has claimed that Rothbardian libertarians want to “destroy man and his right to Life,” believe “depravity is nonexistent in man’s nature,” are “anti-wealth,” and favor “communal control.” For these points, Richards offers not a single quotation from Rothbard or any other libertarian.

I am drawn to one of my favorite Frederic Bastiat quotes, when he said:

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

With some credulity, statists have become conditioned to let others — even words written on paper — have dominion over their lives. When someone offers the radical notion that no one else owns your body, they are called the dangerous ones. When some point out that the state has no resources of its own and can only exist by usurping our rights, with some arrogance, they are told to be the enemies of individual rights.

To Richards, I say trust in yourself and treat your neighbors as an equal. So long as you look to leaders for the change you seek, you can bet to be changing out one set of dogs for another while ignoring the things all of us can do for the betterment of ourselves and those around us.

This is the same point I made in a post earlier this month. Committed libertarians have not made any progress electorally because they are not willing to scratch enough backs, and if they were willing to scratch enough backs they wouldn’t be committed libertarians any longer. It is not simply a small-government versus a big-government mentality. It’s electoral libertarians or constitutionalists versus a multitude of warhawks, rent seekers, and stripes of big-government conservative and liberal social reformers who are more than willing to trade favors. Those are entrenched groups, and they find that big government suites their needs.

Before those groups came to power, Ludwig von Mises published “Human Action”, the most complete case for classical liberalism, and “Socialism”, which described the calculation problem of centralized economic planning. Leonard Read opened the Foundation of Economic Education, aiding the early careers of F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Henry Hazlitt. Ayn Rand championed the heroic nature of the individual. Their support for electoral politics was understandable given government’s popularity in the 1940s and 50s; but they failed to stop government growth when government was much less intrusive and when it was a tiny fraction of its current size. All the things that have happened since — the trillion dollar-per-year empire, the instillation of dictatorial client states in South America and the Middle East and the subsequent “blowback,” the hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians killed by American forces, and the authoritarian law enforcement tactic leveled against American civilians — happened despite their work. Those tragedies and many more happened anyways.

The fear is that liberty would be in full-scale retreat and that greater atrocities would have taken place had libertarians not participated in electoral politics. There’s a case to be made there, but it is speculation. What isn’t speculation is that government spending as a part of the economy is at an all-time high, and everyone expects it to stay on the current trajectory indefinitely. Most Americans still support pre-emptive war and torture for anyone the government labels a terrorist. In Michael Cloud’s book “Secrets of Libertarian Persuasion,” he cares to use the Weight Watchers Test to gauge the promises by politicians of reducing the size of government, referring to the famous diet plan in which participants meet regularly to weigh themselves in front of other members. He said:

The Weight Watchers Test of government lets us know where we are, which direction we’re moving … and how fast we’re going.

The Weight Watchers Test of government frees us from sleight-of-mouth and political illusions.

It offers us the facts, the truth:

Are we moving toward bigger and bigger Big Government … or getting closer and closer to individual liberty, personal responsibility, and small government?

According to the Weight Watchers Test, libertarians have failed and failed more miserably than anyone else I know. (I include myself in that criticism.) The government has grown from arguably the freest non-colonial government in all of history to the most dangerous existing threat to humanity (considering the military arsenal at a president’s disposal and their predecessor’s historical willingness to use it). A limited government has the perverse tendency of growing immensely since lifting many regulations and securing relative stability makes it possible to generate astounding amounts of wealth, allowing the government parasite to grow largely discretely until the point where the parasite of government becomes so entrenched that government and the market almost appear co-dependent and inseparable.

There are three possible reasons why I think libertarianism has lost political ground. First, we could be wrong, and libertarians fail to understand the scope and circumstances to which coercion should play in human interaction to promote prosperity. Philosophically, I think libertarians (those who support the maximum attainable role of individual liberty) are right. Human beings are the most prosperous, yet fragile, animals on earth. So I don’t think humans have progressed because of our extraordinary physical traits. It is because of the human mind and its reasoning ability. So it seems that the negation of the reasoning mind by initiating force is detrimental to the fruits of human progress. I appreciate Ayn Rand’s comment that “All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.”

Second, libertarians may have failed due to a lack of effort. For this, I refer to the Ron Paul’s presidential campaign of 2008. In one day in November of 2007, his supporters raised over $4.3 million. A month later, supporters exhausted over $6 million in a single day, a record for the largest fundraiser in the history of politics. Libertarians are unlikely to ever find someone as honest and distinguished as Paul. He got more media attention than any ideological libertarian before, yet he rarely garnered more than 10 percent in Republican primaries despite the thousands of YouTube videos and millions of dollars invested. Even if Paul ran again, I’m doubtful that level of enthusiasm could be reproduced.

Third, maybe libertarians have tried the wrong strategy of clinging to government strictures to achieve intellectual inroads. Instead of trying to liberate the entire country, we could try to focus on something of which we have some control — ourselves and our personal relationships.

A belief in the maximum role of individual liberty is inherently an individualist philosophy. That means taking responsibility for our own liberty, just as we take responsibility for our own welfare — instead of giving that power to middlemen, the politicians. We can “be the change,” as Ghandi said, and lead by example to thwart the arbitrary controls others seek to impose on us. In that way, our ideals, cascading individual by individual, will eventually be reflected in the institution of government to the point where it is commonly accepted that government is no longer necessary. I don’t have to wait for the whole country to shift before I take responsibility for my own life and enjoy the benefits of living by honest, consistent principles. It can be achieved by taking peaceful direct action through education, outreach, and agorism.

What if Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Rand, and Hazlitt had worked outside the system 50 years ago? Imagine how much further liberty would have advanced. That too is speculation, but we’ve seen that electoral politics isn’t a path to salvation either.