#murray rothbard

[toscanoirriverente]

#murray rothbard

[nando161mando]

’They will die of hunger at the proprietor's door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, "So perish idlers and vagrants!”’

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

#murray rothbard #Pierre-Joseph Proudhon #leftist quotes #book quotes #quotes #quoteoftheday #book quote #life quote #beautiful quote #quote #quotable #class war #eat the rich #eat the fucking rich #anti capitalism #antinazi #antiauthoritarian #ausgov #politas #auspol #tasgov #taspol #australia #fuck neoliberals #neoliberal capitalism #anthony albanese #albanese government #fuck the police #fuck the supreme court #fuck the patriarchy

[nicklloydnow]

“The other two adjustments made by the state in order to overcome its lowest point of popularity and rise to its present size have to do with interstate relations. For one thing, as explained earlier and just mentioned again by de Jouvenel, states qua monopolistic exploiters tend to get involved in interstate warfare. With their internal exploitative power weak, the desire to compensate for these losses by external expansion rises. However, this desire is frustrated by a lack of internal support. The support is created through a policy of redis-tribution, industrial regulation, and democratization. (In fact, states that do not adopt these measures are bound to lose in any long-lasting warfare!) It is this support that is used as a springboard for a realization of the state's expansionist desires.

This newfound support takes advantage of the fact that redistribution, regulation, and democratization imply a greater tangible identification of the population with a specific state and thus almost automatically lead to an increase in protectionist if not open antagonistic attitudes toward "outsiders" and that in particular state-privileged producers are by nature hostile to "foreign" competition. This support is transformed by the state and its intellectual bodyguards into a frenzy of nationalism and provides the intellectual framework for the integration of socialist-egalitarian, conservative, and democratic sentiments.

Backed by such nationalism, states begin on their expansionist course. For more than a century an almost uninterrupted series of wars and imperialist expeditions set in, each one more brutal and destructive than the previous one, with always greater involvement of the non-combative population, culminating in World War I and II but not ending with this. In the name of the socialist, conservative, or democratic nation, and by means of warfare, states have expanded their territories to sizes compared to which even the Roman Empire appears insignificant, and have actually wiped out or brought under foreign rule a steadily increasing number of culturally distinct nations.

However, not only external expansion of state power is brought about by the ideology of nationalism. War as the natural outgrowth of nationalism is also the means of strengthening the state's internal powers of exploitation and expropriation. Each war is also an internal emergency situation, and an emergency requires and seems to justify the acceptance of the state's increasing its control over its own population. Such increased control gained through the creation of emergencies is reduced during peacetime, but it never sinks back to its pre-war levels. Rather, each successfully ended war (and only successful governments can survive) is used by the government and its intellectuals to propagate the idea that it was only because of nationalistic vigilance and expanded governmental powers that the "foreign aggressors" were crushed and one's own country saved, and that this successful recipe must then be retained in order to be prepared for the next emergency. Led by the just proven "dominant" nationalism, each successful war ends with the attainment of a new peacetime high of governmental controls and thereby further strengthens a government's appetite for implementing the next winnable international emergency.

Each new period of peace means a higher level of governmental interference as compared with the previous one: internally in the form of increased restrictions on the range of choices that private property owners are allowed to make regarding their own property; and externally, as regards foreign relations, in the form of higher trade barriers and of increasingly severe restrictions on population movements (most notably on emigration and immigration). Not the least because it is based on increased discrimination against foreigners and foreign trade, any such peace contains the increased risk of the next international conflict, or pressures the affected governments into negotiating bi- or multilateral interstate-agreements aimed at cartelizing their respective power structures and thereby jointly exploiting and expropriating each other's populations.

Finally, the fourth adjustment is made necessary by the other three, and again because of the ongoing process of interstate competition, crises, and warfare. It is less of the state's own making than are redistribution, democratization, and war-making just as it is not of its own making that there is interstate-competition at all. Rather, in fashionable Hayekian terminology, it is the unintended consequence of the fact that short of one state's domination of the entire world (which is, of course, every state's dream!) the continued existence of other states keeps exerting a significant constraint on each state's size and structure.

Whether intended or unintended, this structural adjustment must also be noted if one wishes to fully understand the development that has led to the present world of statism. It is also only by mentioning this adjustment that the question why it is specifically the tax-state that has risen to world dominance is finally answered.

It is easy enough to explain how through a series of nationalistic wars during the nineteenth and twentieth century the states of Western Europe and North America could come to dominate the rest of the world and leave their imprint upon it. Notwithstanding the presently booming cultural relativism, the reason for this is the simple fact that these states were the outgrowth of societies with a superior intellectual tradition - that of Western rationalism - with its central ideas of individual freedom and private property, and that this tradition had laid the foundation for the creation of economic wealth far exceeding that existing anywhere else. Because they parasitically drew on such superior economic wealth, it is not at all surprising that these states were then able to battle all others victoriously.

(…)

Naturally, redistribution, democratization, and nationalism cannot be cited again here, for assumedly these states have already adopted such policies in order to regain internal strength and prepare for interstate warfare in the first place. Rather, just as it is the relatively stronger tradition of private property ethic that is responsible for these states' dominance over the non-Western world, so, ceteris paribus, is a relatively more liberal policy responsible for their long run success in the struggle for survival among the Western states themselves. Among them, those states which have adjusted their internal redistributionist policies so as to decrease the importance of a conservatively minded policy of economic regulations relative to that of socialistically inclined policy of taxation tend to outstrip their competitors in the arena of international politics.

Regulations through which states either compel or prohibit certain exchanges between two or more private persons as well as acts of taxation are invasions of private property rights. In pursuing both types of redistributionist policies, the states' representatives increase their own income at the expense of a corresponding income reduction for someone else. However, while by no means less destructive of productive output than taxation, regulations have the peculiar characteristic of requiring the state's control over economic resources in order to become enforceable without simultaneously increasing the resources at its disposal. In practice, this is to say that regulations require the state's command over and expenditure of taxes, yet regulations produce no monetary income for the state but only income in the form of the satisfaction of pure power lust (as when A, for no material gains of his own, outlaws that B and C engage in mutually beneficial trade with each other). On the other hand, taxation and a redistribution of tax revenue according to the principle "from Peter to Paul" increases the economic means at a government's disposal at least by its own "handling-charge" for the act of redistribution but may produce no other satisfaction (apart from the increased appreciation by the Pauls) than that of actually possessing certain economic resources and being able to expend them according to its own whims.

Clearly, interstate conflicts and war require economic means, and even more resources the more frequent and longer-lasting such events are. In fact, those states which control more ample economic resources expendable on a war-effort will ceteris paribus tend to be victorious. Hence, since a policy of taxation, and taxation without regulation, yields a higher monetary return to the state than a policy of regulation, and of taxation cum regulation, states must willy-nilly move in the direction of a comparatively deregulated economy and a comparatively pure tax-state in order to avoid international defeat.

It is this relative advantage in international politics of the tax-state over the regulatory state that explains the rise of the U.S. to the rank of the world's foremost imperial power. It also explains the defeat of such highly regulatory states as Nazi-Germany and Fascist-Italy, the relative weakness of the Soviet Union and its allies as compared to the NATO-alliance, and the recent simultaneous moves toward economic deregulation and increased levels of imperialist aggression of the Reagan and, to a lesser extent, the Thatcher governments.

(…)

It cannot be fought by a simple boycott, as could a private business, because an institution devoted to the business of expropriating and exploiting does not respect the negative verdict revealed by boycotts. It also cannot simply be fought by countering its aggression with defensive violence because the state's aggression is supported by public opinion. Thus, overcoming it depends on a change in public opinion. The private property ethic - the idea that private property is a just institution and the only means of creating economic prosperity, and the view of the state as an outcast institution that is destructive of wealth formation, must be revived and must again inspire people's minds and hearts. With the rampant statist ideologies of nationalism, democratism, and redistributionism (of either the socialist or the conservative kind), this may sometimes appear hopeless. However, ideas have changed in the past and can change again in the future. In fact, ideas can change instantaneously. Moreover, the idea of private property has one decisive attraction: it, and only it, is a true reflection of man's nature as a rational being.” (p. 69 - 75)

#hoppe #hans hermann hoppe #economics #ethics #private property #state #statism #etatism #mises #ludwig von mises #rothbard #murray rothbard #libertarianism #libertarian #austrian economics #hayek #rationalism #individualism #ancap #anarchocapitalism

[kramlabs]

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you."

Don Marquis

#critical thinking #free thinker #free thought #ingersoll #lysander spooner #stefan molyneux #graham hancock #thomas dilorenzo #Walter block #murray rothbard #miles mathis #philosophy

[kontextmaschine]

Hearing these assessments of Murray Rothbard and paleolibertarianism as a predecessor of modern right-populism makes some things I was noticing in the late '90s daily libertarian links roundup at free-market.net but didn't have referents for finally make sense, particularly Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo (noted as a disciple) at Antiwar.org. The distinct thing about the paleos it seemed to me was their monetarism, and with that site they were leading with a position – non-interventionist right-pacifism – that they did honestly hold, but seemed more importantly an open niche they could claim. Associating them with '90s white-Enough!ness… makes sense, though.

Makes it a little funny that was completely unrelated to how I came across Steve Sailer, which was actually his comments on Matt Yglesias' American Prospect blog

#paleolibertarianism #murray rothbard #justin raimondo #paleoconservatism #lew rockwell

[liberty1776]

New York was the toughest nut for the Federalists to crack. For here was one state where not only was the population overwhelmingly opposed to the Constitution, but the opposition was also in firm and determined control of the state government and the state political machinery. Here was a powerful governor, George Clinton, who would not, like Hancock and Randolph in the other critical states, yield to a sellout under pressure. Clinton had been a highly popular governor since the formation of the state, had a strong political machinery based on the mass of upstate yeomanry, and was determined to organize … Continue reading →

#US History #The AntiFederalists #Murray Rothbard

[volunteerismandanarchy]

First proposed by American libertarian philosopher Samuel Edward Konkin III, sometimes known as SEK3, Agorism is a libertarian social philosophy that advocates the elimination of coercion in society with the goal of ensuring that all relationships between people are voluntary exchanges. This article will explore agorists’ main beliefs, paying particular attention to Samuel Edward Konkin III’s New Libertarian Manifesto (1980) and An Agorist Primer (2008).

#Agorism #The Collector #Libertarian #Samuel Edward Konkin #Murray Rothbard

[kentonralphtoews]

#power dynamics #manipulation #murray rothbard #freedom #voluntaryism #daily quotes #quote of the day

[musicpizzaman]

In the heart of Ouagadougou, a fierce debate ignited between Murray and Thomas under the glowing African sun. They stood in a vibrant marketplace, full of lively chatter and the scent of roasting maize. Today's topic was the balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility.

Murray, championing the cause of the free market, argued, "The individual should have the ultimate power to decide what's best for himself. It is through such freedom that we can achieve the true potential of humanity."

Thomas, however, saw things differently. "And what of the collective good, Murray?" he asked, his eyes gleaming with passion. "What of our duty to our neighbors, our community, our world? Surely, it is through unity and shared effort that we can uplift the many and not just the few."

Their words clashed, their voices echoing around the bustling market. Each argument was met with a counter, each statement with a rebuttal. There was heat in their words, a fervor that came from deep-seated belief and conviction.

But amidst this spirited debate, there was an undercurrent of respect, even admiration. The intensity of their ideological clash was matched only by the intensity of their connection. They were each other's equal, matching intellect with intellect, passion with passion.

As their argument reached its peak, Murray looked at Thomas, his eyes shining with fervor and said, "You're wrong, Thomas."

"And so are you, Murray," Thomas retorted, his own eyes burning with intensity.

A moment of silence fell between them. The lively market sounds seemed to fade into the background, leaving only the two of them locked in a gaze. They could see the fire in each other's eyes, the unwavering conviction, and underneath it all, an undeniable admiration.

In the midst of their ideological battle, Murray stepped closer to Thomas, closing the distance between them. "You infuriate me," he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper.

Thomas, unflinching, retorted, "The feeling is mutual, Rothbard."

Then, in a move that shocked them both, Murray reached out, pulled Thomas closer, and their lips met in a passionate kiss. It was a contradiction, an unlikely melding of two diverging paths. It was a moment of surrender, where argument gave way to connection. The crowd, the noise, the world around them faded away, leaving only the two of them and the mutual understanding that, despite their stark ideological differences, their respect and affection for each other remained unshaken.

When they finally broke apart, both panting slightly, Murray looked at Thomas and said, "We may never agree on economics, Thomas. But there is one thing we both can agree on."

"And what is that?" Thomas asked, a small smile playing on his lips.

Murray simply replied, "Our feelings for each other." Despite their clashing beliefs, their connection was unbroken, a testament to the enduring power of love in the face of adversity.

#rothbard #thomas sankara #Murray rothbard

[lisamarieblair]

“It is clearly absurd to limit the term 'education' to a person's formal schooling.”

― Murray N. Rothbard, Education, Free & Compulsory

#learning #quote #education #murray n. rothbard #school

[suswous]

Rothbard “Baby Markets” Murray

#been thinking abt Argentina #sorta funny bcs before the election I had been listening to ‘baby merchant’ from CopRock #and that reminded me of Rothbard ‘Baby Markets’ Murray too #and then I see mention of him (Rothbard ‘Baby Markets’ Murray) again

[nicklloydnow]

“GUILT SANCTIFIED

July 1990

Earlier in this century, Left-Liberalism came to America preaching the alluring gospel of Liberation from Guilt. Americans, they boldly proclaimed, are repressed, inhibited, guilt-ridden for giving in to their natural desires and impulses. We come to preach you a joyous removal of guilt, hammered into you by repressed ministers and priests. We preach hedonism, the end of guilt, following your desires, and to put it in a common rebarbative phrase of the 1960s Sexual Revolution: "if it moves, fondle it.” Sex, furthermore, is "only a drink of water," natural and harmless.

The era of guiltlessness under our Left-Liberal culture lasted, as I remember, about six months. Now, the entire culture is characterized by massive collective guilt, and if anyone fails to give due public lip-service to a long list of solemnly avowed guilts, he is literally driven from public life.

Guilt is everywhere, all-pervasive, and brought to us by the same scoundrels who once promised us easy liberation. A brief rundown: guilt for centuries of slavery, guilt for the oppression and rape of women, guilt for the Holocaust, guilt for the existence of the handicapped, guilt for eating and killing animals, guilt for being fat, guilt for not recycling your garbage, guilt for "desecrating the Earth."

Note that this guilt is never confined to the specific individuals, say, who enslaved or murdered or raped people. (There are, I dare say, very few enslavers left in America today-say a Southern slaveholder aged 150?) Effectiveness in inducing guilt comes precisely because the guilt is not specific but collective, extending throughout the world and apparently for all time.

In the old days, we reviled the Nazis for their doctrine of collective guilt; now we embrace the same Nazi concept as a vital feature of our ethical system. For confining guilt to specific criminals would not do, because it would not fit with what Joe Sobran has brilliantly called our doctrine of Accredited Victimology. Some groups are accorded the status of Official Victims; everyone not in the Victim groups are, therefore, criminals and Official Victimizers. The Victimizers are expected to feel guilty about the victims, and therefore because there is no point to guilt without a pay-off - to pay through the nose in money, privileges, and "empowerment" forever and ever without end. Amen.

There is never a way of getting out from under. And this is what our liberators have brought us. In return for old-fashioned Christianity and guilt about sex, they have brought us a new religion of Victimology and of the Goddess Nature. And even sex, the last bastion of hedonism, is no longer guilt-free; with the onslaught of "sex exploits women,” and ravening condomania in the interest of "safe sex," it might be better to scrap the whole thing and go back to Christian guilt. Certainly it would be simpler and more peaceful.

As in all other aspects of our rotten culture, the only way to save the day is to raise the banner high and engage in a frontal and all-out onslaught against the Left Guilt-inducers. In such an onslaught lies the only hope of taking back our lives and our culture from these malignant pests and tyrants.”

#rothbard #murray rothbard #guilt #guilty #victims #victimology #sjw #woke #wokeism #libertarianism #liberty #rockwell #llewellyn rockwell

[kramlabs]

Hans-Hermann Hoppe vs Walter Block* on Hamas

*def sad to see Walter Block take the position he did

:

:

Hoppe:

Breaking up with a person you have known for more than thirty years, with whom you have participated in countless conferences and co-authored a couple of articles, even if only in the somewhat distant past, is nothing done lightly. It is even harder, if one shares with this person a common standing as a public intellectual and both our names are mentioned frequently in one breath as prominent students of the same teacher, Murray N. Rothbard, and as leading intellectual lights of the modern libertarian movement founded by Rothbard.

But then: in this position, it becomes near-imperative to always stay on guard and take notice if a person closely associated with your own name goes astray and falls into serious error, and you may be compelled to publicly distance and dis-associate yourself from this person in order to protect your own personal and intellectual reputation (along with Rothbard’s and that of the entire libertarian intellectual edifice). Such is the case with Walter Block.

Block, to his credit, has published countless articles that pass muster by libertarian standards and there are likely many more to come, he has effusively praised Rothbard over and over again and he likes to refer to himself as the “sweet and kind Walter.” However, he has also published materials that clearly disqualify him as a libertarian and Rothbardian and that reveal him instead as an unhinged collectivist taken in by genocidal impulses, very much like Rand and the Randians recently taken to task by Fernando Chiocca, rather than a sweet and kind person.

I will offer three exhibits to substantiate this claim.

Exhibit one: Block’s writings (together with Alan Futerman and Rafi Faber) on the classical liberal respectively libertarian case for Israel, endorsed (surprise, surprise!) by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The cornerstone of the libertarian doctrine is the idea and institution of private property. Property, whether in land or anything else, is lawfully (and justly) acquired either by means of original appropriation of previously unowned resources (homesteading) or else by means of voluntary property transfer from a prior to some later owner. All property is always and invariably the property of some specific, identifiable individual(s), and all property transfers and exchanges take place between specified individuals and concern specified, identifiable objects. In reverse: all claims to property by a person who had neither homesteaded or previously produced such property, nor acquired it through voluntary transfer from some previous owner are unlawful (unjust).

For the potential problem of restitution or compensation this implies: In every case of conflicting property claims brought to trial for judgment, the presumption is always in favor of the current possessor of the resource under consideration, and the burden of a proof-to-the-contrary is always on the opponent of the current state of affairs and current possessions. The opponent must demonstrate that he, contrary to prima facie appearance, has a better claim because he has an older title to some specified piece of property than its current owner and whose ownership is hence unlawful. If and only if an opponent can successfully demonstrate this must the questionable possession be restored as property to him. On the other hand, if the opponent fails to make this case matters stay the way they are.

It is not in question that a considerable number of cases exists, where lawful compensation or restitution is owed: where person A can demonstrate that he is the lawful owner of some specified piece of property currently in possession and wrongfully claimed as his own by another person B. It is also not in question that there exist some cases, in which a current property owner can trace back the title to some of his present holdings for many generations. But it should also be obvious that for most people and most present holdings any such back-tracing from present to past ends up lost in history very quickly and, in any case, gets increasingly more difficult and murky with time, leaving little if any room for any present-day reparation-demands for “ancient” crimes.

How about 2000 year old crimes? Is there any one living person to be found today, who can claim lawful ownership of some specific piece of property (land, jewelry) that is and has been for a couple of thousand years in the possession of others, by demonstrating his own prior claim to these possessions through proof of an uninterrupted chain of property title transfers going from him and today back all the way to some specific ancestor living at Biblical times and unlawfully victimized at that time? This is not inconceivable, of course, but I very much doubt that any such case can be found. I would want to see it, before I believe it.

And yet, Block et. al., in their attempt of presenting the liberal respectively libertarian case for Israel, maintain that they can justify the claim of present-day Jews to a homeland in Palestine based on their status as “heirs” of Jews having lived two millennia ago in the region then called Judea. Not surprisingly, however, except for the single and in itself highly questionable case of the Kohanim (Jews of priestly descent) and their specific connection to the Temple Mount, they do not provide a shred of evidence how in the world any one specific present-day Jew, through a time-span of more than two thousand years, can be connected to any one specific ancient Jew and be established as legitimate heir of some specific piece of property stolen or otherwise taken from him two thousand years ago.

The claim of present-day Jews to a homeland in Palestine, then, can only be made if you abandon the methodological individualism underlying and characteristic of all libertarian thought: the notion of individual personhood, of private property, private product and accomplishment, private crime and private guilt. Instead, you must adopt some form of collectivism that allows for such notions as group or tribal property and property rights, collective responsibility and collective guilt.

This turn from an individualistic to a collectivistic perspective is on clear display in Block’s et. al. summary conclusion (p.537):

“Rothbard supports homesteading as the legitimate means of ownership (the first homesteader gets the land, not any subsequent one)….Libertarians deduce from this fact that stolen property must be returned to its original owners, or their heirs. This is the case for reparations. Well, the Romans stole the land from the Jews around two millennia ago; the Jews never gave this land to the Arabs or anyone else. Thus according to libertarian theory it should be returned to the Jews.”

Bingo. But homesteading is done by some specific Ben or Nate, not by “the Jews,” and likewise reparations for crimes committed against Ben or Nate are owed to some specific David or Moshe as their heir, not to “the Jews,” and they concern specific pieces of property, not all of “Israel.” Unable to find any present David or Moshe that can be identified as ancient Ben’s or Nate’s heir to some specified piece of property, however, all reparation claims directed against any current owner are without any base.

Another property theory is needed to still make the case for a Jewish homeland. And Block and his coauthors offer such a theory: property rights and reparation claims can allegedly also be justified by genetic and cultural similarity. Ancient Jews and present-day Jews are genetically and culturally related and hence present-day Jews are entitled to the property stolen from ancient Jews; and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs immediately before and in the aftermath of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, then, is not a crime but simply the re-possession of what legitimately belongs and has belonged for two millennia to the Jews.

Yet this theory is not only obviously incompatible with libertarianism. It is also plain absurd.

Just consider: Jews lived for hundreds of years in Egypt and when they finally reached their “promised land” this was by no means empty. According to Deuteronomy and Joshua quite a bit of killing, pillaging and raping had to be done before taking over the land. Ancient Jews were not just homesteaders, they were also perpetrators, and there had been already plenty of ethnic mixing with other people of other tribes, with Egyptians, Greeks and all sorts of other people around the Mediterranean, long before the Romans arrived and took over, and this genetic admixture, later also with Arabs, continued up to the present day. Any genetic linking of present-day Jews to ancient Jews, then, becomes an impossible task. There are contemporary Jews that show no genetic traces to ancient Jews, and there are plenty of Gentiles who do show such traces; and in any case, the genetic similarities to be found between the ancient and the present Jews will be one of countless variations and degrees. How to decide then who of the contemporaries is entitled to what part or portion of the holy land? (Interestingly, it appears that the closest genetic similarity to ancient Jews could be found among indigenous Christian Palestinians.)

Moreover: what if this fanciful new theory of property acquisition and inheritance via genetic similarity were generalized to all tribes and ethnicities? There are countless cases of expropriations and expulsions of one group or tribe by another in human history, of victims and of perpetrators, involving non-Jews as well as latter day Jews. How about every group of present descendants of some historical victim group demanding the restitution of assets currently held by the members of another group or tribe on account of the fact that such assets had been stolen from one’s ethnic forebears some time way back in history (whether by the group of present owners or any other group)? The result would be legal chaos, interminable strife, conflict and war.

If this collectivistic nonsense is not enough to disqualify Block as a libertarian, the following exhibit, demonstrating its monstrous consequences, should remove even the slightest remaining doubt that he is anything but a libertarian, a Rothbardian or a sweet and nice person.

Exhibit two: This is a recent editorial by Block (again co-authored with Futerman), originally most prominently published (although behind a paywall) by one of the most establishment papers, the WSJ, (what a surprise!) and subsequently easily accessibly reprinted on Block’s own newsletter on October 12, 2023. It is titled “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas. Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes to uproot this evil, depraved culture that resides next to it,” and as the title already indicates, it is this screed of his, then, that reveals Block as an unhinged, bloodthirsty monster, rather than a libertarian committed to the non-aggression-principle as the second, complementary foundational pillar of the libertarian doctrine.

Subject here are the events of October 7th, 2023, its aftermath and consequences. On that day, members of the so-called Hamas, running the Gaza strip, attacked, maimed, killed and kidnapped a large number of Israeli soldiers and civilians. (As is to be expected in any type of war, both warring parties are presenting widely different stories concerning the actual events and numbers. What has become clear so far is only that the number of casualties runs in the several hundreds to low one thousands, and that a considerable portion of such casualties were actually the result of “friendly fire,” per helicopter, by the Israeli Defense Forces.)

What is a libertarian supposed to make of this event? First, he must recognize that both, Hamas and the State of Israel, are gangs financed and funded not by voluntary membership contributions but by extortion, taxation, confiscation and expropriation. Hamas does so in Gaza, with the people living in Gaza, and the State of Israel does it with the people living in Israel as well as the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Gaza is a tiny, poor and densely populated territory, and Hamas is accordingly a small, low-budget gang, with only some rag-tag army and little and mostly low-grade weaponry. Israel is a much larger, significantly more prosperous and less densely populated territory, and the State of Israel, subsidized long-lastingly and heavily by the world’s mightiest and wealthiest of all gangs, the USA, is a big and high-budget gang, with some large, well-trained professional army, equipped with the most sophisticated and destructive weaponry available, including atomic bombs.

The older one of these two fighting gangs is the State of Israel, itself established only recently, in 1948, by mostly European Jews of Zionist persuasion, and by means of intimidation, terrorism, war and conquest directed against the then-present, and for many centuries before, mostly Arab residents of the region of Palestine. And it was also by means of intimidation, terrorism, war and conquest, then, that the explicitly Jewish State of Israel was successively expanded to its present size. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were uprooted, expropriated and expelled from their homes and turned into refugees as a result; and large numbers of these victims or their direct heirs are still in possession of valid title to land or other properties now in possession of the State of Israel (the Israeli Land Authority) and its Jewish citizens. (At best, only a meager 7 percent of the present Israeli territory was regularly acquired or purchased by Jews before 1948, and could thus be claimed as legitimate Jewish property.)

Hamas, on the other hand, is one of several Arab resistance movements, parties and gangs formed in reaction to the Israeli-Jewish take-over and occupation of Palestine. Founded originally in 1987, and since 2006 in control of the Gaza Strip, which was and still is subject to a rigorous land, air and sea blockade by Israel and hence frequently referred to by knowledgeable observers as an open-air concentration camp, Hamas is committed to the reconquest of the lost territories, including by means of violence and acts of terror such as on October 7th. Explicitly directed not against Jews qua Jews but specifically against Zionists, it actually received funding also from Israel in its beginnings, in order to build it up as a counterweight to the growing influence of the larger, more moderate and better funded secular underground resistance group Fatah, and its PLO leadership in exile in Tunisia. As Fatah and the PLO were put in charge of some parts of the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Peace Process that started in 1993, the more militant and islamic fundamentalist Hamas’ relative intransigence became a useful tool for the increasingly influential extremist Israeli factions which sought to derail the peace process, and succeeded in doing so by increasing their building of Jewish settlements that split up the West Bank into non-contiguous open-air prisons controlled by Israel, rendering a Palestinian state essentially impossible. (There has been speculation as to the motive for this seemingly strange Israeli decision of lending support to Hamas. Quite plausibly: because events such as those of October 7th, can and are indeed currently being used by Israel as a dramatic proof and public demonstration of its long-held contention that there can never be any two-State solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and Israel, for the sake of regional peace, must be still further expanded and restored as one single State to its alleged original, biblical size.)

In any case, then, before this background, how is a libertarian to react and evaluate the 10/7 events? First off, he would want to wish the pox on the leadership of both gangs and on all gang-leaders of foreign states that have lent and continue to lend support to either one of the two warring gangs with funds stolen from their own subject population. As well, he would acknowledge that the Hamas attack on Israel was no more “totally unprovoked” than the Russian attack a little while ago on the Ukraine. The attack on Israel was definitely provoked by the conduct of its own political leadership, much like the Russian attack on the Ukraine had been provoked by the leadership of the Ukraine. And he would not fail to note also that in both cases, that of Israel as well as that of the Ukraine, their provocations had been encouraged, backed up and supported big time by the predominantly Jewish neo-con gang-leadership in charge of the US government.

Apart from this, there is little a libertarian can do except raise his voice in favor of peace, talks, negotiations and diplomacy. The Hamas leadership should be accused for having brought about through its terrorist actions the danger of some massive retaliation by a militarily far superior and more powerful enemy gang, the State of Israel. And the Israeli leadership should be blamed for having failed blatantly in protecting its own population owing to its apparently severely deficient surveillance agencies. The leadership of both gangs should be encouraged – and indeed pressured through public opinion – to agree to an immediate truce, and at once negotiations concerning the return of the hostages held by Hamas should be started. And as for the identification, capture and punishment of the various individual perpetrators and their superior commanders (including incidentally also those responsible for the Israeli victims of “friendly fire”), this should be left to regular police-work, to detectives, headhunters and possibly also assassins.

What must be avoided, however, in any case and at all costs, is an escalation of the armed conflict through a massive retaliatory strike by the Israeli military against the Hamas housing and hiding out in Gaza. This even more so, because Israel, with some 10 million inhabitants, incuding a minority of some 2 million Arabs, is surrounded exclusively by some less-than-friendly or even openly hostile neighboring states with a total population counting in the hundreds of millions, and any escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hamas may well expand and degenerate into an all-out war, engulfing the entire region of the Near- and Middle-East.

But this is precisely what Block et.al. are demanding. Based on their collectivistic theory of inheritance presented in exhibit one and the alleged “historical right” of “the Jews” to a homeland in Palestine derived from this theory, Block, in response to the events of October 7th, advocates an all-out attack by Israel on the Hamas hiding out in Gaza (and while we do not know if Netanyahu has read Block’s piece in the WSJ, Israel, under his leadership, has exactly done what Block has been asking for).

Leaving Block’s sketchy, characteristically one-sided remarks on the history of modern Israel and the region aside, which could have come directly from the Israeli ministry of propaganda, and that show himself completely oblivious to the genocidal impulses openly expressed by several leading members of the mighty Israeli military and government, all the while making much hey out of the reciprocal sentiments on the side of the (comparatively speaking) almost powerless Hamas leadership, this, in this own words, are Block’s demands (with my italicized comments interspersed in parentheses):

“The West needs to understand that to defend human life and dignity, it isn’t enough to claim to side with Israel. It needs to understand what this means: total, unrestricted support. (Does such support also include taxes forcibly taken by the various gangleaders in charge of Western States from their own population?) That is nothing less than allowing this beleaguered country to defend itself fully. To recognize that Hamas needs to be destroyed for the same reason and by the same method that the Nazis were. (Does ‘Nazis’ refer to all Germans living in Germany at the time, including all non-Nazis, Nazi-opponents, and all German babies and children; and does the method of their destruction include also the carpet bombing of entire cities such as Dresden, filled with mostly innocent civilians?) Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes to uproot this evil residing next to it. (How about Israeli Jews opposed to war? Silence them, too, whatever it takes?) And, more important, that once it begins to proceed in that direction, it won’t be demonized for defending that which is the core of Western civilization (does this core also include the sort of apartheid practiced in Israel?) and which its enemies hate the most: the love of everyone’s right to human life, dignity and happiness.”

“In other words, it needs to support a complete, total and decisive Israeli victory. If this implies an overwhelming, unprecedented use of military force, so be it. Hamas is and will be responsible for any civilian casualties. Cause and effect. They created their own destruction, and its consequences.” (So, there is no need whatsoever to distinguish between members of Hamas and inhabitants of Gaza generally? They all, including all babies and children, are indiscriminately guilty, part of a depraved culture and a collective evil that must be rooted out once and for all? How about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza, then, as the US did about eighty years ago on the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as collective punishment for the crimes committed by the Japanese government-gang?)

“Mere victory isn’t enough. Israel has won every war it ever fought. This time, the triumph must be so thorough and conclusive that there will never be any other war for this country. (Haven’t we heard this before: the war to end all wars?!) Israel has a moral right to finish the job, and the West has a moral duty to support it. Let Israel do whatever it must to finish this war in the fastest way possible, with the minimum civilian and military casualties on its side. (How considerate, and totally meaningless, even shameful, after everything said to the contrary before about the irrelevance of civilian casualties!) The consequences of this lie on the group that initiated the causal sequence – the one that must be completely destroyed, Hamas.”

Whatever these outpourings of Block’s are, they have nothing whatsoever to do with libertarianism. In fact, to advocate the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents is the total and complete negation of libertarianism and the non-aggression principle. The Murray Rothbard I knew would have immediately called them out as unhinged, monstrous, unconscionable and sickening and publicly ridiculed, denounced, “unfriended” and excommunicated Block as a Rothbardian.

Indeed, unforgivably, with his WSJ piece Block has made a contribution to the horrors actually following the events of October 7th and still unfolding: the near complete destruction of Gaza and its reduction to little more than some huge pile of rubble and a vast field of ruins, the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent civilians by the Israeli military, and the continuous widening of the armed conflict, including by now also the Lebanon and Yemen, and of the Israeli leadership itching (egged on in this endeavor by its neo-con compatriots in the US) to further include as a target for destruction also the Iran, as Israel’s alleged deadly arch-enemy.

Incidentally, Block’s supplementary reason given for his categorical “We Must All Stand with Israel” position (Israeli government leadership and all), is also faulty and implies a betrayal of the non-aggression principle. Essentially, it boils down to this: The Jews in Israel have made more and better use of the territory under their control than the Arabs made or are currently making with the territories controlled by them; and hence, the Jews have a better claim to some territory-in-dispute than the Arabs do. This reasoning is actually quite popular. However, even if the first part of this statement is accepted as true, the second part does not follow from it. Otherwise, every man-of-proven-success would be permitted to take the property of any long-proven-loser, which can hardly be reconciled with the libertarian non-aggression principle. Even “losers” have a right to life, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

If that is not already more than enough to forever disqualify and discredit Block as a libertarian, he manages to top it off in some short final exhibit that reveals him as a man without sense of measure and proportion.

Exhibit three: This concerns Block’s reply to a short piece by Kevin Duffy, contrasting a passage taken from Rothbard’s For A New Liberty: A Libertarian Manifesto with a passage from the just quoted screed of Block’s in the WSJ, and concluding that both are obviously incompatible and impossible to reconcile. Block’s response can be found here. Remarkably, in his reply, he does not even try to provide further reason for his advocacy of total, unrestricted war (not surprisingly, as that would mean trying to defend what is absolutely, truly and genuinely indefensible!). Instead, he evades the direct challenge and then quickly digresses into some entirely different and unrelated subject matter.

Libertarians are not pacifists, and indeed, Rothbard, as Block excusingly notes, was not opposed to all war. But conspicuously, Block then fails to say that the wars Rothbard considered possibly or potentially justified had nothing whatsoever in common with the sort of war actually proposed by him. What Rothbard had in mind was defensive violence used by secessionist movements against some central occupying powers trying to prevent them by means of war from leaving, i.e., something obviously a world apart from the total war advocated by Block.

Yet in stating that Rothbard “does not at all oppose war, period,” Block tries to create the deceptive impression that his deviation from Rothbard, then, is merely a minor one, only a matter of degree. Various deviations from Rothbard, he then continues, have been suggested or proposed before by other authors. And he cites (and links) to this effect several contributions of his own, of Joseph Salerno, of Peter Klein and also of myself, and notes that none of these has led to the exclusion of anyone of them as Austro-libertarians, nor would Rothbard himself have excluded them as such on account of these writings. Indeed, Rothbard embraced some of these deviations (such as mine, for instance), and he may well have seriously considered the others. Such then, Block claims, should also be the appropriate reaction to his deviationist position on the ”war question,” and such also, he believes, would have been Rothbard’s personal reaction upon reading his WSJ piece.

Grotesque. If anything, this assessment of Block’s only indicates that he has lost any sense of measure and proportion. None of the other “deviationist” writings mentioned by him in comparison to and as an excuse and justification for his own deviationist position on the war question is, or can be interpreted by any stretch of the imagination as a break with or renunciation of the fundamental principles of the Austro-libertarian intellectual edifice. But his call for total and unrestricted war and the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians is actually the complete and uninhibited rejection and renunciation of the non-aggression principle that constitutes one of the very cornerstones of the Rothbardian system. To believe that Rothbard would have given serious consideration to his WSJ piece is simply ridiculous and only indicates that Block’s understanding of Rothbard is not nearly as good as he himself fancies it to be. The Rothbard I knew would have denounced the piece in no uncertain terms as monstrous and considered it an unforgivable aberration and disgrace.

Author: 

Contact Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher. He is the founder and president of The Property and Freedom Society.

#Walter Block #murray rothbard #Hans-Hermann Hoppe #gaza

[dostoyevsky-official]

hard to put concisely how awful milei, who has just won the argentine presidency, is. a thatcher-loving ancap who cloned his dead dog and named the clones after murray rothbard, milton friedman, and robert lucas, but who still does ouija-board sessions to take political advice from the first dog, who may or may not have incestuous relations with his sister, who wants to get rid of almost all ministries, who calls university students parasites, who wants to dollarize the economy and close the central bank, legalize guns and organ selling, and privatize healthcare, who may or may not have been involved in an operation to sell children's organs, whose vice president praises the dictatorship and visited videla and his gang in jail, and who regularly has meltdowns during interviews, laughing out of nowhere, or complaining about "voices" not letting him answer questions

#this is a job for and-so-on #this is the tip of the iceberg #argentina

[liberty1776]

#Economic Myths #Murray Rothbard #Economics

[volunteerismandanarchy]

Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered, but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet. Murray N. Rothbard, The Anatomy of the State

#Murray Rothbard #Liberty #Statism #Coercian