Property

One of the caveats people have with anarchism in general, besides how we help the poor in a voluntary society which is my next post topic, is property and property rights. What is property? I suppose this post will be about more than just property and the rights that come along with it but also about how one would go about defending it in a free society, specifically the course of action if someone aggresses on your property through theft or whatever. First I'd like to establish what property is viewed as and how it is obtained. As voluntarists or anarcho-capitalists property is always going to be defined as something that is scarce, something that no two people can have claim to at one point without conflict. For example, a piece of land could be viewed as property or a car because no two people can claim ownership over them without having to take it from the other person. If something isn't scarce then an infinite number of people could claim ownership over something without directly taking from another person something they couldn't have otherwise. Property is ALWAYS going to be something physical or else it won't have the possibility of being scarce. Now hopefully it's more understood what property is regarded as the next step is how does one obtain said property? This belief is one that's ingrained in the idea of self-ownership, the belief that you own your body because you have the exclusive right over it since only you can make your body function in a productive way. To extend from that since you own your body and what you do with it you should own the so called fruits of your labor which is the productive ability your body can produce. Since you can produce things it would be immoral to say you don't own the things you use to make something else, i.e. if you turn your land into a farm with your labor you should naturally own the farm. The next step is how does one obtain property? This is settled by the first homesteader principle, which says the one to first use a natural resource to produce something should be the owner of that resource. If again you are the first person to turn a piece of land into a farm or a place for a house you should have the exclusive right over that land and no one should be able to take it from you. After you've used this natural resource and have claimed exclusive ownership over it you have the right to keep it indefinitely or enter a voluntary contract of said land for trade or for sale. I know that I said that I would go into how one would go about defending property if someone was to agress on your property but that would be a whole 'nother post in itself so I will not make this any longer than it needs to be. But to be sure we must understand that no one and I literally mean no one has the right to take any of your property without your consent especially if it's forced "consent". We are free people who are slaves to no one.

Talking to the right and left

As liberty activists we often find ourselves defending ourselves not only from those on the left but surprisingly even those on the right. Those on the left call us greedy and inhumane because we don't want to redistribute the wealth and want less regulations. Those on the right call us immoral and unpatriotic because we don't want to push our moral beliefs on others and despise the military industrial complex. We share many beliefs from both sides and these are usually the sides that the right and left have in difference. The differences that the right and left have are both one in the same in the terms that they both believe in big government to address these issues. As libertarians and anarcho-capitalists we completely are against big government in general. Why? As libertarians the Constitution gives certain abilities to the Federal Government and the rest to the States and the people. As anarcho-capitalists we object to the state in its entirety. But that's really beyond the point for this post since at hand we are trying to talk to the people on the left and the right and help them see the light like we did before we became libertarians. The biggest issue at hand is to shed light on the problems we have in our society. I will not argue that at the tip of the iceberg many of the things those on the right and the left see are truly problems, but the fail to see the monstrous mass of ice underneath. People see the rising costs of living, rising cost of college tuition, and the rising unemployment rate. They don't see what actually causes these things and how they've come to be, it's only seen at face value. People see terrorists wanting to attack us, drug abuse, and protests. And again they don't see what causes these things and how they've come to be. This is how we must talk to these people. We are educated people and we must make them question the things they see so that they can come to their own conclusions. Our greatest weapon in this movement is to light a fire and make people think. My biggest goal in this movement is to make people think about The Federal Reserve and what they have done to the money we are forced to use. We can do nothing as a people if we have nothing. With peace and freedom we can once again be prosperous people.

V for Voluntary, what is it?

Many of us liberty activists didn't quite start as libertarians. We belonged from the left and right a false paradigm which is the dichotomy most Americans live by, one choice or the other nothing else. We woke up, we saw the inconsistencies involved with both parties, we saw that both parties are one in the same, they were both about big government. We noticed our hard earned dollars were being taken from us for a welfare state from the left and for the military industrial complex from the right. Our own dedication and research led us to Dr. Ron Paul, one of the few that was trying to save us from big government. My own research and reading from the background that Dr. Ron Paul learned from of Austrian Economics and protection of civil liberties has led me down the path to Anarcho-Capitalism another word for Voluntarism. Before I go into these I'll first offer an explanation of what government itself is. Government is defined as the people who are in control of the state, the state itself is defined as what has the use of legitimate force over a certain territory.¹² Murray Rothbard and Ludwig Von Mises have both called the state as what uses compulsion and coercion to enact policy, or they have the monopoly of violence over a certain territory. This is the definition I go by since the only legitimate use of force is when property is stolen or contract is violated leading to the theft of property. The state can never claim the legitimate use of force over a man because the state itself has nothing and cannot product anything, the only way the state exists is by being a parasite living off the productive citizenry. With the absence of the state there's no group that has the monopoly of violence, this is the society that Anarcho-Capitalists and Voluntarists believe in. There's different forms of anarchy that people believe in, the ones that us Voluntarists believe in is a state-less society with property rights. Property rights are established in a free society is done by the homesteading principle, where the first person to make use of natural resources like land owns that land and the exclusive right to keep it or sell it as he sees fit. This is based off the principle of self-ownership, where you own your body and by extension own the productive ability of your labor and by extension should have the moral right to own the natural resources to which you first produced something with your labor. The protection of these property rights when established is based off the Non Aggression Principle (NAP). NAP says that you should never aggress on someone elses property and they should never aggress on your property. If this happens the NAP is violated and now you have the ability to use legitimate force, although in a truly free society this is not to say that we advocate a wild west gun-slinging method to settle disputes because we believe in peace. If you'd like to know how a free society would settle disputes in a peaceful manner then leave a comment because it is not in the scope of this post.

The society is a voluntary society where all forms of interaction among individuals is done voluntarily i.e. without force. Many people believe that this system would be impossible to implement. But if we look at what we have here in America and around the world we can see that civil liberties and purchasing power of the citizens are always destroyed at the hands of the state. Do we want to be slaves to the government or do we want to be free people?

It's our choice to decide.

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government ²http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)

Voluntary is peace

When you give anyone the monopoly of violence this is destined to be the outcome. Government couldn't exist and therefor couldn't kill hundreds of millions of people without using compulsion and coercion to steal from honest citizens through taxing and inflating a money supply which is theft in itself. The creation of the state is legitimately the antithesis of freedom. A voluntary world is a peaceful world.

Guns and the law

Although it is truly sad what happened in Colorado the lives that are gone will have truly been wasted if we don't learn from those that were in attendace. We must realize that there are bad people out there that want to inflict harm on others. You cannot blame the methods used to cause the harm but must blame only the harmer. Take this incident as a reason to arm yourself and train yourself to be able to defend yourself, loved ones, and innocent people. Gun free zones are not safe havens they attract shootings since it's well known that legally armed citizens cannot protect themselves there. I posted this on my Facebook page after the tragedy and received support. But now as the days go on we have seen increasingly more articles calling for more gun control. To their credit most are not calling for complete destruction of gun rights but merely more control on high capacity rifles and magazines since there is no "legitimate reason" to own such things. They forget that as free people we should have the ability to purchase whatever merely because we want to. But not going to deep into that argument I provide an irony in their logic. Most of these people, with their political ideologies, believe that drug laws are detrimental to society because non-violent people are criminalized and drugs are still widely available despite the complete restriction of drugs by the federal government. I agree completely with them to this point and that it isn't the governments job to regulate what you put in your body as long as you don't hurt someone else. By the very same token the irony protrudes because even with stricter gun laws or abolishing gun rights all together people will still get their hands on weapons, non-violent people will be criminalized for merely possessing an object, it's again not the governments job to tell me what I can own, and criminals will be able to attack more easily when there's no way for the citizenry to protect themselves. When seconds count the police are minutes away.

True freedom?

One must always ask what is liberty and how can it fully be obtained? Through my research I have ultimately come to one single conclusion that cannot really be refuted without the use of some utilitarian and socialistic ideologies. The only way that we can ultimately be free is with through abolishing the State itself. No Constitution, regardless of how well written, can guarantee ultimate freedom as long as there is government that uses compulsion and coercion. Many of us believe (and I was guilty at one point) that government should be used to protect private property and contract, but it can only do so by having a non-natural monopoly of violence at the point of a gun. There's no greater meaning of "It's not the left vs the right it's the State vs you." because then in essence every justification of supporting statism, be it for the protection of property and contract, is a socialistic justification which morally I have to oppose. This is because in order to fund the government that should protect these things you must use compulsion and coercion. The state cannot possibly exist without stealing through taxation. Stealing is ALWAYS morally wrong and should never be justified even through the use of government. If we are to truly be free men and women we must live in a completely voluntary society with the absence of the state and its means of compulsion and coercion.

Thoughts so far on Human Action by Mises

My single greatest leap into our movement has been my attempt to understand on the intellectual level what it is we are fighting for. I've read many of Ron Paul's books and a history book on the Federal Reserve by Rothbard but nothing that is considered scholarly writings. My adventure has thus started with Human Action which is an economic treatise. Here's the link to the free ebook offered from the Mises Institute, which offers most of their books for free in this format to help spread the knowledge. http://mises.org/document/3250/Human-Action Now on the book itself- It was written in the 40s so a lot of the words are dictionary needing. But other than that it's not hard to read and for a book on economics it is not dry at all. Mises has slowly evolved through the book going through explaining what human action is in the context of praxeology to how and why society has actually evolved to economic calculations. It's been a beautiful transition from each of these topics as well as mixing them together to get the overall understand to just how all are necessary in an economic society. I'm not even a third of the way through this book so there's much to come, if you have any questions let me know!