In, “What is to be Done?” Rothbard argues that our objective is to “advance our principals—to spread libertarian-individualist thought… among the people and to spread its policies in the political arena.” The liberty movement has two main objectives: “boots on the ground” action and creating and disseminating propaganda. The propagandist wing of the liberty movement currently resembles a book club, albeit a large and decentralized book club. Currently the movement pushes forward with enough energy that even the layman not usually inclined to read is motivated enough to do so, however, we should not bet on this continuing. The book club model works fine for now, but it is essential that the propagandist wing further develops blogs and forums focused on different aspects of the liberal project, and particularly develops a means by which a layman may be exposed to increasingly radical ideas.

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The axiom of self-ownership is fundamental to anarcho-capitalistic and voluntaryist philosophies. Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that the act of arguing itself requires the arguer to have accepted the axiom of self-ownership. I suggest that if someone has reasons for arguing, their reasons will be reflected in the assumptions they make about “reality.” These reasons compel them to argue, the very act of which Hoppe has shown to contain an assumption of self-ownership. We would therefore expect the assumptions arguers make about reality to contain at least one concerning self-ownership. In this essay I debunk the Marxist notion of the exploitation of the laborer even if we, for the sake of argument, concede the labor theory of value, and then I show how this relates back to an assumption about the right to self-ownership.

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Seeing the LRC post on how the conversion time from being a libertarian to being an anarchist is about two years again made me think about whether it’s better to help libertarians on the way to anarchism or voluntaryism or to try to convert overt statists to libertarianism. After considering the question for a bit I realized the answer was neither, or rather, both. When talking with either one, however, it is important to remember the goal is not their immediate conversion to antistatism, but rather, to try to help nudge them along the way

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