Attention: The world is coming to an end! Buy gold, guns, and gas masks!
The doomsday, Armageddon, impending collapse, mass starvation and war-lording reality, coming to a city or neighborhood near you, is a reoccurring theme among many pro-liberty websites. Whether it’s selling guns, gas masks, and water purification tablets or advising people to place their money into strange and obscure investment vehicles (e.g., nickels), doomsday moneymaking schemes abound throughout the liberty movement.

The yellow journalistic technique of exploiting doom has severe consequences. Not only is the doomsday premise false but its affirmation is damaging to our psyche. It corrupts the virtues of freedom and is counter-productive to the anarcho-libertarian movement. It’s time for a reality check.

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Time and again I read Austrian School economists dissing Peak Oil Theory. They likely do this because they have not taken the time to fully understand the theory behind peak oil. Instead, they get caught up in the doom and gloom predictions made by many proponents of Peak Oil Theory and the erroneous calls for some sort of government intervention to alleviate the matter. The problem with this dismissive attitude, however, is that by not acknowledging the validity of Peak Oil Theory, the Austrians lose legitimacy in the eyes of a large percentage of the population, namely the environmental left.

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In a corrupt and decaying world, conventional wisdom demands that the answer to our problems is to choose which bitter flavor of government we should endure. Many look to libertarianism as the sweet flavor of change.

There seems to be a plethora of supporters and critics who wish to wax eloquent on this subject.  Yet, the discussion always revolves around the utility of libertarianism. How would it work? Who would provide services like roads, schools, and protection? Who would help the needy? These discussions and critiques go on and on ad infinitum.

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I am, as of this writing, seventeen years old. I am also an Anarchist. Now do away with all your preconceived notions of a hooded teenager looking for a way to rebel against his parents. I came to be an Anarchist the same way most of you did. I did my research and saw that the state was not only woefully inadequate, but harmful and immoral as well. And as how I came to this conclusion? Well It seemed the only right course.

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As I sat and watched tonight’s GOP Presidential debate in South Carolina it became clear to me that despite much greater name recognition than four years prior, Congressman Ron Paul’s message of non-interventionism will continue to fall on deaf ears. As a minarchist this phenomena was both infuriating and incomprehensible. As an anarchist, however, it makes perfect sense.

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The other day I began reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Though I’m a bit turned off by some aspects of Jobs’s personality, I’m fascinated by the entrepreneurial eagerness that seemed to fill his brain from an early childhood.

Looking back, many other industry titans, including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, also had jobs when they were young; their intuition wasn’t limited to the classroom.

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Many people who come to the philosophy of liberty from the right hold on to their conservative talking points on corporations and unions. I came here from the radical left. So it was obvious to me that organized labor played a legitimate role in a free market and that corporations were a creation of the state. But I hadn’t committed a lot of time to forging my opinion.

Both unions and corporations are rooted in freedom of association, but it seemed to me that corporations limit legitimate liability, and unions violate freedom of disassociation. They seem fundamentally similar because they both mitigate economic liability with state force. But I wanted to check my own ex-liberal bias. So, I interviewed one person from each side, a radical unionist and a tea-party patriot, to talk me through the gaps in my understanding.

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An interviewer once asked H.L. Mencken, “If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?” Mencken quickly responded, “Why do men go to zoos?”

It is for the same reason that I find myself continually watching political debates.

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Almost all of us hold two beliefs which contradict a third near-universal belief.  The first is that a state, however else defined, is a geographic monopoly of security and justice.  One cannot appeal a ruling beyond the state, and whatever private providers of security and justice may exist, they do so in pronounced subservience to and supervision by the state.

The second is that monopolies invariably cause high prices and low quality.  Is it so absurd to unite these two self-evident ideas and suggest that states are poor providers of security and justice?

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What is a natural right as opposed to a right acquired by contract?

Natural rights begin with the idea that a human being is a form of property. The question becomes “who is the owner?” There are three possible alternatives: each person is a self-owner; someone else owns him (slavery); or he is an unclaimed good.

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