Larken Rose sits down with Liberty on the Rocks co-founders for a discussion about voluntarism. How do you get there from a minarchist perspective? Larken has some answers!
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Notable quote:
And if you take away the euphemisms and the garbage that train people to not see the reality then it's kind of hard to miss the glaring contradiction between being a decent person and believing in government. Cause they just don't match. When people have to choose between them, most people would choose "I would rather not have innocent people be robbed" and the moment you'd rather not have innocent people be robbed, you are an anarchist.
Well, I would say that Stacy the statist would argue that of course it is wrong to be robbed, but if you're not robbed by the government to pay for education and police and necessary functions you will then therefore instead be robbed by your average Joe mafia man to pay for whatever it is that he wants, because without government and police there will be utter chaos.
And again, these are excuses that come up, there are basically excuses that people fabricate to try to justify the contradictions in their own head. Because Stacy statist would not use that argument in any context other than politics. She wouldn't go up to someone and say "I'm sorry to have to rob you, but if I don't steal your money in order to hire this guy to protect you, somebody might rob you.". Nobody is insane enough to think that in any context other than politics and government. So all of that kind of argument, and I've heard tons of statists say exactly that and use that as their argument. But because they never use it in any other context it shows that they're fishing for an attempted rationalization of a belief system that doesn't make any sense.
(7:56)
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The idea that government will ever serve the people better than freedom is saying, you know, you being able to spend your own money -- that's gonna work out really badly for you, but me stealing your money and deciding how to spend it on your behalf -- that'll be great. And that's the excuse for government.
(13:24)