thales

It would be a huge disservice if you all are teaching him that libertarianism is about just what you say it is, because there is a long and rich tradition of libertarians disagreeing about things like anarchism/minarchism, intervention, NAP, etc. IOW what you get here is mainly *Molyneux's* take on libertarianism, not libertarianism in the broad sense.

It should be obvious that people have a right to come to the defense of innocents anywhere on the planet, and that they have a right to organize to do so. It is also true that forcing others to defend these innocents (via involuntary taxes or conscription) is improper. But it is likewise improper to force people to build roads, monitor aircraft for safety, punish rapists and thieves, etc. etc. The ideal is a society that is structured on the basis of perfect consent. This ideal is possible, but not when advocates are preaching a confusion and have no sense of priorities. The first priority is to help people understand how a society based on consent is moral and practical, not to try to end road-building, policing, air traffic control, or protection of innocents abroad (whether or not the US is actually doing this is something that is debated well-enough by those who are not concerned with a perfectly consensual society; it is a waste of time to be dragged into such arguments.)

If I could answer this question as a straightforward forum post I certainly wouldn't have written the essay! People generally do not buy into elaborate ideologies such as yours for trivial reasons, so untangling them is not trivial either. If you think that some particular step of my argument has gone wrong then address that step.

Why is what you are "interested in" relevant to universal philosophic principles? The argument is that, if you're interested in truth, you ought to be interested in using proper methodologies for defining concepts. So you are either question-begging or just giving us your philosophically irrelevant emotional states. The more truth is on your side, the more sincere you are, the easier it should be to make a coherent argument. The less it is on your side and the less sincere you are, the more you will be prone to fallacy, as in the above distortions of my position, motives, or this latest oddity of decreeing what you are "interested in."

EndTheUsurpation: Since you were the one who apparently thought you could do a long-distance mind-meld concerning my motives and got things very wrong, your judgement is in question and your summary assessment has zero credibility. What you need to do, at a minimum, is pick some specific statement I made and demonstrate why it is wrong (more likely you'll only be demonstrating why you have failed to comprehend it). Your mere opinion that my essay is a "straw man" is less than useless. Nor is your excerpt from my essay relevant, since it's a mere conclusion not an argument. The arguments are in the previous 14 pages...

Thank you. This is an absolutely ridiculous misrepresentation. I never said any such thing. Again, this is ridiculous. The truth is that I think anarchism is contradictory, which means it can never be put into practice, which means those who cling to it will be ineffectual and not get what it is they seek (a free society.) The thing is, when you pretend to know my motives *and then you are very wrong about them*, you put me in a special position in assessing your own motives in doing such a thing.

Hello, I'm the author of the "Against Anarchism" essay. I'm writing this post reluctantly, due to the gross distortions and presumptions about my view posted thus far. I mean, someone who'd never read my works might take these misrepresentations at face value, but I the author can testify that they haven't really understood the first thing about what I've actually written. Do my "critics" here think that it's important to accurately represent those who you are criticizing? From whence does the slipshod criticism spring? Did you simply not read what I wrote, or are you just afraid of viewpoints that might contradict your own?