Phil

Hey there, just a general critique from me. While I find the "truth about...(add historical personality)"-series interesting and entertaining, the podcasts appears slightly one-sided to me. Basically they seem to be collections of negative facts one can find about the people featured, which to me is slightly different from "the truth" about a person. What do you think? Perhaps you should rename them into something like "some facts about...the mainstream media don't report" or something along those lines. Oh, by the way, 2 more people you could make similar "truth about" podcasts on are Churchill and FDR, who are both celebrated mainstream heroes who were actually in many ways extremely negative characters who supported lots of very questionable policies and also had major flaws in their personalities, their only real claim to fame being having had Hitler as their opponent.

I bought Rothbard's "Anatomy of the State" which appears like an interesting short introduction.

Hi, my dad will celebrate his 70th birthday soon. I would like to give him a good introduction on the topic anarchism/voluntarism, that is concise, well written, not too difficult to read or too long etc., basically a primer on the subject, since he is still an unrelenting statist. Any proposals?

I agree, people should not carelessly offer "advice" about supposed cancer cures, if they know little about the subject matter and the concrete diagnosis. I guess this is true for most matters, but especially ones as serious as this. The same is true for giving family advice to other people as well, by the way.

He indeed is and Stef has confirmed that he is indeed an ancestor. Check out at the resemblance: /emoticons/emotion-4.gif Cool, not sure I buy into that resemblance thing, since even children can look quite different from their parents, never mind 10 generations down, but still interesting. Would be cool to know more about my own ancestors. This whole ancestor research thing came into some disrepute in Germany after people had to prove their "aryan" ancestry back to the 1700s to become government officials back in the 1930s.

Haha, this is funny, was that guy really an ancestor of Stefan

Also in a statist system entry to the market is restricted, it's very difficult to found successful new companies, because of all the regulations that work against you, because as a small businessman you don't have political clout, can't afford to hire a team of tax lawyers that circumvent national taxation etc., which are nearly prerequisites for success in a highly statist system, so existing companies grow very large, while relatively few new companies enter the market to compete with them. The result are huge corporations that can afford to pay their top level staff 1000 times what average employees earns and extreme economic inequality between individuals.

Wish you a speedy recovery. As far as I know there has been really significant progress in the treatment of haemato-oncological diseases in recent decades, so I hope you hold your head high and overcome the disease.

Oh, and of course there should be self-ownership of one's own body and one should be able to choose what to ingest, if one wants to argue from morality.

Just my two cents. I assume there is a general human tendency towards drug use, as it's done in all cultures that have drugs that I know of. Instead of incarcerating people and forcing users into an unsafe black market with dangerous substances one could have research into safer drugs and safer routes of administrations by ending state prohibition and handing over the industry to regular non-criminal companies, drying up the organized crime aspect of the business and protecting consumers and society at large. The present situation is like people drinking moonshine from the black market and funding organized crime in the process, instead of regular brew produced by professionals (not that that isn't also harmful when drunk in excess) and like throwing alcoholics in jail, imo. On a side note, in my experience a lot of the state propaganda (like "not even once" etc.) is really dubious at best. There is no drug that is immediately addictive that I know of and most are only really dangerous used chronically or acutely overdosed and overdosing is a direct result of murky black market products whose purities the consumers can only guesstimate as a result of state prohibition.

Makes sense, there's also another approach to increase freedom I've tried. I've reduced my working position from full time to 3/4. So I'll probably not be rich and independent 20 years in the future, but my present income is still ok and I have a lot of free time NOW while I'm still quite young which I guess also increases personal freedom (like 17 weeks of holidays last year with still a reasonable middle class income).

Personally I don't have it bad in the present system right now, I'm doing ok in the statist system, I'm just talking about the larger picture and a possible transition to a less statist society, since in many of his podcasts Stefan makes it seem like a stateless society seems to be in reach somehow. So I guess my point is that at present I just don't see that happening due to widespread attitudes in society and the short-term interests of many people at least seemingly aligned with the state.

Hi, I've been observing this whole issue from the sidelines for a couple of years. I started out as a classical libertarian in my youth in the 1990s and since listening to a number of Stefs podcasts back in 2006 shortly after he started fdr I converted to anarchism and have basically supported statelessness as an ideal since. Of course things can change pretty quickly, like in the case of monarchies in Europe losing power or formerly communist states changing, but in both cases you had widespread popular support to get rid of feudalism and communism. In the case of anarchy I don't know a single person in real life who supports it and quite to the contrary many, if not most people seem to even support a further expansion of state powers, both when it seems to suit their narrow self interests by getting more out of the state and even as a general theory of supposedly creating more "social justice", "regulating the economy", "protecting the environment" and all the other great goals statists want to achieve with more state power. The only anarchists and libertarians I have "met" have been online, while in real life the vast majority of people seem to support the existance of a massive state (in Europe at least, I live in Germany). In such a situation how can there be any hope of even seeing the state reduced in our lifetimes? I mean even if there was some great event that might for the moment overwhelm the existing state some other forced collective structures would presumably take its place right away, like after the collapse of nazism or communism.