This is an excerpt from part two of my talk with Dr. Gerard Casey on his book Libertarian Anarchy. Enjoy. -P

Gerard: I would suggest that while somebody can say that they don't accept the non-aggression principle– saying it is one thing, living it out in reality is another. And I doubt if there's anybody who can actually go through life without living that. I mean, you take your average academic in the days when you got paid by check and you went into your mailbox at the end of the month expecting to find a check in there. Right? And there wasn't any. And you said, “Oh where's, where's my month's pay?” And they said, “Oh, well, we just made an arbitrary decision not to pay anybody this month.” Okay, very quickly you would find that person using the language of “You can't do that. That's not right.” . . .

Penjammin: “It's an injustice!”

Gerard: . . . So it's not absolutely impossible that somebody could do this, but I think it's practically incoherent. That's the way [I would] put it.

Penjammin: I think the word you use in your book is self-stultifying.

Gerard: Hey, I told you I could write in those days. Self-stultifying huh?

Penjammin: That's very good. I like that one, too . . . I think most people would agree, almost immediately, that: “I don't want to be aggressed against, so I'm not going to aggress against others.” There's the principle of reciprocity that you talk about in your book as well there. But then they say, “Well, when it comes to the government that's different.” So why think it applies to the government, to government actors? And what difference does it make if it does apply to them?

Gerard: Oh, well. And then the question was, “Well, why should it not?” In other words: “What makes what makes them so special?” That comes down to the basic question, of course, for anarchy, which is “What is it that gives one person or a group of people the right to make laws backed by force or the threat of force- which is aggression of course because if you don't obey the law, in the end they're going to come and either lock you up or take your property. That's aggression, and it only works in one direction from their point of view . . . they have the right to do this to you, but you don't have the right to do it to them. And we say, “Well, why is that? What remarkable quality- is it your superior intellect?” Well, looking at your congress and our in our parliament, I think the answer to that is fairly clear . . .

Penjammin: [laughs]

For more Gerard Casey, check out The Liberty Classroom. Also, hear the episode below.

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

This is another excerpt from my episode with Dr. Gerard Casey in which we discuss his book Libertarian Anarchy. Enjoy. -P

Penjammin: How would you define anarchy in itself? Not anarcho-capitalism, but just anarchy.

Gerard Casey: Well, that's very simple. Anarchy simply rejects the idea completely that it's in the nature of things that somehow some people are destined by virtue of some quality (I don't quite know what that'd be) to rule over others. There there may be anarchists whose idea of the good life is to live in the woods and eat squirrels. it's not mine.

Penjammin: Alright. Yeah.

Gerard Casey: You don't reject community. You don't reject organization. You don't reject order or any of these things. You simply say that these are things that come about through the voluntary interactions of human beings, and not through the imposition of order top down. Now, obviously, there are exceptions to this. So clearly, in the family, if you're two year old says, “Hey, dad, I've been reading your libertarian anarchy books, and I'm going to stroll across the road by myself across six lanes of traffic.” To which your reply is “Like hell you will.” Right? …because you have a responsibility here and you have, actually, an authority, a natural authority (which must, must seem so strange for me to talk about that). But the point there is that authority is to be exercised not for your good, but for the good of those who have been given into your care. And of course, you have to relinquish that as they grow older and are in a position to accept responsibility for what they do themselves. So leaving aside those kind of exceptions, no one has any authority . . . if you're walking down the street and you see a total stranger and you give them an order, say, to tie their shoelaces or button up their jacket or something, they're going to look at you really funny.

Penjammin: Yeah,

Gerard Casey: That's. If they don't clock you one. Right?

Penjammin: Right.

Gerard Casey: …because nobody has any obligation to do anything you tell them. They're just walking along, minding their own business. This whole idea of which, to us, seems incredibly natural because we're so used to it. And one of the things I try to get my students to see was just how odd it is that some people, simply because of some arrangement with which most people have had nothing to do, namely a constitution, for example, and because somebody else voted for them, they went into a booth and put a mark in a piece of paper… suddenly these people collected in a building somewhere, get to determine what you can and can't do and what you must and mustn't do. Right. Well, it might be that what they what they want you to do and what they don't want you to do is great and so on. That's fine. But on the other hand, where do they get where do they get this authority from? …

Penjammin: Samuel, you know, at one point he anointed Dave with oil, but now is he using voting boxes? I don't think so.

Gerard Casey: Remember, you're talking to a Catholic here. We don't read Bibles, you know. [laughs]

Penjammin: I'm going to leave that one right there. You go ahead and say that. [laughs]

For more Gerard Casey, check out The Liberty Classroom and listen below.

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

The below first appeared in my eletter. Subscribe here penjams.com/subscribe.

There are Rothbardian libertarians advocating aggression. Now it comes with a caveat, like “under current circumstances, I [support aggression],” but still. How crazy is that? It’s extra sad because the impulse (to be marketable or to honor common sense) is good and understandable. But misguided, it's getting many to undermine the liberty movement. Or… change my mind. 🙂

What do I mean? Say libertarian border cowboy Ron Sonswan doesn’t like federal involvement in border control. He objects on grounds of aggression. He says, “They’re interfering in the local government’s work in such a way that it supports the on-going trespass [aggression] of potentially dangerous people onto the property of the good people of this town. Meanwhile, they also impede our ability to protect our own lands with violations of our rights to bear arms [aggression].”

Ron might also object to the local government’s involvement for the same reason. “Sure. Our local guys also violate our rights to arms and such [aggression] but not mine, and not as much. I don’t like that either, but it’s better than them Washington Democrats sacrificing us to their political agenda. At least the local guys don’t make things worse and expose us to other dangers in the process. They have to live here too.”

He prefers the localized efforts to that of an army under a president that makes things worse. That doesn't mean he likes it. One can prefer the lesser evil without promoting it. It seems like libertarians are forgetting that. It's special-pleading to object to some laws with a principled stance against aggression, only to advocate aggression in more extreme cases. If the principle doesn't hold up to the scrutiny of hard cases, then it's refuted and no good for the easy cases either.

“Ideally, we’d have a sizable, competent, and insured organization owned and ran by all the land owners, subject to reputable judges, whereby we took care of business ourselves. I could get behind that, but that's just not an option yet.”

Ron admits the common sense of what his live options are in merely preferring the lesser evil. He doesn’t have to promote it, to be pro-aggression (under certain circumstances), to be temporarily of conflicting principles. Still, when fit hits the shan, most anarchists sound like minarchists, and minarchists approach neocon.

. . .

And there was more, but I'll leave that for the good people on my email list. Don't forget to subscribe, and have yourself a Happy Easter weekend!

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.