What Soviet Onion said. Times a hundred.

You would think author(s) so clearly attuned to the State’s Orwellian doublespeak over mass murder would hesitate just a little bit before rushing to justify collateral damage when it suits their goals.

You would also think that radical individualists would tend to put human lives and safety before the success of “The Cause.” It feels like the author into the Blockian lunacy that treats personal rights as one minor and disposable form of property rights. It really is too much to ask for a little compassionate restraint.

Callous inhumanity aside, the problem with his perspective isn’t the use of violence, but the fact that it glorifies violence to the exclusion of all other tactics and values necessary for creating a libertarian counter-culture. Like you, I don’t disavow the use of force, but having a terroristic obsession with it is missing the point. We fight to protect other things that are intrinsically valuable; life, its property, and the open society that allows both to flourish. Values like liberality, tolerance, feminism and anti-racism are just as important to a libertarian society as the right to organized self-defense (not to be confused with this guy’s strategy). It’s important to actually promote these positive aspects of libertarianism in addition to undermining or destroying the tools of aggression, and that definitely means a conscious attempt to cultivate a counter-culture.

Even beyond that, defining ourselves as simply the opposite of what exists now is letting our enemies set our agenda for us. That’s another benefit to counter-economics; it focuses on creating something positively libertarian to show the world what it can be. It doesn’t just make decontextualized attacks on the State.