Says Wikipedia:

The Blyskawica (Lightning) was a submachine gun produced by the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, a Polish resistance movement fighting the Germans in occupied Poland. A successful construction, it was most probably the only weapon designed and mass produced covertly in occupied Europe.

Lessons gained from Open Source Ecology could be useful for a variety of libertarian projects.

Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid “resilient communities.” By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and “evolve to freedom.”

HT: Shawn Wilbur on Facebook.

I originally intended to do the following rant on my internet radio show Thinking Liberty, but it might have grown too large. Maybe I’ll find another use for it, like make a video of me preaching it in the streets.

Government is a gang. Or at least it’s made up of gangsters. Obama’s a gangster, Bush is a gangster, Bloomberg’s a gangster, the CIA – they’re the biggest gangsters in the business. And it’s gangsters all the way down.

It’s not all about the money – they can’t be bought off with cool stuff – money just buys them more influence. They get more power, more status, they control more things. It’s a big power game, and they want you to play by their rules. The rules are there to keep the structure of authority in place so there’s something to win after they step on the people who get in their way and cut deals with those who can put them in office.

And there’s not really a debate, not really a discourse. There are just degrees to which different people identify with different power structures that would chew them up and shit them out when it was useful. Some people’s identities are so invested in the state that they take personal pleasure when the state’s enemies suffer, and take personal offence when the state’s authority is challenged.

If you want to play the game to take authority out – if you want to win for freedom, you gotta make up your own rules. You gotta find the weak points and dismember the system. Wherever you can sever individual identity from authority’s desires, wherever you can encourage people to self-organize, wherever you can put power in the hands of the people – the power of knowledge, entrepreneurship, and solidarity not the power of authority and rank, wherever you can go forward without standing on someone’s back, go for it.

But don’t think you can just wash your hands of it. While you’re standing on the sidelines, they’re using their piles of loot to pull more unwilling participants into the game. It might not be you. But don’t think the rules don’t affect you. Don’t think you can just get a few people to leave the stadium with you and be fine. As long as that authoritarian power structure is held firm by it’s foundation of bad ideas, they’ll fucking get you if you try to take power from them.

They assault people with potentially lethal high-voltage torture devices. They throw people in cages and hold them incommunicado for crossing their turf without permission. They think it’s worth killing a half million children if it hurts the prestige of a thug who challenged them. Just a matter of public policy for the greater good of those who want authority over our lives!

If you want liberty, you have to arm yourself with knowledge and go on the offensive. Don’t think they’ll give in without a fight, but fight them smart-like. Their rules are for them – you can’t win with massive firepower, you can win with smart subversion. And protect the liberty you claim by knowing when to be rigid and when to be flexible. You can flourish when you throw the tyrants off your back and don’t try to get on another person’s back. Go and make freedom!

Ignorance plus arrogance equals fail:

Calling an anti-constitution advocate a Libertarian is Sophistry and muddies the water for the sake of,…What? Sorry to those who want otherwise, but the label is taken, find another.

This makes me figuratively bang my head against a wall.

Long Title: “Why The Law of Equal Liberty is a better starting point for libertarian thought than The Zero Aggression Principle (a rough draft & exploration)”

One could use the Zero Aggression Principle (AKA Non-Aggression Principle) to determine acceptable action, but its language confuses issues and leads to harmful associations. The Law of Equal Liberty (AKA Formula of Equal Freedom), described by Herbert Spencer in the mid 19th century, seems a better way to formulate the requirements and boundaries of liberty.

The exact wording of the Zero Aggression Principle differs among its proponents, but L. Neil Smith describes it like this:

no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being for any reason whatever

Admittedly, I have read very little of Herbert Spencer (whom Roderick Long often defends from defamation). Clarence Lee Swartz’s 1927 work What is Mutualism didn’t convince me to go mutualist, but it did make me more favorable toward Spencer’s formulation of liberty. On Page 21 of the Invisible Molotov version, Swartz bases liberty on Spencer’s formula, which he describes thusly:

That every man may claim the fullest liberty to do as he wills compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other man.

The Law of Equal Liberty is otherwise written as:

Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of every other man.

Here is why I think the Law of Equal Liberty (LEL) is more useful in acting for liberty than is the Zero Agression Principle (ZAP).

1) ZAP requires defining force in a way that does not mean physical force, but instead coercion. Pushing a person out of harm’s way does not violate his liberty if he does not want to be harmed. Shooting a terrorist who hasn’t hurt anyone yet but threatens to is likely acceptable because the terrorist is attempting to coerce – even though the first act of physical force would be by the person who shot him in defense. So saying that you oppose the initiation of force means you have some explaining to do. With the LEL it is clearer that you may do as you will to stop a person from doing something that is incompatible with the liberty of others.

2) ZAP must be stretched if it can apply to using force against those who have initiated force in the past, or have stated their intentions and shown the ability to initiate force. Does a state of “force initiation” exist once coercion has been used until restitution is made? I do not see this problem with LEL.

3) Using force against an individual who you haven’t seen use force but is a member of a deadly organization is agreeable to liberty and to individualism, but it would seem to violate ZAP. It is likely that many members of Nazi death squads didn’t personally shoot unarmed people (see Ordinary Men) but one could not expect a resistance fighter to make the distinction. An individual can choose to identify as a member of a harmful organization, and if he can be reasonably expected to know that the organization is a threat to others then force can be used against him.

4) Anti-segregationist sit-ins on private property and Bash Back disruptions of church services can be said to initiate force by occupying property that doesn’t belong to individuals who have initiated force. But the targets of these actions have violated liberty by joining with a system based on physical oppression. It is unreasonable to think that someone can help people murder then be immune from the consequences on his property as if it were “base” in a game. Thinking in this way requires drawing lines between what is and is not acceptable, but hard work is no excuse for failing to adopt good principles.

From a LEL standpoint, those who bolster oppression by creating spaces where some people are regarded as inferior to others (and therefore thought of as acceptable targets for violence) are assisting the violation of people’s liberty. One could call their activity aggression, but it again seems that you would need to redefine the way most people think of aggression, and I don’t see why this is necessary when a better principle exists.

5) The Law of Equal Liberty uses more positive language (“claim the fullest liberty to do as he wills”), while ZAP has more restrictive connotations (“no one has the right, under any circumstances”). The libertarian project can be thought of as the creation of a world in which liberty is maximized. The LEL is more compatible with this mentality.

6) The ZAP suggests a defensive posture resembling that of conservatism, but the LEL suggests equality.

Both 5 and 6 might contribute to the right-wing flavor that the American free-market libertarian movement often has. Those who start with the desire for ultimate freedom limited only by the equal freedom of others might be less attracted to ZAP than to LEL. Those who start with the desire to set the rules that must be dogmatically adhered to might be more attracted to ZAP than LEL.

The ZAP may also be responsible for the perception among free-market libertarians that all politics is about using force to restrict behavior. The ZAP addresses only the use of force, and therefore every discussion of upholding liberty becomes a question of using force. For example, authoritarianism in the workplace that does not use physical force can be said to prevent a person from doing as he wills (talking back to bosses, influencing the conditions of work, etc). The ZAP does not address this, but LEL would seem to imply the utility of some kind of proportional means of opposition (bolstering worker power through unionism, establishing competing business models, etc). Thus LEL promotes a more complete and realistic view of maximizing liberty.

The Zero Aggression Principle is seemingly more precise than the Law of Equal Liberty. But it is only precise once the definition of terms like “aggression” and “force” are agreed upon. The meaning of liberty, doing as one wills without infringing on the ability of others to do so, is implied in the Law of Equal Liberty.

I think it is useful to have principles that succinctly point the path to liberty. As noted in the lengthy title of the post, this is a rough draft and exploration. Feedback might result in revised versions.

(link)

Short quotes are sometimes short on meaning because they are divorced from context or explanation. But they are frequently useful. I try to come up with a pithy slogan to open each Thinking Liberty show. Here are some I worked on recently that aren’t ready for radio:

Political ambitions are efforts to realize personal desires – the political is an effort to realize (and universalize?) the personal.

A person who desires dominance over his own life, and not over the lives of others, who reasons his beliefs to consistency is an anarchist.

Humans must be free to develop a meaningful existence. Authority rests on the notion that some people are entitled to decide life for others.

To be libertarian means to seek maximum individual liberty and minimal authoritarian interference. To be consistently libertarian one must be an anarchist. Rulership is only detrimental to freedom; people can organize and enforce agreements without any class of people being in charge.

Individuals must liberate themselves. We can only make freedom easier to choose.