Wow, something tells me these Objectivists have their own agenda, not all that much to do with Ayn Rand – at least as I understood her to date. This said, a collaboration between all who promote individual freedom can only be a good thing…

Rothbard is my main inspiration, although I can only speak for myself. That being said, it is extremely hard to convince anyone that things would operate better without the State. Too many “what ifs”. Centuries of propaganda. Centuries of State rule. One has to be willing to explore ideas before you can accept them.

I found Austrian economics by means of Objectivism, but I noticed back then that they only seemed to promote Human Action and Economics in One Lesson. If you asked one of their experts for anything else they were likely to “blank out” — not sure if it is still that way. I still value a lot of what I learned from their stuff, but I’ve definitely migrated to the Tom Woods side in regard to war/foreign policy and anarcho-capitalism. I guess maybe we could say it is positive step that Objectivists are no longer excommunicated for talking to libertarians.

Except they don’t promote individual freedom to its fullest extent. They’re pretty good in regards to the voluntary free market – though I disagree with their conflation of self-interest with greed – but their militarist beliefs contradict that same freedom in so many ways (the freedom of innocent civilians of whom they advocate wholesale slaughter, the freedom from the absurd taxation to the State and military-industrial complex which occurs by nature of this kind of war, etc.) Leonard Peikoff also believes that the Waco Siege was justifiable.

While I think Yaron Brook is disturbing, he might be correct saying libertarians today are less influenced by Rothbard. But it’s a weak technical point.

RIght now, I think they’re more influenced by Ron Paul. However, since the good doctor was influenced by Rothbard, one could say Rothbard never really left.

Personally, I wish more attention was paid to David Friedman. I think the consequentialist approach, while completely lacking in moral grounding, is way more realistic and most likely to succeed.

Doug Casey: Randites are a secular religion
5:15
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryD5lqRM-Tw

Exactly. I didn’t know who Rothbard was 3 years ago or so. I can’t be the only one.

I decided myself an anarchist in high school, over thirty years ago, after reading a book on anarchism from my high school library. I haven’t seen the book since, but it might have been a book called The Anarchists by James Joll. It definitely emphasized “left anarchism” in the nineteenth century, and I identified more with “the left” than with “the right” at the time.

The book didn’t reach far into the 20th century, so it didn’t reach Rothbard and probably wouldn’t have discussed him even if it had discussed later anarchists, because “capitalism” was antithetical to the “anarchism” of the 19th century. All capitalism was state capitalism to 19th century anarchists. “Anarcho-capitalism” would have seemed an absurdity to any of them, a contradiction in terms.

I identified my anarchism with people like Proudhon, Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Tucker, all of whom were on the “far left” in their day, though Tucker is a hair’s breadth from Rothbard in reality. Later, while still in high school, I discovered the Libertarian Party and identified with it to some extent, but still I didn’t encounter Rothbard, presumably because Ed Clark led the party at the time.

I was never much of a Libertarian partisan though. I was a communitarian and imagined realizing anarchism less by reforming established states than by withdrawing from states to form intentional communities. The community that I knew best at the time was Twin Oaks in Virginia, an intentional community established in the seventies that still exists today. I had also read a book about Twin Oaks, called A Walden Two Experiment, in high school.

In college, I happened to meet someone who knew a member of the Twin Oaks community, so I had a chance to visit it and came away somewhat disillusioned. By that time I had lost most of my interest in intentional communities anyway. Life at Twin Oaks then was nearly as spartan and restrictive as life in a college dormitory, largely because it sought an agrarian self-sufficiency inconsistent with the degree of specialization and trade necessary for much wealth.

I still sympathized with the idea of intentional community and governance by consensus, but I never had agrarian self-sufficiency in mind. I was a computer science major, in the early eighties at the dawn of the personal computer revolution, so I saw no place for myself in a community like Twin Oaks. The community also held most property in common then. Many other intentional communities exist, and most involve private property in natural resources as well as personal possessions.

I’m still a communitarian essentially, but a free community is not a simply “commune” or “communist” in the now conventional sense. Intentional community neither implies nor rules out common property. A free community may adopt any standards of propriety that members want to adopt, including Rothbardian property rights.

The only rule of intentional community is that community members make the rules. If a member doesn’t like the rules, he persuades other members to change he rules, or he leaves the community for a more acceptable community. A community may incorporate voting into its rules, but people ultimately vote on terms of association with their feet. The organizing principle of intentional community is consensus rather than “democracy” in the majoritarian sense or “natural rights” in the classically liberal sense.

I finally discovered Rothbard through libertarian coworkers. Libertarians are very common among software developers and IT people generally, possibly even more common in the early eighties than now. My closest friend at my first job was an Objectivist who also accepted the “libertarian” label. A friend of his was a libertarian more in the Rothbardian camp. I also claimed the “libertarian” label, but most of this thinking was new to me. We had some interesting debates but were always friendly. As Ron Paul says, freedom brings people together.

My friend sometimes claimed that I wasn’t a “true libertarian”, but history was on my side, so I didn’t care. I don’t care that people dispute my “libertarian” bona fides now either. The ideas matter to me more than the labels.

Though I discovered Rothbard at this point, I didn’t explore his thinking deeply for many years. I rediscovered him through Scott Horton and associates decades later, sometime before 9/11. By that time, my understanding of property, specialization and trade had evolved in a more classically liberal direction, so some other people thought me more “on the right”, but I never ceased to be a communitarian. I never decided that people generally should organize resources as Locke or Rothbard or anyone else directs, only that I preferred a more “capitalist” organization of resources myself.

“Capitalism” still has many connotations that I reject. I reject much intellectual property and title in perpetuity to radio frequencies for example, only for myself of course. If other people want to form communities respecting these proprieties, that’s none of my business, but I expect these proprieties to reduce productivity, so I expect these communities to be poorer than other communities, all else being equal. I don’t want to force people to be richer.

A misapplication of objectivist philosophy has held back the progress of freedom. I used to be a liberal, and then an anarchist, and I was looking for a philosophy that did not believe in supreme fictional beings, and a philosophy that “tolerated” (or accepted) drug and gun possession, and enshrined free speech absolutely. (I suppose I already had such a philosophy, but was unaware others also did.) After seeing Ralph Nader speak, I realized I had nothing in common with him (the crowd at UIC bleated mindlessly in favor of taxing the internet, even those who were working for dotcoms), and went home and googled “Capitalism.” I intrinsically knew that the state was my enemy, but wasn’t aware that there was a group of people working to reduce the power of the state. Seemingly racist and religious outreach had previously pushed me away from people like Rense, and other conspiratarian sites. At this point, the difference between objectivists and Rothbardian anarchists is negligible. Branden writes very well about this idea, and shows that Rand misapplied her own philosophy in her strategic rejection of libertarians. For many years, this crippled the libertarian movement, just as misapplications of the objectivist philosophy cripple recruitment to a philosophy of reason (Peikoff’s defense of the Waco raid, by an unconstitutional and unlawful government agency).

One major problem is the labeling of objectivism as a “closed system.” It is a closed system (epistemologically), but it needs to be treated as an open system, for its own survival. If this change doesn’t happen, objectivism is doomed. Libertarianism (the political application of objectivist ideas) is on the rise, no matter what, thanks to technology.

Also bothersome: the preoccupation of small minds as to what to call evolution towards voluntary dispute resolution organizations. Some people say those things wouldn’t be governments (thus running afoul of mindless orthodoxy from the objectivists), others say they would be governments (thus attracting criticism for people who let Rothbard, Molyneux, etc… think for them). It’s entirely academic, and requires an impossible and non-existent knowledge of the future.

I personally think Doug Casey and Neal Stephenson are right about the evolution and evolutionary defense escalation of “phyles.” Nothing in that belief system (about what is likely to happen) contradicts the objectivist epistemology, as written. The problem comes from failure to continuously and accurately reapply that philosophy to reality.