You May Not Be Ready for This Post

Gerard Casey is a professor of philosophy at University College, Dublin. His most recent book is Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State. In this video he talks about the ideas and works of Murray Rothbard. Shocking stuff, yet you can’t quite turn away. (I was reminded of this video because Professor Casey is joining us for a live Q&A tomorrow at 2pm ET at my Liberty Classroom, where he teaches Introduction to Logic.)

NJDave

Things start to get really subversive around the 17 minute mark.
Citizen

Thinking outside the Government box is a difficult human endeavor.
We’ve become so indoctrinated that few are even capable of Libertarian thinking on a scale that Rothbard considered.
The point made that Governments in general are the mass murderors in history is hardly ever questioned when we send tens of thousands to a desert location to exterminate tribal primitives in the name of “National Security”
Still we continue to support the Empire WarFare State with blind loyalty
martha

I am pretty certain that the incredible number of deaths in the 20th century are ones that have been perpetrated BY States against THEIR OWN citizens, and excluding any war casualties.
Citizen

Martha,
Stalin killed an estmated 5 million Russian peasants, Hiltler killed 6 million Jews, Pol Pot killed an estimated 8 million Cambodians et al,
You are correct…. Governments are OUR collective worst enemy.
I fear my government, that means we have a tryanny!
Government should fear US, then there is Liberty
cathguy

I have been a huge critic of Dr. Woods, but the more I read, the more compelling some of these arguments become. Gerard Casey makes a really interesting presentation in this video, and I am going to be getting his book.
cathguy

It’s 17 min. on that are the most compelling.
http://www.facebook.com/samuel.sparling Samuel Sparling

brilliant interview. I actually just got into Rothbard last week after you’d recommended Anatomy of the State in a talk I saw on youtube. Can’t thank you enough for turning me on to that one, he put so much together in such a clear and rather concise way in that essay!
Gil

By such simplistic reasoning governments are the heroes of the 20th century because the population grew six times in that period.
Gil

Yeah right one person killed millions. In reality, millions of people killed millions of others. People are their own worst enemy.
http://www.TomWoods.com Tom Woods

Obviously he means wrongful deaths. He is saying that the figures regarding deaths at the hands of the state doesn’t even include the state’s wars.
Anonymous

The Soviet Union (a state) killed millions of Russian peasants while Stalin was the head of state. No state is ever one person, but it isn’t a group of individuals acting independently either.

A state is not a group of people subject directly to a head of state either. It is a group of people following general rules, including rules designating makers of more specific rules, typically in an authoritarian hierarchy with a single root.

Human beings naturally follow rules and respect authoritarian hierarchies, but the corresponding instincts evolved within familial and tribal groups. These instincts cannot make us our own worst enemy, because they are integral to what we are fundamentally.

In my way of thinking, a man cannot be his own worst enemy. A man may seem to behave self-destructively from my perspective, but I don’t decide that a man’s behavior is destructive to the man. Only the man himself decides.

The enemies of humanity exploit human instincts essentially to trick instinctive, human machinery into following authorities other than the natural authorities that humanity evolved to follow. Thus we have “the father of the country” and a “brotherhood” of the subjects of a state. “Patriotism”, a word suggesting loyalty to one’s father, denotes loyalty to a state.

Casey makes the point that the Roman Catholic Church arguably was the first state, and it certainly incorporates this technique. God is “heavenly father”. Members of a priestly class are “fathers”. Monastics are “brothers” and “sisters”. Convents have a “mother superior”. All of these people are subject to a hierarchical authority with Holy Father at its root.
MBrown

This series “Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers” sounds interesting, but at a cost of $130 each, this is something for libraries to get.

The volumes include:
The Salamanca School by Andre Azevedo Alves (LSE, UK) and José Manuel Moreira (Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal)
Thomas Hobbes by R. E. R. Bunce (Cambridge, UK)
John Locke by Eric Mack (Tulane, UK)
David Hume by Christopher J. Berry (Glasgow, UK)
Adam Smith by James Otteson (Yeshiva, US)
Edmund Burke by Dennis O’Keeffe (Buckingham, UK)
Alexis de Tocqueville by Alan S Kahan (Paris, France)
Herbert Spencer by Alberto Mingardi (Istituto Bruno Leoni, Italy)
Ludwig von Mises by Richard Ebeling (Northwood, US)
Joseph A. Schumpeter by John Medearis (Riverside, California, US)
F. A. Hayek by Adam Tebble (UCL, UK)
Michael Oakeshott by Edmund Neill (Oxford, UK)
Karl Popper by Phil Parvin (Cambridge, UK)
Ayn Rand by Mimi Gladstein (Texas, US)
Milton Friedman by William Ruger (Texas State, US)
Russell Kirk by John Pafford (Northwood, US)
James M. Buchanan by John Meadowcroft (King’s College London, UK)
Dan

I take your point for its intention but your figures are awful. I would argue that far more than 5 million Soviet peasants were killed throughout Stalin’s reign. The more egregious one though is that it is closer to 1-2 million dead under Pol Pot. It’s nit-picking I know but seems wrong to not correct it.