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Monday, October 6, 2008

Aggression Abstinence or Aggression Reduction?

Starchild, all of the talking in metaphor gets tedious, even to me.
Bob can now just reply: if you're in an airliner at 30,000 feet, and
non-aggression would consist of it being on the tarmac, do you demand a
nose dive? Yawn.

So let's get concrete. Can you explain why it's not OK for the LP
and/or its candidates to advocate state/local vouchers as both a vast
improvement over the current creepingly-federalized and
already-socialized K-12 education industry and as a way to create
unstoppable momentum for complete privatization?

P.S. Can you give examples of people -- like maybe yourself -- who
turned from non-libertarian to libertarian by being "persuaded of the
rightness of just one idea -- the Non-Aggression Principle", and for
whom this preceded rather than followed adoption of the libertarian take
on most issues?

That wasn't my path to libertarianism. I was never a social
conservative, and my early conversion to atheism that solidified my
social tolerance was about religion, not the idea of aggression. I
didn't have clear economic convictions until I watched Free To Choose on
PBS in high school, which in just a few weeks made me a lifelong
advocate of the idea of markets and competition. But it took another
ten or twenty years to convince me market-by-market that there was no
need for government intervention in a variety of markets like currency,
deposit insurance, intellectual property, spectrum use, etc. I only
accepted opposition to aggression as a recognizably non-post-hoc
principle when geolibertarianism showed how to make it consistent with
the textbook economic analysis of the four kinds of goods (private,
public, club, and common).