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Monday, April 6, 2009

Sipos Borrows Joe McCarthy's Stationery

http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/04/libertarian-national-committee-chair-statement-on-fy10-budget-passage

Thomas Sipos, would you care to name names of any prominent LP leaders/candidates who fall into your "Republican lite" category, and cite your evidence for it?   Joseph McCarthy's papers are stored at Marquette University.  You might want to contact them to see if he left any blank stationery for compiling such lists of names.

Every single episode in which there wasn't a monopoly on force-initiation over a region becomes a test case for anarcholibertarianism. Despite the literally hundreds of such test cases, the only purported successes advanced for the theory involve a few thousand pre-industrial farmers sprinkled sparsely across medieval Iceland and the frontier of colonial Pennsylvania. In contrast to how even bastard forms of minarchism have been so spectacularly successful compared to all other significant social experiments, the track record of anarcholibertarianism is simply embarrassing.

History provides many examples of situations in which there was no functioning monopoly on force-initiation over a significant region for a significant period of time (for any non-embarrassing standard of significance). There is not a single case in the entire history of organized crime across hundreds of cities in scores of nations over multiple decades in which the unregulated market for protection behaved remotely like what is predicted by anarcholibertarian theory. This track record becomes even more dismal if you include all the cases in history in which there have been regions lacking effective sovereignty by a central authority. This amounts to an empirical falsification of the anarcholibertarian theory of protection markets that by the standards of social science is spectacularly conclusive.

It's silly to try to define all taxation as violating the platform's injunction against "all efforts by government to redistribute wealth".  It would be silly squared to try to say this of "taxes" that are actually just court-contestable non-zero default fines on aggression e.g. pollution.  It would less silly to say that requiring such default fines to always be zero is an effort to redistribute wealth to polluters from the polluted.