A convert to Orthodox recently shared “The Contingency of Knowledge and Revelatory Theism” by R.M. Mannion, an essay that he cited as most influential in his adoption of theism. While Mannion does provide a decent summary of epistemology’s history, he contrives a problem where none exists for me, as well as a completely self-defeating solution.

Mannion opens the essay by setting up a duality:

“There are two fundamentally different ways to understand the world: intentional and accidental. An intentional world is one that comes about on purpose and for a purpose. It is a world that is what it is, because someone intended it to be that way. In contrast, an accidental world is one that comes about by pure chance, for no purpose and for no reason.”

This duality is assumption-heavy. Even first sentence doesn’t quite pass the smell test for a legitimately exhaustive duality in “intentional and accidental.” There is a legitimate category for things that are not necessarily either intentional or accidental: incidental. The existence of knowledge itself is a compelling example. Knowledge is contingent on the existence of nervous systems. There is no need for a world to contain nervous systems however. Such systems came into existence not because they had to but because this world’s laws permitted it. The size and durability of the world made it probable. Purpose presupposes nervous systems sufficiently advanced to model an application for which something is created. In the Misesian sense all human action is purposive. Our nervous systems create behavior that achieves certain ends. When there is a mismatch between a certain behavior and a certain end we say that the end is not that behavior’s purpose and vice versa. With respect to that end, the behavior lacks purpose. Purpose as a concept still applies however, because our nervous systems’ creation of behavior is inescapable. Purpose does not apply to that which was not created, which is everything that is not a means to integration with a modeled application.

There is a question as to whether it is possible to create something without purpose. Ludwig von Mises, maintains that the answer is no. For example, when flipping a coin a person cannot choose heads or tails in a way that satisfies the mathematical definition of randomness.ⁱ Their choice is legitimately arbitrary, but not random. This is another subtle but significant distinction that Mannion misses in his relegation of everything not purposeful not “pure chance.” Adults arbit age of maturity for youth but not with a random number generator¹. In terms of programming math, it is correct to say that purpose for non-created things is not zero, but a null value. Any non-zero number divided by 0 is not any number, but undefined. Most life on Earth is not created, but it is the product of approximately random genetic mutation combined with highly non-random environmental selection. The environment is the ultimate arbiter of how nervous systems, and therefore purpose, comes to be. Is there not some circularity however, between genes and environment? Are not genetics an environment of their own? Indeed they are, but circularity is not the problem Mannion thinks it is, and we will see why later.

Mannion maps the preceding duality onto another:

“The first story is of an epistemology in which man is aided. It is an epistemology that is grounded, not by man but someone who is in a position to know. It is grounded by God. It is a theonomous epistemology.

The second story is of an epistemology in which man is not aided. It an epistemology that is grounded in man and by man. It is an autonomous epistemology.”

There is a certain tendentiousness in Mannion’s presentation. Theonomous epistemology describes the relationship between man and God as one where only God is in a position to know. There is a definite echo, however, between “autonomous man” and “only God.” In characterizing views conflicting with his own as “autonomous” he begs the question of “autonomous with respect to what?” That would in Mannion’s opinion of course be his god, but there are many non-Christian theists in the world who agree with his epistemology, but with the very significant exception of regarding his as “autonomous” with respect to their own god. He describes his epistemology as one where man is aided by his god. This seems to be an immediate contradiction with the epistemic exclusivity he assigns his god. “Aided by” of course, does not usually mean “completely dependent on.” There is only slight overlap between the two in practice, but it is only this overlap that permits Mannion’s terminology. There are polytheists who accept Mannion’s concept of epistemology and do not necessarily even disbelieve in his god, but believe that his is aided by or even completely dependent on their chief deity for knowledge. This suggests at least the possibility that Mannion’s proposed solution to the alleged problem of knowledge does not solve the problem but merely pushes it back a step.

Mannion states his thesis thusly:

“The history of epistemology demonstrates that man, unaided, has not, and cannot, attain a foundation on which to base a theory of knowledge. We will see that any theory of knowledge that originates solely from man must be characterized as arbitrary, ambiguous, and incoherent. But, if man has no coherent theory of knowledge, then his beliefs are without warrant, and if his beliefs are without warrant, then he can make no claim to be in possession of knowledge.”

Mannion’s thesis is highly aggressive. There is an empiricist implication in his appeal to history. He states that history has demonstrated not only that man, unaided, has not attained a foundation of knowledge, but cannot do so. Even if it has not yet been shown in history, that does not mean it will never be. His appeal to history, a product of man, seems to conflict with his position that knowledge is the product of a being who exists outside of history altogether. He cannot claim any participation in history on God’s part as an out either, for he explicitly states earlier that the crucial epistemic advantage God enjoys is from his position not in our world but “in back” of it. His thesis also implicitly asserts that a foundation for a theory of knowledge is conceptually meaningful, let alone necessary. He characterizes all epistemology that conflicts with his own as stipulating that knowledge “originates solely from man,” which as we have recently explained is a fallacy of the excluded middle. He claims that without a theory of knowledge that is “coherent” in his view, man “can make no claim to be in possession of knowledge.” Man obviously does possess knowledge however, if not knowledge of the supernatural surety that Mannion demands, so if it can be shown that either a foundation of knowledge is not necessary, or that an alternative foundation works, Mannion’s thesis would be falsified.

One of Mannion’s premises is that man, his knowledge, and the universe as a whole is “infinitely improbable” without God. This appears to refer to the fine-tuning argument for creationism. The argument goes that because the mathematical parameters that undergird our universe have such a low tolerance for deviation, it would be highly improbable if they were not consciously designed. The standard rebuttal is that this does not at all necessarily make such a designer likely, because it is no less plausible that our universe is one of many universes, and that the parameters are simply the outcome of the law of large numbers. This is known as the Anthropic Principle. There is subtlety to the fine-tuning question however that is usually lost on both sides. Hunter Ash explainsⁱⁱ:

“Our laws of physics have certain free parameters in them. These are numerical constants that are determined experimentally, such as the mass ratios of various particles, or the relative strengths of the fundamental forces. The structure of the laws of physics permits a range of possible values, not just the particular values we observe…

Why do we live in a universe with one of the tiny minority of possible parameter sets that permit life? All that follows is speculation, but we can grade the speculations on plausibility:

1. We do not know the true, fundamental laws of physics. It may be that the fundamental constants only seem like free parameters in our current approximate models, but are actually fixed by the structure of the true laws. However, no major proposed unified theories fix the constants. For example, in string theory they are encoded into the shape of space, but many shapes are possible, so the parameters are still effectively free.

2. [critique of the Anthropic Principle] A multiverse with a flat distribution over the space of constants does not match what we observe. In the space of constants, the vast majority of the volume is near the edge. That is, a randomly selected life-permitting universe will be *barely* life-permitting. Just on the edge of habitability. This is not what we observe. Our constants are comfortably nestled in the interior of the life-permitting region. Discoveries like the one below emphasize this: our laws of physics are actually quite conducive to the production of life, rather than barely tolerant of it. If the distribution over parameter space is not flat, then its concentration in the life-permitting region is just the same mystery restated.

3. Religious explanations. If you assume our universe was intentionally designed for life, then this resolves the mystery. Of course, this just shifts the improbability to the immeasurable domain of metaphysics.

4. Evolutionary cosmology. Consider the genome. The vast majority of possible sequences of As, Gs, Ts, and Cs do not produce viable organisms. Only a tiny minority of possible genomes actually code for life. The fact that almost all the genomes we observe are viable is explained by evolution: starting from a single barely-functional replicator, mutation and selection gradually concentrate probability in the region that produces viable organisms. What if something similar explains the fundamental constants? Physicist Lee Smolin posited a possible mechanism for universe reproduction: black hole formation. Though the details are quite technical, it is at least possible that every time a black hole forms, a new universe that exists “inside” the black hole experiences its big bang, with slightly mutated values of its parent universe’s fundamental constants.”

Ash goes on to raise the possibility of hyper-advanced civilizations creating new, biotically propitious universes by harvesting of black holes for energy. This could account for why our universe’s parameters are so comfortably within the habitable zone. Although the existence of such a civilization would be extremely rare with an initially flat distribution of physics parameters, it only takes one to spawn a great brood of life-friendly parameters. It also, in Ash’s opinion, would account for why our universe is so amenable to mathematical modeling. Ash’s discussion should make clear that the nature of the universe and our knowledge of it is not nearly as simple as “God or chance.”

Mannion’s approach emphasizes metaphysics as a necessary foundation. He gives examples of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers as representatives of the Autonomous Story. Their metaphysics were elemental: Thales believed that “ultimate reality” was water; Anaximenes, air; Heraclitus, fire; Parmenides, being. The term “ultimate reality” is Mannion’s. He uses the term as though it is meaningful, but it is not at all clear that it is. What distinguishes “ultimate reality” from “reality?” Is there any difference between this distinction and the distinction between the set of “everything” and its subset of everything knowable to us?

Regarding rationalism, Mannion cites the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry as evidence of rationalism’s shortcomings. Here Mannion makes the basic error of taking incompleteness for wrongness. He claims that the current model of the universe as finite yet unbounded disproves Euclid’s Axiom of Parallels. He is imprecise in this claim, because although the physics of General Relativity within this model uses non-Euclidean geometry, this model per se does not exclude Euclidean geometry. This is because the existence of a fourth dimension of spacetime curvature does not exclude the standard three-dimensions of space, within which Euclidean geometry is no less valid than if the fourth dimension did not exist. Indeed, non-Euclidean geometry cannot exist without Euclidean geometry, because the concept of curvature is meaningless without the concept of flatness. Euclidean geometry cannot exist without non-Euclidean either, it is incidental that we discovered the former first, but also illuminating here because the reason we did so is because it is in fact true and maps on to our everyday world quite well.

Mannion provides a historical overview of empiricism as well, identifying aspects where he believes it falls short. He correctly identifies empiricism’s failure to justify itself without reference to a priori concepts like causality. Some of his other criticisms fall short however. Mannion illustrates George Berkeley’s critique of empiricism thusly:

“Let’s assume we see a desk in front of us. What we are tempted to say is, “I have a perception of a desk in front of me, therefore, there is a desk in front of me.” The first assertion, “I have a perception of a desk in front of me” is empirical and not controversial. But, the second assertion, “There is a desk in front of me” does not follow from the first. It has no logical connection. It is not empirical. It is a bold metaphysical assertion.”

Here Mannion claims a sharp metaphysical difference between percepts and objects. The metaphysical difference is not at all clear however. “Percept” and “object” are both concepts. They both exist as such. The difference between them is on the conceptual level, not the metaphysical one. Arguing against the metaphysical soundness of either is a performative contradiction, for any argumentation presupposes that they are real. Otherwise an argument (an object) could not be assimilated (a perception). “I have a perception of a desk in front of me” is a statement that relates two things: Me and a perception of a desk. The statement “There is a desk in front of me” is the same, just omitting the unnecessary verbiage of “perception.” This verbiage would only have utility if we thought we were hallucinating. It is Mannion’s assertion that the statements have no logical connection that is the bold metaphysical one.

Mannion moves on to David Hume’s attacks on rationalism, and on the entire edifice of epistemology. He discusses Hume’s critique of identity and causality. Mannion defines identity as “the concept that there is some continuity in the nature of an object over time.” Hume claims the possibility that such continuity is illusory, that the person reading the beginning of a paragraph is not the same as the one reading the end, or that an object perceived at one moment in time is not the same as what appears to be exactly the same object at another. If we are to accept Mannion’s definition of identity as time-dependent however, this would contradict his belief in God, who is identified as a being existing outside of time. Identity is not time-dependent however. Time is a function of change in state. To perceive such a change we must be able to identify one state versus another. It is time that is identity-dependent. Identity is not “continuity in time” but the mere fact that existence entails that some thing exist. For a thing to exist is for it to be what it is. Hume is simply concatenating concepts nonsensically. What does it even mean for something to comprise exactly what it was before, yet not be still that thing? No, it means it is still that same thing. Hume’s critique of identity is a distinction without a difference.

Hume’s critique of causality uses the example of billiard balls colliding. Hume states that he looks at the event and sees contact between the balls, that he sees one action follow another, but cannot see a necessary connection between the two. Yet contact itself is a kind of connection. The balls have a certain identity, which is to move when momentum is transferred to them. Causality is identity in action. Because identity is a necessity of existence, causality is also necessary.

Of Hume’s critique, Mannion writes:

“Causality, like identity, and external and internal substance, are properties of our minds, not of the world. They are the products of our imagination. The reason we believe in the external world, the self, and identity is not for logical or empirical reasons, for there are none. It is psychological; it is a habit of the mind.”

Mannion attempts to diminish identity and causality by reducing them to “products of our imagination.” By “imagination,” Mannion really means “consciousness.” Setting aside his poor word choice, he is still wrong. Consciousness is an axiom implied in the grasping of identity. To grasp that something exists, we require an awareness of existence. Such awareness is consciousness. Existence and its corrollary of identity are primary, not consciousness. To be conscious is to be conscious of something more than consciousness. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself would be a contentlesss consciousness, a non-awareness, and thus not a consciousness at all. Not anything. Literal non-sense. Mannion again distorts language in terming our awareness of the world as mere “belief.” Here he again conflates metaphysics and epistemology. The very identity of our existence is as conscious beings. We don’t “believe” in the world we experience, we perceive it. It is only following the integration of percepts into concepts that the concept of “belief” even becomes applicable. Belief necessitates the possibility of error in concept or proposition formation, but perception itself is inerrant. When we see a straight stick partially submerged in water, the image is not the distortion of a non-submerged stick to appear bent, but perception of the nature of water to refract light. What Mannion is doing here is setting up what he believes to be be a weak version of primacy of consciousness, which he seeks to replace by what he believes to be the correct primacy of consciousness, the primacy of God’s consciousness.

Mannion also brings up the analytic/synthetic dichotomy attributed to Leibniz and reprised by Hume. Mannion dismisses Hume’s analytic category as being one of “mere tautologies.” The example he gives is the statement “all sisters are women.” Mannion is being facile with this. The most immediate evidence is the wording of his example, a wording that inverts the natural order of abstraction from low to high. The concept of “sister” is an abstraction from the more basic concept of “woman.” Even the basic concept of “woman” however, must be integrated from percepts of different people. This, however basic, is still a conscious, volitional, and individual achievement in its own right. It is facile only after the fact to treat the results of a process that becomes rapid and automatic with our development as goods merely given by society or nature. Harry Binswanger calls this error “retroactive self-evidency.”ⁱⁱⁱ Mannion is guilty of this error when he says such a proposition “may tell us something about how we use language but it tells us no new information about the world.” The very ability to describe a higher concept’s subsumption of a basic one presupposes an epistemic hierachy built by gaining new information, in this case, that one of the relationships a woman can have with another woman is the sharing of parents. Mannion’s presentation of Hume’s analytic category tells us nothing new about knowledge, but it does illustrate how language can be manipulated in a way that diminishes the significance of secular knowledge, or in the case of Mannion’s thesis, inflates the significance of knowledge’s unremarkable limitations.

Moving to the other side of the dichotomy, an example of a “synthetic” proposition would be “women get pregnant.” This example is mine, not Mannion’s. I use it because it shows that if the analytic/synthetic dichotomy is real, it is not a very sharp one. In a literal sense “women get pregnant” is not a definition, because of course some women don’t get pregnant. But the capacity to become pregnant is, in a teleological sense, defining of womanhood. The dichotomy also underappreciates the significance of the difference between a concept and a proposition. In How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation, Harry Binswanger criticizes the dichotomy for reducing a concept to the “common belief that a concept is only a shorthand tag for its definition, which is a proposition.”^iv A concept however, is like an open-ended file folder, to use an analogy of Ayn Rand’s. Such a folder can contain all knowledge of the instances of a concept, or “units” that can be classified within the concept’s conceptual range. A summary description of the folder’s classification criteria is a plain different thing from the folder itself. This description is a definition. A definition is a proposition with a consistent form. Consistency is maintained when it refers to a firm locus in a conceptual hierarchy, a locus bounded by its logical relation to other concepts in the hierarchy.The analytic/synthetic dichotomy creates an arbitrary, simplistic hierarchy of its own that bestows unearned superiority (in the view of thinkers like Mannion at least) to non-definitional propositions over definitional ones. A concept is the means of knowledge formation; a proposition is the end. Means are often considered subordinate to ends, yet ends are nothing without means to achieve them. Subordinate means of lower rank order, but it does not necessarily mean of inferior value, epistemic or otherwise. Derogating definitions is like saying a journey is inferior to its destination for being defined by it.

Binswanger provides further clarity on the difference between concepts and propositions:

“Concepts are the elements of thought; propositions are the thoughts. Accordingly, a proposition does not have the kind of unity that a concept has. Propositions are not integrations — not in the sense that concepts are. A proposition is an organized combination of concepts (or proper names) not an integration of them: the parts of the proposition — the individual words — remain apparent as components.”^v

A proposition is the use of concepts to identify things. The concept of pregnancy refers to a state of womanhood, one with significant medical implications among others. If the concept of pregnancy did not have “analytic” definitions relating it to reproductive biology, aiding a pregnant woman in an emergency would be badly confounded because a salient fact about her would have to be synthesized. But the concepts of that synthesis would also need to be synthesized and so on. Propositions such as “women get pregnant” or “that woman is pregnant” work because of the earned automaticity of the conceptual definitions they draw upon, and the very development of higher order concepts such as “pregnancy” cannot occur without the use of propositions.

Concepts however, are permanent. They refer to all that a thing is, regardless of how much any of us know about it at a particular time. When we learn, we update our personal understanding of a concept but do not alter its ontological status as such. We store them with words, but the same is not true for propositions. Even the highly generalizing proposition “women get pregnant” is not stored, certainly not in the way that its component words, definitions, and concepts are. Even much more common, particularized propositions such as “this woman got pregnant” are not stored. Our memory of a woman getting pregnant is different from the proposition that identifies it. A memory is an integrated (or more precisely, reintegrated) experience. The act of identifying the memory, however, is the act of combining the concept of memory with relevant other concepts describing it: “I remember the day she told me she was pregant.” It is not an integration however, because “memory” is not integral to “pregnancy” and vice-versa. A temporal concept like “day” does integrate with “memory” of course, but the point is that unlike concepts, propositions do not have to be integrative. They are not stored but are formed as needed by their emergent applications. We can update our concept of pregnancy with say, a first hand experience of the fact that a pregancy can conclude prematurely, but this would not be an updating of the original proposition “I remember the day she told me she was pregant.” The component concepts of propositions do have to be integrative however. The must be integrative both unto themselves by nature, and with one another by their definitional, logical relation in the hierarchy, a hierarchy that as we discussed previously, is not given but intellectually achieved. The analytic/synthetic dichotomy divorces knowledge formation through propositions with the prerequisite storage of their components.

Mannion goes on to discuss foundationalism, the question of how to “justify why we ultimately believe something.” This is a reprisal of Mannion’s belief in an “ultimate reality” distinct from reality mentioned earlier, from a different aspect. What Mannion does not do is justify the question. Of those who do not answer such a question he writes: “[Their] belief is arbitrary and fideistic.” He does not consider that belief in an “ultimate reality” is what is arbitrary and fideistic, that the non-answerers respond in this way out of rational recognition that the concept of “ultimate belief” is meaningless. In the discussion of identity earlier we referred to three metaphysical axioms:

1. Existence exists.

2. Something exists.

3. Consciousness exists.

They are axiomatic because no attempt at refutation can be made without using them as premises. It is hard to imagine anything more foundational than these. Mannion initially writes instead about the problems faced by those who answer the question. He describes how answerers allegedly fall into infinite backward regress or circularity. If one’s epistemology is properly grounded however, they will ultimately arrive at the above axioms.

Mannion does go on to discuss the concepts surrounding these axioms, albeit critically. He claims that Berkeley, Hume, and Kant demonstrated that “man cannot justify belief in the existence in the external world.” All they have actually demonstrated is that even men held up as great philosophers make propositions that are blatantly self-contradictory. The very concepts of justification, belief, and external world are all impossible without consciousness, and consciousness can only exist in a world that also contains a part external to consciousness.

He quotes W.V.O Quine:

“Physical objects are conceptually imported … as convenient intermediaries … comparable epistemologically to the gods of Homer. For my part, I do … believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods … But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind …”

Objects are available to perception; gods are not. Quine here is making a relativistic assertion that ignores this by arbitrarily designating objects as “intermediaries.” Intermediary to what? Blank-out. Quine’s relativism derives from his dismissal of the inherently hierarchical nature of knowledge. Quine’s makes this dismissal explicit elsewhere in his writing:

“Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. . . . Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed . . . . [Quine 1953b, 43]”

Harry Binswanger rebuts Quine:

“What “adjustments elsewhere in the system” could make it possible to reject the laws of logic? Those laws, including Excluded Middle, are the hierarchical base of all conceptual functioning. The very idea of “revision” implies that the revision is what it is, that it is not what it is not, and that it is not a nothing. What “adjustments” could preserve algebra while denying arithmetic? Or could hold onto the concept “orphan” while denying the concept “parent”?”^vi

Mannion asserts we have no autonomous basis for belief in the self: “We are confident in the assertion “I exist,” only to the extent that it is completely without content and meaning.” This is obviously self-contradictory because “we” is simply the plural of “I,” so if “I” is “without content and meaning,” then no reference to anyone’s perspective, “I”, “We”, “You” has any content or meaning, including Mannion’s assertion.

Mannion questions the reliability of the senses again, this time appealing to inter-species subjectivity:

“We do know, that the sonar of bats, the stereoscopic eyes of man, and the compound eyes of flies all project very different images. Each gives sufficient information for survival, but ‘which’ should be taken as normative?”

Mannion’s premise of objective normativity is invalid. The very concept of norm implies a non-zero variance, and variance between perspectives is what defines subjectivity. That one being’s perspective differs from another’s does not by itself diminish either perspective, or diminish any other. The form of a table always looks different to two different people in the same room because they can never occupy the same vantage point at the same time. No vantage point is superior to any other; they’re just different. In the case of inter-species subjectivity, it is simply the result of how each species evolved to make sense of the environment it inhabits. Knowledge cannot be separated from the biological context in which it forms. Compared to objective normativity, there is no greater merit to the notion that there is some normative number of breasts for a person to have that transcends the fact of half the population having two and the other half none.

Next Mannion discusses the Problem of Induction. He concludes therefrom: “Without justifying inductive generalizations, scientific conclusions cannot be reached, and universal propositions cannot be made.” His conclusion is easily refuted: A proposition consists of a subject and a predicate. Each of the metaphysical axioms we referred to earlier are propositions with a common predicate, the fact of existence, connecting three distinct subjects:

1. Existence exists.

2. Something exists.

3. Consciousness exists.

Each is universal, and necessarily so among the universe of entities who can comprehend propositions. Mannion also claims that full uniformity of nature is necessary to justify scientific conclusions. Our rebutting discussion of the Anthropic Principle earlier however, did not rest on uniformity, only a certain stability. One of the more interesting features of black holes is that the laws of physics seem to break down as their singularity is approached. This feature is interesting however, because it is an exception rather than the rule. No entities capable of studying black holes or the topic of knowledge could exist in a universe where black hole behavior were the rule.

Having criticized induction as incapable of producing universal propositions, Mannion concludes from this that without something else coming to the rescue, deduction and logic are baseless. He asks: “Do we know a priori that Eastern Monism is false? If not, then possibly all is “A” and there is no “non-A.” His question is absurd because the very evaluation of the truth or falsehood of Eastern Monism or anything else requires identification of “True” and “False” as concepts. Mannion’s entire thesis is meaningless absent the terms “justified” or “unjustified,” terms which feature over and over again throughout his essay. Logic, the art of non-contradictory identification, inheres in the second metaphysical axiom: Something exists. For something to be something it can only be what it is, and not what it is not. An entity that can conceive the propositions: “All is A” or “There is no ‘non-A’” has necessarily grasped the first axiom, that existence exists, in his use of “is.” Once again, such grasping is impossible without being an identification of the second and third axioms as well. No identification of an existent is meaningful without being able to also conceptualize the non-existent, i.e. the absence of that thing, which is the same as the presence of something else. There is no conceptual A without Non-A and vice-versa. Existence in its totality itself however, as distinct from the concept of it, does not depend on “total non-existence.” The latter, not only by definition of the former, but by the very act of defining the former, is a contradiction in terms.

Mannion then goes on to discuss Pragmatism, which he characterizes somewhat uncharitably as a “cope” with the alleged failures of epistemology. Mannion tries to diminish the fact that truth exists in the context of its utility to achieving our goals. This diminution is really just Mannion’s personal feelings about this however. There is no objective basis for saying that truth is lessened for its existence in this context. Truth is an epistemic concept, and only conscious beings can conceptualize. Consciousness is a biological phenomenon, the means by which living things process sense data concerning their environment. It is much more plausible to view Mannion’s attacks on objectivity about this fact as a cope for his personal discomfort with it.

Having concluded his history of philosophical attacks on knowledge, Mannion states what he believes to be the only viable theory of knowledge remaining, which is the Transcendental Argument. He quotes Karl Popper’s formulation:

“An argument which appeals to the fact that we possess knowledge or that we can learn from experience, and which concludes from this fact that knowledge or learning from experience must be possible, and further, that every theory which entails the impossibility of knowledge, or of learning from experience, must be false, may be called a ‘transcendental argument’.”

Mannion concludes from this argument that God must exist because in his opinion there is no other possible source of knowledge. Mannion’s argument is an argument from ignorance, and a weak one at that. It could of course be the case, as we mentioned early on, that there is another source we simply haven’t discovered yet. But as we have seen, there is a theory of knowledge that robustly connects our everyday experience as a rational animal with self-evident metaphysical truths. It is the Objectivist theory of knowledge, the modern capstone resting on the redoubtable thought of Aristotle and Aquinas. Mannion is either unaware of it or does not consider it worthy of consideration. This is very convenient for Mannion, because Objectivism represents a serious alternative to the mysticism that he presents as the only alternative to the failures of skepticism.

Theonomous epistemology is really nothing more than a rehashing of the Argument from First Cause for the existence of God:

Everything must have a cause.

To avoid infinite causal regression, at the beginning there must have been an uncaused cause.

That uncaused cause must be God.

--

All knowledge must be justified by other knowledge.

To avoid infinite justificatory regression, at the base of all knowledge must be a knower whose knowledge is self-justified.

That knower must be God.

The conclusion, as we have already identified, is an argument from present ignorance. The second statement is a contradiction of the first. All knowledge must be justified by more basic knowledge. Yet a god’s knowledge is at least part of all knowledge, and the Christian God is said to know all. What caused God? Blank-out. How does God know? Blank-out.

Another issue with this argument is that it confuses infinity with infinite regress. Infinite regress is the product of propositions that are contentless, the most notorious instance being the proposition: “This sentence is false.” If we take its grammatical correctness and validity of its conceptual referents in isolation to be correct philosophical grammar as well, then going on to evaluate it results in an interminable flip-flopping between True and False. But linguistic grammar is not philosophical grammar. The truth about that proposition, as distinct from the truth of that proposition, is that it is not a proposition at all. It is a pseudo-proposition because it refers to no content beyond a self-evaluation. Real propositions however, must refer to content beyond their own evaluation, otherwise they cannot be independently evaluated, thus negating their very purpose as propositions. This does not exclude self-reference however: “This is not a sentence” is a real proposition because it contains content beyond its evaluation, which is the question of its identity as a sentence, not whether the correct evaluation of that question returns True or False. That the correct evaluation is False is neither here nor there. The proposition “This sentence is true” is no less of a pseudo-proposition than “This sentence is true” for this reason. This, as it happens, is in pure essence exactly what the final sentence of Mannion’s article contains: “God’s revelation is self-authenticating[.]” This would be too obvious an instance of infinite self-evaluative regress, so to Mannion adds this obfuscatory premise: “because, by it, everything else is authenticated.” But as we have seen, this contradicts his original premise: That no knowledge can be self-justified. Mannion’s linguistic legerdemain is the substitution of the words “revelation” for “knowledge” and “authenticating” for “justified” that he had been using throughout the essay up until this point. Regardless, Mannion’s premise does nothing to rescue his argument from infinite regress. What he has done is try to support one as-yet unjustified conclusion, that God’s revelation is self-authenticating, by passing off another unjustified conclusion, that God’s revelation has in fact authenticated everything else, as a premise.

We now differentiate infinity from infinite regress. Infinity is a proposition that takes the form: “Operability is not negated by operation.” Subtracting 1 from 3 has no bearing on the ability to subtract 1 from the difference of 2 as well. There is nothing contradictory about a timeline that can be infinitely subtracted from either. As the Theory of Relativity shows, time is a function of motion. Although a local perpetual motion system contradicts thermodynamics, there is nothing in physics that prohibits the spacetime continuum itself from being in a state of continuous change. One theory of cosmology posits a perpetual cycle of spacetime expansion and contraction, alternating between “big bangs” and “big crunches.” There is also Smolin’s “budding theory” of the cosmic lifecycle mentioned earlier. It is not at all meaningful to speak of anything “before” the Big Bang, because “before” and “after” are concepts valid only within a spacetime system, not as attributes of that system itself. This is on top of the fact that as also mentioned earlier, the laws of physics, themselves appear to break down in singularities such as black holes and the one our universe emerged from. Even if the universe can exist in states that we are not physically capable of being aware of, the fact that a state of the universe can exist in a state we can be aware of is immutable, eternal, and self-evident as the fact that existence exists. Just as operation does not negate operability, the potential for a change in state does not negate the fact of that state. There is no contradiction or regression to this, nor can there be.

Earlier in his concluding section Mannion presents something that bears a passing resemblance to Han-Hermann Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics, which in a nutshell argues that arguing for violence as a preferable form of conflict resolution is a performative contradiction because the act of arguing itself presupposes preference for peaceful conflict resolution.

“Autonomous man can use reason and his senses while denying belief in God, and can thereby do math, science, and manipulate the world around him. But, he can give no account of reason and senses apart from God. Therefore, just as reason presupposes the actuality of logic whether or not one believes in it, so, reason presupposes the actuality of God and the truth of our first story whether or not one believes in it. This being the case, all arguments are arguments for the existence of God and no argument against the existence of God can be made. For in the final analysis, an argument against the existence of God is like an argument against arguments.”

Mannion’s premise that logic and reason presuppose God comes from his falsely dichotomous argument from alleged ignorance we have already rebutted, including the allegation. It is worth adding here that if argument presupposes anything, it is that reality is objective among the interlocutors to the degree that there is potential utility in in exploring the concepts and propositions they individually form about reality and how they can be further clarified. Reality’s objectivity derives directly from the Law of Identity we have demonstrated as the foundation of logic.

In the beginning of his concluding paragraph Mannion negates the entirety of his preceding content: “God is proven, not as the conclusion of rational or empirical theistic arguments, but as the very ground of argument itself.”

His essay is an attempt to prove two conclusions: that knowledge can come only from God, and that God exists. In his effort to prove them he uses throughout the essay, albeit inconsistently, both his rational faculty and empiricism from science and history. In the beginning, as already mentioned, he overtly argues from empiricism:

“The history of epistemology demonstrates that man, unaided, has not, and cannot, attain a foundation on which to base a theory of knowledge.”

Shortly thereafter, he explicitly argues from rationality:

“But, even if our senses were reliable, after the work of Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, Quine, and all the coherentists, we know that all experience is sufficiently theory laden that it is not rational to simply assume a close identity between reality and our perceptions of it.”

That he attempts to conclude therefrom that it is the fact of argumentation, not rationality and empiricism, that proves God, in no way renders his essay any less rationalist and empiricist. His conclusion steals the concept of argumentation, which cannot exist absent rationality and empiricism, a violation of the inherently hierarchical nature of concepts we demonstrated above. His abrupt about face regarding rationality and empiricism at the end is therefore a performative contradiction. Here is another contradiction: If logic/reason/senses are as precarious as he claims, and God is the source of these, then God himself contains something that is significantly precarious.

Here is a much more plausible proposition, which is the opposite of what Mannion argues: It is not knowledge, but God who is contingent. Knowledge is not made in the image of God; Mannion makes God in the image of knowledge. The fundamental problem Mannion alleges with knowledge, contingency, is the very problem with his whole approach: Each of his two conclusions is contingent on the other: God exists because he is the only explanation for knowledge; knowledge only exists because of God. A is true because B says so; B is true because A says so. It is fitting he ultimately comes to steal the concept of argument itself, because his argument is not even an argument at all; it is nothing more than a pseudo-proposition. It is born of the conceptual invalidity of his premises: “Ultimate reality,” “Consciousness beyond the senses,” etc. To be frank, under the scholarly gloss much of his essay is really just stoner-speak: “How do you KNOW we’re not in the Matrix, man?” “If you were unplugged, how would you know that wasn’t also a Matrix?” “How do you know that you know that you know that you know…” Turtles all the way down.

Mannion’s overall approach to epistemology is to stack up the many mostly real historical failings of skepticism and the rationalist versions of mysticism, then to claim that the only alternative is his religious version of mysticism. His case ignores the great triangulation against this false dichotomy: the objective approach to epistemology, whose most modern form is fittingly as part of the philosophy called Objectivism. This philosophy derives from metaphysical axioms, which unlike the concept of God, are self-evident. Epistemology is arguably its most robust derivation and its greatest contribution to the history of ideas. If God’s existence is even a possible or meaningful idea, it is not derived from the epistemology that Mannion presents.

1 which itself is not true randomness but a simulation thereof

i Wysocki, I., Dominiak, Ł. Austrian Economics and Compatibilist Freedom. J Gen Philos Sci 55, 113–136 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-023-09640-x

ii Hunter Ash. Untitled Post on the Fine-Tuning Argument. 12/3/2025 3:39 PM EST.

iii Binswanger, Harry. How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation. Pg 208. TOF Publications, Inc. August 6, 2019.

iv Binswanger, pg 265.

v bid

vi Binswanger pg 303

I initially passed on LiquidZulu’s “Anatomy of the Celebritarian” critique of Dave Smith when he released it. I passed mainly because I no longer care to defend Smith due to his anti-American and anti-white attitude toward Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, magnified by his simping for brown people who hate us when they clash with Israel. Smith has even cucked on immigration, now demanding of an operation mass deporting millions (which he has claimed on multiple occaisions to support) to avoid making any mistakes or hurting anyone, a cheap virtue huckstering of himself by contrast with failure to meet an outrageously unrealistic moral standard he asserts.

Recently however, a couple of colleagues asked me for my thoughts on the video. It is out of respect for them rather than Smith that I listened to it in its entirety in my car recently. I don’t believe I missed anything from the visuals, but feel free to point them out to me if this is the case. My reaction is mostly “meh.” Zulu does deserve credit for important, on-point and well-deserved criticism of Smith at point in Smith’s career where he fell short as a libertarian apologist. However, Zulu’s criticism of the broader type of libertarian Smith represents, i.e. a right-wing one with a sensible set of political priorities, falls flat, not just because I think Zulu is wrong for disagreeing with our priorities, but because the bad-faith and self-aggrandizing way Zulu attacks them.

Zulu presents the fundamental difference between him and Smith as being respectively one of “principled radicalism” vs “pragmatism.” He discusses the philosophy of Pragmatism and attempts to tie Smith to it. Pragmatism is a philosophy developed primarily by William James circa the turn of the 20^th century. My knowledge of Pragmatism is second hand, but I think I have a good gist of what it’s about. Based on that, Zulu seems in the video to, as many Objectivists are criticized for, argue against a crude caricature of his philosophical opponents. Zulu seems to attribute to such opponents the dictionary definition of lower-case p pragmatism, which is an emphasis on expediency that tends to disregard ideals, principles, or even philosophy itself, to Pragmatism. It is telling that William James’ name is not mentioned once in the video. He instead quotes John Dewey, who was influenced by Pragmatism but was not at all an architect of the philosophy:

“Men, instead of being proud of accepting and asserting beliefs and “principles” on the ground of loyalty, will be as ashamed of that procedure as they would now be to confess their assent to a scientific theory out of reverence for Newton or Helmholz or whomever, without regard to evidence.

If one stops to consider the matter, is there not something strange in the fact that men should consider loyalty to “laws,” principles, standards, ideals to be an inherent virtue, accounted unto them for righteousness? It is as if they were making up for some secret sense of weakness by rigidity and intensity of insistent attachment. A moral law, like a law in physics, is not something to swear by and stick to at all hazards […].1”

Of this Zulu says:

“I think that is about as clear as one can get in outright rejecting the concept of a principled approach to ethical questions.”

Dewey does not reject principles here however. He rejects treating adherence to them without regard to evidence as an inherent virtue. He is correct on this for because for one thing “inherent virtue” is a contradiction in terms. Virtue is efficacy in value creation, and there is no value without a valuer. Dewey may be right about evidence as well, at least in a secular sense. If ethics is solely a matter of faith, they are a solely a religious matter. Philosophy has nothing to say about it. Dewey was of course a bad actor, and his above quote is just the motte in a motte-and-bailey where he sought to replace rational, evidence-based principles in politics and education with irrational and deluded principles of his own. Principles are still principles however, and not even Dewey was so unsophisticated as to simply cast them aside.

What does William James actually say about Pragmatism? Contra Zulu, who throughout the video characterizes it as seeking immediate results, in the Second Lecture on Pragmatism James says:

“The word ‘pragmatism’ has meant everything from the mere striving after working results to the tendency to get ahead of scientific principles and to let philosophy follow the lead of the arts and crafts. But the pragmatic method, as I have just stated it, is not a method of the arts and crafts, but a method of logic, or rather, of logical criticism, which applies to all elements of belief…”

James’ method here is one of truth pursuit, using a particular definition of truth. Zulu describes the Pragmatist definition as: “[t]he true is that which works; and a thing working means that it achieves certain purposes, purposes held by a consciousness.” That Zulu is setting up a straw man here to knock down is indicated by the preceding part of the sentence:

“Of course, there are many objections to pragmatism, not least is that it is a form of the primacy of consciousness: the thesis that consciousness precedes existence. They tell us that the true is that which works; and a thing working means that it achieves certain purposes, purposes held by a consciousness. So the true is that which satisfies the purposes of a consciousness.”

This is not precisely what James says of truth however:

‘Grant an idea or belief to be true,’ it says, ‘what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?’ The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.”¹

There is nothing to indicate that James regards consciousness as metaphysically primary. Indeed, some of James’ phrasing indicates some agreement with Objectivism (the philosophy Zulu espouses): “if the belief were false?” James treats belief’s veracity as one that has an independent basis in reality distinct from belief, unlike certain postmodernists who treat truth as relative to belief itself. The concept of truth is an epistemological matter anyway, not a metaphysical one. The error comes from taking the ability to apply the concept of truth to discussion of metaphysics as proof that truth itself is inherently metaphysical. Indeed, if we apply the Pragmatic method to metaphysics, the primacy question is arguably irrelevant: It could very well be that our consciousness is an awareness of something, and that something is a product of consciousness. Zulu would dismiss this as circular, but it could also simply be recursion, an essential feature of many software programs. Regardless, as long as the conscious experience is sufficiently consistent in its constituent properties, reason can function in integrating those properties to model such experience in the future. Because we cannot experience any existence other than our own, the question of primacy is irrelevant to truth. Zulu’s straw man does not even impersonate the man of the hour, it is really nothing more than a red herring.

Rather than immediacy, James’ conceives Pragmatism as seeking to verify what leads us “prosperously” from one part of our stream of experience to another:

“You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be CHANGED.”

The last phrase is easily misunderstood. James is not saying that experience determines or changes reality, but that a part of reality, our environment, is malleable to a degree, and that a key part of truth pursuit is identifying what is malleable and how.

Zulu goes on to criticize Pragmatism, and more broadly consequentialism, on the basis that what “works” for people is value subjective:

“Pragmatism simply takes as given that you already come into it with a code of values provided by some other school, and then it tells you that given those values here’s how you can tell what works to achieve them or not.”

This is another straw man, specifically a fallacy of an ignored alternative. Values are not provided by another philosophical school, they inhere in our unique neurology and circumstance. They are a given inheritance. Although I find great value in Objectivism, this is where I part company with Ayn Rand, who held that values are something rationally chosen. Rationality however, applies only to the actualization of given values, it does not create or choose them. It does not even apply to them. Values are neither rational nor irrational; they are arational. A persistent error that Objectivists make is taking the arational for the irrational. They take the refusal to invert the direction of reason’s proper application as rejection of reason itself. In this, they actually imply primacy of consciousness: Because reason and values are both part of consciousness and reason is involved in actualization of values, values must be the product of reason, rather than a prior existent we are conscious of. Objectivists and “objective morality” believers generally also commit the error of taking value subjectivity for value randomness. They treat as sound the moral relativist² argument that if values are subjective, there is no reason we should defend our own values versus any others. They disagree not with its logic but with its premise. The truth is that the premise is correct but the conclusion is false. It is false because justification is not applicable to values. Once again, they are given.

On the whole I think Zulu, along with many libertarians, make too much hay about getting the ethical foundation of libertarianism “correct.” It’s counterproductive to insist that people support a movement for the “correct” reasons. A good example is how many libertarians denounce Javier Milei despite his terrific success because part of his motivation is supporting Israel. What should matter is that they meaningfully advance liberty, and that the movement has the wherewithal to extract contributions from people with bad reasons while quarantining such toxicity. My own organization takes this principle to its logical conclusion by excluding libertarians who retard the advancement of liberty and including non-libertarians who further it. If anything, the consequentialist approach of David Friedman is the a stronger foundation than Zulu’s because it allows us to more easily promote libertarianism in terms of values that many good, productive people hold that aren’t limited to natural rights. Moralism turns people off.

Zulu sees the specter of pragmatism not only in the left-libertarian capital-P Pragmatist Caucus represented by Nick Sarwark but also the Mises Caucus represented by Dave Smith. He terms the latter “Neo-Prags.” Zulu’s views the Mises Caucus as failing to improve on the Pragmatist Caucus. This is a highly disparaging view, because Pragmatist Caucus was very much the opposite of what the most charitable interpretation of their name represents. William James would have reviled them for their dogmatic attachment to party over political purpose. This is despite the fact that the very reason the Mises Caucus was formed was to put the Libertarian Party back on a principled footing. Zulu to his credit, acknowledges this by quoting from Dave Smith’s debate with Nick Sarwark on the topic. Zulu does not mention that Smith won this debate however. One can criticize Smith for inadequate understanding of principle, or for what one believes is a misapplication of principle, but his commitment to principle has never been in question. I agree with Zulu that the first two items apply to Smith, but not the third.

Smith’s poor understanding of the principles of libertarian theory were evident in the debate he lost with Andrew Wilson, and Zulu does a very good job of taking Smith to task for this. Zulu shines in particular in providing the clear explanation of the Rothbard’s e contrario argument that Smith failed to. I have some criticisms of my own regarding Smith’s performance to round out Zulu’s. The first is Smith’s acceptance of a poorly-formulated debate topic: “Is Libertarianism better than Christian Populism?” Zulu criticizes this for putting the burden on the libertarian to demonstrate superiority, but on this I think he’s being a bit too autistic. The gist of the topic is really just “which is better?” The problem I have with the topic is that it implies a mutual exclusivity that should not be automatically accepted. Far better in my opinion would have been to format the title of the debate as a resolution: “Is Libertarianism The Real Christian Populism?” The Christian case for libertarianism is extremely strong (another thing Objectivists get wrong), and libertarianism certainly identifies many legitimate grievances that ordinary people have against a privileged elite.

Zulu spends most of the time criticizing how Smith responds to Wilson’s challenge to demonstrate self-ownership. Zulu is right about how Smith mangled Argumentation Ethics here and how the e contrario argument would have worked better. I think Smith missed an opportunity to reject the validity of Wilson’s challenge itself however. That Wilson opened the debate by challenging Smith to demonstrate rather than explain self-ownership implies Wilson’s acceptance of self-ownership’s coherence as a concept. The error Wilson makes is demanding in “demonstration” that Smith treat self-ownership as something that needs to be cosmically objective like what Wilson believes his own doctrine of “divine command” to be, as “more” than a social convention. What Smith should have pointed out is that even Wilson’s doctrine of “divine command” is something that, on top of being personally accepted on faith, has to be socially translated, transmitted, and applied. The manner in which this occurs can change over time, which Wilson contends is somehow a weakness of self-ownership but not his own doctrine. What Wilson overlooks is that for certain conventions like ownership, the changes are mainly at the edges in cases like slavery. There is still significant conceptual overlap across time and place. All political philosophies apply only to a society. It is in light of this that Smith should have questioned the productivity of arguing which position is more of a social construct. Smith should have reframed the debate as between conflicting policy sets that derive from different values. As discussed earlier, intellectual demonstration is not applicable to values, they are given. At this point Smith could preempt Wilson’s contention regarding value subjectivity by pointing out that libertarianism’s acceptance of such subjectivity is a feature, not a bug. Libertarianism is the resolution of such subjectivity via the property norm.

That an ideology is a social convention, which necessarily implies potentiality of social contravention, is neither an indictment nor endorsement of that ideology. An ideology is desire for the big picture to differ from the status quo. Even people who think that the status quo is perfect still desire for everyone else to stop trying to change the status quo. Ideology is therefore defined by deviation from it. That social deviations from a norm over time or place exist not only does not refute a norm as such, it validates it because the very defintion of norm is meaningless absent variance! Finally, Smith could have nabbed Wilson for at certain points substituting the term “social construct” for “social convention.” The former is cribbed directly from the left. It is nothing more than a pseudointellectual dodge of biological realities that the left is averse to, realities like race and sex. The property norm itself is a biological reality that transcends the human species. If Wilson was looking for an objectively demonstrable basis for self-ownership, Smith would have done well to hit him with this.

Zulu also criticizes Smith for not biting the bullet when Wilson pointed out that hardcore libertarianism rejects conscription and legal prohibition of non-reproductive incest. Zulu criticizes Smith for abandonment of principle alone. In Smith’s defense here, principle is a causal identity that generalizes. Generalization however, usually carries exceptions. Libertarian is still a reasonable label when it applies to the full set of your policy positions much better than any other. A liberal is still a liberal even if a small minority of his positions are conservative and vice versa. A better criticism of Smith is that he missed an opportunity to show how libertarianism promotes patriotism and punishes depravity better than alternative systems. I go into detail on this in my article on prohibition.

Zulu claims that Smith fails to live up to the example set by Smith’s greatest hero, Ron Paul. To support this claim, Zulu characterizes Ron Paul as someone who exemplified the approach championed by Albert Jay Nock in his essay “Isaiah’s Job.” The biblical story emphasizes the value of perserverance in the preaching of truth even though most people will not listen. This is because even though civilization may well be doomed to collapse because too great a portion of its population is too far gone, there exists a Remnant of people receptive enough to your message who will be the ones to rebuild civilization when the time comes. While Ron Paul does indeed exemplify this, what Zulu ignores is that even Ron Paul had enough situational awareness to adjust his messaging to his audience. In his presidential campaigns he reversed course on the white nationalism of his 90s newsletters, reverting to espousing Ayn Rand’s straw man of racism being the most primitive form of collectivism. Even though white nationalism is crucial to the long-term furtherance of liberty, Paul had the sense in 2008 and 2012 to recognize that America wasn’t ready for that message yet. In politics however, much can change in a short time. A majority of the right, including many libertarians, now realize that for America to remain free it must be preserved as majority white. Zulu supports open-borders while denouncing restrictionists as pragmatists.

The pragmatist boogeyman Zulu tilts at seems to be a rationalization of his open-borders lunacy. This is suggested by the inordinate amount of time he spends in the video reviewing Smith’s debate on immigration with Alex Nowrasteh. I’m not going to go out of my way relitigating the debate here. I will say that a great bulk of Zulu’s argument rests on the premise that property cannot be held jointly. This is false because libertarianism is a doctrine of homesteader primacy³, and the overwhelming majority of property in the world was homesteaded jointly by clans, not lone-wolf individuals. In addition, rejection of joint-ownership would necessitate coercive restriction of people who want to voluntarily apportion among themselve the stream of benefits that an asset provides. Zulu fails to appreciate the very basic legal distinction between a natural person and a party to an agreement. A party comprises one or more natural persons. The individualist part of libertarianism that legitimizes an agreement is that each natural person has to voluntarily consent to the agreement. There is no limit to the number of persons who can be part of a party to an agreement however. The libertarian property norm requires that a scarce resource be owned by a single party, not a single person.

In the section on Smith’s immigration debate, Zulu actually tries to claim that because the state doesn’t transfer the title of the property it purchases with taxpayer money to the taxpayer, the taxpayer has no claim to that property. And within this very same section, Zulu has the gall to call Smith the legal positivist! I think this pretty much sums up how seriously we should take Zulu on the immigration issue. Further unseriousness on his part is his claim that Smith’s proposal of moving the military from abroad to our border would entail martial enforcement of immigration law inside our country.

I did enjoy Zulu’s comparison of Smith to the character of Gail Wynand in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. Smith, like Wynand, is a slave to his audience. Wynand is still vastly superior to Smith however, because at least he knows what he feeds them is slop and holds his audience in contempt for this. Smith however, actually believes that he is providing his audience with elite libertarian apology, flexing the tagline “the most consistent motherfucker you know,” which Zulu rightfully calls him out on. Unlike Zulu I think that Smith is sincere in his rationalization of pandering to his audience as being principled, because Smith’s audience does include many principled libertarians. Unfortunately being a principled libertarian does not make someone a good person overall, and most of Smith’s audience are effete contrarian hipsters, mosly of either the libertarian or groyper variety, NPCs who unreflectively oppose the current thing rather supporting it. Smith’s pandering to such people undoes him on the war issue, where he perverts libertarianism into pacifism. Zulu fails to call Smith out on this however, because he actually agrees with him!

Zulu has a sizable section of the video where he promotes a strategy of “libertarian Leninism.” This uses tactics that Lenin and other leaders of small minority factions to wield massively outsized influence. An example of this tactic is running a radical LP candidate with the intention of extracting concessions from one of the major parties in exchange for dropping out the race. Zulu deserves credit for proposing a practical course of action rather than just complaining about Smith and the Mises Caucus’ actions. He also deserves credit for countersignalling agorists’ denunciation of Javier Milei. He fails to differentiate himself with his proposal however, because Smith’s Mises Caucus colleague Angela McArdle has advocated the same thing.

Again, my biggest issue with Liquid Zulu is not that he criticizes Dave Smith. Smith has indeed let the liberty movement down in significant areas concerning the application of libertarian principle. Zulu and I agree partially on which areas these are. On certain areas however, what Zulu takes to be a failure to stick to principle on Smith’s part I regard as reasonable consistency. The most significant of these is immigration, and what I dislike about Zulu even more than his stance on borders is the dishonest chauvinism with which he positions his stance. He calls libertarians who see borders as a critical instance of property boundaries “pragmatists” (which as we have seen is a toothless accusation anyway) or “fake libertarians.” He stoops to hurling the latter label at Smith in the conclusion of the video using a cheap gotcha based on the fact that Smith has at one point said that if someone were to convince him that policing commons like borders were unlibertarian, he would reject libertarianism. Objective third parties to this conflict will recognize that, whether they agree with Smith’s issue positions or not, he is very much affirming with this statement his commitment to principle. Smith’s commitment to being principled about political philosophy goes so far that he considers a single deviation from that philosophy’s core principle as rejection of the philosophy. I don’t go as far as Smith here. As mentioned near the beginning, I think it would be perfectly fine for Smith to continue calling himself a libertarian in such a scenario if the other broad labels were less accurate still in conveying his set of policy positions. Zulu, in his inquisitorial myopia, discounts the possibility that it is commitment to the higher principle of intellectual integrity that leads Smith to remind his followers that political philosophy is a domain where his mind is always open to change with compelling logic and evidence. Zulu ultimately attacks Smith for true purism: The commitment to treating libertarianism purely for what it is – a legal doctrine rather than a religious cult.

In light of this, Zulu’s attempt to portray his opponents as cargo cultists early in the video, then condemning them for failing to follow the example of Isaiah in the middle of the video, comes off as projection on his part. When I found out about the video, my tweeting appreciative amusement over the fact that Smith had driven Zulu to produce a scripted three hour video (in which I made it clear this was in spite of my dislike of Smith) cost me a few followers. This behavior does little to dispel the impression of Zulu’s following being a cult. Indeed, many of his followers actively reinforce this impression with their satirical “Zeil Zulu” salute and their chant of “I would not take the ladder.”⁴ Their behavior is a kind of semi-self aware post irony. They know they’re cultists, but they believe their cult is the one good one, a cult of principle rather than power. Regarding principle and power, they’re right in a sense. They are principled, but they treat the principles of individualism and non-aggression they have warped into principles of atomism and pacifism as religious dogmas. Not unrelatedly, they are powerless, which is obviously a good thing. The warped principles they cleave to are what lead them to the insane conclusions that Zulu posits in the video, like that the Mises Caucus are no more principled or effective than the Pragmatist Caucus, and that the president the latter helped elect is no improvement over what Kamala Harris would have been. The primary evidence that Zulu cites in favor of the latter conclusion is Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration and restriction of legal immigration. This only works as evidence however, if you’re an open-borders libertarian. For restrictionists, Trump’s immigration policy is a massive win. Zulu is so self-absorbed, blinkered, and chauvinistic, he cannot even acknowledge what a massive controversy immigration is within the libertarian movement. Of course, political philosophy is not determined democratically by the movement it animates. This weighs in favor of the restrictionist position, as libertarianism’s two leading thinkers in Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe both became strongly restrictionist the further they took the philosophy. They are far from the only restrictionist luminaries either. Zulu also cites Trump’s foreign policy as evidence, despite the fact that it has included wins like deposing a communist dictator in Maduro and weakening Russia’s communist influence by neutering their greatest Middle Eastern ally in Iran. Let’s throw Zulu a bone here however, and discount immigration and foreign policy in comparing Trump and Harris. I asked Grok to ignore those issues in grading Trump and Harris as libertarians by the standards of its greatest thinkers in Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Ayn Rand. Using a score of -2 to +2 instead of letter grades, weighting each of 10 issues equally, Trump scores 0, while Harris scores -17. This does not even count Trump’s full and unconditional pardon of Ross Ulbricht, a tremendous libertarian victory that belongs solely to Angela McArdle and the Mises Caucus, and that absolutely could not have been achieved with a Harris administration.

Zulu makes a number of fair criticisms of Smith and a number of unfair ones. Zulu’s priorities as a libertarian are so poor however, that on the most important libertarian issue, immigration and MAGA, the ones that determine whether any other libertarian policies are even possible, he falls flat on his face. While Smith, due to shortcomings where he is truly pragmatist in the non-philosophical way, doesn’t go as far as I would like on these either, compared to Zulu is still a better, more practical libertarian on this count alone merely by not failing on them.

1 The emphasis is James.’ It might have been clearer however, if he had emphasized only WE. The notion of assimilation etc. external to ourselves is of no practical value.

2 Subjectivity is a type of relativity. Relativity refers to variance in relation to something else. Subjectivity is variance in relation to consciousness or personal experience. It is relativity’s impersonal meaning that is the likely reason why the term “moral relativism” is much more of a pejorative than “moral subjectivism.”

3 Zulu has a section where he criticizes Smith’s presentation of homesteader primacy. Zulu’s (correct) criticism is not of primacy itself, but that Smith promotes Locke’s “labor mixing” as the criterion of what constitutes legitimate homesteading. This is merely another labor theory of value, in contrast to libertarianism’s conflict-avoidance doctrine concerning the subjective valuations of resource consumers.

4 In reference to a libertarian stress test, in which NAPtists like Zulu condemn taking a neighbor’s ladder without permission to save their mother from her burning house. Sane libertarians have no problem taking the ladder as long as the taker pays restitution if the neighbor asks for it.

Table of Contents
-Opening Remarks
-Gambling
-Homosexuality
-Prostitution
-Pornography
-Drugs
-General Problems
-The Slippery Slope
-Other Issues
-Concluding Remarks
-Footnotes
-Sources

Opening Remarks

Null positionists and third positionists both wish to minimize the harmful effects of degeneracy on the nation. We differ sharply on how to do this however. Null positionists regard civil society as the sphere with which primary policymaking against degeneracy should lie. Third positionists regard the state as that sphere. This article explains why the third positionist approach is comparatively counterproductive to the point of exacerbating degeneracy, and even causing dysgenesis.

I am a reactionary libertarian. I believe that legalization of all behavior that does not violate the property norm is most supportive of natural order. It is worth prefacing here however, that this book is not a case specifically for reactionary libertarianism, but against third positionism, which leaves non-libertarian null positionist ideologies such as paleoconservatism and neoreaction available as options too. These latter ideologies allow for a certain degree of property violation in fighting degeneracy, but still place strict limits on the government’s scope of activity in this regard to avoid imposing undue enforcement cost on healthy people. A paleoconservative may support universal prohibition of internet pornography, but would not sanction so much as the existence of an agency like the NSA, let alone allowing it to aid in enforcement. This is because the NSA is unconstitutional. A neoreactionary may support a sovereign corporation enforcing a similar policy in its realm, but would oppose that same corporation attempting to acquire another sovcorp to do the same. This is because acquisition would violate their corporate charter. Third positionists by contrast, do not regard such limits as essential. I make libertarian arguments concerning prohibition because I believe they are strongest, but even if I didn’t believe that, it would still strengthen the overall case to present them. This is because if it can be shown that libertarianism, the reactionary position that is farthest from the third position in terms of what is legally permissible is still plausibly superior in mitigating degeneracy, then the third position is likely to be very weak indeed by dint of that distance.

What is degeneracy? In defining it many third positionists commit the use/abuse fallacy: If something can be abused, any and all use of that thing is also abuse. Evidence for this error on their part lies in the existence of the distinct term “vice”, which refers to activities that are often used degenerately but are not in themselves degenerate. Examples are gambling and drinking. What differentiates addiction from indulgence is whether the manner in which the activity someone indulges in hinders their enjoyment of things they value more highly. Such values are subjective, but the value that degeneracy hinders, especially in light of its etymology, has a more objective quality. It is the value of life’s continuity itself. The root word is “gens” which is Latin for clan or tribe. In the broadest sense, therefore, degeneracy covers everything that undermines the flourishing of the tribe. Third positionists believe the best way to combat this is statist prohibition (hereafter termed prohibitionism), a national ban on degeneracy.

Gambling

We start our rebuttal to third positionist censorship with identifying instances where use is not only not abuse, but possibly beneficial. The vice we start with is gambling. Gambling has a certain swashbuckling quality to it, especially games such as poker that require skillful bluffing, a skill that translates well to statesmanship. The Anglo subtribes of America who were the good guys in the War Between the States, the Anglicans and the Borderlanders, were enthusiastic gamblers in contrast to the Puritans and Quakers who regarded games of chance as sinful. There’s also a quite white-coded quality to professional gamblers who engineer systems to beat what from the house’s perspective are supposed to be games of pure chance. The Puritans won the war, so we mostly have to go to beringean casinos to gamble now. While this is an improvement over mob administration, all else equal it’s probably better still for a nation to legally own its own casinos because higher trust reduces the propensity to cheat. A notable recent exception to outsourcing of American gambling is the legalization of sports betting in a number of states¹. Many poople oppose legalized sports betting, citing things studies such as Arnesen and Matsuzawa 2024ⁱ that show domestic violence increases after lost home team NFL games where betting is legal. What they omit in citing this study is that it also shows domestic violence decreases in betting-legal states after home wins by even more. The study did not even factor in the effects of close wins, only upset wins, and the authors themselves caution that their results should not be grounds for reversing legalization. Other studies show negative financial impacts such as an increase in bankruptcies in legalizing states. These studies showed that lower income people were much more inclined to abuse, however these studies do not control for race, which is significant because significant disparities in violence and impulse control exist between races even when socioeconomic status is controlled for. According to Grok’s analysis of census data, 45% of bottom quintile households are black or latino. 50% of the bottom quintile is white, however only about 16.5% of the white population is in the bottom quintile. The financial results do buck the trend of legalization reducing abuse of vices. It may be partly to do with the fact that other forms of gambling are still heavily restricted, creating an artificial concentration in sports bets. Another factor is the new technological increase in availability of intra-event betting, an on-demand form of dopamine hit that exists in much greater abundance than for games like slots, lottery, and horserace.

We must all consider the entertainment benefit to the great majority who are not addicts, and the opportunity of a fun profession for a small minority. From a monetary perspective betting is zero sum, but of course price is not value. For many the entertainment value is not the expected return but the extreme risk involved. Sports betting makes sports better, not just from an entertainment standpoint in injecting interest into even the most hopeless mismatches, but also from an analytics standpoint that sabermetricians can use, subject to conflict of interest restriction. Regarding conflicts of interest, it should be noted that the transparency of legalized betting may have helped bring to light the NBA betting scandal involving Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker (D). Simon Laird has pointed out that many of the complaints about sports betting also apply to sports fandom itselfⁱⁱ, such as the addictiveness of gentlemen’s fantasy leagues, along with many other features. Sports have the advantage of incentivizing fitness, has been show to actually make people, especially men, more right-wing as it increases. They teach teamwork and personal accountability, and their zero-sum nature teaches valuable political lessons.

The sports betting issue also highlights the value of legalized information betting in general, which is currently labeled “prediction markets” due to restrictions. Prediction markets can help the public see through the lies of corrupt politicians’ and their toadying pollsters; this is a reason why politicians hate them. Legalization of gambling and other vices has the advantage of providing a source of tax revenue that can provide tax relief in other areas. This is a eugenic policy because it represents an average transfer of resources from the degenerate minority to the healthy majority.

It is also pointless to ban gambling as a business only, because casual gambling would be uninteresting for all but the most aggressive risk seekers if there was not at least the opportunity to profit from it consistently. Blanket prohibition of gambling, and especially sports betting, could also set a precedent for the banning of financial derivatives, which, though monetarily also zero-sum, are immensely useful instruments that actually often help reduce risk. There are now even derivative contracts for sports and other events. Altogether it is not at all clear that inhibiting the transfer of money from those who value risk more than expected return to those with the converse preference is a good thing. It may even be a good thing in that resources flow from those of higher time preference to those of low time preference. This would be likely in a scenario where abusive casino operators are boycotted, especially being kicked off of app stores. Property should only be sold or leased to casinos on condition that they vigilantly monitor and mitigate problematic behavior, including generous support for addiction treatment. They should not be required to put addiction treatment information in their advertising however because it comes off as paternalistic.

Homosexuality

Homosexuality, which in truth is almost an exclusively male phenomenon, is a kind of deviance that is mostly nurtured. This does not mean entirely inculcated however. Although there is a small degree of genetic predisposition, the primarly disposing factor appears to be uterine hormonal levels. A fetus undergoes several testosterone baths – The first induces the development of primary sex organs, the second influences sexual orientation, the third influences intensity of orientation. The lower testosterone level of the second bath that causes homosexual predisposition is influenced by cortisol, the hormone that elevates in response to stress. Third positionist regimes tend to be higher stress environments due to their greater militarism, surveillance, and economic constraints. The Dorner study claiming to show an increase in the number of homosexuals among Germans born during the Second World War seems to corroborate this, although the study has not been successfully replicated.ⁱⁱⁱ

There may be some adaptive value to homosexuality. Gay shaman theory is an instance of this. Under conditions of group selection, it is not necessarily optimal for all members of a tribe to reproduce. In deep evolutionary history only about 60% of men reproduce anyway. Although higher status men have higher fertility on average, it may be better for some high status men in certain roles not to be burdened with the responsibilities of fatherhood so that they attend to spiritual leadership roles that are all-consuming. The priestly practice of celibacy may be an offshoot of shamanic selection – the key result is the absence of fatherhood, not the absence of sexuality.

Homosexuality is an instance where third positionists commit a reverse NAXALT fallacy, or what we could term the DOCTOR (determinism of central tendency or regression) fallacy – that because homosexuality is a net negative for most homosexuals in their individual lives, no homosexual can be a net contributor to society. This is falsified by the fact that a number of outlier contributors have been or have been strongly suspected of being homosexual:

1. Alan Turing, openly gay British mathematian and computer scientist. His Theory of Computable Numbers laid the groundwork for the invention of electronic computers, which occurred toward the end of his tragically short life. Persecution for his sexual behavior likely contributed to his suicide in 1954.

2. Leonardo Da Vinci, Italian artist and inventor. Best known as the painter of the Mona Lisa, he also conceived early designs for helicopters, tanks, and parachutes. Historical records strongly indicate he was gay.

3. Sir Francis Bacon, British philosopher and statesmen. Credited as a significant developer of the scientific method and contributor to empiricist philosophy.

4. Baron Friedrich von Steuben. A Prussian military officer who trained the Continental Army during the American War for Independence. He was instrumental to the American Victory at Valley Forge.

A counterargument against homosexual scientists and inventors is that their innovations would have eventually been discovered by someone else anyway. This ignores the value of time – there was likely no other trainer of von Steuben’s caliber at Valley Forge, for example and a loss there might have flipped the outcome of the war. The same is likely true of Alan Turing, whose work was instrumental in cracking the Germans’ Enigma Code.

There is speculation that Alexander the Great, Frederick the Great, and Sir Isaac Newton may have also been gay.

The speculation of homosexuality that is most intriguing to this article is the case of Enoch Powell. These claims center on his time as a student and young academic in the 1930s, drawing on personal letters, poems, and later accounts by colleagues. These claims have been strongly contested by Powell’s official biographer and others, who believe reflect social awkwardness instead.

During his time at King Edwards School and Trinity College, Cambridge, Powell had an intense intellectual focus, an ascetic lifestyle, and limited social interaction. He did not form romantic attachments to women. This continued through his stint as a professor of Greek at the University of Sydney from 1937-39 before he enlisted in the British army at the outbreak of World War II. The bulk of evidence given as indicative of homosexuality is his letters and statements about his personal life. One letter reportedly stated he “had no interest in women at all” and described feeling “repulsion” toward them. In contrast he wrote of an “instant and instinctive affection” for young men, which he believed needed to be “camouflaged” to conform to societal expectations. Powell published First Poems in 1937, which contains verses some have interpreted as homoerotic. The reportedly allude to romantic or emotional attachments to men. Biographer Michael Bloch cites these verses in Closet Queens: Some 20^th Century British Politicians as part of a pattern of “intense” expressions from Powell’s 1930s and 40s. Bloch also believes however, that Powell was not only closeted but also for the most part celibate: a “virtual stranger to physical homosexuality.” According to John Evans, the Chaplain at Trinity College and Extra Preacher to the King, Powell left instructions with him to reveal “at least one of the romantic affairs of his life had been homosexual.”

Powell’s official biographer Simon Heffer contends that Powell’s letters and poems are not confessions of homosexuality. His lack of relationships with women were due to shyness. Heffer agrees with Bloch that Powell avoided acting on whatever same-sex impulses he may have had. Powell married Pamela Wilson at age 40, had two daughters, and maintained a stable family life until he died.

The case of Powell reminds us that homosexuality is a spectrum, not a distinct pathogen, one of often considerable ambiguity as well. Prohibitionism creates a culture where great men like Powell never get to realize their greatness because they weren’t given the benefit of the doubt when coming of age.

The DOCTOR fallacy against homosexuality ignores the Pareto Principle: even if homosexuality has no upside, the few homosexuals who are of outlier contributors may have such an outsized positive impact on society that they more than offset the negative impact of homosexuals as a group. It is in this light that we should consider the cost-benefit calculus of prohibition against homosexuality.

In terms of kinship continuity, it is ideal to pressure homosexuals into staying in the closet and raising families. This of course does conflict somewhat with the goal of minimizing exposure of children to homosexuals, who have a significantly elevated rate of pedophilia as a group. This conflict is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the kind of homosexuals who either submit to social pressure to closet or do so of their own accord are the kind who are also unlikely to be pedophiles. Familial pedophilia is extremely rare for closeted homosexuals due to the strength and universality of the incest taboo. The reason why the null positionists approach of free market prohibitionism against homosexuality is that unlike prohibitionism it is able to discriminate accordingly. It can account for the elevated pedophilia rate even among closeted homosexuals by prohibiting their interaction with children not their own. Such an approach helps ensure that such homosexuals remain positive contributors even in the event their behavior is accidentally discovered. Open homosexuals are squeezed out of civilized society through freedom of disassocation.

Prostitution

Prostitution provides ready fodder for right-wing men to indulge in adolescent white-knighting by seeking its prohibition. They ignore significant instances where has a definite utility. It provided an outlet for nobility forced into chilly marriages for the purpose of forging political alliances. This is a reason why the Church became involved not only with regulating brothels but also profiting from them in the Middle Ages, if not running them directly. Prostitution was regarded as sinful of course, not because of its transactional aspect (men pay for sex one way or another), but because it is a type of fornication. It was recognized as a lesser evil compared to seduction of respectable women and rape, and one that helped reduce instances of the latter. St Augustine declared “If you expel prostitution from society, you will unsettle everything on account of lusts.”^iv St Thomas Aquinas argued that in some cases prostitution must be tolerated despite condemning it as a sin on several counts.^v The mitigation that the Church offered was not lobbying the state to prohibit it (a number of municipal governments attempted to expel prostitutes to no avail) but to set up sanctuaries for those who wished to quit the profession and encouraged them to become nuns. The policy that municipal governments turned to in lieu of expulsion was ghettoization. Another, complementary policy was requiring prostitutes to wear distinguishing clothes. Officials did so out of a desire to avoid confusion with respectable women, but a downside to this approach is that it normalizes prostitution to a degree. It may be more expedient to prohibit dressing as a prostitute everywhere in a town while enforcing a bottom-up ghettoization through restrictive covenants instead of a top-down zoning of it. Worth noting is the fact that if blanket prohibition of prostitution fails even on the municipal level as it did in the Middle Ages, it seems much more implausible for the national prohibition of third positionism to be any more successful.

Today, prostitution is topical in the context of inceldom. It does not appear to be pinned down as to whether inceldom contains an exception for the soliciting of prostitutes. For some there may be none affordable in their area. For many the stigma is by itself a dealbreaker. Another hurdle is of course illegality. If prostitutes count as removing the status of incel, then legalizing prostitution would reduce inceldom. Because incels are those who are more likely to conform to current feminist social norms that inhibit approaching women, they are also more likely to comply with laws prohibiting the solicitation of prostitutes. Legalization therefore, would likely have a significant effect. As with any other vice, it is not as though it need be a crutch either. Even if prostitution does not count as relief from inceldom, it could still serve as a transitional measure helping incels become socially and physically comfortable with women. Legalization also has the effect of reducing inhibition of abused prostitutes to report their abusers to the authorities.

Prostitution also has the knock-on effect of stripping romantic relationships of excessive commercialism and sexual preoccuption. When men know that sex is guaranteed elsewhere according to their willingness to pay for it, they are less likely to behave caddishly in romantic settings, diverting more of their resources into the romantic journey toward sex rather than trying to bribe dates into it prematurely.

Web 2.0 has seen the natural evolution of prostitutive services like adult phone chatlines into video services like OnlyFans. A moral panic has arisen on the right regarding OnlyFans for its popularity, horseshoeing with sex-negative feminists. Key context concerning popularity that is often missed, however, is that OnlyFans creators are an international market. OnlyFans currently has about 4.5 million creator accounts. Grok estimates that women of childbearing age across the world who both are eligible and have the means to be a creator to be around a billion². This yields a use percentage ceiling of less than 0.5 %. This is a ceiling because it says nothing of activity within the accounts. Grok estimates that only 10-30% of creator accounts are active, depending on the definition of activity. Creator activity is, in financial terms, extremely unrewarding for the overwhelming majority. The top 1% of accounts earn 33% of the revenue and the top 10% earn 75%. Between 50 and 70% of accounts earn nothing, a median of $0. This pulls the mean earnings down to only about $104 per month. Because of this, most OnlyFans creator accounts are mostly dormant. Between 70% and 80% of content is sexually explicit.³ Of this content about half is softcore and half is hardcore. It is interesting to note that in 2021 OnlyFans seriously considered prohibiting sexual content due to pressure from banking partners and payment processors concerned about reputational risk. Although this was ultimately rejected due to backlash from creators and their advocacy groups, it does go against the common third positionist notion of jewish collusion between bankers and pornographers.⁴

OnlyFans may have a silver lining. In addition to providing what could be a safer, if not entirely happy, medium between recorded pornography and prostitution for men short on sexual success, it may teach many women a valuable lesson. Many of those in the bottom half of earners came on to the platform overestimating their sexual market value. The economist who goes by Dr. Insensitive Jerk on Twitter explains the value in this:

Every woman needs a man she feels lucky to be with, but she can’t find one if she is a 5 who imagines she’s an 8.

Here is another win:

The bottom 80% of men are invisible to young women, even while she takes his burger order. So when an average man hits on a young woman, and forces her to see him, she thinks, “This is the ugliest man I have ever seen.”

He is not the ugliest man; he is mid-rank. However, he might be the ugliest man she has ever noticed.

OnlyFans will beat that bad habit out of her, because her followers will not be top-20% men. Far from it. Yet she will have to notice them, because if she doesn’t, they won’t pay her.

Perhaps for the first time, she will actually see a sample of below-average men, see them in detail, with her eyes pried open by cash.

Her below-average followers might even become the ruler by which she measures that average guy who hits on her.

This seems like a win for everyone, including her, because now she might have a realistic chance of finding a man she feels lucky to be with.

For both sexes, the secret of happiness is low standards, and you won’t find much lower than the average OnlyFans subscriber.

Even better, an OnlyFans model must do more than just notice her followers. She has to give them what men want, or she won’t get paid.

For many young girls raised on Sex in the City, the idea of giving men what they want will seem foreign, even alien. For her whole life until OnlyFans, she was taught that a woman should never do anything just to please a man. He should love her for being herself and doing what she wants to do.

Yet on OnlyFans, she will have to practice pleasing men, to hone her skill. That’s another win: She learns how to please a man. Since pleasing men will be paired with the Ding of arriving cash, she will be conditioned like Pavlov’s dog, and she might even learn to enjoy it.

Pleasing men could become a habit, like smoking.”

OnlyFans is more of a symptom than a pathogen. It was originally created not even to be sexual, more as way for women to earn from displaying sundry affairs of interest to others such as cooking. The massive demand for it comes from not from male sexual desire per se, which is constant and has been correspondingly marketed to long before the interenet, but from the epidemic of male loneliness, which is significantly attributable to the internet. The reason is because high-status men are now through the internet much better able to connect sexually with multiple women on a concurrent basis. Even if encounters are infrequent, such women will still consider themselves taken. This is why only 1/3 of Gen Z women report themselves single while 2/3 of Gen Z men do. OnlyFans profits by providing lower status men with fake girlfriends. This is sinister to be sure, but the problem is fundamentally the social surrogacy inherent to the internet.

Pornography

Pornography is the vice with the least reedeming features if any. Some have argued that it reduces sexual abuse in the way legalized prostitution does but there is also an argument that its perversion normalizes and possibly increases sexual abuse. We can look at some data that many third positionists overlook to buttress our case that they have not given the general issue of prohibition due consideration. Substacker Black Francis has helpfully compiled a review of the liturature¹ across an array of contentions concerning the effects of pornography. What follows is a summary of key findings.

A commonly cited source in favor of prohibitionism is the Meese Report commissioned by the Reagan adminisistration. It purported to show an increase in aggression among men but did not control for factors such as the increase in violence in media generally (and violence in media causing increases in real-world violence is itself a dubious claim). It showed in increase in rape fantasies among women but not an increase in actual rape. This report was commissioned during the inner city crack epidemic, a largely black issue, as well as during a time when third world immigration was also on the rise.

More recently, the anti-pornography group Fight The New Drug has released a series of interviews of people about the destructive effects of pornography on their lives. This is a small and likely self-selected sample however. We would expect from a large random sample that there would be at least an odd few who would report some sort of benefit. Indeed, when we turn to such a sample such as that of Hald and Malamuth (2008), a size of 688, we see a different result. Both men and women reported more positive effects than negative. The correlation with positive effects did not diminish with increased consumption either, and was statistically significant, unlike the correlation with negative effects, whose size was also much smaller. Postive effects were significantly driven by perceived realism of the performers among others. In other studies by Hald, negative effects were driven significantly by number of sexual partners among others. A more critical study comes from the Wright 2017 meta-analysis of 50 studies on the relationship between pornography consumption and interpersonal/intrapersonal satisfaction. The analysis found a -0.10 correlation with interpersonal satisfaction (p < 0.001). The average effect size for intrapersonal satisfaction was -0.3. The effect sizes in this study were small and weak however, and it is unclear what the criteria for a negative outcome were. Stulhofer et al. 2021 found in a study of 4177 individuals in Germany, religiosity was a significant driver of reporting negative effects of personal pornography consumption.

The straightforward intuition that pornography consumption results in less sex may not be accurate either. Some studies, such as Albright 2008, support this intuition. It found an r of -0.362 for men and -0.104 for women. It was not limited to pornography but covered several different online sexual activities such as erotic chats. Pfause and Prause (2015a) however, found a positive association between pornography consumption and desire for a sexual partner. Desire of course, has little to do with success. People who are more satisfied with their sex lives will express less desire for other or additional partners. This leads to the question of what effect pornography has on existing relationships. Bennet et al. (2019) conducted a study on this. They found that consumption of pornography did not impact desire for one’s partner. The study also found that feelings of guilt over viewing pornography negatively influenced sexual desire for one’s partner. Studies on the association between pornography consumption and number of sexual partners is strongly positive. There is some circumstantial evidence that pornography does not suppress sexual activity in the case of South Korea. Of particular interest to nationalists, despite the country’s legal prohibition of live-action pornography, their fertility rates are the lowest in the First World. This assumes however, that prohibition meaningfully reduces pornography consumption, which seems logistically implausible to say the least. Zillman and Bryant in 1988 conducted a study where they had students watch either pornography or an R-rated film in each of six weeks. The students who had watched pornography had a lower view of marriage as an essential institution. They did not provide metrics such as standard deviation that could be used to calculate an effect size however. Malcom and Naufal conducted a study in 2014 that showed a negative correlation between pornograhy consumption and probability of being married. Issues with this study are that it does not separate heavy pornography consumers from light consumers and that it is cross-sectional, meaning no causal direction can be reliably inferred.

What of pornography’s effect on existing relationships? Evidence is mixed here as well. An oft-cited study by anti-pornography groups is Kenrick, Gutierres, and Goldberg (1998), where 65 people married or in relationships were selectively exposed to pornographic photos. The men who were exposed to pornograhy reported lower levels of love for their partner and rated their partner as less attractive after. Other similarly designed studies such as Dermer and Pyszczynski (1978) and Amelang and Pike (1992)have found no effect however. A replication of Kenrick and meta-analysis by Balzarini et al. (2017) including the original study with a total of 830 participants yielded no significant effects. There are other studies indicating a negative effect on relationships such as Shumway and Daines (2012), which attributed 10-25% of divorce increases in the 60s and 70s to pornography as measured by Playboy sales. This study specifically is countered by Wongsurawat (2006) which showed a negative correlation between Penthouse sales and divorce rates in the early 90s. A large study (n=8376) by Grov et al. (2011) found significant positive effects when couples consumed pornography together. Kohut et al. (2021) conducted multiple studies that also showed positive effects for both shared consumption and non-consumption but negative effects for unshared consumption. The phenomenon of moral opposition to pornography producing negative effects for individuals translates to relationships, as Maas et al. (2018) indicates. As for infidelity specifically, most studies suggest that the direction of causality is one of escapism – that people who are dissatisfied with a relationship to the point of cheating are also more likely to seek sexual refuge in pornography.

An interesting anecdote of pornography use seeming to be caused by, rather than causing, a bad relationship can be found in none other than that of anti-pornography crusader Gary Wilson, author Your Brain on Porn. Before becoming anti-porn crusaders, Wilson and his wife Marnia Robinson were sex gurus. Informing Wilson’s advice was his “healing from a long-term addiction and chronic depression” according to his wife. The addiction she is referring to was pornography. According to her book Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow, she and her husband had sexual problems long before he started watching porn. These problems are unsurprising in light Marnia’s attitude toward sex revealed in a 2008 interview:

One can view the orgasm cycle as similar to a drug or alcohol cycle because it emanates from the same mechanism in the brain, using the same neurochemical, dopamine. When anything -- whether a substance (cocaine, too much sugar) or an activity (gambling, orgasm) -- over-stimulates your reward circuitry, it produces a high, followed by a period of recovery.

That recovery is, in a sense, a withdrawal. The difference between sex and drugs is that the orgasm “hangover” is so much a part of us, so natural and programmed, that it is hard to recognize -- unless, of course, you escape the cycle [samsara] entirely. It can make you feel uncharacteristically needy, irritable, anxious, depleted, or desperate for another orgasm.^vi

To fool Mother Nature, you obviously have to do something different in the bedroom. This is why the Taoists, and others, recommended learning to make love in a way that doesn’t trigger our subconscious mating program -- or rather, triggers only the attachment part of it, not the move on part of it. We can make use of this natural attachment program, which bonds us to our children and parents, in our romances, too, by emphasizing generous affection, playfulness, gentle intercourse, and, of course, by avoiding orgasm. Results include greater harmony and wellbeing, and, remarkably, less sexual frustration.

Marnia Robinson is a quack. The proper treatment for sex addiction is similar to treatments for other addictions: Have the addict find more activities outside of sex that provide happiness and meaning, so that sex is no longer a form of escapism and can be enjoyed for its own sake. Only someone who is sexually dysfunctional would advise avoidance of orgasm specifically. If anything such avoidance creates even more sexual frustration, and more desire to make of for the lack of quality sex by increasing its quantity. Gary and Marnia’s sexual problems spiraled into not only porn addiction but also infidelity.^vii Rather than confront their own dysfunctional nature they chose to externalize the blame and declare war on Mother Nature herself. They do this while trying to rationalize their dysfunction as natural. Marnia again:

I think polyamory is a very logical solution to the fact that mammals are not monogamous. Hunter-gatherer societies are polyamorous…

[Sexual compulsions] decrease your freedom and cloud your judgment, so as a spiritual matter they slow your evolution. Unfortunately, anyone who decides to move beyond a sexual compulsion has to go through an uncomfortable withdrawal period.

Wilson claims that quitting porn heals the brain and increases strength and energy. His claims are undermined by survivorship bias however. People who are inherently strong and self-disciplined overall who indulge in porn in a moment of weakness will also be the ones much more likely to kick the habit. Those who don’t will tend to be inherently weak, low-energy people. Although Gary Wilson and his wife are secular peeople and crusade against porn in secular terms, what they have in common with they religious crusaders is a compulsion to externalize responsibility for a problem that is fundamentally internal by unscientifically demonizing it. Jesus rebukes them both:

“Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.”

-Matthew 15:11

Returning to the literature survey on pornography and dysfunction: Several studies: Foubert (2017), McDougal (2012: 63), Begovic (2019) Dickson (2017), and )appear to indicate that pornography causes impotence. When key controls are applied however, the true cause appears to be specifically pornography addiction. Addicts, according to the studies, are a small subset of pornography consumers. Further confirmation of what our intuition tells us is that there is a significant association between loneliness and pornography use is found in studies too numerous to list here. These studies also examine other mental health issues. Overall, when relevent controls are applied, longitudinal analysis shows a dissipation in issues such as depression and anxiety from an initially negative baseline Stulholfer, Tafro, and Kohut (2019). Longitudinal study, including of adolescents, suggests that mental illness tends to precede high pornography consumption. The mental health effects also appear to be mediated by moral incongruence and religiosity (Grubbs et al. (2019). Mental health studies have also been conducted on pornography performers. Gruzden et al (2011) studied a group of 174 performers and found lower levels of mental health compared to the control group. Griffith’s studies in 2012 and 2013 found no significant difference however.

There is some evidence that pornography increases sexual aggression (as distinct from rape). Gonsalves and Scalora 2015; Hughes, Brewer, and Khan 2019; Kernsmith and Kernsmith 2007; Stanley et al. 2016). Bogaert, Woodard, and Hafer (1999) found that low IQ males are more inclined by pornography toward sexual agression. This inclination is also heavily mediated by inclination toward aggression generally. As for rape itself, evidence is mixed. Court in 1984 found a positive relationship between legalization and rape rates in a number of Western countries. Japan’s rape rate however, declined from 1975-1995 as its pornography laws became much more permissive, but this is confounded by significant population aging. A country that became youger while pornography laws were relaxed is India. Math et al. (2014) and Math et al. (2014) found no relationship between this and sex crime rates. Kutchinsky found a decrease in rape allegations in Denmark after pornography was legalized, and a decrease in exhibitionism and voyeurism in Copenagen (1971, 1973, 1985).

There is also the question of whether pornography’s legalization exacerbates sex trafficking. Hughes (2010) observes via narrative interviews that there is a link between the porn industry and trafficking, but this evidence is limited and anecdotal. There does not appear to be any literature on legalization and sex trafficking. It is reasonable that pornography producers and distributors face penalties for content that they know to involve trafficking or underage participation. User age verification law however, is not reasonable because of the privacy compromises it represents. A brick and mortar adult content outlet can simply have a policy of turning away those who look too young, and those who are willing to compromise their privacy further to obtain smut can do so by producing an ID. Identity theft and blackmail in such a situation is highly traceable. This is not so on the internet.

The greatest concern over pornography is over addiction. To gauge the severity of the problem we need to properly define addiction. The accepted definition in the psychiatric profession is for what is termed “dependence”.

“Dependence, as defined by the DSM criteria, requires meeting at least three out of seven specific criteria. These criteria include tolerance (needing more of the behavior or stimulus to achieve the same effect), withdrawal effects when the behavior is ceased, engaging in the behavior for longer periods than intended, unsuccessful attempts to control or stop the addictive behavior, significant time spent preparing for and recovering from the addiction, sacrificing important activities due to addictive behaviors, and continuing to engage in the addictive behavior despite negative consequences.”

There have been studies of pornography use that address some of these criteria. For tolerance, Landripet, Busko, and Stulhofer (2019) found that among male adolescents preference for violent and coercive pornography slightly diminished over 24 months. For withdrawal, Dwulit and Rzymski conducted a survey among pornography quitters on frequency and severity of withdrawal symptoms. This survey did not have a baseline however so it is uncertain as to whether symptoms such as insomnia increased after cessation. Fernandez et al. (2023) conducted a study which tracked withdrawal symptoms, positive and negative affect, and cravings for a period of seven days after quitting. It found no differences between the abstinence and control group. For sacrificing important activities there is some evidence in the survery conducted by Villena and Actis (2019). 40% reported that their consumption interfered with family, work, social life, or academics.

There is the related but significantly distinct phenomenon of compulsion to consider. Compulsion refers to “repetitive behaviors or mental acts undertaken to alleviate anxiety or distress. It is not driven by seeking pleasure or gratification.” Most researchers consider compulsive pornography use to be a better-founded category than addiction. Egan and Parmar (2013) found that certain personalities correlate with compulsive behavior in general: neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and obsessional checking. Because agreeableness and conscientiousness correlate with religiosity, religiosity is also correlated with compulsive behavior. Rousseau, Bothe, and Stulhofer (2020) conducted a longitudinal study on religiosity directly as related to compulsive pornography use. They found that “religion, negative emotions, and impulsivity predicted higher levels of problematic pornography use, even when baseline pornography use was controlled for.” What is important to note is that problematic pornography use is almost always self-reported, and when this is accounted for, it appears that religiosity increases self-reported pornography addiction, not that religiosity causes increased problematic pornography use that can be objectively diagnosed.

Another angle from which to approach the question of pornography addiction is to what degree pornography is a drug, as the name Fight the New Drug implies. A study cited by those who favor its classification as such is Voon et al. (2014) where 19 subjects with compulsive sexual behavior were compared with 19 healthy subjects in terms of their brains’ activation when exposed to pornography. Certain areas of the brain that activate during drug use were found to also activate with pornography viewing. Voon’s qualification is sometimes omitted in her citation: “Despite her early findings, Voon says it’s probably too early to put compulsive porn users in a box with people who suffer from drug or alcohol problems. ‘We need more studies to clearly state that it’s an addiction,’ she says” (in Weir 2014).” This is due to the fact that while pornography’s activation overlaps with that of other vices, the activiated regions in their totality are distinct as shown in studies such as Arsalidou, Vijayarajah, and Sharaev (2020). Addiction cannot be defined in terms of some absolute threshold of activation either, because individual predispositions and tolerances vary significantly. A subset of the drug question is the “porn brain” hypothesis. This comes from a study by Kühn and Gallinat that showed higher pornography consumption to be associated with lower grey matter volume, lower left putaminal activity, and lower functional connectivity of the right caudate to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. A replication study has not been performed and if it were to be it is unlikely that the findings would replicate, given the low statistical power of brain imaging and neuroscience (21% and 8%) and of the low replication rate of 6% in neuroscience. The structural and functional MRI techniques used in the study have been criticized for having been, in critics’ opinions, over-extrapolated from by the authors. The technical reasons for this are too dense to delve into here. Although Kühn and Gallinat noted a significant correlation between pornography and alchohol consumption, it is strange that they did not control for this because alcohol consumption is known to lower gray and white matter volume. Television and video games do not affect brain structure or composition so it seems implausible that pornography would.

Several remarks about this litany of studies: The first is that they must be approached with caution due to the severe leftist character of the psychological profession. What a leftist psychologist defines as a positive outcome may in fact be a negative one (e.g. they are liable to take weakness in men for gentleness). Even an objective researcher has to rely on subjects’ self-reporting in many cases, and this reporting is likely biased by the leftist character of the culture itself. I suspect this may be the case for the positive reported effects for shared pornography viewing by couples. A number of fellow rightists I know personally have reported crippling cases of pornography addiction among their associates. This anecdotal reporting is less of a contradiction to the research than it may appear at first glance however. This is because of a salient throughline to the research: The positive association between religiosity/moral incongruence and self-reported problematic pornography use. It is a simple phenomenon: Those who are more predisposed to view pornography as immoral and shameful will naturally have a more negative experience with it. The people in our space are self-selected for higher levels of religiosity and incongruent moral foundations such as sanctity and disgust sensitivity. The general population is lower and likely does in fact have a significantly less negative experience with pornography, even if not a positive one on average.

Third positionists in particular undervalue the differentiation of their own nation’s population in terms of predisposition. It is too simplistic to dismiss normies as “degenerate” and hold up the dissident right as “pure” (anecdotal experience in the latter sphere very much belies this conceit). While gender is a basic biological binary, normal human sexuality is still a spectrum. It is not as though normies lack religiosity or incongruent morality either; progressivism is literally a religion among normies, and religiously-tinged values such as purity are as strong among them such as in attitudes toward organic food compared to conservatives’ attitude toward sex. Another generality we find in the literature is that is not so much pornography that perverts people but more that perverts are the kind of people who consume pornography problematically. The same goes for more benign forms of mental illness or lifestyle problems, where pornography serves as a means of escapism, not a cause. It is not so clear on the right that hardline opposition to pornography makes one a chad either. Anti-pornography crusader Matt Fradd is on record as opposing mixed martial arts for non-martial purposes. His reasons for doing so are pure soy. It is also not clear that not opposing or even indulging in pornography habitually is automatically degenerate. White identitarian The Noble Traitor perceives an artistry to certain forms of pornography of which some can be connoisseurs.

We should also examine whether pornography use is truly of the pandemic proportions that the right alleges. According to the Survey Center on American Life, 43% of men 18-29 have not watched pornography in the last year. A higher percentage of men 18-29 view pornography as morally wrong (42%) compared to men 30-49 (37%). These percentages roughly correspond to the percentage of population who are conservative, and white conservatives have approximately replacement fertility. This is further evidence against the belief that pornography is a significant demographic threat. The proliferation of porn viewing today is to a significant degree a product of the internet’s relative newness. The generational difference in moral views of pornography indicate an inflection point where it becomes more broadly viewed as a vice, much in the way that the new technologies of cigarettes and hard alcohol were in the early twentieth century after an early proliferation of use. Cigarette smoking was banned in certain public areas and is heavily taxed but otherwise state prohibition has been minimal; its use has been stigmatized by large public awareness campaigns, only some of which are governmental. America famously attempted full prohibition of alcohol in the early twentieth century (more on that in next section) but otherwise has been fairly hands off. The way forward in marginalizing pornography is to culturally associate it with loserdom.

The downside of pornography prohibitionism is considerable. Driving it underground would obviously exacerbate the production of extreme depravity in pornography, as well as exacerbate the human trafficking issue due to reduced transparency. It also discourages submission of evidence of sex crimes. Pornography stands out among vices in convenience of accessability, therefore suppressing it to any substantial degree would require an unacceptable level of surveillance. The level of surveillance that governments and their corporate cronies conduct on us is already unacceptable. The recently-passed Online Safety Bill in the UK, ostensibly to protect children from pornography, is a Trojan Horse for censorship of disfavored political speech, or even mere news content that the government sees as inclining viewers against its agenda. Twitter, not even UK-based, recently restricted access to footage of migrant hotel protests to UK-based users until the platform could estimate the user’s age^viii. Third positionists may counter that their ideal government would not censor such footage, but even if we pretend that their government’s censorship policy were judicious, the problem remains that the very surveillance infrastructure can be coopted by subversives within the government, and ultimately by a replacement enemy government.

Commensurate with pornography’s ease in accessibility is the ease with which it may be planted by unscrupulous authorities where prohibited. Because of this accessibility, third positionists sometimes make the argument that because parents cannot themselves fully surveil their children’s media use, the state needs to stop toxic media at the source, or at least provide a sort of surveillance safety net. These are false alternatives. They are false for one thing because the state cannot practicably make any real dent in the volume of pornography available, especially in the internet era, and also because they ignore the role that civil society plays in keeping children safe. Other parents want their own children to have lots of friends to play with, which would not be the case if they were known to be negligent in protecting their children from toxic media. Churches and social organizations can facilitate collective bargaining on the part of communities to shield those communities from harmful influences. An instance of this was the lobbying to require pornography sites to use .xxx as a top-level domain. This would have allowed much more effective parental blocking. The effort failed but is useful because it shows a method of protecting children that does not require surveillance of households. The domain restriction was more of a convenience, not an essential, due to the ability to perform DNS blocking at the level of the home router itself. In this regard technological advance is a boon to private protection against pornography; in the printed pornography era there was effectively no practical way to prevent a household member sneaking naughty magazines in. While it is true flash drives are even more concealable, being forced to download the content in places less private than the home at least exposes users to higher likilhood of social shaming.

Pornography prohibitionist Jason Cannon presents a narrative case for prohibition in his article “The Plot Against Australia”. He chronicles the series of events where prohibition of obscene materials in Australia was repealed. He begins by noting the Customs Act and Post and Telegraph Act derived from the UK Obscene Publications Act of 1857. He notes the broad powers of these acts, which included the power to “search through the luggage of arriving travellers from overseas”. Given that this does not specify foreign travellers, it is odd that Cannon passes over such intrusiveness without comment. He also mentions that the prohibition included possession and not just import and distribution. He describes the Australian standard of obscenity as recognizing that “one cannot effectively protect children from pornography without also restricting it for adults” due to second-hand obtainment by children. This premise assumes that prohibition of pornography does meaningfully restrict adult access to it, which is highly questionable considering the relative ease of producing and smuggling it even before the internet era. Unsurprisingly in the internet era pornography prohibition is an exercise in futility: China has some of the strictest anti-pornography laws in the world yet 94% of men there report watching it^ix, even more than in the US^x. For the pre-internet era it is reasonable to estimate the ease of obtaining pornography as being comparable to the ease with which alchohol was produced under Prohibition in America. This premise is also refuted by the significant role that civil society can play as mentioned above, both in protecting children and marginalizing perverted adults. Finally, a similar premise to Cannon’s can argue against prohibition, which is that to meaningfully restrict pornography usage would require surveillance of non-users; just because someone does not currently use does not mean they could not fall into temptation at anytime, especially if they are of risk factors like being a young male. Other risk factors include mental illness, and invasions of privacy is the last thing non-threateningly mentally ill people need.

Cannon also provides an account of censorship under the aegis of Australian obscenity law that was not strictly of pornography, but of the magazine Oz whose content, which included interviews with abortionists and aborting mothers as well a satirical piece about chastity belts. This case illustrates the problem of judgment calls in prohibitionism. If pornography should be banned because some deem it obscene, then so could potentially benign forms of expression. I should emphasizse at this point that this polemic is against third positionism specifically, not against traditionalism. Indeed, a significant objection that null positionists have to third positionim is that it is excessively modern in certain respects. Many, though probably not most third positionists are pro-abortion, and nearly all third positionists support censorship of art and ideas that they perceive as contrary to their values. This creates the potential for obscenity lawfare over abortion. Australia’s obscenity laws were so strict that The Trial of Lady Chatterlay, an account of court cases concerning Lady Chatterlay’s Lover breaking UK obscenity laws, was targeted. Cannon treats the entire matter as though it is self-evident that these laws were a good thing, and unlike for the case of age restriction vs blanket prohibition does not even acknowlege the other side’s position, which is that such laws criminalize forms of expression that are productively provocative. Cannon instead actually asserts that the controversy around Lady Chatterlay proved the need for such laws to be tightened! It is remarkable that Cannon does not consider that their heavy-handedness was a legitimate grievance that bad actors could use to push other schemes such as abolishing the White Australia policy by association with the justness of their anti-censorship crusade. It is often said that Australia is a nation descended not only from convicts, but also their wardens. This may account for the severity and longevity of its obscenity laws, as well as the particularly draconian measures imposed during COVID. It was basically the flu, which is certainly not nothing because flu pandemics have killed many millions of people. The error was treating a seemingly novel pathology as an existential threat. Third positionists make the same error regarding pornography.

Cannon’s narrative is one of post-hoc reasoning: Culture declined and pornography became more depraved following legalization, therefore legalization by itself was a net negative. He does not consider that culture was already in decline long before pornography was legalized. He could argue that legalization accelerated it but this is difficult to disentangle from technological shift. This ­post-hoc reasoning characterizes prohibitionist arguments for recriminalization generally, and thus we will revisit it in the section reviewing general errors in arguments for prohibitionism.

Drugs

Pornography addiction is obviously not the most destructive of addictions, however, we could concede for the sake of argument that such addiction is as destructive as addiction to hard drugs like heroin and methamphetamines. It would still far from follow that monopolistic prohibition thereof is anywhere close to an optimal policy. We cover several topical types of drugs.

We start with alcohol, the drug whose prohibitionism in 1920s America reminds us that prohibitionism can be a brief misguided experiment rather than an indefinite futile war on the human condition. Prohibition was primarily a Progressive movement, with heavy overlap with women’s suffrage in particular, yet some on the right have tried to revise the history of this experiment in an attempt to claim that Prohibition worked.

One claim is that certain indicators of alcoholism decreased. A source for this is Jack Blocker 2006. He reports a decline of ethanol consumption to 1.2 gallons per year by the early 1930s, which is less than half of pre-1910 levels, along with reductions in admissions for alcholic psychosis and lower rates of liver cirrhosis^xi. Consumption levels according to his report did rise back to about 70% of pre-Prohibition levels by 1930, but did not return to pre-Prohibition levels until the 1970s. An issue with this data is that much of it is self-reported, and under prohibition lawbreaking respondents are significantly less likely to be truthful even when anonymous. We saw something similar during the 2016 election where the “shy Trump supporter” effect grossly depressed polling in favor of Clinton. Even seemingly more concrete data like psychosis admissions and cirrhosis are likely to suffer from this effect due to the desire to avoid stigmatizing an already-suffering patient. The cirrhosis rates specifically may not directly correlate with consumption levels, as they may be influenced by changes in drinking habits, improved quality of medical reporting and demographic changes such as immigration^xii. Furthermore, the death rate from alcoholism was lowest not during prohibition but during World War I. It was during prohibition that this rate returned to pre-war levels in the US, while in countries without such as the UK, Ireland, and Denmark, death from alcoholism continued to fall.

It is plausible that drinking may have actually increased under Prohibition. Drinking’s illegality to some degree made it more glamorous and intriguing to the young. The organized criminal bootleggers in particular had no moral hangups about trying to get teetotalers to break their abstinence and for moderate drinkers to drink to excess. Many moderate drinkers would drink more simply as an act of defiance. The sheer number of speakeasies that sprang up buttresses the case that Prohibition was completely counterproductive to its own aim of reducing drinking. Estimates of the number of speakeasies opened compared to the number of saloons and speakeasies closed supports this. Below is a table compiled by Grok for the cities in the US that were largest as of 1920:

Not only did speakeasies proliferate, due to the centralized structure of Prohibition, prohibitionists lost control over where drinking establishments could operate. Before Prohibition they had used local ordinances, taxes, licensing laws and regulations, and local-option laws to prevent or discourage the sale of alcohol in the center city, near churches and schools, on Sundays and election days, and in their neighborhoods. Under prohibition, speakeasies sprang up not just in the seedy areas but in middle-class neighborhoods, business districts, locations that had been dry or had the appearance of being dry.

Legal exceptions such as medicinal whiskey, sacramental wine, and patent medicines were also exploited to keep up with demand. Economist Mark Thornton notes: The amount of alcoholic liquors sold by physicians and hospitals doubled between 1923 and 1931. The amount of medicinal alcohol (95 percent pure alcohol) sold increased by 400 percent during the same time. Those increases occurred despite rigorous new regulations.

Any health benefits of prohibition must be weighed against the the health damages. Thornton aids in accounting for these in “Alcohol Prohibition was a Failure”.^xiii He cites economist Richard Cowan’s “Iron Law of Prohibition.” This is that when a substance is prohibited, the more strict the enforcement, the greater the potency of the substance becomes^xiv. In addition, Thornton points out: “When drugs or alcoholic beverages are prohibited, they ... will have greater variability in potency, will be adulterated with unknown or dangerous substances, and will not be produced and consumed under normal market constraints.”^xv Under any prohibition, the largest expense of producing contraband is avoidance of detection, which results in concentrated forms of contraband being heavily favored. Before Prohibition, Americans spent roughly equal amounts on beer and spirits. Under Prohibition however, nearly all production was of distilled spirits and fortified wines, whereas beer production, due to its bulkiness that made distribution riskier, became much more expense in comparison, its price increasing by more than 700% compared to 433% for brandies and 270% for spirits, resulting in an absolute increase in consumption of spirits. Being underground, production quality and transparency standards were next to non-existent, resulting in moonshine that was often of lethally unknown concentration. Even Prohibition’s leading academic proponent Irving Fisher acknowleged this:

“I am credibly informed that a very conservative reckoning would set the poisonous effects of bootleg beverages as compared with medicinal liquors at ten to one; that is, it requires only a tenth as much bootleg liquor as of pre-prohibition liquor to produce a given degree of drunkenness. The reason, of course, is that bootleg liquor is so concentrated and almost invariably contains other and more deadly poisons than mere ethyl alcohol.”^xvi

In the same work Fisher observes people drinking less but getting drunker. Crime statististics bear out the latter part of his observation: Between 1920 and 1921, arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct increased 41 percent, and arrests of drunken drivers increased 81 percent.

The adulteration Fisher mentions was also a serious problem, but what he doesn’t mention is that it was not only the malfeasance of unscrupulous bootleggers but the government as well. Bootleggers would steal industrial alcohol to redistill, and as a deterrent the government mandated the denaturing of industrial alcohol with foul-tasting or toxic substances. In response to improving redistillation methods, under Prohibition the government escalated its approach in the mid-1920s, mandating the inclusion of deadlier poisons that were harder to remove, such as methanol (wood alcohol), benzene, gasoline, kerosene, and even more exotic toxins like pyridine bases and mercury salts. This caused an estimated 10,000 deaths minimum. There was also the scandal of “Ginger Jake,” a popular patent medicine laced with up to 80% alcohol that became contaminated with the neurotoxin tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate (TOCP), which caused “Jake Leg” paralysis in an estimated 50,000 to 100,000^xvii.

In addition to the substitution of more concentrated, dangerous alcoholic products, Prohibition also saw the substitution of alternative and often dangerous other drugs for alcohol. In addition to patent medicines consumers switched to narcotics, hashish, tobacco, and marijuana. The purveyors of such products were of a similar dangerous criminal element to organized bootleggers.

Another revisionist claim is that the increase in crime was a continuation of a preexisting trend caused by southern and eastern european immigration. While it is true that crime rose significantly during the the Ellis Island period (as did state-level prohibitionist measures however, which likely contributed), what the prohibitionists’ rebuttal misses is that the rate of increase spiked immediately with the passage of the Volstead Act. Nor did the rate decrease when the Immigration Act of 1924 that curtailed such immigration went into effect that same year. It remained at its Volstead Act level until the 18^th Amendment was repealed in 1933, at which point crime plunged dramatically to a level even lower then as of that amendment’s passage. Crime continued to fall, albeit at a much slower rate for the next 40 years, likely due to immigration restriction. It did not spike again until the War on Drugs began. In fairness, this later spike may have been due to the rise of soft-on-crime policy reforms that were introduced in the 60s. The subsequent decline may be attributable to the repeal of some of these reforms. It may also be because demand for the Drug War’s contraband is far lower than for alcohol.

Civilians also experienced a higher rate of violent crime victimization. Betwen 1920 and 1921, thefts and burglaries increased 9 percent, while homicides and incidents of assault and battery increased 13 percent. The crime rate rose steadily during Prohibtion, peaking at Prohibition’s repeal, at which point they immediately plummeted. It should also be noted that Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1934, the year following repeal.

Source: Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1975), part 1, p. 414.

These crimes increased in spite or because of increased expenditure on Prohibition’s enforcement. During the 1920s the annual budget of the Bureau of Prohibition went from $4.4 million to $13.4 milion. Coast Guard spending on Prohibition averaged over $13 million per year. Prison populations swelled as well. Total federal expenditures on penal institutions increased more than 1,000 percent between 1915 and 1932, but overcrowding persistent. Prohibition not only increased the burden on taxpayers but corrupted government officials as well. Commissioner of Prohibition Henry Anderson remarked: “the fruitless efforts at enforcement are creating public disregard not only for this law but for all laws. Public corruption through the purchase of official protection for this illegal traffic is widespread and notorious. The courts are cluttered with prohibition cases to an extent which seriously affects the entire administration of justice.“

Those on the right who concede that alcohol prohibition was a failure will still sometimes engage in special pleading to the effect of: “Prohibition of alcohol failed because alchohol is too great a part of American culture but prohibition can work against other drugs.” Alchohol is no greater part of American culture than European culture however. We now move on to other drugs, the next being marijuana.

Third positionists argue in terms of bringing back prohibitionist measures from the relatively recent past such as the Prohibition of alcohol from the 1920s. If we are to make arguments from antiquity however, we need to consider antiquity holistically. Marijuana is a mild hallucinogen, and hallucinogen use has been fairly common among european cultures dating back to antiquity. There is even speculation that ingestion of psilocybin advanced human cognitive evolution itself, though this is controversial. The earliest evidence, albeit indirect, is from the Neolithic period, which is archeological finds such as pottery residues and plant remains^xviii. More direct evidence is found in the Bronze Age, where analysis of human hair strands from a 3,000-year-old burial site in Menorca, Spain, revealed traces of atropine, scopolamine, and ephedrine—psychoactive alkaloids derived from plants like nightshade, mandrake, and joint pine^xix. These were likely used ritualisitically by shamans to experience what they believed to be contact with spiritual realms. In ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries—a secretive religious rite held annually—involved a beverage called kykeon, which some scholars believe contained ergot alkaloids from barley infected with fungus, producing LSD-like effects to facilitate mystical visions^xx. Opium and cannabis were commonly used for pain relief and sleep induction, with evidence dating back to Neolithic influences^xxi. These substances were integrated into both daily medicine and ceremonial life, reflecting a cultural acceptance of altered states for healing or divine communion^xxii. Among Iron Age Celts, druids—spiritual leaders—may have incorporated hallucinogenic mushrooms into religious ceremonies, with theories linking “magic mushrooms” (psilocybin-containing species) to visionary quests or immortality myths in legends involving apples, berries, and hazelnuts^xxiii. In Norse societies, Viking berserkers—elite warriors known for frenzied battle states—are speculated to have used Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) mushrooms or henbane to induce rage, dissociation, and hallucinations, enhancing their fearsome reputation. Fly agaric, with its red-and-white cap, has deep roots in shamanic folklore across northern Europe, potentially dating back millennia for entheogenic purposes.^xxiv

As for cannabis specifically, earliest documentary history begins with evidence that harvested cannabis was present as early as 11,700 years ago near the Altai mountains, and was spread by none other than the Indo-Europeans. A high-status Tocharian burial in Xinjiang contained 800 grams of THC-rich cannabis, likely for shamanic purposes^xxv. Cannabis was adopted by Scythians, Thracians, and Dorians for both ritualistic and recreational use. Herodotus (circa 440 BC) described Scythians inhaling cannabis smoke in sealed tents during funerals to induce trance-like states and euphoria^xxvi. Homer’s Odyssey (8th century BC) may reference cannabis in the drug nēpenthés, used to alleviate pain and induce forgetfulness^xxvii. Romans were familiar with cannabis by the 1st century CE; Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) noted its use for ropes and medicinal decoctions to treat arthritis and gout and Galen observed its warming, head-affecting effects in desserts.

In the Medieval period european cannabis usage was primarily industrial such as for textiles, ropes, sails, and paper.. The Anglo-Saxons introduced it to Britain in the 5th century AD, and Viking ship excavations from the mid-9th century have yielded cannabis seeds.^xxviii Medicinal applications continued, with cannabis documented in European herbal texts for pain relief and reducing inflammation. The Islamic world by contrast, introduced restrictions in the 13^th century, just before its so-called Golden Age came to an end. European cannabis usage continued aplenty in the Renaissance, with Henry VIII mandating hemp farming for rope production, primarily for use by the British Navy.^xxix

Colonial Virginia would continue in this vein; their Assembly passing acts in the 1630s and 1760s that went so far as to imprison those who failed to grow sufficient quantities.^xxx

At this point some clarifying definitions are in order. Cannabis is a catch-all term taking its name from the genus of the plant cannabis sativa L (and sometimes related species like C. indica or C. ruderalis). Just as there are many varieties of other cultivars, there are many varieties of the C. Sativa species. Varieties low in delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) used mainly for industrial purposes are called hemp. Varieties high in THC used mainly for psychoactive purposes are called marijuana. THC binds to the brain’s CB-1 receptors, which are part of the endocannabinoid system (ECS). The ECS not only regulates the brain, gut, and immune system as medicinal marijuana makes familiar, but also the skin’s wound healing, and the reproductive system’s embryo implantation. The ECS has three core components:

1. Endocannabinoids, which are small lipid molecules made on-demand in cell membranes from arachidonic acid.

2. Cannabinoid receptors, which are G-protein-coupled receptors on cell surfaces. G proteins are guanine nucleotide-binding proteins that transmit signals from external stimuli such as cannabinoids.

3. Metabolic enzymes, which rabidly break down endocannabinoids.

THC and cannabidiol (CBD) are plant-based endocannabinoids, or phytocannabinoids. THC mimics anandamide, the “bliss molecule” (ananda is Sanskrit for joy). Anandamide reduces pain signaling, helps extinguish traumatic memories, and stimulates hunger. The ECS regulates overall levels of chemicals like anandamide. THC replicates the effects of anandamide with greater potency and longevity. It should be noted that the labeling of this system in honor of cannabis may be intended to softpedal marijuana use as “natural.” Third positionists will selectively appeal to nature to justify acts of savagery, but this author will not.

The modern european world caught up with the Islamic one with prohibitionism of marijuana usage in the 20^th century. The main rationale is the increased risk of psychosis associated with marijuana use. The association has been shown over decades of study and is robust to meta-analysis. A number of reviews and meta-analyses implicate marijauna as a significant causal driver. A 2022 meta-analysis found no significant psychosis risk from less-than-weekly use but markedly higher risk from frequent use, supporting a threshold effect.^xxxi A 2024 Nature Molecular Psychiatry review of chronic adolescent exposure reported a three-fold risk for daily users.^xxxii Longitudinal studies show earlier psychosis onset (by 2–6 years) in cannabis users.^xxxiii Other similar studies suggest a potential reduction in schizophrenia by eliminating cannabis use disorber by 6-15%. While these numbers may seem impressive, we should keep in mind that schizophrenics are less than 0.5% of the population, so a small absolute increase in their number will produce a large relative one. A causal relation has biological plausibility in that THC acutely induces transient symptoms of psychosis in controlled studies.^xxxiv CBD may counteract these effects, explaining why balanced strains or pure CBD show neutral or protective associations.^xxxv Recent genetic studies indicate bi-directional causality; genetic liability to schizophrenia increases cannabis use, but cannabis initiation or CUD causally elevates schizophrenia risk.^xxxvi

The dose-dependency finding is significant because it shows blanket prohibition’s crudity in subjecting responsible users to the same punishment as degenerates. Like alchohol, cannabis is minimally harmful and sometimes beneficial when used responsibly. Reasonable restriction of its usage would be something like a 21 or higher year age requirement to purchase products with high THC concentrations. Marijuana prohibition also parallels that of alcohol concerning medicinal usage. When recreational usage is specifically forbidden, medicinal marijauna becomes overprescribed. Prohibitionism obviously is not the answer to the opioid crisis either; what is reasonable is punishment of purveyors who try to cover up risks of dependency. Indeed, the crisis has been exacerbated by marijuana’s prohibition, as marijuana is an effective substitute for opioids in many cases of pain relief. 70% of cancer specialists support prescribing marjuana, and nearly half have advised patients to obtain it illegally.^xxxvii The substitution effects seen under alcohol prohibition with marijuana also apply in reverse to marijuana prohibition: One of the biggest lobbyists for it is the alchohol industry, who as of the time of writing scored a win in sneaking into the shutdown-concluding bill a provision that limits THC content to 0.4 mg per container, effectively baning all hemp-derived consumer products.

Marijuana prohibition in european countries is a modern phenomenon. The first municipal ban in America was El Paso in 1914. Bans grew upward from municipal to state to national over the course of the 20^th century, culminating in its being made a Schedule I Substance in Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. The reasons for banning it were a combination of observational repulsion regarding its side effects as well as cultural aversion to its popularity among blacks and Mexicans. The latter is where the label “marijuna” for high-THC cannabis variants came from. The ethnic targeting behind prohibition is often invoked by progressivists as a mark against it. There is good reason that this is a demerit from a reactionary standpoint as well however, in that prohibitionism’s mass incarceration of savage races needlessly puts such races on the dole. Although many third positionists are racial separatists, many others believe in a “white man’s burden” to nanny the savage races, especially african Americans. Even if one believes that european and african Americans should share a polity, prohibitionism does not follow as a policy. As for Mexicans, the problem is obviously one of open borders, which has important implications we will discuss later.

The costs of marijuana prohibition are considerable. Because it is abundant and inexpensive compared to other drugs, it is a ready-made weapon that corrupt police officers can use to frame innocents. Here are several of real world examples:

1. In 2019 former Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy Zachary Wester was arrested for systematically planting drugs, including marijuana, methamphetamine, and paraphernalia, on innocent motorists during traffic stops for minor violations like broken taillights. One victim, Teresa Odom, had meth planted in her truck in 2018, leading to her arrest. Another, Lora Penn, spent 12 days in jail after Wester allegedly placed meth and a needle in her purse. Victims described lives upended—lost jobs, family separations, and stigma from false drug charges. The scandal affected over 100 people, with at least 11 filing civil lawsuits. 119 cases were dismissed, and 10 people were released from prison.^xxxviii

2. In 2017, Staten Island NYPD Officer Kyle Erickson was accused of planting marijuana in a car during a traffic stop, as captured on bodycam footage. The video shows him tossing a bag of weed into the back seat while searching, then “finding” it to justify an arrest. This was the first such incident; in 2018, another video emerged of Erickson seemingly planting marijuana in Ronald Shields’ car after a stop for tinted windows. Shields, a 61-year-old man, was charged with possession but the case was dropped after the footage surfaced. The NYPD initially cleared Erickson in the first case, claiming the weed was already there, but public outcry and a lawsuit followed. Federal probes into similar NYPD planting allegations involving Erickson and others began in 2022.^xxxix

3. Former undercover officer Stephen Anderson testified in court that NYPD narcotics units routinely planted drugs—often cocaine or marijuana seized from evidence lockers—on innocent people to meet monthly arrest quotas. This “flaking” affected hundreds, particularly in Brooklyn and Queens, leading to wrongful convictions. Anderson described framing bystanders in bars or on streets to boost stats for overtime or promotions. The revelations prompted internal probes, but few officers faced charges; despite over 400 cases reviewed.^xl

The stop for tinted windows in the second story illustrates the downward spiral of prohibitionism: The criminalization of one thing due to gross exaggeration of its negative externalities feeds into abuses relating to other similar criminalizations. Worth noting that under neoliberalism, even with its feminized antipathy toward police, a great deal of abuse on their part is still sanctioned. How much worse therefore is such abuse under fascism, where police are legally privileged over civilians? It’s quite plausible that a fascist regime would harshly criminalize window-tinting for the alleged threat it poses to police officers. This is despite the fact that it deters carjacking because it prevents prospective jackers from discerning whether a potential victim is a threat or not. Fascist cops and their bootlickers would try to claim that “only black thugs tint their windows” to justify such tyranny.

A related menace is the use of drug sniffing dogs, which are notoriously unreliable:

“In U.S. v. Bentley, we see just how damaging the Harris decision really was. Lex, the drug dog that searched Bentley’s car, had a 93 percent alert rate. That is, when Lex was called to search a car, he alerted 93 percent of the time. He was basically a probable cause generator. His success rate was much lower, at 59 percent. That is, the police actually found drugs just six of the 10 times Lex told them they would. That means that four of every 10 people Lex alerted to were subjected to a thorough roadside search that produced nothing illegal.”^xli

In both of the above stories marijuana was put in contact with the victim’s car, but it is plausible that a police officer could frame someone merely by dropping contraband near their car and claiming that the victim threw it out as the officer approached.

The recent history of cannabis is consistent with the Iron Law of Prohibition: Prior to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, cannabis was distributed and consumed mostly in low-THC (4% or less) forms. Since Tax Act and stricter prohibitions that came later, higher concentrate forms and hashish have proliferated. THC levels reached 17% in 2017^xlii.

In recent decades marijuana has been legalized or decriminalized in many European countries, US states, and a number of municipalities. Prohibitionists claim these reforms have been a failure. Evidence they offer for this includes the increase in smoking in public. This not a failure of legalization of marijuana however, but of the continuted illegality of forcibly removing smokers from public places. Most public places remain socialized and controlled by leftists who are pro-marijuana. In the case of municipalities especially, when something is legalized in one area but remains illegal across a much larger surrounding area, the legalizing area becomes a magnet for that thing. This inflates the impression of increase in usage that legalization results in. So the real problem is not only socialism in commons and left-wing control thereof, but also the right-wing maintaining prohibition and socialized commons elsewhere. A case can be made however, that so long as US states are forced by the Federal government to leave their borders open, it is practical for red states to prohibit marijuana and other leftist vices at least on paper to keep leftists out. If enforcement were to focus on public usage, this would be a reasonable approximation of a realistically libertarian society.

Some prohibitionists accept non-criminalization of soft drugs like marijuana but maintain that hard drugs such as heroin should be universally prohibited. One thing this ignores is that the current hardness of drugs such as heroin is a consequence of the Iron Law of Prohibition described earlier. Heroin is an opium derivative, and opium has been used for centuries as a painkiller and recreational sedative. Laudanum, a tincture of raw opium, was a common form of pain relief throughout the 19^th century. Morphine, a more potent form, was extracted in early 19^th century and used during the War Between The States. Heroin was extracted from morphine in 1898 by Bayer and marketed as a non-addicted cough suppressant and painkiller. Doctors used it safely in low doses.

The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 prohibited opiates like heroin for non-medical use and was followed by stricter bans beginning in 1920. This resulted in increased and more rapid transformation into more potent and concentrated forms. Opium gum was processed into morphine at the poppy fields, then turned into heroin at nearby labs for easier transport. The concentration of street heroin has increased over time, culminating in overdose epidemics like that of Washington DC in the 1970s. More recently we have seen the development of hyper-potent variants such as fentanyl-laced heroin.^xliii Fentanyl itself can be used effectively as an offensive knockout gas and therefore ought to be protected under the 2^nd Amendment.

Cocaine has a similar story. Isolated from coca leaves in 1859, it was used medicinally in the late 19^th century in tonics, including in Coca-Cola until 1903. Like with heroin, doctors would often self-medicate but rarely overdosed due to low concentration. Chewing raw coca leaves is a mild stimulant, a practice common in South America during the same period. Recreational coca was banned along with heroin under the Act of 1914, and subsequently saw an increase in the prevalence of powder cocaine over milder forms. The potency increased sharply again with the invention of crack cocaine in the late 70s, which is even easier to transport and distribute than powder cocaine.

There are certain drugs that are hard even absent prohibition such as Ecstasy, which works by punching holes in the brain’s axons. A case against prohibitionism for these, in addition to standard issues of framing, asset forfeiture, and government corruption, is that given the substitutability between hard drugs and soft, it is better for parasitic degenerates to kill themselves quickly with the former than slowly with the latter.

Civil asset forfeiture is one of the worst instances of prohibitionism’s corruption of law enforcement, with serious externalities to the general public. Many innocent people have had their possessions, even their homes seized, merely for being suspected of association with drug trafficking. Being charged with a crime is not necessary. Three of the most egregious cases are these:

1. In Shelby County, Texas, local police systematically targeted out-of-state drivers, during traffic stops under the pretext of drug interdiction. Officers seized cash and valuables, threatening bogus drug charges or child custody loss to coerce forfeiture waivers. Millions were netted without arrests or evidence of drugs, with proceeds funding luxuries like a $500 popcorn machine and police bonuses. The scheme was exposed via lawsuit, leading to national scrutiny but no full restitution for victims.^xliv

2. Michael Albin was a 65-year old Vietnam veteran, cancer patient, and restaurant owner, residing in an RV in the parking lot of his workplace.

In 2009 state law enforcement began an undercover gambling investigation of his restaurant and purchased a small amount of marijuana from a cook.

Based on that purchase and the presence of nine video poker machines at the restaurant, police searched Albin’s RV and recovered four ounces of marijuana. This was below the legal threshold of one pound permitting the seizure of a vehicle, but law enforcement argued the RV was actually a “container.” They seized the RV and sold it at auction.

Albin passed away in 2012, shortly after the state appeals court ruled the seizure invalid. His $30,000 in attorneys’ fees were not covered, and his estate received less than they believed the RV was worth.^xlv

3. Jerry Johnson started his own trucking company in 2015, and currently has two trucks and two employees. Johnson had previously served time in prison for possession of cocaine and marijuana, most recently in 2012. His trucking company had helped him turn his life around and become a positive contributor to society.

Seeking to add a third truck, he flew from Charlotte to Phoenix to attend an auto action in August 2020. He was carrying $39,500 in cash, which is completely legal. It is common for bidders at such auctions to pay in cash.

When he landed in Phoenix, an undercover officer approached Johnson in baggage claim, asking if he had money or drugs on him.

When he revealed he was carrying the cash, the officer interrogated Johnson for an hour and gave him a choice of signing a forfeiture agreement or being arrested. Johnson signed.

He has not been charged with any crime, and the Transportation Security Administration has refused to return his money. A judge has ruled that Johnson failed to prove the money was legally his, and litigation is ongoing.^xlvi

Case 1 is cited in a study examining the relationship between value of assets seized and drug related arrests by county. Although the overall effect size was small, it was actually negative. This reflects the perverse incentives inherent to prohibitionism: It is more profitable and lower risk for the authorities to loot innocent people than go after the traffickers themselves.

There are other egregious cases of forfeiture, such as those of Frank Ranelli and Phil Parhamovich that, although they do not directly involve drugs, are arguably products of the culture of surveillance and financial constriction attentive to prohibition. We have become a society where being cash-based, i.e. preferring not to trust our money with banksters, has effectively become a crime. Third positionists are fine with economic crime when government does it, so there is little reason to think their prohibitionism would amount to anything more than further illicit enrichment of the government and its cronies, including bankers.

Empirical evidence in favor of directional legalization even of hard drugs comes from Portugal. In the late 1990s, Portugal suffered one of Europe’s worst drug crises. Around 1% of the population (~100,000 people) were addicted to heroin alone. Needle-related HIV infections were soaring (nearly ,400 new cases in 2000) and overdose deaths (around 400 annually).

In 2000, Portugal’s minority Socialist government passed Law 30/2000, which came into effect in July 2001, decriminalizing the possession, acquisition, and use of all illicit drugs for personal consumption. This made Portugal the first country to decriminalize all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, cannabis, and others. Personal possession was limited to quantities not exceeding a 10-day average supply (e.g., 1 gram of heroin, 2 grams of cocaine, or 25 grams of cannabis). Exceeding these thresholds can lead to criminal charges for trafficking, which remains a serious offense punishable by imprisonment. Exceeding these thresholds can lead to criminal charges for trafficking, which remains a serious offense punishable by imprisonment. When police encountered someone with drugs, they confiscate the substances and issue a citation, they referred the individual to a local Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction (CDT). These commissions, composed of legal, health, and social work professionals, assessed the person’s situation—considering dependency, substance type, and other factors—and decided on responses.

Outcomes from CDTs was non-punitive and health-focused: proceedings may be suspended for non-dependent users (especially first-timers), or users may agree to voluntary treatment to avoid sanctions like fines, community service, or license suspensions. No jail time was imposed for personal use. Portugal invested heavily in expanding treatment centers, harm reduction programs (e.g., needle exchanges, methadone maintenance), prevention education, and social reintegration efforts like job assistance for recovering users.^xlvii

The results of Portugal’s reform are impressive: Overdose deaths plummeted from around 400 in 2000 to 290 in 2006, and further to just 20 in 2008. By 2012, Portugal’s drug-related death rate was 3 per million residents, compared to the EU average of 17.3 per million—one of the lowest in Europe. Overall, drug deaths dropped by about 80% from 2001 levels, and as of 2024 data, Portuguese residents are 45 times less likely to die from overdoses than Americans. HIV infections linked to injection drug use fell by 90%, from nearly 1,400 cases in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, with new diagnoses among users dropping 17% more broadly. Hepatitis B and C cases also halved. The one negative result of the reform was a massive relative increase in psychotic disorder hospitalizations, from 24 in 2001 to 588 in 2015, an increase of 2,350%. The percentage of these cases linked to cannabis increased significantly. Lifetime drug use did increase, from 7.8% in 2001 to 12% in 2012, however, this was in line with general European trend. The increasing general trend may be partially due to liberalization of drug laws, but may also be symptoms of increasing immiseration under globalism. To the extent the general trend is due to drug liberalization, this is hardly an indictment. Honest proponents of liberalization don’t pretend that liberalization doesn’t increase general experimentation with drugs; our contention is that the decrease in damage done to society despite this is well worth it.^xlviii

A final word on the Drug War: The case of Mitchell C. Henderson, an absolute specimen of a law enforcement officer as well as a nationalist, successfully infiltrated Columbia’s Cali Cartel and brought down the organization. He was forced to start his life over again with a new identity to escape reprisal. One of his occupations during this latter phase of life was as a corrections officer, and it was his experience in this role that redpilled him on prohibitionism’s futility:

“It was an eye-opener. Inmates were thoroughly searched entering the jail and were subject to random searches without cause. Yet they got knives, guns, cocaine, heroin, and cellphones in through all that security. Think about how ineffective the TSA that we pay taxes for it? I have been through their screenings; they are like the Atropine Injectors in a Soldier’s Gas Mask Bag, it only gives false hope.

...This also opened my eyes to “Prohibition.” It does not work. Even if you jailed every single American and had cameras watching them 24/7, they could still get firearms or illegal drugs. Even a totalitarian police state could not prevent people from getting firearms and drugs. If there is a will there is a way.”^xlix

General Problems

In tackling prohibitionism vice-by-vice we have seen certain commonalities in its problems emerge such as externalities to the healthy and enrichment of violent criminals. This is because prohibitionism has serious and fundamental problems regardless of specific application. We now make the comprehensive case against it by explaining its such problems.

Problem 1. Degenerates are mostly born, not made. A man can make himself stronger through weightlifting, but having the discipline to lift regularly is mostly a function of personality trait conscientiousness, a trait that is fifty percent heritable. Being a mesomorph, someone whose musculature hypertrophies well in response to lifting and thus makes exercise more visually rewarding, is almost entirely genetic. The same is true for strength of character as well, which is why children given up for adoption have significantly more problems than orphans. It is also the reason why problems like mental illness tend to precede degenerate behavior as shown in the pornography studies cited above. Third positionists emphasize evolutionary and genetic differences in character between races but pay insufficient attention to the same differences within their own race. Nature, especially in a society of abundance, creates many defective people who cannot be fixed. It is evil therefore, to try to guilt healthy people into spending time and energy trying to do so, let alone force them to using the state. On the other end of the spectrum, blanket prohibition reduces the quality of life for those who indulge in vice responsibly, who are disproportionately the natural aristocracy. If prohibition is selective for those who fail some genetic or class-based test, this creates an artificial divide in society that causes resentment of those who pass. Opposing legal standards between classes of people is something liberalism arose in reponse to. The aristocracy and the commoners are at their most harmonious when both are subject to natural law. This does not mean that in terms of punishment severity they should be treated as relative equals as liberalism would have it; if anything the nobility should be held to a higher standard. No one should be above the law itself however.

Problem 2. Because of the constancy of not only born degenerates but also many more people responsible enough to indulge in vice non-abusively, there is a steady and substantial demand for vices, a demand that does not exist for violent crimes. Demand is a vacuum that supply always rushes in to fill one way or another. This by itself argues against statist prohibition, because demand for means of censoring degeneracy represents a profit opportunity for doing so efficiently. We see this in voluntary content ratings boards for the video game and film industries, as well as universal availability of parental controls on devices. We see a cottage industry of content sanitized by Christian businesses such as Angel Vid.

The constancy of demand for vice means that statist prohibition does not substantially reduce vice; prohibitionism instead drives it underground, thereby enriching and empowering the dregs of society. The dregs are not only non-governmental criminals but also those in government. Likewise for hostile foreign powers. This is not to say that the state does not have a discernable effect on usage; prohibitionism does prevent many people on the margin from experimenting. To a small degree a legal barrier may also help people who want to quit do so. Most of these people are not degenerates however, whereas degenerates, who almost by definition have a compulsive need for vice that wholesome pursuits do not substitute for, are much less deterred by prohibition.

It is remarkable that right-wing statists do not see prohibition’s parallel to gun control, an issue where they are just as alacritous as libertarians in pointing out the fact that criminals are hardly deterred or hindered at all by laws prohibiting guns, meaning that such laws result in only criminals having them. It is no harder to obtain vices than guns. Similar to guns, a number of vices, as discussed earlier, are not inherently bad, but means of pursuing certain ends. Bad people will use them to pursue bad ends; good people will use them to pursue good ends. Similar to how it is wrong to brand an individual with any certain moral status based on race because some members of that race commit evil, it is wrong to brand a product or service with a negative moral status just because some people use it immorally.

Problem 3. Prohibitionism invades the privacy of the healthy and innocent. Anti-prohibitionist assertions such as “you can’t legislate morality” and “vice is a victimless crime” harken at this. Taken literally by themselves however, they are stupidman arguments vulnerable to third positionist criticism. The claim “you can’t legislate morality” is countered by third positionists by pointing out that violations of person and property that libertarians wish to limit legislation to, or concerns about social inequality that anti-prohibition leftists wish to limit legislation to, are also moral concerns. This however misses the common meaning of the claim, which is that there is a type of morality that is private in nature, which is to say, certain behaviors can threaten one’s own existence but no one elses, whereas the other type, sometimes distinguished as ethics, is behaviors that threaten both.

An important but less commonly intended meaning is that you can’t fix congenitally immoral people with legislation. This is true by itself but also does not by itself refute prohibitionism because prohibitionists can argue that the elevated likelihood of serious crime represented by degeneracy justifies the state unilaterally removing degenerates from society. While obviously the only purpose of punishment is to minimize the likelihood of future crime, this obviously also does not mean at any cost, because otherwise the optimal means of crime prevention would be to kill everyone. The prohibitionist premise of crime prevention amounts to pre-crime, not even of a certainty at the level of Minority Report, but rather a crude heuristic-based dragnet that grossly violates the principle of proportionality.

Even under prohibitionism, the overwhelming majority of vice enjoyers do not commit any serious crimes. Vice enjoyers as a whole do commit serious crimes at a significantly higher rate because this group includes the subset who are degenerates, which in turn contains a subset who are superpredators in terms of committing serious crimes. This disparity however, is to a significant extent a selection effect created by prohibitionism itself, because someone who is not deterred by the illegality of committing a minor transgression is less likely to be deterred by the illegality of a major one. It is also redundant because a sound justice system allows for discretionary sentencing for serious crimes based on evidence of character, including degenerate tendencies. This is necessary because the probablity of recidivism varies significantly from criminal to criminal for a given crime depending on character and circumstance. At one end of the spectrum there are addicts who will steal from innocent people to score one more hit. At the other end there are heros certain in lifeboat scenarios who have to steal to save an innocent life, in which case proportional punishmnent takes the form of nominal restitution if asked for. In this way, crime is consistently punished in a way that minimizes it at a reasonable cost, and requires no violation of the proportionality principle.

The more commonly intended meaning of “can’t legislate morality” implies that prohibitionism of private immorality is unacceptably invasive compared to alternative means of mitigating such immorality. The correctness of this view becomes apparent when we examine the argument “vice is a victimless crime”. Obviously this is not literally true. Abuse of vice damages relationships, especially with those closest to the abuser. Loved ones often try to rehabilitate abusers, but for those abusers who are too refractory, sensible loved ones will disassociate. Here we have discovered the steelman rather than stupidman version of the “victimless crime” argument. The “crime” (abuse of vice) only has a second party victim for as long as that victim chooses to put up with it. Because vice abuse is not coercive toward its second party victim, that victim has the time and autonomy to choose whether or not to continue associating with the abuser during the period of abuse.

This is not the case in matters of violence however. By nature, acts of violence are coercive and cannot perforce be disassociated from as they occur. Even though in cases of non-homicidal violent crime the victim can disassociate after the fact, psychic trauma is often permanent. Non-violent abuse can also be traumatic however, so why should violence be legally actionable while vice should not? It is because there is a subtle but significant difference between what is objectively harmful and what is objectively actionable. Frequent non-violent verbal altercations caused or exacerbated by drunkenness are clearly in the former category in terms of their effect on a marriage, yet fail to be actionable. Law requires sound evidence, and a verbal altercation by itself comes down to “he said, she said.” The second prong is cost, and such an altercation is simply not worth the considerable time and expense that a criminal case entails. Although in retrospect a long accumulation of verbal abuse is often more damaging to a marriage then a one-off act of physical abuse, acts of abuse, if they are actionable, must be tried on an act-by-act (count-by-count) basis. A one-off act of physical abuse, however, cannot reliably be known to be a one-off event in advance. Compared to an act of verbal abuse, an act of physical abuse increases the probability of a future act of serious abuse exponentially more, which makes the considerable cost of prosecution worthwhile in many cases.

The entire purpose of criminal justice is to minimize future crime at a reasonable cost. This is why even many acts of physical abuse are not brought to trial, because the victim is privy to information that indicates it was a one-off, or because it is obvious to the prosecution at the outset that there simply isn’t enough evidence to convict. This is because it is crucial that convictions of innocents are kept to a minimum. This is hardly less the case in abuse situations involving drugs or other vices. It is perverse, therefore, to think that use or distribution by itself, in a manner that harms no one, not even the user, should be prosecutable. A final point to drive this home: If there is one class of people that we ought to pay a steep price to protect, it is children. It is possible for parents to badly abuse their children in non-physical ways. And yet, it is obvious that such children must remain with their parents in almost all cases, because the power to take children from their parents is one that has such immense potential for even greater abuse that the conditions under which it is exercised must be extremely limited.

We have used the term prohibitionism to refer to the type of prohibition that defines third positionism: monopolistic, one-size-fits-all legislation against vice by the state. What null positionists support is not the absence of prohibition but a free market therein, which unlike prohibitionism is efficient, eugenic, and humane. This can be shown from first principles. Under the such a market, property owners can be prohibitionists who are even more strict than the state because they are the ones who have on-the-ground knowledge of their property’s usage. Under a free market in probibition, the government only has to use its standard law enforcement apparatus to assist property owners in removing degenerates.

Under prohibitionism, there is an additional bureacracy that is tasked not only with the above, but also trying to eliminate or substantially reduce certain vices across the board. This is a much larger undertaking even before evaluating its feasibility and therefore makes such a bureacracy costly. Because the state cannot come close to eliminating vice, the goal of further reduction of vice stays perpetually on the horizon, thereby creating a perpetual pretext to increase funding. Prohibitionism’s exacerbation of organized crime creates further pretext for such an increase. What results is an endless “War on Vice”, as futile and dysgenic as all other Wars on Blemishes of the Human Condition like the War on Poverty. The cost of this bureacracy takes resources away either from enforcement of serious crimes, including serious crimes associated with degeneracy, or from other beneficial uses, or both. Although in theory this bureacracy could be funded voluntarily, third positionists are believers in taxation, which is an inherent disutility experienced by a large swathe of the population.

Third positionists may propose that an anti-vice bureacracy be funded through fines of vice, but all this amounts to is a sin tax with more haphazard collection practices, as well as one that creates a horrendous incentive for the bureaucrats to frame innocent people. It is bad enough that prohibitionism incentivizes invasion of privacy. Although a warrant application process can check this, third positionists tend to regard such due process as a liberal hindrance. Regarding framing generally, third positionists may counter that it is also possible to frame someone for serious crimes like murder. Framing for murder is exceedingly difficult however, whereas as we have seen in several places earlier in this article, framing someone for vice is much easier. A murder case almost always requires a body, usually not also the framer’s. If a murder is to be committed primarily for the purpose of framing, this represents massive personal risk to the framer even before the risk of being caught. Framing for other serious crimes carries similar risk. The requirement of a victim representing documentary evidence of the crime is the hurdle that does not exist, practically speaking, with framing for vice.

Most people, including even most degenerates in some respects, do not want to live around degeneracy; moreso among the landowning class. Landowners will allow little to none of it on their property. They do so to a larger degree today because they are bribed through programs like Section 8 to tolerate it, as well as coerced through laws like the Fair Housing Act which prohibits realtors from mentioning crime rates, a strong correlate of degeneracy. Because degeneracy negatively impacts property values, landowners are strongly incentivized to prohibit it when they are free to do so. This can take the form of formal agreements including covenants, as well as informal decisions such as not to renew leases with degenerates. A covenant is simple to scale; all it requires is the copying of a lease agreement. The economic incentive to protect property values is so strong however, that relatively little coordination is necessary. This is especially true under an equitably free market where property values are protected by default against public degeneracy. Through market incentives, degenerates are inexorably squeezed out of civilization and into the wastes. Because degenerates will always exist, the choice is whether the healthy can fully liberate themselves both economically and geographically through disassociation, or whether we are forced together with degenerates in some way under prohibitionism. As Mitchell C. Henderson put it: “I say Vice Control because you cannot stop it, you can only really control where it happens and when it happpens.^l”

Another important aspect of prohibition is the difference between private and public degeneracy. Statist warping of language distorts understanding of the issue. This is due to how statists arrogate stewardship of commons such as roads and parks to the state in their referring to all socialized property as “public” and all non-socialized property as “private.” These terms in reality refer to default access: “Public” means “open to anyone not specifically excluded, while “private” means “closed to all unless specifically invited.” There are many instances of non state-owned commons such as thousands of miles of roads, while the state builds private goods such as residences in the form of housing projects. It is erroneous therefore, to assume as third positionists do that statism is necessary to control degeneracy in public areas.

In a free society, common areas are held primarily in a trust whose majority stakeholders are usually the community’s wealthiest members. This is already the case in certain special economic zones, as well for many conservation trusts. Just as the property price system and on-the-ground knowledge makes the free market superior for private residences, so too do these advantages apply to public areas. Another advantage is that community-by-community policy can accommodate the spectrum of preferences for tolerance of public vice. For example, some communities can permit smoking in common areas, others can issue vape-only ordinances, others for aesthetic or cultural reasons might prohibit vaping as well. Many third positionists believe that there is one objectively righteous vice prohibition policy that applies similarly to public and private spaces both. Maybe they’re right. In practical terms however, this is irrelevant because peoples’ attitudes toward vice are hardwired as a spectrum with significant variance. Because it is effectively impossible to change peoples’ minds, optimal policy is functionally subjective. One-size-fits-all policy handed down by a national government creates needless conflict between the nation’s communities over control of that apparatus to impose their preferred policy on everyone else.

The Slippery Slope

The Slippery Slope argument for prohibitionism is that if a less harmful type of degeneracy is legalized, this significantly increases the likelihood that an unacceptably harmful type is legalized. Some opponents of prohibition rebut with: “That’s a Slippery Slope argument, which is a fallacy.” Prohibitionists today riposte with: “Society has degenerated since certain vices were legalized, therefore the Slippery Slope is real.” Let’s analyze each of these arguments in turn. An issue with the Slippery Slope argument when made by third positionists specifically is that it affirms the significance of principle. The principle here is threat to family stability and by extension kin continuity. In other contexts however, third positionists deny the significance of principle itself, e.g. “principles don’t matter, power does.” Because all of nature operates by principles however, everyone lives by some sort of principle. The core principle of third positionists is that authoritarian collectivism is best for the nation. Their rhetoric against principles generally is really just bluster trying to intimidate their opponents into surrendering their principles.

Another issue is that “unacceptably harmful” is subjective in the context of prohibitionism’s harms. Some types of degeneracy are indeed very harmful, however prohibitionism may be more harmful still. As for “the Slippery Slope is a fallacy,” this is a midwitted trope. There is a fallacy called the false continuum, which is confusingly sometimes also called the “slippery slope fallacy.” The false continuum argument pretends that because two or more observations lie on the same continuum, there can be no meaningful difference between them. This is not the prohibitionists’ argument however. They aren’t claiming that legalizing degeneracy that is low in harm is the same as legalizing degeneracy high in harm; they’re claiming that the former leads to the latter. In citing society’s degeneration post legalization however, prohibitionists have not proven that legalization of low-harm degeneracy leads to legalization of high-harm degeneracy, they have merely proven that the former does not per se prevent the latter from occuring. To treat society’s degeneration as proof would would be a post hoc fallacy.

Why has society degenerated? Third positionists often blame libertarianism which is strange because they often at other times dismiss libertarianism as completely irrelevant. The latter is of course closer to the truth, not only because for many decades we have lived under one of the largest and most leftist states in history, but also because in the case of prohibition we have had very little in the way of libertarian reforms. Libertarianism in its modern form wasn’t even formalized until the 1960s, and society was already degenerating well before that. Gay rights is sometimes held up as an example, however, ever since the Lawrence v Texas Supreme Court decision (and for the most part long before that), gays have already enjoyed the same legal rights as everyone else. Extending marriage licenses to gays is expanding the state’s purview over marriage in an attempt to elevate the barren and the base to the status of the bountiful and beautiful. This is leftist to the core. The Obergefell v Hodges decision, which mandated gay marriage nationwide, expanded state control even further as well as centralized it in the Federal Government, which is contrary to both libertarianism and the principle of federalism. The very reason the US government invaded the domain of marriage in the first place was to enforce anti-miscegenation laws, a policy that third positionists support.⁵

Society has degenerated because leftists, not libertarians, have been in charge. Have they instituted some reforms such as marijuana legalization that are incidentally also somewhat libertarian? Yes, but bad people often do good things for the wrong reasons. One reason leftists want to legalize drugs is because it provides an additional source of tax revenue, but unlike the right they do not wish to use it lower other taxes. Another reason is because legalization helps expand state rehabilitation centers, which are institutions of direct social engineering. Under current federal law⁶ patients can forfeit the right to own a firearm when they are involuntarily committed for drug usage. The welfare state generally, which third positionists support, is is a massive amplifier of degeneracy. Because the left seeks to destroy everything that is healthy, they view healthful liberal reforms on social issues as mere steps to forcing the healthy to subsidize the degenerate. A significant reason the left was able to gain power was because such early reforms were reasonable and consistent with property rights. The right lost ground for being associated with prohibitionism’s puritanical pettiness. Had the right supported a libertarian approch that shifted prohibition to a free market therein, they would have gained ground and even fooled the left into believing such a catastrophic loss was a win. The slippery slope argument falsely implies a lack of agency on the part of the healthy versus the degenerate, especially the healthy in government. It contradicts third positionists’ belief in statism. To the third positionist, a sufficiently large and centralized state can impose whatever policy it deems best on the nation willy-nilly. What they don’t realize is that such policy could just as easily be a free market rather than a monopoly in prohibition.

A free market in prohibition is what fully empowers us against the degenerate because that is the only way we can fully disassociate from them. A null positionist government, while non-monopolistic, is also more absolutist than a third posititionist one, in that it does not have the pretense of selfless service to the nation to maintain. It is therefore better able to enforce a free market in prohibition absolutely, suppressing leftists who invertedly take the free market part as a step toward their parasitic schemes. The libertarian prohibition policy is a triangulation against the integrationism of both leftists and third posistionists that properly liberates the nation from the degenerate. As such it is as far from the slippery slope of degeneracy as a society can reasonably be.

Third positionists also fail to consider that prohibitionism has a slippery slope of its own. The Drug War is the most poignant instance of this. Slightly heavy-handed paternalism intended to protect people from themselves becomes predation through civil asset forfeiture and other grievous injuries. Third positionists may invoke the point raised in the preceding paragraph – their belief that through sheer monopolistic might the state can maintain prohibitionism with steady-handedness rather than heavy-handedness and prevent it from spiraling. Why is this unlikely? The reason is because by nature prohibitionism is a violation of the property norm. The property norm is a principle, and as explained earlier, despite bluster to the contrary, third positionists are no less believers in principle than anyone else. Denying to someone the significance of principle is still affirmation of the principle that expression ought to convey intelligible content. The attempt to persuade someone out of their principles or principles generally is affirmation of the principle that social suasion should precede resorting to violence. This is applicable to prohibition also.

As we have seen, the power of disassociation is a compelling case for why suasion should at least be the default, with violent methods of prohibition resorted to only if dissociation proves inadequate. It is compelling because property is one of the very most important social principles there is. It transcends even the whole human species, and for humans it is a cornerstone of civilization itself. If property is violated in one area, it can in principle be violated in any area. As discussed in the article on power, third positionists explicitly subordinate the principle of property, rather than regarding it as coequal to other other cornerstones. Third positionists may counter that principles are abstractions, and that most people are not concerned with the abstract. Most people aren’t, but the kind of people who architect society are, just as literal architects are concerned with the principles of engineering statics. People who are higher in intelligence tend to have more extreme political views because they have greater capacity to take principles to their logical conclusion. The logical conclusion of property violation is global race communism. The reason why even paternalistic violations lead there is because they result in negative externalities. One is the pointless conflict over the apparatus of prohibitionist control. A more immediate one however is simply that violation instantly creates deadly enemies where none need exist. Yes, degenerates are generally enemies, although a fair few can be quite productive despite their bad habits. Violation of their property alone, not to mention that of the innocents caught in the crossfire of a Degeneracy War, impairs productivity. The negative externalities from violation are more social ills that provide a pretext for the state to expand its scope of activity to remedy. A monopolistic state is for this reason actually incentivized to exacerbate these problems.

Another principle whose violation has serious consequences is personal responsibility. The notion that a benovolent state needs to save people from folly isn’t limited to “social” issues either. The same paternalistic attitude is what has given us state retirement programs. If we accept the premise that people will not save enough for retirement on their own without being forced to by the state, a mandatory miminum contribution to an account designated for retirement by the state makes sense. The problem is that once you accept the premise that people need to be protected from themselves and their unreliable behavior, it follows that they need to be protected from the unreliability of capital market behavior. This is why most state retirement programs are pensions, which create serious solvency problems for states due to the insatiable desire by the public for more and more handouts, and by welfare bureacrats to exand their fiefdoms. A state pension system, because of its income guarantee, coerces redistribution from the young to the old, creating enemies of demographics that ought to live in harmony. Technological advance that increases abundance and extends lifespans creates an older and more burdensome population as well. The temptation is then to import younger foreigners to support the pension system. All of statism’s logical conclusion is globalism. Prohibitionism, because of its totalizing premise, even before its enrichment of bad foreign actors via smuggling, is no exception. While on the subject of international trafficking, it is worth noting that prohibitionists, even third positionist ones, tend not to differentiate between the rights of citizens and those of foreigners in dealing with trafficking of vice. It is arguably more robustly nationalist to accord your own people their right of privacy in vice, but not foreign entrants. This can be best enforced when ports of entry are marketized, with resale of shares limited to citizens only. This system is more resistant to capture by bad foreign actors than a socialist one.

Another aspect of the slippery slope to consider is its hypothetical bottom. In right-wing circles non-libertarian rightists attack libertarianism on this by identifying extreme depravity that could technically be legal in a libertarian society. Examples are things like consensual cannibilism and necrophilia. The first problem with appeal to depravity is that prohibitionism’s problems of forced integration apply at least as much to depravity as they do to degeneracy generally. Likely more, due to the extreme rarity of such behavior, it is a total absurdity for everyone to be treated like a potential suspect. No matter how rare extreme depravity is exactly, the integrationism of prohibition and statism generally create conditions where extreme deviants are potentially in position to respectively capture the enforcement apparatus and thereby victims en masse. For example, a third positionist regime is more likely to socialize businesses like mortuaries. This is because burial of the dead is an important part of affirming kinship ties in eternity and for this reason some nationalists may it deem it “too important” to leave to the “Mammonistic” whims of the market. If it were socialized, this represents an opportunity for the handful of necrophiles out there to command the industry, with no alternatives available to their victims due to the state’s elimination of competition. Socialized housing for the living becomes dominated by the dregs; there is no reason to expect any different of socialized housing for the dead. As for cannibalism, it should be noted that in history, third positionist regimes allied with Stalin, whose terror famine drove significant numbers of europeans to cannibalism. Even after Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded Ukraine, his appointed administration there maintained Stalin’s ruinous farm collectivization policies. It is reasonable that we want to resemble either regime as little as possible.

The practical possibility of extreme forms of depravity like cannibalism and necrophilia being legally practiced in a libertarian society is near zero. As mentioned earlier, the most extreme degenerates are also those least likely to be deterred by their behavior’s illegality. Because such behavior is an extreme taboo, the default legal assumption in all encounters of it in a libertarian society is that it was not consented to, and therefore unlawful. Consent would carry a very high burden of proof, such as written and notarized documentation. An extreme degenerate is not the type of person who would comply with such measures. Only degenerate notaries and other professionals would promulgate such contracts, and in a realistically libertarian, i.e. right-wing libertarian society, such professionals would be, at best, expelled from all reputable certifying organizations. Their customers would also be ostracized. While extremely depraved people are largely immune from social, if not economic ostracism, sensitivity to social ostracism increases greatly by degree of separation. We can go even further than this in a free society however. Legal and law enforcement professionals can refuse their services to the depraved not just for promulgation of depravity, but altogher. Meaning depraved people will not be defended even if violent crimes are committed by them. This is the practice of outlawry, which has strong precedent in Medieval europe. In a free society, just as law enforcers and adjudicators cannot force anyone else to associate with one another, no one can force law enforcers and adjudicators to serve anyone they don’t want to.

The legal calculus regarding consensual depravity is overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining the property norm as an absolute so as to maximize privacy. Privacy is often confused with secrecy, but what privacy really means is choice over what personal information others get to see or not. Privacy is inextricably linked to the property norm, which is that scarce resources that are peacefully acquired give one the choice over who can and cannot use them. The media by which personal information is transmitted are no less such a resource. We do not consider it acceptable to surveill private places even though that’s where the majority of murders are committed. Third positionists may counter that the state should simply refrain from surveillance of such places under prohibitionism. The problem with this is that the commission of a crime forfeits the criminal’s property rights, including their right to privacy. Meaning that even the many people who indulge in vice privately and responsibly have no right to privacy. Third positionists may counter again that suspects, as distinct from criminals, retain their rights. A problem with this, is that a suspected criminal does forfeit their right to privacy if the authorities have probable cause. Here lies the rub: To obtain probable cause in the first place regarding private vice, privacy and property must be violated. As explained earlier, not even victims of others’ non-violent degeneracy have a claim that is comparable in terms of practical legal actionability to that of victims of domestic violence. Vice’s lack of victims embodying real evidence of harm necessitates surveillance, with all of its culture of gossip, snitching, and blackmail, as a substitute. It becomes easy rather than hard for the authorities to conduct intrusive searches on flimsy pretexts. There is no property without privacy, and there is no civilization without property. Civilization is too valuable to allow the handful of people who are both depraved and legally scrupulous to ruin for the rest of us.

Other Issues

In arguing for statist social engineering, third posititionists often analogize family and nation. They believe that the relationship between government and the rest of the nation is like the relationship between parents and children. This analogy is obviously false because 1) most of the nation are not children but adults, and 2) the best custodians for children by far are intentional biological parents, not other coethnics. This is true vis a vis such parents’ own local community, let alone the national government. While there is a substantial element of truth to “it takes a village to raise a child,” third positionists do not get to invoke this because they believe that their subjectively-defined interests of the nation as a whole take precedence over the interests of the village. Third positionists like to march around exhorting people to “kill your local pedophile,” yet their argument has a significant feature in common with that of pedophiles: that children and adults should be treated the same concerning significant lifestyle decisions.

All children are of diminished capacity. They cannot form crime syndicates, corrupt public officials with bribery, and for the most part lack the avarice that causes criminals to do things like cut drugs with toxic chemicals. When adults are treated like children by an authority they become resentful of that authority and will likely seek to undermine it in some way, such as refusing to comply with investigations into serious crimes. It is difficult to be paternalistic without also being patronizing, and when paternalism is taken this way it erodes respect for paternal authority figures, even when they are well-meaning. Prohibitionism also creates a parallel to the Streisand Effect we could term the ‘Forbidden Fruit Effect.’ When something is treated as so inherently evil that it must be universally prohibited, that thing gains allure for its transgressiveness. Harsh punishments including death compound this effect. Although prohibitionism reduces experimentation generally, the Forbidden Fruit Effect is greatest among those whose personalities are high in openness and low in agreeableness. It is types who are cosmopolitan enough to engage with the world their nation’s behalf, yet also hard-nosed enough to negotiate effectively, who are disproportionately those who are suited to political leadership positions. Prohibitionism therefore has a disproportionately adverse affect on a key demographic of a functional polity. It is adverse primarily not because it increases experimentation per se, because this class is better able to handle vice responsibly, but because it brings them into contact with the criminal underground, thereby increasing corruption. It is better for vice to be mundane, for innocuous experimentation therewith to be broadly accessible. This way leader-types are less likely to experiment with dangerous forms of vice - because vice generally is too “common” to be cool.

The flip side of the ‘Forbidden Fruit Effect’ is the effect that prohibitionism has on the less independently-minded class of people. This is of complacency – when people think a social ill has been “cured” by law, they are less conscientious in protecting their families from that ill. It is an instance of moral hazard, which is the general effect where people who perceive themselves to be insured in some way against the risks of a behavior will engage in that behavior or tolerate it in others to a greater degree. Crucial virtues that should be universally cultivated are vigilance and agency. It is better for degenerates to be “out in the open” but in their own enclaves, so that ordinary people can be perpetually reminded of their existence, of the fallen nature of man generally, but also at a safe distance. People will thus take measures to make sure that degenerates remain at such a distance.

A free market in prohibition minimizes the harm that degeneracy does, not only because of its superior efficiency in punishing degeneracy but also in helping people rehabilitate from it where possible. This is due to the inherent superiority of voluntary aid over a welfare state: Benefactors can cut such aid off at will if it is abused. Organizations that are lax in doing so will see their funds swiftly diverted to those that are strict. The coercive nature of a welfare state contradicts this, because there is little incentive to penalize lax administrators. The state can simply keep taxing the productive no matter how much such laxity disgusts them. Voluntary rehabilitation organizations are maximally productive because it allows productive people to ensure that their funding of it is only to the extent that it benefts them.

An element of coercion in rehabilitation that prohibitionists also consider beneficial is involuntary commitment of degenerates, similar to how the criminally insane can be involuntarily committed to a mental institution. This creates a perverse incentive regardless of whether a rehabilitation clinic is state-run to feed it patients who should not be there to increase its revenue. A better approach is for people predisposed to degeneracy, especially genetically, to be able to get a tattoo authorizing forcible intervention if they succumb. Voluntary contracts into irreversible arrangements already exist in irrevocable trusts. Marriage can be treated similarly up to a point; it is perfectly reasonable for people to opt for a marriage contract with criminal rather than civil penalties for breach.

Voluntarism with respect to rehabilitation is a soft social Darwinism: It allows those who are best able to help the fallen do so without being dragged down themselves, while the worst degenerates who refuse help perish. The soft argument is not necessary however. The case against prohibitionism can be made through hard social Darwinism alone. This means that we could concede as a hypothetical that prohibitionism does save a great many of the nation from themselves. This still does not answer the question of whether they are worth saving. Degeneracy is largely a bottom quintile issue, and even in cases where it is severe, the worst of it is still a small portion of this percentile, such where even at the worst of Portugal’s heroin addiction crisis it was only 1% of the population. It is also a small percentage of the population that is responsible for national survival, the core value of third positionism. Less than half of a percent of the european population is military. Of course, it takes a much larger percentage of the population to power an economy supporting the military, but this still not necessarily a majority due to the Pareto Principle, which is that half an organization’s productivity is attributable to the square root of the number of its members. The nation is best protected when its greatest protectors are not subordinated in their property rights to its least. This was taken to an extreme in ancient Sparta, whose warrior aristocracy ruling over its Helot slave caste was only about 10% of the population. Even a society of 90% literal slaves, not figurative slaves of degeneracy, was a force to be reckoned with.

Concluding Remarks

Third positionists would enslave the large healthy majority of a nation to its small degenerate minority through the forced integration inherent to prohibitionism. This inherence can be shown from a priori comparison with a free market in prohibition powered by freedom of disassociation. Freedom of disassociation is the most fundamental human right there is. The modern West’s abrogation of it is the cause of white genocide. Even though prohibitionism can exist without anti-discrimination law, it is always at minimum forced integration on an economic level. It is also forced integration on a lifestyle level, where authorities are incentivized to, through surveillance, treat everyone as with potentially something to hide, which is inevitable when usage and distribution is illegal even in private. Although survivalism is a bad standard of value, prohibitionism is suboptimal even on this count. When quality of life is considered, prohibitionism is abysmal because it lets those who indulge in vice irresponsibly ruin vice for the responsible.

Aristocracy carries with it an expectation of noblesse oblige. This obligation is to promote the greatness of the nation as a whole however, not to negate the ignominy of the nation’s lowliest. It is an obligation to maintain a framework of ordered liberty that produces greatness. Prohibitionism is a policy of chaotic slavery: The chaos is caused by enriching and empowering organized crime, enough to corrupt government to such a degree that it becomes effectively legal in many areas. The slavery is the suppression of a good time among the great merry middle of society who are neither degenerates nor Puritans, their forced integration of this middle with the latter two, and their immiseration with surveillance, framing, and forfeiture. Right-wing prohibitionism is not a principled counteracting of leftism but a horseshoe with it: The exploitation of human weakness as a pretext for exploiting and surveilling those self-responsible enough to overcome it. It is the agenda of a patriarch whipped by the den mother; ultimately nothing more than a less honest longhouse. Only when we are free to leave such a place are we free from the perennial degeneracy of its denizens. The truly aristocratic reactionary is at once serenely indifferent to the unworthies he leaves behind and intensely solicitious for his fellow warriors and wanderers, even when their own shortcomings as men causes vice to momentarily lead them astray.

Footnotes

1Thanks to a loophole, sports derivatives contracts (effectively resellable bets), can be purchased in all 50 states through Crypto.com.

2A somewhat surprising fact concerning eligibility is that only about 36% of creator account applications are approved.

3OnlyFans does not release creator statistics to the public. Grok is using estimates provided by third party marketing organizations.

4The jewishness of pornography and finance is also overstated by third positionists. This will be addressed in a future article.

5 I do not discuss race-mixing as a topic in the body of this article because it is not even a vice in my opinion. No serious nationalist wants literally zero immigration for eternity, and as long as there is immigration there will be mixing. I for one, do not wish to get in the way of true love among the virtuous no matter the races involved. Absence of anti-miscegenation laws is a good thing from a nationalist standpoint. It signals objectivity about endogamy’s dominance as a biological norm. Despite the proliferation of both race-mixing propaganda and of genetic mutants more likely to mix, barely 10% of white people actually do, and there is a firm biological ceiling on the numbers who ultimately will when people are naturally free to choose their mates. The mutants skew left wing, and are thus of sub-replacement fertility. Race mixing actually enhances human biodiversity when sound immigration policy alone prevents it from being anything but the exception that proves the rule of endogamy. As with any form of experimentation there are negative side effects such as limited donation tissue compatibility. This can be mitigated by legalizing tissue sales. Health insurers can also play a role by charging higher premiums to those of mixed race. Only civil rights and certain privacy regulations currently prevent this.

Attacks on mixed-race couples, are counterproductive be they legislative or not. They alienate many key allies in more cosmopolitan spheres. Part of this alienation is the spurious scientific claims wignats make, such as claiming that a mixed-race child is less biologically related to his parents than a random unmixed child from their respective races. This is a basic conflation of haplotype, which is always 50% from each parent, with population genotype. It’s really just a tautology: “A mixed child’s ancestors comprise different races, while his unmixed parents’ and their coethnics’ ancestors comprise the same race.” Race may be an extended family, but it is still vastly different from immediate family. Inbreeding is literally vital for the former yet often deadly to the latter.

618 U.S.C. § 922(g)(4)

Sources

iMatsuzawa, Kyutaro and Arnesen, Emily Sports Betting Amplifies Emotional Cues & Intimate Partner Violence. Sep 27, 2024 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4938642

ii“Should Sports Be Illegal?” by Simon Laird 1/31/2025 https://simonlaird.substack.com/p/should-sports-be-illegal

iiiG. Schmidt & U Clement. “Does Peace Prevent Homosexuality?” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7560931/

iv“Prostitution in the Middle Ages” https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/society/sex/prostitution.php

vAquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologica: Secunda Secundae Partis (Second Part of the Second Part), Question 10, Article 11

vi Adam Elenbaas interveiw with Marnia Robinson 06/27/2028
https://web.archive.org/web/20080627090833/https://realitysandwich.com/finding_peace_between_our_sheets/

vii“Porn Addiction is Fake” by Deep Left Analysis. 02/04/2026 https://substack.com/inbox/post/149084042

viiihttps://freespeechunion.org/protest-footage-blocked-as-online-safety-act-comes-into-force/

ix“Pornography Use Could Lead to Addiction and Was Associated With Reproductive Hormone Levels and Semen Quality: A Report From the MARHCS Study in China” Zhihong Cui 1,†, Min Mo 2,†, Qing Chen 2, Xiaogang Wang 2, Huan Yang 2, Niya Zhou 2, Lei Sun 2, Jinyi Liu 2, Lin Ao 2, Jia Cao 2,* 2/10/2021 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8461095/

x“How Prevalent Is Pornography?” Daniel Cox, Beatrice Lee, and Dana Popky 5/3/2023

xi Blocker Jr, Jack S. “Did Prohibition Really Work? Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation” (American Journal of Public Health, 2006) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1470475/

xii“Alcohol Prohibition and Cirrhosis” Angela K. Dills, Jeffrey A. Miron 07/01/2004

xiiiMark Thornton, “Alcohol Prohibition Was A Failure”. Cato Institute, July 17, 1991 • Policy Analysis No. 157,https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/alcohol-prohibition-was-failure

xiv Richard Cowan, “How the Narcs Created Crack,” National Review, December 5, 1986, pp. 30–31.

xvMark Thornton, “The Potency of Illegal Drugs,” Auburn University working paper, 1986; and Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition.

xviIrving Fisher, Prohibition at Its Worst (New York: Alcohol Information Committee, 1927) pp 28-29

xvii
“Americans knew their booze was poisoned—and drank it anyway” by Isabel Ravenna 04/10/2025

xviii“Psychedelic Drugs – Ancient European Evidence” by Tom Metcalfe https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/psychedelic-drugs-ancient-europe-evidence-menorca

xix“Ancient Europeans Took Hallucinogenic Drugs 3,000 Years Ago

“ By Sarah Kuta 4-10/2023 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-european-hallucinogenic-drugs-hair-strands-180981956/

xx“Did the ancient Greeks use drugs to find God?

“ Interview with Brian Muraresku. 5/24/2024 https://www.wpr.org/religion/did-the-ancient-greeks-use-drugs-to-find-god

xxi“Archaeologists Find Evidence of Hallucinogenic Drug in Ancient Rome”

By Elaine Velie. 2/11/2024 https://hyperallergic.com/871183/archaeologists-find-evidence-of-hallucinogenic-drug-in-ancient-rome/

xxii “The high life: Doing drugs with ancient Greeks and Romans” By Tim Brinkhof. 7/9/2022

xxiii“Magic Mushroom Cult: The Mysterious And Lost Rituals Of The Ancient Celts” By Nicole Buckler.

xxiv “Fly agaric mythology and folklore”

xxvMarc-Antoine Crocq”“History of cannabis and the endocannabinoid system”

“ 1 7/22/2020 in Dialogues Clin Neurosci https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7605027/

1. xxvi Herodotus. Histories. Vol. IV. 73–75.

xxvii Crocq ibid.

xxviii “The History of Cannabis Part 2: Medieval and Colonial Worlds.” 8/6/2022

1. xxix Clarke, R.; Merlin, M. (2016). Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany. University of California Press. p. 179. ISBN . Archived from the original on 15 April 2023. Retrieved 23 March 2023.

xxx Herndon, G. Melvin. “Hemp in Colonial Virginia.” Agricultural History, vol. 37, no. 2, Apr. 1963, pp. 86–93. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3740774.

xxxi

“ Tessa Robinson 1 2, Muhammad Usman Ali et. al. Risk-thresholds for the association between frequency of cannabis use and the development of psychosis: a systematic review and meta-analysis 1 10 11 Psychol. Med. 07/2023 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35321777/

xxxii Li, Z., Mukherjee, D., Duric, B. et al. Systematic review and meta-analysis on the effects of chronic peri-adolescent cannabinoid exposure on schizophrenia-like behaviour in rodents. Mol Psychiatry 30, 285–295 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02668-5

xxxiii Matthew Large, BSc(Med), MBBS, FRANZCP; Swapnil Sharma, MBBS, FRANZCP; Michael T. Compton, MD, MPH. Cannabis Use and Earlier Onset of Psychosis: A Systematic Meta-analysis. Arch Gen Psychiatry Published Online: June 6, 2011 ;68;(6):555-561. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/211301

xxxiv Suhas Ganesh, M.D., and Deepak Cyril D’Souza, M.D. Cannabis and Psychosis: Recent Epidemiological Findings Continuing the “Causality Debate. American Journal of Psychiatry

Volume 179, Number 1

xxxv Rajput J, Narahari S, Arif T, et al. (September 20, 2025) The Relationship Between Cannabis Use and Schizophrenia As a Risk Factor or For Its Therapeutic Potential: A Systematic Review of Evidence. Cureus 17(9): e92793. doi:10.7759/cureus.92793

xxxvi Vaucher, J., Keating, B., Lasserre, A. et al. Cannabis use and risk of schizophrenia: a Mendelian randomization study. Mol Psychiatry 23, 1287–1292 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2016.252

xxxvii “Jeff Sessions’ War on Marijuana Could Make the Opioid Crisis Worse” By Monica Hunter-Hart. 6/13/2017 https://www.inverse.com/article/32930-jeff-sessions-weed-war-drugs-heroin

xxxviii “Ex-deputy accused of planting drugs on Florida drivers is arrested“ By Eliott C. McLaughlin, 7/11/2019 https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/11/us/florida-deputy-arrested-planting-drugs-charges

xxxix “A New York Police Officer Was Caught on Camera Apparently Planting Marijuana in a Car – For the Second Time” By Alice Speri and Tom Mannon. 3/18/2020 https://theintercept.com/2020/03/18/nypd-misconduct-body-cameras-marijuana/

xl “Ex-Cop Alleges N.Y. Officers Planted Drugs On People” Interview with John Marzulli on All Things Considered. 10/14/2011 https://www.npr.org/2011/10/14/141362858/ex-cop-alleges-n-y-officers-planted-drugs-on-people

xli “Federal appeals court: Drug dog that’s barely more accurate than a coin flip is good enough” By Radley Balko 8/4/2015

xlii “Concerns Over High Potency THC Products Warrant Greater Education, Not Criminalization

“ By Paul Armentano. 8/22/2022 https://norml.org/blog/2022/08/22/norml-op-ed-concerns-over-high-potency-thc-products-warrant-greater-education-not-criminalization/

xliiiLeo Beletsky, Corey S. Davis,Today’s fentanyl crisis: Prohibition’s Iron Law, revisited, International Journal of Drug Policy, Volume 46, 2017, Pages 156-159, ISSN 0955-3959, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0955395917301548

xlivMark Gius. “The Effects of Civil and Criminal Forfeitures on Drug-Related Arrests.” Justice Policy Journal, Volume 15, Number 1 (Spring, 2018) https://www.cjcj.org/media/import/documents/the_effects_of_civil_and_criminal_forfeitures_on_drug_related_arrests.pdf

xlv“Civil asset forfeiture: seven horror stories” By AFP Staff. 4/30/2021

xlvi“Civil asset forfeiture: seven horror stories” By AFP Staff. 4/30/2021

xlvii “Is Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization a Failure or Success? The Answer Isn’t So Simple” By Gregory P. Shea. 9/5/2023

xlviii“5 Years After: Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results” by Brian Vastag. 4/7/2009https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/portugal-drug-decriminalization/

xlixHenderson, Mitchell C. A Man Beyond His Mission. 2019Pg 401.

lIbidpp 263-264

A number of years ago I was privileged enough to ask Charlie Kirk a question in person, though at the time I merely regarded myself as fortunate. This was during the groyper wars against Conservatism Inc, when, at the behest of Andrew Anglin, I attended one of Kirk’s events, where in the Q&A I and others like me challenged Kirk from the right on issues such as his then support for open borders and Israel no matter the consequences. Kirk at the time was little more than a mouthpiece for the corrupt conservative establishment, a pinata for the hard right to make an example of. To his great credit, however, over time he adjusted his views in the years since to become increasingly realistic regarding difficult truths of our age. To his equally great credit he never compromised his principles or positivity, unlike many others on the right.

Kirk’s assassination was a shock in the moment, but unsurprising in the zeitgeist, one in which the sitting president had survived multiple attempts on his life in his election campaign the previous year. Such acts have a silver lining: They result from the efficacy of both figures. Both Kirk and Trump were and are eroding two key bases of support for the left: The young and the non-white. Through his class, sincerity, and command of facts and logic, Kirk exposed the viciousness of his leftist attackers on college campuses all across the country, often by sheer contrast with his goodness. His approach mobilized millions of young people to fight back against those hellbent on destroying their future. I know that millions of others were as saddened and angered as I was when hearing he’d been shot. In prescience of the eeriest sort possible, one of Kirk’s last tweets was this.

The barbaric murder of Iryna Zarutska only a few days before had sparked national outrage. Acts like that committed by Decarlos Brown are nothing new; they have been common for decades, as they are the direct result of that great communist cause celebre, civil rights. What is new however, is that perhaps better than anyother committed recently, this murder was captured in explicit, horrific detail on video, including even smoking gun evidence of racial motivation: audio of Brown saying “I got that white girl.” That video, wherein Brown stabbed Iryna in the throat, together with the closeup video of Kirk taking Tyler Robinson’s bullet in the throat, drove home with thermonuclear force this message: The time for attempting to talk the left into decency is over, and we cannot allow the left power in our country.

There is something that I’ve long held in common with Kirk: A passion for debate with progressivists. While Kirk focused on authoritarian left progressivists in SJWs, I engaged with the progressivist camps adjacent to mine in the libertarian right: the authoritarian right and left libertarians. Having little in the way of notoriety however, my engagement amounted to little more than self-indulgence. Being terminally online, arguing, and complaining is all they really do, so engaging with them, no matter how many arguments you win, actually plays into their hands. Our enemy is the one Kirk confronted head on: The authoritarian leftists who hold the actual power. It is no more productive to argue with them if doing so mobilizes no one to our cause as Kirk was able to do. It is for this reason that in honor of Kirk’s memory I will no longer debate with progressivists that do not elevate my organization's notoriety. 100% of interaction with them must directly further the cause of destroying them in real life.

The first enemies we need to deal with are the blackpillers, demoralizers, and “nothing ever happens-ists” who purport to be on our side. Their expectation is that if an event does not result in us getting everything we want immediately, it is of no significance. This is so pitifully ridiculous that the best way to deal with such people is to ignore them. If the events of last week have not roused them then nothing ever will. The next enemies are the remaining cucks in the conservative and GOP establishment who plea for “unity” with the left, especially those who opportunistically exploit Kirk’s sacrifice to try and contain the “extremists” in us. They are to be primaried and defunded, and we shall proceed in full with cancelling the left; whimpering appeals to false equivalence notwithstanding. Those remaining need to pull out all the stops to push Trump across the Rubicon and end this farce we call liberal democracy. While it is critical to honor Kirk’s memory with potent symbolism such as Lomez’ proposal to name a national park in Utah for him, there is also a risk that Republicans will content themselves with mere symbolism rather than striking while the iron is hot and taking bold, decisive action to crush our political enemies. Something that is immediately actionable is invoking the Communist Control Act of 1954 to dissolve the Democratic Socialists of America, with which Tyler Robinson was affiliated, along with Antifa, BLM, and all other like organizations. When Democratic Party members obstruct this process, of which there will be many, they too can be arrested. Through long term attrition of this kind the Democratic Party will eventually be hollowed out, leaving only puppet opposition whose identity is preserving middle class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. For far too long conservatives have moaned “imagine if the roles were reversed!” This is how we actually reverse them. Charlie and and family deserve no less.

1. Neither individual values, nor group tendencies thereof, have to be justified.

2. The inherent subjectivity of values necessitates property as a norm to peacefully resolve the universal problem of scarcity.

3. Liberty is the value of peace. Reaction is the value of order. Peace and order are unified by the property norm.

4. Additional values such as sanctity, loyalty, and tradition are indispensable to the maintenance of peace and order.

5. Actualizing our values requires power. We use all power at our disposal, however less than optimal the present system may be, to more closely approximate our estimation of what an optimal system would produce.

6. Loyalty to our in-group is in our individual interest. At the same time, there is no metaphysical group right that justifies violating the property rights of any of that group’s individual members. Individualist mania however, is no more a justification for violation than a collectivist one.

7. Character is paramount because successful organizations are built on trust. Perfect ideological alignment means nothing if a would-be member of our organization is untrustworthy.

8. Ideology however, is a significant part of the character of a political activist. Proponents of tyrannical ideologies, no matter how much they purport to promote any of our values, cannot be tolerated.

9. For the preceding two reasons membership is open to those of good character who see property violation by the state as a necessary evil at best, and therefore believe that the permissible scope of such action must be heavily circumscribed.

10. As the preceding principles indicate, meaningful progress in the present toward a much freer, peaceful, and orderly society is more important to us than purity concerning what the best possible system producing such a society actually is. We focus on making small but continual steps toward that goal, secure in the knowledge that over time they will accrue to great improvement of our society.

In Part I I repudiated the view of fascism that Chase Rachels and I shared when he published “Fascism is a Step Towards Liberty” in 2018. Had Rachels himself done so, I probably would not have bothered. Not only has he not, however, his view of fascism has grown significantly more favorable since. Based on recent Twitter and Telegram conversations with him, he now not only believes that fascism is necessary to halting the Great Replacement, but that libertarian activism is not currently worthwhile for related reasons. Rachels, to the extent he is still politically active, has therefore now thrown his lot in with the fascist movement, while to his credit remaining a destinational libertarian. This part, therefore, will explain why I have done something quite different.

In Part I I described my experience as part of a fascist organization, in which I realized that even the aristocracy among fascists are pigs. That organization, which was primarily online, was not the only one I associated with, however. A friend of mine became a member of NSC-131, a New England-based street activism organization. At the time, NSC stood for Nationalist Social Club – Anti-Communist Action, a direct counter to Antifa. Although I was never a member I did meet them in person several times. The leader and I got along well despite our opposing views on political economy. I liked that despite the obvious reference to national socialism the organization's name, the cheeky twist suggested a big tent approach focused on opposition to globalism and communism rather than promotion of socialism but for white people. Despite my doing them several favors, my friend brought to my attention that many of them were talking ill of me behind my back, partly because I'm half-jewish, which I've never been secretive about, but mainly because I'm an outspoken opponent of socialism, national socialism being no exception. I have always welcomed criticism, provided that it is honest and straightforward. Badmouthing behind my back, however, suggests inability to cope with one's sacred cows being challenged. A good nationalist embraces good-faith argument over political economy because that's how policies that are good for the nation are brought to light. He does not treat his political economy as religious dogma. I used to be a classical liberal but logic and evidence changed my mind. Despite the difference in socioeconomic character between NSC and the secret society I was a member of, what they had in common was a cultural of passive-aggressive brittleness when it came to legitimate differences of opinion. Many in nationalist circles try to shut down arguments over economics and religion, claiming that they're trying to stop “infighting”. Some of these attempts are well-intentioned but counterproductive because economics and religion are far too important to ever stop fighting about. Furthermore, some of the most effective fighting forces in history have had combat training so fierce as to be deadly. Ferocity in good faith combat is as virtuous on the ideological level as it is on the physical level. Many of these suppression attempts are not well-intentioned, however, because the people behind them who say “we all need to stop infighting” really mean “we all need to stop infighting and agree with me”. They do not want to honestly persuade opponents into agreement, however, but intend to simply impose their views on their opponents by force when the revolution goes kinetic. We see this even within exclusively fascist movements in instances like the Night of the Long Knives. Their insistence that “we don't have time to argue about this” is that of a hustler. It is the moral duty of conscientious nationalists not to let our movement be taken for a ride, because that ride can be on a road to perdition. Indicative of this, NSC has since changed their name to National Socialist Club and their tagline to “anti-capitalist, anti-communist”.

Let's explore the difference in character between the fascist and libertarian movements in greater depth. The first thing to point out is that what matters most is policy. It is theoretically possible for a society to be ruled exclusively by government of left-libertarians but its policies will still be significantly better for the nation than fascist ones because the policies are grounded in fundamental facts of reality. Although the personal values of such government's officials would be unhealthy, the policies of such government would be almost identical to that of government of right-wing libertarians because there is really only one core libertarian policy set. A difference in immigration policy would be that a left-libertarian government would treat the right of invitation as equal to the right of exclusion. This vulnerability would be countered by large scale covenants prohibiting invitation of undesirables, which any libertarian government is obligated to enforce. This would be somewhat more costly than a blanket prohibition on high-risk foreigners or a system where property values were protected (including from ethnic diversity of any kind) by default. It would be far from ruinous, however, and less costly than fascist immigration policies that likely inhibit healthful cosmopolitanism and restrict natives from leaving when it suits them. So even on the issue that most divides left libertarians from right, the one that fascists have the greatest basis for attacking the libertarian movement on, left-libertarians would ultimately be better than fascists.

Rachels and libertarians like him may counter that the preceding is a destination, not the severely sub-optimal interim we are dealing with today. Under conditions of statism, Rachels would point out, left-libertarians treat state-owned property as unowned, to which therefore foreigners have as much right of access as natives. This means that left-libertarians who have policymaking influence will do nothing to restrict access to such property. As demented as their view of state property relating to immigration is, it is not especially significant compared to their support for absolute freedom of association. Just as in the destinational scenario, people can, if left-libertarians have their way with the Civil Rights Act, form covenants that restrict the property available to be sold to foreigners to such a small amount that mass immigration is made prohibitively expensive to prospective immigrants. It means very little that immigrants have unlimited access to roads and parks when hardly anyone will hire or house them. Left-libertarians of course, would work to marketize common areas as well, which would benefit natives much more than foreigners because the former's vastly greater resources would enable them to purchase the bulk of the offerings and thus put common areas under direct control of non-state actors. This would be a significant shift in control from a group that hates white people to people who don't. This control would shift to a better informed population as well, because government indoctrination through the Cathedral would end. The welfare magnet is also something left-libertarians would do away with. Under such a regime, more undesirable foreigners would be invited than under our interpretation of the property norm, but not in numbers that come anywhere close to being problematic.

The preceding scenario is unrealistic but useful as a thought experiment because if we can show that an unrealistically worst case scenario regarding libertarian rule is still preferable to fascism, the more realistic scenario becomes highly preferable. Left-libertarian rule is unrealistic because (1), left-libertarians are allergic to power, and (2) left-libertarians are a decided minority. Two-thirds of libertarians are right-of-center to some degree. Recently, perhaps due to exposure to neoreactionary thought, right-libertarians have wised up to the realities of power. As a result the Libertarian Party's Mises Caucus has pivoted to a kingmaker strategy where we leverage the power of our willingness to switch votes to reward our friends and punish our enemies both inside and outside the Republican Party. This strategy has proven highly successful with respect to Trump's 2024 campaign. In forsaking the LP nominee in favor of Trump, the then party chair Angela McArdle was able to extract concessions from Trump, notably the appointment of a libertarian to his cabinet and freeing Ross Ulbricht. The true libertarian turned out to be McArdle herself, though a number of Trump's other picks have strong libertarian leanings, particularly with respect to the departments they've been nominated for. There is also of course DOGE, which Ron Paul himself is advising. As of the time of writing DOGE is auditing the IRS itself and has indicated the Fed is likely next. Trump himself has in a short time cut a good number of federal staff and has effectively shut down USAID, one of the worst offenders in facilitating the Great Replacement. He has also cut funding to the South African government and offered Afrikaners refuge. A recent small but highly significant win has been the rehiring of a DOGE staffer who was doxxed and fired over tweets where he said he wanted the Civil Rights Act repealed, a eugenic immigration policy, that he wouldn't marry outside his ethnicity even if paid to, and that H-1B Indians should be replaced by LLM AI and sent home. He also tweeted that he wouldn't mind if both Israel and Gaza were nuked off the face of the earth and “I was racist before it was cool”. Trump, along with JD Vance and Elon Musk, supported his rehiring, striking a massive blow against leftist cancel culture. All three who came to his aid are much closer to libertarians than to fascists. Trump and Musk hold Javier Milei in especially high regard. Milei's victory is concrete proof that libertarians can attain power even in the unfavorable conditions of liberal democracy, and his achievements this far despite lacking parliamentary support have shown that libertarians can wield it effectively. The same is true on a smaller scale with the Free State Project in New Hampshire.

On the subject of wielding power, an important clarification is in order: There are some who claim that that fascism is necessary because in order to defeat the left the right needs to wield power, wielding power is authoritarianism, and fascism is right-wing authoritarianism. The fallacy lies in the second statement. The truth is that the wielding of power is not a defining feature of authoritarianism at all. This false notion comes about because of a basic conflation of the descriptive and prescriptive. Many people, including many libertarians and most fascists, define authoritarianism as “when political authority acts forcefully”. This uselessly vague descriptive definition came into existence because many words with the “ism” suffix are purely descriptive and not at all ideological, words such as “magnetism”, for instance. Obviously libertarianism is ideological, however, so in a political context so too must be authoritarianism. The degree to which non-libertarian regimes are anti-liberty, however, is such a broad spectrum that “non-libertarian” is also too vague of a definition of authoritarianism. We have discovered a helpful clue in the preceding deduction, however: “anti-liberty”. While also too vague by itself to be the right definition, it highlights the inherent conflict between libertarianism and authoritarianism. The reason for the conflict is the difference in how these ideologies treat conflict between liberty and authority in a political context: Libertarianism holds that where there is a conflict between liberty (as we define it) and political authority (especially the authority of a monopolistic state), liberty ought to be deferred to. Authoritarianism holds that authority ought to be deferred to when it conflicts with anything else. The difference in how each ideology defines conflicting opposition is a significant asymmetry that authoritarians exploit through the vague definition: Whereas libertarianism applies only to the domain of law, authoritarianism can apply to all domains involving authority. A father who makes his son chop firewood with little time left over for play is also authoritarian, but what he is infringing on is his son's freedom, not liberty as libertarians define it, because the latter is not applicable unless his son were worked to the point of injury severe enough to be considered child abuse. Authoritarians gloss over this crucial distinction, as well as the distinction between legitimate authority in non-political domains and illegitimate authority in government. It should be obvious that authority in government and other domains is necessary for libertarianism to be implemented. Libertarianism is a legal philosophy, and authority inheres in law enforcement. Law is nothing without enforcement, and enforcement requires the wielding of power. Given the proper definition of authoritarianism it should also be obvious that authoritarianism opposes legitimate authority. Legitimate authority arises under the conditions of free competition that liberty creates. A legitimate authority does not abuse his or their authority. Whether state power is concentrated in one person or dispersed among many is irrelevant where the pure philosophy of libertarianism is concerned. Many mistakenly regard monocracy as authoritarian. In cases where liberty in property is subordinated to authority, this is abuse by libertarian definition. A “strong man” who wields power against tyrannical abuses of power, both within the state and outside, is anti-authoritarian, and if he does so consistently he is libertarian.

Having properly defined authoritarianism, we now need to ask what kind of person is attracted to the right-wing version of it. Does being right-wing mitigate the pathology? It does not. When I was in my fash-friendly phase I liked to flatter myself with the notion that “right vs left” really means “right vs wrong”. Having the benefit of further reflection informed by Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Framework, I now recognize that right and left are the political manifestations of the masculine and feminine respectively. Because politics is a domain of violence, it is natural for the masculine instinct to dominate this domain. Its dominance should certainly not be total, however. History has seen many competent female rulers, and certain feminine values such as mercy are crucial counterbalance to masculine ones. Fascism is where this counterbalance is lost. Without the anchoring of a proper object of protection (a feminine concept) men do not properly mature. Fascism is the ideology of an immature male. The neoliberal globalism of today is that of an immature woman, a feminized kind of fascism. Although fascism is to a degree a reaction against comparatively feminine ideologies, compared to the libertarian movement fascism does not even differentiate itself as more masculine. According to ChatGPT, between 20-40% of fascists come from the left. Due to ChatGPT's leftist political bias this is likely a low estimate. In National Socialist Germany, the percentage of SA recruits that were former communists is estimated to be between 70 and 77% and of the SS, 63%1. Regardless, the primary concern here is moral character. While ideology is not a 1:1 determinate of character, it is often highly predictive. The greater a part of someone's overall identity, the more predictive it becomes. Fascism is a right-instinct variant of progressivism, and it is unreasonable to think that right-wing progressivists are of any better character than their left-wing counterparts. If anything, they are worse. Left-progressivism has long been the thoroughly dominant ideology of the most influential Western institutions, so nearly everyone is a left-progressivist by default. For most of those “on the left” today, however, their political views are not a significant part of their identity. Fascists today however, are hyper-political almost to a man. To adopt an ideology that is so taboo to left-progressivist authoritarianism that dominates our culture, yet itself is also authoritarian, is the behavior of someone consumed by lust for power. This is the reason why early adopters of white nationalist ideology are adversely selected. In earlier times when the cultural association between white nationalism and authoritarianism was much stronger, for someone to adopt white nationalism usually meant amenability to authoritarianism. It is important to remember that for however many bad people are in power, there are always a comparable number of enemies of the regime who are also bad. Jared Taylor has observed that early American Renaissance conferences were filled with “weirdos”. This is basically a euphemism for neonazi thugs. Encouragingly, Taylor has also observed that the quality of AmRen attendees has risen dramatically in recent years. Even more encouragingly, a soft form of white nationalism has become normalized on the American right. People like Charlie Kirk now echo talking points that his groyper critics (including me) leveled at him only a few years ago. They do not yet believe that American nationality is limited exclusively to whites but they do acknowledge the importance of maintaining a white majority because whiteness is part of our heritage and conservation of our heritage is an end unto itself. In this way, basic nationalism and civic nationalism are not inherently antagonistic.

It was not only my experience with fascist activist groups that caused me to realize just how bad fascists were but also extensive interaction with fascists on free speech social media. When I brought up why fascist policies are counterproductive to right-wing values, I received as much personal invective from them as attempt at actual argument. It was like a game show: “Today, it's time to find out: Are you a Jew...Fed...or Faggot?!”. That I happen to be half-jewish is irrelevant here because virtually none of my accusers actually knew this or had any real reason to believe it. I also made it clear in these arguments that I was just as much of a nationalist for white people as anyone who calls himself a white nationalist. It often went beyond epithets into the territory of wishing opponents of their authoritarianism harm. Rachels and other libertarian apologists for fascism (yes there are such people; it pains me to admit I used to be one of them) claim that such viciousness is not representative of fascists on the whole. I asked several chatbots to do a survey on this using this prompt:

Estimate fascists attitudes toward libertarians by percentage in the following categories:

Positive

Critical (has significant disagreement with libertarian ideas but does not attack libertarians personally)

Hostile (desires to harm libertarians)

ChatGPT when prompted to survey fascist attitudes toward libertarians returns following the following conservative2 estimates based on historical and ideological trends:

Attitude | Percentage

Positive | ~5%

Critical | ~50%

Hostile | ~45%

I asked Twitter's Grok as well, instructing it to use only tweets. Here are the results:

Attitude | Percentage

Positive | ~15%

Critical | ~60%

Hostile | ~25%

Although sourcing tweets does have the advantage of focusing on what today's fascists express, we must bear in mind that Twitter is quite censorious of fascists, resulting in a self-selection of milder fascists, and the genuinely hostile among them self-moderate to some degree to avoid bans.

I also asked Google's Gemini. Gemini is the furthest left of the three, but what was interesting is that partly because of this, it seemed, based on its explanation of its method, to attempt to measure not what fascists say they believe about libertarians, but what they believe in their hearts. It inferred attitudes based on the principles of fascism and the historical behavior of its adherents. Here are its results:

Attitude | Percentage

Positive | <5%

Gemini: It's highly unlikely that fascists would hold genuinely positive views of libertarianism. Any apparent "positive" attitudes would likely be tactical or based on misinterpretations. For example, some fascists might temporarily align with libertarians on specific issues (e.g., opposition to certain regulations) for strategic purposes, but their underlying goals would remain fundamentally different. Also, some fascists might co-opt libertarian rhetoric for their own purposes.

Critical | 25%

Gemini: Some fascists might engage in critical analysis of libertarian ideas, acknowledging certain points while ultimately rejecting them. This would be a minority, and the critiques would generally focus on the perceived weakness of libertarianism in providing national strength. They may see some economic points as useful, as long as it benefits the state.

Hostile | ~70%+

Gemini: Fascists view libertarianism as a direct threat to their core principles. They see individual liberty as disruptive to national unity and state control. They would likely wish libertarians harm, and seek to suppress libertarian ideas.

The results when viewed in the context of their methodology show a crucial phenomenon we must consider: Fascist deception. My own experience within a fascist organization awakened me to this. Fascists will feign friendship with libertarians because they can extract labor and resources from us this way. They will initially emphasize the areas of agreement and downplay the fundamental incompatibility. Over time, however, they will casually assert a bad policy as something that is taken for granted that everyone agrees with, and when the token libertarian speaks up and says “no that's wrong and here's why”, their true contempt for libertarians is revealed. It is telling that the segment of fascists who do not currently express hostility toward libertarians do not express hostility to the hostile fascists either. When push comes to shove, they will at best refuse to restrain the openly hostile. This is because they regard right-wing libertarians as useful idiots to be disposed of when we cease to be useful to them. Because authoritarians will never share power with us, we can never share power with authoritarians.

Fascists are not of course monolithically evil, but neither of course are Zionists. Laura Loomer has spoken out against white replacement and has criticized even many within Trump's administrations for anti-American policies such as H-1B visas. More recently Trump fired several members of the National Security Council reportedly at her behest. As Muslims become more numerous in the West, so too do the number of jews who feel threatened by the presence of their semitic rivals. While most jews can be treated the same as white leftist ideologues who will not respond rationally, a minority will, and many among this minority will be wealthy financiers who will feel threatened by Islam's prohibition against lending at interest. Certain fascists such as some within the TRS network however, oppose the deportation of Muslims who demonstrate against Zionism. The philosemitic BAP-Yarvin-Thiel network by contrast brings much-needed sophistication to the right, and more importantly significant influence, especially through JD Vance. Former Identity Europa leader Patrick Casey has rejected wignattery for reasonable paleoconservatism. Recently he published an article reminding the right that Trump's deportation of leftist anti-Israel arabs is to our advantage because they are also anti-white, even if Trump's reasons for doing so aren't ideal. Trump's more based successors can add anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-white, and anti-Christian as reasons later. There is already movement in this direction with the State Department's new directive to monitor employees for anti-Christian bias. While jewish power is waning due to technological shift and the receding of World War II from memory, it remains and will remain quite significant for the remainder of our lifetimes, and much more significant than that of fascists who regard economic success as jewish grifting. While money by no means guarantees power it is a prerequisite for it, and it is therefore counterproductive to drive away potential donors. Even if you believe that there is no solution within the current political system, you still need money for to prep for race war. Obviously if race war arrives jewish donors would have no recourse anyway. Walt Bismark has pointed out that competing with jews makes whites stronger, which is one reason why he allows them in his highly successful Tortuga Society, of which I am a member. The political order we right-libertarians strive for will greatly amplify this; extracting maximum productivity from jews while making their shenanigans illegal where expedient. Fascists would throw this away out of spite.

Fascist antipathy toward economic success is evident in that they often do not even bother to smear it as jewish especially where it is enjoyed by positive influencers on the right. They take the profitability of such influencing as prima facie evidence of grift. The attacks on Walt Bismark for the profitable business features of his Tortuga Society are a textbook instance of this. This raises the very significant matter that economic success is essential to political success. Again, obviously it isn't everything, as Trump beat Harris soundly despite having been at a significant spending disadvantage. There is still a large amount of funding that a presidential candidate needs to win however, just as there is a substantial amount of funding we require in our own lives to be successful as activists. When we're working multiple on-site jobs just to get by we don't have the time to join local boards or campaign for aligned candidates. When we don't have capital to start businesses that hire our guys becomes much harder for them to spread our message without fear of employment cancellation. Fascists however, not only support a number of the existing measures that cripple our economy such as monopolized currency, socialist infrastructure, make-work programs, public health, and government housing, they support additional measures that would cripple us much further such as heavy protectionism, rent controls, minimum wage, credit card interest caps, student loan forgiveness, and mandatory family leave. Many fascists actually celebrated Biden's eviction moratorium. Fascists dismiss these concerns as “mere economics”, trying to minimize them as “materialistic”. It should be obvious that these concerns have relatively little to do with accumulation of physical stuff. Even for weapons there are only so many you can carry on your person at once. Economics is life. The most scarce resource of all is time. Every action we take is a trade away of alternative actions in time. As Randian hero Ellis Wyatt said:

“What's wealth but the means of expanding one's life? There's two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster. And that's what I'm doing: I'm manufacturing time."

Given that time is money, it is trivial to see that money is also time. Demographically time is against us and we need to buy as much time as we can.

That time is against us is used as an argument that we should accept fascism as an emergency measure. This makes no sense because the property norm is more important in an emergency where the need for mitigation of scarcity is even greater, which is why laws against price gouging are so heinous. Rachels has countered this with a thought experiment at the level of individuals:

Suppose you're hiking in an arid park with your child and he gets bitten by a rattlesnake. Nearby is a man with an ATV. The nearest hospital is far enough away that your child will likely die without motorized transport. The man refuses you the use of his ATV, however.

Rachels claims that the emergency justifies commandeering the ATV despite the property violation this entails. He also claims that this translates to the level of civilization. Both claims are dubious. First let us look at the thought experiment critically. The man's refusal is not even necessarily immoral. If you put yourself in an environment where there is a significant chance of snakebite but a small chance that any other forms of motorized transport but his are available in such an event, then it is arguably you who is ultimately guilty of child endangerment. This is because there is a significant chance that there would be no transport available at all. The very reason why the man is riding an ATV in the first place could be because the park is too snake-infested to safely travel on foot. For this reason he might reasonably suspect that your predicament is a ruse to steal his vehicle. Perhaps rattlesnakes are in reality rare in the park. The ATV owner may not know this however. Regardless of your own degree of culpability, your child is innocent. Your child's innocence is not however, a legal claim on anyone's property. There plenty of abusive parents in the world but their evil can never be a legal claim on the property of others. Most abuse in the world is not even a reasonable moral claim on anyone else. To concede this premise would entail acceptance of third world refugees.

Let us now stipulate that the ATV owner's position is morally adversarial to ours. It is still not automatic that you are morally entitled to commandeer the ATV. If you are a prominent political figure in a libertarian society, you arguably should hold yourself to higher moral standard in terms of promoting ethics associated with libertarianism (not promoting libertarianism per se; I explain this distinction in the next paragraph). An example of this would be sentencing your own son to death for committing a capital crime, as holds the legend surrounding the 3^rd century B.C. Roman general Regulus. Note that I did not specify adult son either, as someone who is depraved enough to commit such a crime in childhood is arguably even more likely to be a repeat offender than an adult. Obviously there is a stark difference between the guilt of a child in this scenario and the innocence of the child in Rachels'. The point is that there is arguably an actual greater good than the continuation of your individual bloodline. Although this could be taken as collectivist (and Rachels is accepting of collectivism anyway), this is also consistent with individualist and actualist ethics. In setting a example in the most extreme circumstance of commitment to ethical principle a libertarian leader helps minimize the likelihood of statism's reestablishment. Rachels as a Christian holds deontological ethics. Deontology is an article of faith, but faith is a virtue and even though “inherently wrong” is a contradiction in worldly terms, it is obviously also of immense societal value for its potentates to treat violation of the libertarian property norm as such. The great majority of people who reject deontology are soulless neoliberals and globalists. The ATV owner's behavior would also need to be punished by non-invasive means. By definition, such a potentate would also have great ability to make an example of the miscreant.

Most libertarians would say that they would commit the crime of commandeering the ATV to save their child's life and turn themselves in immediately after to pay restitution. Note that we do not in any way exempt the action from the category of a crime. The error Rachels implies with the thought experiment is that an essential part of libertarianism is it being a personal moral philosophy. Libertarianism does not entail a value judgment on the commandeering per se. The only value judgment that libertarianism consists of is a legal one, which is that all victims of property violation are entitled to restitution from the criminal, and if restitution is not made, the criminal forfeits the right to exist within that society. Punishment in such a case can be either execution or exile. Because we make no exception to libertarianism proper at the level of the interpersonal with the prosecution of the commandeering, there is not even any exception at this level that could so much as potentially justify a massive contravention of libertarianism at the level of civilization. We make laws based on everyday norms, not extreme exceptions. Even if it were a genuine exception, it does not at all follow that fascism should be supported in the current emergency. Because fascists are of such low character, any support they receive from us would likely be squandered and they will fail to defeat the globalists anyway, if the National Justice Party is any indication. Rachels should at least consider the possibility that the true stakes are zeroth positionism or bust.

Rachels' thought experiment is one among several stress tests of libertarian commitment to property protection. Here is another:

Suppose you're standing on the balcony at the top of a tall building. The balcony collapses and you grab a flag pole below the balcony. There is no balcony below the flag pole, however there is a window of condo at the same level. Is the condo owner entitled to prevent you from trespassing in his condo by swinging from the flag pole into it?

Under standard criteria of proportionality, the owner is not permitted to thwart your crime of attempted trespass because that would kill or seriously injure you. The restitution he is entitled to is small because the crime is small. These scenarios do not prove any exception to libertarianism; they at best refute Christopher Cantwell's proposal that all violations of the non-invasion principle should carry the death penalty3.

Rachels' premise is collectivist survivalism. I do not share this premise, however I can easily envision a national culture of hard social Darwinism where the legal right of property owners to defend their property always supersedes the moral right of personal preservation. In such a culture the condo owner could prevent your entry. This culture would be more conducive to survivalism than the humanitarian one Rachels advocates in his thought experiment because it would select for a high degree of risk-aversion and a low degree of the kind of empathy that could be weaponized into refugee acceptance. It would in effect create a culture more like that of the Chinese.

Whites should not be like the Chinese. The Chinese, and all other peoples should be more like us on an ethical level. To the extent other races wrong us they should be punished. What we should not do is punish ourselves with collectivist ethics. Actualist ethics are what makes us great. Imposition of fascism is the ultimate betrayal of our grand history of freedom fighting, from the Indo-Europeans to the American War for Independence. All civilized societies that have been the closest approximations of a libertarian order have been white societies. The leader of NSC-131 once remarked to me that he unironically desired a “white North Korea”. If we become North Korea, that would be the most Pyrrhic victory against globalism imaginable.

The issues of our time can be reasonably categorized as demographics and everything else. Because demographics is concretized in policies such as immigration and anti-discrimination law it is easy for nationalists to forget just how important the “everything else” category is in the aggregate. A point of agreement between right-libertarians and fascists is that America in its current geopolitical form is unsustainable. Fascists will even identify some significant factors within the “everything else” category as contributing to this. The solutions they propose are counterproductive however and when you explain why they at best dismiss the category as insignificant and at worst will treat you as an enemy despite near perfect agreement on the demographic category. Most fascists desire a breakup even though this seems to runs counter to their defining agenda of political centralization. Granted, the kind of centralization they desire is primarily over a macro-linguistic national group, but the imperialism of historical fascist regimes undermines their attempts to differentiate themselves from the centralizing tendencies of the current regime. Support of fascists also undermines credibility with conservatives who are of better character. Fascism goes not only against our heritage in the War for Independence but also the frontier spirit that characterizes the historic American nation. Conservatives may have been slower to adopt identity politics for their nation but their reluctance was mostly for healthful, individualist reasons, reasons in keeping with our national character.

Europeans are more socialist than Americans, but it is a bad idea to support fascism there as well. One reason is because Europeans are more socially liberal than Americans, but a more important reason is that fascism's centralizing agenda runs counter to the goal of breaking up the EU. It's a much more consistent position to want to undo the unifications of Germany and Italy as well than it is to stop at the level of their EU membership. Politically savvy pro-liberty politicians in Europe can emphasize the unfairness of their welfare states' redistribution to aliens, while subtly promoting market reforms that will “save” entitlement programs from insolvency. Just because Europeans don't value freedom as much as we do doesn't mean that freedom is any less guaranteed to improve their situation in objective ways.

What does supporting versus not supporting fascism mean? Supporting means giving fascists our labor and resources. Not supporting means withholding these. We don't get in fascists' way when they fight other socialist gangs on the street but we don't fund their legal defense of their fighting either. We run candidates everywhere we can regardless of whether fascists are also running. Few fascists will run for office in reality because they mostly don't believe in electoral solutions. The Republican party will therefore never become fascist at the level so the question of voting for any major fascist party is moot. As for the unlikely scenario where the choice is between a fascist and a left-libertarian, the choice would obviously depend on whether significant immigration reform is on the table.

Rachels has accused me of being excessively “ideological”. In truth no one is any more ideological than anyone else, because ideological just means wanting something in the big picture to be different from the status quo. Even those who think the status quo is otherwise perfect want others to stop trying to change the status quo. When people use the term “ideological” pejoratively they simply mean that they believe someone else's ideology to be less practical than theirs. Right-libertarianism is the most practical ideology. The practicality of libertarianism lies in its grounding in general realities of the human condition such as value subjectivity. The right-wing part of the worldview orients us toward the specific values that well-adjusted libertarians see both as means of implementing our legal system and as ends our legal system furthers. Of obvious significance to the matter of implementation is choosing which among other political factions we should support. The selection standard of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is too broad because as mentioned earlier there are always at least as many bad people who are enemies of a bad regime as there are bad people in that regime (there are also good people within bad regimes we should also avoid alienating). There are many good people who should not be supported due to incompetence. Just because there are a few good fascists does not mean that the policies they want to enact are any less destructive, so want to keep them from political power everywhere we can. Fascists are even more desperate now than they were in their original form and are correspondingly hostile to libertarians. The original fascists were quite hostile enough to classical liberals; today's fascists see libertarianism as an extreme form of classical liberalism. Despite this, I recognize that there are certain cases where fascists should not be ignored. In the scenario where they seize control of a region such as the Pacific Northwest it is rational for a faction like the Free Staters in New Hampshire to coordinate simultaneous secession from the Federal government. It is also sometimes expedient to posture as fascists in negotiating with leftists because they fear fascists more than anyone else. Fascists sometimes try to claim this as evidence that their ideology is strongest, but the reason leftists, the weakest of people, fear fascists is because they see themselves in them. Mad lust for power, no matter what the rationale, is a weakness because it is a kind of lack of self-control. It is also telling that neoliberals, who are more powerful and sophisticated than leftists, fear libertarians more than they do fascists. This is evident in this quote from Klaus Schwab:

"There is of course an anti-System which is called Libertarianism, which means to tear down everything which creates some kind of influence of government into private lives."

He did not even mention fascism in this speech. One reason for this is because neoliberalism is similar to fascism in significant ways, such as its collusion between big governments and corporations to exert social control. They both feature freedom for the ruling bureaucracy and social engineering for the ruled. They both use demographic identity as a cudgel to rationalize and entrench their power. They are both frequently imperialist. The therapeutic and humanitarian traits of neoliberalism are what define its devouring maternalism in distinction to fascism's devouring paternalism. The reason why Schwab focuses on libertarianism is that libertarianism in its consistency as a freedom philosophy exposes neoliberalism's hypocrisy. Neoliberalism often purports to be a freedom-maximalist ideology, yet commits egregious violations of objective standards of freedom in pursuit of its own subjective standards like freedom from xenophobia.

If by “ideological” Rachels means to imply that what I consider to be friendly ideological territory to be constrictive, he is also wrong. One of the defining features of my organization Liberty+ is that it is open to those who would not only violate the non-invasion principle out of self-preservation as in Rachels' thought experiment, but who do not believe restitution is owed in a highly-restricted set of cases involving government. These include neoreactionaries, Propertarians, paleoconservatives, and national conservatives, a coalition I term “zeroth positionist”. The operative term here is “highly-restricted” because these ideologies, unlike third positionists, have a solid understanding of what government is and why it must be limited. Liberty+ is also closed to left-libertarians for the same reason it is closed to fascists: Because too large a part of their worldview is anti-liberty. Even more importantly however, my organization is closed to both those factions because of its criterion of character. Character is so important to my organization that I even exclude those who are ideologically identical to me but for whatever reason I do not trust on a personal level. Without trust, we cannot make progress toward a much better society, which is also more important than agreement on what an optimal governance structure looks like. Character and ideology cannot ever be fully separated however and there is a point where the political becomes the personal. For fascists it is personal too often. If they truly didn't believe non-demographic issues weren't important they wouldn't assert their particular views on those issues in big-tent reactionary organizations in the first place. You don't get to assert “1488” as a package deal then turn to those who push back on the 88 and say “stop distracting us from what really matters; let's just focus on the 14”. If there is anyone who is “too ideological” in the sense that Rachels means it, it is fascists. Even from a coldly Machiavellian standpoint where zeroth positionists are nothing but useful idiots to be disposed of later, it is rational for third positionists to feign friendship with us in the interim. My experience with a third positionist organization comprising men with at least the intellectual sophistication for this approach proves that third positionists are such ideological chauvinists that they couldn't even do this. Note that I did not limit the “useful idiots” in this case to just right-libertarians either because fascists regard other zeroth positionists as not nearly “based” enough or even as controlled opposition.

Real right-libertarian friendship with fascists has been tried. It failed because true friends hold one another to the highest of standards, which fascists cannot tolerate because the very nature of their ideology is one of low standards for both nation and state. This is no significant loss to right-libertarians because we along with other zeroth positionists are superior people. We are smarter, more economically productive, and of much higher character. Why is this so? We already know that the reason why libertarianism is so much less popular among non-whites has nothing to do with access to our literature. The level of access in the West is equal. It's because of inherited predisposition. The same holds true among whites. People of self-esteem, those who want to maximize the actualization of their values and who have the capacity to understand the system that facilitates such actualization, naturally gravitate further and further to right-libertarianism and similar ideologies as soon as we are exposed to the ideas. Other lesser people just go: “Eww, personal responsibility? No thanks.” Fascists certainly have no excuse of ignorance considering the massive amount of time they spend arguing with right-libertarians online. Instead of graciously accepting defeat when they lose and changing their mind (or even respectfully agreeing to disagree) they just call us names. They cannot change their minds because their hearts are congenitally hardened with spite and petty resentment. Their ideology is motivated by a desire to abdicate the responsibility they bear both as individuals and as a race for bad predicaments. They seek to scapegoat and and tear down groups of people more successful than they are such as capitalists because they define their worth in relation to others. That we are presently fewer in number than third positionists means nothing because as jews have taught us well, a tiny but well-organized and motivated minority can exert massively outsized influence on society. That we are in a state of war for the future of the West does not change the equation either, as the Spartans taught us at Thermopylae. I do acknowledge however, that in the demographic big picture numbers are not nothing, full-franchise democracy remaining constant. We as reactionaries are the ones who must remain calm against this onslaught because we recognize that democracy is a sham anyway. We can obtain the requisite electoral numbers by leading the MAGA movement, the remnant of the right who had the good sense to reject fascism, even if not for reasons nearly as precise as ours. In the interim while we work to abolish democracy itself we can outpace the declining white percentage of the population through franchise restriction, gerrymandering, and county-level accession to redder states. A beacon of hope lies in the the cases of Fiji and Kyrgyzstan, whose indigenous populations were able to restore their supermajority status after becoming minorities. There was also the Spanish Reconquista, which took 700 years. Patience, not panic, is the order of the day. With vastly higher numbers of equally capable people in our own countries we have much greater wherewithal to effect the same change.

Though I have been thoroughly critical of one of Rachels' particular views in these two articles, I want to conclude by affirming that Chase Rachels is still a hero to me. That he remains a libertarian while many other have libertarians moved in an authoritarian direction is by itself commendable, but what is remarkable about Rachels is that he remains such despite experiencing particularly appalling treatment, including being doxxed and fired, at the hands of left-libertarians. It is for this reason I am proud to have archived his Radical Capitalist blog on my website, which I highly recommend to whatever handful of my readers have not read it yet. I hope that Rachels if maintains that fascists are our friends, he can at least respect the need for zeroth positionists to have our own organizations for efficiency reasons alone; good fences and all. He is already an honorary member of Liberty+ but if he's looking for a zeroth positionist organization with notoriety and material backing as of the time of this writing I recommend the Natural Law Institute, which I am also a member of. I am pleased to report that in the years since Rachels' doxxing the libertarian movement has become much more based . It has become so based in fact that I joined the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire last fall to help impose quality control on the word “libertarian”. It is too good of a word to ever give up. We amassed sufficient numbers at the annual convention in March to soundly defeat an attempted takeover by the leftberts. If a group of people as disagreeably individualistic as right-libertarians can recognize the significance of group identity and the need for team defense against collectivism, the future of liberty in the West is bright indeed.

The Right mostly agrees on what we are against, but there is much less agreement on what we are for. Ubersoy's recent manifesto, Right-Wing Progressivism, is an ambitious attempt to remedy this. Coincidentally, “right-wing progressivism” is a term that I coined independently, however my coinage is a pejorative term specifically for third positionism. Ubersoy however, has a significantly different meaning in mind, for he explicitly rejects third positionism's authoritarianism. Rejection of authoritarianism, however, is far from necessarily libertarian, and Ubersoy's ideology isn't libertarian either. It does have a certain affinity with right-wing libertarianism but is also significantly different in interesting ways.

The term “progress” in a political context has been so tainted by left-wing progressivism that it is often used ironically by the Right to refer to the ravages of the former. Ubersoy's belief in the term's salvageability is therefore commendably bold. He begins the case for salvage by criticizing the right for being excessively nostalgic and resentful. Just because there is a great deal of subjectivity about what progress actually is does not mean that there isn't an objective and politically practicable concept out there yet to be properly articulated. A trait that distinguishes the reactionary right from the normie right is objectivity about the effects of evolution on human psychology, so Ubersoy's evolutionary grounding of his definition is sensible:

“Progress is the process by which an entity enhances its self-organizational structure through innovation.”

In expanding the basis of his basic definition beyond the human realm he helps make his definition objective. In applying this definition to the human realm he refines the “enhancement” term to mean increasing our control of our environment. This is effectively technology. Political engineering is a form of technology that features heavily in Ubersoy's vision.

The problem that Ubersoy's engineering seeks to solve is that of harmonizing what he calls the “trialectic”, which comprises the forces of Hierarchy, Freedom, and Democracy. He contrasts this with the dialectic of liberalism and leftism whose synthesis has produced the current regime. To support his concept he cites several examples where he sees parallels: The Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Spandrell's three factions of neoreaction – Ethno-Nationalists, Theonomists, and Techno-Commercialists, the slogan of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Dugin's three modern political doctrines: liberalism, fascism, and communism. While Ubersoy is certainly correct regarding today's regime, his basis of support for trialectic seems forced, a numerological departure from his usual scientific rigor. The number three does appear to have a particular psychic resonance, likely because it is the number of repetitions required for most people to be able to remember a new piece of information. Ubersoy does not, however, oversimplify his examples by representing them as differing aspects of the same phenomenon. He instead views them as distinct paradigms unto themselves, paradigms that specify trialectics whose contents differ from that of other paradigms. He is not saying that the examples lend support for his particular conception of the trialectic, merely that they support the trialectic as a general concept.

Ubersoy's proposed political system is what he terms Tektology, which he has engineered for the purpose of harmonizing the trialectic. He believes that through such harmonization, Tektology will maximally facilitate the evolution of the polity, which in turn maximizes human progress generally. A key feature of evolution is differentiation of traits, in biological evolution certain traits are selected for, resulting in a certain integration referred to as speciation. Ubersoy believes that this “integration through differentiation” is applicable to human society as well. This application is well-grounded in its familiar manifestation as division of labor – differentiated skills and interests channeled into specialization that produces a higher level of economic integration. Integration comes about because trade is necessary to realize the advantages of specialization. Not only is the level of integration higher, but also the level of complexity. Increasing complexity of the means by which an entity self-organizes is for Ubersoy another feature of progress.

No proposal for a political system would be complete without a coherent conception of power, so before presenting the specific features of his Tektological system Ubersoy presents a conception of his own. This is a place where his manifesto shines very brightly. Unlike the pretentiously lowbrow on the dissident right, Ubersoy is not uncritically deferential toward Carl Schmitt, whose particularist view of power he describes as “craftier” than most contemporary theorists' but still decidedly incomplete. Schmitt's view of power fails to account for instances where particularist exceptions to the general cannot be made because in such instances the general is the laws of nature. Ubersoy is also to be praised for not dismissing liberalism in its entirety out of hand. He praises John Locke as being “among the first theorists to intuitively perceive power as the capacity to instigate change.” It is unclear the basis upon which Ubersoy believes Locke deserves this distinction, however. Although his manifesto is very well-sourced overall, this claim lacks one.

To formulate a proper view of power in society, Ubersoy believes it is necessary to understand “the universal commonalities of power manifested in multiple spheres of being. There are two complementary principles that determine the constitution of universal power: 1. Force of Element/s within the Sphere. 2. Organizing Principle of the Sphere.” The “organizing principle” of a sphere is the element without which all other elements in the sphere become disorganized. The spheres include non-human nature. The law of nature that Ubersoy analogizes to power in society is that of gravitation. In doing so he expresses a view significantly more nuanced than “might makes right”. In astrophysics it is not precisely correct to say that less massive bodies orbit more massive ones; rather both bodies orbit their mutual center of gravity. Ubersoy parts ways further with third positionists in that he regards “higher” types of polities as having the organizing principle of ideology rather than an incarnate leader:

“[I]n highly advanced political orders the polity revolves around its universal principles of organization as it would revolve in programming languages and natural sciences, while primitive political orders are too disorganized to apply a universal social contract for all of its citizens”

Ubersoy also identifies a “differentiating dynamic” that describes elements subject to gravitational forces in the cosmos. This is a parallel to my own concept of “differencing” as the basis of mathematics. An infinite and perfectly undifferentiated continuum (1 aka unity) must be “differenced”, which is to say undone in some way to have operation. The operation of addition that creates the number 2 is a single differencing of 1. The version of the manifesto reviewed here is a first edition only; Ubersoy could strengthen his case by describing differentiation at the most fundamental level in future editions.

Ubersoy offers a cleverly contrarian rebuttal to both liberals and rightists who quote Voltaire's “to understand who rules you determine who you are not allowed to criticize.”:

“Such a statement is accurate in most cases, yet fails to account for societal values and moral considerations in which certain groups, like veterans, the elderly, the disabled, abuse victims, the pregnant, and many others become morally elevated by society without actually being powerful themselves, for they do not form centers of gravity.”

This view sees a phenomenon like jewish power as complex: While jews may not be able to build centers of gravity on their own, they are adept at presenting themselves as possessed of the sacred qualities that puts groups like those Ubersoy beyond the criticism of most. In doing so they are able to attach themselves to existing centers of gravity in institutions built by other groups.

After an abstrusely theoretical discussion up until this point, Ubersoy takes an abruptly empirical turn with his discussion of institutional capture by leftists. He cites a litany of research showing left-wing dominance of the academic and managerial classes. He uses the term “nomenklatura” from his Russian background as a catch-all term for these classes, which he designates as his equivalent of Curtis Yarvin's “Cathedral”. The statistics he cites are alarming: 89% of Ivy League graduates and 77% of the top 1% ($150,000 and a postgraduate degree) for instance, support rationing gas, meat, and electricity to fight climate change, compared to 24-25% of the general population. Our “representative democracy” is very much the opposite. This provides justification for the radical reforms to democracy Ubersoy subsequently proposes.

Unlike many others on the Dissident Right, Ubersoy believes that a form of democracy is not only salvageable, but desirable. To explain this he differentiates between qualitative and quantitative democracy. Ubersoy defines qualitative as “being of higher or lower quality”, which is somewhat confusing because this blurs the distinction between difference of degree and difference in kind. Ubersoy associates qualitative democracy with the vertical and quantitative democracy with horizontal. He criticizes the current democratic system for its overextension of the franchise, which increases its magnitude along the quantitative/horizontal dimension at the expense of the qualitative/vertical. The remedy he proposes is a points-based franchise weighted toward right-wing values: Additional votes are granted for being married, having kids, military service, etc. Additional measures he recommends are the dissolution of the nomenklatura, and replacement of the current lawmaking branches of government with what he terms a “directive” branch controlled directly by voters. He recommends a “delegative” branch to enforce the laws, which is essentially what the executive branch was originally intended to be. Ubersoy intends this system to produce “market democracy”, a polity characterized by a high degree of competition between institutions of governance. This aim is consistent with support for decentralized and competitive government that characterizes zeroth positionists. Tendency toward centralization is something that Ubersoy explicitly criticizes both the current system and third positionism for earlier in the manifesto.

Ubersoy's proposed reforms raise questions: If voting outcomes matter, then why is democracy preferable to a benevolent dictatorship? The standard answer is that democracy produces leadership that is more consistently benevolent. In reality of course representative democracies consistently produce predatory demogogues. Ubersoy's system partially mitigates this in the directness of its democracy, but leadership positions within the delegative branch, which is elected by the directive one, are still unavoidable. Even the more right-wing electorate his points system would produce would still likely vote for bad policies like Social Security and Medicare if the Tea Party and much of the MAGA movement is any indication. The revised constitution Ubersoy proposes would act as a check to some degree, but the changes Ubersoy chooses (and chooses not) to make to it are downright bizarre: While recognizing that the Civil Rights regime has effectively supplanted the US Constitution, instead of abolishing the former he believes it more expedient to formally integrate it with the latter, only enforcing the Civil Rights Acts' race-neutral language sincerely and extending protections to political orientation. The first measure is a reinforcement of white genocide's fundamental mechanism, which is forced integration. Discrimination against white people per se is not a fundamental problem, the problem is that white people are not allowed to discriminate themselves. This is because non-whites desire access to white areas but not vice-versa. Further The second measure assumes with gross naivete that the state can be trusted to objectively adjudicate antidiscrimination with regard to political orientation of all things. Exacerbating this is that Ubersoy's proposed franchise is still open to non-whites, and because it substantially weights fertility, this advantages non-whites who are r-selected against whites, who are relatively k-selected. Were the right ever to gain sufficient power at the national level (if ever) to restrict the franchise to the degree Ubersoy proposes, discrimination against the right would be moot at that point. His proposed constitution's new free speech provision creates an arbitary provision that allows speech discrimination for organizations smaller than 5,000 but prohibits it for those larger. Ubersoy fails to recognize that discrimination is not only a form of speech, but the most important kind because actions speak louder than words. Ubersoy even implicitly affirms this in provision 3 of his constitution:

“The constitution must provide its citizens with rights for anonymity and remaining silent.”

For someone to own a media platform is to reserve the right to control the views expressed thereon in manner that controls perception of his own views by association. If the platform owner wishes not to have any particular view on a certain issue associated with him, he is within his rights to suppress all discussion of it on his platform. With provision 2 Ubersoy rams his own verdicts on culture war issues down the throats of the entire nation:

2. “The constitution must guarantee a legal right of bodily autonomy for all adults and children (no transgender surgeries for minors, no abortion bans for adults, euthanasia becomes a guaranteed right).”

Child sex changes should not even be dignified with recognition; enforcement of existing laws against child abuse is all that is needed. The other items are issues that are so inherently subjective on a cultural level that they are perfectly suited toward being decided at the level of the states (or lower). Ubersoy cavalierly dismisses the formidable ethical tradition that respects the bodily autonomy of unborn children. The provision is also at odds with his aim of avoiding political homogenization, which is stated repeatedly through the manifesto. It is also strange that Ubersoy says nothing about vaccine mandates here.

Provision 4 could have been lifted verbatim from any left-wing progressivist party platform:

“The constitution must provide its citizens with opportunities for political and economic participation.”

Provision 7 is frightening:

“The constitution must ensure delegates are given full legal powers of intervention into public or personal spheres of citizens, institutions, and organizations for the purposes of resolving conflicts provided such is the democratic will of the polity.”

Ubersoy's proposed constitution redeems itself however, with provision 6:

“The constitution must guarantee the right of a democratic self-organization of any kind, including the exit from the union provided this is the will of the majority of the voting population residing in the area.”

While at odds with the forced integration measures he recommends earlier, this is a crucial out. The manifesto is not so schizophrenic as this contradiction may make it seem either. The left is terrified at the thought of their interventionist and integrationist policies being turned against them, so while we right-wingers may not believe such policies optimal at all, it can help us to signal to the left that we think we do as a negotiating tactic. To become independent from the left it may be necessary to concede the right of leftist secession from us. This “push-pull” approach may also be the reason why under Ubersoy's model the franchise remains open to non-whites and leftists – to provide them the illusion of participation that democracy is notorious for.

Ubersoy brings the manifesto toward a close by answering anticipated objections from third positionists, conservatives, and libertarians. While he is to be commended for adhering to intellectual best practice, he does not do a good job steelmanning the libertarian position. He addresses the lay version which is “smaller government is always better”, citing as a counter several instances where GDP growth correlates positively with government spending. This does not refute libertarianism at all, which is concerned not with size of government but the scope, specifically that government should have no scope in the business of racketeering at all. If people wish to voluntarily pay more for governmental services that are larger than what is currently provided, libertarians can have no objection. His treatment of libertarianism is strange because one of his earlier chapters in the manifesto borrows the title of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed, adding only a question mark at the end. He mentions Hoppe near the beginning of the manifesto as well. Hoppe is the world's leading living libertarian thinker, and anyone who has grappled seriously with his work could never honestly define libertarianism as a layperson would. Indeed, the reactionary version of libertarianism espoused by Hoppe presents considerable problems for Ubersoy's system. Ubersoy maintains in his manifesto that taxation is necessary, but wishes to give voters much greater choice on how the proceeds are spent. If the public cannot be trusted to voluntarily pay “enough” for governmental services, why can we be trusted to choose what we spend our money on? Ubersoy's points-based franchise system, whose inequality of influence he is proud of, raises the question of why we can't simply make the business of government like a corporation where influence over its long-term operations is directly proportional to ownership stake (a la defense insurance agencies or the Patchwork of Curtis Yarvin. Other businesses do not grant ownership stake to anyone, let alone the public, based on criteria such as marital status, fertility, or even, in the case of publicly-traded companies, technical knowledge of the product or operations. One of Ubersoy's criteria is political knowledge, which suffers from the same critique one can level at the color-blind version of civic nationalism – that Soros NGOs or similar can simply coach bad actors through the test. Ubersoy would have such NGOs dissolved, but this does not address the problem of independent study, which is largely ineradicable, and any serious attempt to eradicate it would conflict with Ubersoy's valuation of freedom of speech (something that libertarians as such do not care about and that reactionary libertarians explicitly oppose). Although in this regard Ubersoy goes too far in an effort to avoid seeming “authoritarian”, he does draw a nice distinction between authoritarianism and strong but benevolent leadership in a figure like Nayib Bukele:

“[Bukele] cannot be regarded as an authoritarian in the classical sense, for he is still operating within the broader context of an open system – he was simply given a large amount of executive authority to fulfill a certain task.”

Ubersoy goes on to criticize the notion of benevolent dictatorship saying:

“Theoretically, I can imagine myself being in favor of a dictatorship wherein the tyrant enforces every single one of my political preferences; but what is the actual chance this occuring? And what are the chances all of my political preferences are just, well-informed, and accurate? A perfect relationship between the people and their tyrant in matters of politics has never existed, and the most enlightened autocrat to have ever walked the Earth could never outperform a polity organized by the managerial skill of its enlightened, differentiated elements because no tyrant could ever possess the entirety of his people’s motivations and specialized knowledge. Just as the command economy cannot compete with capitalism, an autocracy cannot compete with a democracy organized in accordance with Tektological foundations.”

Ubersoy's humility in admitting his uncertainty that all of his political preferences are just and accurate is commendable, but he errs by analogizing the economic to the political in the wrong direction. A Tektologic polity would, all else equal, be outcompeted by a reactionary libertarian dictatorship because it is the latter system, not Ubersoy's, that fully exploits the market's superior information signaling capabilities. The elements of taxation and a non-economically based voting franchise by themselves suffer from the economic calculation problems of socialism. A true free market in governance can still have all of his criteria incorporated into the corporate charters concerning shareholder participation. As to the matter of maintaining benevolent rule, the market has already amply demonstrated a workable mechanism of shareholders electing boards of directors who in turn oversee management. The principal-agent issues inherent to such a system are mitigated with mechanisms like stock option vesting schedules, and whatever issues persist pale in comparison to the problems of direct democracy. The long-term incentives of monarchy, especially hereditary feudal monarchy, are further mitigation of the benevolence question, which cannot ever be perfectly resolved. What matters far less than variance in the level of benevolence from ruler to ruler is the mean level of beneficence that the ruler selection system incentives. Ubersoy's Tektological polity would be a substantial improvement over the current system but his electorate would likely comprise Tea Party types whose soundness of economic judgment is fitful at best: “Repeal Obamacare, but don't you dare touch my Medicare!” Earlier in the manifesto he claims that anarcho-capitalism would be undone by the persistence of the nomenklatura. This ignores, for one thing, the substantial degree to which the nomenklatura is supported by statism. We could concede however, a scenario where they retain their current level of influence under an anarcho-capitalist dictatorship. Their, while having a significantly adverse effect on a large minority of the population vulnerable to propaganda, would pose no real threat to the polity as a whole because aspergo-capitalists would-be dictators are psychologically and politically immune to leftist propaganda. The propagandistic power of the nomenklatura may matter in a democracy, but not in a dictatorship.

Ubersoy's Right-Wing Progressivism is a refreshing counter to resentful jeremiads against the jews on the right. The theoretical foundation of his vision is thoughtful, creative, and intricate in its architecture. Ubersoy's balanced view of liberalism and his firm opposition to third positionist authoritarianism are laudable. The Tektological polity he proposes is a substantial improvement over the current system, and also has the advantage of broad marketability to a population whose default worldview remains liberal. Liberalism is losing its luster, however, and Ubersoy's proposal would benefit from resolving its contradictions in certain of his proposals with his stated liberal values. It would also benefit from deeper engagement with the thought of the zeroth positionist thinkers he mentions such as Yarvin and Hoppe. He would do well to show how his proposed system, a market democracy, adds genuine value in comparison to the systems of those thinkers. In this first edition of his manifesto Ubersoy has already succeeded in establishing himself as a serious zeroth positionist thinker, however. Other zeroth positionists should eagerly await future editions where he further progresses in establishing a positive vision for us grounded in an objective concept of progress.

Recently I’ve been pondering the Monty Hall problem and have conceived of what I believe to be an intuitive explanation of its highly counterintuitive solution.

The Monty Hall problem takes its name from the host of the game show Let’s Make a Deal. The game goes as follows:

The contestant has the opportunity to win a new car by guessing which of three doors it’s behind (the other doors have goats behind them). The contestant selects a door. Then Monty opens a door among the other two that has the goat behind it. The contestant then has the option of switching his selection to the remaining door or sticking with his initial selection. Monty then opens that door and the contestant goes home with whatever’s behind it.

The purpose of this post isn’t to weigh whether it’s better to switch or stay, because simple math has already proven the superiority of switching. If the contestant switches he has a 2/3 chance of winning the car. If he stays the chance is 1/3. What is far more fascinating than the math itself is how extremely counterintuitive the answer it produces is. Despite the simplicity of the math behind it, a reader of Marilyn Vos Savant’s “Ask Marilyn” column felt it worthwhile to reassure himself with the opinion of the world’s highest tested IQ about the conundrum. To the credit of smartest persons on Earth everywhere Marilyn supplied the correct answer: switch. What was even more remarkable than the fact of the conundrum being posed to her, however, was that she received in response to her published opinion on it a flurry of contravening commentary from numerous “experts” on economics and game theory, some of whom were downright indignant, outraged even, that Marilyn had allegedly fallen for some sort of con. Their commentary was to the effect of “You, Miss Savant, are far too intelligent to make such a childishly simple error in judgment” or “You may think you’re clever Marilyn, but I’m an expert in post-Nashian meta game theory and let me tell you…”. Marilyn’s response to the reader had been in lay terms, but even after the superiority of switching was demonstrated in formal mathematical proof by Marilyn and experts on the correct side, some of Marilyn’s critics refused to believe it.

The Monty Hall problem is one of the most striking instances of human ineptitude with probability. Our brains have deeply ingrained heuristics that were evolved under conditions requiring objectives quite deviant from that of maximizing the expected value of a raw economic quantity. Marilyn’s outlier cognitive ability notwithstanding, the tenor of response to her shows there is little correlation between intelligence and intuition for probability. Explaining the dynamics of probability in the Monty Hall problem can be done in a number of ways, but I think in terms of explaining the problem in a manner attuned to primitivist, and also right-wing reactionary, sensibilities, mine, which takes the form of an allegory, is hard to beat:

A professional sports gambler of the moniker Big Game Al has three sons, Stephen, Mark, and Robert. By the end of this story his sons will have acquired the monikers Secluded Stephen, Monty’s Mark, and Robert the Robber. Here’s how they acquire them: Al has amassed an impressive fortune in winnings, especially from having won a large bet on longshot tennis prospect Emma Raducanu to win the 2021 US Open. Nearing the end of his life, he writes a will for his sons in which, to circumvent death tax, he officially leaves them only $1.00 in taxable assets. This asset takes the form of lottery tickets to win his antique Red Barchetta sports car. Egalitarian cuck that he is, Al bequeaths his to each of sons a ticket with a value of $1.00/3.

When Al dies the first son to hear of his passing is Stephen. At this, Stephen immediately preps for the possibility that the Feds will selectively target him for tax evasion, especially in light of him amassing a large fortune of his own through speculation on blockchain assets of ambiguous tax status. He builds a compound in northern Idaho called Ruby Ridge Revenge, complete with drones, pitbulls, fully automatic, laser-automated machine gun turrets and a private army called the Blockchain Gang comprising nothing but ex-Navy SEALs of the copy pasta persuasion. Libertarian ubermensch Stephen then retreats with his lottery ticket to the solitude of his fortress, posting behind him “trespassers will be shot” sign, which for him is not an empty threat. Stephen, erring on the side of paranoia, is willing go so far as shooting his brothers on sight assuming them to be Federal imposters. As far as Stephen is concerned the outside world is dead to him with the sole exception of possibly winning the Barchetta.

The next son to hear of his father’s passing is Mark. Mark is a naive Trustafarian communist and is indifferent to the grubby materialistic concern of inheritance. He’d like to check his white privilege in the form of giving his ticket away to an aspiring dubstep rapper but he’s too stoned and lazy to do so. Being this way, he makes no effort to safeguard his father’s legacy either.

The last son to get the ticket is Robert. Robert is a national socialist and hates Mark, whom he regards as a race traitor. Upon hearing that his father put them on equal footing in his will, Robert flies into a rage and hires a hitman named Monty Hollowpoint to take Mark out. Monty, in the easiest job he’s ever had, carries it out and gives Mark’s ticket to Robert. Robert is a nice-guy national socialist and considers Stephen based despite his differing views on economics. He considers sharing the ticket with Stephen in some way but realizes this is now impossible. While watching Dexter on Showtime for ideas on disposing of Mark’s body he muses to himself “Stephen at times invokes the notion of ‘inalienable rights’. In secluding himself in the way that he has he’s created what is now an inalienable ticket”.

In this story each brother represents a different door on the show and his ticket the initial probability of winning the car. Stephen the Secluded is the contestant’s initial selection. By rule, Monty Hall cannot do anything with that door. Its contents and chance of winning of 1/3 might as well exist in a different dimension. The fact that Monty does not open the initially selected door is determined entirely by rule and has absolutely nothing to do with whether initial selection is correct or not, as Monty always has a non-car door to open no matter which door the contestant initially selects.

Monty’s Mark is the door Monty opens. Mark’s assassination in the story and the taking of his ticket is analogous to Monty revealing one of the goats. The winning brother/door is now down to two, but the counterintuitive core of the conundrum is that whether the contestant switches or not, his odds of winning are at that point not 50/50!

Robert the Robber is the remaining door. In killing Mark and taking his ticket, Robert has doubled his own chances of winning the Barchetta and reduced Mark’s by 100% – from 1/3 to 2/3 and from 1/3 to 0/3 respectively. Winnings and losses from games of chance (and most games in general) are from the player’s point of view zero sum. The corresponding odds must sum to one (hence Al setting the official value of the Barchetta to $1). A relatable real world instance is racial quotas. Taking the size of a desired incoming class as fixed, a college admission department’s putting a floor on the number of dark-skinned students is necessarily putting a ceiling on the number of light-skinned ones.

The error that contestants (and some “experts”) make is partial but no less fatal for that. Most people will intuit that Monty’s opening one of the goat doors increases the chance that the remaining door is a winner. Where they err, however, is in believing that Monty’s revelation also increases the chance of their door being the winner! For the reasons associated with Stephen the Secluded described above, this is literally 100% wrong. The Monty Hall problem elicits a potent manifestation of the possession heuristic, where people who form a connection to an entity, no matter how superficial, tenuous, transitory or even perverse (e.g. Stockholm Syndrome) tend to value that entity more. The possession heuristic is actually a distillation of human spirituality itself – the desire to connect with something external to ourselves. So compelling is this instinct that such sentimental preference can extend even to a fake door on a game show whose only connection to us is a random guess. The notion of “their” door being on a desert island in a vast sea of the statistical sample space leaves neurotypicals feeling cold.

My readers who are not nice-guy national socialists (or just not very bright) might read into my allegory the moral that national socialism is a superior political economy to libertarianism. The true social lesson (this essay is not on morality; I hate moralism actually) here is in fact, albeit a recondite one, the opposite: the importance of reconciling one’s economic model to certain facts of reality, no matter how spiritually unsatisfying (or simply irrelevant in my view) they may be. Just as those who want to maximize their chances of winning the zero sum game of Let’s Make a Deal have to set aside their possessive inclination and accept the statistically atomized nature of their position in the context of their final decision, those who want to maximize their chances of winning the zero sum stakes in the fight against globalism need to reconcile themselves to the fact of our neurally atomized nature in the context of economic decision making. The only sound model of such behavior can be one that recognizes that we are in this sense no less atomized from our brother nationals than the 1/3 chance of contestant’s initially selected door being the winner from the chances of his brother doors at the moment of Monty’s reveal. This model is called “methodological individualism”. The individuation of your value set in its totality, which informs your equally individualized decision making throughout your life, is absolute and belongs only to you. Put most simply, you cannot live anyone’s life but yours. The spiritual connective instinct is most potent in the human need to belong to and further a family, which in my story manifested in Robert’s desire to share his ticket with his brother. For this reason many nationalists allow this instinct toward their extended family in particular to compromise their thinking on economic issues, even though to do so is tantamount to rejecting math itself. In formulating a model to underpin a political economy nationalist leaders need in their thinking to stand cold, hard and alone, and the correct conclusion regarding the market drawn from methodological individualism is to treat the market as Stephen wished to be:

Left the hell alone.

The libertarian to alt-right pipeline historically has followed three paths:

1. A number of people who once identified as libertarian who were some combination of shallow, stupid, wicked, and cynical rejected the whole philosophy itself to become some flavor of fascist.

2. Others who were not necessarily any of those estimated that the benefits of violently aggressive intervention in a few select areas of life outweigh the costs and became a non-voluntarist zeroth positionist (neoreactionary, Propertarian, paleo or national conservative) or merely mistook libertarianism for classical liberalism, claiming to reject the former when in reality they were just rejecting the anti-liberty features of the latter.

3. Others still rejected liberal baggage while retaining both the philosophy and label of libertarian. The adjustments this third camp made were strategic, including shifting from the liberal emphasis on self-limiting government to the reactionary emphasis of strong government that is effective at keeping order, which is the codependent of the defining libertarian value of peace. Another adjustment of significance was becoming embedded in third positionist activism, the belief being that fascism was a step toward a free society. I am of the third camp and was for a time committed to the last strategy. The latter was a massive mistake.

Fascism’s allure today is its novelty as an ingredient in the redpill on globalism. Humans are creatures driven by simple conspiratorial narratives, and the narrative that the enormity of globalism in the present is only meaningfully opposed by a plucky remnant of supposedly the only movement that opposed globalism in the past is compelling. The real world, however, is messy, complicated, and often anti-climactic. Regardless of how much the world of today resembles what it would look like if the Elders of Zion were real and had their way, all the evidence points in the direction of white elites being co-puppeteers with jews rather than the former being puppets of the latter. I was captivated by the conspiratorial element as well, and as a result I joined up with a fascist secret society modeled on the Freemasons whose leaders I met a Propertarian event. The persuasive (if not professional) potency of documentaries such as The Greatest Story Never Told and Europa: The Last Battle created a good measure of sympathy for fascists within me, leading me to view them similarly to how normieconservatives view leftists – as basically good people who were merely misguided on a number of issues. The high professional and intellectual caliber of the society I joined reinforced this impression. Some of the society’s members never disappointed me; one was even financially quite generous in a time of need. As I engaged in debate with certain members as to the merits of right-wing libertarianism vs fascism however, it became apparent to me what a lousy bunch fascists are on average. They accused me of pacifism and wanting to poison children (by itself a contradiction!) because I don’t think our people are strengthened by looting each other and for opposing institutions like the FDA. The leader of the group claimed that I as a libertarian, opposed principles necessary to right-wing thought, and that because I am a libertarian I therefore opposed nationalism. This was despite my being one of the group’s most steadfast and conscientious members. In continued conversations they doubled-down, at which point I left the group in disgust and started Liberty+. Part of Liberty+’s mission is to make sure that fascists do not come to power when the globalists fall from it. Some right-wing libertarians, though, remain of the opinion that fascists should be supported. What follows is why they should not.

Chase Rachels, who is one of my biggest influences, wrote an essay for his now-defunct blog Radical Capitalist (which I have archived in its entirety) in 2018 called “Fascism is a Step Towards Liberty.” The first time I read it, which was not long after publication, I, like him, was enamored with the fascist movement and was in full agreement. Having reread the essay six years later however, with the benefit of extensive interaction with actual fascists and having been much better educated on what fascism specifically is and has been, I have now come to strongly disagree.

Rachels opens his article by stating that the purpose of Radical Capitalist is to help forge an alliance between libertarians and the Alt-Right. This, he writes, is for the purpose of remedying the shortcomings in each movement. What Rachels does not say explicitly is that the primary deficit of non-libertarian Alt-Righters is just that: That they are not libertarian. What the resulting fusion would ideally amount to, therefore, is the Alt-Right becoming subsumed into the libertarian movement. This would take right-libertarians from their currently solid (approximately 2/3rds) majority of the movement to a supermajority that overwhelms and defeats the left-libertarians. The libertarians who go “Alt-Right” would do so in the manner that the third camp in the pipeline did as described in the first paragraph above. Rachels claims that “such an approach does not require a breach in libertarian principle, an endorsement of aggression, a repudiation of private property, nor an expansion of State power.“ This logically necessitates one of two outcomes for the non-libertarian Alt-Right: They either become libertarian or they are politically neutralized. It is strange therefore, that Rachels proceeds to argue in way that suggests he is accepting of authoritarianism on the Alt-Right.

He continues:

“However, many lolberts have objected to this claim by countering ‘but much of the Alt-Right is fascist!!!.’ Of course, the term ‘Fascist’ and ‘Fascism’ have been abused and stigmatized to the point to where they have become synonymous with pure evil. As such, they have lost much of their discernible meaning. This obfuscation and perversion of the concept of Fascism as well as other concepts and institutions such as nationalism, the nuclear family, monogamy, individualism, and capitalism is an integral facet of the Cultural Marxist agenda. The Manipulation of language is essential to surreptitiously undermine, gaslight, divide, and disorient one’s opponent.“

Fascism stigmatized itself in the eyes of patriotic pro-liberty people because of the numerous abuses inherent to its socialism and authoritarianism. That the Cultural Marxists who defeated fascists happened to manipulate other concepts does not mean fascism does not deserve its stigma. Lies about nationalism, the nuclear family, and other features of “The Authoritarian Personality” are actually much more effective due to their association with the true abuses of fascism. Goebbels himself emphasized the importance for persuasive propaganda to a good measure of truth. One reason communism does not have the same association with authoritarianism is not just because the communists won World War II, but also because it has a rich history of anarchism, whereas authoritarianism is a defining feature of fascism.

Rachels goes on to contrast fascism with democracy, saying that our current system contains the worst elements of both. This is correct. However, he does not mention how some aspects of fascism are pathologically democratic. Both fascism and democracy sanction statist violence in the name of the people, and fascist regimes historically have arisen through democratic processes. He claims that knowing which of these is closer to libertarianism is “crucial” to libertarian strategy. This is questionable because it suggests there is some sort of necessary sequence is which pro-liberty reforms are made. Sequentialism is incompatible with the fact that libertarianism is grounded in timeless human universals, which means that we need to directly pursue a libertarian social order and takes wins toward that end everywhere we can get them, whenever we can get them. It does not matter whether the results of this process in the interim more closely resemble one bad system or another, because those systems are bad and not our goal. To Rachels’ credit however, as of 2018 he says this: “Of course, it may not be necessary to travel through the eye of Fascism in order to reach a libertarian social order, but we can at least recognize that it is a point along the correct trajectory (even if it’s a point that we are able to skip over).“ Rachels is now of a different opinion. Based on recent conversations, he now believes that fascism is a necessary near-term step not just to achieving libertarianism in full, but to saving the white race. This is strange for someone who once used the metaphor of a hurricane to describe fascism, a force that destroys indiscriminately.

He then accuses other libertarians critical of fascism of “purity spiraling”, which he differentiates from “staying principled.” While I have no reason to doubt Anarchyball’s overall interpretation of libertarianism is one of purity spiraling, the example Rachels gives of it however, is uncompelling:

Anarchyball is correct in this exchange: By the end of his days, Mussolini, having already socialized 75% of Italian industries, wanted to socialize all businesses with more than 100 employeesⁱ. Regulation of industry increased when Hitler came to power, reversing the Weimar Republic’s late recovery. Even during his invasion of Soviet Russia, Hitler admired Stalin and indicated that he wished to take Germany even further in direction of Soviet central planningⁱⁱ. During the 1936 recession, the NSDAP became divided into two camps: a moderate one led by Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, who wanted a reduction in military spending and a reduction of autarkic trade policy, and a socialist one headed by Hermann Göring who wanted to dramatically increase the state’s central planning to build up the military. Hitler ended up siding with Göring and implementing Göring’s Four Year Planⁱⁱⁱ. According to Alan Bullock in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. A factor in Hitler’s decision was Göring’s lack of economic knowledge^iv. Both dictatorships repressed capitalist political parties.

There has been no indication historically that fascist regimes move their countries in a freer direction. Because large business donors and the wealthy do not want socialization of their industries and estates and most voters want handouts, it is plausible that liberal democracy’s terminal state is a market-leaning business sector combined with a substantial welfare state. While fascist regimes also require some give and take with big businesses and the wealthy, they do not require their full support for their political survival. Top marginal tax rates in most Western countries have been reduced since World War II and overall taxation as a percentage of output has changed little. The mob rule of direct democracy is of course quite communistic, however what we have today is a very far cry from that. Liberal democracy may be a road to social democracy, but historically it has not been a runaway train to full-blown socialism. Fascism, brief as its historical existence was, does appear to be the latter.

Rachels follows up with this meme:

Rachels represents this as another illustration of pointless libertarian purity spiraling. He suggests his article “Preferring Some Candidates to Others Is Not Statist” as a further illustration of such purity spiraling, particularly the inability of some libertarians to grasp ordinal preferences. His article on candidates, however, is regarding a cross-sectional preference, not a temporal one. Recognizing that some candidates’ platforms are closer to the goal of a free society than others, however, and that voting for such candidates moves us closer to that goal, is completely different from believing that policy reforms within the libertarian platform must be achieved in any particular temporal order to achieve liberty. Recognizing that some wins for liberty are much more important than others is also completely different from sequentialism, because achieving both a small win and a big win, but achieving the small win first, is obviously better than achieving just the small win or none. A sequentialist could believe however, that achieving a small win or none is better than achieving both wins if the wins occur in what he believes is the wrong order. It would be uncharitable to Rachels to take the meme too literally, but it should be pointed out that its assertion that fascism is a necessary step toward liberty is an extreme form of sequentialism, not just one within the libertarian platform, but one that actually stipulates anti-libertarian policies as antecedent preconditions for libertarianism. As quoted earlier, as of 2018 Rachels did not believe in such sequentialism.

Rachels then goes on to define fascism using Smash Cultural Marxism as a source, which he claims will facilitate rational and productive evaluation. This is not very persuasive to libertarians, as Smash Cultural Marxism has no grounding in the traditions of libertarianism and independent economics, let alone the reactionary libertarianism of Hoppe. Predictably therefore, SCM’s definition is self-serving, vague, and appalling to any liberty lover conversant in deconstructing predatory collectivist propaganda:

Fascism is based on free enterprise – but with constraints (the primary constraint being, “Is the particular economic activity in question good for our nation/people?”). Also, a businessman can become wealthy in a Fascist country, and the government has no objection to this (this is in stark contrast to Communism). Fascism also encourages private ownership of property (again, in stark contrast to Communism where private property is not allowed).

In a nutshell, Fascism basically tells entrepreneurs, “Go ahead and start a business, earn a lot of money, be successful, but don’t produce any products or services which damage our nation and our nation’s people… and make sure you treat your workers fair and pay them a living wage. If you don’t follow these rules, we’ll shut you down.”

With regard to banking, usury is not allowed under Fascism. The government tightly controls all aspects of monetary policy, including terms of lending. The government issues/prints money and lends it interest free, as needed, to grow the economy and ultimately serve the citizens.

Rachels, however, says of this: “From the above it seems clear that Fascist governments are favorable to market systems and private property. “

The qualifier “but” following anyone’s claim to grounding in freedom is a surefire tell that such a person intends to stomp freedom into the ground. The standard of “national good” is a collectivist blank check for the state to mulct the nation every which way. State control of the financial sector is poisoning and constriction of the economy’s very circulatory system. State monopolizing of money lending to prevent the payment of interest is an assault on time preference itself, an eminently rational convention derived directly from the natural pattern of cooperative growth and necessitated by mortality. The latter is so insane that it was never actually put into practice in either the Third Reich or Fascist Italy. Regarding this, Rachels writes something similarly bizarre: “Fascist governments also oppose the Central Banking System as evidenced by the fact that they issue currency directly as opposed to borrowing it into existence from the Central Bank.” Whether money creation is direct or debt-based is not what defines a central banking system as central, it is the state acting as the lender of last resort for banks it charters. When a private independent bank counterfeits depository receipts and lends them out, this also causes inflation in the exact same way a state can but no one calls it central. When states can inflate directly with the treasury there is no greater disincentive to do so than through the banking system; a number of free-market economists argue that they are more incentivized to. Given the preceding conditions, private property under fascism is private in name only, when the state decides what property you can buy or sell, how much, from/to whom, when, where, and for what reason, life under fascism is just a less honest form of communism. SCM’s claim that fascists are fine with “earning a lot of money” flies in the face of one fascism’s seminal thinkers in Gottfried Feder:

In spite of the doubtlessly existing agreement that the considerations of the public interest have to go before the private interests, remarkably there has been, according to the legal ideas valid among us, precisely with regard to the form of the use of property, no moral limitation determined beyond the criminal.
It is, to be sure, forbidden to act with violence against one’s fellow man (extortion — murder — manslaughter — betrayal and illegitimate enrichment, etc.), but it has never and nowhere been forbidden to pile up immeasurable wealth^v

Although Hitler ultimately dismissed Feder as economic adviser as a concession to his industrial backers, property and wealth in the Third Reich was still subject to a significantly higher degree of confiscation than it is in America today.

Rachels acknowledges that these features of fascism are anti-libertarian, but minimizes them as a “wash” for their similarity with our current system. This is the opposite of convincing.

Rachels then quotes SCM describing fascism’s extensive anti-degeneracy measures. Chase attempts to pass these measures off as a wash with the current system, writing, “various forms of artistic expression are regulated “. This is not true, at least for America. The Brandenburg vs Ohio Supreme Court ruling of 1969 permitted all forms of expression that are not incitements of violence, and even to qualify as incitement the violence exhorted to must be both imminent and likely to happen^vi. There is of course, Operation Mockingbird and the CIA’s boosting of modern art like that of Jackson Pollock, but news media is not art, and in terms of freedom of expression, subsidy is not comparable to regulatory suppression. Rachels could cite regulation of ideas and culture through our government school system, but this ignores the significant fact that homeschooling is broadly legal in America, whereas the Third Reich banned it in 1938^vii. Rachels says it is “certainly” better for degenerate rather than wholesome content to be censored, but this is probably more true for the masses than for the high-openness, often creative minority for whom censorship creates a significant Streisand Effect. Rachels also ignores the dysgenic effects of prohibitionism’s expropriation of the non-degenerate to fund the impossible task of decimating the degenerate. The current legality of vices that were not legal under fascism is a mark in favor of our current system. Rachels also ignores that certain infringements on liberty that currently exist in formerly fascist countries like Germany such as restrictions on smoking and homeschooling are holdovers from fascism. Rachels reminds us that “ we’re comparing the current State to Fascism, not a libertarian social order to Fascism “. Even on this count fascism does not measure up to our own terrible system in significant ways, but moreover, why should we as libertarians be comparing fascism to our current system in the first place rather than to a free society? Our current system is such a low bar that even attempting to make the case that in many areas it’s a wash with fascism is by a libertarian standard a massive indictment of fascism. I will return to the why later. For now, consider that having unconvincingly attempted to paint large sectors of the respective systems as a wash, Rachels then drops this howler:

“Moreover, many libertarians often times (and incorrectly) confuse the Nation with the State. The nationalist sentiment of a population does not necessarily translate into a pro State sentiment. In fact, Fascism tends to promote the idea of “family” and “ethnic community” first. This presents a hard limit on the expansion of the State.”

Fascists by the very constitution of their ideology (and etymology) bind the nation and state into one: “Everything within the state; nothing outside the state” in Mussolini’s summation. Why are errant libertarians to be criticized here while fascists are let off the hook? Although Rachels is correct that nationalism is not necessarily statism, this a NAXALT argument because it is believed to be by most nationalists (and not just fascist nationalists).

Fascism promotes the idea of “family” and “ethnic community” first so that it can hide behind them while ruthlessly looting them. Protein intake and children’s heights plateau’d and even declined in some areas under the Third Reich^viii, and to the extent the Reich supported family at all it was with dysgenic policies such as housing subsidies. Dysgenics in the name of eugenics suits fascism because it helps create a weak and dependent nation lacking resistance to the state’s predation, a nation that is brainwashed into believing they are being elevated to ubermensch. Note the parallel with liberal democracy where the nation is enslaved with great efficiency because it believes that democracy makes them free. Fascism in theory presupposes that putting these “first” means being pushed into “first” by the state as necessary, which is implied expansion rather than a limiting factor. Fascism is defined by the belief that there should no limits on the scope of the state’s activity, so long as it puts family, community, and nation “first”. Because what counts as first is subjectively defined by the state this is a blank check for statist intervention, the extreme opposite of a “hard limit”. It is inexcusable for a libertarian to fall for such a basic statist ruse so credulously. Rachels attempts to make a case for limited fascism by contrast with globalism, which by definition is the lowest bar possible: “This is in distinct contrast with other globalist States, such as the US, which contend that all people from any background may fall under the “protections” and “jurisdiction” of a global “humanitarian” democracy. Thus, there is no ideological limit to the size of the current State. “

To make the case for such an absurdity as limited fascism, Rachels is forced to stretch our current liberal democratic nation state as an object of comparison to a fully globalist one. The relevant criterion here is not whether a limiter of the state’s scope is nominally restrictive, it is whether in practice it is an objective limiter that actually functions as such like the libertarian property norm. The macro-linguistic national groups that fascism rules (by definition) is not a significant difference of scope in this context compared to multi-national or global empires. They are both sufficiently large, that unlike family or community, that collective affinity between one random household and another within is negligible. While there is a significant difference in the administrative practicality of maintaining control between the geographic scales; there is no significant difference between them as limiters of the state’s activity scope within their territories. They are in this regard both worse than worthless because they are pretextual instances of the collectivist anti-concept of the “common good”.

Rachels then quotes Mises on fascism:

This quote ignores the context that the because the fascists had brutally crushed pro-liberty reactionary opposition, the fascists were the only remaining faction with the political power in certain countries to fight the communists. It also ignores that the fascist ranks were swollen themselves with communists who had no opposition to their ideologies economic depredations, and were merely opposed to the imperialism of foreign communists. The quote is also taken out of context. It comes from Mises’ 1927 book Liberalism. It is found in Chapter 1: The Argument of Fascism, where earlier in the paragraph Mises criticizes fascism:

“Repression by brute force is always a confession of inability to make better use of the better weapons of the intellect – better because they alone give promise of final success. This is the fundamental error from which Fascism suffers and which will ultimately cause its downfall.”^ix

Later in the paragraph Mises writes:

“That its foreign policy, based as it is on the avowed principle of force in international relations, cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization requires no further discussion. The sentence that follows Rachels’ quote is: “But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.”

Rachels maintains to this day that fascism is justified as such an emergency makeshift. I will address this in detail later. For now I will point out that Mises discovered himself to be naive about what he perceived as fascists’ intentions, for he would later be forced to flee his native Austria when National Socialist Germany took over. Mises went on to write a whole book excoriating fascism called Omnipotent Government. He was, as I was, redpilled by life experience.

In the next section of the article Rachels attempts to make the case fascism is better categorized as capitalist rather than socialist. This section suffers from continued out-of-context quotation, bad sourcing, and taking fascist propaganda at face value.

He begins with the truism that all polities are a mixture of capitalist and socialist elements. This is an error not just because it is a truism (all property crime is a deviation from a free market) but because “capitalism vs socialism” is itself Marxist dialectic. Marxists made the term capitalism as an object to be defended and subject to their criticism. Property in capital needs no more defense than in anything else. Rachels then claims that although Hitler called himself a socialist and claimed to oppose capitalism, the capitalism that Hitler opposed was specifically the version corrupted by state meddling. While there was a fair amount of meddling in the capitalism of Hitler’s day, some of which Hitler opposed, it is clear from his writings and overall policymaking that he opposed freedom in the use of capital itself. As mentioned above, Hitler was heavily influenced by Gottfried Feder, who was explicitly opposed to free market capitalism. Although he ultimately dismissed Feder as economic adviser, it is telling that Hitler made him adviser in the first place, and the dismissal was motivated not by fundamental disagreement with Feder, but to allay the fears of his industrial backers that he would implement some of Feder’s more radical anti-business proposals. Here it should be mentioned that in 1932 campaign financing from industry was overwhelmingly against the Nazis, as historian Henry Ashby Turner pointed out^x. The same is true for Italian Fascism: Fascism certainly was not a movement supported by big business in Italy either. The fascist government played an immense role in the economy to the detriment of the capitalists. Historian A. James Gregor observed that

“…the Italian business community, in general, welcomed the disappearance of Fascism. Fascism never served the interests of Italian business.”

It is also telling that Hitler retained the overtly communist Goebbels as propaganda minister until the very end.

Next Rachels produces the quote from Hitler that is memed by his apologists in an attempt to contrast his National Socialism with Marxist socialism:

‘Socialist’ I define from the word ‘social’ meaning in the main ‘social equity’. A Socialist is one who serves the common good without giving up his individuality or personality or the product of his personal efficiency. Our adopted term ‘Socialist has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not. Marxism places no value on the individual, or individual effort, of efficiency; true Socialism values the individual and encourages him in individual efficiency, at the same time holding that his interests as an individual must be in consonance with those of the community. All great inventions, discoveries, achievements were first the product of an individual brain. It is charged against me that I am against property, that I am an atheist. Both charges are false. Adolf Hitler in the Sunday Express on September 28, 1930

First, note the source and date. This quote was publicly directed while Hitler was a prominent politician but had not yet achieved ultimate power. Even on its face it is just a rehash of Rousseau, but the reason for its tone of moderation is that this is the classic pivot toward the center that politicians pull once they have mobilized their base behind them. The broader electorate’s more milquetoast sensibilities must be pandered to as well. This is a departure from the overt influence of Marx on of the NSDAP’s 25 Point Program^xi, which Hitler never modified. In 1932, the same year the NSDAP was elected to power, Franklin Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, accused Herbert Hoover of “leading the country down the path of socialism.”¹. The policies both Hitler and Roosevelt imposed would do this despite. Rachels attempts to whitewash Germany’s downgrade under the NSDAP, however. He cites the Economics of Fascism Wikipedia article. On a topic such as this, communist-run Wikipedia is not very credible, as communists are motivated to associate capitalism with fascism to the greatest extent possible. Evidence suggestive of this bias is found in the fact that a search for “privatiz” on the page returns 48 results while “socializ” and “nationaliz” return a combined 5. As of the time of this article’s writing, the introduction to the Wikipedia article reads: “Historians and other scholars disagree on the question of whether a specifically fascist type of economic policy can be said to exist. “. This is not surprising, because fascism has little specific economic doctrine beyond “national interest”, so it ends up being whatever the state deems expedient. The article also mentions that Hitler himself affirmed this at one point “The basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all”: In practice this results in a great deal of intervention, both because of fascism’s collectivism and because of self-interest’s persistence when people attain positions of unlimited power. It is no different from other forms of socialism in this regard. Rachels cites the article’s mentioning of industry privatization under fascism:

Fascist governments in both Italy and Germany privatized state-owned enterprises at certain times.[33][34][35] These privatizations were carried out in the early stages of both regimes (1922–1925 for Italy and 1934–1937 for Germany) and represented a reversal of the policies of the democratic governments which had preceded them. The democratic governments had brought a number of industries under state ownership and the fascists decided to return them to private ownership.[36] In doing so, they went against the mainstream economic trends of their time, when most Western governments were increasing state ownership.[37][38]

One thing to note is that some of these privatizations were of industries that had been socialized earlier by the very same fascist governments. In debunking the claim that privatization absolves fascism of socialism, PraxBen makes an important distinction between privatization and liberalization:

“Privatization simply means putting legal ownership into the hands of a private individual. But the private individual can be a member of a socialist or workers’ party, or have a legal monopoly granted to them by the government, or be subject to extreme governmental regulations. This type of privatization can favor socialist parties when they don’t have full control over the government. It’s better to have an industry privatized under a party member than nationalized under their opposition. Liberalization, on the other hand, deregulates state power and gives ownership to individuals in a competitive free market.”

Economist Germa Bels observes:

“Whereas the modern privatization in the EU has been parallel to liberalization policies, in Nazi Germany privatization was applied within a framework of increasing control of the state over the whole economy through regulation and political interference.”

This is consistent with the Nazi’s disregard for private property as described above. They made this disregard official in abolishing Germany’s constitutional right to private property on February 28^th, 1933. When private property is private in name only, privatization of industry is also private in name only. Businesses under fascism were dictated as to how much they could produce, pay workers, to whom they could sell, for how much, and when. PraxBen writes²: “The Nazi state introduced measures commonly found in state socialism, such as national investment boards, state control of prices, banking, and foreign trade, and regimentation of business activities. Economic historian Peter Temin wrote,”

“Both governments reorganized industry into larger units, ostensibly to increase state control over economic activity. The Nazis reorganized industry into 13 administrative groups with a larger number of subgroups to create a private hierarchy for state control. The state could therefore direct a firm’s activities without acquiring direct ownership of enterprises.”

Of Fascist Italy, PraxBen writes: “Mussolini mandated union membership, harshly regulated industries, and socialized over 80 firms.”

The stock holdings of banks were confiscated by the fascist government, and practically bankrupt companies were taken over. As a result, the Italian government held substantial positions in numerous other businesses as well as controlling interests in others, including iron production, naval building, and shipping.“

Rachels moves on to discuss fascism and central banking. He quotes Red Ice:

When Hitler’s period as Chancellor of Germany began, the German people had no work, no money and were starving. A wheelbarrow full of 100 billion-mark banknotes could not buy a loaf of bread at the time, and many Germans were living in shacks after countless homes and farms had been seized by Rothschild/Rockefeller-controlled banks.

In his 1967 book The Magic of Money, Hitler’s Reichsbank President, Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, let out the big secret:

“The mark’s dramatic devaluation began soon after the Reichsbank was “privatized,” or delivered to private investors.”

In other words, responsible for the post-war hyperinflation was not the German government, but rather the privately owned central bank in Germany, and its monopoly over the creation of money. Germany’s economy was crashed and devastated by bankers… that is, until Hitler arrived.

After Hitler was elected, refusing to play ball with the Rockefeller-Rothschild rules, one of the first things he did was fix the corrupt, debt-based financial system. By completely thwarting the international banking cartels, the Nazi government issued its own currency known as Reich Marchs, which were debt free and uncontrollable by international financial interests.

…If America nationalized their currency as Hitler did for Germany, they would effectively sever all ties with international bankers, the manipulation of their government and economy would cease, and they would live debt-free. Just as Hitler issued debt-free currency for Germany, Abraham Lincoln setup an interest free banking system in the United States when he was President, and he was murdered for it. Former US president Andrew Jackson issued interest-free currency, and two shots were fired at his head in an assassination attempt, but the shots misfired and he survived. John F. Kennedy issued interest-free currency during his presidency and we all know how he met his untimely demise.

After Germany’s public banking system was installed, world Jewry responded by declaring war on Germany, including a global boycott of German goods. Within two years, the German economy was flourishing with its new-found stable, and inflation-free currency.

Red Ice’s summary of Germany’s banking history is packed with distortion. Their first claim that Germans were destitute as of 1933 omits the fact that Weimar’s hyperinflation peaked in 1924. By the time the Nazis came to power the economy had already recovered significantly. They quote a highly non-objective source in Schact, the former director of the Reichsbank, who would naturally want to distance a state central bank from hyperinflation by blaming it on the private sector. Schact’s quote is a spurious, post-hoc attribution that ignores that the Weimar Reichsbank was fundamentally a state institution; its private equity ownership feature is of a quite different nature from ordinary ownership in a corporation (to his credit Rachels corrects Red Ice on this immediately below their quote). The Third Reich’s own policies were somewhat inconsistent with the hostility today’s national socialists have toward private banks, because the NSDAP privatized Germany’s four largest commercial banks shortly after taking power^xii. The Federal Reserve system of the US is similarly structured but has never caused hyperinflation. The overwhelming majority of central banks in the world are fully state-run, and multiple fully state-run banks have caused hyperinflations. Although private banks can inflate, a free banking system quickly drives inflationists out of business as non-inflationist banks redeem the unbacked depository receipts at the inflationist ones. When it is discovered that the receipts are counterfeit this causes a run and the bank shuts down. By contrast, when a state with a monopoly on money production inflates, either directly or through its banking partners, no one has any economic recourse, resulting in a mass wealth transfer from late recipients of the newly printed notes to early recipients. The cause of the Weimar hyperinflation was the German government’s monetization of its crippling reparations debts from World War I. One could argue that this was not the German government’s fault because those debts were imposed by the Triple Entente in the Treaty of Versaille, but that simply pushes the blame back a step where it still lies with states.

Red Ice’s claim that the Reichsmark was debt-free is a trivially debunked falsehood. Not only did the Reich issue debt, it forced businesses to buy it³, as well as forcing conquered countries such as Greece to loan it money that was never paid back⁴. Rachels even contradicts Red Ice himself by quoting Hoppe on German National Socialism later on in the article, where Hoppe compares the Reich’s monetary and fiscal performance with that of New Deal America. One of the points of comparison is the debt burden each country had. Red Ice celebrates Abraham Lincoln of all people for issuing currency that was supposedly debt-free in greenbacks. The greenbacks were the first currency issued by the US government that were not fully redeemable for specie, which is one of the many crimes Lincoln has to his name. The whole purpose of Lincoln’s issuance of greenbacks was to create more debt to finance his war against the Confederacy than commodity money would allow^xiii. Red Ice also claims that the attempt on Andrew Jackson’s life was because he issued debt-free money. Jackson did not issue any new currency; he simply vetoed the renewal of the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, thereby ending it. John F. Kennedy never issued his own money either, let alone debt-free, he merely issued Executive Order 11110 delegating to the Treasury his preexisting authority to issue silver under the Thomas Amendment of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, as amended by the Gold Reserve Act. This was merely a temporary measure; Kennedy himself was in favor of phasing out silver certificates in favor of Federal Reserve Notes and called upon Congress to do this⁵.

Crucially, none of these presidents sought to prohibit outright a real driver of inflation: The fraudulent practice of “fractional reserve banking”. None of them sought to prohibit anything that can be objectively described as debt slavery either, which is forcing taxpayers into debtor status to whomever holds government debt. Neither did Hitler. Red Ice seems to be implying that debt is the fundamental problem in money production. This is not true; a bank can counterfeit all the depository receipts it can for itself, spend them, then skip town rather than lending any of them out. This is what states do when they inflate directly, sans the necessity of skipping town. Lending counterfeit money is simply a longer con. Nearly all debt in any advanced economy is denominated in money; barter is inefficient enough in the present, let alone across time. To be fair to Red Ice, it is unlikely that their position is that debt per se is bad, but that the production of money through debt issuance is bad. This is true because it is an instance of material tampering with the supply of money, but neither the debt part nor the increase in the supply is what is fundamentally problematic. For anyone, including a bank, to destroy a stockpile of depository receipts belonging to someone else without their consent would also be destructive, not only because it would significantly hinder the owner’s ability to withdraw his deposit on demand, but also because it would distort interest rates upward due to the artificial scarcity created by such a hindrance. This detail may be subtle but it is crucial because focus on the problems of debt and inflation creates an excessive bias against banks. While states create much more debt then any bank can on its own, debt becomes associated with banks in the public mind because the public has much less hands-on experience with state scrip than with mortgages and credit cards. This bias leads to the conclusion that rather than tampering with the money supply by any party being the problem, the problem is private banks issuing depository receipts for money stored for safekeeping and convenient transfer, because this perfectly legitimate practice is so superficially similar to “fractional reserve banking”, which is the fraudulent practice of lending such receipts, or counterfeit copies thereof, without the depositor’s consent. Although depository receipts can serve as a medium of exchange alongside money, they are not themselves money because of their non-homogeneity; the level and quality of warehousing services varies from bank to bank. A receipt from an uninsured bank that gets robbed will be worth less than one from a sound bank. A sound supply of true money barely changes if at all, while the number of depository receipts in circulation can change significantly depending on the general demand for security and transfer services. Depository receipts are mistaken for debt because in the lay public’s mind debt merely means “owing somebody something”, rather than a contract exchanging money across time. Depository receipts are demand deposits, however, and the right to redeem them on demand excludes them from the category of debt. It is time deposits that are invested in debt, and as such fall into an entirely separate category of banking service which is investment. The core investment in which banks have expertise is loans. The bank offers to use its expertise in evaluating creditworthiness to make loans it believes will be paid back, and shares the interest with the investor. The investor accepts the credit risk along with the bank. Although these securities sometimes trade on a secondary market and can function to some degree as a medium of exchange within such a market, their inability to be redeemed on demand and their non-homogeneity in terms of credit underwriting quality decidedly excludes them from the category of money as well. In the current fractional reserve system insured on the taxpayer’s dime, however, the crucial difference between the two basic types of services that banks provide is badly muddied. Banks have little incentive to disclose the fact that the money intended merely to be warehoused is in fact being invested, because if the investment goes bust the deposit is insured up to $250,000 by the FDIC. This is before even getting to implicit bailout guarantees and access to emergency lending from the Federal Reserve. It is doubtful a free-market banking system would ever feature services like interest-bearing checking accounts, certainly not accounts both bearing interest and offering unlimited check writing ability. Warehousing is a fee-based, not an interest-based service. It is little surprise, therefore, that economic populists like Red Ice get the money issue so badly wrong.

Red Ice claims that “if America nationalized their currency as Hitler did for Germany, they would effectively sever all ties with international bankers, manipulation of their government and economy would cease, and they would live debt-free”. This is delusional. America’s currency is already nationalized; the private features of the Federal Reserve system, as the preceding explanation should have made clear, are incidental regardless of their extent. Their actual extent is not all that significant; the Federal Reserve was created by an act of Congress, has to requisition money for its operations from the Treasury, enjoys the privilege of legal tender laws, holds regulatory power over its member banks, and has its governors appointed by politicians. It is an independent agency, meaning it operates independently of other agencies and does not carry out orders on monetary policy directly from Congress or the President. The latter can still influence policy, however, in their power to appoint and confirm personnel. A truly private (or liberalized, as defined above) institution has none of these features. A private feature that does exist is a limited equity stake in the system held by member banks, however, such equity does not return a pro-rata dividend but a fixed payout rate of 6%; the remainder of profit goes to the Treasury^xiv. The equity shares do not have voting rights like common shares of a corporation, the system is authoritarian central planning of a kind that third positionists should like: nominal private ownership belying state control. Dispensing with the nominally private features and fully nationalizing the monetary system would simply make the Federal Reserve system like the overwhelming majority of central banks already in existence, and the majority of such banks inflate worse than the Fed. It should also be noted that money can be produced independently of both banks and government, historically this is quite common. The rise of cryptocurrency is driving this home further. If the state were to nationalize all banking functions, which Hitler came close to doing (referred to by Red Ice’s use of the term “public banking” for Hitler’s system) this would be catastrophic for the reasons attentive to socialism of any crucial industry. Red Ice blithely ignores the basic fact that increasing the government’s power over the economy increases the capacity for systemic manipulation and abuse thereof. There’s even a term for this: Keynesianism. Keynesianism is the belief that the government can manipulate the economy into greater prosperity through deficit spending and inflation. Keynesianism is banking-agnostic, but the effects of deficit spending and inflation are no less destructive when the government does these things with cronies in other industries than with banks. Red Ice’s claim that Germany’s economy recovered in two years is mainly based on the labile metric of GDP, a metric which is easily manipulated through Keynesian policies, a metric which in other contexts Red Ice have dismissed for the same reasons. The claim that world jewry declared war on Germany is a meme based on a sensationalist Daily Express headline from 1933. The vast majority of jews do not work in banking, nor do those outside banking understand the destructiveness of fractional reserve banking to them. and it was quite reasonable for them to wish to starve the national socialist regime of the fruits of their labors, as that regime had made explicit its intent to arbitrarily prohibit jews from working in a number of occupations they had relied on historically for sustenance. Because at the time jews had no state, it is ridiculous to take this headline of “declares war” anywhere close to literally.

While Rachels does correct Red Ice on one point of fact, it feels perfunctory in light of how much distortion on their part he simply lets slide. Sometimes what is unsaid makes a stronger case than what is, and what Rachels does not say in terms of correcting Red Ice’s distortions makes a strong case against his.

Perhaps sensing this on some level, Rachels goes on to cite a much more authoritative source in Hoppe’s “The Economic Doctrine of the Nazis”. Rachels does so for the purpose of comparing the Third Reich with New Deal America. On a number of standard macroeconomic metrics, the Reich appears superior. For the most part I will not dispute the veracity of the metrics themselves. I will say that employment can be highly misleading due to its variance with labor force participation and discouraged worker effects. It is likely even more misleading in the case of the Reich, which had mandatory national service for its youth and introduced military conscription earlier than did the Roosevelt regime. According to the Wikipedia article on the economics of Nazism, real wages fell 25% between 1933 and 1938. The article also mentions that “Hitler’s administration decreed an October 1937 policy that “dissolved all corporations with a capital under $40,000 and forbade the establishment of new ones with a capital less than $200,000,” which swiftly effected the collapse of one-fifth of all small corporations.” Not even Roosevelt’s administration passed something that egregious. Although we must take communist-run Wikipedia articles on Nazism with a grain of salt, it hardly needs to be said that like the system of today, the New Deal is an abysmally low bar for comparison. The Reich’s faster recovery from the depression in terms GNP per capita is also misleading due to its massive military build-up to invade Czechoslovakia and Poland. Hoppe also points out that inflation as measured as measured by consumer and wholesale price indices was much lower in Germany than the US. There are of course significant limitations to price indices as a measure of inflation, but the key point to make here is that the Third Reich, like its supposed enemies and Weimar predecessor, was still inflationary. Hoppe mentions that Hitler lowered taxes in a number of areas such as automobiles, housing construction, and property. Hoppe does not mention, however, that tax revenue from corporate taxes increased 1,365% from 1933-1938 while GNP (which includes the taxation that is government spending) increased by only 57%. Total fiscal revenues grew 110% over this period^xv.

Hoppe praises Hitler for his “significantly more enlightened” understanding of monetary economics, quoting Hitler declaring: “The value of a currency depends on the volume of production behind it. Falling production weakens it; rising production strengthens it. Money is only a matter of paper production; the real task is to increase production to the extent money is increased.” This is a classic case of someone with right-wing instincts in Hitler having the right instinct about an issue but drawing the wrong conclusions. Hitler is right about the effect of production on money, but perhaps being biased by Weimer hyperinflation in his mind’s rearview mirror, falsely reduces money to a ‘matter of paper production’ (likely confusing depository receipts with money as discussed earlier). He also appears to assume that increase of the money supply is an inexorable, exogenous force. Hitler correctly concludes, given this false premise, that maintaining purchasing power requires an increase in economic activity. The Keynesian bias is clear, assuming correct translation, in the phrase “the real task is to increase production.” He views people as passive sluggards who need to be prodded by the state to produce enough to keep up with the rate of monetary increase. The policies this view results in, of course, create a turbo-charged treadmill of an economy where the state inflates faster than people can keep up their production with, with those of least means, especially fixed means, often falling off completely.

The final section of Rachels’ article addresses the objection that some libertarians have to dictatorship as such. He rebuts this objection with Hoppe’s observation that long-tenured rulers naturally have a longer-term stake in the welfare of a nation than do politicians who have to concern themselves with a short-term election cycle. While Rachels’ rebuttal is correct as far is it goes, he does not address the fundamental problem that is naturally associated with dictatorship: the unlimited potential scope of the government’s activities. A democratic republic where natural law is esteemed, which is to say, where people only vote on who enforces natural law, rather than vote on law itself, is superior to a regime where an autocrat can legislate anything on a whim, or worse, anything behind the pretext of “national interest” as in fascism.

Rachels’ concludes:

At this point, it should be clear why a move towards Fascism from our current position would be a move towards liberty. Thus, we as libertarians should not be averse to allying with the Alt-Right simply because some of them are Fascist. This is perfectly fine. Fascist governments have a relatively healthy respect for private property and free enterprise. They oppose the Central Bank. They promote traditional western values and institutions. Of course, the most satisfying aspect of Fascism is its ability to mercilessly destroy the Communist threat.

It is not at all clear beyond the presumably much more restrictive immigration policy (though even here fascism is inferior to our system) that fascism is much of a move toward liberty at all. Immigration restriction does not at all distinguish fascism from other reactionary ideologies. It is perfectly reasonable to wish to avoid association with a phenomenon because it contains a significant element of toxicity. We justify discriminatory behavior against dangerous diversity with Mark Levin’s quip: “If you knew one Skittle in a bowl was poisoned but not which, would you eat any?” In the case of the Alt-Right, however, which comprises disparate factions loosely connected by opposition to globalism, it is trivial for right-wing libertarians to embrace only the other factions that are well-aligned with us, such as Propertarians, paleoconservatives, and neoreactionaries (Liberty+ does just this). Fascists are to be excluded. Their respect for private property and free enterprise is a sham; not only do they not oppose a central bank, the historical instances of fascism retained the pre-existing central bank and increased its power. Moreover, they are committed to the monopolization of money production through the state. Fascism goes sharply against Western values: Its genuine collectivism is against actualist individualism, its authoritarianism is against liberty, its monopolistic centralization is against political competition. Fascism failed to defeat communism historically, colluded with the worst of communists in Stalin, included numerous communists among its ranks high and low, and ideologically differs from communism more in emphasis than in substance. Fascists are inveterate enemies of libertarians, and it is strange that this even needs to be said. That being said, forming alliances with certain enemies can be expedient when facing a common threat. This is always provisional, however, and must be treated with caution. In the comments to the essay, Rachels indicated agreement with this as of 2018. He said explicitly then that he did not see fascism as a necessary or ideal step to liberty. He now sees fascists as not only potential allies but friends, however, and believes that fascism is now necessary to save the white race, and possibly liberty, but to him the latter is something that can be discussed “later”. Well I’m not waiting to discuss the evil of authoritarianism until later, I’m going to attack it with all my might now and through the end of my days. Part II will rebut Rachels’ current position.

Sources

ihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_Verona_(1943)#Proposals_made_at_the_Congress

iiZitelmann, Rainer “How Hitler Became a Believer in the State-Planned Economy” FEE, February 22, 2022. https://fee.org/articles/how-hitler-became-a-believer-in-the-state-planned-economy/

iiiKershaw, Ian (2000). The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. London: Bloomsbury Academi. Pp 18-20

ivBullock, Alan. (1991) Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-58601-8 pp 440-4

vFeder, Gottfried. The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation (trans. Alexander Jacob). Self-published, 1923 Pg 15

vi“Brandenburg v. Ohio” https://infogalactic.com/info/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

vii Poole, Christian. “The Nazi Origins of Germany’s Ban on Homeschooling” June 22, 2020. https://thinkingwest.com/2020/06/22/nazi-ban-homeschooling/

viiiBaten, Jorg, & Andrea Wagner. “Autarchy, Market Disintegration, and Health: The Mortality and Nutritional Crisis in Nazi Germany 1933-1937.” CESifo, 2002. https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo_wp800.pdf

ixhttps://quotepark.com/quotes/1946647-ludwig-von-mises-it-cannot-be-denied-that-fascism-and-similar-movem/

xToland, John, Adolf Hitler (1992), p. 277.

xi“National Socialist Program” https://infogalactic.com/info/National_Socialist_Program

xiiChristoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner (June 2006). “The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry” (PDF). The Journal of Economic History. Cambridge University Press. p. 406.

xiiiTerrell, Timothy, “The Dollar Crisis of 1861–1865: Greenbacks, Gold, and Confederate Dollars“ 10/25/2023 https://mises.org/podcasts/2023-supporters-summit/dollar-crisis-1861-1865-greenbacks-gold-and-confederate-dollars

xivMartinez, Brandon “Are Central Banks Private?” Martinex Politix Investigates July 13, 2023 https://odysee.com/@martinezperspective:2/central-banks-martpol:b

xvReichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft, Germany’s Economic Situation at the Turn of 1938/39 (1939), p. 62.

1. “FDR’s Disputed Legacy,” Time, February 1, 1982, p. 23. ↩︎

2. PraxBen. “The Myth of “Rational Fascism” September 24, 2022 https://praxben.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-rational-fascism ↩︎

3. Tooze, Adam. Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy pg 514. Penguin Books, 2006. ↩︎

4. Hille, Peter. “The Nazis’ stolen ‘loan’ from Greece” 10/10/2018 https://www.dw.com/en/nazis-stolen-loan-from-greek-bank-will-germany-pay-it-back/a-18224874 ↩︎

5. “Executive Order 11110 – End of Silver Coinage“ Armstrong Economics. May 20, 2013 https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/research/a-brief-history-of-paper-money/executive-order-11110-end-of-silver-coinage/ ↩︎

John Victor is one of zeroth positionism’s best communicators. During his John Mark days as a video creator he demonstrated this by taking the concepts of natural law in Curt Doolittle’s highly technical formulation and translating them into plain English, often applying them to current events. This approach created broad appeal even among normieconservatives. Unfortunately, attempting to leverage this appeal by doing a joint IRL event with the “Boogaloo Boys” created a contretemps for which many on the dissident right excessively blamed John. This combined with the outcome of the 2020 election caused him to go dark for a couple of years. At the time he did so it was uncertain as to whether he would ever resurface. To the great delight of his fans he has done so recently with a fresh screen name and a new book: How To Fix America’s Political System – Wisdom for Government System Design from History, Science, and the Bible.

His mention of the Bible in the subtitle minimizes ambiguity as to who the target reader is. John grew up as an evangelical Christian and Christian conservatives were John’s target viewers in his John Mark days. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that this mention is not just to grab his target reader’s attention, but refers to extensive chapter-and-verse quotation of the Bible in support of his thesis: That the law of the Bible is natural law, and therefore should be made the law of the land as enforced by a new, re-engineered constitutional government. Non-Christian conservatives and libertarians will still enjoy the book’s sections on the Bible, however, because in these sections he extracts our supreme precept of secular ethics: Don’t steal. This is the eighth of the Ten Commandments. A great insight John makes is that the four commandments surrounding the eighth are also prohibitions against theft on what he considers to be various forms of property. Adultery, for instance, is theft of the sanctity of marriage. Christian conservatives especially will delight in Victor’s call to make Christianity America’s official religion, while avoiding the church socialism of theocracy. He justifies this Biblicly by drawing attention to the fact that the Ten Commandments lead with stating the nation of Israel’s proper relationship with God. The book is also sprinkled with illuminating explanations of what literal translations of certain passages mean, such as how the Hebrew word translated as “honor” in “honor your father and mother” means “pay attention to the outcome of their choices”. This reveals the Fifth Commandment to be the Biblical source of Chesterton’s Fence: You ought not always make the same choices as your ancestors, but before you deviate make sure you understand those choices.

Victor pays special attention to the choices of conservatives’ most celebrated ancestors: America’s Founding Fathers. While appropriately deferential, Victor is vigorous in taking the Founders to task for the Enlightenment errors that caused their constitution to fall short in achieving its intended purpose. He balances this with commendation for their implementation of what the Enlightenment did get right, as well as of the Fathers who were more cognizant of the Enlightenment’s errors. The meat of Victor’s book is a set of proposed reforms to the Constitution derived directly from natural law. The core problem of the original constitution is not only that it did not ban leftism (the ideology of theft) outright, but it also did not have proper enforcement mechanisms to preserve itself. The original constitution contains no provisions for the punishment of officials who violate it. The new fortified constitution he describes contains multiple such enforcement layers, going far beyond the failed internal “checks and balances” of the current constitution. Framing this discussion is a lucid, powerful, and insightful paradigm Victor introduces: Stopping Power vs Starting Power. Stopping power refers to the power to stop certain behaviors. Of crucial importance is the reform that recognizes that such power should not be at all limited to the government in enforcing natural law among the people, but should be unlimited among the people themselves in giving them the power to bring any government official who violates natural law to court subject to harsh punishment. Starting Power, however, which is the ability to start new ventures like a foreign expedition, is extremely dangerous in the hands of government and therefore should be extremely limited.

An Enlightenment belief that Victor obliterates is that putting Starting Power in the hands of the people through a legislature is desirable, because the great majority of the people are terrible at political initiatives for reasons that Victor lays out thoroughly. If government is to have any Starting Power at all, it should reside exclusively in the hands of the executive branch, a branch run by an executive with direct operational control over it like a CEO does with a corporation. A key change Victor proposes is to make the CEO long-term rather than short-term. If this sounds monarchical it’s because it is. The starting power entrusted to the king under this scheme is limited to a short list of enumerated functions however, and wise to the republican sensibilities of American conservatives, Victor refers to this executive not as a king but as a “Long-term CEO” throughout the book (the only time he uses the word king outside of Biblical citation, in fact, is where he recommends against labeling the executive as a king in the fortified constitution). Restoring long-term executive rule, in combination with lavish compensation and harsh punishment for corruption, greatly realigns the incentives of the executive with the nation’s long-term objective interests.

The science that Victor cites draws heavily on the Moral Foundations framework popularized by Jonathan Haidt. Victor simplifies the framework by classifying the population into two personality types: Type R, who are those who, due to being low in agreeableness and higher in systematizing cognition, are able to think critically enough to preserve and grow the nation’s capital, vs Type E, those who are high in agreeableness and higher in empathizing cognition, whose political tendency is is to consume capital. Victor masterfully flips what appears to be a blackpill in the fact that Type Es greatly outnumber Type Rs, into a whitepill, which is that for Type Rs to rule Type Es is the historical norm and is easily achievable again when Type Rs today cast off the Enlightenment falsehood that majority opinion matters.

The book isn’t perfect; libertarians will have some quibbles with what Victor believes is the ideal purview of government, especially at the Federal level. In particular they will object to his characterization of the Federal Reserve system as private, when in reality it is a state-dominated partnership with nominally private banks. Even the private elements of the system are not those that would be found on a free and fair market in banking. Victor recommends that a monopoly on money production be given to the treasury only, presenting seemingly false alternatives between government banks and private banks controlling money production. For most of history, however, money has been produced independently of both, and even within the age of banking we can retain the benefits of free market money production while prohibiting the practice of banks of counterfeiting receipts of money so produced (so-called “fractional reserve banking”). Such prohibition, both in the form of voluntary self-regulation on the part of banks as well as statute, has sound historical precedent. This counts very little against the book, however, because Victor’s target audience is decidedly not the majority of libertarians, and to his credit on this matter, Victor does at least state at the end that the constitution will require the money produced by the treasury to be sound. Another anomaly in the book is that despite John’s distillation of natural law as prohibition on all forms of theft, and his defining of the conservative instinct as “anti-theft” (accurately in my opinion), he retains enshrinement of taxation in the fortified constitution, albeit with the improvement of an explicit cap on the percentage of national output to be taxed. Taxation is regarded by many as a form of theft, however, including many conservatives among his target readers, not just anarcho-capitalist libertarians, and the arguments for treating taxation this way are formidable. The discussion of taxation in the book would benefit greatly from either addressing this objection, or from recommending no Federal taxation at all, as in the Articles of Confederation. In his proposed revision to the First Amendment Victor incorrectly states that it’s illegal to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater; this was a hypothetical example given in the 1919 Schenk Supreme Court decision that upheld restriction on distribution of anti-war literature. This decision was overturned in Brandenburg vs Ohio in 1968, however. This error does not at all vitiate the overall case Victor makes for banning public advocacy of leftism, however, and the case he makes is quite sound.

The flaws are minor, however; it is the monumentally important ideas that Victor conveys, in combination with the book’s highly conversational, accessible style, that make this work shine with sheer brilliance. The book’s core reforms that it proposes are so important, in fact that it is not an understatement to say that the fate of Western civilization itself hinges upon whether the right-wing in America rises up and implements at least a close approximation of them. This is why I unreservedly recommend this book as the most important political book any conservative alive today will ever read.

This thesis was inspired by opposition to uncontrolled immigration from a libertarian standpoint. Pro-control treatment of immigration is usually utilitarian: The threat posed to neighbors by the invitation of dangerous foreign races is a clear-cut instance of a negative externality that the property norm protects neighbors from. The aesthetic externalities of diversity are usually ignored. They should not be because they have a materially adverse effect on property values. The following is the case as to why damaging neighbors’ property prices is a violation of the property norm and therefore should be protected by legal default.

The most appropriate place to begin this case is at the beginning of property appropriation, a.k.a. homesteading. Homesteading is an act of value creation primarily but not exclusively for the homesteader. This value has not only subjective but objective properties. This is because purely subjective deference to a homesteader’s land use by neighbors is usually not a sufficient basis for peaceful relations. While it is technically possible for neighbors to cede an unlimited amount of virgin land to a homesteader, regardless of the extent of his labor, it is far more likely that the actual extent of his boundaries will closely approximate the extent of his labor because that is the means by which he creates value for them that is objectively marked by trade. Homesteading labor is a dangerous and difficult business. Clans who homestead mostly have to fend for themselves against wild animals and bandits at serious risk to their lives. Part of the value homesteaders create is simply keeping a parcel of land clear of these threats. Forest must be cleared for farming. Rocks must be removed from the soil. If suitable building material is not locally available, a house must be constructed at great expense from material transported over great distance. Successful homesteaders are therefore much more courageous and industrious people than latecomers on average.

Because prices can come about only through trade, and trade can occur only with ownership, the price of unowned land is effectively zero. The price that others pay for homesteaded land is therefore an objective record of the value the homesteader creates. Even though we cannot directly measure the property’s utility for the buyer, we do know that the buyer values the property more than whatever he paid for it. The buyer accepts the risk of future fluctuations in the real estate market as a whole, but he hopes that latecoming neighbors, while perhaps not increasing the price, will at least respect the sweat equity built up by the homesteader by refraining from diminishing it. This expectation comes from both self-interest and admiration for the homesteader’s efforts. The subject of discussion thus far is a moral agenda, so we must go further to see why it is also a legal one.

Despite the significant difference between law and morality; there is no purpose of law but to mitigate immorality. Immorality means behavior that negatively affects us on the level of existence itself. There are a number of immoral behaviors, however, that we libertarians are staunchly opposed to legislating against because it is grossly impractical to do so. Impracticality results from a significant degree of subjectivity regarding a behavior’s degree of destructiveness or because the behavior can be concealed easily enough that trying to curb it effectively would require an unacceptable degree of surveillance. Other behaviors, however, are objectively and overtly destructive enough to others to justify intervention with deadly force. What is key here is that it is not whether a behavior is destructive or not per se that determines whether it is legally actionable. It is that there is objective evidence of of material destruction caused by one person of agency to the property of another. A property boundary is an objective criterion of legal action that determines the parties involved in a possible crime in terms of where a behavior occurs in relation to it. It is not the behavior by itself. Usually sitting around isn’t a crime but it is if it is on someone’s property without their permission, even if no material on the property is damaged. A youth sitting around his parents’ house may become a criminal if he is legally judged to have become an adult and his parents feel he has overstayed his welcome. How parents feel about their children, including the judgment of attaining age of majority, is subjective within objective family norms. However, the fact of having made and recorded the judgment is an objective fact that is legally actionable. A subtle but important point here is that it the absence of permission, not disobedience of a request to leave, that makes trespass a crime. Regardless of how the property owner subjectively feels about the trespasser or whether they even know the trespasser is present, the fundamental imposition is the compromise of the owner’s potential for usage of the property simply by occupying space in it. How someone wishes to use their property is subjective; the constriction of potential usage combined with absence of permission is an objective criterion of crime. If an owner hunts on his property and a shot accidentally catches the trespasser, the owner is burdened with disposing of the trespasser somehow. Although presence on another’s property is not determinative per se, trespass is an obvious case of property norm violation. Violation does not, however, require a person himself to cross a physical property boundary. Many cases of fraud do not require such invasion. In the case of “fractional reserve” banking, a bank need not do anything physically to a depositor’s receipts; it is criminal to create and lend out counterfeit copies of the receipts, which objectively decreases their purchasing power and disrupts the economy by distorting interest rates. The parallel to the decreasing of neighbors’ property prices and disrupting their quality of life is obvious. Likewise, there are certain behaviors that can occur entirely within the confines of a physical property boundary that are still clear violations of the property norm. An example is someone standing on their own property pointing their own gun at a nearby neighboring property. Once again, it is not the behavior per se that determines violation. Obviously pointing a gun anywhere, including the sky, creates a potential trajectory in the direction of someone’s property; the determinant of violation, however, is proximity, impediments, and ballistic angle. Ballistic angle is especially illustrative here: Because property does not extend ad caelum, aiming at the sky over someone’s property rather than directly at his property is often actually the greater violation! Key takeaways from the preceding examples are these:

1. A behavior is only a violation in terms of its effect on others. However:

2. Behavior that occurs entirely within the confines of someone’s estate can still be a violation of others’.

Threats to property, intentional or not, are violations because they either force the property owner against his will to take action in responding to the threat, action that is necessarily not his most otherwise preferred course thereof. Even if he is not aware of the threat, the potential damage to his property or person is necessarily an infringement of his freedom to use and dispose of his property according his subjective valuations. Subjectivity is the reason for law; objectivity is law’s stabilizing framework. In the context of this discussion what is most important is that these aspects of law are complementary, not antagonistic.

In the case of certain behaviors having an adverse effect on neighbors’ property prices, the subjectivity involved in price formation is no obstacle to protecting prices from such behaviors. The market, which can only exist under the aforementioned conditions of legal complementarity between the subjective and the objective, is itself the economic mechanism by which subjective values are harmonized by objective prices. The reason why we punish vandalism is not just because it is done without permission and is extremely likely to offend the subjective aesthetic sensibilities of the property owner, but also because it lowers the price of his property. This occurs because the offended owner’s sensibilities are not randomly idiosyncratic but part of an objective norm: the desire for safety. Vandalism is proof unto itself that the neighborhood is unsafe for property and signals that a neighborhood may also be unsafe for persons. Prospective buyers do not have the luxury of long-term trial living to determine whether the latter is the case. As we have seen from above, however, crossing an estate boundary as in vandalism is not necessarily for a violation to occur. If a deviant behavior is sufficiently public, like performing one’s morning yoga routine naked on the front lawn, it will have a similar price effect as vandalism for similar reasons.

That violation of norms have adverse affects on property prices demands further analysis. A norm is the central tendency of a distribution of attitudes. The variance of this distribution is subjectivity. The concept of norm is meaningful only when the distribution is not only varying but also non-uniform. Uniformity would mean that no attitude is more common than any other. Obviously the distribution of attitudes toward something like unprovoked killing is extremely non-uniform. That unprovoked killers exist and have an opposing attitude toward such behavior, however, means that the distribution has variance, i.e. subjectivity. Either a distribution has variance or it does not. Because morality consists of existential attitudes and behaviors and because these vary, this by itself makes makes morality subjective. Most people, however, regard unprovoked killing as “objectively wrong”, or at least recognize that the degree of subjectivity around it as very low. If morality is either subjective or it is not, however, then strictly speaking degree of subjectivity cannot apply. How is it then, the both here and earlier in this article where we related law to morality, we used term “degree of subjectivity” without hopefully any confusion? It is because colloquially “subjectivity” is not used to refer to morality’s variance being non-zero, but to the fact that the magnitude of this variance itself varies greatly from issue to issue! For instance, it is an objective fact that abortion is an unprovoked killing of a distinct human life. For a great many, however, even on the right, this by itself does not justify abortion’s prohibition at all. What is significant here is that “it’s subjective” is by itself no basis whatsoever for determination of whether something is prohibited or not. And yet, “it’s subjective” is the most common objection other libertarians have to protection of property prices against violation of norms by neighbors. Opponents also may also claim that I am committing a false continuum fallacy: That because both unprovoked killing and being a bad neighbor are misbehaviors along a continuum whose degree of badness is a subjective judgment, they should both be legally prohibited. I am not, however, arguing for blanket prohibition of irresponsibility on the part of neighbors. I am arguing for protection of property prices by legal default, which is significantly different. Next we will see why.

“By legal default” means that behavior that is deviant in a way that materially lowers neighboring property prices is prohibited unless all affected neighbors give explicit permission. Otherwise, the only other way such behavior could be engaged in is in a location remote from neighbors. This is a clear differentiation of neighborly irresponsibility from homicide because the latter always has a victim regardless of where it occurs or how many people other than the victim give the killer permission. It should be noted however, that a significant though not primary motivation to punish homicide is homicide’s annihilation of the value of the victim’s human capital, which can be priced in terms of the present value of their expected lifetime income, so punishment of property value damage is far from entirely dissimilar. An actual dissimilarity is that property price damage is a civil, rather than criminal offense. The tort is a latecomer’s breach of duty to respect the value in his neighbor’s property as built up by homesteaders and maintained by their transferees. The protection point is the value at the time of latecomers’ arrival, not the high water mark of value however, because of course a homesteader could slack before latecomers arrive, which means that the price received from latecomers would be less than what it would have been had they arrived earlier. Tort law is a system of proven efficacy that is widely endorsed in libertarianism. Leading libertarian thinkers such as Rothbard have rigorously applied tort law to externalities such as air pollution¹. Local property price protection is the logical extension of such application. Although tort law is at the more technical end of the spectrum of libertarian praxis, this legal regime jives quite quite nicely with the casual intuition of “do want you want without harming others”. By allowing deviant behavior with neighbors’ consent, the principle of voluntarism is preserved. The subjectivity of harm is resolved through the market’s incorporation of all attitudes on the moral distribution (including deviants’ positive valuations!), producing an objective record of harm in the form of price decrease due to dominance of norms within the distribution.

Another objection is that irresponsibility can also be prohibited by covenant. The problem with this is that covenants are formal contracts, which takes time and incurs legal costs to properly prepare. Enforcement of such contracts is also more costly due to their idiosyncrasies. It takes but one holdout neighbor to collapse the proposed covenant due to the nature of neighborhood effects such as in the vandalism example given earlier. Prospective buyers may not know whether the vandal is a neighbor, but given that there is a significant likelihood that this is the case, they do not know which neighbor it is, thus depressing all neighboring property prices. A neighbors who is negligent enough to let their gardens or lawns become overgrown with weeds or naked yoga practitioners are less trustworthy in policing vandalism, less trustworthy in supervising others’ children playing, etc. When one neighbor is irresponsible, others often slack as well because their efforts in maintaining their property are not fully rewarded. Opponents may counter that shaming and ostracism can complement or substitute for covenants. The problem with this is that the type of people who commit public acts of depravity, the type most damaging to property prices, are also the type who are utterly insensitive to shaming². It is absurd that any normal person should ever need to go door to door asking his neighbors to sign a covenant prohibiting something like public bestiality. It is positively perverse that responsible people should ever have to do such a thing merely to maintain the sweat equity they put into maintaining a home. Covenants are for public matters of taste, not of public morality.

Home equity is no mere status symbol. For many it is foundational wealth. People take great pride in their stewardship of the homesteads that have been handed down through generations, and even greater pride in leaving their descendants either real estate or proceeds from the sale thereof. Your ability to control your own environment, to elevate its quality and comfort, and to spend your time as you wish is a direct function of wealth. A significant reason why we value liberty politically is because we value freedom personally, and there is little that is more freeing than wealth. Opponents may dismiss protection of wealth in home equity as “protectionism”. Protectionism, however, is a blanket prohibition or penalization of an economic activity that threatens the equity of firms that are unwilling or unable to compete fairly in creating value. Such firms are the ones who lobby for protection, although typically protection is applied to their whole industry. It creates a deadweight loss in the market. Property price protection, however, is localized to the radius of the economic neighborhood effects of certain behavior, which is typically a literal neighborhood. It is protection not of the lazy and incompetent, but of those who create or maintain value. While it is possible for an irresponsible and deviant property owner to profit from his behavior, the loss to his neighbors is almost invariably much greater. We cannot, however, like mainstream economists, treat the matter only with monetary cost-benefit analysis because that can justify massive infringements on liberty. When an aggregate dollar figure like GDP is maximized to the exclusion of all other considerations, this could justify a laissez-faire economy coupled with a mandate that everyone work eighty hours a week under penalty of death. It is important to point out here, however, that there is no mandate for latecomers to increase property prices under this model, merely to respect the price at the time of their arrival. The consideration in this case is far more fundamental than dollars and cents, however. People are of course perfectly within their rights to depreciate their own property so long as no one else’s property is so affected. It is the fact that unilaterally depressing neighbors’ property prices is an objectively measurable and negative imposition on them and violates the principle of consent. The quantitative reduction in neighborhood equity is the direct result of the qualitative reduction in overall standard of living. While each of consent violation and net social cost are not by themselves actionable in the case of neighborhood effects, together they form a two-pronged test that can be readily adjudicated.

Property, the core of libertarianism, is itself a norm. The very concept of a norm is meaningless without subjectivity, which is is why it is absurd when statists try to argue against us based on the fact that not everyone respects the property norm. Subjectivity, however, is by itself is no basis for legal diffidence because certain behaviors based on subjective valuation have objective, measurable, material effects on the property of others. Such property is often the product of years of blood, sweat, and tears shed by our homesteading forbears, as well as by transferees whom they deemed worthy of holding title. The moral case for preservation of their legacy, for ourselves and for our posterity, is unimpeachable. This case is what makes the norm of preservation as predominant as the property norm itself. This predominance manifests in the depression of property prices by publicly deviant behavior. These price effects can be scientifically teased out from movements of the market as a whole, which creates a job opportunity for econometricians that is actually productive. Neighbortarianism is a legal system properly grounded in morality, yet one that deftly avoids fractious moralism through both its consent to deviance feature and its criterion of price materiality. Neighbortarianism is a resounding rebuttal to those who claim that libertarianism is a philosophy of anti-social atomism; it applies libertarian theory to issues of neighborhood effects in a way that efficiently promotes the flourishing of healthy families and communities. It pays due deference to the legacy of our homesteading forbears while providing the flexibility to accommodate changing tastes and fashions. It neatly resolves the issue that is most contentious among libertarians, immigration, by subsuming the ethical considerations diversity into the aesthetic ones. This thesis, while building on Rothbard’s externality theory and Hoppe’s discussion of covenants and the bad neighbor problem, is novel unto itself and not yet within the mainstream of libertarian thought. To those libertarians who are open-minded enough to grapple with this thesis honestly, as well as to other, similar political wonks out there, I ask, intellectually speaking, “won’t you be…my neighbor?”.

1 Cf. Murray Rothbard’s “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution”

2 Cf. Christopher Cantwell’s “The Limits of Ostracism”.

Third positionism postures as the embodiment of martial virtue, but is it actually the embodiment of martial vice? To answer this question it is not sufficient to simply point to the sins of historical third positionist military-industrial complexes. We must seriously explore whether a superior alternative is feasible. If the zeroth positionist alternative is substantially superior it does not matter what objective virtues characterize the third positionist model because insistence on it does the nation a disservice as represented by the opportunity cost imposed. The following comparison is motivated thusly.

Basic Advantages

In the Power article we introduced proposed systems for the market-based production of national defense. Here we explore them in greater depth in terms of how they promote military superiority. Curtis Yarvin’s system, while it does have strong historical precedent in systems like the Hanseatic League, does not offer any mechanistic advantage over modern monopoly that defense insurance agencies (DIAs) do not, so we will focus on the latter exclusively. A historical precedent for an economically competitive military is that of the Indo-Europeans, a warrior aristocracy driven by aspiration to glory in battle. In this system warriors could freely gravitate to leaders who demonstrated the greatest prowess in commanding them. In combination with their skill in ironworking this system of consent rather than coercion-based command proved so effective that, with fewer numbers than many have thought (Kemp 69) the Indo-Europeans spread their civilization to the opposing extremes of Eurasia.

Most insurance policies today have an exclusion cause for damages caused by war. This is not because such perils are inherently uninsurable, but because insurers are legally prohibited from providing the means of safely underwriting a war policy, for such means would necessitate the insurance company competing with current states in the provision of what is regarded as the latter’s core function: national defense. The states we currently have are monopolistic, by definition they cannot abide competition. This is highly unfortunate not just because monopolistic states are the most murderous institutions that have ever existed but because there is such natural economy of scope between the defense and insurance industries. Insurers already cover acts of aggression such as theft and considering insurance is already the world’s largest industry there is little reason why it could not scale up to cover bigger acts of aggression. Furthermore, military wargaming is a highly actuarial discipline. Even without the benefits of market pressure, the life-and-death stakes involved result in considerable affinity on the part of the military for estimating the probability of perils.

Both security and insurance are highly scalable industries, and while there may exist a local optimum for the former at a level approximating that of the size of the average Western military today, insurance is an international industry, which means that the operating territory of a DIA’s parent company could serve multiple different macro-nations. While pan-european nationalists tend to be of strong third positionist leanings, this benefit is something they can certainly appreciate. This system treats disturbances of the peace as a problem that transcends the borders of any one country, which shifts the friend/enemy distinction away from “France vs. Germany” toward “French and Germans vs violent criminals.” In contrast with the blood-soaked history of european brother wars, especially the total wars of fascist and other modern states, this shift is the opposite of trivial. This system has an advantage over Yarvin’s Patchwork in that it exploits economies of both scale and scope to a greater degree and is more conducive to standardization on an international scale. Another advantage is that under such a system all policies not pertaining to security strategy are made entirely by individual landowners, which keeps conflict over social engineering to an absolute minimum.

Game Theory

Some third positionists object that game theory dooms a voluntary system of national defense from the get-go. This is actually just the standard public goods argument made by statists generally, burnished with a buzzword cribbed from popular social science. They argue that people will not contribute sufficiently to defense service on a voluntary basis because it is too difficult for providers of defense to exclude non-payers from benefiting from their protection. This is the alleged “free rider problem”. Multiple real-world instances contradict the free rider claim, however. Once instance can be found at the international level. Walter Block points out that During the Cold War, Canada and Mexico, despite enjoying the protection umbrella of the US military juggernaut, maintained armies of their own, as did most of the USSR’s neighbors. This is despite the fact that nations tend to act in their own perceived self-interest due to in-group preference. Another thing the public goods argument misses in the big picture is that much of our enjoyment of life itself is a form of free-riding. We do not pay for the lifting of our spirits at the site of our neighbors’ flower gardens in bloom. We do not pay for the fountain at a mall, nor are we even obligated to fund it indirectly by making a purchase at one of the shops. We do not pay others for their politeness cultivated through finishing school or a career in customer service. In the case of a DIA specifically, while it is hard to exclude non-payers from benefiting from instances where the DIA works, i.e. the enemy not damaging their property, it it trivial to exclude non-payers from receiving insurance payouts for the inevitable instances where a DIA is unsuccessful in protecting their property from damage. This is just a “for-profit” model, by the way. Nationalism, including support for national defense, is not instilled but innate, which is why “nationalism” and “innate” are cognates. Although propaganda can steer nationalist instinct for good or for ill, this instinct is something preexisting that propaganda appeals to, preexisting on the order of millions of years of evolutionary history. Despite already funding the largest military in history through high taxes, the American people also voluntarily fund numerous fully private charities that support servicemen and their families from cradle to grave. There is even a large and successful insurance company that explicitly caters to servicemen but without any official Department of Defense affiliation whatsover in USAA. It is therefore ludicrous to claim that people who so generously fund military support organizations would underfund the military organizations themselves when free to choose otherwise. It must also be noted that it is quite plausible to envision a scenario when choosing otherwise is rational. Like any human institution the defense industry is vulnerable to the madness of crowds and consequently charging off to unproductive wars against threats that turn out to be phantasmagoria. It is especially important therefore to be able to opt out and “self-insure” through increased support for militias comprising comparatively cooler heads.

Returning to game theory specifically, it turns out that game theory actually supports the value of reciprocity that is foundational to zeroth positionism. In the 1980s Robert Axelrod ran a series of tournaments where different game theory experts submitted algorithms designed with the objective of winning an iterated prisoners’ dilemma scenario. The winner was a simple one: The “Tit for Tat” strategy, wherein cooperation was the default approach undermining one’s opponent for a quick short-term gain was used only in retaliation, just as violence in libertarianism is used only in retaliation. Subsequent simulations revealed that this basic strategy is optimized with some measure of forgiveness due to human error, but also with permanence attached to punishment of defectors. This paints a clear picture of how cooperation evolved under conditions of anarchy described earlier. How much greater then, is a cooperative military under the command of a governmental authority under conditions where reciprocity can fully flower?

Not only does game theory support zeroth positionism at the level of its fundamental ethic but also in its application resulting in nuclear weapons proliferation. Bertrand Lemennicier offers a mathematical demonstration of why McNukes promote peace in “Nuclear Weapons: Monopoly or Proliferation”. He starts the thought experiment with the simple scenario where only one party has nukes. In this case there is a strong temptation to aggress because there is no comparable threat of retaliation. The US government dropping fission bombs on a prostrate Japan at the end of World War II appears to confirm this. We can regard this scenario as the third positionist ideal if we define the one party as the set of states within white nation-states. This is unrealistic due to the fact that the Chinese and North Koreans have nukes and their IQs do not appear to be declining below a mean critical to maintaining status as a nuclear power within the foreseeable future. At the level of the nation-state third positionists insist on this party being the state only. This may be “realistic” in that it is the status quo, but is it realistic in terms of promoting peace? Compared to competitive proliferation this actually turns out to be significantly more hazardous. Before we proceed with summarizing Lemennicier’s demonstration as to why, we should address a couple of arguments in favor of statist cartelization of nuclear polities.

One argument is that as nuclear weapons proliferate, there is, ceteris paribus, an increased chance of accidental launch. The first thing to point out is that competitive proliferation does not necessarily mean a higher number of nukes per nation, it means a higher number of organizations, be they municipal, regional, national, or international, having access to nukes. Access does not mean that all organizations with the means to manufacture or purchase nukes will do so. Most billionaires and corporations outside the security industry would content themselves with conventional security measures due to the high cost of maintaining and safeguarding nukes and that most threats to their security come from within their countries rather than elsewhere. Due to military scalability, it is conceivable that an international free market in defense would produce a number of nuclear firms that is fewer than the number of current nuclear states. Let us assume, however, that an international free market would, regardless of the number of nuclear firms, produce more nukes, which is not unreasonable if we treat nukes as goods, as monopoly by definition restricts the production of goods. We can argue this would increase safety, because the more nukes produced, the more “reps” manufacturers have in making failsafes and developing safe handling procedures. Increased output is associated with economies of scale, and the cost savings from such economies can be invested in better safety. There is also the more fundamental fact of free market competition’s superior information and knowledge efficiencies over socialism.

Fortunately, we have not had have a real-world accidental launch yet. We also have not yet had a nuclear third positionist or zeroth positionist regime to make a proper observational comparison. The best real world comparison of political economy’s possible effect on nuclear technology is Three Mile Island vs Chernobyl. The former was the result of a concatenation of unfortunate malfunctions in monitoring equipment, whereas the latter was the result of reckless and incompetent experimentation with heterodox safety procedure on the part of its personnel. The Three Mile Island incident was only a partial meltdown that exposed local residents to about as much radiation as a chest x-ray, in actuality a demonstration of how safe Western nuclear energy was, whereas Chernobyl was a full meltdown that blew the roof off of the plant and released massive doses of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere, killing 31 people within three months, The Three Mile Island plant was run by GPU, a publicly traded utility company, whereas the V.I. Lenin Plant at Chernobyl was run by the Soviet Ukrainian government. In the cases of responsible usage of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, the historical record weighs in favor of proliferation and more market-oriented production, respectively.

Let us also address specifically the phenomenon of a potentially higher number of organizations having nukes. Might this result in less standardization of safeguards, increasing risk of accidental launch? There is little reason to think so. The market for PC peripherals has a vast number of firms yet nearly all use the USB standard. The “UL” marker that many household appliances have stands for “Underwriters Laboratories”, which is a private safety certification firm. Private certification firms enjoy a network effect from standardization, keeping their number few, but this effect is still highly precarious due to potential competition. If a dominant firm is caught taking bribes; their certification of even non-bribing firms becomes worthless in the latter’s eyes and they will switch to a competitor as soon as possible. A government safety agency is monopoly and therefore a monopoly on venality as well. It carries the perceived special authority of the state yet it is no less difficult to bribe state officials than anyone else. As a monopoly, however, it does not face nearly the same level of pressure to maintain its integrity as a market.

Another argument in favor of cartelization concludes from the fact that some people are maniacally irrational that nuclear proliferation not only increases the risk of accidental but intentionally cataclysmic launch. There are several problems with this. First, although many people who are attracted to power are psychopathic, psychopathy is not the same as psychosis. Psychopathic means deviance from common concern for one’s fellow man while psychotic means prone to severe episodes of deviance from reality itself. Although psychopathy correlates with psychosis, most psychopaths are not psychotic. Attainment of the level of power necessary to wield nuclear weapons requires a level of attunement to reality that effectively precludes psychosis. It is important to remember that marketization here is not an Oprah Winfrey-style lottery but an orderly and competitive process where only competence that goes far beyond not being psychotic is entrusted with nuclear weapons. This process does select for a certain psychopathy, however, a trait that has been observed to be common among both politicians and CEOs. The kind of psychopath selected for in CEOs, however, is, unlike in politicians, a benign kind overall. It is necessary to have a certain deviance from common concern for fellow men in order to make the hard decisions concomitant with running a successful business. While politicians make hard decisions too, they are incentivized by the monopoly they run to make decisions that enrich themselves and expand their power at the expense of their clients, whereas a businessman’s self-interest is much better aligned with that of his clients because the market mechanism only enriches him when he creates value for them. Such value in the case of national defense includes minimizing risk of intentionally cataclysmic launch. What if a CEO becomes psychotic? While of course a politician is no less likely to become psychotic in office, the formally corporate structure of competitive governmental organization provides significantly more safety in that the launch codes are held not by the CEO’s aide but by the board of directors or by the shareholders directly, as described in Yarvin’s model in the Power article. It is trivial for the board or shareholders to revoke nuclear privileges in such an unfortunate and rare case.

Returning to nuclear game theory, Lemennicier’s demonstration goes as follows: He assumes rationality on the part of all players. “Rationality” in his demonstration is rational in terms of third positionist values in that it means seeking to acquire the most territory and resources. He assumes two possible strategies: Aggressive (Hawk) or Cooperative (Dove). He begins with a scenario with two players, John and Peter. Nuclear war is assumed to have both gains and costs. Each player if armed, will only launch a nuclear attack when the expected gains exceed the costs. The scenario begins with the case where only one player has nukes. In this case Hawk is the dominant strategy because the non-armed player will always surrender and the armed player will gain all of the former’s resources. The cost to the armed player is zero. When both have nukes, however, each player will only play Hawk if he expects the other to play Dove. The probability one player will play Hawk is therefore a direct function of his estimate of the probability the other player will play Dove. This is because total destruction is assumed in the case of both playing Hawk. In this case gains are zero, and each pays the full cost of war. Each player is indifferent to strategy when the net gains from each strategy are equal. Under this condition Lemennicier extracts a formula from the payoff matrix:

John’s estimate of the probability that Peter will play Hawk = Gain when John plays Hawk and Peter plays Dove / Opportunity Cost of War when John plays Hawk and Peter plays Hawk

“Opportunity Cost” here means the sum of the direct of cost of war to each player and the gain each player would have realized had they both played Dove instead.

John will play Hawk when the gain ratio on the right hand side of the equation exceeds John’s estimate of Peter’s Hawkishness. As the cost of war increases, the probability that Dove is played also increases. What happens when we increase the number of players? If we assume the players’ expectations of one another are rational then there is no reason that one player’s estimate of the others playing Dove will differ significantly from the others’ estimates. Making this simplifying assumption allows us to multiply the probability estimate side of the equation by the total number of players and to increment the direct cost term by the number of players added. The other terms do not change. Another assumption in this model is that the gain of war does not change with the number of players. This assumption is reasonable pertaining to territory for the nuclear age because all land on Earth has been homesteaded at this point. If a higher number of players is indicative of increased political competitiveness and therefore increased general prosperity, we could concede that the potential gains of war increase as well, though Lemennicier does not make such an assumption. If we do make this assumption, however, due to the law of diminishing marginal returns the prosperity return to political competitiveness must be less than 1:1 with respect to the number of players. This means that as the number of players increases the gains increase less than the costs, and that as this number approaches infinity the gain ratio approaches zero. This outcome is the same whether gains increase with the number of players or not. This is likely why Lemmenicier does not bother introducing the assumption in the first place. As the gain ratio approaches zero so too does the probability that anyone will play Hawk. The frequency of nuclear conflict therefore also diminishes toward zero as the number of players increases.

Nuclear weapons evoke an eschaton that leads many to believe that such weapons somehow transcend the laws of self-defense. Third positionists are Hegelians, i.e. historical relativists, and thus sometimes argue that a change in technology “changes the game”. When we take a scientific view, however, we see that those same laws apply to nuclear weapons in full. Just as more guns means less crime, as John Lott has titled his seminal work regarding reducing restrictions on that weapon class, more competition in the production of nuclear weapons means less war crime.

Demotic Subversion

A significant way in which third positionism also corrupts national defense is via its democratic pretenses. “Democratic” as describing third posititionism does not mean direct rule by the people as the social democrats would have it, but rule in the name of the people (demotic). This is not an unreasonable connection given the fact that both Hitler and Mussolini were democratically elected and fancied themselves rulers in their nations’ names. When the nation is consolidated under a monopolistic state in the modern fashion, wars between states become wars between whole nations. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn contrasts the types of warfare the traditional and modern systems necessitate in “Monarchy and War.” Leddihn, having first provided historical examples of republics reverting to monarchy to offer hope for civilized reform, proceeds to connect the collectivist kind of nationalism advocated by third positionists to democracy and its destructive militarism. He observes that democracy results in the politicization of the whole society, and this holds true whether the democracy is direct, representative by a parliament, or representative by a fuhrer. Because the foundation of government is usually the military, when “the people” are “the government”, democracies are liable to introduce conscription, as per the “duty” that a citizen’s “political freedom” entails. Leddihn describes military indoctrination as a tragic consequence necessitated by general conscription:

“One of the most immediate and degrading consequences of the general military service in the time of war was the ‘indoctrination’ of the draftee. They were in their vast majority innocent and largely even unwilling civilians whose enthusiasm for fighting and killing was very limited. So they were taught to hate the enemy, degraded to the impersonation of wickedness, ugliness, and devoid of all virtue. This had been different in previous ages, when soldiers were men—gentlemen as well as ruffians—who loved to fight and offered their services to anybody who led and paid them well.”

Leddihn goes on to provide two example of mercenary noblemen who offered their services to multiple different nations: Prince Eugene of Savoy and Baron Gideon Loudon. Loudon, interestingly offered his services first to Frederick II of Prussia but was rebuffed and consequently ended up joining the army of the Holy Roman Emperor and defeated Frederick in battle. This freewheeling individual enterprise in the military domain is reminiscent of the Indo-European military described at the beginning of this article.

Conscription within European nations, by contrast, traces its lineage to sordid roots in the French Revolution. It was an institution that Napoleon retained in his coup, and the success of his military campaigns (which were the result not of conscription but of his strategic genius) caused other european nations to institute it out of belief such a measure was necessary to compete with the likes of France. This included the American Union in its war against the Confederacy. The Union’s success was due neither to strategic genius nor conscription but a population nearly three times larger the Confederacy’s along with superior industrial might. Lincoln’s devastation of the South along with the tyrannies imposed on the North in his crusade to impose his vision of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is one of history’s greatest indictments of democracy and collectivist nationalism together. His view of America not as a collection of nations settled among sovereign regional states but as a singular nation to be corralled as tax cattle is a view shared by third positionists.

Pursuant to the goal of macro-nationalist solidarity, pan-nationalist movements such as those of Bismark and Garibaldi would make public spectacles of synchronized military gymnastics and parades. The third positionist regimes of interwar Germany and Italy, along with Soviet Russia, would continue these due to their demotism. They are silly distractions to a serious military. The warrior of redoubt is content knowing his training has equipped him with the means to defend himself and his family and has no need for adulation from crowds of strangers. These spectacles are symptomatic of what Leddihn calls the “horizontalization” of society, which contradicts third positionists’ advertisement of themselves as promoters of effective martial hierarchy. The hierarchy they promote is an unaccountable military-industrial complex over ordinary taxpayers.

Worse than being encouraged to gawk at the standing army looming over them, civilians are indoctrinated similarly to the soldiers, indoctrinated to hate enemy nations, to regard them as subhuman. This is necessary for the civilian population to accept total war where attacking concentrations of civilians is part and parcel of such conflict. This is in contrast to traditional wars which were primarily feuds between royal families where the objective was to outmaneuver the enemy to win the battle with minimal damage to even the royals’ estates, let alone the subjects. The masses can only be motivated to total war through appeal to their base bloodlust, which makes total war difficult to conclude. Politicians are inhibited in offering peace terms generous enough to induce a losing enemy to sign what could be considered a genuine treaty, rather than a treaty under brutal terms that is nothing more than a written acknowledgment they value their survival more than their pride. Politicians think demagogically; noblemen think dynastically. Such noblemen were driven out in the nationalist consolidations of Germany and Italy. Leddihn points out that when the German League liberated Sleswig-Holstein from Danish rule they did not permit the legitimate noble heirs to return to power. The Third Reich became heir to the consolidation of Bismark’s Second Reich, a consolidation by a “National Liberal in an initiative of nationalist progressivism”. Leddihn laments this development for its diminution of generosity’s source in the nobility:

“After all, generosity is a virtue more frequently found in the small top layers than among the masses. It takes, after all, intelligence to suspect that generosity very often pays while egotism does not.”

While like the nobility politicians are a class apart from the masses, unlike the nobility they are beholden to the base desires of the masses. The nobility are concerned not with votes or adulation with their rents/land taxes being paid, thus they much better can act with a view toward the wellbeing of their long-term descendants in war and other domains of statecraft.

In fairness to the Third Reich, Leddihn notes that in 1935 they petitioned Britain to agree to a pact where in the event of war all parties would avoid aerial attacks on civilians in the hinterland. Britain’s Labor government turned down the pact on the purported grounds that such a measure “[along with] all efforts to humanize war would make wars more acceptable and would thus be a blow to the noble cause of pacifism.” Is this evidence that third positionist heads of state are actually the peers of noblemen in the magnanimity of their attitude toward war? In the full context of modern German history it is a weak datum. This petition coincided with the beginning of the Third Reich’s massive military buildup. They likely anticipated the possibility of war with Britain resulting from their planned invasion of Poland, especially given Britain’s having sided with the Slavs against Germany in World War I. Desiring to minimize German civilian casualties would be consistent with Hitler’s plans to colonize Slavic territories with surplus German population. Churchill’s predecessors in the Labor government served him well waging war the way he desired against Germany through terror bombing of urban civilians. Hitler eventually did retaliate, albeit reluctantly. The RAF advised Churchill against such bombing in the first place, so humaneness in war was inconsistent within both sides. Hitler’s seeming benevolence toward the British at Dunkirk is confounded by the fact that Goering advised him that the Luftwaffe would be able to intercept the evacuated British in the channel and thereby reduce German casualties. There are always exceptions that prove the rule, but the rule that the combination of nationalist consolidation with demotism is a noxious one is well substantiated by history overall.

Conscription

We now focus on contrasting the zeroth and third positionist stances on conscription, a policy Leddihn cited as an instance of democracy’s noxious effect on war. Conscription is a form of abduction and forced servitude that third positionists support despite the fact that the collective survival that motivates men to enlist is among the most powerful instincts in existence. The notion that “too few” enlist without conscription is hogwash. First of all, too few for what? If a war is so unpopular that fighting it would be literally impossible without conscription, it is unlikely that victory in that war is beneficial to the nation as a whole. Indeed, most ordinary people have a good nose for bankers’ wars, even if they cannot implicate the banks explicitly. They come to support them only with extreme propaganda and false flag operations such as Americans in both World Wars, Afghanistan, and both Iraq wars. The premise of the notion that there is a single minimum required headcount ignores the substitutability of military hardware for labor, as Gary Becker points out in his 1957 essay arguing against the draft. Some argue that paying enough to attract enough volunteers would be too costly to the taxpayer. This is not an argument that third positionists are entitled to make, however, because their philosophy is that no cost to the taxpayer is too great if a “national interest” justifies it in their view. Let’s throw them a bone, however. Becker refutes this argument as well, drawing attention to the high elasticity of labor supply in comparable civilian industries. High elasticity in labor supply means that a small increase in wage for an occupation results in a large influx of labor to it. Even after the largest and most destructive war in history the American military was able to raise about 1.5 million men in 1947 and 1948 paying a relatively low wage compared to the civilian sector. The economic case against conscription goes further than dollars and cents, however. Economics is also heavily concerned with incentives, and although obvious we must still point out here that people forced to work against their will are generally less productive than those who voluntarily chose their occupation as the best among the alternatives available to them. White American southerners of sturdy Borderlander fighting stock have enlisted in the military in droves since Nixon ended the draft, as they had before, to the point that many falsified their age to enlist during World War II. It is due to the military’s current infection with wokeness that enlistment is now declining. The draft in fact was a significant factor in the Vietnam War’s unpopularity that ultimately ended it and one could argue that Vietnam was the last good war that America fought in the sense that at least we were fighting communists. The imposition of conscription is a good indicator that the war is bad, and the necessity of conscription to even stand a chance of winning a war guarantees that the war is bad. In view of the horror of war, conscription is among the worst forms of slavery, especially given how prone statists are to engage in bad wars.

Even after their warm bodies argument is refuted conscription advocates argue that such a measure is necessary because “we don’t want to be a military of mercenaries”. The first thing to address is the notion that doing something primarily for money is ignoble. Hardly any of us holds an occupation primarily for the love of it, the economically rigorous definition of labor, in fact, is: “Activity that is compensated for the sacrifice of preferred activity.” As with any trade, we engage in it only because we value the money we receive in return more than the sacrificed activity. Many conscripts are monetarily compensated anyway, and to the extent they fight out of the desire to avoid the pecuniary costs of court martial they are no less “mercenary” than enlistees. Even literal slave conscripts like those of Xerxes’ army fight not for love of country but in exchange for avoidance of the whip or withheld meals. What about the Spartans, who could be described as being conscripts from birth? Obviously the fact of the Persians also having conscription means that conscription per se could not have been the difference maker in that particular conflict but could third positionists still argue that the Spartan military was an instance of conscription working? No, because in the Spartan’s case conscription was an incidental feature of their extreme militarism, and it was the attrition to their aristocracy’s ranks caused by such militarism that resulted in their nation’s downfall. The Spartans are in this regard actually an argument in favor of the free market in national defense and the kind of accountability it imposes. The claim that free market suppliers of military labor are somehow less loyal than conscripts is uncompelling, because fighting for money and fighting for one’s country are hardly mutually exclusive. Stockholm Syndrome is about the best argument one could honestly make for conscription in this regard, but this condition is hardly regarded as healthy or even all that persistent. Even in the case of a mercenary’s sole concern being money, reputation for loyalty is remunerative to maintain, especially in a free market for his services. A mercenary who reneges on his contract for a higher fee elsewhere is hard pressed to ever find fighting work again. Loyalty, especially to a state, is not a suicide pact either. If the enemy state you are fighting is marginally more tyrannical than your own but in the middle of the war yours is overthrown by revolutionaries who are downright totalitarian, switching sides is a legitimate act of counterrevolution. “What about the Romans?” conscription advocates might say. “Did not their hiring of foreign mercenaries contribute to their downfall?”. On the contrary, like the Spartans, the Romans’ downfall was their founding stock’s diminishing, especially in relation to the lesser peoples they allowed in their homeland. The Romans’ mercenary corps, however, comprised mostly Goths, who certainly were not a lesser people. The Goths, in fact, were Germans, whom the Romans were never able to conquer. In the latter days of the empire they were actually strong enough to extract tribute from the Romans and enjoyed a higher per-capita level of wealth (Asha Logos). Had the Romans not hired the Goths, in fact, their empire would not have lasted nearly as long. It must also be pointed out here for the sake of completeness that notwithstanding the reputational reinforcement of loyalty, mercenaries need not be foreign.

A final point to make regarding conscription is that opposition to it does not mean opposition to any kind of mandate of military service. Such a mandate may under zeroth positionism take the form of service, or subscription thereto, being a condition on which property is purchased or rented. It is likely that more sustainably free societies would have such conditions. A common requirement would be a subscription with a waiver for those who serve a minimum number of years.

Further Advantages

Having fended off the critique arguing for conscription’s necessity, we can now resume our offensive taking the form of demonstrating the market military system’s mechanical superiority. One advantage of such a system is its combination of scalability with local agility and responsiveness. While something like training in small arms handling may benefit from a high degree of standardization on a large scale, tactics are something that can be adapted most readily by a marketized military, for example, forces from an area near a major river can concentrate on using it as a natural defensive structure, or on how to avoid being backed into it. Macro-nations tend to occupy country whose terrain varies greatly: Bavarian Alps vs the north German Plain, the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains vs the Great Plains, etc. Where there is overlap in service in a locale, a direct observational experiment arises where the locals can shift their subscriptions to the DIA that adapts training, tactics, and strategy best to that locale. In certain locales, perhaps those with highly unusual geography, the DIA may spin-off the cadre, which then outsources geographically neutral basic training to the original DIA or others. It is likely, however, that overlap will persist in most places despite superior local adaptation by one DIA because of other considerations that their customers make.

One of these considerations is the substitution between manpower and hardware mentioned in the discussion of conscription above. Some customers may wish to keep more troops out of harm’s way even if this means paying more. Capital deepening and technological improvement in the military hardware industry keeps the cost of substitution down. A free market helps curb excess hardware production at the expense of personnel training as occurred in National Socialist Germany (Riemann). It also curbs the production of boondoggles like the F-35. Other customers may see high technological usage or dependence as fragility, desiring numbers to always be a source of strength if not a decisive advantage.

Another consideration customers have is tolerance of collateral damage. Even within libertarian circles there is a broad preference spectrum, especially concerning proportionality. For Ayn Rand, who considered collateral damage in war to be entirely the responsibility of the aggressing state, the optimal amount of force used was however much maximizes the physical safety of the defenders only, which removes any limit an amount that can be considered acceptable. Murray Rothbard was of a more humanitarian bent, contending that due to diminishing returns to force in increasing the defender’s own safety, there was a limit beyond which the application of additional force constitutes an act of aggression on the defenders’ part. Resolving such subjectivity is what the free market is made for. Blowback from indiscriminate prosecution of a war by one agency make in the most extreme case result in another agency in the same country declaring war on the indiscriminate agency. The threat thereof, however, reduces the likelihood of this last resort. The unleashing of evolutionary selection through free market choice will result in a sustainable range of force that is used in waging war.

National defense is associated primarily with defense against external threats, but under competitive models internal defense is a large part as well. In The Private Production of Defense, Hoppe substitutes “aggression” for “defense” in “defense insurance agency” to emphasize the comprehensiveness of the service provided. Aggression as libertarians define it includes all violations of the property norm, including fraud. All violations include those committed by people in government. A free market in policing provides higher quality policing, which means more apprehension of criminals and fewer abuses of the innocent, at a lower cost. Monopolized policing, however, shreds accountability for abuse. An egregious abuse in today’s monopoly is of qualified immunity. Qualified immunity is immunity from liability for damages caused by a policeman, provided such damages were caused under certain qualifying conditions. Today, the qualification is merely that the policeman did not break any “clearly established” law. Of this the Independent Institute’s Chris Calton writes:

“Given that statutory law cannot reasonably anticipate all the unique circumstances that officers will face, nearly any abuse of power meets the criteria for qualified immunity, even in cases in which an officer brazenly defies reasonable expectations for appropriate conduct.”

In the same article Calton cites several cases of qualified immunity abuse, including the notorious murder of Daniel Shaver captured on his killer’s police camera.

The Gestapo does not appear to have been any better than today’s ZOGbots. A law passed in 1936 exempted the Gestapo from responsibility to administrative courts, meaning that ordinary citizens could not sue the Gestapo to conform to any laws. Under the policy of Schutzhaft (“protective custody”), the Gestapo had the ability to imprison people without judicial proceedings (Infogalactic).

When the provision of law and order is monopolized policemen become agents of disorder. In contrast, free markets in law produce laws converging on the ideal balance between the rights of policemen to defend themselves and the rights of civilians to recourse when they are harmed. Free markets in courts provides for careful adjudication of such law. Free markets in policing curb abuse by making abusive police offers easy to fire. Real world instances of free market justice systems are hardly limited to those cited in the Power article, either. The San Francisco Patrol Special Unit is descended from the private special patrols were started in the 1840s to protect miners and merchants. Today it has authorization to carry out limited police functions such as issuing citations and enforcing city regulations, on top of providing contract-based protection for property owners. It is currently only semi-private, being the only private security consortium that is allowed to operate under the city of San Francisco’s charter. Even with this restriction, however, it provides service at a per hour rate that is lower than what off-duty municipal police provide (Grigg). In Britain, TM Eye is a private police force that within two years of its founding brought prosecution against more than 400 criminals with a 100% conviction rate. It has conducted investigations into several murder cases the Metro police have not completed and provided help in cases of rape, missing persons, burglary, theft, stalking and blackmail. 43 criminals have been jailed (Camber).

Historical Precedents

Like policing, voluntarist production of external defense is not limited to the speculation of free market philosophers. There exists strong historical precedent for voluntarism from the non-governmental sector in a number of places. One relatively recent instance is the American War for Independence. Although George Washington disdained militias, favoring a formalized strategy of military engagement, necessity forced him to adapt his army to the guerrilla tactics that characterize militias. Actual militias played a significant role in the war as well; the term “Minutemen” refers to militia men who could be “called up within a minute”. Officially they were conscripts into the Continental Army, but they earned their moniker because of their eagerness to fight notwithstanding. A number of scholars believe that rejection of Washington’s guerrilla tactics for stubborn persistence with conventional warfare was a significant contributor to the defeat of the Confederacy, for which many of Washington’s descendants fought (Stromberg).

A strong militia culture is crucial in the maintenance of a free and sovereign nation. A substantial portion of the nation’s defense should be provided on a not-for-profit basis by people who are not full time military professionals. The ideal dynamic is one of great fluidity between full-time professional providers of national defense and part-time amateurs, which discourages tribalism of the “thin blue line” variety. To help bridge this line ex-military professionals serve as natural militia leaders, not just elite private security for the wealthy. There should be non-profit militias that are large enough for their administrators to be full-time professionals. The culture should celebrate the militia to the same degree it does the military because a mass militia culture greatly helps prevent the re-emergence of statism among the military. This celebration can manifest in material incentives like the awarding of discounts to militia as well as military members. Resale covenants on property requiring participation in national defense can include militia participation as a qualifying activity. Militia training in such a nation is regarded in the same way as exercise: The conditioning of soundness of the body politic.

An instance of for-profit voluntarist defense is the history of privateering. Privateering is a method whereby a citizen of one nation may force another nation to pay restitution for damages caused by one of its citizens. With government permit called a letter of marque and reprisal, the aggrieved party may hunt the other nation’s merchant ships and seize their cargo. This practice can be scaled when the damage is caused by the waging of war by another nation’s government. The great value of this practice is disrupting the enemy’s economy and by extension its supply lines. Thousands of privateering ships were employed in Elizabethan England, the Seven Years’ War, King George’s War, the War for Independence, and the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson recognized the military importance of privateering:

“every possible encouragement should be given to privateering in time of war with a commercial nation. . . . Our national ships are too few in number . . . to retaliate the acts of the enemy by licensing private armed vessels, the whole naval force of the nation is truly brought to bear on the foe.”

Some historians like Faye M. Ker believe that without privateering America would have been unable to hold off Britain’s navy in the War of 1812. Privateers are sometimes confused with pirates for obvious reasons, however, the former were effectively disincentivized from degenerating into the latter through the use of surety bonds. Privateers, unlike pirates, adhered to rules of engagement under international law such as never firing on a target ship under false colors. Because a substantial part of their profit derived from their prizes, privateers sought to capture rather than destroy their targets, unlike their socialized naval counterparts. This incentive enriched their own nation not only directly but also indirectly by leaving the present enemy’s capital base intact for trade production in peacetime. Privateers were highly effective: Canadian privateers captured around 600 ships during the War of 1812; the famous Liverpool Packet alone accounting for a tenth of these. In the French conflict with Spain and Holland from 1672-1679, French privateers captured at least 1300 Spanish and Dutch Ships. During War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97), the city of St. Malo captured “3,384 English and Dutch merchant ships and 162 escorting men-of-war.” with 40-50 privateers sent out each year. French privateers captured or destroyed more than 1000 English and Dutch ships during the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1713) (Sechrest).

There are even historical instances that indicate the superiority of privateering over socialized navies. In the first fourteen months of the Seven Years’ War, French privateers captured 637 British values, and much of their success was due to the fact that “commanders of the King’s ships appear to have been shamefully lax in the unpleasant duty of convoying merchant vessels, and in pursuing the privateers of the enemy.” In 1813 America sought to cripple British shipbuilding by disrupting its importation of essential materials from Russia. America sent three ships to intercept trading ships from these nations in the Arctic circle. One was the navy frigate President, which was 1576 tons with 52 guns and 460 men. The other two were much smaller privateers, the schooner Scourge and the brig Rattle Snake. The President burned one brig while the privateers captured or destroyed at least 23 ships, many of which were “large, square-rigged, oceangoing vessels”. Privateers were, in the opinion of The Republic’s Private Navy author Jerome Garitee, “America’s only effective marine force” in the War of 1812. Unlike America’s navy, America’s privateers were not driven from the sea by the British. Privateering was so effective that in the USA’s early years a number of congressmen opposed having a socialized navy because they saw privateering as a better option. Tragically, protection racketeering on the high seas would prevail instead in the 1856 Declaration of Paris where seven maritime nations banned privateering. The only reason for this, which is now clear, is that socialized navies could no longer abide a free market in naval warfare exposing their inferiority (Sechrest).

Expansionism

The primary normative function of the military is defense, because expansion, if desired, is impossible without the former. The degree to which third positionism is inherently expansionist is a matter of some debate. Some third positionists are universal nationalists, meaning they recognize that imperialism is often detrimental to even the imperial nation and believe in self-determination for all nations. Others such as Richard Spencer, however, explicitly reject what he calls “omninationalism”, calling instead for a white imperium. Even universal nationalists, however, are hard-pressed to claim that third positionism has no inherent tendency toward expansionism at all. For one thing, all third positionists, being statists, believe in a maximal expansionism of government against competitors in the security industry within their country. Furthermore, they do not believe there should be any real limits to the scope of government’s activity outside of security provision, which is expansionist against the rest of the nation. A specific intervention third positionists support is protectionism, which they use to promote a significant degree of autarky. Autarky is impoverishing due to its rejection of comparative advantage. Protectionism therefore produces pressure to offset autarky’s economic shortcomings through territorial expansion.

The historical instances of third positionist regimes, National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, were both expansionist, especially Germany. Both retained the macro-linguistic empires established by Bismark and Garibaldi. National socialist ideology called for Nordics to rule over peoples they viewed as inferior, especially the Slavs, whom Hitler particularly hated. The Nazis were clearly not content with restoring Germany’s pre-1918 borders because they invaded Prague after they had already annexed the Sudetenland and invaded Poland long after the Nazis took effective control of Danzig. Fascist Italy sought to recapture the glory of the Roman Empire with its ill-fated escapade in Ethiopia. The destruction of these countries that resulted is a cautionary tale against runaway militarism coupled with imperialist hubris.

Zeroth positionism is neutral on the value of expansionism per se. The principle of libertarianism at its core is agnostic to the scale of its own application. If one makes makes the value judgment to universalize it, is difficult to justify an offensive war even for the sole purpose of liberating a foreign nation from a tyrannical government due to considerations of collateral damage mentioned earlier. It comes down to not only a value judgment weighing liberty vs survival, but also a judgment as to whether it is your own place to make the former judgment for the tyrannized nation. In any case, it is not at all necessary to show that zeroth positionism is more effective at empire-building than third positionism because our rubric is not what is most prestigious or beneficial to a nation’s government and its defense contractors but what is objectively best for the nation itself. The historical record indicates that imperialist nations end up being ruled by foreigners, as chronicled in numerous instances by Kemp in March of the Titans. Even if we pretend that empire-building is an objective national good, however, zeroth positionism is still superior. All the preceding reasons as to why a free market in defense is superior to a monopoly apply to offense as well. This holds true not only for the military but for the maintenance and administration of an empire. The ability of the founding nation’s citizens to opt out at will provides a check on the tendency of empires to overextend. The international scalability of the insurance industry provides considerable capacity for military buildup on an imperial scale, while competition in government provides capacity for responsiveness to the diversity of local cultures that necessarily exist within an empire. The relegation of government to enforcement of landowners’ policies, rather than setting policies itself, mitigates conquered nations’ resentment against foreign rule and preserves international cultural diversity. The last item assume empire-building for the sake of liberating foreign nations from comparatively less accommodating governments. This assumption is not necessary to zeroth positionism, however. It is theoretically possible to be a kind of chauvinist who values liberty for his nation and his alone but is a totalitarian imperialist toward other nations. Even a chauvinist of this kind will still rationally prefer a free-market military for the sake of conquering and subduing foreign nations more efficiently.

Having compared the third positionist model of national defense with the zeroth positionist one in a number of different aspects, we find that the third positionist model wanting by objective standards of national interest. What is thought by many to be an unassailable position regarding what, if any services must be monopolized, turns out to be vulnerable. It is vulnerable both on empirical grounds showing that marketized militaries are certainly not mere conjecture, as well as on theoretical grounds within the very theoretical framework invoked to dismiss marketization: game theory. The efficacy of the nations’ bravest men is not a game for economic central planners to play with. They are at their most effective when their commanders are held accountable by the market mechanism. Without such accountability runaway militarism is what results, always to the nation’s ruin. It should be hardly any revelation in fact, that “taxpayer-funded security” is as much of an oxymoron as “protection racket”, because they are ultimately one and the same. In the words of Michael Malice, “national security is too important to trust any monopoly with, let alone the government.”

Sources

Asha Logos. Our Subverted History Series. Part 4 – The Germanic Peoples.

Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, 2006.

Becker, Gary. “The Case Against the Draft.” 06/19/2007, Hoover Institution. https://www.hoover.org/research/case-against-draft

Block, Walter. “National Defense and the Theory of Externalities, Public Goods, and Clubs”. Published in The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2003. https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production

Calton, Chris. “How Qualified Immunity Became Absolute Immunity for Police Officers”. 08/01/2019 The Independent Institute. https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-qualified-immunity-became-absolute-immunity-police-officers

Camber, Rebecca. “Britain’s first ‘private police force’ has caught 400 criminals with a 100 per cent conviction rate after taking on cases regular officers are too busy to look at”. 02/02/2018. The Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5346699/First-private-police-force-caught-400-criminals.html

“Chernobyl disaster”. https://infogalactic.com/info/Chernobyl_disaster

“Gestapo”. https://infogalactic.com/info/Gestapo

Grigg, Will. “Too Good for Government ‘Work’: The Death of a Baton Rouge Peace Officer”. 06/22/2018 The Libertarian Institute. https://libertarianinstitute.org/everything-will/too-good-for-government-work-the-death-of-a-baton-rouge-peace-officer/

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. “The Private Production of Defense,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 14, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 27. https://mises.org/journal-libertarian-studies/private-production-defence

Kemp, Arthur. March of the Titans: The Complete History of the White Race. Ostara Publications, 1999.

Lemmenicier, Bertrand. “Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation or Monopoly?”. Published in The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2003. https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production

Riemann, Günter. The Vampire Economy New York: Vanguard Press, 1939 https://mises.org/library/vampire-economy

Sechrest, Larry J. “Privateering and National Defense: Naval Warfare for Private Profit”. Published in The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2003. https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production

Stromberg, Joseph R. “Mercenaries, Guerrillas, Militias, and the Defense of Minimal States and Free Societies”. Published in The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2003. https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production

von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Erik. “Monarchy and War”. Published in The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2003. https://mises.org/library/book/myth-national-defense-essays-theory-and-history-security-production

A house is not necessarily a home. There exists within this distinction a world of difference, and it is this difference that is causing the current war of the third world against the first. Immigration is this war’s primary weapon. Under wartime conditions it is easy to panic and lose one’s grasp of realistic political principle, especially concerning issues so contentious. Lest our victory in this war become a Pyrrhic one in the long-term we need to crystallize our understanding of immigration in terms of which political system’s policy, i.e. that of liberalism, third positionism, or zeroth positionism, is most robust against globalism. This comparison is best introduced with historical context.

The modern nation-state is an extreme historical aberration. The absence of jealously-guarded borders enclosing macro-linguistic groups of europeans is only conspicuous to Western nationalists today because for most of our history they did not exist. Up until 1914 a man could travel from one end of Europe to the other with minimal political (if not economic) constraint (Taylor 7). Due to dynastic intermarriage, monarchical reign, especially during the Middle Ages, was often over discontiguous territory. One of the Free State Project’s full-time employees once described herself to me as pro-open borders because she recognized that free migration between Northern Ireland and the Republic helped mitigate petty religious strife in her ancestral homeland. While the difference between europeans and global southerners is so great that we rightfully refer to them as being of different worlds with borders between that ought to be enforced accordingly, the differences between european peoples is much smaller, though certainly not insignificant. Liberals argue for global open borders on the basis of a false continuum along this spectrum. Third positionists commit the same fallacy in the reverse direction when they argue for centrally planned immigration control, the quality of which within the universal limitations of central planning is dependent on the quality of the planners themselves. Permissiveness in admittance policy between the territories of european peoples should be proportional to their compatibility, and only a free market in such policy maximizes this flexibility. While neighborhoods in a free Ireland can be expected to be homogeneously Protestant or Catholic depending on the denomination of the nearest church, both denominations can live harmoniously within a city the size of Belfast provided that public works are demonopolized, which mightily mitigates factional squabble for control.

Economics

Cheap labor is an immigration bogeyman that right-wing populists share with their counterparts on the old left. They remember from Econ 101 that an increase in supply of something lowers the price but little else. Some recognize labor as an input to production and the benefit coming from such an increase in labor supply in the form of lower prices for goods and services, while also recognizing that the cost of increasing a country’s labor supply by mass third world immigration greatly outweighs this benefit. As is typical, however, they misdiagnose the actual disease underlying this malady as laissez-faire capitalism. An obvious flaw in their theory that immediately presents itself is the fact that demand for lower priced goods and services is a human universal. Corporations and consumers in the third world are no less desirous of cheap labor than those in the first and would love to see the brain drain that globalism inflicts on their countries reversed. Migratory pressure occurs because the first world is the first and third world is the third. Both first world jobs and welfare are higher paying but the reason that whites alone share their welfare with the third world is because they are altruistic. Welfare statism and capitalism are inherently antithetical, both because of the opportunity cost that funding a welfare state imposes in terms of potential capital investment and also the employment disincentives it creates. Some third positionists uncritically swallow neoliberal propaganda claiming mass immigration boosts GDP, reactively framing the issue as one of necessary conflict between economic and national wellbeing. This is easily falsified, however, by the case of Japan, who despite the devastation experienced at the hands of the Americans in World Word II also experienced the highest GDP growth of any country on Earth in the decades following with near-zero immigration. Global economic studies show no correlation between immigration policy and GDP generally, as Peter Brimelow has observed in Alien Nation. Third world immigration, in fact, is a weapon of mass destruction against human capital in its exacerbation of welfare statism, in the costs of increased petty crime, and in the lost productivity attentive to diversity (more on the latter below). More sophisticated third positionists may concede this but object to a free-market immigration policy on the grounds that it allegedly benefits the nation’s “capitalists” at the expense of “workers”. This objection is addressed next.

In a free labor market wages are not dependent on the ethnic composition of the labor force, only the marginal productivity of labor itself. Marginal productivity is how much revenue is increased by bringing on an additional laborer given the total number available. Due to the law of diminishing returns marginal productivity of labor decreases as the number of existing laborers increases. The businessman as such is concerned only with increasing this number. He cares not, all else equal, whether this increase comes from immigration or growth in the native population. Because immigration is an increase in the local labor supply, however, not an increase in the global one, the businessman regards immigration as a substitute for native population growth only insofar as his operations are locally constrained. Ironically enough, constraints of this kind such as restrictions on offshoring are measures that third positionists favor. In failing to grasp the fundamental differences between uncontrolled immigration of foreign labor and free trade in goods (a mistake that liberals also make) they seek restriction of the latter, which creates both stronger domestic pressure for immigration as an offsetting cost control measure and stronger foreign pressure due to increased impoverishment of less productive countries resulting from the hampering of international trade. Goods are not people. Japanese cameras cannot commit crimes against Americans, either on the street or at the ballot box. For the most part people are not goods either, when they are we call it slavery, which has its own issues.

A counter example third positionists could cite in support against capitalist indifference to the ethnic composition of labor is the expressed preference for diversity on the part of some contemporary capitalists for the reason of undermining unionization. To whatever extent this is true, the net economic effect of diversity is clearly negative. In terms of direct effects, diverse workforces are less productive because they are less cohesive. Even if it were not virtually mandatory in the Griggs era, human resource departments at diverse companies would still have some kind of diversity office to mitigate the negative effects of diversity. This of course is by itself an inefficiency that a genuinely free market swiftly weeds out.

Unionism as a premise of third positionist opposition to free market immigration policy has other flaws too. In pointing out business’ use of diversifying immigration against unionism third positionists undermine their premise that capitalism views all peoples as economic units that are fungible for their inherent sameness. If they cite the previous paragraph as unwitting support of this premise on my part they commit the error of ignoring my qualification with the crucial economic condition of all else equal. Tests of any scientific theory, economic or other, must to the greatest extent practical, isolate as variables the terms in the model corresponding to the hypothesized factors in the overall phenomenon being studied while holding the other terms constant. This is especially true in economics, however, due the sheer multitude of factors in play. The size of the available labor supply for a given role within his company is only one of a multitude of factors the businessman must consider in making personnel decisions. Decisions that maximize value are decidedly anti-egalitarian. The difference in compensation between executives and entry-level employees at large corporations by itself shows clear correspondence to the Pareto Principle. The best businessmen, however, recognize not only quantitative differences in groups such as in productivity levels between org chart tiers but also qualitative differences such as cultural outlook. This is why assessment of cultural fit is such a common feature, indeed a key feature of job interviews. Treating a company holistically rather than in a materialistically reductive manner is of such vital economic importance, in fact, that there exists a business-specific term for it: synergy. Synergy is when the productivity of multiple organizations combined into one exceeds the sum total of the groups working separately. It often refers to the cost savings enjoyed from mergers of whole companies¹ however it can apply to personnel decisions at a single company as well. Teams of bureaucrats may not get along well mixed with teams of researchers but both teams working as homogeneous nations within the same world of one company creates positive synergy. The negative effects of ethnic diversity can be thought of as negative synergy, which is also a real and recognized phenomenon in business². The blind spot many business leaders presently have toward ethnic diversity’s negative synergy is not anything inherent to business at all but the result of osmosis from a whole society dominated by progressivism, including business schools so dominated³. Contra Strasserists and other leftists, businesses as such are not inherently conservative or right-wing. The latter are political orientations and politics is the domain of violence. Internal violence is bad for business⁴ so there is a natural tendency for business policymakers who are not political ideologues to remain politically neutral in their personnel decisions. In ignoring Robert Conquest’s Second Law, however, right-instinct businessmen have made a fatal mistake. In failing to exclude ethnic and globalist nepotists from policymaking roles businesses once controlled by meritocrats have been taken over by such nepotists, hence the Full Merit designation Liberty+ offers to businesses as protection. In general capitalism supplies what’s demanded, especially what the state demands at gunpoint. Non-whites are far more accepting of despotism generally so a despotic state is naturally much more demanding of diversifying immigration than a voluntary one.

There is a more fundamental objection to unionism as a premise of the third positionist immigration stance, however, and that is the fact that unionism is a problem only insofar as the state and other violent organizations make it. As explained earlier, an average wage on a free market is determined by the marginal productivity of labor itself, not the means by which workers bargain with employers. This being an average, however, allows for variance within industries and even companies of skill at wage bargaining. It is far from the case that collective bargaining is always more lucrative than individual bargaining either. A worker of superior bargaining skill to that of a union leader prefers to negotiate individually and views union dues as a complete waste of money. Western labor markets are very much unfree, however, due to the litany of legal privileges labor unions enjoy among other reasons, and for this reason it is often advantageous even for such an exceptionally skilled worker to join one. Big businesses choose to counter unions with diversifying immigration rather than lobby for the abolition of the very regulatory state that privileges labor unions because that same state also privileges big businesses against smaller competitors in a whole host of ways. The imputation of diversifying immigration to capitalism as a necessary feature is just one example among the many fallacies of spurious association that third positionists commit. These fallacies derive from the uselessly vague and leftist way they define “capitalism” as a catch-all term referring to big business and financial institutions they happen to dislike, diverging from liberals in their objection specifically to these institutions being run by jews while remaining in accord with many liberals in their objection to the wokeness these institutions presently promote. What capitalism actually is however, is simply the enshrinement of property in capital, and capital is simply a good that happens to be used in the production of another good. As Blood Wealth Soil nicely puts it: “Capitalism means that if you have a hammer, you get to keep the hammer and whatever you make with it.” “Woke capitalism” is the result not only of succumbing to Conquest’s Second Law described in the previous paragraph but also the legal privilege that the Griggs decision and other policies confer and is in this regard a subset of the regulatory blight brought up in this one. Regardless of diversifying immigration’s economic effects, no businessman or anyone else has the right to import aliens who physically threaten the nation’s wellbeing. Importers of non-violent aliens who threaten the nation in other ways are to be checked with a fierce nationalist cancel culture. The efficacy with which cancel culture has served our enemies is self-evident to anyone alive today and there is no reason it does not serve us just as well. Its efficacy today is proof that the homo economicus view of businessmen is wrong. Wokeness is unpopular and often costly to publicly promote yet big businessmen do so anyway because of the moral precedence it has in their minds. Destroying wealth does nothing to dampen demand for diversifying immigration, what needs to be destroyed is the notion that tolerance, especially tolerance of those who promote such immigration, is a virtue. Wealth is a crucial source of national strength, and property in capital, including full freedom of association therein, is something that we as nationalists should protect as robustly as property in everything else.

Libertarianism

Laissez-faire capitalism is the economic feature of libertarianism and third positionist hatred of liberty is not at all confined solely to the realm of economics. Unfortunately the libertarian movement, being another casualty of Conquest’s Second Law, is quite squishy at present on what pro-liberty immigration policy looks like, which facilitates third positionists’ throwing of the free society baby out with the open borders bathwater. This is a shame not only because liberty is precious unto itself but also because genuinely libertarian immigration policy is nationalistically superior to the centrally planned kind. The remainder of this article corrects both the libertarian movement and third positionists on the remaining pertinent matters in this order.

Subversives within the liberty movement promote open borders by association of liberty with openness. This is obviously spurious as the foundation of liberty is property, which in libertarian philosophy is defined as the control of one party over the use and disposal of a scarce resource to the exclusion of all others in the world who want it. Territory is no less scarce of a resource than anything else and the property norm no less applicable thereto for that reason⁵. A country is therefore defined in libertarianism as the aggregate real estate holdings of a nation. The plural here is crucial in its distinguishing of the individual ownership that defines libertarianism from the intended collective ownership that defines collectivist ideologies generally. The word “intended” is also crucial here, because in actuality what such ideologies result in is state ownership in the name of the collective. There is nothing more anathema to libertarianism than globalism in this regard, which seeks to collectivize all countries under a one world state. Multiple individuals may voluntarily enter into a contract apportioning joint ownership of property, however, and under conditions of statism “state-owned” property a libertarian may rightfully regard as jointly-owned by taxpayers. Some libertarians on this matter suffer from a form of reverse statism where government is so inherently malevolent that they believe government-owned land must be regarded as unowned lest those who would lay claim to it become possessed by the Actonian demon of corrupting absolute power. The privitization process this view demands however, is an egalitarian free-for-all where a Bushman enjoys no less of a claim to Arctic territory owned erstwhile by the Canadian state than an Eskimo. Whether you call it “government”, “state”, or “security services”, a free nation would obviously have in some such organization(s) a substantial ownership stake and would leverage this toward the enforcement of immigration policy. Regarding the state as an immigration policymaker, some libertarians also arbitrarily regard forced segregation of non-whites from whites as a far greater evil than forced integration despite the fact that a free society would by necessity be segregated from unfree ones. For reasons of ethnomasochism, however, they have a double standard on this which reveals itself in their denunciation of white colonialism, which was a form of forced integration unto itself. Moreover, it is also a fact that forced racial integration of whites with the third world is a far greater evil than forced segregation. From both an individualist and a collectivist standpoint it is more important to be able to associate with people who are more like you rather than less, especially when “less like you” means hostility to the very concept of liberty and deadly hatred of you for being different.

Spurious association of liberty with licentiousness is primarily the province of left-libertarians but on the issue of immigration liberals also make similar arguments. On the national question, however, they do not so stridently dismiss the value of national homogeneity but will say instead, “whatever your views on nationality are, how can one person in a free society forbid someone else from admitting a foreigner who carries no disease and has no criminal record?” While these criteria are by themselves fully consistent with the non-aggression principle, a significant problem is that official records from third world countries are worthless due to the corruption of the police, courts, and laws themselves. Even granting perfection in third world criminal justice there is still the fact that a third worlder who has not yet committed a crime is still much more likely to do so than his first world counterpart, thus his admittance represents an increased exposure to NAP violation for the latter. This is a direct application of Murray Rothbard’s easement concept addressing environmental externalities, which is considered the gold standard in libertarian thought on the issue. The concept is: If a community homesteads land with a certain level of environmental cleanliness, they have, in addition to the land itself, also homesteaded an easement to that level of cleanliness in perpetuity. If an industrial concern subsequently wishes to build a plant nearby that will pollute the community’s environment, that community has a right to prohibit that plant’s construction. Likewise, a nation that has homesteaded a territory also has homesteaded with it an easement to their own crime and disease rates, which entitles everyone within it to prohibit everyone else from importing foreigners belonging to groups with significantly higher rates. In an age where all land on earth has already been homesteaded, many people, including many libertarians who should know better, have lost appreciation for the importance of homesteading as a legitimizing criterion of property. All property in land had to be homesteaded at some point in the past, after all, so all voluntary exchange of land is descendent thereof. Because whites are by far history’s greatest homesteaders, a homesteading emphasis in immigration policy for white countries may be regarded as a benign form of white supremacy. Regarding significance of potential breaches of homesteaders’ easements, “significance” here means a statistically significant difference, not necessarily a large one. It is rational, all else equal, to avoid groups even of minutely higher risk. While some groups’ crime rates are so high that banning them by fiat may be considered NAP-pursuant⁶, subjectivity of risk tolerance regarding other groups is resolved by freedom of association, covenant, and tort. While it is possible to effectively vet immigrants on an individualized basis for crime and disease, it is also cost-prohibitive to do so on the scale at which the third world seeks to immigrate to the first. Cost effectiveness is a significant premise of the libertarian critique of statism and is one that cannot be dismissed because of strangely sentimental attachment to the color-blind version of individualism. The most objectively libertarian immigration policy under the condition of statism is where the state issues bans based on immutable characteristics such as race (which in contrast to ideology is nearly impossible to fake) to minimize the nation’s exposure to NAP violation. This is in keeping with government’s mission of keeping the peace, and libertarianism is the aim of peace for a given society.

The Asian Question

“But wait,” both liberals and third posititions may say, “the discussion thus far has been only about third worlders. Asian crime rates are even lower than whites’ so how can libertarians oppose their immigration?” Firstly, believe it or not, we libertarians have tastes and preferences that our politics has no bearing on, including ethnic in-group preference. National homogeneity is an immense aesthetic value in its own right and insofar as diversity is of value from the minority cosmopolitan standpoint, local diversity, even in urban areas where cosmopolitans congregate, always comes at the expense of international diversity. To make a locale within a country more diverse is to lessen that country’s distinctiveness vis a vis the rest of the world. It is no coincidence therefore, that Japan and Iceland are not only the most peaceful countries in the world but also among the most beautiful. The type of resale restriction on my land I would attach to it (and encourage others in my community to adopt) would therefore stipulate that in perpetuity no foreigners are to be admitted (let alone sold property) while homogeneity in any white country is less than 99%. One can go further than this in fact: Insofar as asian influx lowers property values (in spite of asian docility, this would be the result not only of the dilution of white ethnic aesthetics but also subtler cultural frictions such as asians’ more insular, less neighborly tendencies) such an influx can be regarded as a tort against homesteaders and their economic partners, if not the criminal offense as the admittance of third worlders should be. As a point of fact, asian in-group preference is even stronger than that of whites and relatively few within their countries, which already enjoy a first-world standard of living for the most part, desire to mix with the latter in the first place. Political refugees from China and North Korea can collaborate on creating a refuge on the borderlands and will eventually succeed with sufficient international aid. Enlightened South Koreans recognize that it is in their long term interest to welcome North Korean refugees as a means of undermining the North Korean government in pursuance of long-term reunification, notwithstanding the cultural divergence that the peninsula’s partitioning has caused.⁷ However many asian refugees end up in the West under these dynamics would be too few in number to be of any adverse political effect.

Secondly, while aesthetic preference regarding asians would be resolved by freedom of association, covenant, and tort in a free society, we currently live not in a free society but a democratic oligarchy. Regardless of whatever mixture of democracy and oligarchy our polity actually is, we do not want to be flooded with the type of people who will vote or legislate away our freedoms. Governmental crime, in fact, is an even more serious problem than street crime and polling reveals that asians are at least as anti-liberty in their political affiliation as mestizos. While in their homelands asians have built impressive civilizations in decidedly undemocratic fashion, under Western democratic system their political activity is deleterious to civilization. Mercifully, asians have historically sought advancement in Western countries much more through economic rather than political means, which sets them apart from other foreign races. As whites recede in number and influence in their countries, however, asians have started becoming more politically aggressive, for nature abhors a vacuum in power as much as anything else. This is tragic because whites and asians get along quite well under conditions of freedom. The principle that good fences make good neighbors is the core of why separation between our races in necessary under any conditions but especially important under the presently predatory political system we live under. Restoration of respective racial and national sovereignty will be that which restores mutual respect and harmony between whites and asians and makes the entire world a far better place for it.

Thus far we have established the superiority of libertarian immigration policy on economic grounds and dealt with the third positionists’ stupidman of “open-borders” libertarianism. The task remaining is demonstrating the superiority of libertarian immigration policy on non-economic grounds. We can separate this into three sub-topics: immigration, emigration, and enforcement mechanisms.

Immigration

Immigration to a nation may be likened to seasoning of a dish: Too much drowns out the main flavor but an amount to taste helps complete the dish as a meal. As the COVID lockdowns hammered home for us, there is no substitute for in-person interaction in many situations and this is true for interactions between the indigeneous and foreigners also. Maintaining friendly relations with foreign nations requires reciprocation of the generosity foreigners show in accommodating us as guests in their countries. How many foreigners are optimal? Like seasoning, this is also a matter of taste. Even if we take indigenous supermajority status of 80% as an objectively desirable minimum there is still a great deal of subjectivity regarding the returns to homogeneity above that. The truth is that there is no right answer; some might be fine at four out of five, others might not be comfortable being anything less than a 99% majority. A free market in immigration policy harmoniously resolves the perennial tension between a nation’s cosmopolitanism and provincialism in contrast to a one-size-fits-all solution which engenders conflict. It is important to note that immigrants do not randomly sprinkle themselves across a country but concentrate in cities so in a nation that is both free and relatively cosmopolitan, provincial people do not have to deal with diversity that they do not desire. Moreover, the nation’s most globally powerful and influential people tend to be the ones who have greater need of domestic interaction with foreigners. While dispensations by immigration central planners could be made for such needs, such dispensations require wasteful bureaucracies to issue them. Setting the nation’s elite against the commoners in a struggle for control of the immigration planning apparatus is dangerously counterproductive folly.

Emigration

A healthy community or nation is indicated not by whether relatively few of its healthy people leave per se, but how few leave when they are free to do so. A third positionist regime is more likely to impose restrictions on the ability of the nation’s people to leave for whatever manner of pasture they perceive as greener, which is in fact what happened under the Third Reich. The NSDAP imposed severe penalties for taking the Reich’s currency abroad, along with restricting travel for business purposes (Riemann 48). The purported reason for this is a vague appeal to “national interest” but the real reason is simply that such a regime is inherently abusive and must impose such restrictions to prevent its more productive people from diminishing its tax base. There are perfectly legitimate reasons why good people leave their homeland for an extended period of time, even permanently, and escaping an abusive government is only one among many. Distancing oneself from an abusive family situation, broadening one’s horizons, reconnecting with foreign personal heritage, academic study, and business interests are other examples. Just as third positionists and liberals conflate government and country, so also do they conflate country and nation. A nation is people and their geographic distribution has no bearing on their metaphysical status as a nation. The Hungarian Ultra-Orthodox jewish sect Satmar actually rejects the state of Israel as contrary to the Torah, believing that because jews are God’s chosen people, a state (indeed all political activity) is a weakening crutch to their flourishing as a diaspora. The disadvantage of diaspora status is a premise that third positionists use to argue for the necessity of state restriction of emigration. Here they commit a universalist fallacy: If anyone is allowed to leave then the whole nation will scatter. Jews, it must be noted, did not scatter voluntarily, in fact, one of the greatest cornerstones of their grievance with europeans is their expulsion by the Romans from their homeland. They ignore the fact that when a country’s government is well behaved, all else equal, the overwhelming majority of the nation will remain in that country even if there is no emigration restriction whatsoever.

Just as it is crucial for the health of a nation as a whole for its healthy majority to be free to leave their homeland as it suits them, so too is it crucial for its unhealthy minority to be unhindered in their natural geographic drift away from the healthy core. One-size-fits-all prohibitionism is dysgenic for reasons that will be explained in a future article on the topic. Under a property-by-property prohibition policy, by formal means such as restrictive covenants and informal means such as landlords declining to renew leases, degenerates will be inexorably squeezed out of a country’s core territory toward the borderlands where they pose minimal risk of molesting the healthy. A free emigration policy by definition does not hinder this process, whereas a monopolistic policy represents the possibility of forcing the healthy majority to associate with degenerates. Not only is this a possibility under any monopolistic state, but in a fascist one it is a certainty due to the fact that third positionists actually believe in intra-national altruism, which is to say that they believe that the healthy must be forced to attempt to rescue the degenerate from themselves whether the former stands to benefit at all. In their support for rigid country borders enforced primarily by a monopolistic state third positionists would corral the nations’ sheep and goats together.

Enforcement

Third positionists view walls as a concomitant to country borders centrally planned by the modern state. They suffer today from envy of the walls enclosing countries such as Israel and China, which they admire as extensions of the police states that characterize those countries’ governments. They view such structures as embodiments of national strength. The truth however is that such walls are for the weak. They represent excessive dependency on the state for protection from trespasses that do not even rise to the level of military invasions. Third positionists love to highlight the double standard of today’s ruling class in their advocacy of open borders from within the security of their walled, guarded mansions, but they fail to recognize that this undermines their case for having a state fence off its country. When individuals have the ability to safeguard their property to this degree country walls are at best superfluous. One does not have to be among the one percent or even a property owner to enjoy such protection either; even renters today have access to security systems such as Ring doorbell cameras that castle barons of old could only dream of. The mass affordability of such systems owes much to the fact that the industry is largely unregulated. Industrial capitalism has also made possible the mass affordability of military grade weapons with which to protect property borders. In a free society every man is literally the king of his own land and castle and it is economic freedom that has generated the wealth that lets today’s everyman live longer and safer than the kings of old. The deprivation of property protection that the everyman experiences today is the dictate of the modern state. Those of a predatory state fear and loathe those who are capable of protecting themselves against that state’s predation. If not for the predation of the modern state the disparity in means of protection between the everyman and the elite would be no greater than their disparity in means of automotive transport is now. A fascist state is predatory by definition. The best third positionists can do addressing the incentive of a fascist state to undermine its country’s borders so as to weaken the nation’s resistance to it is say “if such a state succumbed to such temptation then that state would not be classifiable as third positionist anymore.” What they cannot refute is the fact that while the economically progressivist regimes of early 20^th century Europe and America may have had nationalist immigration policies at their inception, all of them are thoroughly globalist now no matter which side they fought on in World War II. “That’s because the jews won”, they object. To some degree this is true, however, the desire for more money and power is a human universal that does not abate when someone happens to work in government. It is non-whites who prefer larger goverments with more services, so regardless of jewish representation over time a progressivist state will be dominated by people willing to replace whites with non-whites to further state expansion. Franco’s Spain, the one relatively fascist state to survive World War II, is an excellent case in point.

Third posititions may try to argue for wall socialism through association of works such as Hadrian’s wall and the Great Wall of China with the glory of the civilizations that created them, however the truth is that these civilizations both declined after those works’ construction. One can sputter about post hoc till the cows come home but a causal definite in this case is that a distant, external symbol of national defense creates complacency regarding the defense of one’s nation where it matters most, which of one’s own family on one’s own property. In contrast to the Romans and Chinese, the greatest nations among our race, i.e. the ancient Spartans and Indo-Aryans, never had such walls. The lesser among a nation who feel the need for external defense symbols like walls even under the impressive level of security a free society affords them without will have their demand more efficiently satisfied by a fully free market in construction. Those who claim that such projects require the taxing power of a monopoly state are refuted by the fact that America’s oldest organized interstate highway to become transcontinental was constructed privately through the cooperation of non-governmental property owners. Whatever defensive structures resulted from such an arrangement would be much more robust and much less unsightly than the grim barbed wire and concrete enclosures we see from the modern state today.

Concluding Remarks

Nations are multilayered, organic, and evolving entities that exist in interrelational flux with one another. There is no single bright line that differentiates one nation from another. That globalists attempt to dismiss the value of nationhood itself using this premise is no reason that our immigration policy should not reflect objectivity about this fact. What our nations need is neither the absence of borders that globalists want nor rigid centrally planned ones that third positionists want but a free market therein. A nation is people and only such a system, one that affords people maximal liberty of movement to wherever landowners and their easements let them travel, can maintain a harmonious equilibrium between the need to leave our father’s house and the need to keep our house a home.

Sources

Cox, Daniel, Juhem Navarro-Rivera and Robert P. Jones “In Search of Libertarians in America”. PRRI 10/29/2013. https://www.prri.org/research/2013-american-values-survey/

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann “Of Private, Common, and Public Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization” 2/23/2011 Libertarian Papers, Volume 3. http://libertarianpapers.org/1-private-common-public-property-rationale-total-privatization/

Kevin “Leaked Documents Reveals Amazon Pushes for Diversity to Prevent Unionization” One Angry Gamer 4/25/2020 https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2020/04/leaked-documents-reveals-amazon-pushes-for-diversity-to-prevent-unionization/

Lokteff, Lana “dIvErSiTy iS oUr StReNgTh”. Red Ice TV. 9/13/2022 https://redice.tv/news/diversity-is-our-strength

Meeks, Harold “On The Road to Yellowstone” PICTORIAL HISTORIES PUBLISHING CO., INC. 2000 http://www.lincolnhighwayoh.com/v1/Yellowstone.htm

Nadler, Allan L. The War on Modernity of R. Hayyim Elazar Shapira of Munkacz. Modern Judaism, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Oct., 1994), pp. 233–264

“Americans See Broad Responsibilities for Government; Little Change Since 2019” Pew Research Center 5/17/2021 https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/americans-see-broad-responsibilities-for-government-little-change-since-2019/

“Trends in party affiliation among demographic groups” Pew Research Center 3/20/2018 https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-affiliation-among-demographic-groups/

Rectenwald, Michael “Woke Capitalism is a Monopoly Game”. Mises Institute 2/10/2022 https://mises.org/wire/woke-capitalism-monopoly-game

Reynolds, Morgan “Labor Unions”. Econlib. https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/LaborUnions.html

Riemann, Günter The Vampire Economy New York: Vanguard Press, 1939 https://mises.org/library/vampire-economy

Rothbard, Murray “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” Cato Journal 2, No. 1 (Spring 1982): 55–99. https://mises.org/library/law-property-rights-and-air-pollution

Rothbard, Murray “Nations by Consent” Journal of Libertarian Studies 11, No. 1 (Fall 1994): 1–10] https://mises.org/wire/nations-consent

Taylor, A.J.P. From Sarajevo to Potsdam New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1966

Notes

1N.B. merger is something third positionists oppose hawkishly except when such companies are governments consolidating into modern states. Their carving out of an exception to anti-trust law for labor unions is also something they have in common with ZOG.

2Financial analysts apply a “conglomerate discount” to the valuation of companies comprising subsidiaries in unrelated industries due to negligible synergy and material bureaucratic overhead.

3The author experienced this first-hand in one of the country’s leading business schools.

4This is true even of businesses in the violence industry, i.e. governments: https://infogalactic.com/info/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

5“Non-invasion principle” might be a better term than “non-aggression principle” for this reason also

6In 2015 Japan in a moment of weakness admitted 27 middle eastern refugees and 2 were arrested for gang rape: https://www.libertynation.com/japan-admits-almost-no-refugees-still-see-rapes/

7This would seem to run counter to political decentralization but our aim in this is not conglomeration of Korea’s existing governments but merger of the two that retains the best of each, namely North Korea’s hardline nationalism and South Korea’s economic freedom, while divesting each of its current baggage that is the opposite of the aforementioned features. The resulting government would be more libertarian than either is now, and the ratio of that government’s to size of the entire Korean nation would be smaller than between the sum of the two current goverments and the nation today.

Richard Hanania has recently taken a shining to Ayn Rand, and while his takes have been solid they’re predictably dusted with neoliberal coal. My view is that Rand’s philosophy properly extrapolated from is the extreme opposite of neoliberalism. Give it a listen and decide for yourself!

Some believe that the Great Replacement justifies collectivism as a response. When we thoroughly examine collectivism, however, we discover that nothing justifies it.

First, “collectivism vs individualism” is a false dialectic. It is false not because we can massage the definition of these words so as to make their referents harmonious, but because the very duality is logically unnecessary, regardless of its harmony or antagonism. A group does not exist independently of the individuals it comprises. Individual identity always comprises a number of group identities, including the identity of “individual”. A tribe almost always outlives any given individual member, however, there is no point in time when the tribe comprises anything other than its individual members. For an individual who is the last living member of his tribe, his birth to that tribe requires that at least one other member have been alive contemporaneously with him, there is thus a metaphysical living group identity that is ineluctable. A group identity may be such a value to an individual that he may consider his own life not worth living without it, but it his still his life and cannot be anyone else’s. No one can relate to and value a group in the exact same way as anyone else due to individual uniqueness.

Although group commonalities such as blood ties tend to be more self-valued features of our individual identity than unique features like our fingerprints or retinal patterns, the manner/degree of how/how much individuals value such commonalities varies from person to person. An individual may also substantially value things in which a group relation does not inhere, such as certain types of hobbies. Regardless of how group-oriented one is, an individual’s value set in its totality is unique. One can act only toward satisfying his own value set because he cannot live anyone else’s life. Objectivity regarding this truth is the ethic of actualism. Actualism is unburdened by the need for external validation of any value within one’s value set because one’s value set is determined by one’s unique neurology and situation. These are almost entirely beyond anyone’s control, even situation, because even aside from geography of birth, neurological wiring is what determines situational outcomes. A simple way to understand actualism is “don’t worry about stuff you can’t control” applied to ethics. Although collective opinion of morality is the more common standard of external validation for non-actualists, individual opinion, even one’s own, is also a form of external validation, and just as unnecessary. Actualism rejects the false self that is defined in terms external to the actual self, external to our direct experience of life and will to live. Actualism does not leave us wringing our hands about the morality of our values because our values are the morality! The actualist never even asks “is it ‘right’ for me to want better for myself”, let alone “better for my group?” Such wants are taken as tautologically given; the always imperfect state of want satisfaction continually presents us with problems to solve in reducing imperfection in this regard; the actualist focuses solely on solving such problems. A significant problem for us to solve is that others’ value sets conflict with our own, often lethally. Actualism is absolutist objectivity about this subjectivity, a subjectivity that exists between individuals and between groups. The social action of actualism is reciprocity, the mutual actualization of individually and collectively subjective value sets. Reciprocity is exclusively pro-social action, the ethics of individualism and collectivism are also motives to social action that attempt, with varying sincerity and success, also to actualize value sets in spite of subjectivity. Because they permit irreciprocity (rights violations), however, they are less successful. Respect for property rights is an instance of reciprocity that an ideal political system protects. Political systems premised on ethics other than actualism expose property rights to significant threats, which makes the case against such ethics much more than academic.

We will start with collectivism. Collectivism is belief in a group interest that transcends aggregate individual interests. Because a group does not exist independently of its individual members, such an interest is nonsense. Specifically, it is an anti-concept, which is a belief that functions to destroy belief in a valid concept by smuggling inside the valid concept an incompatible one. Both “group” and “interest” are valid concepts, as is central tendency of individual interests, as is shared interests (or more precisely, compatible interests) among individuals. The latter two are what can be regarded as true group interest, however, their validity is what gives plausibility to the anti-conceptual version of group interest, which smuggles the prescriptive into the descriptive. It achieves this by exploiting the semantic ambiguity of the “ism” suffix. “ism” can, in addition to denoting ideology, denote pure description of a certain phenomenon. For example, aposematism describes the phenomenon of poisonous animals having bright colors that warn predators. Man is the most dangerous animal of all, but does it make sense based on the preceding fact alone that we should dye our hair neon colors like SJWs do? This by itself is a naturalistic fallacy, but the naturalistic fallacy that collectivism commits is more egregious because its premise of a transcendent group interest is not even true. It is something that certain weak individuals wish were true because it provides them moral cover to parasitically actualize their own value sets at the expense of their betters. They regard actualism as “selfish” so they represent the parasitism within their value set as a transcendent group interest to which “individualism” (what they call actualism) must be subordinated. This shows why ideologization is so dangerous. Ideology per se is simply the desire for something in the big picture to differ from the status quo. Changing the big picture is often a dangerous endeavor, and there is nothing wrong with danger either per se. The problem is the human tendency to erect entire ideologies based on the naturalistic fallacy, ones that force values on or from reality, rather than those based on a robust differentiation between facts generally and the subset of facts that are values. Sound ideologies take value sets as a given and give careful consideration to descriptive cause-effect relationships germane to actualizing certain of those sets. Both collectivism and individualism can be used in a purely descriptive sense to emphasize behavior of an individual as distinct from a group and vice-versa. If a term contains a both a meaning that is bad and one that is good/neutral/non-value-laden, however, it should not be used at all because the principle that “one bad apple spoils the bunch” is as applicable to rhetoric as to anything else. If you have to explain “no, that’s not what X ‘really means’”, you’ve already lost.

Although it need not be explicitly religious, collectivism’s appeal is of a similarly transcendent character, what people describe as “belonging to something greater than oneself”. There is a world of difference, however, between having a sense of belonging to something physically or temporally bigger than oneself and treating something other than yourself as of greater moral significance, as collectivism does. Because the only true morality can be actualization of one’s own value set, it is impossible for anything external to that set to be of greater moral significance. Collectivism is evil because it demands the impossible.

Collectivists often sanitize collectivism by defining it descriptively as “people working together for a common purpose”. Working together by itself, however, necessitates common purpose, which is the project being worked on, the project being the proximate purpose of the work. The correct term for working together is “collaboration”. Absent collectivism, the ultimate purpose beyond the project that the project serves each collaborator is subjective to that individual. Collectivism, however, requires that the ultimate purpose of the project be held in common. This creates needless conflict. For example, if one collaborator’s motive is financial and the other’s is spiritual, it is counterproductive for the latter to insist that the former’s motive also be spiritual. Effort put into attempting to change a collaborator’s motive is effort that could have been put into the project instead. Regardless of motive, if collaboration is voluntary, each individual expects that the project will make him better off. If collaboration is collectivist, however, the purpose is a supposed group interest that is something other than the interests of the collaborators. This means that at least one of the collaborators is made worse off by working on the project. Because no one can voluntarily make himself worse off in terms of actualist wellbeing, collectivism necessitates coercion.

Individualism in its best form is really actualism, but a broader benign form of it is simply rejection of collectivism. An individualist of this latter type dismisses collectivist demand for the unearned as a naturalistic fallacy: “You owe me this property because I am X group” rather than “Giving me or others in group X property is consistent with these of your values because…” Because collectivist demand for unearned property is persuasive, it is very frequently issued, frequently enough that individualists will often reactively refer to natural rights in property as “individual rights”. This is mistaken, however. It is hardly a leap for a leftist to go from “a society must be judged based on how it treats its most vulnerable people” to “…most vulnerable person”. An individual demand for the unearned based on what a unique special snowflake someone is is no more valid than a collectivist demand. The unnecessary emphasis on the individual of the term “individual rights” biases its proponents toward atomism. Atomism is a serious perversion of individualism because all else equal, irreciprocity toward more than one person is worse for that individual than irreciprocity toward him alone. The term “individualism” should not be used for the same reason that collectivism should not be used. It can be taken to mean reactive atomism. That a reaction to a bad thing can go too far does not make that bad thing good, however. We should also stress that rejecting both individualism and collectivism terminologically does not imply an equivalence between them. Living as a hermit, to the extent that it is bad at all, is not at all comparable to the mass slaughter that collectivism is responsible for.

Collectivists may object that because most of humanity cannot be rationally persuaded to abandon collectivism, it is rational for the rest of us to embrace collectivism. If europeans are attacked as such, their argument goes, it is rational for us to defend ourselves as such. A problem with this argument is that it does not make the case for why defending ourselves as europeans is superior to defending ourselves regardless of the reason we’re attacked. Another problem with it is that it is merely an argument from popularity, which is easily refuted by the fact that the minority of humanity disinclined toward collectivism is overwhelmingly european, and european superiority in a number of endeavors is attributable to this disinclination. The drive to exploration, for example, is one that requires a individual and his crew to be able to reject the plea “we need you back home!” Saying “I want to climb that mountain because it’s there” is simply a less egotistical way of saying “because I want to”. Science advances by the insight of individuals that deviates in some way from group consensus. This behavior is commonly called “individualism” but what europeans actually have is a superior affinity for is actualism. Failure to understand this distinction is a significant reason why europeans have been subverted by a form of collectivism impersonating individualism, which is humanism.

Humanism substitutes the collective of humanity for the collective of the tribe. Humanists believe natural tribalism is bad for humanity, so they often advocate that we identify as “just individuals” rather than as tribesmen. This appeals to the european eye toward the universal, which is present even in weak and foolish europeans. To be an individual, however, is to be an individual something. The very word “individual” literally means “not divided”¹, which implies at a minimum the potentiality of a group. What “just individuals” implies is “just humans”. When other traditional group components of individual identity such as family, community, nation, and race are suppressed for the supremacy of human identity, individuals are left weak and hollow. The tribalistic instinct always massively persists, however, so the kind of weak individuals attracted to humanism end up substituting non-traditional tribal identities such as sex, sexual identity, class, and ethnomasochism. Right-wing collectivism is a reaction to humanist collectivism, which is almost uniformly left-wing. Right-wing collectivism substitutes a transcendent group interest at the level of the natural groups. Because collectivism requires rights violations and because strength in numbers applies to capacity to violate rights, the purported interests of larger groups such as nation and race takes precedence over smaller ones such as family and community. In this regard right-wing collectivists are also humanists despite pretension to the contrary, they are humanists for subspecies of humanity, and given the size of such subspecies, there is little practical difference between them and their left-wing counterparts. Because the individual and family are the fundamental building blocks of nation and race, the latter also suffer under collectivism. Because strength is found much more in concentration of political power rather than numbers, however, what right-wing collectivism results in is a monopolistic state ruling in the name of all these natural groups, emphasizing one group’s “interest” versus another’s however expedient to furthering its racket. Collectivism of the state over all of humanity and its myriad of natural subgroups is the worst collectivism of all.

The challenge in writing this article lies in articulating a case for non-articulation. In-group preference is something so natural, normal, and deeply-ingrained, not just to man but all biology, that there is no rational basis for labeling action in accordance with such preference. Value set individuation is something so obvious that most people, in their hysterical moralism, cannot help but miss. We zeroth positionists are not most people however. Our collective efficacy as a vanguard requires a highly superior objectivity about the human condition and resultingly handsome optics. Actualist triangulation against the false dialectic of collectivism versus individualism is just this.

Practical applications:

• Political collectivism is downstream from cultural collectivism. Rejection of cultural collectivism, such as an heir being told he has a duty to run a family farm business regardless of his aptitude, is an example (the NSDAP’s farm laws were a historical instance of the downstream effect). The counter to this is to show, for example why pursuing an area of superior of aptitude not only makes that heir but his family better off, both in terms of absolute and comparative advantage.

• Avoid, in our public presentation (and even private to some degree for the purpose of building public-facing habits) excessive use of othering terms like “white nationalist”. Use terms that other the enemy instead like “globalist”, “socialist”, “neoliberal”, “great replacer” and everyone's favorite, "gay race communist". The racial animus of our enemies will come up in discourse naturally. For ourselves use terms that are familiar and normie-friendly like “patriot”, “conservative”, “right-wing”, or “libertarian” in some combination, while taking reactionary absolutism as a matter of course in the policies we advocate. This “conscious conflation” we could call it, helps us appeal to normies while pulling them into our ideological gravity well on a subconscious level. An example is preferring “patriot” to “nationalist”, while maintaining that patriotism entails a certain nationalism (A country is a type of environment. Environmental quality includes genetic environment, so wanting your country to be the best place it can be requires eugenics). We should continue to sprinkle variants of "nationalist" in however, so that right-wing collectivists remain marginal in claiming it.

• Add meritocratic nuance to issues such as immigration policy, such as a points-based system that weights both genetic assimilability and outlier talent. This would not be racially exclusive, but would make it effectively impossible for any non-white to immigrate who isn’t in contention for a Nobel Prize. The libertarian insight that citizenship is a statist construct is helpful here; what should be emphasized regarding ethnic identity is the non-negotiability of supermajority status. Pursuant to this is limiting policymaking roles in the West to our own, in government and elsewhere, while rejecting the arbitrary privileges of ethnostatism. Transitional measures that feature such privileges are to be both commended as significant improvements while criticized in terms of comparison with the superior system of neighbortarianism.

• Point out that even from a “white nationalist” standpoint, collectivism is unbecoming of white people because actualism is what makes us great. Also point out that other races’ evolving of actualism would make everyone better off, while also emphasizing the imperative of preserving the purity of our ethnic aesthetic within our countries.

• Just as individualism versus collectivism is a false dialectic, so too is “civic nationalism” vs “ethnonationalism”. Not even hardcore third positionists want immigration to our countries to be open to any white person; they wish to exclude libertarians and socialists of a flavor they view as too semitic. In having an ideological litmus test in addition to the standard tests of disease and criminality, they too are civic nationalists. It is therefore important for zeroth positionists to emphasize the ideological litmus tests of our own that we wish to impose on top of racial ones, especially tests that screen out all socialists, “national” or otherwise.

1 As does “atom”, which is another reason why individualism creates a bias toward atomism.

What is the third positionist response to the our critique? To pretend we don't exist at all by arrogating generically reactionary values such as national sovereignty, family stability, and respect for nature, package-dealing such inarguably righteous values with the noxious political and economic ones that actually define their view and slapping their own singular label on it. To the extent they acknowledge us at all they dismiss us as lacking relevance based on their greater popularity. To this we can simply say: there are always more midwits than bigwits. Third positionism is in actuality a right-instinct variant of progressivism, and progressivism is a worldview inherently appealing to the former segment of the bell curve. Third positionism's progressivist character is conveyed in its label (a label, which must be noted, that third positionists choose for themselves). Both third positionists and other progressivists represent their political economy as a pragmatic "third way" between capitalism and communism. The ways in which these progressivist philosophies differ are insubstantial, and this is especially true of their contemporaneous historical instances such as Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany vis a vis Progressive Era and New Deal America. They both favor a high degree of state intervention in the economy; only the specific interventions are occasionally different. They are both demotic in their need for validation in the popular consciousness, using the go-between vehicle of the modern political party. They are both criminally collectivist, it is only the collective that differs. For the third positionist it is the nation, for the others it is "society" or humanity. That the homogeneous nation is a naturally more cohesive group makes third positionism all the more pernicious, as such a nation's higher levels of trust and lower levels of corruption partially conceals the destructive effects of its policies. It leads to the belief that socialism works when white people do it. Sociologically third positionist progressivism is a lower middle class movement, other variants are upper middle class. The former is more martial in its pretensions, the latter more humanitarian. The former views capitalism and communism as jewish and materialistic, the latter views them as materialistic in a way that has not been humanistically optimized. What they have most significantly in common is that they are mongrel philosophies held by the great muddled middle, both lacking in consistency with the divergent political instincts that flavor them.

Third positionists believe that their worldview represents a substantive difference in kind from capitalism and communism. On a certain categorical level this is true, because while the latter are purely economic stances, third positionism as described earlier packages in social stances with economic ones. On the Nolan chart (a.k.a. political compass) it occupies primarily the "authoritarian-right" quadrant. The Nolan chart is one framework among several, however, and the term "third position" does not refer to it. Its source is a differently oriented chart explained in this video. This chart sets conservatism (the first position) in opposition to left-liberalism (the second position) on the horizontal axis and libertarianism (the zeroth position) in opposition to "big government/statism" (the third position) on the vertical. In the post-Enlightenment era these dualities can be respectively categorized as liberal and reactionary. The key to resolving much confusion around these labels (e.g. how can "conservatives" be categorized as "liberal"?) is to recognize that (contra Nolan) "right" and "left" are not sets of policy positions, economic or other, but primal instincts that predict policy positions. These instincts are respectively the masculine and feminine. This is why it is overly simplistic to describe third positionists as either just "right-wing" or "left-wing". Their emotion is masculine and right wing but their callow emotionalism is a feminine trait associated with the left. It is their failure of emotional regulation that results in the leftist policies that contravene their aims. Although the masculine instinct is much better attuned to political reality, politics being the domain of systemic violence that is almost exclusively male in practice, it is still just an instinct, and improperly understood instincts, however healthy, can trap one in ignorance and superstition. Third positionism is an ideology of ignorance and superstition borne of masculine instinct. We on the right often like to flatter ourselves that our worldview is that of mature men, but compared with the left this a very low bar indeed. We would do well to remember that political instincts are a spectrum, and many rightists hold worldviews heavily contaminated with leftism. Even the most laissez-faire conservatives of today frame their positions in terms of their consistency with liberalism, and the most instinctually illiberal of third posistionists favor political structures and policies that are decided compromises with liberalism. These contradictions betray a lack of maturity in the superficiality of thought forming them. They show that the third positionist platform is not in fact a material economic difference in kind from either left-liberal socialism or neoliberalism, it is a difference of degree and often not even a large one. Both modern conservativism and third positionism are boyish betrayals of the right to the left.

Following the libertarian to alt-right pipeline to its third positionist terminus is also such a betrayal. The draining of the of the libertarian movement by the third positionist one is a somewhat overstated problem, as many third positionists who claim to be former libertarians were really liberals, and those who were libertarians were shallow in understanding and weak in their convictions. The latter are especially ridiculous: “I used to be a libertarian but now I think it's good for brothers to steal from each other.” The drainage is still a significant problem, however, and Liberty+ inserts in the pipeline a junction that provides a path for men of integrity to maximal efficacy as activists. Supreme though our political economy may be over all others, it behooves us to remind ourselves that political economy is a only part of our overall worldview, and worldview is only part of a man's overall identity. There is a significant correlation, however, between political view and one's overall moral character. Compared with other types of progressivism third posititionism may be the least of evils, but it is still progressivism, and progressivism is an evil ideology. To the extent an evil ideology is a significant part of a man's overall identity that man is himself evil, and on the dissident right ideology tends to be quite a significant part. It is unsurprising therefore, that third positionists are by and large such a low-rent bunch. While in the abstract there is no logical reason why libertarians and third positions cannot be allies against globalism, third positionists are not logical people. For them, the zeroth positionist refusal to forsake the god of nature for that of their particular statist sect is unforgivable blasphemy. Their suicidal chauvinism in the face of white extinction is definitive proof of their wickedness. This is why one of Liberty+'s projects is a comprehensive, issue-by-issue refutation of their corrosive creed. We do not tolerate evil anywhere in our civilization and make no exception for the movement to save it. Defeating globalism for good demands the depositing of all deadwood beliefs on the right in the dumpster of history where they belong, and the virtue of carrying out to it all of third positionism's failed and fraudulent schemes is for us here its own very great reward.

Table of Contents
-Opening Remarks
-Monopoly vs Sovereignty
-Competitive Government
-The Anarchist Stupidman
-The Red Herring of Natural Rights
-The Real Enlightenment Liberals
-Serious Problems
-The Stakes
-Sources
-Footnotes

Opening Remarks

The fundamental difference between null positionists and third positionists is how we believe power ought to be structured and applied. The state power structure that null positionists favor is decentralized and competitive. The structure that third positionists favor is centralized and monopolistic. The application of state power that null positionists favor is limited primarily to the keeping of the peace. Third positionists oppose limits on the capacity of the state to intervene in the peaceful affairs of others. What follows is an explanation of why the null positionist model of power is imperative for the nation.

In arguing against null positionism third positionists often assert “there has always been a state and always will be”. As the introduction makes clear, however, the argument is not about whether the existence of states is the norm, it is about how they ought to to be structured and apply power. Their argument is one of fatalism, a naturalistic fallacy in the raiment of argument from the authority of antiquity. Let us temporarily define “state” in the way that third positionists (and all non-libertarians) functionally do: A national-scale organization with a monopoly in the industry of security, which we libertarians identify as a protection racket. Perhaps such states have always existed. That does not mean they always will, and even if they will that does not mean we should not resist their criminality however we can. As it happens, their premise is false, not only under their own definition of a state but under any definition, false in history, false in the present, and false in future plausibility.

Almost the entirety of humanity's existence as a species has been in a condition of anarchy, which is defined here as absence of formal law or formal institutions of law enforcement. It was in such a condition that whites came into being, while it was not until the rise of the state that jews did, so from a purely survivalist standpoint the state is not an obvious essential. The state's emergence may have coincided with the rise of civilization, but given the nature of statism described in detail further on, it was the abundance of civilization that made statism possible in that parasitism cannot exist without a host. Both the Indo-Europeans and the panoply of peoples they conquered (mostly other Europeans) had states, however, the Indo-Europeans' succcess owed to both the innate superiority of their people and also that their state was less statist than those of their conquests. The United States of America were founded with one of the smallest states in history and America experienced its period of greatest growth, dynamism, and heroism when it remained small. It was during the period of statist consolidation of the Progressive Era that America began to go into decline, and now the moribund empire is run by the one of the largest and most predatorily statist states in history. Most of mankind, in fact, did not experience regular tax collection until the the 17^th century A.D (Scott 2017). In state of anarchy there was still tribal hierarchy of course, but of relatively low power distance. The leader of the tribe was almost always known personally to all tribesmen, which created a good measure of accountability. Accountability means the degree to which leaders were incentivized to protect rather than violate the property norm. The property norm is the value judgment that peaceful resolution to problems of scarcity is preferable to violently aggressive resolutions. This norm is not an exclusively human value either; other apes such as chimpanzees display a sense of it developed to the point where one will refrain from swiping food perceived to be in the possession of another, even if that other is a subordinate individual (Kummer 1990). This gives lie to the third positionist claim that the property norm is something that can only exist with a state to protect it. Here it must be noted that the very way in which they define a state is one that necessitates violation of the property norm, so at best they can try to claim that some amount of violation is necessary to prevent greater violation. That which defines third positionism is not the view, however, of a statist minarchist who believes that a state should commit violent aggression only to fund its enforcement of laws protecting property and contract, but the view that any amount of violent aggression against anyone is justified as long as it serves a “national interest”.

The third positionist concept of “national interest” or “common good” smuggles in subjective and parochial desires (such as Hitler's hysterical hatred of smoking) for the nations' aims with the objective interest of protecting the nation's property holdings. The latter is what the null position limits the state to, rejecting the anti-concept of “common good” in favor of a “common bad” that all well-adjusted people of a nation seek to protect themselves from, which is violations of the property norm. The fascist combination of subjectivity and unlimited state power results in the “national interest” being merely whatever those in control of the state say it is. All manner of skullduggery may therefore be perpetrated just by saying the magic words “national interest”, especially when a jingoistic spin may be put on it. Unaccountable militarism and protectionism, which benefit a handful of the state's corporate cronies at the expense of the nation as a whole, are prime examples. Even it we make the unrealistic assumption that a polity premised on the third positionist concept of national interest is free from graft, the more fundamental problem with their concept is its subjectivity itself. The fact is that within even an ethnically homogeneous nation there will always be wildly different aims as to what the nation should aspire to. Should it have a space program? If so how ambitious of one? Should it be isolationist or imperialist? If the latter should it seek to enslave or to uplift? Should there be an official national church or religion? If so which? When the state is a monopolistic decision-making apparatus the result is national squabble for control of that apparatus, which saps the nation of its strength. Third positionists reply to this contention with platitudes like “life is not peace; it is in struggle that men find purpose”. This ignores the problem of scarcity: The more resources brothers expend fighting one another the less they have to defend their country against their enemies. While struggle between various factions to increase their power and influence in society is inevitable, even healthful sometimes, the violence inherent to a monopolistic state specifically and the struggle for control thereof costs the nation a hugely unnecessary amount of blood and treasure.

Monopoly vs Sovereignty

A monopoly in the security industry is equated by statists with the concept of sovereignty, however there is a highly significant difference between these concepts. It is here we introduce some definitions of concepts that will be used throughout this article:

Power: The ability to make someone pay a price for defying your will. Physical force is one type of power that we call “hard power”. Soft power, like that which media, finance companies, and 4chan memesters wield, is all other power. Ubersoy in his manifesto Right-Wing Progressivism provides a more formal and nuanced definition of power that compellingly rebuts the “might makes right” slogan popular among third positionists:

“Even the craftier understandings of social power, like in the case of Carl Schmitt who defined a possession of power as the ability to make particularist exceptions to the generalized, thereby triggering the state of exception, are not able to explain why smaller bodies in space fall under the gravitational force of heavier bodies, and nor can they imagine instances in which states of exception are impossible to craft in the first place, such as among the dynamics of evolution and progress, universal mathematics and programming languages, and laws of nature. Consequently, I have decided to remedy this flaw with my own perception of the generalized
(and social) power … in which the true constitution of power is uncovered by understanding the universal commonalities of power manifested in multiple spheres
of being.

There are two complementary principles that determine the constitution of universal power:

Organizing Principle of the Sphere.

Force of Element/s within the Sphere.”

We start with Force first. Contra “might makes right”, in astrophysics it is not precisely correct to say that less massive bodies orbit more massive ones; rather both bodies orbit their mutual center of gravity. It is strange that third positionists bluster in this way, as they were so badly crushed by the historic might of the Allies the Second World War they became the biggest pariahs the white race ever produced. They also mistake might as hard power alone, for which Ubersoy also takes them to task:

“Laymen often say that to understand who rules you determine who you are not allowed to criticize. Such a statement is accurate in most cases, yet fails to account for societal values and moral considerations in which certain groups, like veterans, the elderly, the disabled, abuse victims, the pregnant, and many others become morally elevated by society without actually being powerful themselves, for they do not form centers of gravity.”

Here Ubersoy identifies an instance of the true source of power: morality. We use morality here in a purely descriptive sense, in terms of what is statistically considered moral. This includes the common denominator of Ubersoy’s instance, which is the Individualizing sector of the Moral Foundations framework. Morality is behavior that redounds on existence itself. It proceeds directly from the will to live, and the will to destroy life. It is no accident that moral and morale are cognates, because without conviction that a cause is moral Man has no real motivation to fight for it. It is not raw hard power capacity that carries your side to victory; it is the ability to convince your enemy that his cause is no longer morally worthwhile to fight for. The better you understand your enemy, and natural law generally, the more likely your victory. Might does not make morally right because morality has a significantly subjective parameter, and that subjectivity spans from the mightiest to the weakest. Might wins, and because winning is driven by being scientifically, if not “morally” right, it is still much more accurate to say that right makes might.

Regarding organizing principle, Ubersoy explains:

“to determine who rules over you it is not enough to determine who you are not
allowed to criticize; rather, what must be determined is which element or organizing principle would cause the system to become disorganized if removed. For example:

ˆ -In the job market, it is the owner of the company and the supervisors.
ˆ -In the market economy, it is money and market laws.
ˆ -In the solar system, it is the Sun.
ˆ -In primitive societies, it is a charismatic leader.
ˆ -In a political movement, it is a leader in lower political organizations or an ideology in higher ones.
ˆ -On the Internet, it is those with larger followings and the infrastructure in which they are permitted to gather followings”

Organizing principle is a useful concept for understanding the next two terms we define:

Government: A subset of total of hard power in society; the subset of the population that can systemically affect the behavior of that population with such power. A state is the organized subset of government.

Sovereignty: Having enough power to impose a price for defiance of one's will that no one is willing to pay.

Monopoly: The coercive suppression of competition.

There is clearly overlap between the concepts of sovereignty and monopoly in that defiance of someone's will is a type of competition and that successful monopoly is sovereignty against competition. The crucial difference between them, however, is this: While sovereignty is total suppression of competition at the level of will itself using hard power, soft power, or some combination, monopoly is some degree of suppression of competition at the level of a certain industry using hard power alone. Whence the difference in the type of power employed? The reason is that monopoly is an economic concept, and in economics monopoly is said to be achieved when a firm is able to raise the price of its product by restricting output. If free competition exists however, it would be the price-raising firm that would go bankrupt because no one would be willing to pay one firm a higher price for a good they can get at lower one for the same good from any other firm. Because such a discrepancy represents increased profit opportunity for the non-price-raising firms, the only way to achieve a monopoly price is to forcibly bar competing firms from operating in the industry. Statism in its mechanical aspect is monopolization of the security industry on a national scale, which necessitates violently aggressive suppression of would-be competitors in that industry. Third positionists make specious arguments for the application of anti-trust law against alleged corporate monopolies while championing what is by far the most destructive monopoly in history, which is the modern state! The libertarian property norm, by contrast, is sovereignty over only that which is peacefully acquired. A nicely succinct definition of this norm, in fact, is: “non-aggressive sovereignty”. As mentioned in the immigration article, the libertarian property norm assigns to the homesteader absolute control of property so acquired to exclusion of all others in the world who want it, which can be considered a highly localized monopoly. To maintain this monopoly the homesteader seeks sovereignty over his property, as does any successor he authorizes. At the same time, however, he has no monopoly over property not his, and all industries in his society are not monopolized but competitive because a critical mass of the population is sovereign in their will to free competition. The Propertarian Eli Harman calls such a system a “distributed dictatorship of sovereign men”. Libertarians call it a “free society”.

No matter what we call it; null positionists of all stripes recognize such a system as superior to a fascist one, and one reason for this is quite fundamental: The economic calculation problem. This problem was identified by Ludwig von Mises in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Mises showed that under a system where the property norm is weak, economic decision making is an exercise in futility. Economic decision-making is dependent on the price system, where prices provide signals as to how resources may be deployed in way that optimally satisfies wants and needs. The price system in turn depends on the freedom to transact, and freedom to transact depends on how well-defined property rights are. After all, why go to all the trouble of calculating a price for something when a customer can easily appropriate that good from you without paying, seeing as you have no special claim to control over that good's disposal? Economist Jonathan Newman summarizes Mises' thesis with this syllogism:

Without ownership, there is no exchange.

Without exchange, there are no prices.

Without prices, there is no economic calculation.

Without economic calculation, production decisions are made in the dark.

When that happens, basic needs go unmet.

Mises uses the extreme conditions of full-blown Marxist socialism to illustrate the extreme importance of property and the price system, however his intellectual heir Murray Rothbard recognized that the calculation problem was not limited to a fully socialist (i.e. economically monopolized) society but applied at the industry level as well (Man, Economy and State pg 613). In applying the problem at the industry level he showed that economic calculation was just as much of an obstacle to complete vertical integration of an industry (i.e. one firm operating the whole production chain, voluntarily or coercively, the latter being a monopoly) as for an entire economy. For a production market to function there must exist at least two firms whose production scope does not overlap for at least one of the production chain's stages. This is because to set a price that efficiently allocates resources toward that stage, the producer at that stage must be able to compare the value of possessing their product with the value of obtaining something else for it that the producer does not currently possess. Put simply, there is no economic sense in selling something to yourself. Rothbard's insight has a profound political implication: That statism (even “minarchist” statism) in its mechanical aspect of the security industry's monopolization, is as such inherently inferior to competitive government for its inefficient resource allocation. What is profound about this is that it demolishes the notion that the only important determinant of the quality of a state is the moral character of its personnel. A monopolistic concern composed entirely of perfect angels cannot function as well as a competitive market for want of the essential price signals that only the latter can provide. With regard to third positionism in particular Rothbard's insight is devastating to two of its tenets: (1) That national socialism is a completely different kind of socialism from Marxist socialism and that the problems of the latter do not apply also to the former. (2) That a homogeneous, high-quality population is a more important determinant of the quality of the state than the structure and policy of the state itself. Empirical data shows that degree of economic freedom is close to IQ in predicting economic output per capita (Fraser Institute 2023; Lynn and Vanhanen 2002). A popular anti-libertarian meme is sarcastic reference to Somalia during its period of statelessness as a “libertarian paradise”. This is debunked by the fact that Somalia in this period was safer and more prosperous compared both to before its state's collapse and to its neighbors whose states remained. Ironically enough, the case of Somalia is an important reminder that even total anarchy is preferable to many instances of statism, especially the statism of today. Third positionists believe in effect, that having the “right” population or the “right” people in charge magically transmutes bad things the state does into good things. Not only does the calculation problem smash this notion to bits, one can make the argument that state tyranny is actually exacerbated when the state is composed of homogeneously high-IQ, high-trust people because they are cleverer, more cooperative, and more efficient in running their protection racket (for an instance of this on a smaller scale all one has to do is compare the jewish and Italian mafias). Andrew Anglin has pointed out that poor countries are significantly freer in a number of areas than rich ones because their states, despite their corruption and litany of oppressive and self-serving laws on the books, have few resources to actually enforce their racket. The bad things that a third positionist state does specifically will be addressed later in this article and critiqued in detail in later articles.

Competitive Government

Fortunately there exists a mechanism for peacefully resolving a nation's subjective aspirations which is neither anarchy nor monopoly. It is competitive government. Competitive government is a system with strong historical precedent in the feudal monarchy of early Medieval Europe. A feudal king is the literal owner of the land he rules. In having the ability to sell his kingdom he is incentivized to be a good steward of it so as to increase its value. When many such kingdoms exist the king is made accountable to his subjects not only by the external economic incentive of a competitive marketplace in land but also by the internal pressure of his subjects themselves, because it is easier for them to escape as no subject is ever very far from from a border. Medieval Europe had a great many independent political units indeed, numbering in the thousands at the beginning of the second millennium (Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed pg 107). This is because the median kingdom size in such a marketplace will necessarily be small, which keeps power distance as described in the second paragraph relatively low. Even monopolistic states cannot rule indefinitely without a critical mass of consenting governed, and under competitive government this number is significantly lower. Monarchy's explicit singularity of command provides additional accountability, as there is minimal ambiguity as to who is to blame when administration of the realm fails. This is in contrast to fascism, which, although autocracy has been a historical feature thereof, has substantial capacity to submerge blame in the expansive bureaucracy of the modern state. The latter feature is one that not only defines fascism but also differentiates it from other reactionary worldviews.

Liberals and third positionists are incidentally correct that monarchy per se by no means guarantees good governance. Monarchy describes a state structure, but describes nothing about the state's activities, i.e. whether or not it behaves monopolistically and what types of policies it enforces. The optimal polity is one that many libertarians call “stateless”, although what they mean precisely by this is a non-monopolistic state. Multiple societies closely approximating this have existed and thrived in the past; the most notable examples being Breghun Ireland, Saga Iceland, and the American Old West. Each provides compelling examples of how core governmental services such as dispute adjudication, law enforcement, and national defense can be provided on a bottom-up rather than top-down basis. Breghun Ireland had non-sovereign kings whose role was limited to presiding over the tuath (an association of free men) in its assembly and leading it in war. Separate from this was a legal system of professional jurists called filid who handed down law and their jurisprudence as a hereditary oral tradition and worked in tandem with surety guarantees from ordinary citizens to hold one another to their contracts and punish wrongdoers (Peden 1971). Saga Iceland's highest authority was an assembly of chieftains who provided law enforcement and dispute resolution not with taxation but on a fully fee-for-service basis with no territorial exclusivity for any individual. Saga Iceland was a shorter-lived society than Breghun Ireland but it still lasted for more than 300 years, and it was only when taxation in the form of a mandatory church tithe was introduced that the competitive governance system eroded and the country collapsed into civil war. The American Old West had a tribunal system of criminal justice under which violent crime rates were lower than in the eastern half of the country, which is especially impressive considering how transient much of its population was at the time. Medieval Europe on the whole, on top of the competitive monarchical feature described in the previous paragraph, had other features that set it far enough apart from the modern state to be considered effectively stateless. Breghun Ireland was far from alone in limiting the power of the king to that of an enforcer, rather than an issuer of law. Neither the king nor the nobility had the power to unilaterally expropriate their subjects (McIlwain 367). Law itself was polycentric; the church, universities, and guilds had their own systems of law, and each these institutions were weighty centers of power in their own right, serving as both a check on the power of the king and on one another. This horizontal array supported each tier in the society's well-stratified vertical array: the king, nobility, knights, vassals, and serfs. This system is an example of a naturally tiered society as described by the Dutch political philosopher Johannes Althusius, whose work is a rebuke of his statist contemporary Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes envisions society as a monocentric system in which a sovereign state rules over a largely non-differentiated mass of subjects. In essence, a two-tiered array resembling a millstone rolling around a wheat field rather than being integrated into a serviceable mechanism in the millhouse. The Hobbesian model is of course that of third positionism. The insufficiency with which third positionism recognizes societal differentiation and the problems resulting from this will be dealt with later in this article.

Third positionists reply that a similar system cannot/ought not be instituted because “that was then and this is now; those societies don't exist anymore.” So what though? Countless more statist societies have come and gone as well, and their ends have been much bloodier and more destructive than those of any of the societies mentioned above. In confusing proximity to the status quo with realism about what is beneficial third positionists commit a categorical error, as the superiority of competitive government is not particular to any time or culture, but derives directly from universals of the human condition such as scarcity and corruptibility. In confusing such proximity with desirability they commit another naturalistic fallacy. The modern state is the necessary institutional engine of white genocide and its other abuses in combination are just as monstrous. There is no sane option for government that is not radically different from the status quo; our radicalism as null positionists is what recommends us to take over when the modern regime collapses. We should not accept the third positionists' implication that there is little in the present day and age to support competitive and unobtrusive government either, however. Even though most of us live under the largest states in history today, the portion of our lives we spend interacting with it directly is still quite small. When we do it is almost invariably unpleasant, and in relatively recent history was at least as unpleasant for those who opposed the considerable excesses of German National Socialism or Italian Fascism. The US Federal Government is the largest state in history yet under it there are, according to Dr. Bryan Caplan, still more private security personnel than there are police officers. People overwhelmingly opt for private arbitration over government courts when given the chance. The most prosperous and pleasant places to live today are small countries with limited governments such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Liechtenstein is almost a fully libertarian state (Liechtenstein Constitution, Paragraph 2 of Article 4). An instance of competitive government can be seen in the tax havens such as Monaco, the Bahamas, and the Cayman Islands which provides a check on larger states looting their most productive holders of capital. The documentary The Monopoly on Violence cites two locations in the world that are currently similar to the aforementioned “stateless” societies of the past. These include the hill country in southeast Asia, where the people who fled the state-dominated lowlands have largely prevented the formation of anything close to a monopoly state where they live now. The people of Churan, Mexico abolished all political parties and disbanded the police. Thanks to concealed carry, crime was well-deterred following this, and in 2014 the Mexican supreme court ruled their arrangement constitutional.

Some third positionists ignore the fact that null positionists do not wish to replicate feudal monarchy or other competitive systems exactly as they were but implement a similar system enhanced by developments in technology and political philosophy. One such system was proposed by Curtis Yarvin in Patchwork when he wrote under the screen name of Mencius Moldbug. In this system civilization comprises tens or even hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous polities (Yarvin's term is “patches”), whose states (“realms”), while sovereign, are also pure profit-maximizing entities whose revenue is solely the taxes upon their realm's properties. Under such a system there is neither the pretense of the state being anything but a corporation¹ nor the pretense of any “national interest” that rulers can smuggle their subjective schemes into. The people have no more and no less of a say in government than voting with their feet. Because the states are dependent on demand for residency in their patch to operate as going concerns, however, this system, like feudal monarchy, fosters an immense amount of governmental competition to make their realm the most pleasant possible place to live. A key feature that differentiates it from feudal monarchy, however, is another powerful check on tyranny: cryptographic weapon locks whose key is in possession of the sovereign corporation's (“sovcorp”) shareholders. Such locks are not a speculative technology, they are what restricts the ability to launch a nuclear strike to the President of the United States whose aide carries around the launch codes (cryptographic keys) to the nukes. Yarvin is of the opinion that just about any weapon mechanism including bullet cartridges can be safeguarded with such locks. If the CEO or any of his subordinates go rogue the shareholders (or their elected board of directors) can instantly disable his weapons. It is possible for stock to be made available to any willing buyer, in the real world it is likely that sale of stock in a real world sovcorp would be restricted to those of the same nation as the sovcorp's employees. It is also likely that residents of a patch would be prohibited from owning stock in that patch's sovcorp to prevent conflicts of interests among them. Residents sign a literal social contract with the sovcorp wherein each party agrees to certain standards of behavior, one of the most important of which is the sovcorp is refraining from geopolitical merger with other realms. The substrate for such covenants in the real world would be likely the systems of English Common Law or Continental Law. Disputes over contracts would be resolved by arbitration as is already common today. The ultimate arbitrator is the CEO (“Delegate”) of the sovcorp. Although as sovereign he can suspend a contract at will, abuse of this power is sharply curtailed by the checks of profit competition and cryptographic chain of command as described above. In Yarvin's view competition for supremacy in the providing of security would result in an extremely high level of surveillance and tracking. Regardless of the accuracy of this prediction, the same checks would curtail abuse by a surveillance state of whatever size. Tracking systems such as individual RF tags mitigate the issue of frequent border crossings attentive to a world of small countries, which corroborates the case for the superfluousness of country walls I made in the immigration article. Because war is costly for governments, those operating under an explicit profit motive in a system like a patchwork would operate with a foreign policy of neutrality, going only to war to neutralize the aggression of the irrationally belligerent. Alliances of whatever size necessary for such neutralization would coalesce quickly and organically and disappear just as quickly when the danger subsides. Such is the efficiency of a free market of sovereign states.

An alternative system has been proposed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and other libertarian theorists: Defense insurance agencies (DIAs). This system will be discussed in greater detail in the article on national defense; here we highlight features that define it specifically as an integral part of a null positionist state. The DIA is a model of how national defense can be incentivized on a purely for-profit basis which exploits the natural complementarity between wargaming and actuarial science. Both security and insurance are highly scalable industries, and while there may exist a local optimum for the former at a level approximating that of the size of the average Western military today, insurance is already an international industry (the world's largest in fact), which means that the operating territory of a DIA's parent company could serve multiple different macro-nations. As pan-european nationalists tend to be of strong third positionist leanings, this benefit is something they ought to appreciate. This system treats disturbances of the peace as a problem that transcends the borders of any one country, which shifts the classification of friends and enemies away from “France vs. Germany” toward “French and Germans vs violent criminals.” In contrast with the blood-soaked history of european brother wars, especially the total wars of fascist and other modern states, this shift is the opposite of trivial. This system has an advantage over the Patchwork in that it exploits economies of both scale and scope to a greater degree and is more conducive to standardization on an international scale. Another advantage is that under such a system all policies not pertaining to security strategy are made entirely by individual landowners, which keeps conflict over social engineering to an absolute minimum.

The Anarchist Stupidman

As we have seen above, power directed toward the maintenance of a free society is the opposite of anarchy in terms of how anarchy is conventionally defined: Lack of laws, rules, institutions of enforcement or hierarchy of power. Murray Rothbard may very well be the greatest political philosopher of the 20^th century but he chose poorly in labeling his philosophy “anarcho-capitalism”. Each of the terms in the label mean something quite different to most people than they do to Rothbardians. In using the term “anarcho” he limits the focus of the philosophy to the question of government. Rothbardian libertarianism, however, has nothing to do with government per se. It merely does not make an exception for people who happen to be part of government in its condemnation of violent aggression. In using the word “capitalism” he limits the focus of the property norm to capital. Because most people just use “capitalism” as a catch-all term referring to everything that big businessmen and financiers do, “anarcho-capitalism” give the impression of a society where big business and finance get to run amok without any rules. Some libertarians, especially the Beltway types, reinforce this impression in their apology for deplatforming of dissidents by large media and financial firms, saying that that it is simply “the free market speaking”². This apology is simply false. The Federal Reserve, Operation Mockingbird, the bailouts of 2008, and the Twitter Files are just a few examples of the extensive collusion between the state and such industries. Even if no such collusion existed, virtually all companies, even bad ones, have a means for customers to submit complaints. Customers submitting complaints about deplatforming is as much the free market speaking as a firm's refusal to associate with them, and the same is true for boycotts.

A charge leveled at libertarians by third positionists is that we are allergic to the use of state power. The question the latter fail to answer satisfactorily is: Power used for what? Libertarians have pointed out a litany of instances where the use of state power as a cure for a social ill turns out to be worse than the disease. Power, like most other things, is a scarce resource. Squandering it on counterproductive interventions leaves us all with less capacity to apply it where it is useful and productive: The suppression of violent aggression. To this end libertarians believe we should use all the power we have. This can take unexpected forms. Under constraints where many violations of property are legal and and many actions that do not violate property are illegal, it is justified to avenge the former through weaponizing law against the latter. For example, although private affirmative action is not a violation, supporting things like anti-discrimination law, is a violation, therefore suing such an organization of such supporters for violation of anti-discrimination law is just. I have coined the term “compensatory aggression” for this in a libertarian context, however, it is a really just a consistent application of the common law principle of estoppel. Estoppel prevents a person from asserting a claim, right, or fact that contradicts their previous words, actions, or representations, especially if another party has relied on those earlier statements to their detriment. Under this principle, an organization’s support for anti-discrimination law is an action that contradicts their affirmative policy. Having show prior disregard for others’ right of freedom of association, they do not get to invoke such a right in defense of their affirmative action policy. They have estopped themselves from it.

The prior violation is the justification that third positionists and other right wing statists do not bother to identify. Peter Quinones for example, once tweeted: “Faggot libertarians enter the chat [about whether the government should ban corporate ownership of residential real estate]. Like the ones calling DeSantis a commie when he wouldn’t let supermarkets require vaccine passports. There’s a wall with their name on it.” One thing Quinones should realize here is that one of the fundamental reasons why freedom of disassociation is crucial is that the subjective perception of a threat on a property owner’s part is a massive disutility unto itself, one that they are entirely within their rights to mitigate regardless of whether the threat is real. In the case of resisting replacement, no threat from foreigners need even be perceived; the loss of a sense of home is reason enough to refuse to accommodate them. COVID-1984 was a clear reminder that some instincts are healthier than others. It was also a reminder that government cannot be trusted to determine which instincts are the healthy ones. That DeSantis was right about the COVID vaccine and the paranoid supermarket owners were wrong is merely a data point that future health commissars can use to claim that such planning works. As an aside, it is perfectly legitimate for businesses to impose medical requirements as a condition of association. A modeling agency, for example, can require models to take weight loss medication if they exceed a certain body fat percentage subsequent to hire. Forced integration is the cause of white genocide. It is a nonstarter to accept the notion that government reserve the right to determine whether someone’s reason, if any, for refusing to accommodate someone is kosher. Commitment to a principle of supreme moral value is demonstrated most convincingly when that principle is under the greatest stress. The principle of estoppel exists because equity is inextricable from moral consistency. The good Christian people who make up the core of the MAGA movement we want to appeal to are the kind of people who care about such consistency. If Quinones or DeSantis wants to make a convincing argument for provisional furthering of anti-discrimination law, he should either point to prior unpunished property violation on the supermarket owners’ part, or argue that the owners’ discrimination against the unvaccinated constitutes proof of such violation. This would not be considered proof beyond reasonable doubt in a normal court of law however. They also need to show that the benefits of such a measure would outweigh the costs of enriching discriminatory owners and pulling customers away from non-discriminatory ones.

Third positionists try to smuggle in expanding the scope of statist activity with increasing activity against the left. They try to justify this by highlighting that the left will use all the power they can against us anyway. This confuses the zero-sum nature of power generally with the amount of power available to the left in government. It is similar to how only a fraction of the nutrients in a capsule are able to be absorbed by the body. Statism is an inherently leftist phenomenon because of its entropic parasitism. Continuing the analogy, increasing statism increases the bioavailability of power within the governmental capsule to the left. Insofar as the right is better grounded in reality than the left, it redounds to our benefit much more to marketize as many services as possible. This is because the market’s price system provides feedback signals concerning our value creation as political activists much better than statism can. Institutions like the welfare state meanwhile, even if temporarily reformed to serve whites only, weaken us further with their inherent dysgenesis. Further explanation of how it is provided later and in other articles. The immiseration that statist institutions create in turn creates more demand for leftism. Third positionists accuse their opponents on the right of ignoring current political reality, yet a current political reality they ignore is that a substantial part of our polities are democratic, and democracy is a system that keeps the left in power more often than not. Even though the left will try to use everything at their disposal against us when they are in (and out of) power, the harm they are able to do is much less when there is much less at their disposal in the first place. It is much harder for them to create a new government program than take over an existing one due to the tax increase required. Once a program is created, it is much harder to dissolve, let alone in a way that times the electoral market. As Milton Friedman put it: “There is nothing quite so permanent as a temporary government program.”

While it is true that in most white countries today hard power is highly concentrated in the state, America is a great exception. Of the approximately 400 million guns in the country 98% are not in the possession of the state. While obviously hard power is much more than a 1:1 function of gun stockpile, what is indisputable is that if heritage Americans turned their guns against the System they would do an immense amount of damage to it. If third positionists truly believe that power lies only in the state, things look very bleak indeed for them because there is no way for them to take control of the federal government in America or any Western European country for the foreseeable future. Libertarians however recognize that “no political solution” really just means “no democratic solution at the federal level”, that politics is violence, that freedom needs to be fought for, and that in the war for freedom you have to pick your battles wisely. One worthwhile battle is seeking local political office for key positions such as sheriff and Republican precinct chair. A notable libertarian movement that is particularly attuned to the necessity of attaining political power is the Free State Project in New Hampshire (of which this writer is a participant), whose unofficial tagline is “taking over New Hampshire and leaving you alone”. The fact that the a quarter of the New Hampshire houses of congress are now either Free Staters or FSP-endorsed is testament to the commitment of Free Staters to the attaining of political power. The pro-liberty legislation that has been passed since the project's migration trigger point such as constitutional gun carry, educational freedom accounts, phasing out of the dividends tax, and nullification of Federal vaccine status mandates and Second Amendment infringements is testament to Free Staters' willingness to use political power. An excellent initiative from the constitutionalist wing of the liberty movement is found in Tactical Civics, which is reviving independent grand juries and militias county by county in these not-so-United States. A notable historical example of the effective use of power in furtherance of freedom is found in the military junta of Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet was much more of a pragmatist than an ideologue, and in the first few years after taking power from the Allende regime he did little in the way of dismantling the suffocating institutions of his socialist predecessor. When Chile's economy failed to improve, however, he decided that it was time to try something different, and a group University of Chicago-educated free market economists among his countrymen just happened to be in position to catch his ear in the right place at the right time. Even as his reforms bore fruit many communist agitators tried to stymie his efforts, and thanks to his creative approach to physically removing them we now have an irrepressibly hilarious meme to convey the concept.

At this point third positionists and a minority of libertarians called agorists object that it is hypocritical for a libertarian to participate in politics in the first place. This objection confuses politics, which is the struggle for power generally, with statism, which is supporting the use of power in the state to commit violent aggression. Because the polity we live in is statist already, seeking to attain power within it to mitigate the state's violent aggression is a legitimate act of self-defense. What about the fact that state jobs are currently paid by taxation, which by definition is expropriation? Doesn't seeking them create higher demand for such expropriation? No, because state jobs are currently created by coercive fiat rather than by the market, seeking them does not create the same kind of wage-raising demand pressure. The openings for state jobs once created are effectively a given in the short-term, if libertarians don't take them others will, including our enemies. Not even agency directors have the ability to abolish their own agencies, so it makes sense for us to have people on the inside to mitigate the harm such agencies do and to use whatever power such agencies have to mitigate the harm that predators outside the state do, especially predators of the statist persuasion. Such predators include anyone who so much as votes for statism. Libertarians by and large regard the use of lethal force as a proportionate defense against burglary. Democracy is millions of people each burgling you of pennies. Mitigating statism's harm therefore can take the form of state measures going as far as the state execution of democrats. This does not mean that it is acceptable, however, for a libertarian to seek any kind of career with the state. Agencies that are outside libertarianism's acceptable scope of government such as welfare and education, bureaucracies that are necessarily parasitic, cannot in good conscience be depended on by a libertarian for his lifetime's bread. Working for such agencies can only be a temporary measure taken to sabotage them. What constitutes acceptable length of a mission to sabotage an inherently parasitic agency is a judgment call resulting from full context cost-benefit analysis. A saboteur who is independently wealthy enough to give away his government salary (as Trump did) is in a better position to act as one than one just starting to make his way in the world, for example. Abolition of parasitic agencies can be pursued by those of us within the state who are in a position to effect that change. There are certainly non-libertarian reasons to avoid working in the state we have, but collective efficacy as libertarian activists demands that we use all means at our disposal to further liberty, which means some of us working in the state however suboptimal the state currently is.

Statism may be “the most dangerous superstition” as Larken Rose puts it, but agorists (and Rose himself to a degree) suffer a form of it only in reverse where they regard government as a demonic rather than beneficent deity with which any association results in possession, providing yet another cautionary instance that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. This is false, both in its implication that the amount of or absoluteness of power in society ever varies much, or that people change much when given absolute power. The truth is that people are who they are; money and power does not change them but merely makes them more of who we already are. Government is a tool which can be used for good or bad ends. Government is best when it is used to protect property on a voluntary basis. That it often does the opposite means we should strive to the fullest to obtain property in government to the exclusion our competitors, who comprise both the left-progressivists who currently rule us and the right-progressivists who seek to supplant them.

The Red Herring of Natural Rights

Third positionists go beyond attacking anarchist stupidmen and attack libertarianism's most popular foundation itself: Natural rights. This attack varies in nuance depending on the sophistication of the attacker; in its crudest form it does not even rise to the level of an argument but is simply a threat of violence for blaspheming their statist religion. Their actual argument, however, goes as follows:

It doesn't matter how strenuously one invokes rights because violence, not the abstract concept of rights, is the ultimate arbiter of human behavior.

As Liberty+ co-founder Blood Wealth Soil points out, however, there is by this token no more substantive basis for the national duties of third positionism than for the natural rights of libertarianism. A duty is not something handed down from heaven but simply whatever the strongest gang around can violently coerce you into doing. Neither libertarianism nor Objectivism nor BWS' ethics of actualism rejects duties either; the first merely rejects duties as justification of violent aggression, along with all other purported justifications. The latter reject the existence only of unchosen duties. We may not choose our parents, but the duty of caring for them in their dotage (the question of duty is not applicable to children, who are incapable of moral autonomy) is something we choose to assume so as to reciprocate the decency with which they treated us as children. We may not choose the government of the territory we are born in but how we reciprocate that government's behavior is entirely our choice; there is no moral “duty” that government qua government can demand. Rights, like duties, can be broken down into positive and negative kinds, which is explored later in terms of effectively contrasting these subsets. First however, we will defend natural rights on their own terms. A key term in the third positionist argument is “ultimate”. Although sometimes used colloquially to mean “total”, “ultimate” really means “final” or “last”, which in this context means that violence is a last resort. No one can deny that violence or direct threat thereof is an extreme aberration in the everyday lives of civilized people, when they experience it at all it is in a state of desperation. What third positionists really mean in their argument is that all else equal, someone who applies force³ to those who defy his will be more successful than a pacifist, which is trivially true, however in implying that libertarianism is pacifist they commit an egregious strawman: Libertarianism places no limit on the amount of force that one may apply in self-defense as long as it is proportional to the threat confronted⁴. Although it does not prohibit an individual from being a pacifist, it strictly forbids forcible interference in the efforts of non-pacifists to defend themselves. It is likely even that in the most sustainably libertarian societies participation in defense organizations would be a requirement of the covenants on which such societies are premised. In the anarcho-tyranny of today, white people are actually prosecuted for defending themselves from violent crimes their governments decline to mitigate. Libertarianism condemns this forcible imposition of pacifism as strenuously as it does all other violent crimes. What third positionists majorly fail to address with their critique regarding force and will, however, is will to what? By definition all non-libertarian ideologies are wills to something other than maximal peace for a given society. Because aggressive violence is an extreme aberration, the onus is on the third positionist to justify its use by an objective standard of nationalist value.

Third positionists hearken at something true with their critique, however, which is the subjectivity of rights. A right may be defined as “A scope of action within which it would be immoral to interfere”. Because morality is subjective so too are rights. Most third positionists are however, like most people, deniers of this subjectivity, taking the fact of variance of a distribution of moral sentiments⁵ to mean that such a distribution is also uniform, i.e. serial killing is as normal as volunteering at a food drive. They are more hypocritical than most people however, in the nihilism they tactically project at the inherently moral nature of rights while at the same time self-righteously anointing themselves as guardians of “objective morality” and denouncing libertarianism as morally nihilistic. Their denial of moral subjectivity refuted by the simple fact that the word “normal” is simply the adjectival form of “norm”. “Norm” refers to the hump of a distribution where most of the observations typically lie, and by definition a humped distribution is not uniform. It is therefore meaningless to describe any measure of central tendency of a uniform distribution as “normal”. The extreme error that “objective morality” believers commit is to equate recognizing something as subjective with trivializing that thing. There is nothing more subjective, and nothing less trivial, than love. The same can be said of natural rights. “Objective morality” is coach speak, a cope for a person who lacks the objectivity to accept that certain other people are hardwired differently, and sometimes in a way that makes that person an object of deadly, implacable hatred. Good and evil are the spiritual adjectives of friend and enemy. Because morality pertains to existential status itself, there is a certain fitness in groups that desire so strongly that their enemies not exist that they regard their enemies' morality as already non-existent, which, from the former's standpoint, renders the former's morality metaphysically invariate, or “objective”. While this conflation of ought and is is usually good religion it is always bad philosophy. Natural rights proponents who are religious, in fact, refer to such rights as “God-given”. Because the boundary between religion and philosophy is sometimes blurred, natural rights proponents have a vulnerability to guilt by association on this count. Although premising one's political philosophy on natural rights does not entail belief in the oxymoron of “objective morality”, there are very few natural rights proponents who do not also hold such a belief, which renders them vulnerable on this count as well. Morality is an emotive phenomenon, and the reality and intensity of emotional belief in collective or positive rights is no less than belief in individual or negative ones like natural rights. Consider the following hypothetical exchange between a capitalist (a negative rights proponent) and a socialist (a positive rights proponent) as an illustration:

Capitalist: Controlling the prices doctors and insurers choose to charge for their services is a violation of their natural right of controlling one's own labor and patients' natural right of choice in disposal of their own property.

Socialist: The right to life-saving care irrespective of one's ability to afford it trumps any right to maximum choice therein. I choose compassion for the nation's less fortunate.

An effective⁶ response here on the part of a capitalist, regardless of whether he accepts the socialist's altruist premise, is:

“Maximum economic freedom in healthcare is necessary for providers to be able to come up with solutions that are affordable even for the nation's least affluent. This is seen in outcomes for the least affluent in nations that have such freedom as compared to ones with socialized or regulated healthcare systems.”

Note the complete sidestepping of “rights” in the riposte. The capitalist may be a complete egoist privately but has still refuted his opponent in terms of his opponent's own humanitarian values, without invoking any that his opponent does not share. The capitalist's individual rights, however, are still defended in his support for a policy that is consistent with them. It is collectivist, in fact, to demand validation of one's moral premise, individualist or not, in the hearts of other people. Getting the results that you want is all that matters. The capitalist has also deprived his opponent of the opportunity to employ sophistry that argues for socialized medicine in terms of individual or natural rights. Natural rights are real but only as robust as belief in them. They are useful rhetorical shorthand when preaching to fellow believers but due to their subjectivity they are not a practical premise for normative political discussion among decent people with differing values. No productive policy discussion can be had without a focus on the actual consequences of such policies, rather than their “rightness” or “wrongness” per se.

Libertarianism is justified entirely in terms of the consequences of its policies, which renders natural rights, notwithstanding its popularity among libertarians, a total red herring of a premise to attack libertarianism with. Libertarian policies are often presented by both its proponents and opponents as being a systematic derivation of an absolute moral axiom (i.e. the non-aggression/non-invasion principle), which is valid.1 What is not valid, however, is when its opponents attack such an axiom for being “abstract” as opposed to “pragmatic”, as if the very concept of pragmatism is not also an abstraction, which all concepts are. Also invalid is when opponents attack its moral absolutism⁷ as “rigid”, a term with which they smear those who are more principled, once again in opposition to what they call “pragmatic”. What they fail to realize besides the fact that morality is both absolute and subjective as described above, is that pragmatism is not synonymous with practical, for practicality is inherently rational, and pragmatism (the subordination of principles to perceived practicality) that comes from anything but rational principle is the opposite of practical. The principle of internal peace is eminently rational for a nation, for conditions where violent destruction is minimal are by definition the most efficiently productive, all else equal. For this reason a policy-by-policy productivity analysis using objective standards of value such as economic output per hour of labor is no less valid a justification of libertarianism than axiomatic derivation. This justifies libertarianism from both an individualist and a collectivist standpoint, but a standard that is strictly subjective to the individual, i.e. the thrill derived from a general condition of absolute liberty as distinct from the specific consequences of that freedom, is also a valid justification, and perhaps the most reactionary one of all: “Liberty is no more and no less than my unshakable will, and may God have mercy on anyone who contravenes me.” Emotivism does not necessarily compete with consequentialism either, as the effect a policy has on one's psyche is the ultimate consequence by which that policy may be judged. Natural rights are a real and valid foundation of libertarianism but can only be properly defended in terms of their consequences or one's spiritual investment in such rights. Consequentialism and emotivism, however, have no need of rights.

Further buttressing of natural rights' superfluousness is found in Hans-Hermann Hoppe's argumentation ethics. Hoppe points out that the very act of arguing against libertarianism, i.e. arguing for the commission of violent aggression, is a performative contradiction. A presupposition of argumentation is that during the course of such an act an arguer regards dialogue as preferable to physically assaulting his opponent. Even if an arguer regards the dispute as a mortal one it is still in his self-interest to at least attempt to persuade his opponent, even if the chance of persuasion is small, due to the risk that violence poses to the former. In putting the word before the sword so to speak, he has provided tacit support for the primacy of peace as a value. Even the most ardent militarist views the objective of waging war as to bring about its end through victory, which results in a state of at least a provisional sort of peace. In Hoppe's paradigm the brutes on the internet who dispense with the pretense of good faith argument by threatening libertarians with the rope and gas chamber are actually the most honest exponents of their ideology. Libertarianism may be thought of as the consistent application of basic standards of morality but even basic standards of morality are too great of an ask for many people, especially fascists and communists. What null positionists have in common with these enemies of ours is recognition that argumentation is highly limited in its persuasiveness where political ideology is concerned and that such ideology must be physically fought for if it is to be realized.

The Real Enlightenment Liberals

Third positionists' attacking of natural rights is part of an attempt to smear libertarianism by associating it with Enlightenment liberalism, implying that nothing about the Enlightenment is good. We have seen in the the previous section already however, that the liberal ethic of natural rights is good when judged by the fruits it bears when a polity is premised on it. When we examine liberalism further, in fact, we discover that libertarianism has very little in common with it overall and what commonalities there are concern liberalism's virtues, and that third positionism, notwithstanding the sincerity of its reactionary impulse, actually has a significant amount in common with liberalism, which is disturbing because its commonalities concern liberalism's worst features. Before exposing this dark kinship between the Enlightenment and third positionism we should give the Enlightenment its due rather than accepting the premise that nothing about it is good, as well as critically examine the claim that libertarianism is a mere subset of classical liberalism.

The Enlightenment's most valuable contribution to the history of ideas is its recognition that primitive heuristics do not by themselves make a rational society. Religion is a motivational memeplex of such heuristics, and as such works well in prescribing prosocial behavior. It works poorly compared to science, however, in making accurate predictions describing reality. If libertarianism can be said to be fully agreement with the Enlightenment about something religion-related it is rejection of the divine right of kings. Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu recognized that the state is not some inexorable force of god or nature but a mechanism that can be engineered, and that design decisions have significant effects. That the specific redesigns recommended by thinkers like Montesquieu happen to be defective does not invalidate their basic insight. We have shown the superiority of the competitive mechanism earlier, here we explain the relationship or lack thereof between libertarianism and Enlightenment liberalism. In reality, the relationship is thin at best. The only other relation libertarianism bears to liberalism besides rejection of divine right is the similarity of its property homesteading theory to that of John Locke. Locke's property norm is somewhat crude, based on mixture of labor alone with virgin land. If mixing labor is all that is required, after all, one could homestead the whole Pacific Ocean just by dumping a can of tomato soup in it, as Robert Nozick pointed out. Libertarianism, however, sidesteps the significance of labor entirely through its criterion of non-aggression. Whether people labor all day or simply lounge about on virgin land, what legitimizes their use of it is simply that they did not violently seize it from anyone else. If others regard you as such an awesome guy they will voluntarily accord you full use and disposal of literally all the virgin land you do nothing but visually survey, libertarianism accords full sanction to such subjective deference. Laboring on virgin land and eventually bumping up against others doing the same is incidental. The ultimate and objective determinant of libertarian legitimacy in land is whether at that point all interested parties proceed peacefully or not. Richard Spencer in a podcast once characterized libertarianism as “extreme liberalism” for its having in Locke's property theory an ancestor of one of its foundations. This however, is like calling a bird an “extreme dinosaur” by dint of mere descent. As a point of fact, libertarianism's true origin lies much more in Late Spanish Scholasticism than in the Enlightenment. Thinkers such as Vitoria, Navarrus, Covarrubias, and Molina anticipated the economic foundations of modern libertarian thought by more than 300 years. On the relationship between value and price, they are much closer to the mark than Adam Smith, whose failure to recognize the former's subjectivity led him to a proto-labor theory of value that Ricardo would go on to develop fully and Marx would popularize. Murray Rothbard himself takes Smith to task for this in An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Unlike liberalism and all its squishiness, libertarianism is an absolutist and reactionary philosophy; if it has any sort of familial relation to liberalism it is like that between Zeus and Cronus, and we see this in libertarianism's rejection of all liberalism's defining features (other than those discussed above): Notably: The social contract, the “pre-societal individual”, self-limited government, and common good as a floating abstraction. The pre-societal individual is an especially ridiculous concept, not just because such a person has never existed, but also because political philosophy as such can only apply to a society. This by itself renders the characterization of the libertarian political philosophy as one of “atomized individualism” an absurd strawman. Furthermore, libertarianism's necessary economic aspect of laissez-faire capitalism is not something that defines liberalism, as Dr. Ricardo Duchesne points out. The most charitable possible interpretation of liberalism’s “pre-societal individual” is simply rejection of collectivism, but the very ambiguity of the concept in the context of the liberal “common good” giving rise to the need for interpretation is itself a distinguishing inferiority to libertarianism, which rejects collectivist rights infringement explicitly.

How does third positionism fare in differentiating itself from liberalism, especially from the French Enlightenment that was much more noxious than the English one associated with libertarianism? Compare the following quotes:

In a well-ordered society, there is no tension between private and general will, as individuals accept that both justice and their individual self-interest require their submission to a law which safeguards their freedom by protecting them from the private violence and personal domination that would otherwise hold sway. In practice, however, [I believe] that many societies will fail to have this well-ordered character. One way in which they can fail is if private individuals are insufficiently enlightened or virtuous and therefore refuse to accept the restrictions on their own conduct which the collective interest requires.

I define from the word 'social; meaning in the main ‘social equity’. A Socialist is one who serves the common good without giving up his individuality or personality or the product of his personal efficiency. Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not. Marxism places no value on the individual, or individual effort, of efficiency; true Socialism values the individual and encourages him in individual efficiency, at the same time holding that his interests as an individual must be in consonance with those of the community.

The first is from a summary of Jean Jacques Rousseau's concepts of will in The Social Contract. The second is Adolph Hitler quoted in the Daily Express Adolf Hitler in the Sunday Express on September 28, 1930⁸. Note the similarity in how each believes in a “common good” that is something other than the sum total of society's individual interests. The commonality compounds as we learn how exactly Rousseau intends to harmonize instances where such conflicts arise. For Rousseau, laws are only legitimate when agreed upon by an assembly of citizens and only good citizens can make good laws. How then, does one ensure that only good citizens assemble? By making the citizens good. Who makes them good and how then? Rousseau's answer is the figure of the “legislator”. This figure “has the function of inspiring a sense of collective identity in the new citizens that allows them to identify with the whole and be moved to support legislation that will eventually transform them and their children into good citizens.” In terms of “inspiring a sense of collective (or at least collectivist) identity” there are few figures in history better suited to the role of legislator than Hitler himself! Small wonder then, that Bertrand Russell once remarked “Hitler is the outcome of Rousseau”.⁹

Hitler was not the only third positionist outcome of Rousseau however. His most formative ideological influence in Gottfried Feder is also an unmistakable intellectual descendant of Rousseau. In the very beginning of his seminal work The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation, he starts by echoing the above superstition of collectivist interest:

“Public interest before self - interest” is the first law of National Socialism.” (pg 15)

Feder goes on to echo another one of Rousseau's key ideas, which is that regarding property:

The extreme still ruling among us of an unlimited right to property, on the other hand, has led us already to the last step before the temple of the god Mammon, on whose door stands in golden letters: “Everything belongs to the One” . Even this frightening economic form must equally lead to a depersonalisation of property — only in another way — in that, finally, all of working mankind is here pressed into a frightful debt slavery to an anonymous financial power.

(ibid)

The parallel in Rousseau's work is found in Discourse on Inequality:

In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau traces the growth of agriculture and metallurgy and the first establishment of private property, together with the emergence of inequality between those who own land and those who do not. In an unequal society, human beings who need both the social good of recognition and such material goods as food, warmth, etc. become enmeshed in social relations that are inimical both to their freedom and to their sense of self worth. Subordinates need superiors in order to have access to the means of life; superiors need subordinates to work for them and also to give them the recognition they crave. In such a structure there is a clear incentive for people to misrepresent their true beliefs and desires in order to attain their ends.

(ibid)

Feder and Rousseau both believe that the property norm leads to lies: Worship of Mammon and misrepresentation of true self; respectively. They also both believe that because certain types of inequality result from property there is something inherently flawed about consistent protection thereof. The type of inequality they find problematic is not the inequality of fisherman A, who has one fish, stealing from fisherman B, who also has one fish so that A now has two fish and B none. The inequality to which they object is where A has more fish because he is a fisherman and B is not (or less of one). Feder makes this explicit earlier on the very same page:

In spite of the doubtlessly existing agreement that the considerations of the public interest have to go before the private interests, remarkably there has been, according to the legal ideas valid among us, precisely with regard to the form of the use of property, no moral limitation determined beyond the criminal.
It is, to be sure, forbidden to act with violence against one’s fellow man (extortion — murder — manslaughter — betrayal and illegitimate enrichment, etc.), but it has never and nowhere been forbidden to pile up immeasurable wealth

Here Feder has juxtaposed extraordinary economic success, which he explicitly differentiates from fraudulent gain (“illegitimate enrichment”) with extortion, murder, manslaughter, and betrayal. But don't worry, Feder isn't some rabid Red like Marx or Proudhon. Only two paragraphs later he denounces Marxism for going “so far as to explain property as 'theft''. He's a sensible centrist who associates productive use of property with murder, not an extremist who associates it with theft, understood? Rousseau also positions himself as such a sensible man, for in Book 1 chapter 8 of The Social Contract he justifies statism as a perpetual necessity for the protection of property; which precludes treating his political economy as congruent with that of Marxism, which sees the state withering away after it has abolished property. However, when combined with the fact that Rousseau explicitly differentiates individual will from general will as something that the state needs to ensure conforms to the latter, he confirms his belief that the state needs to limit property, as individual will cannot be expressed without property. Because Rousseau sees inequalities as mundane as landlords over tenants and employers over employees as to some degree deviant from the general will, the necessary conclusion is that the state must limit property to promote the general will. This voids the property norm as something the state serves to faithfully protect for its maximizing of societal peace and renders it something that is merely permitted protection insofar as the state sees protection as pursuant to the general will. By the same token however, the state may violate the norm to any degree in this pursuit. “Your” property under the ideal regimes of both Feder and Rousseau is whatever table scraps the state deigns to let you lick off the floor. Both are communists without conviction, but at least Rousseau has the excuse of living before communism was philosophically formalized by Marx et. al.

Another parallel between third positionism and liberalism is observed by Duchesne in same article referenced above. In that article he points out that the thinker regarded as most influential in the 20^th century and beyond is not Karl Marx, whom many third positionists believe cannot have any affinity with them because he was jewish, but John Rawls, who was not. Duchesne also notes that many on the dissident right (he does not refer to third positionists or paleoconservatives by name but these are who he is referring to) desire a liberal society, one with belief in “civic virtues”, party politics and government by representation, but for white people only. What they fail to realize is that when principles like “representation” are taken to their logical conclusion, globalism is the result. After all, what could be more civically representative than making citizens of the whole world?

Yet another trait third positionists share with Enlightenment liberals is the belief in a self-limiting state. Unlike for liberals, the basis of this belief is not in internal checks and balances but a more religious kind of faith that the leader of a fascist state will simply “do the right thing” through his special ability to commune with the “national will” or similar. It is clearly a very delicate balancing act that the leader must perform in his statecraft, for third positionism accepts no limits on the means he may employ so long as his end is “limited” to the “national will”. In reality for a liberal state, the separated powers within the state will mostly just collude with each other to expand the states' power at the people's expense. A historical example is the Reichstag granting the newly elected chancellor in Hitler dictatorial powers. As Hitler and the NSDAP would do go on to then do, a third positionist ruling party will invoke “national interest” whenever it wishes to expand its power at the nation's expense. Under third positionism the state does not serve the nation; it merely pretends to so as to force the nation to serve it. The state is not the nation. The nation is what families do, and under null positionism families coalesce in a mass militia culture that provides a real check on state power (in addition to the already considerable check that is the profit motive) that incentivizes the state to serve the nation.

Serious Problems

Thus far we have been primarily counterattacking third positionist criticisms of null positionism, which should have by now made clear the former's inferiority. We now focus on why third positionism is not only inferior but utterly intolerable for the nation. Murray Rothbard provides a useful framework for this in the “Power and Market” part of Man, Economy, and State (pp 877-878). Here he presents a typology of violent aggression in society. Rothbard labels such aggression “intervention” when committed by a state. There are three types of intervention:

1. Autistic intervention: When the state restricts or compels the behavior of an individual that does not have any material effect on other parties. Examples are flag-burning bans and mandatory salutes.

2. Binary intervention: When the state restricts or compels interaction between an individual and it. The prime example of compelled interaction is taxation. An example of restricted interaction is the sealing of records concerning state malfeasance.

3. Triangular intervention: When the state restricts or compels interaction between non-state actors. Examples are minimum wage and anti-discrimination laws.

Autistic intervention is an instance of statist tyranny in its petty aspect. Petty tyranny is far from trivial either, as forced acceptance of small indignities conditions the nation to accept large ones. An analogous example is keeping kosher in Judaism. The purpose of kosher according to rabbis is that if ordinary people are occupied with the minutia of rules concerning dress, diet, etc, they are less likely to commit a serious sin. Ironically, third positionists behave quite jewishly themselves in their support for the autistic intervention of flag burning bans. Third positionists may try to claim that this is proportional because a flag can also symbolize a nation, which in their view would mean that the demonstrator intends a genocidal holocaust in burning it. This ignores the fact that a fascist state wraps itself in the nations flag which allows such a state to use the symbolized nation as a human shield when someone decides to demonstrate against that state's abuses of the nation by burning the amalgamated symbol. It also ignores the fact that the demonstrator might very well intend the flag to symbolize the nation as well as the state but their symbolic immolation of the nation is intended as an admonition against the state's genocide of their nation. Evidence indicating that the reason third positionists support bans on flag burning is not to defend the nation but the state lies in the fact that under the Third Reich it was a crime not only to burn the German flag but the NSDAP flag as well. On the whole, how brittle does a state have to be to threaten with death someone who vandalize its logo or refuses to salute it? A truly secure and competent regime either simply shrugs off such demonstrations when they are baseless or, to the extent the people's grievances are genuine, uses them as feedback in improving the quality of its service. The desperation of autistic interventions strongly suggests that deep down the people of a state committing them know how lacking their regime is in legitimacy.

The binary intervention of taxation is expropriation. As we have seen in the section on monopoly and competition, when a state forcibly suppresses competition it hampers the price system necessary for optimal service provision. The same is true when a state steals from its clients. While it is technically possible for a monopolistic state to refrain from treating its clients this way, as many people would “voluntarily” subscribe to it having no competitors to turn to, obviously the kind of state actors who would would fight a turf war against other would-be state actors are not the kind of people who would pass up the opportunity for additional spoils by directly extorting the nation after securing victory. The payment of “taxes”, therefore, is of protection money. When a state does a bad job of providing its services, the very first thing one ought to do is stop paying. The easier to stop, which is to say, the easier it is to economically punish bad state actors, the better the quality of state services provided.

While obviously the enrichment of mobsters at the expense of others is dysgenic by itself, Hoppe has pointed out that that the reduction in taxpayer's income raises taxpayer time preference (Democracy – The God That Failed pg 10). The more tenuous our existence, economic or otherwise, the greater value we attach to present experience. This runs counter to what Hoppe calls the “process of civilization” which is effectively labor in the economically rigorous definition of the term as used above. In laboring, we express low time preference in committing our present experience to performing activity that is not what we wish to do most. We are rewarded with an increase in wealth and existential security. In trading the fruits of our labors we increase wealth and security further, which permits us a longer-term view to how we consume. It is only with sufficiently high wealth and correspondingly low time preference that we can undertake projects whose completion will not occur long beyond our lifetimes. The process of civilization is therefore maximized when people are free to labor and dispose the fruits thereof unmolested. Criminality represents extremely high time preference behavior whose destructive effects are not limited to the trauma of seizure; such effects include increase of victim time preference as well. A monopolistic state is therefore massively criminal and de-civilizing of the nation.

Triangular intervention is where the state makes voluntary interaction between mentally competent people its business. Third positionists believe that this is justified where “national interest” demands it. The domains intervened in can be broadly categorized as “economic” and “social” as on the political compass. Each domain and the case against intervention therein will be treated in detail in its own article. We can succinctly steelman third positionists here using an example combining both. Recreational drug use is categorized in political compass quizzes as a social issue but it is also big business, including for the state. Setting aside for the moment whether statist prohibition actually works, any prohibitionist policy of the state will have costs both explicit and implicit. Explicit cost is primarily the budget of the enforcement agency or agencies. Implicit costs include law enforcement opportunities foregone by diverting enforcement resources to prohibition instead of property protection. Also included are innumerable other opportunity costs imposed by tax increases to the extent prohibition enforcement is in addition to rather than instead of property protection. Other implicit costs are those attentive to struggle for control of the state apparatus resulting from the sheer subjectivity of preferences concerning prohibition's scope. Statist prohibition agency A, by dint of its monopolistic, violent aggression, necessarily imposes a cost in its prosecution of degenerate B on normie C that is greater than what C entails when voluntarily attempting to rehabilitate or refusing to associate with B. To put this in terms of a concrete example, what is less costly to an ordinary person who is not a junkie? A national drug enforcement agency or landlords simply declining to renew leases with junkies and their dealers? Even if a prohibition agency is funded solely through fines of degenerates, this creates a horrendous incentive to frame innocent people for degeneracy. This in turn creates an incentive (on top of the cartelized price) to retain rather than destroy confiscated contraband or manufacture its own. Third positionists love to point to knock-on effects of vice as supposed justification for prohibitionism but fail to realize that prohibitionism has knock-on effects of its own that are much more costly!

Prohibitionism is a triangular intervention concerned primarily with preventing certain interactions but triangular intervention can also take the form of compelling interaction. The forced racial integration of civil rights is a noxious instance familiar to all reactionaries, yet authoritarian reactionaries accept a related forced interaction that is comparable in destructiveness. This is the welfare state. Economic historian Robert Higgs has written a comprehensive explanation of just how destructive coercive resource transfer by the state is. Presented here is a condensed version:

1. Taxes for the purpose of income redistribution discourage the taxpayers from earning taxable income or raising the value of taxable property through investment. People who stand to lose part of their earnings respond to the altered personal payoff.

2. Transfer payments discourage the recipients from earning income now and from investing in their potential to earn future income. People respond to a reduced cost of idleness by choosing to be idle more often.

3. Recipients of transfers tend to become less self-reliant and more dependent on government payments. When people can get support without exercising their own abilities to discover and respond to opportunities for earning income, those abilities atrophy. People forget—or never learn in the first place—how to help themselves, and eventually some of them simply accept their helplessness.

4. Recipients of transfers set a bad example for others, including their children, other relatives, and friends, who see that one can receive goods, services, or money from the government without earning them.

5. Because some transfers are more generous than others, some classes of recipients come to resent the “injustice” of the distribution of the largess. Hence arise political conflicts.

6. Just as recipients engage in internecine warfare, so do taxpayers, who resent disproportionate burdens in funding the transfers.

7. As a result of the preceding two consequences, the entire society grows more divided and pugnacious. People lose their sense of belonging to a common political community with collective interests and joint responsibilities.

8. Among the recipients of transfers, self-help institutions languish. When they are gone, people who need help have nowhere to turn except to the government, [yet] private associations have much greater success in making sure that people who recover their capacities then resume taking care of themselves.

9. Just as self-help institutions wither among the needy, so do charitable institutions among those who are better off. When government agencies stand ready to attend to every conceivable problem in society, people whose sensibilities incline them toward helping the less fortunate have less incentive to organize themselves for doing so. Hence, government transfers crowd out private transfers.

10. As citizens drop out of their involvement in charitable and helping institutions, letting the government take over, they become less self-directing and more accepting of all kinds of government activity. What was once a prevailing suspicion of the enlargement of government becomes a resignation to or an acceptance of its continuing expansion into new areas.

11. Facing less opposition, those who support the new programs are more likely to triumph politically. New government programs proliferate quicker, restrained somewhat by budgetary limitations but not much by fundamental ideological objections. [M]ost people resent paying for the programs, but they have no objection to the programs themselves.

12. Redistribution involves more than T who pays and R who receives. In between stands B, the bureaucracy that determines eligibility, writes the checks, keeps the records, and often does much more, sometimes intruding into the personal lives of the clients. The mediating bureaucracies consume vast resources of labor and capital, accounting for much of the gross expense of the transfer system. For the government to transfer a dollar to R, it is never sufficient to take just a dollar from T. In addition a hefty “commission” must be paid to support B. From a societal perspective, one must recognize that labor and capital employed by the bureaucracies cannot be used to produce goods and services valued by consumers. Again, society is poorer.

13. Once a bureau is created, its personnel become a tenacious political interest group, well placed to defend its budget and make a case for expanding its activities. A bureau often constitutes one side of a political “iron triangle,“ joined with the organized client groups that form the second side and the congressional committees with legislative jurisdiction or oversight responsibility that form the third side. When the bureau becomes politically embedded in this way, as most do, its impoverishment of society can continue indefinitely without serious political challenge.

14. Taxpayers do not simply cough up money to fund the transfers without resistance. Many of them devote time, effort, and money to minimizing their legal tax liability or evading taxes. Society is poorer, and will remain poorer as long as people continue to devote resources to tax resistance.

15. Even if no one tries to resist the taxes or alters his behavior in supplying labor and capital, the cost to taxpayers will be more than one dollar for each dollar taken by the government, because it is costly just to comply with the tax laws.

16. Just as taxpayers do not passively submit to being taxed, recipients and potential recipients of transfers do not just sit quietly waiting for their ship to come in. They also act politically. Society is poorer and will remain poorer as long as people continue to devote resources to seeking transfers.

17. Just as taxpayers must employ resources to comply with the tax laws, so recipients of transfers must employ resources to establish and maintain their eligibility to receive the transfers. In each case, more resources are squandered, and society is that much poorer.

18. By adopting programs to redistribute substantial amounts of income, a nation guarantees that its government will become more powerful and invasive in other ways. Because government itself is the most menacing interest group in society, nothing good can come of this development, and much evil may come of it.

19. Creating a more powerful and invasive government means that the liberties of citizens will be diminished. For a long time American citizens enjoyed extensive rights in the negative sense—rights to be left alone by governments or other people as they went about their lives. As...entitlements have grown, therefore, liberties in the sense of negative rights have necessarily diminished.

Attempting to provide a social safety net is one instance among many where the state oversteps its core functions of security and dispute adjudication. Although the problems of monopolization apply to these “extracurricular activities”, monopolization is not the only problem for such instances. Whether it funds the provision of such services by “taxation” or not, the state simply isn't very good at them, which is why we don't see private security firms today sharing a parent organization with say, agribusinesses. At core, their business is cracking skulls, and even if one is exceptionally judicious in deciding whose skull should be cracked, this skill set does not transfer well to other areas of human endeavor, mainly because violence, as we pointed out above, is highly aberrant within a civilized society. The economic term for this problem is “diseconomy of scope”. This problem is mitigated in the real world by the application by financial analysis of a “conglomerate discount” to the valuation of companies comprising subsidiaries in unrelated industries due to negligible synergy and material bureaucratic overhead. Third positionists sometimes attempt to justify socialist interventions like the welfare state by pointing out that services like police, courts, and the military are already accepted as socialized ¹⁰. Given the problems of economic incentives and calculation alone, this actually argues in favor of privatizing, or to be more accurate, voluntarizing the core services. Taken as a whole their argument constructs an intellectual package deal using a false continuum fallacy and appeal to the popularity of the status quo: Even if we pretend for the sake of argument that coercive provision of the core services is optimal it does not at all follow that such provision of other services is not a catastrophic failure, let alone even close to optimal. On top of the massive damage inflicted on the nation by triangular intervention as Higgs lays out, one of the very worst consequences of both binary and triangular intervention is dysgenesis. Only inferior people have need of expropriating their brothers. When more resources go to the inferior at the expense of the superior, the former proliferate more. Laissez-faire capitalism, meanwhile, is a eugenic system where more resources flow to the intelligent and industrious.

Third positionist integrationism goes beyond economic, however. A deeply problematic feature that defines the worldview is forcible and large-scale territorial integration. At a minimum this integration is along macro-linguistic lines, e.g. all Bavarians, Prussians, Saxons, Silesians, and Austrians under a centralized German state. Third positionists treat all members of the same macronation as brothers who owe filial piety to their adopted father so long as he desires to instill the right values in them, regardless of the means he uses to do so. The macro-linguistic criterion is an incredibly foolish one, as there are hugely divergent cultural, religious, and kinship differences within such a nation, differences that are often lethally opposed. Civil wars within such European nations are common throughout history, however their frequency is not ultimately because such differences exist per se, it is because by definition a civil war is a struggle for control of a state, especially a monopolistic one, and such states are common through history. From the War of the Roses to the Roundheads vs the Royalists in little England, from the Gracchian civil war of the Roman Republic to even the Sonderbund war in Switzerland of all places (Kemp 1999), european nationals have butchered their brothers with abandon. Though it was not in fact a civil war, what is vulgarly referred to as the American Civil War is another poignant reminder of just how lethal intra-national clashes can be, for more Americans were killed in that war than in all other wars combined. Although Americans are originally an almost all - English nation, the country was settled in different places by four disparate cultures who each came from different regions of England: The Puritans from East Anglia, The Quakers from the north Midlands, the Cavaliers from southwest England, and the Borderlanders from the north. The War of Southern Separation was a flaring up of atavistic hostility between these cultures (Fischer 1989).

Like the moralistic northern aggressors of 19^th century America, third positionists also have strongly imperialist tendencies due to their violently aggressive impulses and their desire for the state to force a high degree of national self-sufficiency. The greater the tendency toward centrally-mandated autarky (as distinct from private prepping), the greater the impetus for the state to expand its tax base geographically due to the reduction in domestic product such autarky imposes. Another driver of third positionist imperialism is their monomaniacal racial preoccupation. In their simplistic framing of the struggle for the west as “whites versus jews” they imply an unrealistic standard of white unity. In the immigration article I described the religious strife in Northern Ireland as “petty”. I did so from the perspective of pan-european nationalism, with which I sympathize personally but reject strategically. While coordination of activism between members of the family of european nations is eminently rational given the threat we all face in common, the overwhelming majority of nationalists are not and will never be rational in this sense. The minority who hold the pan-european perspective may be more natural leaders among us but not even the most able leaders can overcome the tribalism that has been conditioned by millions of years of evolution. We all recognize ourselves as tribal for this reason but many third positionists, especially those of a spiritually pan-european bent (most are), fail to recognize how provincially tribal we are. There is a well-known statistic from anthropology called Dunbar's number, which refers to the maximum number of people with whom an individual can maintain a stable relationship. The eponymous author of the original study put the figure at 150 based on extrapolation from the neo-cortical size of other primates. Others put the figure lower based on nutritional constraints. Stable relationships within this limit are formed along a communal culture such as religious sect, recreational pastime, or, for a minority, political ideology. The complexity and intensity of communal bonds is beyond kaleidoscopic, and the nature of these bonds are such that they are at odds with attempts to forge similar ones at scales well beyond Dunbar's number. Certain anthropologists extrapolated similar conclusions, positing that societies of larger size require more restrictive enforcement of laws, norms and rules to remain stable and cohesive (or at least to appear that way). The greater degree of forced integration; the greater degree of authoritarianism. The pan-european religious aspiration and its associated means of a fascist state threaten the local bonds that form a bulkwark against grandiose racial schemes. Although patriotism entails a certain nationalism, nationalism per se, when it impinges on the flourishing of the individual, his community, and his country, is the opposite of patriotism.

A historical instance of third positionist imperial hubris can be found in Hitler's squandered opportunity to restore Germany's norm of confederation, choosing instead to yoke Austria to the Reich rather than recognizing it as an independent country as Putin has at least purported to do with the Lughansk and Donetsk regions of modern Ukraine. In his sheepish acceptance of the Anschluss plebiscite he laid a single noose around nearly all German necks. This ultimately resulted in Austria being placed under Allied supervision from 1946-1955 where it was forcibly reconstituted as a democracy, and even when the Allies “released” Austria with the treaty of 1955 Austrians were denied the right to own or manufacture nuclear weapons or guided missiles and forced them to give the Soviets part of its crude oil output (Kemp 1999). The Austrians have never recovered South Tyrol either. Swiss Germans, it must be noted, experienced comparatively less in the way of Allied brutality for having retained their independence in the Swiss Confederation. For those would would counter that this would have happened anyway, the war would almost certainly never happened in the first place had Hitler restored German confederation to all of German-speaking countries, devolving power back into a military order along the lines of the old Hanseatic league. The Allied powers would, being swept up in the fad of consolidationism, perceive this as a dissipation of German power when in fact it would have been be an augmentation of it via the benefits of political and military competition attentive to decentralization. Consolidation of German-speaking countries into the Reich instead increased Allied paranoia and eagerness for war. A parallel instance of consolidationist folly can be found in the Soviet Union's relocation of large numbers of Russians to the Baltic States in a deliberate effort to undermine nationalist resistance to its pan-slavic imperialism. The deliverance of the ethnically Russian Donbass to the Ukrainian satellite government served a similar end whose brutal repercussions we are palpably experiencing today. The latter instance shows that it is not just central planning of the movement of people that is a scourge but also the central planning of borders themselves.

Third positionists claim that their integrationism is necessary to prevent warlords from wreaking anarchy. This is, first of all, rather unfair to our Indo-European ancestors, whose state can be accurately described as an aristocracy of warlords. That aside, even the large modern nation-states of the world exist in a state of anarchy with respect to one another, so if we accept the premise that territorial monopolization by the state is preferable to anarchy of any sort, we must also accept the world state of globalism. Perhaps third positionists will then concede that the categorical rejection of anarchy is too strong, but there still exists a local optimum at the level of the macro nation. In that event they would be hard pressed to make such a case given the problems presented in the preceding paragraphs. Moreover, the system we null positionists favor is one based on economic incentives, and wars of aggression at any level under such a system would be prohibitively costly in materialistic terms. The strongest argument against integrationism, however, actually arises when we consider the fact that there will always be power seekers who are not materialistically rational, including those who are downright evil. True reactionaries recognize that it is inevitable that evildoers will gain power somewhere. It is clearly preferable, therefore, that wherever that is be small.

At this point the rare third positionist who is objective enough to change his mind regarding power in an ideal society might still protest that because the current system is far less than ideal, to the point of being an existential crisis for our civilization, that fascism is necessary if only as an emergency measure¹¹. This is false because as stated near the beginning of this article, the supreme virtue of liberty is inherent in aspects of the human condition that are universal, i.e. scarcity and value subjectivity, which do not lessen one bit in an emergency and actually increases in the case of scarcity. Freedom must always be fought for, only the degree of kinesis varies. When a genuine emergency is accepted as a rationale for the state increasing its control over the nation, the state will simply manufacture emergencies to further increase its control and in ways that enrich it at the nation's expense. The con that fascists try to put over on libertarians is to pretend that the former's emphasis on the martial virtue constitutes a monopoly on such virtue; this way they can claim that in wartime emergency the only viable regime is theirs. As explained in the section on competitive government, however, a free market in the cultivation of martial virtue will foster a substantially greater amount of it. The only way we will truly conquer our current crises, rather than merely trading them for fascist-flavored ones, is through voluntary, organic martial action that resurrects the spirit of the Minutemen.

Fascism's aspiration to a strong military may be one of its defining features but achievement thereof is not, and in reality the low level of accountability faced by the military-industrial complex in such a regime causes runaway military quantity (especially in terms of expenditure) at the expense of quality. What defines fascism is authoritarianism, and authoritarianism can be defined as: The belief that where authority and liberty conflict, authority is to be deferred to. In a political context, the authority in question is a monopolistic state. Because such a state is a massively criminal enterprise, deference thereto is both pathetic and perverse, and even more so to believe that an authoritarian state would ever relinquish power to liberty lovers. “Libertarian fascism” really is, on both a philosophical and strategic level, an oxymoron.

The Stakes

Third positionism is a classic instance of what Ayn Rand called the intellectual package deal: If you agree with part of a proposition then you must agree with the whole. Third positionists demand that if you agree that the authoritarianism of globalism is to be opposed you must accept their own authoritarianism. Third positionists hide this behind appeals to the inevitability of power and hierarchy generally, what they omit is the fact that their position is differentiated from ours by its preference for the use of power for predation and the establishment of a hierarchy of the expropriators over the expropriated; a hierarchy that is unnatural and must be imposed with violent aggression. Such a hierarchy runs counter to fascism's eugenic aspirations because life itself thrives through differentiation into hierarchies in the absence of external and artificial impositions. Only the incompetent and genetically defective have a need to use violent aggression to create a hierarchy where they are on top. Even if such defectives have a right-wing will toward hierarchy; their behavior is in effect no different from that of left-wing defectives who will toward equality: The result is an egality where the undeserving are at a status equal to that of where the deserving ought to be. In a system of absolute freedom by contrast, which is pre-civilizational biological evolution, it is the fittest who ascend to the upper echelons in the hierarchy of survival. Herein lies the difference between what Jared Clarke incisively terms “artificial vs natural hierarchy”. Because libertarians oppose authorities of artificial hierarchy who loot property but support those of natural hierarchy who protect it, it is appropriate to redefine the “authoritarian/libertarian” axis of the political compass as “artificial hierarchy/natural hierarchy”. The null positionist system is survival of the fittest bounded by respect for property, which fosters a eugenic hierarchy where beneficent leaders rise to the top through free and open competition for followers and funding in the manner of our Indo-European ancestors. Free competition is eugenic because it is in conformity with the natural law of evolution. Herbert Spencer may have been a liberal but his ideal of social Darwinism is as reactionary as it gets: The uncompromising application of a principle as old as life itself toward the civilizing of our inborn savagery.

Arguments by third posititionists from the false inevitability of statism are a form of gaslighting. Rather than make a positive case for statism they simply attempt to demoralize their opponents into submission to it. They attempt to impose their value judgment that violent aggression is desirable by cloaking it in the white lab coat of value-free political science, much in the way that left-progressivists do with “climate science”. “It's just the science! Are you saying people don't commit violent aggression? Are you saying the climate doesn't change?” It is the classic conflation of “is” and “ought” mentioned in this article's discussion of natural rights. Unlike ordinary religionists, however, whose conflation is mostly an innocent misconception, third positionists, being by and large scheming political ideologues, are playing a malicious shell game. “Can” no more equates to “should” merely because the latter is a subset of the former than “is” equates to “ought”. We can even pretend for the sake of argument that statism is inevitable and that the third positionist conclusion from that premise that we should accept their version of statism is not just gaslighting but an argument in good faith. Such an argument is tantamount to saying that we should not resist the crime of violent aggression because it will always exist. If third positionists then resort to tactical nihilism in saying that crime is merely whatever the state proclaims illegal, then by their logic they must accept white genocide because the states we currently live under have legalized it. Their only defensible position at this point is to say that it is moral to resist the violent aggression of an enemy state but immoral to resist the violent aggression of theirs. In doing so they have affirmed morality's inherent subjectivity, which negates their fundamental premise of objective and unconditional moral duty to the nation that requires a monopoly to enforce. Even if one believes in the oxymoron of “objective morality”, what is indisputable is that there are some people who will never come around to whatever standards of morality others believe objective, which makes morality functionally subjective even to such believers. Hoppe proved the optimality of competitive government given such subjectivity in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property and chronicled the gradual abandonment of this system in From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy. At the expense of brevity of the latter's tile he could have added “to oligarchy”. America and by extension Europe became much less truly democratic in the early 20^th century in the rise of an oligarchic technocracy whose expertise was not in protecting property but manipulation of public opinion in a way that justified continual expansion of their bureaucracies at public expense. The third posistionist regimes of interwar Europe were neither a return to democracy nor to aristocracy, though they sometimes purported to be. They were reactive appropriations of these bureaucracies that resulted in further expansion.

Third positionists' commonality with left-progressivists goes further than commission of the naturalistic fallacy. The reason they commit such a fallacy that ordinary religious people are liable to is because they themselves are adherents of a religion, which is statism. In the section on monopoly and competition we differentiated a state, the organized subset of government, from statism in its economic aspect, which is monopoly. The essence of statism however, is not economic but spiritual. Statism is a religion whose god is the state. Sometimes this is literal: The despots of cultures such as ancient China and Egypt were literally worshipped as gods, and the emperor of Japan was officially regarded as divine up until 1945 when the American state forced him to renounce that claim. Literal deification is not essential however; what defines statism is at minimum the functional deification of the state. What this means is that the state is treated as a supreme being who gets to do things beings who are not it cannot. God and the state alone provide order in their dominion; we mere mortals would be guilty of “pride” or “anarchy” if we dared compete in such provision. Where the Lord or lord giveth, he also taketh away: Even though plague is part of the universe that God created, we call plague not “mass murder” but simply “an act of God”. When states commit mass murder we call it “making war” instead. Whatever the literal truth of ordinary religious beliefs may be, it is clear that ordinary people benefit from a moral framework presented as a metaphorical narrative. Statism, however, is the exploitation of the religious instinct to impose the morality of altruism.

“Altruism” is a much-misunderstood word. Most people use it to describe an act of kindness or beneficence, but in using it they do not consider whether the benefactor himself benefits from the act or not. What truly defines the word in the terms its coiner specified, however, is that the benefactor intends to benefit another without any consideration as to whether he himself benefits from the act, including psychologically. The psychological stricture makes this moral standard impossible to achieve willfully and is therefore evil to the man of self-esteem. The enforcement of this standard requires the commission of violently aggressive coercion, which makes statism the natural religious carriage for altruism. Altruism can be imposed on a collective level as much it can on an individual level. The Great Replacement is the all-time instance of this. We see this in excuses like “they just want a better life!”. While sometimes self-interest is also appealed to in terms of economic and cultural enrichment, these very much take a back seat to altruistic moral bludgeoning. The main reason for this is simply because moral appeal is the most powerful form of persuasion, but another is that unlike economic and cultural enrichment, a better life for third worlders has the advantage of being true. White people have a singularly strong will to both the morality of accommodating the Other and to reasoned truth. This combination proves too much for most, and we see evidence of this in how conservatives, even some on the dissident right, think they “own the libs” by pointing out that most migrants aren't “real refugees”, allowing for the possibility that a third worlder is entitled to access the west if his claim to refugee status were genuine. Victimhood is not virtue. Bad things are at least as likely to happen to rapists and murderers as they are to everyone else. A refugee is by definition someone who is associated with something to be fled from and is therefore to be treated with suspicion rather than sympathy. All third worlders are ipso facto refugees. The only consideration white people of self-esteem can countenance is whether someone seeking access to our land makes it a better place for us to live, with special concern given to the potential cost their presence potentially imposes on the purity of our ethnic aesthetics. All “wretched refuse of the teeming shore”, however, can never be admitted. If such people eventually cleanse themselves through eugenics some of our people may condescend to give them an asylum hearing.

Third positionists are selective altruists. The believe that altruism toward non-whites is bad¹² but altruism among whites is good. This is obviously perverse because altruism is defined by self-denial and whites no less have selves than do non-whites. What whites do have that is almost unique, however, is recognition of the absoluteness of the self in a certain aspect, i.e. the fact that the only life that a man can live is his own. This is commonly called “individualism”, though an even better term is from Liberty+'s own Blood-Wealth-Soil, who coined the term “actualism” to describe his moral philosophy, which he shares with the author. Actualism is the antithesis of altruism; it recognizes the total superfluity of external validation of individual or shared values, including validation by denial of an individual's values in favor of external ones. While most core values, being the products of deeply-ingrained biological instincts, are widely shared with others, an individual's value set in its totality is as unique to that individual as his DNA. His means of survival, of actualizing his values, is his nervous system, a system that is entirely atomized from those of others. Very little of anything an individual, even a creative genius, think or feels is original, however his actual experiencing of these phenomena occurs entirely through his own individual nervous system. It is in this sense that one can live only by one's own mind and judgment. It is only external hard power that blocks or terminates this life process. In the case of criminality this is beneficial to peaceful people, however the defining core of the third positionist agenda is forcing their own criminality against the values of the latter, and only against other criminals insofar as there is a conflict in values. Such as conflict is often not the case because under their system there can be only one adjudicator to bribe, thereby harmonizing the values of one class of criminal with another. The most brilliant achievements of creative genius of our race were realized because geniuses had the liberty to actualize their values of inquisitiveness and inventiveness, and the geniuses who achieved greatness despite living under totalitarian regimes such as National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union did so because they were given much more liberty to produce than most of their countrymen. Null positionism is superior to third positionism in our recognition that liberty benefits not only the great but also the small. In a libertarian society the fruits of productive success in actualizing our values are exchanged across classes to the greatest mutual advantage. It is therefore in liberty that we do not merely survive, but thrive.

“Liberty” is used intentionally in the previous paragraph rather than “freedom” because although these terms can often be used interchangeably, they are not synonymous and often maliciously conflated by third positionists in contexts where distinction is essential. Consider the Marxist slogan “a hungry man is not free”. Freedom is an abstract term that means “scope of possible action”, so the slogan when taken literally is true. The subversion Marxists intend with it, however, is have the word “freedom” taken to mean “liberty”. “Liberty” is a type of freedom, the freedom to act given a certain rule or standard, as in “at liberty to divulge information”. For a libertarian, that standard is peace. A libertarian society is one that maximally actualizes the value of peace within the parameters of the property norm. Peace here is the same as natural order, an order resting on natural hierarchy as described earlier. A hungry man in such a society may not be free in a certain respect, but he still has full liberty. Every decision in life involves trade-offs and these trade-offs include the trading one kind of freedom (or restriction thereon) for another. In laboring we exchange hunger's impingement on freedom for an impingement on the freedom with our time. Third positionists, however, strawman the null positionist standard of liberty as seeking a utopian state of “absolute freedom”. What is truly utopian is their belief that absolute freedom for the state, purportedly bounded only by a subjectively-defined national interest, is in any way healthful for the nation.

The toxic consequences of an unlimited state animated by the third positionist worldview were manifest in the polity held to be a paragon of that worldview, National Socialist Germany. A comprehensive expose of these consequences in that state will be provided in a future article. It will suffice here to say that when one looks past the advertising brochures and examines hard data concerning the actual quality of life of ordinary Germans from that period, such as protein intake and children's heights, the Third Reich is revealed to have been a catastrophe (Baten & Wagner 2002). A fortress can also be a prison, and however mighty the socialist fortress of the Reich may have been against its rival socialist regimes for a time, it ultimately fell, in no small part due to the chauvinist folly of its ruling party. The Reich really was a prison and not just due to the state's restrictions on emigration. The Reich retained and expanded institutions that were already ruining Germany: The welfare-warfare state, central economic planning boards, state-run schools, and central banking. It was both insult and injury inflicted on a country that had already experienced more than its share of both. Benevolent nationalism respects the individual rights of one's compatriots; malevolent nationalism violates those rights and undermines the nation as a whole. National socialism is nationalist treason.

Statism is cancer, and the unlimited statism of third positionism is an aggressive form of it. This disease is passed off by its proponents as a cure for diseases of other kinds. The violent, reckless aggression of its police state and military-industrial complex is represented by its proponents as manly vigor, but such behavior is the opposite of manly. It is the behavior of a man who at heart is nothing more than an angst-ridden teenage boy, whose failure of emotional regulation results in failure to produce for his own household, leaving crime his only course of survival. It is grosssly ironic therefore that third positionism, an inherently criminal ideology, is represented as the only means for the white race to survive. What this claim amounts to is saying that we need to put all of the nation's eggs in one basket held by a mafia of callow clods, provided that mafia is sufficiently hostile to certain foreigners. We simply are supposed to sit and hope that mafia will just keep “doing the 'right' thing” indefinitely and will never be subverted again because reasons. As demonstrated early in this article, we could even grant third positionists for the sake of argument a monopoly state staffed entirely with perfect angels in perpetuity, and such a state would still be inferior to a competitive one for efficiency reasons alone. Survivalism is a terrible standard of value anyway, one that is anathema to the Faustian spirit that animates our race. Had survivalism been Edmund Hilary's standard of value, he never would have climbed Mount Everest. In hiring a Nepalese sherpa Hilary was clearly no chauvinist either. This is not to say that third positionism's best proponents are chauvinists in the way that many hostile foreigners are, but when they make racially-relativist arguments like “a welfare state works just fine in a homogeneous white population” they directly imply it, as if white people have superpowers that supersede the basic laws of economics. In their support for such communist institutions they contradict their claim that third positionism is a system different in kind from communism, rather than different in degree. The truth is that third positionism is communism, a communism driven merely by misshapen masculine instincts rather than feminine ones. The hundreds of millions killed by communism in the 20^th century can have added to its tally the tens of millions of Germans and Italians who died in the pointless war their states embroiled their people in against rival communist regimes.

Just as the historical instances of third positionism's implementation were betrayals of white nations, third positionism as a philosophy applicable to any white nation is a betrayal of our race. The fundamental fact that third positionists ignore is that white genocide is possible only because of the existence of the kind of power structure they favor: a monopolistic and centralized state. A state that has the power to force integration between people within its nation also has the power to force integration between that nation and others, which, given the type of people who are attracted to a position holding that type of power, is a significant likelihood. We have exposed their gaslighting fallacy representing the frequency of statism as inevitability or desirability thereof. Their appeals to the fallen nature of man backfire on them badly: It is because man is so much more depraved than even they realize that statism has been historically common. Having witnessed the ultimate human depravity in the ongoing torture of our people to death by the modern state and its minions, unable to escape by the very nature of statism, it is inexcusable for any of our people to continue sanctioning such an abomination. The reason they sanction such evil is because they themselves are evil. They are not evil because they seek power; the seeking of power is inherent to life itself. They are evil because they seek power for the purpose of preying on their white brothers. They resent jews not primarily because of they are victims of abuses in which jews are over-represented, but because they envy the vastly greater amount of abuse that jews get to commit wielding the weapon of mass destruction that is the modern state.

We have covered much ground in this article and explored certain topics such as monopoly, competition, and natural rights with the complexity of analysis such topics demand. The heart of the matter, however, is simplicity itself: How should power be used? Our answer is commensurately simple: For protection. The third positionist answer when shorn of its sophistry is just as simple: For predation. As the liberal world order crumbles it opens up a power vacuum, and the struggle between the pro and anti-liberty forces of the reactionary right to fill it represents the next great political struggle of our age. This article was written not primarily to win the argument against third positionism, which was won long ago, but to provide morale to prevent the wicked, grasping, authoritarian hyenas among reactionaries from ever gaining power again. The system of free competition in protection that we are advancing is the greatest liberation the white race has yet experienced, and the amount of power it will endow our people with, individual by heroic individual, built from the bottom up to a state of global hegemony, will steady the world for ages to come.

Sources

Anderson, Terry L. and Peter J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004 https://eh.net/book_reviews/the-not-so-wild-wild-west-property-rights-on-the-frontier/

"Anti-Flag Desecration Law (Germany)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Flag_Desecration_Law_(Germany)

Baten, Jorg, & Andrea Wagner. "Autarchy, Market Disintegration, and Health: The Mortality and Nutritional Crisis in Nazi Germany 1933-1937." CESifo, 2002. https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo_wp800.pdf

Baynes, Norman H. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (April 1922 — August 1939) Vol. 1 Oxford University Press, 1942. https://archive.org/details/norman-h.-baynes-hitlers-speeches-vol-1/page/n3/mode/2up

Binswanger, Harry. “Anti-Concepts”. 1986 The Ayn Rand Lexicon http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anti-concepts.html

Binswanger, Harry. “'Package-Dealing,' Fallacy of”. The Ayn Rand Lexcon, 1986. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/package-dealing,_fallacy_of.html

Caplan, Bryan. Interview on The Rubin Report. May 15, 2017. Transcribed by Learn Liberty. https://www.learnliberty.org/videos/bryan-caplan-what-is-anarcho-capitalism/

Clark, Jared. “What Does It Mean To Be Right Wing?” Hoppean.org June 3, 2022. https://www.hoppean.org/article/what-does-it-mean-to-be-right-wing

Duchesne, Ricardo. “Blame Liberal Pluralism for the Impending Ethnocide of Europeans “ The Unz Review, 2023 https://www.unz.com/article/blame-liberal-pluralism-for-the-impending-ethnocide-of-europeans/

“Dunbar's number” https://infogalactic.com/info/Dunbar%27s_number

“Economic Freedom of the World: 2023 Annual Report” https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/economic-freedom-of-the-world-2023-annual-report Fraser Institute, 2023”

Feder, Gottfried. The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation (trans. Alexander Jacob). Self-published, 1923

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed. Oxford University Press, 1989

Forward Observer. “Breaking Down 'Civil War 2' Series 2019. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbVcR4afPYo17MLPdH-ozt42XC_EDwl5z

Higgs, Robert. “Nineteen Neglected Consequences of Income Redistribution” The Independent Institute. December 5, 1994, https://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1155

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy – A Tale of Moral and Economic Folly and Decay. Mises Institute, 2014.

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. Democracy – The God That Failed: The Economics & Politics of Monarchy, Democracy & Natural Order. Transaction Publishers, 2001.

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. The Economics and Ethics of Private Property. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann (editor). The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2003

“Jean Jacques Rousseau” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010, Rev. 2023. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau

Kemp, Arthur. March of the Titans: The Complete History of the White Race. Ostara Publications, 1999.

Kim, Yumi. “Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It”. https://mises.org/library/stateless-somalia-and-loving-it 02/21/2006

Kummer, H. "Evolutionary transformations of possessive behavior. A handbook on ownership and property". Journal of Social Behavior and Personality: Special Issue on To have possessions. 1991

The Monopoly on Violence.

Stateless Films, 2020

Newman, Jonathan R.

https://twitter.com/NewmanJ_R/status/1412154304623005701

Posted 4:59 PM · Jul 5, 2021

Libertywin.org https://libertywin.org/index.php/Liberty_Wins_in_New_Hampshire

“Local Democracy in Liechtenstein”. https://rm.coe.int/local-democracy-in-liechtenstein/1680719c9d 2006.

Long, Roderick T. “Privatization, Viking Style: Model or Misfortune”.

Lynn, Richard & Tatu Vanhanen. IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Praeger, 2002.

Martinez, Brandon. “Was Hitler's Anti-Communism a Fraud?” https://odysee.com/@martinezperspective:2/hitler-communism:3?lid=a4f16738-6d73-4ffb-824c-1ca812ab3155 2023

McIlwain, Charles Howard. The Growth of Political Thought in the West: From the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages. New York:
Macmillan, 1932

Peden, Joseph R. “Stateless Societies: Ancient Ireland”. The Libertarian Forum, April 1971 https://cdn.mises.org/Libertarian%20Forum_Volume_1.pdf

Rose, Larken. The Most Dangerous Superstition. Self-Published; 2011

Tucker, Jeffrey A. “The Late Scholastic Origin of Free Market Economics”. Foundation for Economic Education, 1995. https://fee.org/articles/free-market-economists-400-years-ago/

Rothbard, Murray N. An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Edward Elgard Publishing Ltd. 1995

Rothbard, Murray N. Man, Economy, and State (Scholar's Edition, Second Edition). Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009

Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. George Allen & Unwin, 1946

Scott, James C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Yale University Press 2017

Tactical Civics https://tacticalcivics.com/

Ubersoy. The Right-Wing Progressivism Manifesto. 2025

“White Rose” (German resistance movement). https://infogalactic.com/info/White_Rose

Yarvin, Curtis. “Patchwork: A Political System for the 21^st Century”. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1/ 2008

Footnotes

1 The US Federal Government literally is one: https://freedom-school.com/the-united-states-is-a-corporation.html

2 Which is ironic because they often countersignal Rothbard as being too much of a free-market extremist in other areas.

3 “Force” is used interchangeably by most people, if not most libertarians, with “violence”. Due to its etymological relation to “violate”, libertarians often use “violence” negatively to mean “violent aggression”, which causes accusations of pacifism. This is the reason that the term “violent aggression” is used throughout the article where such specificity is called for.

4 There is subjectivity within libertarian thought concerning how much force may be considered proportional. For Ayn Rand, who considered collateral damage in war to be entirely the responsibility of the aggressing state, the optimal amount was however much maximizes the physical safety of the defenders only, which removes any limit an amount that can be considered acceptable. Murray Rothbard was of a more humanitarian bent, contending that due to diminishing returns to force in increasing the defender's own safety, there was a limit beyond which the application of additional force constitutes an act of aggression on the defenders' part.

5 The very definition of “norm” as in “moral norm”, implies a distribution around that norm, and such a distribution has variance. The existence of moral norms is an objective fact but the concomitant variance is what defines morality as subjective.

6 Assuming the socialist is arguing in good faith, i.e. cares about the actual consequences of the policies in question. Most do not and should not be argued with for this reason. That they are violently opposed to natural rights does not at all invalidate such rights, however, for what such rights entail is the opposite of pacifism as explained in the body of this article. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is about protecting one's natural rights from a society that violently rejects them.

7 Moral absolutism is far from the same as belief in “objective morality”. My set of moral values in its totality is subjective to me and the individuation of this set is absolute. In recognition of the fact that I cannot live anyone's life but my own I do not compromise my life's values as ends in seeking to actualize them; I only adjust the means as I learn. My values themselves do not change in the course of this pursuit or with respect to the values of others. In this regard also my morality is absolute.

8 It should be emphasized here that Hitler was attempting to pander to the political center in his public repudiation of Marxism. His privately expressed views on society were actually well-aligned with those of Marx: https://odysee.com/@martinezperspective:2/hitler-communism:3?lid=a4f16738-6d73-4ffb-824c-1ca812ab3155

9 The full quote is “At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke". From A History of Western Philosophy, 1945

10 It was such an argument made by a liberal that sparked in Murray Rothbard the epiphany that anarcho-capitalism was the only way to consistently operate from a volantarist premise.

11 There are some otherwise “based” libertarians who also believe this.

12 The better among them do at least, however a great many others' hearts bleed for arabs, as seen in their white-knighting for Palestinians against the Great Satan of Israel.

.

The Platform of The National Justice Party

Download PDF

1. The United States of America will be declared an outpost of Western civilization and a state dedicated to its European-heritage population and their posterity. It will be the policy of the state to set immigration and natal policy that will ensure a permanent European majority. The rights of historic minority populations will be respected.

“The United States of America will be declared an outpost of Western civilization”

While important to recognize America as part of the family of Western nations, the use of the word “outpost” is selling America, a superpower whose rise resulted from a distillation of some of Western culture’s greatest attributes, just a little bit short.

“It will be the policy of the state to set immigration and natal policy that will ensure a permanent European majority.”

The NJP uses “state” in the singular, which could be interpreted as its countenancing of continuation of federally controlled immigration and natal policy, which is the primary cause of American replacement. America, both inter and intra-racially, has always been multicultural which the NJP acknowledges, so it is strange that it would support a structure that lends itself to one-size-fits-all. An alternative interpretation is that “state” is used in the abstract to refer to the governments of the states, which would be consistent with the policy of US Constitution. The Constitution largely devolves immigration to them with the federal government retaining veto power of exclusion and taxation of immigrants but not the power to import immigrants of its own preference.

2. We demand the extension of the 1964 Civil Rights act to provide equal protections and privileges to the White majority, or the act must be repealed.

“We demand the extension of the 1964 Civil Rights act”

In later points the NJP claims to support freedom of association, which the 1964 act infringes upon, so it might be more accurate here to say the NJP demands reform rather than extension of the act. The act is already fully race-blind on paper, so addressing its selective enforcement against whites would bolster this point.

“to provide equal protections and privileges to the White majority”

It is best practice for reactionary rightists to avoid using any egalitarian terminology, which is tacit obeisance to leftist dogma. Equality isn’t a thing, not even “equality under the law” would be optimal even if it could be achieved. The purpose of law is to keep peace and order, which requires treating people differently depending on how they affect these things and this obviously varies hugely from person to person and group to group.

3. We support the nationalization and strategic break ups of banks, mass media, and monopolistic corporations in order to create public accountability and guarantee that they serve the nation first.

Nationalization – Socialism doesn’t work just because white nationalists happen to be doing it, as its attentive problems of economic knowledge, calculation, and incentives are human universals. If the NJP want to point to National Socialist Germany as an exception it will find that if it looks beyond the advertising brochures into the actual results of such policies under that regime they will find that it was yet another example of such failure. Crude aggregate statistics such as GDP, employment, and capital investment the NJP might cite in attempted rebuttal are as bogus for the Reich as they are for ZOG. Measurements of actual physical welfare of everyday people in Germany from that period such as protein intake, children’s height, and rates of infectious disease paint a starkly contrasting picture.

Break ups – The “justice” in the party’s name reveals itself to be social justice here, which is what anti-trust is: punishment of productive success that happens to be palatable to many self-described rightists. The sordid history of anti-trust confirms this in all aspects, including its ostensible aim of promoting consumer welfare.

Banks – The financial sector in America is already regulated by 116 different agencies between the federal and state levels, the banking industry being the most regulated of all. The banking system is already semi-nationalized via the Federal Reserve system, which, although nominally private in equity ownership, was created by an act of Congress, enjoys carte-blanche collateralization of its lending on the taxpayer’s purse, and whose scrip is privileged by legal tender laws. It is such regulation that entrenches and cartelizes the industry at the expense of that industry’s health and stability. Further nationalization does not address the fundamental fraud that the government sanctions: Counterfeiting for the purpose of increasing lending base. It merely expands the government’s privilege in doing this at the expense of the non-governmental sector.

Mass media – The NJP ignores the fact that the mass media cartel is a creation of state regulation. The FCC’s function, as Franklin Roosevelt’s administration made clear, is to suppress dissent through selective dispensation of airwave rights.

The NJP also does not address the more fundamental issue which is that the liberal democratic system itself is what empowers the media, because it is a system where public opinion influenced by the media is a license to loot and terrorize on a national scale via a predatory and massively monopolistic modern state.

Monopolistic corporations – By “monopolistic” the NJP means primarily large or multinational. Corporations who achieve this scale benefit less affluent consumers by exploiting economies of scale that enable these firms to offer products at lower cost and should be celebrated for this, not punished. Any regulation that forcibly increases market share at the expense of competitors and consumers should be repealed of course, however, higher market share is not a causally-defining feature of monopoly, but an effect. A free economy is from top-to-bottom much wealthier than the mixed type NJP favors, and this allows even relatively less affluent people to afford to preserve their downtown’s distinct character through support of autochthonous local businesses in counterbalance to the homogenizing aesthetic of lower-cost chains. The ultimate issue concerning monopoly that the NJP needs to address, however, is breaking up the genuine monopoly of the modern nation-state, which is the necessary mechanism of American national destruction.

4. We support a two percent ceiling on Jewish employment in vital institutions so that they better represent the ethnic and regional population balance of the country.

This is pure social justice-mongering only anti-jewish instead of anti-white. The problem is not the presence of jews, it is white acceptance of the altruism they are adept at promoting, along with that morality’s predominant enforcement mechanism of the redistributive state.

5. We support the sacred rights of free speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association. Political views will not be censored by the state or any large private concerns. It will be illegal for any employer to retaliate against workers for political activism and expression outside the workplace.

“We support the sacred rights of free speech, freedom of religion”

These are liberal rather than reactionary values. Is the right to slander heritage Americans and practice profane religions something that the NJP truly wants for America?

“Political views will not be censored by the state or any large private concerns.”

Even granting desirability of freedom of speech (defined as freedom of expression including expressions of what someone wants things to be, no matter how depraved; as distinct from its subset of academic freedom, which is freedom to express one’s opinion concerning what merely is) this contradicts the third value of freedom of association, as prohibition of censorship on the part of governments and other large corporations is a violation of their freedom of association. A preponderance of free speech supporters regard free speech as derivative of property: that one has the right to say to say anything that doesn’t directly threaten anyone else on or with one’s own property, but one has no entitlement to anyone else’s property to do the same.

“It will be illegal for any employer to retaliate against workers for political activism and expression outside the workplace.”

Of all the policies in this platform it is this one that must be opposed most strenuously. It contradicts the NJP’s claim to regard freedom of association as sacred in the very same point in that it demands that conservative business owners retain liberal, even communist employees (and for that matter, third positionist owners to retain libertarian ones!) Virtually every other type of associative freedom in this country has already been strangled and the NJP wants to choke off the most vital one we are lucky enough to have left, the one that represents our sole avenue of escape from globalist progressivism. The divide on this issue illustrates a broader divide between us: The implied premise of the NJP’s platform is that America in its core current geopolitical form is desirable and salvageable via certain reforms. We of liberty+, meanwhile, recognize that it is an abomination that should have been aborted more than a century ago. The best way to deal with it now is hasten its inevitable collapse by dropping out entirely from the beast system, creating a parallel economy of our own robust to neo-Marxism through aggressive ideological and ethnic discrimination, and preparing for the war to defend it.

6. We support private property rights, including a program to make home ownership more accessible to stably employed family men. Small businesses and communities will be granted the right to refuse service or home ownership to anyone for any reason they see fit.

“We support private property rights”

Contradicted by points 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, and 24. Also contradicts itself with: “will be granted the right” A scope of approved-of action that is granted is by definition not a right, but a privilege. This point arbitrarily grants a privilege to business or home owners regarding freedom of association with customers, immediately after denying this same right to the same people in their capacity as employers in the previous point, which is about as flagrant as a flip-flop can be.

7. We stand firm in defense of the right of law abiding citizens to own firearms.

Dilutes the the 2^nd Amendment in its implication that the state ought to be the arbiter of what means of defense non state actors are entitled to. At the time the amendment was written only those deemed criminally insane were forbidden arms, which is a relatively small subset of criminals. The 2^nd Amendment uses the term “arms” rather than “firearms” quite deliberately to include means such as bombs and battleships in addition to guns.

8. We demand the FBI, which acts as nothing more than a political secret police force for elite interests, be abolished and replaced with a legitimate federal law enforcement agency.

The NJP wants to replace the FBI with the Gestapo. If “legitimate” is to mean constitutional, no federal law enforcement agency can be regarded as such. If legitimacy means productive in promoting peace and prosperity, no agency whatsoever that enforces the majority of NJP’s policies can be regarded as legitimate either.

9. We demand an end to political contributions and corporate lobbying. Elections must be publicly financed.

Even if one grants moral sanction to the mob socialism of democracy and its electoral mechanism this measure is counterproductive. Existing legislation toward this end such as the McCain-Feingold act has been shown to hamper the fundraising ability of grassroots organizations that defend in this sphere the wellbeing of the same Americans the NJP claims to care about.

“Elections must be publicly financed.”

The NJP wants to socialize socialism.

10. The corrupt two party system must be abolished and replaced by a system that offers real representation to racial groups and economic classes.

Many who are neither the NJP nor liberty+ would agree with the first part of this statement, however, the politics of envy (which hides behind euphemisms like “representation”) is what has gotten us into this mess in the first place. The system that provides representation to all in proportion to the objectively measured value they create (rather than what they believe they are entitled to) is laissez-faire capitalism, which the NJP explicitly rejects.

11. We oppose America’s ongoing military entanglements and demand the return of all troops to the homeland. We will engage in diplomacy under the doctrine of “America First” and cease the internationalist project of exporting liberalism.

100% agree

12. We will nationalize the defense industry and make war profiteering a criminal act. All able bodied men will be conscripted into national service.

“We will nationalize the defense industry and make war profiteering a criminal act.”

The defense industry is already nationalized (in the sense of the word that is wholly unrelated to the concept of nationalism). Hitler’s war machine had plenty of private contractors as well who profited handsomely from his reckless spending. A voluntarily funded industry, by contrast, would be vastly more agile, efficient, and capable overall because it would benefit from the rigor of competition in a free market.

“All able bodied men will be conscripted into national service.”

While Liberty+ is not categorically opposed to participation in martial organizations as a condition of living in a voluntarily-formed communities, we absolutely condemn all forms of kidnapping, including for the purpose of generating slave labor for protection racketeering. Who would want to fight a war alongside those mixed up in it against their will anyway? You should be in it to win it or not at all, and if enslavement is necessary to victory then the war itself is unjust.

For a real-world example of a superior military approximating voluntarism NJP ought to examine that of our Indo-European ancestors, whose leaders earned their following by demonstrated prowess in battle.

13. Lobbying on behalf of foreign nations will be banned and classified as espionage. Foreign negotiations will be conducted through official diplomatic channels.

100% agree

14. We will declare Israel a rogue state and exporter of terrorism. The national rights of the Palestinian people must be respected.

“We will declare Israel a rogue state and exporter of terrorism.”

This is a direct and necessary consequence of point 11 and is therefore unnecessary here.

“The national rights of the Palestinian people must be respected.”

Humanitarian white knighting for one a tribe of aliens a world away against another is a weak look generally.

In conjunction with point 4 in particular point 14 overall reinforces the stereotype of white nationalists being obsessed with jews.

15. We will establish a new economic policy that stresses the family wage, full and stable employment, and a strong middle class. We will abolish the income tax on productive work and put this burden on capital and speculative income.

“We will establish a new economic policy that stresses the family wage, full and stable employment, and a strong middle class.”

This economic policy is not at all new; it has been tried, is currently in effect, and has been failing for decades. A “family wage” is just a euphemism for a higher legal minimum wage, which is in economic actuality not a minimum wage at all but a productivity hurdle for workers which lowers average wage once the necessary disemployment effects of such a hurdle are factored in. “Full and stable employment” is a nonsense concept; all markets including labor are a discovery process of value creation to which continual flux is inherent. A “strong middle class” is exactly what the policies that caused the mortgage meltdown of 2008 were intended to promote. The artificial increase in homeownership, in classic leftist cause-effect reversal, was believed to promote a middle class lifestyle rather than being recognized as one fruit among many that people predisposed to middle-class values enjoy as a result of actualizing such values. Enough with class warfare, all that productive people need to flourish fully is to cease their acceptance of predators, be they government agents, union bosses, or petty kinds of criminals.

“We will abolish the income tax on productive work and put this burden on capital and speculative income.”

A classic false dichotomy and a fatal one at that. Capital investment is work that both creates other kinds of work and raises the productivity of all kinds of work. Speculation is work that is also to be encouraged and celebrated, as it materially improves the accuracy of capital pricing, keeping it more commensurate with capital’s expected productivity increase. The implication of this point that there exists some sort of free lunch in possession of capitalists that the state and its goons can just swipe and spread among the rest of us without adverse consequence utterly reeks of Marxism.

16. We call for correcting the power imbalance between labor and management through a national labor organization that guarantees employee rights.

If NJP replaced the third “e” in “employee” with an “r” they might have something here.

17. We support an industrial plan that brings home capital and manufacturing and invests in our depressed and de-industrialized heartland. We will implement massive public works projects to modernize our crumbling infrastructure.

“We support an industrial plan that brings home capital and manufacturing and invests in our depressed and de-industrialized heartland.”

The belief that America has been de-industrialized is a myth. America produces more physical goods than it ever has, simply with a smaller percentage of the labor force due to capital deepening and technological advance. This is reflective of economic progress as a whole. A major hindrance to such progress, in fact, are restrictions on free trade that the NJP likely supports in furtherance of this point. The reason they would support such restrictions is that they have bought into neoliberal advertising of current American trade policy as free. A true policy of free trade is stated in a single sentence: Anyone can buy or sell any good or service from anyone else without forcible hindrance. Our current trade agreements, however, are thousands of pages long and riddled with tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and labor and environmental regulations. While national self-sufficiency in certain areas is desirable, central planning by the state toward this end can result in nothing but disaster, National Socialist Germany’s experiments in buna rubber and cell wool being just one instance among many.

“We will implement massive public works projects to modernize our crumbling infrastructure.”

The extent of our infrastructure’s deterioration is significantly overstated, owing in large part to propaganda from special interest groups who stand to benefit from such bloated tax-and-spend programs. These interest groups have the pull that they do because such programs have already been implemented over the course of more than a century. Socialism deteriorates everything, why would anyone expect infrastructure to be any different? America’s first transcontinental roadway was built privately, and before the Progressive Era the utility industry was competitive and vibrant, with hundreds of electricity companies operating within single states for example. Eminent domain and other such socialist measures are the opposite of what we need to satisfy demand for infrastructure.

18. Usurious and predatory lending practices will be outlawed. All credit will be issued by the state with no middle-man profiteers.

“Usurious and predatory lending practices will be outlawed.”

The NJP’s use of loaded and non-economically rigorous terms like “usurious” and “predatory” suggests a preference for populist pandering over serious inquiry into economics that actually benefit the common man. The financial industry is the economy’s circulatory system and money its lifeblood. The industry’s longtime affliction of counterfeiting is leukemia, a cancer of its lifeblood. The NJP’s agenda of socializing the industry is like treating leukemia by transplanting an artificial heart for a healthy one. What the industry needs is intense chemotherapy in the form of sound money such as cryptocurrency and commodities supplanting the cancerous cells of Federal Reserve notes. Also required are bone marrow transplants in the form of replacing the horrendously cronyist current regulatory regime with a return to proper fraud prosecution.

“All credit will be issued by the state with no middle-man profiteers.”

The NJP’s progressivist utopianism is on full display here. Socializing a middle-man industry simply makes the state the middle man, and a much more predatory and dishonest one at that. The pejorative connotation the NJP attaches to “middle-man” with its appending of “profiteer” is further evidence of their economic ignorance: Owing to our mortality the most scarce resource of all is time; the fundamental value middle-men add to the economy is saving everyone precious time in transacting with one another. Even being saved time in acquiring information about an asset’s likely future condition, let alone the asset itself in the present, is a value, which is why even speculators are people the NJP owes an apology for ingratitude with respect to their alleviation of time scarcity’s, i.e. mortality’s impingements. Truly there is nothing more utopian than denial of something this fundamental to the human condition.

19. Health care is a right. Health care must be removed from the control of for-profit hospitals and insurance companies and made a public service for all people. Preventative care will be emphasized and physical fitness will be promoted.

“Health care is a right.”

Health care is a service, and as such requires labor for its provision. To say that one has a right to the labor of another is revealing of intent to enslave the latter. Policies based on this premise are what have caused the massive problems that exist both within America’s semi-socialized health care system and the “nationalized” health care systems of Europe and Canada. The reason why America’s treatment outcomes are better than other Western countries’ is that the former’s profit mechanisms are still allowed a halfway-decent amount of room to function.

“Preventative care will be emphasized and physical fitness will be promoted.”

This works wonders when done on a voluntary basis; traditionalist religious communities being a prime example. What the NJP packages in with this however, is public health, which is nothing more than communism of the body. After the devastation they witnessed COVID-19 public health measures wreak on ordinary Americans it is absolutely perverse for the NJP to sanction it. The disease ailing the health care industry and our very civilization for that matter is altruist collectivism, and the NJP wishes to do nothing but attempt to treat the symptoms with more barbaric measures directly derived from this malignant superstition.

20. We will restore reason, logic and tradition to the education system by implementing a comprehensive classical curriculum. Homosexual, neoliberal, and transgender propaganda will be explicitly banned from being taught to children.

Response:

“We will restore reason, logic and tradition to the education system by implementing a comprehensive classical curriculum.”

The NJP fails to recognize that the fundamental problem with education today is that it is a coercive system, rather than simply something that occurs organically when parents are free to answer their children’s innate curiosity in whatever manner they see fit. Separating children from their parents and cramming “reason, logic and tradition” down their throats is a surefire way to make children hate these things. Did being forced to act out Romeo and Juliet with the ugly girl in class, for example, instill any real appreciation for the Bard? No virtue, by the very nature thereof, can ever be achieved by compulsion.

“Homosexual, neoliberal, and transgender propaganda will be explicitly banned from being taught to children.”

The first and third items fall within the purview of preventing child abuse and are obviously to be supported. The second, however, is merely a political ideology which as such children don’t understand anyway. While within the public sphere corrosive ideologies should be suppressed, it is highly impractical to police ideological propagandizing in private life. In the case of neoliberalism in particular, because many within the NJP view sound economics as neoliberal propaganda, prohibition of the latter threatens to deprive the young of a proper education in the former.

21. We will establish a Department of Culture that will oversee the creation of art and architecture to enlighten the public through beauty and transcendence. Suburbs and small towns will be revitalized with beautification projects to make them walkable and attractive and to encourage social life.

“We will establish a Department of Culture”

An oxymoron if there ever was one; nothing enriches culture like yet another federal bureaucracy right? Adults find culture crammed down their throats in the public square every bit as repugnant as children find it in school. It is the very worst of culture, in fact, that requires state subsidy to persist. The greatest achievements in Western culture, by contrast, were funded by private patronage, such as the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling by the Medici banking family.

“Suburbs and small towns will be revitalized with beautification projects to make them walkable and attractive and to encourage social life. “

The local bureaucracies of zoning boards have already done enough damage to community livability as it is, and shifting control to the federal level will only make this blight worse.

22. The state must act as the steward of the environment. Industrial and economic needs will be balanced with quality of life and the preservation of natural beauty. Wildlife will be protected, and we will expand national parks and wilderness areas. Religious slaughter and other inhumane treatment of animals will be banned.

“The state must act as the steward of the environment.”

The most polluted countries have been and are those whose states are the least limited in their ability to intervene in the economy, Communist China and the Soviet Union being notable examples. Regimes of property rights in environmental resources however, such as the catch rights program for West Coast ground fisheries, efficiently and effectively harmonize demand for consumption of natural resources with the necessity of sustaining them.

“Industrial and economic needs will be balanced with quality of life and the preservation of natural beauty.”

It was a consortium of polluting industrial concerns in the late 19^th century that was the biggest agitator for state regulation of pollution, as the existing tort system was too great a hindrance to their ability to pollute. When regulation of any industry is monopolized rather than market-based there is only one regulator to capture with bribery. Euphemisms like “balance” are exactly the kinds of terms that such cronyist agendas are couched in and it is about time the American nation sees such scams for what they are.

“Wildlife will be protected, and we will expand national parks and wilderness areas.”

The longstanding regime of environmental policy in America, in contradistinction to both the full-blown socialism of the aforementioned nation-states and a regime of property protection, is already very much in line with the “balanced” approach of the NJP’s progressivism. Even this relatively “balanced” approach has been a litany of abuse from the get go, from the cronyist squelching of railroad competition driving Theodore Roosevelt’s land grabs to the gross violations of homeowner rights imposed by the Endangered Species Act (which actually further endangers the species it designates as such by incentivizing homeowners and developers to eradicate instances of such species on their property to prevent its seizure). The very fact that the NJP feels the need to include conservation as a point in its platform is evidence against the need for command and control measures in furtherance of it. Those of a healthy nationalist spirit recognize that their people are part of a larger ecology and therefore have a demand for harmony with it. A free market supplies whatever is demanded, and we see from the premium that private home buyers pay for waterfront property alone an abundant demand for natural aesthetic values of no direct material or industrial use. The most important point to make, however in scrutinizing the NJP’s point here, (especially as pertaining to their agenda of expanding national parks and wilderness areas) is this: A free market does not produce an outcome that any individual or interest group in particular wants, it is by definition whatever results from the peaceful harmonization of wildly differing wants across society. The amount of land set aside for aesthetic enjoyment in a free society, in terms of exact acreage, will not be what any one person or interest group finds optimal. It is the great compromise that leaves everybody mad, as the saying goes. The reward of maximal peace and freedom, however, is something that is self-evidently worth such a compromise.

“Religious slaughter and other inhumane treatment of animals will be banned.”

A contradiction of the NJP’s claim to support of religious freedom in point 5. A significant number of standard farming practices are considered by many to be inhumane; their banning would therefore magnify already increasing food prices and harm the less affluent Americans the NJP claims to be concerned about. Issues concerning religious practices and animal welfare are best resolved by federalism.

23. We support strong families. Married women will be paid by the state to care for their children. No fault divorce will be repealed, and homosexual marriage will be banned.

“We support strong families. Married women will be paid by the state to care for their children.”

Self-contradictory, as the type of women who require taxpayer subsidy to raise children are those who should not have children in the first place.

“No fault divorce will be repealed, and homosexual marriage will be banned.”

Marriage is the province of the church and in Medieval times the church had its own law applying to clergy and members in their role as such. These measures are to be encouraged within this domain. Secular law, however, should have nothing to say about marriage at all, because when it does it simply creates needless strife in squabbling for control of its selective application among the nation’s various religious and cultural factions. The infringement of the rights of homosexuals to form their own agreements among one another regarding matters such as hospital visitation and inheritance aggravates their inherent persecution complex, and given that their revenge manifests in increased levels of child molestation, that is reason enough in the secular legal domain to simply live and let live. Secular law concerning child custody however, should prohibit outright the awarding of custody to open homosexual or transexual couples, as the level of molestation risk it subjects children to is by itself an act of child abuse. In general culture war issues should be resolved by federalism, which also would comport nicely with the NJPs conciliatory positioning of itself.

24. The benefits of automation will be shared among all citizens. Technological advancement will be used to reduce work hours, raise wages, lower the retirement age and increase pensions.

This already proceeds apace and is entirely independent of politics, so it is strange that the NJP would devote a whole point in their platform to it.

25. In order to put an end to racial conflict and hate, all people will be entitled to be policed, educated, and judged by individuals of their own race. No longer will any race be exploited for the benefit of another in America.

Contradicted by point 4, where the NJP reveals intent to exploit jews for the perceived benefit of whites in arbitrarily capping their employment. The majority of jews have productive occupations such as in law and medicine and notwithstanding their nepotism, are productive in their pure capacity therein. A ban therefore, would be diminishing white access to such services if jews were to be expelled. Prohibition of jews from practicing medicine under the Third Reich, for instance, was a contributing factor in the worsening of health outcomes in Germany mentioned in the response to point 3. The historical frequency of jewish expulsion and ghettoization, including multiple expulsions from the same country, raises the question of why they are repeatedly allowed in. The answer is because the presence of jews per se isn’t the fundamental problem. The problem is that we accept government collateralization of its debt with robbery, and for reasons of superstition have in the past enacted prohibition against our own people from moneylending. The combination of acceptance and rejection on the wrong side of each of these issues is what incentivizes the admittance of people who specialize in moneylending, which the NJP’s agenda would drive underground and actually increase pressure to accept jews and their negative externalities. It is a minority of jews in elite positions of power and influence that adversely affect American society, but they are only able to do so primarily because of the progressivist weapons whites provided them around the turn of the 20^th century, as well as certain of the liberal ones America’s founders championed around the turn of the 19^th. The prior points in the NJP’s platform are overwhelmingly more of the same progressivism and liberalism.

Concluding Remarks

The NJP with this platform attempts to walk a tightrope across the political center by balancing itself with a barbell: Bernie Sanders-esque positions on economic issues, America First Republican positions on others. The NJP sprinkles it with both classic and left liberal buzzwords such as “sacred rights of free speech” and “end…racial…hate” to sell the platform to these existing bases. This approach is unconvincing however, both due to the platform’s internal contradictions and the fact that those of its framers who are public figures have publicly expressed elsewhere contempt for all forms of liberalism. While such contempt may be deserved, the conflict between their personal views and their party’s public platform undermines the credibility of both, casting over them a Machiavellian pall. The left will forever revile any platform that explicitly rejects altruism for white people no matter how socialist its other points and the right will revile not only the platform’s socialism but also the crudity which which it presents racial issues. There is little in it to indicate that the NJP is anything other than a bunch of anti-jewish SJWs.

On the subject of viability, the NJP’s ambitions as a political party must also be called into question. In choosing to provisionally designate itself as an LLC rather than a non-profit or registered political party it has acknowledged certain significant institutional hurdles it faces in the hostility of sanctioning institutions such as the IRS and FEC to a nationalist agenda. There is however a more fundamental problem whose manifestation the NJP touched on in point 10 regarding the two party system. In the first-past-the-post voting system that we have there ultimately can be no more than two parties who win with any kind of regularity. The game theoretics concerning the avoidance of vote-splitting will result in two major parties at the inception of such a system, and after this occurs it is impossible to perfectly triangulate a platform between those of the two existing parties. The NJP is clearly straining to do this, but in actuality their only viable target base is the Republican one by demographic default. Their fate under this system will be no different from that of the Libertarian Party, whose platform and results over the past few decades both the NJP and liberty+ recognize as a joke. The reason why third parties are permanently relegated to single digit support has, as explained above, nothing to with the platform however. Third parties can serve functions other than winning elections, of course, and these functions are something that the NJP as a going concern must seriously consider.

Third parties can always serve as a protest vote option, however, because a number of third parties already exist there is little value the NJP can add in this capacity. A better option is as an educational device, which to some degree the NJP already is. Maximum impact in this mode would be achieved, however, if they discarded the conventionally partisan issues and built a platform of iconoclasm toward globalist shibboleths that start conversations leading toward the truth about such things. An example would be:

1. Abolish Martin Luther King Day, the Civil Rights Acts, and all amendments to the US Consitution since the 12^th.

2. Restore Confederate names and iconography everywhere they have been removed.

3. Teach in schools the full context of significant historical events such as the War of Southern Separation, both World Wars, and the Kennedy assassinations.

4. Ban refugees, end foreign aid and foreign wars.

5. Abolish the alphabet agencies and replace them with a task force to crack down on sex trafficking and pedophilia, starting with arrests of prominent ruling class members in DC and Hollywood.

6. Declare Antifa and Black Lives Matter terrorist organizations.

7. Abolish the Federal Reserve and accept tax payments in cryptocurrency and commodities.

Although certain edits to the NJP’s existing platform would eliminate at least some of its apparent internal contradictions, these contradictions appear because the core philosophy underlying it is one that contradicts reality itself. Reality is the fact that good cannot be promoted with evil means; such means only corrupt that which is good. The social engineering its progressivism entails is that: Controlling the lives of peaceful and productive people with the threat of violence. It is premised on the notion that a man’s life is subordinated to the needs of others, the very premise that has destroyed this country. The NJP believes that when these others are those of one’s own nation this premise is a positive good, when in fact a government enforcing this premise on a nation only weakens it as a whole, leaving it vulnerable to hostile foreigners. The NJP’s degrading designs on America are hinted at in its platforms’ very first point where it classifies America as an “outpost” of Western civilization and confirmed in subsequent points where it lays out an agenda to push America further in the direction of European-style socialism. The historic American nation is not an outpost but a great power unto itself borne of a frontier culture, a culture that in many ways embodies the greatest qualities of the white race. Our greatest quality of all is our individualism, our recognition that the only life a man can live is his own. It is only a free society, one where its greater individuals suffer no constraint from its lesser, that is suitable for a nation of this character. That the NJP’s platform is so obviously anathema to this character, too nakedly confused and contradictory to even stand a chance of gaining traction is for this reason a blessing.