If you think limited government is the best way to secure and protect your life, liberty and property, that’s your prerogative and I don’t want to convince you otherwise in this article. In fact, I want to help you achieve your goal – by sharing with you the rich repertoire of effective libertarian tactics used by voluntaryists, agorists and other market anarchists.
Minarchist Toolset Built for Honest Government
Your struggle for liberty desperately depends on your early and successful adoption of anarchist tactics. The fact is that your toolset – voting, electioneering and protesting – is too easy for the tyrants to ignore. Votes can be disregarded or made irrelevant. Independent candidates get locked out of news coverage. Begging voters to choose the red team over the blue team, or vice versa, is an absurd waste of time because we all know it makes no difference. Even if you elect a good candidate, the other 99 per cent overrule her. Protests are controlled, limited and subverted. Face it, your toolset is built for an open, honest government – not for this tyrannous police state.
Your Goal Requires a Real Revolution
Yes, that’s right. This is not your ideal form of government. This is not simply a constitutional republic that has lost its way and needs a few pure-hearted patriots to right its course. This is a dictocracy, where a small elite controls political office. They aim to continually expand both their own power and that of the offices they hold. Only a real revolution will return it to the minimal size you seek. This dictocracy has declared war on you. Will you join the resistance?
Liberty Tactics
With that in mind, here are eight libertarian tactics you can use right now to not only gain more liberty for yourself, but also weaken this police state. Make no mistake, only by strengthening your network and weakening theirs will you be able to build a coalition for the truly limited government you seek.
- Improve Yourself. Improve your mind by reading more and watching less TV. Improve your body by getting off the couch – exercise, eat right, etc. Work on maintaining a positive attitude. Build your emotional intelligence, your leadership and communication skills. Learn new and useful things that will facilitate your survival, such as: riflery, canning, permaculture, welding, carpentry, etc.
- Disobey. Any order from this tyrannous police state is illegitimate. Disobey it until such time as they have the proverbial gun to your head. You don’t have to go to jail, just resist as long as you can. This is not license to act immorally, only to stop obeying illegitimate authority.
- Stop Subsidizing the Enemy. Don’t pay taxes. Don’t loan the government money. Don’t perform services for them. Use their Federal Reserve Notes (dollars) as little as possible. Use honest silver and gold money or barter instead.
- Start a Cash Business. Work under the table, dealing in cash only. Provide alternatives to services offered by the state or its corporate allies at a better price, with better service. Get rich and don’t give a penny to this police state.
- Learn How to Defend Yourself. Take an NRA-approved pistol course and go to your local range weekly at least. Attend every Appleseed event you can. At Appleseed, good folks teach you not only how to use your rifle but also about the sacrifices the founding fathers made. Get a battle rifle and train on it until you’re an expert.
- Produce your Own Food. Start a garden. Learn about permaculture. Get some chickens, rabbits and/or goats. Trade with your local food producers. It’s better nutrition anyway.
- Don’t Aggress. Don’t use the government against your neighbor. Don’t support enlarged government programs of any kind. Don’t call the cops on your neighbor. Settle disputes privately.
- Connect – and Replicate – Locally. Work together locally on these tactics with like-minded folks. Things done in a group are more likely to succeed and continue. The whole will be stronger than the individual parts. Unite, or die, as Ben Franklin put it.
Afraid?
Afraid to stop paying your taxes? Do these tactics require considerable restructuring of your life? Great personal inconvenience? Your significant other or children will never go along with it? Just took out a new mortgage with that $8,000 federal credit? Like your couch too much? Can’t imagine yourself mowing your own lawn, much less gardening or firing a rifle? Worried you’ll be branded as a tax cheat, terrorist or cop-killer? That’s what the founding fathers were, remember? Did they shirk their duty? If not you, who? If not now, when?
Are you of Sufficient Character?
No one ever said liberty was easy. It means responsibility, which most people dread and shirk. But you distinguish yourself by seeking out more and more responsibility. If you admire the founding fathers, consider their hardships. Are you of sufficient character and integrity to do what it takes to live free, and not die? Let’s find out together, shall we?
Photo credit: ubrayj02. Photo license.
11 replies on “Anarchist Tactics that Minarchists Need”
These are great suggestions and it would probably be ideal to have them all covered. However I’m not sure that not doing some of these things is necessarily a sign of weak character. I think strong character comes from being in complete congruence with who you truly are or want to become rather than from an adoption of a certain set of skills and interests even when they go against personal inclinations.
This mainly applies to some aspects of improving yourself and growing your own food, basically the things which require a specific kind of life style. In a natural society, a free market society, people are ideally in such congruence and thus the effective division of labor occurs meaning that only those who truly enjoy a particular lifestyle associated with particular enterprises (like farm life) do it whereas others provide value in the market in a different way.
So in a way suggesting that all libertarians adopt a particular lifestyle and putting that as a sort of a test of character to me seems almost like saying that certain people should act in contradiction to their self in order to achieve liberty. This doesn’t seem to fit the idea of achieving freedom by living freedom.
What responsibility means, in my book, is being true to your self, not contrary. It’s about taking on responsibilities which you know and are perfectly willing to follow through and not seeking others to shoulder the burden of your own mistakes. That’s all there is to it. It’s not about living a particular lifestyle.
Also, about liberty not being easy. How do you define “easy”? It’s such a subjective thing. Something may be easy to one and hard to the other, depending again on personal interests, skills and inclinations. And if the concept of liberty suggests anything in that context then it’s actually ease. Aggression causes hardship. Liberty is in contrary to it what allows you to be who you are, thus at ease with yourself. Everything you do comes naturally if you do what is in congruence with you, that is to say, everything you do comes easy to you.
I suppose what you mean is that *achieving* liberty is hard, but that’s something else and probably has most to do with frustration that comes from seeing the majorities still believing in the state and pushing for continued or more aggression and expressing your opinion and making your choices despite disapproval.
As for saving on sales taxes by buying less food (due to producing it), this is almost meaningless. What the state loses in taxes they make up with inflation. This isn’t how it’s gonna be won. The only advantage aside a personal pride are financial savings, but it’s a trade off. Time you spend on gardening you could’ve spent on something where you’re stronger, for example.
Let me know if I misunderstood you somewhere and what you think.
Regards
First off, this message is addressed to minarchists, constitutionalists and what I call an anarchists-in-name-only / partyarchs, i.e., folks who are wasting time on voting, electioneering and protesting. I want to convince them of the utility of practicing agorism and voluntaryism in their struggle against the government gang, even if they want to keep their minarchist philosophy.
IOW, it’s not addressed to market anarchists such as yourself. I value your comments; this is not to say you shouldn’t comment; just to place it in its intended context.
“Do all these things or you have weak character,” would be a caricature of what I’ve said here.
That’s an entirely different context than what I am talking about. That is a situation not currently in predominant (or any?) existence among my intended audience, and my message is not geared for anyone living in that context.
I go by the dictionary definition of being accountable for your actions. I might use the word ‘integrity’ to communicate what you said there.
It requires radically less effort to go with the flow of an aggression-based system than it does to live without aggression.
That’s a different kind of ‘easy’ then what I am talking about.
I find achieving a state of liberty to be rather easy. We’re probably defining terms differently.
(1) Savings on sales tax is just one very small benefit of producing your own food and/or procuring it locally.
(2) Sales tax saved is sales tax denied. State and local governments don’t have central bank access. What’s more, the currency can not be inflated forever. Every little bit of pressure matters, especially when so many governments are near bankruptcy.
(3) Self- or locally-sourced food has the potential to be considerably fresher and more nutritious than food from the globalized (aggression-subsidized) JIT system.
(4) With peak oil and government subsidies for biofuels, the globalized (aggression-subsidized) JIT system will eventually fail and/or become ridiculously expensive. Throw in hyperinflation and self- and/or locally-sourced food will become a necessity.
(5) With permaculture, there is the potential to produce lots of food with minimal effort. You can work in your chosen professional field *and* reap the benefits of self-produced food.
Thanks for your comments, Daniel.
Yes, I was aware of that, but forgot to acknowledge it. Nevertheless given that you presented these strategies as agorist and voluntaryist as a voluntaryist I felt that they apply to me as well. I might have made a mistake of assuming that all of them should apply to all voluntaryists though rather than some of them to some, depending on personal choice.
Yes, I think I oversimplified it, my apologies.
Right, though I think responsibility follows from integrity and the two might be interdependent. If you’re true to yourself you’d choose the right actions and be more accountable for them. Otherwise the whole chain is somewhat compromised.
Possibly. :S
Hmm good points.. I wont hide that I’m vary of it personally because I live in the city and never really liked rural life style, but you do have a point nevertheless and it could be that I just never really got into it enough to find ways to do it in a way that wont actually feel like what I currently perceive “rural life” to be. Also, I’ve seen ways to grow your own food, at least some of it, even in the city. AeroGarden, comes to mind: http://www.aerogrow.com/
Things like this show a potential for a future in which being engaged in permaculture wont necessarily mean living in rural areas. Instead elements of it may be injected into urban lifestyle and coexist with it. I’m gonna be looking into this stuff more.
Thanks for the insights. Hopefully some minarchists will comment as well…
Thanks, that’s interesting Daniel. I increasingly suspect that high urbanization is due to the aggression-backed system we have today, and so when it goes away (which I think it inevitably will), urban areas will decay and become unsustainable, or at least certainly be not as prevalent and wealthy as they have been.
Libertarianism is a disease. It’s the thought process that by abolishing said and stated rights US citizens we will be free to govern our selves as needed. In part this is an interesting theory — however, it does not hold up for a nation as large as the US. In fact, it doesn’t even hold up in a nation as small as Somalia.
While I agree with some of your points listed above, I do not think that this is the way we move forward as a society. To take away simple basic rights such as education and police functionality, you allow people do run freely without regulation. Sure the school system has it’s problems, but do you really think you can teach your children everything they learn at school? Do you really think that social structure can survive without structure?
Running illegal businesses, and toting your gun around does not make a better American, it’s in fact the antithesis of what being a good American is. This nations was founded on principle of equal rights, not selfishness.
So — sure, don’t pay your taxes, arm yourself, and stop supporting our military, run your cash flow business under the table and maximize what’s there for you. At the same time though, when your house is burning down, been broken into and your child can’t read past 3rd grade — you’ll need to suck it up, and not complain about the system anymore. It falls on you.
In order to stay on-topic for this thread all I’ll say is this:
You don’t have to buy into anarchism or even liberty to use these tactics. All you need is a strong desire to reshape the world according to your principles and vision.
Good luck and thanks for commenting.
“It falls on you.”
Exactly. Hayek said that having freedom in your actions meant that you must bear responsibility in your actions. I’m not sure why people assume that they shouldn’t be or don’t have to be responsible and that they can just let government do everything for them. Take what Friedman said about poverty and altruism; that it is not a government’s job to look after it’s citizens, it’s the citizens themselves who bear the responsibility of caring for their neighbors. He said that the welfare outlook made people less altruistic and more inclined to just “leave it to the state” to fix problems instead of rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty.
Exactly, Robert, leaving all of that stuff up to government means excising it from heart of the community and the marketplace, then stealing the means to run it in a totally inefficient, disconnected fashion.
Rob:
“To take away simple basic rights such as education and police functionality, you allow people do run freely without regulation. Sure the school system has it’s problems, but do you really think you can teach your children everything they learn at school?”
I and my wife both have science degrees. Are you saying that we could not educate our children at least as well as some nitwit fresh out of a state teachers’ college? The statement is absurd on its face.
“Do you really think that social structure can survive without structure?”
Here you are engaging in a trick – equating government-monopolized “services” with social structure. Didn’t a social structure exist before the Federal government came into being?
I don’t mean to be rude, but I am calling out two of your fallacious criticisms and asking you to re-think them.
LibertyVini, great points! Thanks for commenting. :)