You say you want liberty. You complain about police, tickets, regulations, rules, abuses, corruption, politicians and bankers. You know the problem forwards and backwards. You’re an expert on the Federal Reserve. You’ve studied at Mises U. You’ve read Rothbard and watched Molyneux. People even go out of their way to read your critiques and respond to your rants. You talk about the presidential candidates with an air of expertise. You speak about anarcho-capitalism with confidence. You know who will build the roads in a stateless society and who will take care of whom. You believe in freedom.
But you’re not ready for liberty. You want the government to back off or just go away. But you haven’t stepped up your game to fill in the territory you want the state to abandon. How do you expect a (r)evolution to happen if you won’t lift a finger to to build it?
You want to end welfare. But what have you built to replace it?
You want food safety regulations to go away. But how many food safety watchdog organizations have you founded?
You want people to trust in freedom and each other. What have you done to build trust with your next door neighbors?
You want to end the wars. What have you done to build understanding among different cultures and nations?
You want liberty. But you’re not ready for it. You expect a (r)evolution to “happen” any day. You dream of collapse, the fall of the dollar, the destruction of the consumer society. But what have you done to prepare their replacements? Freedom does not just happen. It requires diligent, sustained intelligent work to build the organs of a free society.
Don’t aimlessly pine for collapse. Find the strength inside yourself to build the future. Start now. Be diligent. Stick with it. It takes a long time and a lot of tears to build a new society. Failure to act? Maybe you don’t really believe what you say you believe.
8 replies on “You’re Not Ready for Liberty”
I would add that not being able to do everything is no excuse either. Pick one solution and implement that – don’t worry that you can’t build ALL of the replacements for the failed state systems.
I’ve chosen to work to fix the monetary system. That’s my focus. I’ll help others with their projects when I can, but if I can do this one thing successfully it could change the world.
Pick your focus and work on that. If everyone that wants a freer world would do that, we’ll see enormous changes for the better.
This criticism would apply to me.
I see it as striking a balance. I have to do what I can to survive inside a corrupt system. I’d like to be more active, but my options are severely limited right now.
Right now, I’m restricted to less-risky stuff like promoting freedom. Later, I’ll be more active.
Good point, Ron. Each of us needs to pick a single focus and put all our efforts into it. Ron is a great example of that with his Shire Silver. http://shiresilver.com/
FSK, I know you have unique circumstances, but you’ve been saying that later, later thing for at least 3 years, if not more. Not everyone can take risks, but it gets tiresome to hear such an obvious excuse repeated over such a long stretch of time.
Promoting freedom through writing is one way to bring about the solutions we seek, so you actually are doing something and have been doing it well for some time. Kudos.
Very nice, thought provoking.
That’s right. You don’t hear people clamoring for governments to regulate eBay sellers because they have a reputation system that self-regulates. The very idea of setting up a commission to take that over would sound silly to most people. Make the replacements, make them better, and easier, and people will move over, perhaps not even realizing it.
Excellent post! I’ve long said that letting government take a near-monopoly on welfare and fighting poverty was the worst mistake we made in facilitating out-of-control Federal growth. There are still plenty of private groups that respond to disasters, etc, but they don’t get nearly the attention as everyone waits to see what Uncle Sam will (or won’t) do each time. Get people used to self-reliance and self-organization in the face of challenge, and they’ll begin to wonder what they need bureaucrats for.
Who in their right mind is dreaming of the destruction of the consumer society?
The consumer society is a slave society. We consume and consume but we don’t produce. We’re gluttons. It’s not sustainable. It is terribly wasteful and it is a sign of our enslavement. We need a production, savings and investment society instead.