I'm a little bit unsettled today. This morning, excuse me, I got a real shock. I came to Pete
Becky's 9 a.m. talk, and I'm sitting out there listening, and I'm chuckling to myself, saying,
you know, all the ideas I've had, I've stolen from this guy, and he doesn't even know it.
With that out of the way, I'd like to thank Jan Lester and Paul Birch for their helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this talk, and Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe
I'll pave the way for the road I will recommend today by describing one way of categorizing
human interactions.
They can be located on an axis running between two polar ideas, persuasion and aggression.
Now I am not contending that this is the only way we can evaluate human action, merely that
it is a useful way.
What do I mean by persuasion?
When engaging in persuasion, I intend to convince you that your situation will be better in your own eyes if we do interact and if we do not.
Now, just to clearly differentiate what I am talking about from fraud, I will note that I am using the word persuasion here to mean honest persuasion.
For example, suppose that you and I each live on our own isolated island, with the other person's island the only land in sight.
Further, we'll imagine that we can't travel between our islands due to the shark-infested waters between us.
Now, it's quite possible that each of us might go about our business on these islands unaware of and not interacting at all with the other person.
However, one day while we're at the shore, we happen to meet, and across the waves, we chat to each other,
and I mentioned that there are many coconut trees on my island, but I'm getting a little bit tired of eating coconuts.
You mentioned that there are quite a few mango trees on your island, and that you're very tired of eating mangoes.
So after a bit further chatting, we decide, well, why don't we meet here each day and I'll throw you a few coconuts across the water, you throw me a few mangoes.
Now, it seems obvious to me that each of us prefers that interaction to its absence because it's trivially easy for either of us to avoid it.
And each of us is willing to leave the other alone if the other person declines.
By contrast, if I'm engaged in aggression, I will attempt to force interaction on you without your consent.
Often I will try to convince you that I have the power and will to make your life worse
if you refuse to interact with me on the terms I propose.
Imagine our island meeting again, but now when I discover you have mangoes on your island,
I demand that you bring me several a day. And I tell you that if you don't, the next time I see you
on the near shore, I'll kill you. You know, perhaps I'll throw a spear across the water
in between and run you through. There certainly is an element of persuasion in such a threat.
I must persuade you that I really do intend to kill you if you don't acquiesce and that
I have the ability to act on that intention. Yet the difference between the two examples
is immense. In the case of the mango-coconut exchange, I am quite willing to leave you
alone to go about your business as if we had never met. In the mangoes-or-death case, I
am demanding that we interact. If you will not do so on the terms I offer, then I will
More relevant to the world in which most of us actually live, we are not isolated on our
own island, consider two approaches on my take when trying to get my neighbor to come
hear my next talk.
On the one hand, I may attempt to persuade her that she would like it.
I can try to convince her that I have her interests at heart, that the talk will be
The Theory of Money and Credit
What could be clearer than the enormous difference between these two ways of relating to others?
Persuasion and aggression imply fundamentally different conceptions of other people.
When I engage in persuasion, I regard the other person as a free, intelligent actor,
When employing aggression, I regard the other as merely a means I might manipulate to achieve
my ends, as much as I would regard a stick or a rock.
I conceive of three basic forms of aggression.
Although I admit, as aggressive as I am, I may not have thought of them all.
Aggression by stealth, aggression by fraud, and aggression by committing or threatening
violence.
I could aggress against you using stealth, for example, by sneaking into your house while
Fragile aggression is why I qualified my use of persuasion as meaning honest persuasion.
Fraud certainly does involve persuasion, but rather than persuading you that A will be to your benefit, then delivering though,
I persuade you that you'd like A while secretly planning to deliver B.
For example, in the island scenario we were looking at, again imagine that I persuaded you to exchange mangoes for coconuts.
But now, what I do is I eat the meat and drink the milk out of coconuts, then bind the shell back together.
And when you throw me mangoes, I throw you empty shells across the water.
So while I persuaded you to exchange coconuts for mangoes, what we actually did was exchange coconut shells for mangoes.
Here again, I don't allow you to use your intelligence freely in deciding whether to interact,
I believe that the view of persuasion and aggression adopted here can be helpful in
Socialist anarchists who like libertarians claim to be against aggression often contend
that the ownership of capital goods and the payment of a wage for labor are inherently
aggressive.
But let's go back again to the situation of you and I as castaways.
Imagine now that you've built a boat that you use to go fishing.
You employed your own labor and whatever materials you found upon your island to build that
boat, something I also could have done on mine.
Upon discovering that you have a boat, I now demand that you bring me some of your catch
of fish every day.
You refuse, instead suggesting that if I bring you coconuts, you will be happy to trade fish
for them or let me use the boat for a while.
In response, I protest that you are aggressing against me, using the power you have as an
In order to exploit the labor I have expended in picking coconuts, you are perfectly willing
to leave me alone and allow me to continue my life as though we had never met.
After all, if not for your existence, there would be no boat.
You don't demand that I use your boat or attempt to force me to labor to supply you with coconuts.
only require that if we interact, it be on terms we both agree to. Furthermore, if you
do agree to my terms for exchanging coconuts for fish, then it is clear that you must think
you're better off exchanging than you would be not exchanging. After all, you had the
opportunity to not exchange, so you must believe the exchange is improving your situation.
When this argument was posted to a bulletin board, one commentator said that I was ignoring
the complexities of real-world societies in this sort of analysis.
My answer to that is that if we want to get to the essence of social arrangements, we
have no choice but to reduce them to their simplest forms, for that's when their essential
character can be seen.
In every actual social situation we find a myriad of complex historical circumstances.
Without having first derived various principles concerning social interaction by mentally
isolating pure instances of ideal types, we will find ourselves adrift in the vast sea
of history without compass or rudder.
I believe that if we ever wish to come to shore we must heed Carl Menger's advice from
and Principles of Economics, where he says,
In what follows I have endeavored to reduce the complex phenomena of human economic activity
to the simplest elements that can still be subjected to accurate observation, and to
investigate the manner in which the more complex phenomena evolve from their elements according
to definite principles.
Of course, we can think of cases where the ownership of capital goods and wage labor
are entangled with aggression.
We might find that the traditional hunting grounds of an Indian tribe was taken from
them by force and handed over to some industrialist who begins mining it.
Now the Indians have lost their land and their traditional livelihood and find themselves
in their mines having no choice but to go to work in the mines.
You know, clearly there is aggression involved in a scenario like that.
And it's no doubt true that there are current property claims tainted by past acts of aggression
of that sort.
To the extent that the guilt on the part of the current owner can be proven clearly, most
libertarians would approve of rectifying such situations.
However, the example of the Boehm demonstrates that there is no inherent aggression in the
ownership of capital goods or the employment of wage labor.
If someone should want to claim that some particular instance of some capitalist employing
some laborers as an act of aggression, then it's incumbent upon that person to show what
aggression actually occurred.
Now I hope I'm not going to get myself banned from any further Mises Institute events by
saying this next thing, but I do think that it is possible to be a socialist of a certain
Now, some people might even say that the people, the sort of person I'm talking about is not really a socialist, but I will give you an example.
There's a fellow named Keith Preston whose I've read at times, and he describes his views as follows.
As many readers are no doubt aware, I am an anarcho-socialist myself. I generally favor
an economic order of small businesses and self-employed persons, cooperatives, worker-owner,
managed industries, Proudhonian banks and other similar institutions operating within
the context of a laissez-faire, stateless free market. The Prestonian version of socialism,
Preston hopes to persuade others that they would prefer to live in the sorts of social
arrangements he favors rather than in more traditionally capitalist structures.
Preston is perfectly willing to allow those not persuaded by his arguments to start traditional
hierarchical companies, to work for wages, to rent apartments, and so on.
I'd like to detour for a moment also and point out that Preston's vision of what he calls socialism avoids the Misesian calculation problem.
And that's because his small cooperatively owned businesses and so forth deal with each other in an overarching market economy in which genuine prices can arise.
People still will be able to engage in economic calculation in Preston's ideal world.
His local organizations occupy the place of the firm in standard economic theory,
although they are firms with unusual and to Preston preferable internal structures.
Now I bring up Preston's example because it leads into my next point.
There are different versions of what liberty should be and what a libertarian society ought to look like.
So is it possible for there to be an overarching framework for liberty that allows the liberty desired by free-market libertarians,
that sought by anarcho-socialists such as Preston, and perhaps other visions of liberty as well?
To avoid the Hobbesian war of all against all, humans form civil associations.
A civil association is a group of people united in recognizing the authority of a body of
law over all the individuals who comprise the group.
And recognizing the authority of a body of law implies the free use of one's intelligence
In other words, one must be persuaded, not coerced, into recognizing the authority of that law over oneself.
I believe that for civilized society to exist, the rule of law is essential.
But I would like to suggest as a step down the road to liberty, a single modification to the prevailing view of civil associations, one that I feel is implied by their nature.
Now today the main form we have of civil associations is states, but what I'm going to suggest modifies this in a way that perhaps people would not even call what remains a state.
I believe that the change I recommend is to recognize the right of every person to freely form, join and leave civil associations on their own choice.
I believe that the recognition of such a right would provide a framework for achieving the maximum liberty compatible with human civilization.
Therefore, let me explain what I mean by this right.
First of all, a person's right to join a civil association would extend only to those associations that would welcome the person.
You could not legitimately force your way into a group by violence, fraud or stealth.
On the other hand, no third party, such as a group with which you were previously associated, could prevent you from joining a new group.
Only the people already in a civil association and the person seeking to join it can decide the issue.
Next, I will point out that if we recognize the right to withdraw from civil associations
at will, we have acknowledged the right to secession.
The word secession can be a bit frightening, probably not to this audience, but to some
audiences anyway.
As it conjures up the image of hundreds of thousands of casualties in the U.S. Civil
War and Chechen rebels blowing up buildings.
My own belief is that violent secession is rarely a step forward on the way to liberty.
What I'm suggesting is not that people currently begin making plans to violently overthrow their
current government, but that people come to demand from their governments the right to
exit, just in the same fashion that generally speaking people today demand the right to
and Free Speech.
I'll also note that seceding to escape punishment for a crime already committed is not what
I mean by a right of secession.
In other words, I can't kill someone and then announce, oh, and by the way, I secede, so
don't bother trying to prosecute me.
You know, presumably the entry agreements into civil associations would prevent that
sort of thing.
The sharpest contrast to our current world in what I suggest is that people should be
able to leave a civil association without leaving a geographical location.
Unless they have explicitly agreed to remain part of some civil association in their purchase
or rental agreement for their residence, as, for instance, people often do when purchasing
a condo or a home in a planned community, they should have the right to withdraw both
Both themselves end their land from the authority of their current civil association.
Having done so, a person might attempt to join another existing civil association, might
try to persuade others to form a new one, or might remain outside of any civil association
whatsoever.
To deny people the right to secession employs aggression rather than persuasion in attempting
to constitute a civil association.
It violates the essential nature of civil association, which requires the voluntary
recognition of the authority of a body of law.
Now it's true that today most people have at least some possibility of leaving the state
in which they live.
But to do so they must leave their friends, their families, their jobs, their house, perhaps
even their language behind them.
They are further hampered by numerous immigration restrictions in other states.
Of course, the civil associations I envision are likely to have membership restrictions,
but with a vastly greater number of such associations, it is likely that at least a few would accept
any particular would-be member.
Moreover, the possibility of choosing a truly different form of civil association is slowly
being eliminated by the dawning worldwide state system, where the United States and
its allies are imposing, by economic pressure, the lure of foreign aid and loans, military
Force and so forth, the social democratic model of state corporatism combined with extensive
social benefits and high tax rates upon the entire world.
Many neo-conservative and neo-liberal pundits are quite explicit in declaring social democracy
the end of history and saying that it should be imposed by force across the world.
The United States and its G8 allies may object to countries such as Iraq that allow too little
Freedom, but they also strongly discourage countries from allowing too much freedom.
Countries with tax rates too low are labeled as suspicious tax havens. Those with too much
banking privacy are marked as possible supporters of terrorism. The U.S. government is currently
telling Canada not to relax its marijuana laws. The IMF forbids member nations from
adopting the gold standard as a monetary regime. Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. ambassador to
to Guatemala, actually used to position the campaign against the university there, because
it was promoting the radical libertarian ideas of Mises and Hayek. She had never heard of
Rothbard, I guess, and was questioning the need for an income tax, welfare and public
schooling.
Now, we don't need to posit any sort of global Masonic conspiracy to explain such facts.
For those of you who do posit one, that doesn't mean that there isn't, but we don't need
Government officials are clever enough to realize that states offering people more freedom
than their own are a threat to them, since more libertarian states will tend to draw
bright, ambitious and wealthy people from more restrictive states.
Pure self-interest will lead a state to attempt to prevent other states from being significantly
less intrusive than it is.
In the world's spanning social democracy, we will see Hayek's insight that the worst
rise to the top played out on a global scale.
The unprecedented concentration of power that would exist would place an enormous prize
before the most vicious power addicts.
Therefore, the idea of a right to choose one's own form of government at any geographic scale
is perhaps more important than ever as a counterweight to the New World Order.
The right-arm proposing even leaves those who chafe at any constraints on their behavior
other than their own vision of justice with a way out.
They may withdraw completely from civil life and become an outlaw.
Such people would probably withdraw to remote wilderness areas.
They would be living without the protection of any body of law.
But so long as they left the members of existing civil associations alone, there is no reason
to suppose that they would be pursued or bothered, except perhaps by their outlaws.
But the ability to make one's own law in dealing with others by whom one feels wrong is probably
the most important motivation such a person has for leaving civil association behind.
Since members of different civil associations will still interact with each other in the
world I'm envisioning, the question arises as to how conflicts between them can be settled
peacefully.
In many cases, I believe, civil associations will negotiate agreements with each other
for arbitrating disputes between their members.
Furthermore, the ability of individuals to agree to a system of law without a central
authority to impose one recently has been shown to be much greater than political theory
had traditionally imagined it to be.
Ed Stringham of San Jose State University has demonstrated that the trading of derivatives
on the 17th century Amsterdam stock market proceeded peacefully and without a great deal
of Fraud, despite the fact that the Dutch government refused to enforce derivative contracts.
They basically said that if you are defrauded by someone, and they were very suspicious
of short selling and options and so forth, and they said, oh, if you're defrauded in
such a thing, don't come to us.
And yet, nevertheless, that has shown that an orderly market in derivatives did exist.
Similarly, Peter Leeson of George Mason has cited the law merchant code of the high middle
Civil Ages and Renaissance is another example of voluntary law operating successfully.
The widespread recognition of a right to secession certainly does not make war between civil
associations impossible, but I believe it renders it significantly less likely since
any civil association promoting a war that is even mildly unpopular will be immediately
faced with a wave of secession.
Under such a system, states like those we find today, I think, are less likely to exist.
Many civil associations will have features of current states to which libertarians might
object, such as welfare programs, drug laws, draft laws, and so on.
But if the members of those civil associations have the opportunity to exit, and they have
not done so, then it's clear that they're persuaded that they wish to live under such
a system of law.
If they are in a civil association voluntarily, then I don't perceive aggression being committed
against them by, for instance, laws on the part of their civil association banning drug
usage or something of the sort.
Of course, my idea does not guarantee that no oppressive state could emerge, but I don't
believe it is reasonable to expect guarantees in life.
The widespread acceptance of the belief that human slavery is immoral has not prevented
some people from occasionally capturing other people and enslaving them.
But one must admit that the practice is somewhat less prevalent today than it was in 1750.
Similarly, if a right to secession gains widespread moral approval, then it seems likely that
it will be much more difficult to organize an oppressive state.
My friend Paul Birch expressed a possible problem with my idea.
He doubted the practicality of geographically intermingled civil associations.
As he put it, unless civil associations of which persons are voluntary members are territorially
distinct and not too small, people cannot avoid being subject to laws to which they
have not acceded, because disputes will commonly arise between members of different associations
who have different laws.
I believe that deriving authoritative law for interactions between members of different civil associations through negotiation between the groups goes some way toward handling his objection, as do the cases of voluntary law I've mentioned.
As one piece of evidence, I'm going to mention a novel, Neil Stephenson's excellent novel, The Diamond Age.
Stephenson describes a world that is basically without states as we know them.
People have formed geographically intermingled groups based on the code of ethics to which they subscribe.
There is, for instance, a group called the Vickies who subscribe to Victorian ethics.
People join or leave these groups by their own choice, and the groups commercially interact with each other every day.
Now, I admit that a fictional world like that is not as convincing a bit of evidence as an actually operating society with that feature.
But the fact that Stevenson is able to construct a coherent and plausible world, I think, lends credence to the idea that this is not inherently ridiculous in any sense.
An important feature of the road to liberty I'm suggesting is that the possibility of the real world coming to resemble the vision depends almost exclusively on the widespread acceptance of the idea that membership in the civil association should be voluntary.
Such an idea is already held, albeit incoherently and inconsistently by many people today.
We can hear it expressed in calls for self-governance and democracy.
Rather than attempt to convince a majority of people to adopt an entirely new ethical
or political system, we only need to draw their attention to the fact that there is
a conflict within their current one.
While most people believe in the right to self-government, their failure to recognize
as a universal right to secede significantly vitiates that right.
Even today, the idea of secession can win popular support if presented properly.
For example, last year a Michigan family successfully seceded from the town in which they had been
living.
As Adam Young described it, on Tuesday, December 17, 2002, Aranac Township in Omer City, Michigan
How the joint referendum brought about by the actions of one woman, Cheryl Perry.
The Perrys simply no longer wished to be looted by the Omer municipal government for sewer
services they were not receiving, even if it was only for $41 a year.
After the polls closed, Cheryl Perry got the outcome she wanted.
Out of a total vote tally of 140, with 82 votes yes and 58 miserable voters voting no,
The Perry's had successfully seceded from Omer and Omer's taxman.
Although there were a fair number of no votes, a significant majority of voters recognized
the Perry's right to live under the government of their own choice.
And in a sense, this shouldn't be too surprising, since the national government that those people
live under also came about through an act of secession.
The idea of a right to secession is, I believe, a concrete proposal that can alleviate the
discouragement that many would-be libertarians feel at the prospects for a free society.
There are many people today who do value liberty but find the idea impractical.
They might even think a libertarian world would work but believe we have no hope of
getting there.
Not on the menu, they say.
Statist attitudes are everywhere amongst the public.
The man in the street doesn't have libertarian views.
We couldn't achieve this for centuries.
Fortunately for us, there were pioneers who provided an example of how to eliminate a
pervasive but unjust institution in only a few generations.
They were the abolitionists and the institution was slavery.
As Stephen Carson wrote, several hundred years ago, the notion that the slave trade could
The abolitionists were faced with a choice.
They could have tried to convince the majority of people of the correctness of a particular
religious view, part of which was that slavery is wrong.
But to make the whole world congregationalist, Methodist or Baptist might have taken thousands
In the meantime, if they cooperated with others who shared their opinion of slavery, they could achieve great good in the near future, the end of human bondage.
Achieving their short-term goal did not mean compromising fundamental beliefs.
Someone could still argue that Methodism was the true path while cooperating with the Quaker to abolish slavery.
We often adopt that approach in our day-to-day lives.
Day Lies.
For example, Bob Murphy is a good friend of mine.
Nevertheless, we sometimes have fierce disputes over theoretical issues.
Well, so what?
We're still friends and we're still able to collaborate in areas where we agree.
If we were, for instance, basketball players, I would say that while at times we have a
different idea of what play to run, we're still on the same team.
And differences of opinion like that shouldn't distract us from the basic goal of beating
Now, some people, my embrace of diverse forms of libertarianism here might lead some people
to accuse me of some form of relativism.
The idea is slanderous.
I don't for a minute contend that all philosophies are created equal or that there is no best
worldview.
There is.
It's mine.
But I realize that not all of you immediately are prepared to agree with me on everything.
You'll come around, but it could take time.
So in the meantime, you know, what I suggest is to, looking for allies, to find the basis
where we can agree and move forward on those bases.
Resolving the merits of various ethical systems, bases for liberty and so forth, is not pointless.
That's not my contention in the least.
But I don't think that resolving that debate is how we'll advance on our road.
In order to progress toward liberty, we must convince the average Joe that liberty is important
to him.
Now, I've met the average Joe, and believe me, he has little interest in whether human
Human rights are grounded on natural law, utilitarian calculus, cultural traditions,
or something else altogether.
What will influence the average person, in my belief, is straightforward examples that
illuminate the real nature of various state activities.
We're not trying to get him to overthrow his entire worldview and adopt ours.
What I think we should try to do is alert him to the fact that within his existing worldview
One way to do this is to look at language.
Here I think Ido Holtzman has done us a great service by pointing out the state-generated
fog swirling through our language.
Theft is called asset forfeiture.
The murder of Randy Weaver's wife is called law enforcement.
Budget increases are called cuts in spending.
The mist is necessary to prevent everyone, including those generating the mist, from
seeing what is really occurring.
Our job, as I see it, is to burn off that fog.
Holtzman shows that this fog obscures the immoral nature of the domineering state.
It creates the illusion that the state stands apart from ordinary human values and judgments.
The state somehow represents the mystical will of the people, or our voluntary collective
choices.
If we can make it clear that we should not tolerate behavior from our government that we would not tolerate from our friend, we'll have made a great step forward.
For example, I was talking with a friend of mine some time ago.
He was very interested in politics, but less so in political theory.
And he was querying me about libertarianism.
And as he's an avid camper, I said, well, imagine this, you, Dick, Mark, and I go camping.
And we're going up, we're going to camp up at the top of the mountain, and on the way up, you, Dick and I, decide that, well, it would be nice to build a little lean-to in case the weather is bad on the way back down, we'll have a little shelter.
And we tell Mark, and he says, oh, well, you know, no thanks, I'm really in the mood to keep walking, I'm going to head on up the mountain, and you guys go ahead and I'll meet you up there.
Sorry, Mark. You can't do that. What do you mean, I can't do that? Well, if you do that,
we'll have to kill you. Mark, it's not that we want to kill you or anything. I mean, at
first, if you resist, we'll just rough you up a little bit. But if you keep resisting,
we voted. We're the majority, and you're resisting the will of the people. So you better get
Well, I finished my tale and said, now, how is that different than the social democratic
welfare state?
And he thought for a moment, he said, you know, it really isn't different, is it?
And he told me later that at that moment he became convinced of the essential soundness
of libertarian theory.
My point is that most people would already judge the action of the three campers to be
The people who do recognize it is wrong already, though, we don't need to change their entire
worldview.
We just have to show them that it's this fog that keeps them from recognizing that when
the state acts like this, it's not any different than when the three campers acted like that.
One reason I think a right to secession is that I'm recommending that as our road toward
liberty is that it doesn't require widespread agreement on what specific laws any particular
civil association ought to have.
On the contrary, the recognition of a right to secession peacefully accommodates the widest
possible divergence of opinion about what laws are just by enabling a multitude of legal
systems to coexist without intrinsic conflict between them.
For one thing, this helps alleviate the conflict that has divided libertarianism for quite
some time between anarcho-capitalists who believe that no state can be just and minarchists
who hold that society needs a minimal state to enforce basic laws and provide defense.
If each group recognizes the right of the other to attempt to realize the form of social
Civil Associations might employ traditional police and defense forces, hire private defense agencies, as proposed by Rothbard and David Friedman, form mutual defense agencies, as recommended by Paul Virch, establish the sort of insurance system proposed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Hans Hoppe and Bob Murphy or employ some as yet undreamed of form of defense and law enforcement.
No doubt many people will find some of the laws that other people choose to live under
bizarre or unjust.
However, as long as membership in a civil association is voluntary and no group tries
to impose its vision of just law on any other, I see no reason why such groups should not
I'd like to examine an example that's dear to the heart of many people here and is an area of fierce dispute among libertarians, fractional reserve banking.
Many libertarians view it with extreme distaste. I believe they have a perfect right to form civil associations that do not permit the practice.
However, one person who was against fractional reserve banking wrote to me and seemed to
suggest that it had to be stamped out everywhere by force.
And this was very odd to me.
And I'd like to look at the implication of such a view.
Now let's imagine two civil associations, Rothbardville and Freedman Town, existing in
neighboring villages.
Of course, in the world I'm describing, the groups might even be geographically intermingled,
but that's unimportant for this scenario.
Fractional reserve banking is banned in Rothbardville, but practiced enthusiastically in Freedman
Town.
To be consistent, my correspondent would have to endorse an invasion of Freedman Town by
Rothbardville in order to force the Freedmanites to give up fractional reserve banking.
However, as long as the Freedmanites were not surreptitiously attempting to pass fractional
and Reserve Notes to the Rothbardians.
It clearly would be an act of an aggression, in my mind, on the part of the Rothbardians
to attack them.
Should any individual Friedmanite complain to a Rothbardian that he believes his rights
are being violated because his deposits are not being held entirely in bank vaults, what
I believe the correct response is from a Rothbardian is, you're absolutely right, you've come to
your senses now, secede from Friedman town and join Rothbardville.
I don't see any reason the two groups could not live in peace and trade with each other
as long as the Friedmanites used gold or paper money fully backed by gold for payment to
the Rothbardians.
The Rothbardians might find the Friedmanites' indulgence in fractional reserve banking to
be foolish in the extreme, just as anarcho-socialists might find Rothbardians or Friedmanites who
wanted to work for a wage to be foolish in the extreme.
But liberty surely entails the right to be foolish, so long as one doesn't force one's
foolishness on others.
I believe that the recognition of a right to secession is the single greatest advance
toward liberty that is within our grasp.
Because many people today acknowledge the right to self-governance, persuading them
to acknowledge the right to secession only entails making explicit the logical implication
of values that they already hold.
Furthermore, the abolition movement offers us an historical precedent for this approach,
I suggest.
Rather than engage in endless disputes amongst themselves, the abolitionists united behind
a single simple principle, human slavery is wrong.
Similarly, libertarians of whatever strike today might agree that the bondage of individuals
to a state that they had no say in choosing is wrong.
Under particular laws we advocate, we could unite behind the idea that human freedom is
advanced when each person can choose the body of law under which he wishes to live.
Each of us, within whatever tradition of morality we endorse, can bring into relief those elements
of that tradition that support the freedom of the individual to choose his own form of
governance.
Libertarians can divide themselves in debating incremental versus radical reform, anarchy
Murray vs. Menarche, Rand vs. Mises, Rothbard vs. Friedman, and so on, or we can choose
a common road to travel, one that does not deny or cover up our differences, but still
proceeds directly toward eliminating the great evil from the world.
I suggest we hit the road.